Prompt: In the campaign leading up to Brexit, there were these massive billboards of black people crowded and stacked on a road and referred to as swarms—distinctly animal and non-human language for people fleeing conditions that Britain and other imperial formations have historically wrought. The images featured migrant crossing routes in places like Afghanistan and Libya, but they were being used in the middle of the UK so that people could see it and go, “Oh, that’s what’s happening here, they’re coming across our border, encroaching on our lands.” It was falling into the mind of the white citizen subject being like, “This is happening here,” or “It has already happened here.” Sight as a visual technology, as a mechanism, is already being used and abused in ways that need to be interrogated.  What I know from black study, and what I’ve experienced in my embodiment as a Black trans person and in solidarity with disability rights activists, is that seeing is not always believing, and to interrogate the privileges of sight. What you take through a visual medium and how you privilege that sense is rarely a tool for our liberation. So what then do we rely on instead?  And so for me, the kind of belonging that I hail, in relation to our collective liberation, tries to make that pivot. If not, you and I belong to this nation state because we look similar or we sound similar, because we speak the same language, because we have certain kinds of perceived proximities that the state has organized us into. Instead, we can belong to a different set of commitments wherein I don’t need to visually see your suffering to actually acknowledge it. We can actually orient toward one another and the life we want to lead, so that it’s not born through a series of documents, either visual or textual in statistics, the way that the UNHCR also does, the way throughout Europe, or the way that Frontex manages us and the International Office of Migration also enumerates. Quite simply, it’s an orientation in which we collectively understand that statistics also codify our existence and extract our humanity.

Response: I don’t need to “see” evidence of the Oromo Genocide or see dead people up and down Ethiopia to know that we need to mobilize a collective response to the violence there. I have friends from Ethiopia. I have people who are in a place, telling me something is happening, and I know that they’re committed to their and our collective freedoms. So I don’t need to know that fourty-five Ethiopians were murdered today or ten or twenty or a hundred. I actually don’t need to quantify that severe loss with numbers and not names or lives or memories if I already understand that the ongoing colonial and imperial illogics are producing a reality deeper than a mere number. We don’t need to fall into the same traps of enumeration, quantification, and extraction for us to bear witness. Yet again, there is a “both/and” there, too. I understand why there are the petitions, I understand the enumerations, I understand the visualizing of these things, but I also find it to be a trap of visibility and representation, because then we’re not belonging to each other. We’re not trying to collectively belong to a possible otherwise. We’re actually belonging into the same metrics of statecraft that are causing our harm to begin with.


Prompt: A hundred percent. I don’t know if you self-identify as a group, but what I have specifically learned from you, Zoé Samudzi, and Bedour Alagraa is thinking critically about visual documentation and the desire of the audience to see or experience this sadistic yet orgiastic enjoyment of black suffering. This desire is both dehumanizing and demands bodies, which is not the same. I also appreciate your demand to distinguish black life and black bodies versus “myself.” We’re rejecting statecraft while sitting in the west and as diaspora. So I’m also thinking about people who are incarcerated or who are living in zones with an intensity of unrelenting violence, what does it mean for them to reject technologies of statecraft? What is otherwise for them? Going back to that Philip Alston point, you know, humanitarian technology is a site of pervasive experimentation. On one level, I appreciate that the UN is so transparent; they actually state in their internal documents something along the lines of “Thank God, unlike the EU, we don’t have GDPR, so we can experiment on these populations and try out these new things before they get generalized to everyone else.” How do we resist being brought into the only kind of relation remaining when we only see back home through a documentation of the suffering by NGOs or other humanitarian bodies, which does not allow for a kind of belonging with refugees or those categorized as “internally displaced?” How can we learn from and be in community with them when technologies of the state have become the throughway? I’m thinking right now of a really dope book, Eric Stanley’s Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable. Eric thinks a lot with Black trans feminists, as well as with Angela Davis, about what it means to become ungovernable.  When I used to do work in relation to the UK border with migrant women in detention centers, with a greater physical number of people, we could get heard and things could get done. We could mobilize to stop planes—like those small European detention flights. We could shut shit down in this very material way responding to immediate political and physical needs.

Response: Part of my reticence with technology is with the sleekness and the smoothness of a user experience across platforms, which doesn’t map onto the beautiful incoherence of human subjectivity. There’s increased regulation in how we present ourselves online. Through this, we’re becoming increasingly governable. One thing to consider is actual revolution, which Fanon and many others have taught us is not pretty, not consistent. It’s not an isolated march or rally. I mean, it’s machetes, it’s fires. It’s ongoing violent struggle meeting the violence we’ve (asymmetrically) been subjected to, that we should think about turning to yesterday, already. I know that because of the global structures that we’ve been slated into and the ways that we relate and the things that we would already have to be giving up, revolution across the world holds different weight. I’m trying to be careful as I’m saying things, but it is something that I think a lot about: what is required and how do we prepare? And I’m thinking about how not to just think about it, but to be about it. How do we actually mobilize in the long game while our life spans are being shortened in real time, while being heavily surveilled and coercively governed, while a lot of our communities are being dispossessed and displaced in real time, and when ecological disasters and climate catastrophe means some of us are already out of time? And, here you go, I try not to talk myself out of the very answers that I think are really what’s to come, are really hard to break open and leap out of—in that Fanonian sense—out of the current world order toward some otherwise one.  Registering Gender The discussion around gender that I have been exposed to feels very bureaucratic. Particularly, I’ve been thinking about being “assigned at birth.” Do you identify with the gender that you’re assigned at birth? From my understanding, this has to do with birth certificates. Ethiopia actually has one of the lowest rates of birth registration in the world. Most people don’t even get birth registration until they get their passport if they’re going to leave the country. But it’s something like 1.2-1.3 percent of all children acquire birth registration, even among the middle class.


Prompt: As I went down this Google rabbit hole, I was like, “Yo, this is dope,” because when you’re talking about black methodologies, of misspokenness and the broken pieces, this is the complete opposite of digital surveillance. Everything is about enumerating, I mean, talk about counting—that is the fundamental ontological principle, and it’s really disturbed when people do not participate in birth registration for statistical regimes. I don’t want to romanticize these small acts of bureaucratic refusal or present them as active political commitments to abolishing the gender binary. There definitely is homophobia and transphobia in Ethiopia—I don’t even know how much those words completely translate, not just the literal sexual translation, but in the way that people conceive of gender. I don’t want to make it sound like Ethiopia is in any way a paragon of sexual freedom or gender identity inclusiveness, but at the same time, there is a way that everything is not so linear. So as this gender binary is being enacted onto people through institutions, bureaucracies, and technologies, people are refusing it in different kinds of ways. How do we make sense of that, not just in relationship to resistance, but between each other? What does it mean to think about gender when there is not that same assigning? Gender is nothing if not bureaucratic. Gender is nothing if not a series of accruals and assignations on a global scale. But, and, also, there’s something to really delight in, I think, in terms of a refusal that doesn’t look binary. I’ve had conversations where it’s just like, “Look at all this gender. Gender comes from the West, so let’s say ‘no’ to gender, right?” And so it’s supposed to be a rejection outright. But the queer and trans people that I know and delight in and struggle with, we can relish our gender too, as well as our relationship to it.  Let’s put it this way: gender is a series of attachments, much like belonging—which is probably why this relates to your question. So technology, perhaps if I can try to make a real quick but rough analogy, not as a process or a series of mechanisms through which you manage labor, bodies, time, and all of these sorts of constructs, but actually as a way of deepening attachments. I’d like to think of “trans” when I think about transnational politics and even transdisciplinary scholarship as a moving across borders drawing from how trans theorist Eva Hayward talks about trans being a series of attachments and modes of relating as opposed to across, because grammatically, trans is supposed to be across and then cis would be on the same side. Instead of crossing a border or staying on the same side of a border, of gender, of geography, and so on, it could instead be a series of attachments to that very otherwise set of possibilities that we’re trying to mobilize.

Response: To go back to your concrete example with the Ethiopian birth certificates, I think it’s a super cool note to end on, right, because you actually are talking about possibility. No, of course you’re not saying, “Ethiopia is the trans friendliest place on Earth” or whatever. But by nature of these minor refusals that accumulate into a set of possibilities, then we have possibilities there, right? Like 1.2 percent is nothing to sniff at. So now if I wanted to play with my gender or what I understood or perceived to be gender, away from this kind of assignation, and I’m a trans Ethiopian or a person who is—and there are different words to talk about gender variance in different geographical contexts—then I can make some room, make something else possible for myself. And so I can use the very refusal that the masses are enacting to make room for myself.  And then when I’m carving up that space, because how we identify, and how we are identified is always already relational, then I’m making room for an “us” to thrive in that refusal. Again, I think that is linked to the becoming ungovernable that Stanley talks about, the moving in the wake of interminable catastrophe that Alagraa talks about, the thinking away from sort of genocidal politics of enumeration that Samudzi talks about. These are circulating conversations that black study has made, that precisely can be situated in thinking about technology. Now we’ve moved beyond “just” tech, and also to technologies of refusal and how to make those possibilities endure.  A note to the reader from SA Smythe: In response to decades of Black resistance in the US, many publishers have adopted a “house style” where “Black” is capitalized when referring to Black Americans/USians. This conversation was initially recorded and then edited, but SA Smythe spoke with us about the distinction between Black/black in terms of the larger African diaspora and the continent, and what capitalization gestures toward for/as Western grammar. When referring to Black USians explicitly, they usually capitalize the word in response to those important struggles and conventions of naming. Transnationally, the debates/struggles around that aren’t consistent, and thus Smythe considers it useful to be mindful about making those conventions hegemonic from the US, and what that means for collective, global black liberation. For this reason, global black struggles outside of the US, black study (independent from the interdiscipline of Black Studies), etc., are not capitalized in this interview. As La Marr Jurelle Bruce once tweeted: “As long as you’re writing and uttering the word ‘B/black’ with love and toward liberation, we’re good.” That’s the spirit through which this conversation was held.


