Archive

Custodians of the Internet

What I’d like to do just with the few min­utes that I’m up here is to set the stage. This is a huge set of ques­tions, and I think a set of ques­tions that are explod­ing into pub­lic view in a way that they had­n’t even just a few years ago. So I want to sort of like, set the broad place that some of these ques­tions kin­da live. 

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism

One of the things that I think is real­ly impor­tant is that we’re pay­ing atten­tion to how we might be able to recu­per­ate and recov­er from these kinds of prac­tices. So rather than think­ing of this as just a tem­po­rary kind of glitch, in fact I’m going to show you sev­er­al of these glitch­es and maybe we might see a pattern.

Biased Data Panel Discussion

I think that we need a rad­i­cal design change. And I might ask if I were teach­ing an HCI class or design class with you, I would say, How are you going to design this so that not one life is lost?” What if that were the design imper­a­tive rather than what’s your IPO going to be?

The Relevance of Algorithms

How would we begin to look at the pro­duc­tion of the algo­rith­mic? Not the pro­duc­tion of algo­rithms, but the pro­duc­tion of the algo­rith­mic as a jus­ti­fi­able, legit­i­mate mech­a­nism for knowl­edge pro­duc­tion. Where is that being estab­lished and how do we exam­ine it?

Response to Tarleton Gillespie’s The Relevance of Algorithms”

It seems to me that to con­front algo­rithms on their own terms, we may have to mod­i­fy our pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with the pol­i­tics of knowl­edge and take up an inter­est in the pol­i­tics of logis­ti­cal engineering.

Can an Algorithm Be Agonistic? Ten Scenes about Living in Calculated Publics

This is why it mat­ters whether algo­rithms can be ago­nist, giv­en their roles in gov­er­nance. When the log­ic of algo­rithms is under­stood as auto­crat­ic, we’re going to feel pow­er­less and pan­icked because we can’t pos­si­bly inter­vene. If we assume that they’re delib­er­ate­ly demo­c­ra­t­ic, we’ll assume an Internet of equal agents, ratio­nal debate, and emerg­ing con­sen­sus posi­tions, which prob­a­bly does­n’t sound like the Internet that many of us actu­al­ly recognize.