Later came the Fair Housing Act and other civil rights laws supposed to prevent such discrimination. Benjamin asks us to consider вЂњold school targeted ads,вЂќ like a newspaper ad for housing which tries to entice only white buyers by offering вЂњbeneficial restrictionsвЂќ on who the housing could be sold to. She cites colleagues Brown, Broussard, Eubanks, Noble, Daniels. These issues constituted by tech вЂњsolutionsвЂќ penetrate every aspect of social life under the guise of progress. Benjamin names a phenomenon called вЂњThe New Jim Code.вЂќ It consists of: Benjamin asks: how do we meaningfully differentiate technologies that are meant to differentiate us? But lots of different kinds of вЂњbiasвЂќ were being conflated. The second wave: вЂњof course, artifacts inherit the biases of their creatorsвЂќ. The first wave of these headlines were about recognizing that вЂњ artifacts have politicsвЂќ. Benjamin was interested in headlines and hot takes about racist robots. How should we understand the duplicity of tech solutions? Prof. Social norms and values shape what tools are imagined necessary in the first place. What could possibly go wrong, in the age of вЂњ bbq beckiesвЂќ calling the police on black people minding their own business? The app вЂњCitizenвЂќ was rebranded from its original name вЂњVigilante.вЂќ In its original iteration, the app had a вЂњreport incidentвЂќ feature and was about users policing crime-now itвЂ™s about avoiding it. Benjamin examines Citizen, an app that tracks crime on a map and provides real-time 911 alerting. We must wrestle with widely held deep investment in, and desire for, social domination.ДЇor example, Prof. For those who want to imagine another world, we canвЂ™t just critique the underside. These imaginations are the underside of elite fantasies about efficiency, profit, and control. Most people are forced to live inside someone elseвЂ™s imagination. It is a battleground, an input and output of tech and social order.

Imagination is a site of contestation.

As a consequence, some inventions seem inevitable when they are not.

But social norms exist prior to tech development. People are often conditioned to think about the social impacts of technology. Race is often acknowledged to be socially constructed-it also constructs.

People are often conditioned to think of racism as backward, individual bad apples, the back woods, etc-instead of innovative, the whole orchard, the ivory tower. It produces and constructs, creating value for some as it wreaks havoc on others. Harvard University, located on Massachusett land, is founded upon and continues to enact the erasure of indigenous peoples. Benjamin starts her talk with a land acknowledgement. I was in the audience and took notes, which IвЂ™m sharing here with the hope that they might be useful to others as an alternative to attending in person or watching the video recording. How does technology continue to produce racism, bias, and discrimination, while obscuring the racist conditions that precede it? Speaking today at the Berkman Klein Center is Ruha Benjamin, Associate Professor in the African American Studies department at Princeton.

Jonathan berkman klein center