Prompt: The Black internet has a long history. It has multiple points of origin, as Charlton McIlwain has documented—from Afronet, a BBS network for Black users, to NetNoir, an AOL-based portal “devoted to Afrocentric material,” both of which launched in the mid-1990s. Today, the Black internet has entered the platform era, distributing its riches across Twitter and Instagram and YouTube.

Response: What would it mean to take the Black internet seriously? What would it mean to see Black digital practices (in all their diversity) not in pathological terms—as hailing from the wrong side of a “digital divide”—but as creative, joyful, affirming? What if the Black internet offers a standpoint from which the rest of the internet can be seen, and critiqued, more clearly? These are some of the questions that guide the work of André Brock, Jr., associate professor of Black Digital Studies at Georgia Institute of Technology and the author of Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures. In his work, Brock uses a methodology that he calls “critical technocultural discourse analysis” (CTDA). “It decenters the Western deficit perspective on minority technology use to instead prioritize the epistemological standpoint of underrepresented groups of technology users,” he writes, with the aim of conducting “a holistic analysis of an information technology artifact and its practices.” In other words, CTDA asks, why do people do what they do on the internet—especially when “people” are not just white, cis, heteronormative men? Central to CTDA is the idea of the “libidinal economy,” which originates with Freud, was further developed by the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, and has more recently been taken up by Fred Moten, Frank B. Wilderson III, and other Black thinkers. A libidinal-economic approach emphasizes the role of emotional and psychological intensities in driving anti-Blackness, rather than the more rationalist models of human behavior derived from political-economic approaches. Issue editor J. Khadijah Abdurahman sat down with Brock to trace the history of disinformation from Reconstruction to the present, and to discuss “the unholy trinity of whiteness, modernity, and capitalism.” How do you see the state of mis/disinformation research? What do you think is missing from the conversation?  Disinformation is only perceived as bad when it serves to disrupt the interests of whiteness and white power. White power sounds strong, but it fits. During Reconstruction, the country found all sorts of creative ways to keep black folk from the polls, up to and including murder. That wasn’t a problem. Du Bois documented this extensively in Black Reconstruction, but misinformation against non-whites is typically a footnote in history texts and media reports as it serves the telos of American democracy.


Prompt: Similarly, when disinformation campaigns began to surface in the mid-2000s around Gamergate—or troll farms attacking Black Lives Matter activists—that wasn’t considered worthy of research. We still don’t have great academic research on Crystal Johnson and Blacktivist—two large internet troll farm campaigns that were trying to convince Black folk not to vote. What we do have, however, is a plethora of highly funded research incorporating both quantitative and computational evidence of how disinformation has affected white voters.  For example, reporting on the 2016 presidential election first framed voters as having economic anxiety. They weren’t white—they were economically anxious. Then folk began to find out that economics wasn’t necessarily the cause they were rallying around. They were rallying around xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, and anti-big government. All those are things that white folk are concerned about. Misinformation research is largely conducted by white folk, and their concerns reify this anxiety about the disruptive power of social media and mass media against the interests of white folk.  The object of inquiry of disinformation research has largely been whiteness and white anxiety. Maybe that reflects the classism of disinformation researchers, who are probably mostly trust-fund babies or the partners of people who work in Big Tech. They’re concerned with these “rabble-rousing” and “ignorant” white folks. The emphasis on QAnon is fascinating to me: it’s taken such a god-like center stage in much of the disinformation research.  Reporting on Black vaccine hesitancy has focused on the Tuskegee experiment. Leaving aside the fact that Tuskegee was the complete inverse of what we’re seeing with the Covid-19 vaccine—in that it was an experiment where treatment for syphilis was withheld, or that the racial disparities in Covid-19 vaccination rates primarily reflects availability and access, not hesitancy—the reporting has omitted how many of the pandemic conspiracy theories circulating in Black communities are tied to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

Response: Do you remember that right in the beginning of the shelter-in-place orders, Nick Cannon came out repeating anti-Semitic shit from Farrakhan about the caucusoids descending from the mountains? Then Viacom suspended his show. Busta Rhymes came out and said something that was anti-vax in August 2021, echoing conspiracy theories from Milton William Cooper’s Behold a Pale Horse. The way that book in particular has had a chokehold on the Black entertainment industry is well known in our community. Yet it’s nowhere to be found in this academic discourse of rationality, universality, and mis/disinformation.  Disinformation technologizes and scrubs movements of their xenophobic and racist antecedents to say they represent strictly an information misbehavior. Not a cultural misbehavior. That’s part of the problem. If you scrub racism and xenophobia from disinformation campaigns, what you have is what they would like to say: an attempt to overthrow a government through illegitimate means. But what if you add back in the racism? The better antecedent for QAnon is the John Birch Society, but that’s seen as too explicitly racist.  Black folk have contended with internal disinformation forever. Busta is part of the the Five-Percent Nation, which has had a deep hold on New York rap forever, in terms of coercing patriarchal gender roles and influencing Black relationships to the state. But that was just Black folk being crazy, right?  If you add back in the racism, it adds an entirely powerful libidinal element, in the sense that QAnoners are not overthrowing the government because it was working for white people, they’re overthrowing the government because they felt that it was working too hard to entitle Black and brown folk. Working too hard to give them things to which these white folk feel they don’t deserve. It’s an entitlement culture: we don’t want to give them things. We want them to learn how to work for it. That’s been an anti-Black statement since the 1860s. As soon as we got free, they were like, “Oh, well, these n***** don’t work. They’re lazy. We had to beat them in order to get them to work.”


Prompt: That libidinal economy of the digital seeks to continually restrict information transfer and exchange as an instrumental mode. And by that I mean, it’s strictly the message that’s being communicated, not any of the things which animate that message. So, for the libidinal economy of the digital, we look at productive. We look at efficient. We look at time and space-spanning, right? We look at collapsing traditional order in order to impose modern order. We look at “just in time” manufacturing, which now we understand is a huge problem because corporations sought to “reduce inefficiencies” like merchandise sitting in warehouses or eliminating jobs to demonstrate productivity to Wall Street. As a result we have empty shelves, halted production, and inflation now, but also higher levels of inequality and stress in the decades leading up to this moment.

Response: Believing in Digital Divides I want to just scroll back to the other question about disinformation for a second. There’s this obsession with how other people behave and what their beliefs are. This white, cis, heteronormative, middle-class idea that spaces are not “diverse enough” demonstrates to me how homogenous academic and media spaces are.  I used to do a lot of restaurant work. You’d be working in the back of the house with this dude who’s forty-five from Bangladesh, somebody else who is undocumented from Russia, a seventeen-year-old washing dishes who only speaks Spanish, and then you’re serving these white customers. So, really, it’s the class of people being served who has a more insular view of the world, not the people in the back of the house—yet that’s the class we’re getting research from. The disinformation discourse is very abstracted away from the conditions, beliefs, and societies it seeks to describe.  When I think about disinformation campaigns, I also think about the digital divide, one of the biggest trends in pathologizing Black people’s relationship to technology. Where’s the space to turn ethnography backwards, onto a field that has gotten a lot wrong? The digital divide stuff has shifted to “information communication technology for development,” or ICT4D. They’re looking at Africa, India, Pakistan, and other places, and saying, “They don’t have the same type of networks we have in the West. So, of course, they’re struggling to access the resources that we take for granted.” It’s just as problematic as it was when they were looking at Black folk here in the States because, like you said, it never turns the gaze around to ask what created these conditions. How and why do these conditions continue to persist? Instead, let’s be liberal and only look at the ways people will either resist or are hailed by these particular technological systems in a way that disadvantages them.  As the president of the Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures stan club, the two main contributions of your book are, in my view, Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) as a process through which to understand these technologies, and the importance of the libidinal economy. This largely seems to have gone unaccepted within the dominant research discourse. Is that your experience, or do you feel like people are engaging with your approach?


Prompt: [Ed.: The idea of “libidinal economy” originates with Freud, was further developed by the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, and more recently has been taken up by Frank B. Wilderson III, Fred Moten, and other Black thinkers. It emphasizes that emotional intensities, such as desire or antiblackness, drive “rational self interest” or political-economic modes of thinking.]  The libidinal approach is still too new. I don’t have the impact on social science research yet because I’m still talking about Black people. That’s my mistake. I didn’t try to claim white people are bad. That wasn’t my concern. My concern was to say, “Look at how joyous Black people are,” which is a very different thing.  I have to give a talk to Microsoft in a month and they’re like, “Well, can you present your book in a way that makes it palatable to white people?” Nah, I can’t. And it’s not going to happen because you need to learn about me as opposed to learning what I do to resist you, which are two totally different things.

