Top Posts for 2014

14. "Summoning the Demon": Robot Cultist Elon Musk Reads from Robo-Revelations at MIT October 27
13. Gizmuddle: Or, Why the Futuristic Is Always Perverse January 25
12. The Future Is A Hell of a Drug April 7
11. Car Culture Is A Futurological Catastrophe January 14
10. Very Serious Robocalyptics October 5
9. Em Butterfly: Robot Cultists George Dvorsky and Robin Hanson Go Overboard For Robo-Overlords February 24
8. Robot Cultist Martine Rothblatt Is In the News September 9
7. Geek Rule Is Weak Gruel: Why It Matters That Luddites Are Geeks September 19
6. R.U. Sirius on Transhumanism October 19
5. Rachel Haywire: Look At Me! Look At Me! Even If There's Nothing To See! August 18
4. It's Now Or Never: An Adjunct Responds to SFAI's Latest Talking Points May 5
3.Techbro Mythopoetics December 22
2. San Francisco Art Institute Touts Diego Rivera Fresco Celebrating Labor Politics While Engaging in Union Busting May Day
...and number 1. Forum on the Existenz Journal Issue, "The Future of Humanity and the Question of Post-Humanity" March 9

To round the list out to a nice full fifteen, I append not a hit but a miss, a post fewer people got a kick out of the first time around than I expected, given what most people come here to read: Tragic Techbrofashionistas of The Future Put. A. Phone. On. It! from January 6.

Apart from that last addition, these are essentially the most widely read of this year's posts, excluding a few popular but comparatively insubstantial one-liners. I'll share a few observations about these in the annual State of the Blog post to be written hungover from my bunker come the new year. You can compare these to the listicles from the last couple of years if you like: Top Posts for 2012 and Top Posts for 2013.

The Inevitable Cruelty of Algorithmic Mediation

Also posted at the World Future Society.

On Christmas Eve, Eric Meyer posted a devastating personal account reminding us of the extraordinary cruelty of the lived experience of ever more prevailing algorithmic mediation.

Meyer's Facebook feed had confronted him that day with a chirpy headline that trilled, "Your Year in Review. Eric, here's what your year looked like!" Beneath it, there was the image that an algorithm had number-crunched to the retrospective forefront, surrounded by clip-art cartoons of dancing figures with silly flailing arms amidst balloons and swirls of confetti in festive pastels. The image was the face of Eric Meyer's six year old daughter. It was the image that had graced the memorial announcement he had posted upon her death earlier in the year. Describing the moment when his eye alighted on that adored unexpected gaze, now giving voice to that brutally banal headline, Meyer writes: "Yes, my year looked like that. True enough. My year looked like the now-absent face of my little girl. It was still unkind to remind me so forcefully."

Meyer's efforts to come to terms with the impact of this algorithmic unkindness are incomparably more kind than they easily and justifiably might have been. "I know, of course, that this is not a deliberate assault. This inadvertent algorithmic cruelty is the result of code that works in the overwhelming majority of cases." To emphasize the force of this point, "Inadvertent Algorithmic Cruelty" is also the title of Meyer's meditation. "To show me Rebecca’s face and say 'Here’s what your year looked like!' is jarring," writes Meyer. "It feels wrong, and coming from an actual person, it would be wrong. Coming from code, it’s just unfortunate." But just what imaginary scene is being conjured up in this exculpatory rhetoric in which inadvertent cruelty is "coming from code" as opposed to coming from actual persons? Aren't coders actual persons, for example?

Needless to say, Meyers has every right to grieve and to forgive and to make sense of these events in the way that works best for him. And of course I know what he means when he seizes on the idea that none of this was "a deliberate assault." But it occurs to me that it requires the least imaginable measure of thought on the part of those actually responsible for this code to recognize that the cruelty of Meyer's confrontation with their algorithm was the inevitable at least occasional result for no small number of the human beings who use Facebook and who live lives that attest to suffering, defeat, humiliation, and loss as well as to parties and promotions and vacations. I am not so sure the word "inadvertent" quite captures the culpability of those humans who wanted and coded and implemented and promoted this algorithmic cruelty.

And I must say I question the premise of the further declaration that this code "works in the overwhelming majority of cases." While the result may have been less unpleasant for other people, what does it mean to send someone an image of a grimly-grinning, mildly intoxicated prom-date or a child squinting at a llama in a petting zoo surrounded by cartoon characters insisting on our enjoyment and declaring "here's what your year looked like"? Is that what any year looks like or lives like? Why are these results not also "jarring"? Why are these results not also "unfortunate"? Is any of this really a matter of code "working" for most everybody?

