Archive

The Reality of Racial Bias

I want to talk to you just a lit­tle bit about how the sci­ence of racism, how racism actu­al­ly func­tions, can bring a lit­tle bit of hope to these dif­fi­cult issues, with­out even need­ing to be espe­cial­ly polit­i­cal. And bet­ter than that, how the sci­ence of racism can lead to some action­able solu­tions to these seem­ing­ly impos­si­ble problems. 

Interview with Opal Tometi (#BlackLivesMatter)

There’s a lot going on in the United States, right. So there’s a lega­cy of struc­tur­al racism that’s been impact­ing Black com­mu­ni­ties in the United States ever since we were kid­napped from Africa and brought to the United States. And so what we’re see­ing today is actu­al­ly a con­tin­u­a­tion of the racist poli­cies and prac­tices of the United States. We’re see­ing state-sanctioned vio­lence with impuni­ty on black people. 

Architectures of Quarantine & Containment

One very inter­est­ing addi­tion to the pub­lic space is how we are con­di­tion­ing and defin­ing the pub­lic space with regards to even­tu­al attacks. And it’s chang­ing the land­scape rad­i­cal­ly. And the very first knee-jerk reac­tion was con­crete blocks in front of many insti­tu­tions. Now they’re try­ing to design these con­crete blocks so they seem some­thing which is part of the land­scape but the pres­ence and the robust­ness is still so vio­lent that it’s hard to hide the intention.

The Tyranny of Algorithms and the Use of Predictive Policing by Israel

We have been doc­u­ment­ing and research­ing into human rights or dig­i­tal rights vio­la­tions that are tak­ing place in Palestine and Israel. And one of the most recent case stud­ies or work that we’re look­ing into is the use of pre­dic­tive polic­ing by Israel, which is rather a sen­si­tive issue giv­en that there isn’t a lot that we know about the subject.

Policing the Romantic Crowd; Velocipedes and Face Recognition

We have to be care­ful about dis­tin­guish­ing between mere analo­gies link­ing the Romantic peri­od to our own age that maybe don’t have any use­ful analogs, and those that do have some con­tin­ued oper­a­tional rel­e­vance. Because it is the case that Romantic writ­ers like John Keats, Mary Shelley, William Wordsworth, philo­soph­i­cal­ly mod­eled and to some extent thought through many of the debates and issues that we’re cur­rent­ly hav­ing as we seek to shape the con­tours of our future societies.

Jen Lowe at Deep Lab

Almost a year ago, I put my heart­beat online, and along with my heart­beat an account­ing of all the days I’ve lived, and the days I sta­tis­ti­cal­ly have yet to live, along with my aver­age heart­beat for each day. So I was play­ing with the idea of pri­va­cy. Here’s this very inti­mate mea­sure, in a way. But I’m not wor­ried about shar­ing it because there’s not much you can learn about me from my heart rate.