Response: Data science and information science have long been and will continue to be resistant to theories like libidinal economy, but also to theories like critical race theory, because they are resistant to things which are not of them. They think about things which they can reach out and fix, like ethics. Or reach out and bring in, like the digital divide stuff. But they don’t ever want to engage with the question of how they benefit from certain structures, or how to fix the problems they’ve created. They don’t want to do that.


Prompt: So the libidinal economy has a ways to go. I’m really enthused by the uptake that it’s gotten among critical academics like yourself. Somebody said to me in my DMs the other day that it gives you a framework for understanding exactly what was going on, because we didn’t have words for it before. But white folks will always say racism is not in their heart—which is their own libidinal economy, right? They’ll never be encouraged to take it up, because to do so requires that they interrogate themselves and that’s not going to happen.  Do you think Twitter is an accurate gauge for the Discourse™? Do you have a sense of what readings are driving the adherence to rationalism?  Twitter really is a space where people who don’t read books want to argue with people who write books. That’s tech too, right? I had these students coming through my classes at Georgia Tech who said, “We don’t read this kind of thing. They just tell us to make stuff. They train us how to make it. They’re not asking us to think about it.” Those are the people that Georgia Tech sends into Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Netflix. The people who are trained not to think about things. Lewis Mumford talked about this not on a racial basis, but on a technical basis. He called it “techno-rationalism,” and he said no manufacturer wants a person who has a tendency to engage in anthropomorphic, quasi-rational thinking about the industry that we inhabit. They don’t want anybody to personalize it, because why would you personalize something that’s based on extraction? The only emotion that they valorize is the one where you don’t have a reaction to your extraction. That’s the way we train STEM graduates, and engineers specifically. Then they hear ethics and they’re like, “Oh yeah, I took a course on ethics.” Well, how many courses did you take in your program? Seventeen? I mean, of course you took an ethics class. How do you put critical race theory on top of that? How do you put the libidinal economy on top of that? The whole curriculum is designed not to introduce them to things about the world, much less critical texts. But that’s whiteness. It’s what Charles Mills calls “an epistemology of ignorance.” If they are born not to know, they don’t ever have to interrogate the conditions which led them to their success, because all they have to do is bask in the profit and the privilege. Oh, and enforce the denial of those profits and privileges to people who don’t look like them.

Response: To put it another way, part of my question about libidinal economy is: what is the why of rationality? Let me ask you a different question. Why has Marxism been taken up so strongly by information science and technology people, but not critical race theory?  I know your resistance to political economy and I understand it to a degree. I don’t know if I read enough information science or things that are self-identified in that category to speak confidently about it. But, I’ll say, Ruha Benjamin put together her collection Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life with scholars who are arguably taking up Black Marxism and the Black radical tradition, including R. Joshua Scannell and Andrea Miller, in a way that I find productive. I wouldn’t claim it’s critical race theory per se, but they’re definitely thinking with scholars like Katherine McKittrick and Sylvia Wynter when they’re writing about drones, for example. The end goal is not to be like, “Aaah, apocalypse coming, all the Black people gon’ die because drones is coming.”  There is an evacuated critical race theory where people will cite Crenshaw, Lorde, and the Combahee River Collective—in that order—and have read none of them, understand none of them, and they’re just referencing in order to #decolonize for corporate diversity— —to just check off the boxes.  The Unholy Trinity To me, there’s a connection between the epistemology of ignorance, philistinism or the refusal to read, whiteness, and techno-rationalism because, like you said, there are seventeen courses. There’s one week of ethics, sure—but those seventeen courses were about race too, in their refusal to address it as an explicit object, right? And not race broadly speaking, but white supremacy as a desire to control the nonwhite world and the natural world. I’ve been reading some good stuff recently, McKittrick specifically, and she writes about whiteness’ desire to control the world in hierarchical ways—to categorize it so that it can be placed in a hierarchy. That’s much more modernity than it is whiteness. But they’re hard to separate. You have the holy trinity, or the unholy trinity, of whiteness, modernity, and capitalism. Modernity wants to take us away from our folkways and traditions and make us more efficient and, as such, it extracts us from humans to numbers. Capitalism is like, “Word, because if we extract these people from their humanity, we can then exploit them for profit.” And then whiteness is like, “Say, word, because I was ready to extract these n***** anyway!”


Prompt: So, they all work together in concert and it’s really hard to untangle them. Which is the point of the libidinal economy for me, because it goes past modernity’s desire for numerical extraction and capital’s desire for labor. The strongest political economy critiques address capitalism’s desire to exploit humanity, the world, and its resources for profit. The libidinal economy goes past that to say, “Hey, there’s something about whiteness here.” There’s something specifically about anti-Blackness, because we could talk about China and Africa, right? China is not white. They don’t think of themselves as white. They do think of themselves as a sovereign in the world order and are intent on imposing their way of thinking about the world on the world. So, you see them making loans to African nations where they retain property rights over the properties they develop. And the African nations basically just get to host it. They get a little change from which they can skim off, you know, to make their families rich. But China owns all of that and, by extension, they are exploiting and extracting from the natural resources of the continent, for their own game. Is that anti-Black? Absolutely. Is that white?  Well, it’s Han nationalist. I mean, the Uyghurs aren’t the only ones who aren’t Han.  Right, the Uyghurs are not the only ones who aren’t Han. The entire country is made up of multiple ethnic minorities, but it’s strange how the Muslim ones get singled out for that.  Well, also, I would like to abolish the word ethnicity.

Response: Noooo… [whimpers] No, the term ethnicity must die. You don’t understand, for us sitting in relationship to Ethiopia, they say ethnicity with a hard R. What really is an ethnic group? No, so I’m telling you straight up, Amhara supremacists, they’ll be like, “All those ethnic, ethno-nationalists, all this tribalism…” This is how they refer to Black Indigenous land claims because they want this universal category of Black that is defined by state-based nationalism, in a way that circumvents their own complicity in a system that produces benefit for them at the expense of the vast majority of people, in the wake of the slavery and colonization that happen in Ethiopia. And so, what is an ethnicity? Because the claims that you can make as an ethnic group are very different from the claims that you make as a nation. The former hails a kind of parochialism that I think is different.  The reason why I want to hold on to ethnicity partially is that’s where I got my definition of race from for Distributed Blackness. I fell in love with the sociological explanation of ethnicity. In relationship to Quebec, Everett Cherrington Hughes said ethnicity is not a pattern of traits or behaviors that you can assign to a particular group. Instead, it’s what both the in-group and the outgroup agree that the in-group says does, believes, and behaves. So, it’s a discursive definition and, from there, I feel like it’s important we get the understanding that no ethnicity exists in isolation. It’s always in response to cultural, environmental, geographic, and political factors around them.  So, China is really trying to do the political work of saying there are no ethnicities here, “We’re all one China.” But we can look back at the Freedmen here in Oklahoma who are fighting to be considered part of the Cherokee ethnic group because they got that oil money, and the Cherokee are like, “No, we’re going to go to science and say, ‘You’re not genetically Cherokee, you can’t get this money.’” But the Freedmen are like, “We were raised with you. We have children with you. We have ancestors with you. Therefore, we are part of this culture.” And that difference to me—between race and ethnicity—that is the really tricky thing. It’s always slippery, right? But it’s a boundary that I think makes sense in our world of signifying and meaning.


Prompt: I would say the same exact thing in my explanation of why the term ethnicity must die. The thing is, the work “ethnicity” does in America is perhaps different than in other parts of the world. The most contention is around the category of Hispanic, when they have you fill out demographic forms around race and the options presented are Hispanic or Black—what the fuck is Hispanic? Who agreed to even be from Spain?  What to do about Logic (and Kevin)? Shout out to Logic. I’m appreciative that they let me hijack this shit, right? But I’ve definitely been thinking about what it means to hijack Logic, because “logic” has been so central to the dominant critique of mis/disinformation—that these ignorant, economically anxious white actors are illogical. They’re not pledging allegiance to science and are undermining the Enlightenment rationality that we fought for, that our forefathers fought for—though maybe they shouldn’t have committed genocide against Indigenous people and enslave the Blacks along the way. But they say, “We recognize that, we make an acknowledgment of past harm,” and now let’s focus on logic. So, how do we intervene in the context of this way of thinking about logic, enlightenment, and rationality?  The best thing we can do is establish the validity of alternative epistemological standpoints. What I mean when I say that is that every culture approaches their version of reality differently. Whether it’s geographic, whether it’s genetic, whether it’s environmental, whether it’s political—they all approach it differently. And for the last five or six hundred years, we’ve been forced to endure a world that is structured by a white disavowal of their own embodied consciousness, disdain for women, and anti-Black racism. Those three things are the pillars of what whiteness is, so rationality is a disavowal of not just feelings but also a disavowal of the role that women have in the decision-making process, because women under rationality are considered hysterical.