What if the conspicuousness of Meyer's experience of algorithmic cruelty indicates less an exceptional circumstance than the clarifying exposure of a more general failure, a more ubiquitous cruelty? Meyer ultimately concludes that his experience is the result of design flaws which demand design fixes. Basically, he proposes that users be provided the ability to opt out of algorithmic applications that may harm them. Given the extent to which social software forms ever more of the indispensable architecture of the world we navigate, this proposal places an extraordinary burden on those who are harmed by carelessly implemented environments they come to take for granted while absolving those who build, maintain, own, and profit from these environments from the harms resulting from their carelessness. And in its emphasis on designing for egregious experienced harms, this proposal disregards costs, risks, harms that are accepted as inevitable when they are merely habitual, or vanish in their diffusion, over the long-term, as lost opportunities hidden behind given actualities.

But what worries me most of all about this sort of "opt out" design-fix is that with each passing day algorithmic mediation is more extensive, more intensive, more constitutive of the world. We all joke about the ridiculous substitutions performed by autocorrect functions, or the laughable recommendations that follow from the odd purchase of a book from Amazon or an outing from Groupon. We should joke, but don't, when people treat a word cloud as an analysis of a speech or an essay. We don't joke so much when a credit score substitutes for the judgment whether a citizen deserves the chance to become a homeowner or start a small business, or when a Big Data profile substitutes for the judgment whether a citizen should become a heat signature for a drone commiting extrajudicial murder in all of our names. Meyer's experience of algorithmic cruelty is extraordinary, but that does not mean it cannot also be a window onto an experience of algorithmic cruelty that is ordinary. The question whether we might still "opt out" from the ordinary cruelty of algorithmic mediation is not a design question at all, but an urgent political one.   

Contextualizing My Anti-Futurological Critique for Theoryheads

This rather densely allusive sketch contextualizing my anti-futurological critique won't be everybody's cup of tea, but I've upgraded and adapted it from my response to a comment in the Moot for those readers who find this sort of thing useful but who would likely miss it otherwise. I still think probably the best, most concise and yet complete(-ish) formulation of my critique is the contrbution I published in the recent Existenz volume on posthumanism.

You accuse me of indulging in futurism while critiquing it. All the big boys make such moves, I don't think less of you for trying it. I have heard what you have to say so far, and I must say it seems to me you are baldly wrong to say this, and that believing it sends you off-track...

What I mean by futurism has its origins in specific institutional histories and discursive practices: namely, the emergence of fraudulent methodologies/ rationales of speculation in market futures and the extrapolative genre of the scenario in military think-tanks -- all taking place in the wider context of the suffusion of public deliberation and culture with the hyperbolic and deceptive techno-progressive norms and forms of consumer advertizing...

To give you a sense of where I am coming from and to give you a sense of what I am hearing when you say "modernity" and how I might try to take us elsewhere with futurity-against-futurology, I provide this handy sketch:

To the extent that post-modernity (late modernity, a-modernity, neoliberalism, whatever) is the post-WW1/2 inflation of the petrochemical bubble in which other postwar financial bubbles are blown, my anti-futurology is of a piece with Lyotard's (whatever my differences with him, of which I have many, he makes some of the same warnings).

To the extent that futurism markets elite-incumbency as progress, my anti-futurology is also of a piece with some of Debord's critique of the Spectacle, so-called (the parts about "enhanced survival" in particular), specifically to the extent that Debord's tale of "being degraded into having degraded into appearing" derives from Adorno's culture industri(alization) as formula-filling-mistaken-for-judgment and Benjamin's War Machine as the displacment of a revolutionary equity-in-diversity from the epilogue of Art in the Age.

Your emphasis seems more attuned to aesthetic modernities, so the larger context for me is the proposal that between the bookends of Thirty-Years' Wars from Westphalia to Bretton Woods European modernity indulged in a host of quarrels des anciens et des modernes, culture wars presiding over and rationalizing the ongoing organization of social militarization/ administration of nation-states and their competitive internationalism.

