The mugshot was invented in the 1880s. A century later, face surveillance has gone digital but remains as flawed as ever.
Tag: Technology
Mapping Utopia in the Dark: Matt Tierney on Literature and Technology
“This is not lowered expectations. It’s a wish for a mass normalization of resistance to deadly ways of looking at the world.”
How to See Silicon Valley: Talking with Mary Beth Meehan and Fred Turner
"The ways in which the community itself is breaking down felt like end game capitalism."
The Future Is Not a Solution
How might we learn resilience, care and community in the face of crisis–climate, political, cultural, economic or otherwise?
The Planet Needs Collective Action—not Tech
Digital tech cannot stop climate change merely by “greening” individual consumption.
Prison Tech Comes Home
Landlords’, bosses’ and schools’ intrusion of surveillance technologies into the home extends the carceral state into domestic space.
The Manifest Destiny of Computing
Today is overwhelmingly defined by white-supremacist violence and the whiteness of AI technology. Can seeing them together help defeat them both?
The Ten Thousand Things
“I am supposed to be writing this essay, ostensibly on technology, but not for the first time, I believe I am unable to write; and not writing, doubt that I will I ever write again.”
Can Algorithmic Bias Teach Us about Race?
Machines learned racism from humans. Perhaps humans can now learn about that racism from the very machines they taught.
A Messy Utopia Is All We Might Get
Climate change didn’t just wreck the planet; it closed off and reshaped the future. Even utopia—if we reach it—will be a mess.
Public Thinker: Meghan O’Gieblyn on God, Machines, and Intelligence
“We can’t always explain how algorithms reach their decisions. The reasoning of algorithms, like the will of God, is unfathomable.”
Episode 5: Data & Racial Capitalism
How have data-centric systems perpetuated racial capitalism, and how have different communities, particularly in the global South, resisted this datafication?
Episode 4: Data & Infrastructure
Whose values get embedded into the algorithms that increasingly govern our lives? How are these data infrastructures complicating what it means to be human?
No Cure
Tech promises to cure any ailment, whether an unwelcome feeling or a global pandemic. But what if tech itself is ill? And what is a cure, anyway?
Episode 3: Data & Automation
What harms can result from AI and automation, and how might we address and prevent those harms?
The Indifference Engine
Nobody knows what will be useful in the future. And this is why we so often find humanistic activities in the seeds and roots of STEM.
Episode 2: Data & Labor
How has data been used to organize labor, and how do we make ourselves visible to data-centric systems?
Episode 1: Data & Humanity
How do people show up in data, and what are some of the inequalities that can result from data collection?
Trailer: Becoming Data
How long has human life been quantified as data, and in what contexts? What are some major implications of humanity being measured as data?
What Does a “Click” Count For?
In the digital world, metrics mean everything. But who interprets just what they mean changes across organizations, countries, and cultures.