Response: If you take women out of the decision-making process, you basically get the thoughts of white men. Under whiteness, white men are valued for their ability to resist their dark desires, their empathy, and their care, because they’re making “unemotional” decisions about how to apportion resources. That comes directly back into the data science that we’re arguing with and about, because, to them, the most elegant code is the code that is beautiful in its simplicity and its aesthetic minimalism. The most elegant code also does things to social situations that seem as if they are situations devoid of emotional resonance.  So we could talk about social welfare algorithms where people are now being asked to fill out entire questionnaires about what type of toothpaste they use, because their answer to that question will be put into a database and used to calculate that they are not deserving of welfare benefits because they have too good a taste in toothpaste. How dare you have sensitive teeth? You don’t deserve Sensodyne, you better go get you some Arm & Hammer toothpaste for a dollar! So it’s this continual asceticism, this denial of the pleasures, or even the denial of the experience of the visceral, of the libidinal. That is one of the core functions of whiteness.  One of the most interesting trends during the early stages of the pandemic was that African countries were not experiencing Covid-19 at the same rates as white Western nations. And it turns out that it was because these folk, since they had lived with chronic deadly diseases for centuries, had built up protocols for infection control strategies. And there are other examples where people are doing fantastic things for themselves, of themselves, by themselves that are not beholden to a Western paradigm.  But, to go back to an American context, how are we supposed to gain control over these information resources in order to institute a different epistemological standpoint? Because one of the other things that whiteness is good at is denying access to those resources, so that we can achieve—I hate the word sovereignty—some sort of valence of being part of this nation.


Prompt: One of the slickest things that I’ve seen over the last thirty years is how good conservative movements are at taking terms like woke and critical race theory, stripping them of all meaning, and then getting them used against us. That interpretive flexibility, I would argue, is whiteness’s greatest resource. And it works well for the libidinal economy of information because the digital itself is flexible. It can promote pieces of information in a way that strips them of their context and makes it seem like they’re universal, when, in actuality, they’re very particular. So whiteness and information technology work well hand-in-hand. Maybe by design. What would a Wakandan information technology look like?  Could you talk a little about what you mean when you say that Distributed Blackness proposes a Morrisonian approach to technology?  That’s Ruha Benjamin’s fault. Ruha interviewed me, and at the end of the conversation, she said, “This is a Morrisonian approach to information technology.” I was like, “What you mean? That’s too big. I can’t take that.” She’s like, “No, if you think about Playing in the Dark, where Morrison spends a lot of time in the first couple of chapters talking about ‘American Africanism,’ or a white identity premised on a negative, inverse relationship with Blackness. You’re making that same conversation—not about literature, but about technology.”  What I’m trying to do is establish what Black people have always done. We have always had to watch the other carefully in order to not get eaten by the other or destroyed by the other. We have to know their ways. We have to know how they work and, in the process, from that outside perspective, what we do is we build a Black inquiry on an analysis of invention—because what’s more invented than whiteness? They made themselves up out of English, German, Italian, Dutch, Norwegian. They made themselves into this category called white—that’s an invention like a mothafucka’, right? But in the process of doing so, they had to center that invention against a Black body in order to make it legible.

Response: Charles Mills says Blackness is illumination. Y’all been telling us that we need to illuminate what Blackness is for y’all. But Blackness actually illuminates what modernity is. And that’s where I sit. I use my epistemological standpoint, my positionality in and of the world, to critique the world that brought me into being—that’s Morrison. If you think about Sula, if you think about The Bluest Eye, those are all positions, those are all texts interrogating the world from a particular standpoint that has already been destroyed or attempted to be destroyed.  That shit is powerful to me. It’s not a position of abjectness. I’m not saying, “Oh, I’m on the other side of the digital divide and I’m trying to cross that bridge.” No, I peeped that bridge and it doesn’t take me anywhere that’s really necessary for me to go. And let me tell you how fucked up it was, what you did while you was tearing down the ecosystem and destroying the land, and destroying the people who owned that land before you, in order to make this bridge happen so that you could be more efficient and not have to go all the way around to the ford to ship your goods.  So a Morrisonian approach—an American Africanism—is shorthand for basically saying, from this standpoint, from where you stand on the margins of white society, but in your fullness as a Black person (because Blackness is human, regardless of what Afro-pessimists say), what critiques have you made or can you make about whiteness and the world that whiteness has created? A shit-ton, a lot, right? And they’re critiques that white folk are not capable of making because this is their utopia. For all that they complain about it, this is the world that they wanted, the world that they got.  Man, that look on your face. I’d pay money for that.  So, where we at? Where do we locate this Black sense of place when we know that information science is already so dominated by whiteness? Where do we just stand still and where do we act? We got McKittrick writing Dear Science and Other Stories, Ruha Benjamin’s multiple books, and Simone Browne’s Dark Matters. But, on the whole, where is the Black study folk at?


Prompt: Black studies has not concerned itself with science in any real way. Black studies is more focused on the interpretation of texts, film, video, music, and the like. They have not focused on science at all. You have some historians who have done amazing work, but in general Black studies don’t care.  What McKittrick does that’s really valuable is she talks passionately about how we understand ourselves not grounded in the ways the world told us we should be, but how we understand ourselves as what Black people do. She said Black knowing is feeling, and I was like, “You motherfucking right,” because there’s something about that embodied cognition. When the world is inflicted upon your body, then you listen to what your body says when it’s trying to tell you about the world.  We lack the means of control or even dominance in these tech industries. The best we can do is get an interest convergence with well-meaning white people (WMWPs) and liberal folk to at least trouble their understandings of what the world they’re creating is—whether that’s Black feminist epistemology, whether that’s intersectionality, whether that’s critical race theory, any of those things, right? If we can get them to understand that the harms that they visit upon us are also inadvertently visited upon their children and their grandparents, then we’ll get some action. The problem is we created industries full of white men who don’t care about their momma. Have you seen the movie We Need to Talk About Kevin?  Yes.

Response: That’s the type of industry we’ve created right now. “I wonder what this bow and arrow will do? Oh, I’m sorry, Dad, I didn’t mean to kill them with it.”  We’ve got three white men fighting to get higher into the low Earth orbit—not even in fucking space, just far enough from the planet so they can float. And their aims are celebrated by the mainstream press because they’re visions of a future where they can escape Blackness. As opposed to dealing with the harms that they’ve created with just-in-time manufacturing and two-day shipping and this surveillance culture that they have fostered under the guise of friendship and community. They don’t want to address those harms because those harms have made them a shit ton of money.  Facebook is a good example. My students always grimace when I say the best way to understand Facebook is that it was a creation of a horny nineteen-year-old with more computing skills than social skills, and this was a way he could get to meet, in the abstract, the women he wanted to be with. Because that’s what Facebook was. It was a network that he built where people would submit pictures of themselves and he could select them at his leisure without them knowing that he was looking at them. Once you start from that understanding, Facebook’s extraction of personal data and sales to advertisers makes a lot more sense. It never has been about community. You can see how poorly they understand community with the way they moderate and run Facebook groups. It always has been about the extraction of something to satisfy the libidinal, whether it’s voyeurism or simply wanting to profit off of others.


Prompt: In the fall of 2018, the residents of Atlantic Plaza Towers, a rent-stabilized apartment complex in Brownsville, Brooklyn, received an alarming notice from their landlord stating that the key fob system to enter the building was to be replaced with facial recognition technology. More than 130 residents opposed Nelson Management Group’s plan to install the facial recognition system and mandate photographs for mailbox key replacements. Atlantic Plaza Towers resident Tranae Moran led the fight, then celebrated the successful defeat of Nelson Management’s plan by founding the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Alliance (OBA). Fabian Rogers, a former floor captain at Atlantic Towers—a volunteer position that involves helping residents in an emergency—has followed Tranae to OBA in order to continue educating their community about the dangers of biometrics and elevate the joy of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville neighborhood. Issue editor J. Khadijah Abdurahman spoke to Moran and Rogers about what they’ve learned through their organizing work, and how the anti-surveillance struggle fits into the broader fight for environmental justice, social housing, and community reinvestment.

Response: Can you start us off with the basics? What would you like readers to know about who you are and the work you’ve been engaged with since the peak of resistance against facial recognition in Atlantic Plaza Towers? Tranae Moran (TM): I am a community organizer and community outreach specialist, and my nine-to-five is working with the City’s Tenant Support Unit. I founded the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Alliance (OBA) after assisting the Atlantic Plaza Towers Tenants Association in pushing back against facial recognition technology. After we succeeded in preventing the installation of facial recognition technology in our apartment complex, I wanted to continue the work of educating people about biometric collecting systems and just general tenants rights. I didn’t want to take up too much space in the Tenants Association, so I started the OBA in order to push that initiative forward. So, here we are.  Fabian Rogers (FR): Technically, I think Tranae usually throws the title of cofounder my way, but I’m more of a participant. I’m kind of like an assistant aide of sorts to the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Alliance. But, you know, Tranae would beg to differ, of course. Also, I was a floor captain from Atlantic Plaza Towers, but currently I work as a constituent advocate for New York State Senator Jabari Brisport’s office out here in my Senate District 25. Tranae and I have been able to change the trajectory of our careers, essentially, just from organizing, at no cost at all—just kind of pushing forward until folks finally told us we can make a profit from it.  TM: I don’t want to say a profit; I would rather say make a living out of it. People from our community don’t think of civic engagement and community work as an actual career. No one thinks that just by helping the community, you can make a living doing that. So, this was a very eye-opening experience for both Fabian and I, because we found ourselves doing passion work but ended up making some real impact, and were able to use our lived experience through that to start a career in community work.