"The Future" of futurisms in my sense arises out of those discourses. Design discourses are especially provocative for my critical position, for example, since they are patently futurological -- at once doing and disavowing politics; peddling plutocracy qua meritocracy via the Merely Adequate Yet Advancement through their exemplary anti-democratzing Most Acceptable Yet Advanced MAYA principle -- but still quite modern in what I think is your sense of the term. This matters because futurological global/digital rationality is for me an importantly different phenomenon than the modern that constitutes itself in the repudiation of the ancient: the futurist for me is in between, at once a vestige of modern internationalism and a harbinger of post-nationalist planetarity.

Planetarity is a term I am taking from Spivak, and my sense of where we are headed -- if anywhere -- is informed by queer/critical race/post-colonial/environmental justice theories like hers. In my various theory courses I usually advocate in my final lecture (the one with the final warnings and visions in it) for a polycultural planetarity -- where the "polyculture" term resonates with Paul Gilroy's post-Fanonian convivial multiculturalism as well as with the repudiation of industrial monoculture for companion planting practices in the service of sustainability (but also synecdochic for sustainable political ecology), and then the "planetarity" term marks the failure/ eclipse of nation-state internationalism (say, UN-IMF-World Bank globalization) in digital financialization, fraud, marketing harassment, and surveillance and ecological catastrophe. Polycultural planetarity would build ethics and mobilize democratizations via contingent universalization (that's from my training with Judith Butler no doubt) in the future anterior (a Spivakian understanding of culture as interpretation practices toward practical conviviality). For me, that future anterior is the futurity inhering in the present in the diversity of stakeholders/peers to presence, very much opposed to the closures, reductions, extrapolations, instrumentalizations of "The Future."

Lots of name-dropping there, I know, but almost every phrase here can easily turn into a three-hour lecture, I'm afraid, in one of my contemporary critical theory survey courses. I suspect you might be tempted to assimilate all that feminist/queer/posthuman-criticalrace theoretical complex to the categories you already know -- forgive me if I have jumped to conclusions in so saying -- but I think that would be an error, more an effort to dismiss and hence not have to read the work than think what we are doing as Hannah Arendt enjoined, the call I hear every day that keeps me going.

Techbro Mythopoetics

In an enjoyable rant over at io9 today, Charlie Jane Anders declares herself Tired of "The Smartest Man in the Room" science fiction trope. Her delineation of the stereotype is immediately legible:

The "smartest man in the room" is a kind of wish-fulfillment for reasonably smart people, because he's not just clever but incredibly glib. As popularized by people like Doctor Who/Sherlock writer Steven Moffat and the creators of American shows like House and Scorpion, the "smartest guy in the room" thinks quicker than everybody else but also talks rings around them, too. He's kind of an unholy blend of super-genius and con artist. Thanks to the popularity of Sherlock, House and a slew of other "poorly socialized, supergenius nerd" shows, the "smartest man in the room" has become part of the wallpaper. His contempt for less intelligent people, mixed with adorable social awkwardness, and his magic ability to have the right answer at every turn, have become rote.

Later, she offers up a preliminary hypothesis that the intelligibility and force of the archetype derives from the widespread experience of consumers who feel themselves to be at the mercy of incomprehensible devices and therefore of the helpful nerds in their lives who better understand these things. I actually don't think the world is particularly more technologically incomprehensible now than it has always somewhat been in network-mediated extractive-industrial societies, but tech-talkers like to say otherwise because it consoles them that progress is happening rather than the immiserating unsustainable stasis that actually prevails, but that is a separate discussion. I do think Anders strikes very much the right note when she declares The Smartest Guy in the Room archetype a "wish-fulfillment fantasy," but I am not sure that I agree with her proposal about how the fantasy is operating here.

What is perplexing about the Smartest Guy in the Room archetype, as well as for the more ubiquitous savvy but awkward nerd archetype, is the combination in it of superior knowledge and social ineptitude. Anders proposes that this fantasy space is doubly reassuring -- securing our faith that helpful people will always be around to navigate the incomprehensible technical demands of the world, but that we need not feel inferior in our dependency because these helpful people gained their superior knowledge at the cost of a lack of basic social skills nobody in their right mind would actually choose to pay. The gawky awkward nerd is as obviously inferior as superior, we get to keep our toys with our egos intact, and everybody wins (even the losers).

All this sounds just idiotically American enough to be plausible, but seems to assume that few of her readers -- or anybody, for that matter -- actually identifies with the nerds. Anders seems to have forgotten that she begins her piece with the assertion that The Smartest Guy in the Room is "wish-fulfillment for reasonably smart people," that is to say, the self-image of her entire readership. And of course the truth is that nearly every one of her readers do identify with the archetype, indeed the archetype is a space of aspirational identification in culture more generally, an identification which fuels much of the lucrative popularity and currency of spectacular science fiction and fantasy and geekdom more generally in this moment. That is the real problem that makes the phenomenon Anders has observed worthy of criticism in the first place.

