PERSON
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
New media theorist who anatomised the mechanism by which digital technologies achieve their deepest influence not through spectacle but through disappearance—the gradual, irreversible transformation of the novel into the automatic that she named habitual new media—and who traced the genealogy of machine-learning statistics back to its eugenicist origins.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun holds a degree in systems design engineering in addition to her doctorate in comparative literature, which means she understands both the architecture and the cultural theory of the systems she analyses. Her work sits at the intersection of digital media studies and critical race theory, and it produces conclusions that are uncomfortable from both directions: she shows that the habits of digital life are not freely chosen, and that the mathematical methods underlying
large language models carry historical baggage that their practitioners have not examined. Her concept of
habitual new media explains why the extraordinary becomes ordinary so quickly—and why the ordinary is the form in which power operates most effectively, because it operates invisibly. Her concept of
programmed visions explains why every software environment programs what its users see as possible, and why AI tools program possibility more deeply than