Prompt: A lot of articles feature the fight and the resistance that the Atlantic Towers community waged against the implementation of facial recognition technology. I was wondering if you could set the stage for us: What does Brownsville and Ocean Hill look like? What is your relationship to the community and how did that set the stage for this successful battle?  TM: What does Brownsville look like? Brownsville looks like a multitude of things. It’s a very vibrant and resilient neighborhood with a legacy of activism. When the time comes, we are able to come together and make some waves. Just Atlantic Towers specifically, we are a tight-knit community. We’ve been here for generations: elderly folks, young people—it’s just a little bit of everyone. Our Tenants Association is a direct reflection of that: we have municipal workers, we have people who work for MTA, we have lawyers, we have real estate agents, we have teachers, nurses, caregivers. So it’s a very diverse group of people with expertise in different spaces, which means, if we have the right foundation, we can make a lot of positive movement.

Response: There’s a lot of focus on the negative things that happen in Brownsville. I always say to people, I don’t see a lot of this stuff that you guys say is happening here. It could just be because I am from here and I identify what many other people wouldn’t consider as joy! I know people come to Brownsville and may be a bit taken aback, but I just took a walk to go buy a new pair of headphones because the ones I purchased didn’t work out so well and I’m just like, this is such a joyful neighborhood. Yes, we have things happen, but what neighborhood doesn’t have things going on?  I want to magnify the joy that is present here while giving folks the information they need in order to navigate and not be taken advantage of, because there is gentrification coming here in Brownsville and not everyone has the same access to information. OBA is stepping in to assist with the flow of information.  FR: The other thing to understand is the resiliency and the persistence of Black and brown folks within this community in particular. Fighting back against the narrative that you’re a product of your environment—a lot of Ocean Hill-Brownsville-ites are more than what their environment is. At the same time, a lot of their environment is that which they can’t control. Health disparities come from the fact that Brownsville was industrialized and those remnants of industrialization play a role in environmental violence. Things that you can’t see that make it seem as though Black and brown folks are just born with respiratory issues, when it’s really the environment that we’re living in that plays a large role as opposed to our habits and things like that.  When folks find out about the more invisible things like air quality being bad, or illegal projects affecting the health of Ocean Hill-Brownsville, a lot of times folks become activists and advocates for the community. People live, love, and learn in this community. I think that that’s a staple as to why the culture of Ocean Hill-Brownsville continues to persist despite gentrification and other disparities.


Prompt: TM: Brownsville is made up of the highest concentration of public housing buildings in New York. They are not a priority to the city, if you ask me. There is a lot of neglect happening in these neighborhoods. This neighborhood is a food desert. We don’t have markets. Fresh fruits and vegetables are not easy to find. I mean, we do have a beautiful network of community gardens and local people who contribute their time and energy to those gardens, and help to make our community a more vibrant place. But as far as the city coming in to do cleanups and things like that, we don’t see much of that happening.  Are we creating community spaces for people to take up space in and do whatever it is that they want to do? That is not being done, which is why OBA is committed to creating space for joy, imagination, and vision in Brownsville. Because of the things that people have been through, a lot of them are numb and we have to wake them up first—liven them up with some joy again and de-stressing activities through art—before we can focus on fighting biometric information collecting or the things that take a bit more time for understanding.  Not Just Playing Candy Crush I don’t know if this is your experience, but it’s something I definitely complain about in academic or institutional spaces, when they want to bring in “community,” the currency is “impacted people.” They want you to share a little bit of your trauma, your individual story, and then talk about “organizing”—organizing is anything that’s not writing a paper in the way that they speak. And then they’re done with you, and you can go back to whence you came from until they want to trot you back out again for the pictures and stuff. I’m not even interested in critiquing that. Rather, I want to ask, what does the conversation look like across ourselves and across neighborhood intimacies?  It definitely has stood out to me how OBA has been a collective effort. It’s you leading the fight Tranae, but it’s not like you are the sole hero. Even how you conceptualize what the problem is and how you situate it into both the joyous community and the environmental factors or ecologies of various types of violences that people are subjected to. I really appreciated that. I remember reading all about OBA in 2019, and now we are about to be in 2022 and you guys haven’t just been chillin’ playing Candy Crush. What is the state of OBA organizing, not just with Covid, but over this length of time? What has been like, “Yo, I’m never doing that again,” or “This is what has been really hard,” or however you’d like to reflect on that passage of time?

Response: TM: We have been refocusing what OBA wants to do. At first, the main thought was that we need to get information out about biometric collecting systems. We need to inform our community about the dangers and why they need to be aware of their surroundings. That is still a major theme in OBA but this has just been a very stressful time, so we have been trying to find ways to make an impact that don’t ask for too much energy from our community. They are exerting themselves in so many different ways, with work, with kids going back to school, and just with navigating life post-vaccines becoming available.  We partnered with AI For the People last summer for OBA’s first public outdoor event on Juneteenth. The community appreciated the music, food, and information about all of the invisible harms. Many people didn’t know about the topics we covered, including the fact that National Grid runs a fracked gas pipeline through Brownsville. Leaks in that pipeline can expose people to cancer-causing and radioactive gas. As Fabian just mentioned, we are already dealing with environmental issues in Brownsville. There is a large community of people who have asthma here and respiratory problems, and now things are being done that will potentially cause more harm to the health of the people in this community.  FR: We’ve been trying to connect dots between different struggles going on between housing justice, environmental justice, and surveillance with Housing Organizers for People Empowerment (HOPE), AI For the People, and Brownsville Green Justice. For example, pointing out how our landlord trying to install facial recognition into our building plays into the grand scheme of housing injustice. Anti-surveillance includes pushing for social housing or housing access vouchers for homeless folks and things like that.  National Grid is building a fracked gas pipeline in Brownsville. It’s one of many different corporate entities monopolizing essential utilities for all New York housing. It’s reliant on the fossil fuel industry and so they make money by building new infrastructure, not necessarily through gas flowing. This means they have to find ways to circumvent New York state law and other state laws in order to continue building infrastructure. And they end up picking Black and brown communities that don’t come off as active or as in tune with what’s going on, or seem to have a sense of wanting to push back. National Grid fails to inform the community and then the community has to be reactive, so you suddenly see a community activate and want to inform themselves, understand what’s going on, and push back against corporate BS.


Prompt: (Re)active Situations Do you see anti-surveillance organizing as a strategy of abolition or defunding the police? How do you situate privacy issues relative to the other issues emerging in the community?  FR: Sometimes it’s not necessarily focusing on surveillance rights, but just looking at how we deal with corporate enterprises. How do you look at a biometrics company like StoneLock that tried to install its facial recognition system in Atlantic Towers? How do you look at the shenanigans that they pulled off and compare it to the strategies that National Grid is putting in place to try to give folks in Brownsville and Ocean Hill a hard time, in terms of trying to build new infrastructure that will then impact folks’ lives for the sake of a profit that they don’t need? In partnership with the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, I’ve gotten tapped into different anti-surveillance groups, including the G.A.N.G.S. Coalition (Grassroots Advocates for Neighborhood Groups & Solutions). They are trying to dispel the myths embedded in gang databases by reframing the issue for disenfranchised communities that are riddled with gang and community violence as a lack of opportunity, a lack of funding, a lack of resources that makes folks desperate and have to take risks in order to make a consistent living.  When you dispel the idea of “folks out here just trying to create trouble” and you look deeper into it, it forces you to question the tactics that the NYPD uses in order to build a database to help with their so-called policing. With this gang database in particular, it’s a database built off of police bias. It’s not built off of fact. It’s not built off of factual information.  When I think of justice, I always try to simplify it to the essential issue. What’s the essential device that allows this issue to proliferate in said communities, and how do we tap into communities to try to address quality of life issues? How do we tap into communities to be able to empower themselves to be the force to stop those pejorative relationships? If you get caught up in the monotony, you’ll lose sight of the fact that a lot of times these corporate enterprises are using the same strategies. It’s a very cookie-cutter system, but because it’s in a different sort of industry, you don’t think of it as such.

Response: For me and Tranae and other folks that were on our side in terms of surveillance and data privacy advocacy, we had to think about technology in a different way. We had to think about these issues as a housing issue. You often have to think outside of the context of what you’re put in to really be able to dissect the issue and be able to address it, and then be able to translate it to allow folks to feel as though they can be informed, they can be empowered. And then from there, they can be partners and allies, and oftentimes can be leaders.