Anders describes the Smartest Guy in the Room as someone who has "contempt for less intelligent people, mixed with adorable social awkwardness, and [a] magic ability to have the right answer at every turn." It is crucial to grasp that what appears as a kind of laundry list here is in fact a set of structurally inter-dependent co-ordinates of the moral universe of The Smartest Guy in the Room. He doesn't happen to be right all the time and socially awkward and contemptuous of almost everybody else, his sociopathic contempt is the essence of his social awkwardness, rationalized by his belief that he is superior to them because he is always right about everything, at least as he sees it.

Before I am chastised for amplifying harmless social awkwardness into sociopathy, let me point out that the adorable nerds of Anders' initial formulations are later conjoined to a discussion of Tony Stark, the cyborgically-ruggedized hyper-individualist bazillionaire tech-CEO hero of the Iron Man blockbusters. Although Anders describes this archetype in terms of its popular currency in pop sf narrative and fandom today, I think it is immediately illuminating to grasp the extent to which Randroidal archetypes Howard Roark, Francisco d'Anconia, Henry Rearden, and John Galt provide the archive from which these sooper-sociopath entrepreneurial mad-scientist cyborg-soldiers are drawn (if you want more connective tissue, recall that Randroidal archetypes are the slightest hop, skip, and jump away from Heinleinian archetypes and now we're off to the races).

The truth is that there is no such thing as the guy who knows all the answers, or who solves all the problems. Problem-solving is a collective process. There is more going on that matters than anybody knows, even the people who know the most. Even the best experts and the luminous prodigies stand on the shoulders of giants, depend on the support of lovers and friends and collaborators and reliable norms and laws and infrastructural affordances, benefit from the perspectives of critics and creative appropriations. Nobody deserves to own it all or run it all, least of all the white guys who happen to own and run most of it at the moment, and this is just as true when elite-incumbency hides its rationalizations for privilege behind a smokescreen of technobabble. 

The sociopathy of the techno-fixated Smartest Guy in the Room is, in a word, ideological. Anders hits upon an enormously resonant phrasing when she declares him "an unholy blend of super-genius and con artist." In fact, his declared super-genius is an effect of con-artistry -- the fraudulent cost- and risk-externalization of digital networked financialization, the venture-capitalist con of upward-failing risk-fakers uselessly duplicating already available services and stale commodities as novelties, the privatization of the "disruptors" and precarization of "crowdsource"-sharecropping -- the "unholy" faith on the part of libertechbrotarian white dudes that they deserve their elite incumbent privileges

Perhaps this is a good time to notice that when Anders says the Smartest Guy in the Room provides "wish-fulfillment for reasonably smart people" her examples go on to demonstrate that by people she happens always to mean only guys and even only white guys. She does notice that the Smartest Guy does seem to be, you know, a guy and provides the beginnings of a gendered accounting of the archetype: "the 'smartest guy' thing confirms all our silliest gender stereotypes, in a way that's like a snuggly dryer-fresh blanket to people who feel threatened by shifting gender roles. In the world of these stories, the smartest person is always a man, and if he meets a smart woman she will wind up acknowledging his superiority."

That seems to me a rather genial take on the threatened bearings of patriarchal masculinity compensated by cyborg fantasizing, but at least it's there. The fact that the Smartest Guy keeps on turning out to be white receives no attention at all. This omission matters not only because it is so glaring, but because the sociopathic denial of the collectivity of intelligence, creativity, progress, and flourishing at the heart of the Smartest Guy in the Room techno-archetype, is quite at home in the racist narrative of modern technological civilization embodied in inherently superior European whiteness against which are arrayed not different but primitive and atavistic cultures and societies that must pay in bloody exploitation and expropriation the price of their inherent inferiority. That is to say, the Smartest Guy in the Room is also the Smartest Guy in History, naturally enough, with a filthy treasure pile to stand on and shout his superiority from.

From the White Man's Burden to Yuppie Scum to Techbro Rulz, the Smartest Guy in the Room is one of the oldest stories in the book. And, yeah, plenty of us are getting "kind of tired" of it.