Prompt: TM: We are very reactive when things happen because there are no conversations being held with our community about changes being made. That flow of information seems to not flow to us in the way that it should, which is where I want OBA to be able to step in. I want us to be a hub. A lot of these technology companies, real estate developers, and all kinds of folks who are just making their way over to Brownsville claim that they can’t find anyone to talk to. I’m just like, there’s so many community organizations doing work in Brownsville. How could you not find anyone to talk to and get insights from? So, you decided to still push forward with whatever this project was, without speaking to anyone in the community or trying to have a town hall or anything, despite the fact that we are very open to all of those things?  Why aren’t these companies speaking to the community-based organizations? I want OBA to be a hub where they know they can come here and speak with community members who have expertise in different areas, so that we’re not just like, “Oh, what the heck is that? We never heard of this. What are you doing here?” Instead, it’s like, “Oh no, we had conversations with these people. We let them know that we wanted this and that to happen, and this is what we don’t want to see.” Those conversations don’t happen. It’s always a too little, too late kind of situation for us, and I want to change that.  I want us to be involved in the conversations that are being had about the space that we occupy. Like, we live here. There are people here that have a brain and they have wants and needs, and they want to see different things in their community. When Fabian was speaking about gangs, how kids end up in those situations is that they want to go outside, but we don’t have green fields for them to sit in the grass and look at the sky and just ponder. We don’t have spaces like that. They come outside of their homes into all kinds of confusion. Young people have to navigate through these communities, digesting what they see and that’s how they learn. And it’s not always the greatest thing when they don’t have someone, or an organization, there to explain to them what they’re experiencing, so that they can make better and more informed decisions about how they want to navigate through the community.

Response: Housing and (De)Funding The Police As far as the gang database, who gets categorized as a gang? You mentioned that National Grid is putting poisonous gas under the ground, affecting a lot of people. Nobody is calling them a gang, right? But if you’re fifteen years old, Black, with certain colors on, you’re more likely to be identified as a gang member.  Tranae, you mentioned the density of housing projects in Brownsville. People don’t seem to understand that you have a high density of projects, but you also have middle-class home ownership and residents with white-collar jobs. So, even when we talk about community, people within the community have very different relationships to the intensity of surveillance and policing. I also know from my experience, caseworkers live in Brownsville, so there’s people who sit in a lot of different places and have different relationships to policing. How are you thinking through class differences and funding relationships as you organize in Ocean Hill-Brownsville?  TM: In Ocean Hill, there’s a larger amount of home ownership than there is down in Brownsville, which I’ve found to be one of the dividing factors. This is one of the reasons why OBA started and why we have this name—I wanted to bring the two communities together because we are separated due to the infrastructure of Brownsville and the density of the housing projects. We have the same issues, but the intensity of those issues is greater in Brownsville. Ocean Hill will probably be gentrified way faster than down in Brownsville. It’s happening at the same time, but the changes are happening a lot quicker in Ocean Hill.  I’m not finding that everyone wants to defund the police here. The police have actually been very supportive of OBA, thus far, in our events and organizing outdoors. I think it’s about the people and not just police in general, because we have been met with folks not being happy about our presence outside. For example, business owners have called the police but when the police arrive, they’re actually helpful and they like what they see us doing, which is creating space for imagination and joy, and providing information on these invisible harms: facial recognition, surveillance, and fracked gas pipelines in Brooklyn.


Prompt: We want to focus on meeting people where they are, and not on specific topics such as defunding the police, because everyone doesn’t share that vision and we are not trying to divide the community more than it may be already. Everyone has to navigate however it works for their specific family unit. I feel like everyone has that capacity as long as they have the information to do it.  We have not been accepting funding from many organizations. One, because we’re still laying down the foundations for OBA. With the climate of community organizing and community work, and these corporations wanting to put money into the community with whatever other agendas they have going on, I have been trying to be very careful about who we are accepting funding from. We have organizations like National Grid, who are doing great events in our community, but at the same time, they’re running a fracked gas pipeline in Brownsville. They were handing out hot dogs. First of all, why are you giving people hot dogs, anyway? They’re smiling and in community and giving away all these things but, at the same time, they’re being a double. They have these construction workers digging in front of your apartment building, putting all kinds of nonsense into the ground. And they are just going to leave and say, “Okay, we had a great event while you’re dealing with respiratory problems” and who knows what other kinds of health issues because of the things that they’re doing in the community.  FR: An example of resistance we’ve encountered is from homeowners, because Amazon’s Ring doorbell and similar surveillance technologies are marketed to them as basic home protection. One approach that I’ve found helpful is pointing out the corporate relations between a product and possible policing. For instance, Amazon partners with and donates to police departments, and so by buying into the Ring system, you may be indirectly paying into an unnecessary police budget. Trying to build that sort of conversation helps folks understand the bigger picture as to what goes on.

Response: “Defund the police,” in particular, has always been an interesting conversation because people think, like, “Oh, we’re going to take the badges and weapons away from the police.” It’s like, no, folks just want to defund the police’s excessive budget and refund the community for how strapped it’s been for resources. I’m always a stickler for making simple phrases that can open up a bigger conversation. When folks get very defensive about something like “defund the police,” for instance, I’m like, “Well, I think you should look at it in the context that it’s only half the phrase. It’s more of ‘defund the police,’ ‘refund the community.’” We all make the big arguments about how strapped our community has been since the 1970s.


Prompt: Reaganomics and trickle-down theory started to trickle away the resources that helped working-class blue-collar communities push through by having supportive programs, trade schools, and alternatives to what’s out there. So, we should be thinking about how the police are asked to be a Swiss Army Knife when their training doesn’t allow them to be. A police officer isn’t a mental health expert. That’s just a fact, unless they had that background beforehand and then they became a police officer.

Response: Folks say “defund the police” because we’ve bolstered a couple of different economies rather than the community. If we see that the police have bolstered their pockets, maybe it’s a chance to look at how we can stop the excessive spending and start to think about how to funnel back money into the community. That’s what happened pre-Reaganomics, trickle-down theory, and things like that. That all gets lost in the chaos of folks getting caught up in a phrase like “defund the police” or “Black Lives Matter.” It’s always the monotony of getting caught up in the moment of a phrase that feels triggering, rather than unpacking the history and the impact and the side effects of systemic changes that end up de-establishing what a community can provide for itself and for others.


Prompt: The tech industry is a monopolizing force, and one of the many things it monopolizes is the means for producing knowledge about it. In the platform era, the machinery of the internet is locked behind closed doors, creating problems for researchers. Companies like Facebook aren’t keen to share data or the other computational resources needed to develop a complete picture of how large algorithmic systems work (and whom they work for). And these companies’ endless amounts of money give them plenty of other ways to derail critical research, in particular by exercising influence over academia and the other places where knowledge about the tech industry is made, as well as by co-opting or silencing individual researchers.

Response: Given these obstacles, how can researchers both inside and outside of tech companies do the difficult work of research, critique, and resistance? To discuss this and other related questions, issue editor J. Khadijah Abdurahman talked with two leading critical scholars of technology. Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble is a MacArthur Genius Fellowship recipient and an Associate Professor of Gender Studies and African American Studies at UCLA, where she serves as the cofounder and director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry. She is also the author of the seminal book debunking technologies as neutral artifacts of progress, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. Meredith Whittaker is the Faculty Director and cofounder of the AI Now Institute, and a Minderoo Research Professor at NYU. She resigned from Google after organizing with her coworkers against the company’s efforts to build military AI and its failure to address rampant discrimination and sexual abuse. Abdurahman spoke with Noble and Whittaker about how to do critical tech research, and how to insist on transformative justice practices as we try to dismantle technologies of oppression.


Prompt: Beacons was conceived of in the wake of Dr. Timnit Gebru’s high-profile firing from Google. Similarly, the impetus for this interview was the systematic firing of Black women from academia and industries—those who were essentially fulfilling their duties and showing up as their full selves. On one hand, there’s a question of what is to be done about institutional and corporate power—but the bright lines dictating who are the villains in a David and Goliath story let us off the hook in terms of internal cultures of accountability. Are there different ways to relate to one another and be accountable, as we respond to institutional repression? How are each of you thinking about these questions as we’re approaching the one year anniversary of Dr. Gebru’s firing? Safiya Umoja Noble (SN): The question about how do we hold ourselves accountable is really important. I know that there is always a series of conversations happening among people who work in the field of AI and ethics, which is a big tent of people holding competitive and often diametrically opposed ideas. You have, for example, companies like Google that consider themselves leaders in ethical AI; and then you have the women, the people of color, the LGBTQ scholars, the activists, and the journalists who for two decades have been trying to make their issues about the immorality or the politics of various types of technologies legible.  That legibility has also led to an intense capture by people who are not interested in the radical reimagining of or resistance to these technologies, or in the way that these technologies are reshaping society, consolidating power in the hands of a few, and making the world more socially, politically, and economically unequal. So, it’s interesting to have this conversation on the almost anniversary of the firing of Dr. Gebru from Google. Because watching her ascent to that position of leadership and then her firing, when she named the racist technologies and environmentally consequential technologies that Google is developing, is symbolic of the nefarious intent or willful ignoring of the core issues at stake. It’s symbolic because there are in fact thousands of people who have been organizing for a long time around these issues, trying to ensure that these conversations about AI ethics still keep their kind of political importance and are not just completely defanged and depoliticized. I don’t know, Meredith. What do you think?

Response: Meredith Whittaker (MW): There are so many ways I can approach this. It’s very personal because Timnit is someone—along with Meg Mitchell and others—who stood up for me when Google pushed me out. So I’m also seeing an attack on support structures within these organizations and an attack on the people with the courage to call out bad behavior. I think Timnit’s firing was an inflection point that you captured in “On the Moral Collapse of AI Ethics,” Khadijah. When you published that piece in the wake of her firing, it laid bare the stakes and failures we’re confronting.


Prompt: Before Timnit’s firing, there’d been enough people who were willing to—mainly in the name of civility politics—give Google the benefit of the doubt. Then the company fired Timnit, someone who had been outspoken about the racism inside of Google and who had been doing research that was exposing fundamental problems with Google’s business practices. Timnit called out racism and her work showed that the large language models at the core of Google’s current product and profit strategy are biased, environmentally harmful, and an overall problem. It was when criticism of Google’s racist culture and criticism of its harmful business practices converged that Google retaliated, in what I saw as an almost reflexive reaction. It was clear that leadership just “had enough,” and went on to make an astonishing string of unforced errors. The corporate immune system kicked into gear: “Okay, fuck it, we’re going to make a really bad PR move, which we calculate we’re powerful enough to withstand. What we can’t withstand any longer is the tension of ‘supporting’ AI ethics on one side, and selling biased, extractive, unverified AI on the other; of doing diversity and inclusion PR on one side, and discriminating against Black women on the other.”  Google’s firing of Timnit reverberated through the AI ethics space for many reasons. One, I think, is because the space is so co-opted and so unwilling to look at who pays us, at who our community is—insofar as we are a community. And suddenly, unexpectedly, the field was faced with big existential questions, which in many cases challenged people’s comfortable status quo: can we work with Google and other tech corporations? What are the limits corporate funders actually put on our research, on the research we review as part of our conference program committee roles, on the research of the corporate-employed collaborators we co-author with? Many in the space were largely avoiding these questions which, we should note, are standard in many other fields.

Response: This moment also illuminated some of the ways that the field is configured. People use the word community—the AI ethics community, or whatever—but a lot of times “community” is just a bunch of people a funder paid to fly somewhere, or a group of folks whose employers are willing to fund them to go to the same conference. The people in these “communities” may have vastly divergent politics and motivations, and these communities are certainly predominantly white, and often very exclusionary. I may be sitting next to someone who’s funded by the Koch Foundation, who believes Facebook is a net good. But we’re both narrated under this umbrella of “community,” and we’re all usually nice and civil to each other because clarifying political commitments in these circumstances has material stakes, and could get you kicked out of the “community.” To put it bluntly, as the leader of an organization, I have to go back home and I have to make sure my people have jobs and health insurance, that I have health insurance, that my family is supported. Of course, there’ll be certain things I do feel I can agitate or call out. But I also have a duty of care that I may be jeopardizing if I go too far, and I feel this tension constantly.  Amy Westervelt has a really good podcast called Drilled, and the first season traces the history of Exxon. At one point the company was genuinely trying to support and understand climate science and climate change, trying to get ahead of it and figure out how its business model could adapt, to potentially provision other sources of non-fossil energy. This approach got traction until the company refused to adapt their business model to the science and doubled down, which initiated a slow process of Exxon pushing climate scientists out of the company, and then turning to climate denial; for example, funding anti-climate heterodox “scientists” and related misinformation campaigns.  We’re in a similar phase in the AI ethics space. Initially, big companies accommodated the ethical implications of AI research, but when it challenged their culture and their business model, they started pushing us out, denigrating us and our research. This is happening right now. But as researchers weathering this transition, we haven’t had that real talk about things like, “Whose money do we take?” Or: “Why is so much so-called tech criticism funded by the companies whose tech is purportedly being criticized?” We’re in the process of a rude awakening. It’s like a limb coming back to life after being asleep—it’s painful for a lot of people.


Prompt: Open Letters to the Apocalypse Part of what I was thinking through when I wrote “On the Moral Collapse of AI Ethics” was—and I’m saying this as someone who has written my own open letter—what to do with this asymmetry between writing an open letter and the stakes of techno capitalism. The open letter that I spend a lot of time thinking about is the Franck Report of June 1945, which was signed by several prominent nuclear physicists who had worked on the Manhattan Project. They delivered it to the White House, saying “Maybe we should just let the Japanese come over and see our capability, and not drop the atomic bomb?” Then, as we all know, in August 1945, you have first Hiroshima and then Nagasaki.

Response: So we’re facing these tremendous stakes and also have to contend with the civility politics you both alluded to. How do we negotiate the obvious villains of centralized corporate computing capital, while also this negotiation among ourselves? Who is the resistance? How do we identify what that means? What does the coalition look like and how do we start thinking about some of those bright lines?  SN: Well, one of the challenges is that not everybody who is working on these issues relates to themselves as community organizers, or relates to each other inside a politics of accountability, shared responsibility, protection, and support, or has committed to a process of hashing out hard conversations, strategies, and ideas about how to move forward. You see this most profoundly in the fairness, accountability, transparency efforts and movement under ACM—the Association for Computing Machinery, an international educational and scientific computing society—which has really, from its inception, marginalized the more radical political critiques of systems and has sought to pursue perfecting technology and to champion techno-solutionism. Though they might more recently be grafting on a Black feminist quote to open a paper, they’re still seeking to address the fairness questions around tech in terms of better algorithms or better AI.  That’s really different from what others of us are doing, those of us who think some of these technologies should not exist—to your point, Khadijah, that we shouldn’t have the Manhattan Projects of AI today. And then when we look up and see that the whole world has been reorganized through these ubiquitous technology deployments, in every single industry and every sector that are, in essence, snake oil or have profound civil and human and sovereign rights implications. That’s actually a completely different project to be working on in the world.  Part of the challenge here is that researchers have been socialized in academia to be apolitical or to think of themselves as scientists and not as people who have values imbued into the work that they’re doing. That is also part of the problem that we’re trying to contend with around the making of these technologies that are also allegedly neutral and just tools. This is part of the reason why we need feminists and why we need people who are committed and connected to social movements around the world to contextualize our work and to make sense of what it’s working in service of. That’s really important.


Prompt: MW: AI is an umbrella marketing term. It’s not a term of art that describes a specific technique. Companies apply the name AI to data-centric approaches generally, and you never quite know what you’re buying if you’re licensing an “AI” system.  The AI boom of the last decade was not the result of a major scientific innovation in algorithmic techniques. It was a recognition that with massive amounts of data and computing power, you can make old techniques do things they couldn’t do before. The ascent of AI was predicated on concentrated tech company power and resources which had, as their driving force, the surveillance business model.  One thing we rarely discuss is how AI research and development’s dependence on corporate resources worked—and continues to work—to shape and in some cases co-opt knowledge production. In other words, to “do AI” as defined in the current “bigger is better” paradigm, you increasingly need resources that are controlled by these handful of companies. You need access to really expensive cloud compute, you need access to data that is hard and sometimes impossible to get. You can’t just go to the data market and buy it—you often need to get access from the data’s creators or collectors, who are often the tech companies. It’s fair to say that academic computer science disciplines underwent a kind of soft-capture, in which as a condition of doing “cutting edge” AI research, over the last decade they became increasingly dependent on corporate resources, and corporate largesse.  This dynamic led to practices like dual affiliation, where professors work at a tech company but have a professorial title and produce research under their university affiliation. It’s led to tech companies moving whole corporate labs into the middle of universities—like Amazon’s machine vision lab at Caltech. We have a structural imbrication between a massive, consolidated industry and knowledge production about what that industry does. And this compromised entanglement has bled into the fairness and ethics space, in many cases without anyone commenting on it. There are many forces working against our recognition of how captured the technical disciplines are at this time, and how easy it is for them to extend this capture into fairness, ethics, and other disciplinary pursuits focused on the consequences and politics of tech.

Response: To pick one example, Amazon is underwriting half of the National Science Foundation’s Fairness in Artificial Intelligence grants. And while a few people called this out, the fields concerned went on to apply for this funding, and uncritically applauded colleagues who received it. Whole labs are reliant on Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft funding, and if you raise questions about it you’re endangering your ability to support your postdocs, your ability to obtain future funding, your standing with your dean. Or, you’re endangering your colleagues in these same ways. Dissecting the particularities of what it means to be able to do research on AI and related technologies, and how dependent this work often is on corporate resources, is a project that I think can help develop a clearer political-economic read of tech and the tech industry overall, and reveal the capital interests that are propelling research and knowledge production into tech and its implications.  SN: This is a critical area especially during the time of Covid-19, when we saw how fragile so many of our public institutions are. We really feel that at a place like UCLA, where teaching assistants aren’t paid adequately, it’s extremely expensive to get an undergraduate degree, and the pressures to deliver public education are intense. Many, many systems are broken, and it is very painful to work under those kinds of broken systems.  Meredith, I recognize this tech sector political economy you’re describing. They are capturing not only scholars but policymakers who, in essence, use public money to subsidize the entire industry, both through the research efforts at the National Science Foundation and also by making it impossible for democratic public institutions to flourish, because they don’t pay their fair share. They offshore their profits, and they don’t reinvest them back into communities where they do business in extremely exploitative ways. They just expect the public to underwrite it through tax refunds. How in the world can companies like Apple get tax refunds except through pure corruption? As we struggle in our communities with and in our institutions, we have to identify why those conditions are present. We have to recognize who has monopolized all of the resources and we have to examine the narrative about what’s happening with those resources.