Why Our Militant Atheists Are Not Secular Thinkers

Secularity -- from the Latin saecularis, worldly, timely, contingent -- properly so called, is very much a pluralist and not an eliminationist impulse. In naming the distinction of worldly affairs from spiritual devotions, it differentiated the good life of the vita contemplativa of philosophy from that of the vita activa of the statesman or aesthete, but later went on to carve out the distinctions of clerical from government, legal, professional authorities. The Separation of Church and State as pillar of secular thinking and practice is the furthest imaginable thing from sectarian or ethnic strife amplified by the eliminationist imagination into genocidal violence -- and yet the identification of today's militant atheists with a "secular worldview" risks precisely such a collapse.

Secularism has never demanded an anti-religiosity but recognized the legitimacy of non-religiosities. Indeed, in diverse multicultures such as our own secularism becomes indispensable to the continuing life of religious minorities against majority or authoritarian formations of belief, and hence is not only not anti-religious but explicitly facilitative of variously religious lifeways as it is of variously non-religious lifeways.

I have been an atheist since 1983 -- over thirty years by now! after a Roman Catholic upbringing. I am quite happy to live a life a-thiest -- "without god(s)" -- myself, but the primary value of secularism to me has always been its entailment of and insistence on a pluralist practice of reason, in which we recognize that there are many domains of belief distinguished in their concerns, in their cares, and in the manner of their convictions. Our scientific, moral, aesthetic, ethical, professional, political beliefs, and so on, occupy different conceptual and practical domains, incarnate different registers of our lives, are warranted by different criteria. For the pluralist, reason is not properly construed as the monomaniacal reduction of all belief to a single mode, but a matter of recognizing what manner of concern, care, and conviction belief is rightly occasioned for and then applying the right criteria of warrant appropriate to that mode.

Pluralism is not a relativism or nihilism, as threatened bearings of fundamentalist belief would have it, but a rigorous reasonableness equal to the complexity, dynamism, and multifaceted character of existence and of the personalities beset by its demands and possibilities. For one thing, pluralism allows us to grasp and reconcile the aspirational force of the contingent universalism of ethics without which we could not conceive let alone work toward progress or the Beloved Community of the we in which all are reconciled, while at once doing justice to the fierce demands and rewards in dignity and belonging deriving from our (inevitably plural, usually partial) inhabitation of moral communities that build the "we" from exclusions of various construals of the "they." Pluralism allows us to reconcile as well our pursuit of the private perfections of morality and sublimity (my appreciation of the aesthetical forms of which requires my admission of the validity for others, whatever my atheism, of its faithly forms) with the public works of scientific, political, legal, professional progress.

It is crucial to grasp that the refusal of pluralism is reductionism, and that reductionism is an irrationalism. It is a form of insensitivity, a form of unintelligence -- and usually a testimony to and inept compensation for insecurity. In Nietzsche's critique of the fetish (Marx's commodity fetishism and Freud's sexual fetishes are surface scratches in comparison) this reductionism is the ressentimental attutude of the life of fear over the lives of love, the philosophical imposture of deception and self-deception peddled as truth-telling. To impose the criteria of warrant proper to scientific belief to moral belief, say, or to aesthetic judgement, or to legal adjudication is to be irrational not rational. Also, crucially, it is to violate and not celebrate science.

To call the celebrated (or at any rate noisy) militant atheistic boy warriors of today "secular thinkers" is a profound error. To misconstrue as the sins of religious faith as such the moralizing misapplication of faithly norms to political practices is to misunderstand the problem at hand -- and usually in a way that multiplies errors: Hence, our militant atheists become bigots tarring innocent majorities with the crimes of violent minorities, they lose the capacity to recognize differences that make a difference in cultures, societies, individuals all the while crowing about their superior discernment.

Those who commit crimes and administer tyrannies in the name of faith irrationally and catastrophically misapply the substantiation of aesthetic sublimities and parochial mores connected to some among indefinitely many forms of religiosity to domains of ethical aspiration and political progress to which they are utterly unsuited. Fascism and moralizing are already-available terms for these too familiar irrational misapplications. Meanwhile those who attribute these crimes and tyrannies to the aesthetic and the moral as such, as practiced in variously faithful forms, are inevitably indulging in reductionism. This reductionism in its everyday stupidity is usually a form of ethnocentric subcultural parochialism, but the militant atheists prefer their stupidity in the form of scientism, usually assuming the imaginary vantage of a superior scientificity the terms of which presumably adjudicate the unethical in moralizing and the tyrannical in progressivity because it subsumes ethical and political domains within its own scientific terms. In this, scientism first distorts science into a morality which it then, flabbergastingly, distorts into a moralism itself, thus mirroring the very fundamentalism it seeks to critique.