Prompt: I want to ask you about social media and “cancel culture.” In July 2020, Harper’s published “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” signed by a number of prominent people, including Noam Chomsky and J.K. Rowling. The letter criticized “an intolerant climate” on the Left, and in particular, “an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.” The following month, in August 2020, The Atlantic published a piece by Anne Applebaum called “The New Puritans,” that used Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter to criticize social media “mob justice.” The irony of invoking the white woman’s public humiliation for being pregnant out of wedlock is that the book was published more than a decade before the Civil War. Black and Indigenous peoples’ ongoing bondage and claims to liberation are as unnamed in the book as they are in today’s epistles of moral panic.

Response: But how do we negotiate this issue? Is calling people out on Twitter our only mode of addressing power dynamics in the AI ethics space? How can we put forward a vision that is constructive and not just reactive, even though our operational capacity is so low, even though we’re all exhausted, grieving, and torn into so many different directions? What is our vision for transformative justice in the context of knowledge production? MW: Look, I have a lot to say here. First, I think there’s a visibility bias: people see when calls for accountability and redress spill into the public. They rarely see the agonizing work of trying to hold harmful people and institutions accountable behind the scenes. Work that’s too often not only unrewarded, but actively punished. Like many people, I have engaged in a number of accountability processes that didn’t end with Twitter callouts and are not visible to the public. In my experience, Twitter is always a last resort. There are failures upon failures upon failures within these institutions and with the way power moves within them, all of which happen before someone is going to take to Twitter or call on social media as a witness. Timnit taking to Twitter didn’t save her job.  Buried in the moral panic around “cancel culture” is a burning question about how you hold power to account when you’re in an institution that will punish you for doing so. What do you do when your wellbeing and duties of care dictate that you confront and curtail harmful behavior, but you know that any such attempt risks your livelihood and institutional and professional standing? Institutions protect power. Universities don’t want to touch a star professor who’s bringing in press and grants; tech companies have every incentive to coddle the person architecting the algorithm that is going to make them a shit ton of money. These corporations and corporate universities are structured to protect flows of capital and, by extension, to protect the people who enable them. There are infrastructures in place—including HR and most Title IX offices—to make sure that those who enable the interests of capital are elevated and to make sure that it’s as painful as possible for the people who might report anything.


Prompt: This is the backdrop against which we’re trying to figure out how we, as people within these environments, protect ourselves and each other. In my view, the answer to this question doesn’t start with building a better HR, or hiring a diversity consultant. It’s rooted in solidarity, mutual care, and in a willingness to understand ourselves as committed to our own and others’ wellbeing over our commitments to institutional standing or professional identity.  That’s also a question of how we can be accountable ourselves. Especially as people who have institutional power, and who may experience favorable treatment from the same people who harm those with less power. In other words, the more power we have the less we can rely on our experience of people and institutions as an accurate barometer, because there’s every incentive to act the sycophant. This means we need to actually listen to, elevate, believe, and act on the accounts of those with less power, especially Black people and historically marginalized people for whom institutional abuse is compounded. And we need to be willing to put their safety and wellbeing above our institutional and professional standing. This is very hard, but in my view it’s the floor. If you can’t do it, then you shouldn’t be in a position of leadership.  SN: I relate so much to all the things you’re saying. I think we’re in a long struggle around creating systems of mutual care, aid, and support, and that is very difficult. Most of the environments that we’re trying to build those systems within, like academia, are hostile to trying to get work done and get people supported properly. Having said that, we have to keep building these networked communities. We have to be agile and we have to think about how we’re going to create more space for others to do their work.  In my own experience and my own career, I have felt at many times completely unsupported. I have felt like if I could just expand the circle at some point in my career so that more people could be supported, that would be something. The question is, to what degree can we institutionalize that so that all of the possibilities don’t hinge on one person in one space or place, but that we remake entire systems? We want those systems to last and not rely on any one particular person. That’s difficult work and we need to be sharing ideas about how to do that.

Response: But the problems that we’re working on are very big problems in the world and in our communities. I think about abolitionist traditions: you know, how did a handful of people change the world? Millions of Americans got up every day and made pancakes and went to work while people were being human-trafficked right in front of them and enslaved, beaten, lynched, and harmed on the regular. How did abolitionists, in the face of those conditions, abolish the transatlantic slave trade or change the laws around the enslavement of African peoples? How did others resist the expansion into First Nations and Indigenous peoples’ lands? There weren’t millions of people working on these issues. It was, relative to the population, a very small number of people who worked on those things.  I guess I feel heartened by the fact that if enough people can be coordinated, a lot of change can happen. That is why we have to study history and study social movements to figure out how they did it and how to make it last. Especially for those of us right now living through the rollback of the Civil Rights Movement, we know that those changes can also be precarious. We have to figure out how to make them last.  On Some Global Tech Resistance Academia is coming for our lives, so much of our time is swallowed up into institutional administrative overhead, and also we’re facing major stakes that are global. It’s so difficult to even stay on top of our own “domain expertise,” so how do we facilitate transnational solidarity? How do we think about this work as global? What are the points of connections you identify around intellectually, and politically, in your own work? What kind of infrastructure represents the next steps that could be taken to bolster this kind of transnational research? SN: We have to keep our diasporic commitments intact while we’re doing our work. And of course, we sit here in the heart of the American technology empire. We have a responsibility where we are in this location to press on these companies and on governments to ease exploitation around the world. Many of us understand these questions because we come from internal colonies of the United States, which is one of the ways that sociologists have talked about Black people’s experience in the Americas. Our work is connected materially to other people’s lives around the world.


Prompt: We have to be in community. We have to be in conversation. And we also have to recognize what our piece of the puzzle is ours to work on. While it is true, yes, we’re just individual people, together we’re a lot of people and we can shift the zeitgeist and make the immorality of what the tech sector is doing—through all its supply chains around the world—more legible. It’s our responsibility to do that as best we can.  MW: Yeah, I agree. I’m a white lady raised in LA. I had to educate myself on so much that I didn’t understand, and that process is humbling and ongoing.  My voice doesn’t need to be the center of every conversation. But, okay, if I have a little power and a little standing maybe I can move capital, maybe I can ask people what they need and see what I can do to get it to them, to support and nurture their expertise and organizing and approaches, which may be completely unfamiliar to me, and may not need any advice or insight from me. I’m thinking of the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT). Briefly, it’s a computer-science focused conference exploring fairness in algorithms. Over the years, we have seen increasing calls to examine algorithmic and other technologies in the context of racial capitalism and structural inequality, accompanied by warnings about the insufficiency of narrow FAccT-style technical approaches to the problems of algorithms and tech. So, what was the response? From many people, it wasn’t a re-evaluation of the field, but instead a move to absorb. Like, “Oh, well, how about we bolt an Audre Lorde quote to this computational social science paper.” This response continues to place computer science at the center, with racial justice as seasoning. Even though there are, of course, Black feminist conferences that could use some funding, and that have been deep in these topics for decades before FAccT. So my question is, why is the instinct always to absorb into the core instead of diffuse the resources to those already doing the work?

Response: I mean, I fuck with that. We need allyship in the form of funneling actual, material support out of these Western institutions. In July 2019, one of us, Khalid Alexander, received a tip from a fellow San Diego community organizer. “You should be paying attention to the city’s new streetlights.” The message continued, “Apparently, they have cameras attached to them.” Alexander lived in one of the many predominantly Black and brown neighborhoods in San Diego that was under constant police surveillance, including by “gang suppression units” that watch, harass, and document residents. He feared that streetlights with cameras on them could supercharge these efforts.


Prompt: Two weeks later, Alexander showed up at a public library for a forum about the streetlights program (which the city named the Smart Streetlights Program). The only other people at the meeting were the presenters: a police captain, a city staffer, and an executive from General Electric (GE), the company that produced the new streetlights. Their presentation began with an infomercial for the technology, a city-wide network of thousands of LED streetlights mounted with cameras that recorded video around-the-clock. The footage was uploaded to the cloud, where city agencies could use software to count cars, pedestrians, and who knows what else. According to the police captain, the smart streetlights were already being used to solve crimes.

Response: Alexander left the presentation shocked and concerned. Five years earlier, police had rounded up thirty-three Black and brown men from San Diego and charged them with fifty years to life in prison for gang crimes simply because they were included in a police surveillance database called CalGang. The Smart Streetlights would make this kind of state violence more likely—other networked surveillance programs in cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles had led to similar raids—and yet none of the city’s larger civil rights organizations seemed to be visibly fighting the project. The community was going to have to organize resistance to the streetlights itself.