Secularism is a theoretical and practical responsiveness to the plurality of a world in which there is always more going on that matters in the present than any of us can know and in which the diversity of stakeholders to the shared present interminably reopens history to struggle. It is bad enough that today's militant atheists get so much of the substance and value of science, taste, and faith wrong in their disordering rage for order, but in calling their reductionist irrationality "secular thinking" we risk losing the sense and significance of the secular altogether, that accomplishment of reason without which we can never be equal to the demands and promises of reality and history in the plurality of their actual presence.

Consolidated A Quarter Century Later

I was listening to this with righteous fury back in Atlanta as a Queer National, vegan hard-ass (these days I'm cheerfully vegetarian and prefer my queerness post-nationalist), and budding socialist feminist green, writing an MA thesis connecting queer theory and technocultural theory (a trace of which survives here). I had not the slightest suggestion of a hope back then that I would be in San Francisco working with my hero Judith Butler in just two years' time. That was wonderful, even a little miraculous. But I did have great hope and conviction then that those songs would no longer be so thoroughly relevant to the America of 2014, a generation away, an America of ongoing unemployment and lowered expectations and still-profiteering banksters, of SillyCon fraudsters, of racist police, of rising Greenhouse storms. That has not been so wonderful, not so miraculous.

Cop-Cam Sham: Political Problems Demand Political Solutions

Once again we are confronted with another miscarriage of justice as another police officer kills another unarmed black citizen the police are supposed to serve and protect. And once again calls are ringing out on all sides to install more cameras, cameras on police cars, cameras on the street, cameras on the bodies of cops on the beat.

Cop-cam techno-fixers really need to pause and take note: Eric Garner's death by a clearly illegal choke hold was on video and was seen by millions.

Solutions from scholars and activists and experts have been reiterated and mostly ignored for over a generation by now: setting up independent special prosecutors to address charges of police misconduct rather than grand juries composed of colleagues inthe criminal justice system with inherent conflicts of interest; extensive training for police in violence de-escalation strategies and to provide sensitivity to racial and other empirically well-established forms of bias, unconscious and conscious; hiring and promotion policies to reflect the composition of the communities they are meant to serve and protect; community policing, oversight and accountability; ending the harsh sentencing rules installed by the failed racist war on (some) drugs; commonsense gun safety regulations -- all of these and more are indispensable to address ongoing terrorization of vulnerable communities by police in all our names. If I point out that procedures are techniques and regulations are legal artifacts can technofixated futurists get behind these or similar proposals, even if they are not polished chrome and shaped like dildoes?

Of course, more body cameras for police on the street can and probably should be part of the story of better policing practices in our communities. I have nothing against that proposal except the pretense that cameras are "the solution."

It is crucial to grasp that the interpretation of camera footage is stratified and shaped by the same racism that shapes and stratifies the racist policing so many are talking about here, the footage is taken up in the context of the very institutional practices and procedures that are otherwise failing so conspicuously before our eyes. The same collegial incentives to protect police from accountability now would pressure those who presumably guard the footage. Think of "lost" e-mails, selective leaks of secret testimony, orchestrated press releases shaping public perceptions: more video surveillance footage is more mountain to mold. 

It is a strange thing, to say the least, to propose more surveillance as the ready-made solution to the unjust policing of people of color who have lived for generations under a regime of relentless onerous arbitrary surveillance as the substance of much of that unjust policing. Stop and frisk is a surveillance technique, you know. That policing has not been reformed even in the face of generations of obvious, ongoing failures should sound a warning that justice does not flow automatically from the visibility of injustice alone.

State sanctioned violence against black people from slavery, to Jim Crow, to inequitable incarceration and policing, is centuries old: it is not incidental to but an abiding historical constituent element of the justice system. Political problems demand political solutions. In this context, technofixated dreams of circumventions of the political with handy gizmos amount to affirmations of the politics of the reactionary racist status quo. My point in saying so is not to call the techno-fixated racist, but to appeal to their anti-racism to impel them to dig deeper than their usual techno-fixation to take on this long ongoing crisis on the educational, agitational, organizational terms it actually demands.

Personal

To say the personal is political is to notice that in becoming the personal some politics is de-politicized, with political consequences.