Acrylic, metal & a means of preparation: Imagining & living Black life beyond the surveillance state

hello everybody and welcome and welcome back to microsoft research's race and technology lecture series in this series we brought together some of the most important scholars working at the intersection of race studies and technology studies to address the many ways these domains intersect in computer science public health digital media gaming surveillance which we'll hear more about today and other domains if you've been with us before for the lectures that we've been hosting these last few months you've already seen how important it is to understand how technology and race construct one another if we're going to build inclusive technologies that empower us all and if you've missed any of the first five lectures they're available on our youtube channel i want to thank hannah wallach charlton mcelwain christopher morris and eleanor buxton for co-organizing the series and i want to thank all of you for helping us achieve its aims if you have been with us before you've also heard me acknowledge that these topics are fraught and their discussion can be unsettling talking about power is rarely easy the audiences for these lectures have ranged from experts to people getting their first exposure to these topics and we're striving to create an environment in which all of you can ask the questions that this talk provokes for you i will be monitoring questions in the q a and i encourage you to pose them as they arise and we have about 20 minutes for live q a after the talk today we are so fortunate to hear from dr simone brown i'm super excited for this time dr brown is an associate professor of african and african diaspora studies at the university of texas at austin where she is also research director of critical surveillance inquiry csi with good systems csi works with scholars organizations and communities to curate conversations exhibitions and research that examine the social and ethical implications of surveillance technologies both with and without ai with a focus on algorithmic harm and tech equity they continually question what's good in order to better understand the development and impact of artificial intelligence her first book dark matters on the surveillance of blackness won awards in american studies surveillance studies and communication and technology studies and her second book like the mixture of charcoal and darkness is in progress and it's going to examine the interventions made by artists whose works grapple with the surveillance of black life together the essays are going to explore the productive possibilities of creative innovation when it comes to troubling surveillance and its various tactics and imagining black life beyond the surveillance state today she'll be sharing from that walk that walk today she'll be showing from that work with her talk entitled acrylic metal blue and a means of preparation imagining and living black life beyond the surveillance state please join me in welcoming and please put your questions in the chat thank you thank you to everyone at microsoft's race and technology lecture series um to put the work into producing this event and a special thank you to charlton mcilwain for the invitation to be a part of this series so one beginning during my graduate studies i was interested in post-september 11th security measures around identification specifically biometric technologies and i researched those technologies through transcripts of debates in the canadian parliament and documents released to me through the accessed information act this led me to such singers as the minister of citizenship and immigration stating i believe that biometrics doesn't have a race it doesn't have a religion we won't look at the color of the skin we just want to know mathematically if the thumb print fits and in october 2001 when the canadian government announced its chip ready permanent resident card at a press conference at niagara falls the minister of citizenship and immigration held up a prototype of the card and on it was a picture of what seemed to be a white woman with the country code lka for sri lanka and with a tamil last name a couple years after that it was reported the canadian government was considering biometrics for indian status cards it is interesting but not surprising to note here that indigenous populations were among the original targets of containment and the regulation of mobility by way of the past system instituted with the canada's 1876 indian act that they could also be among the first populations to be subject subjected to biometric identification trials in this way the digitizing of indigenous nations by the canadian state at that time forms part of the continuing fashioning of the white settler states through its attempts at governing indigenous identities and mobilities so if biometrics doesn't have a race like the citizenship and immigration minister put it and the canadian state just wants to know mathematically if the thumb print fits then my question was why was this at the time newish technology being trialled to seemingly track immigrants and indigenous people i was interested in how categories of people get casted as risk as security threat and rendered as that which the state seeks protection from and as the reason why consent for these technologies is gained this is in keeping with what ursula franklin has termed the real world of in in the real world of technology the credible enemy she says that the state has to guarantee the ongoing long-term presence of a credible enemy because only a credible enemy justifies the massive outlay of public funds for arms and for securitization but in doing this dissertation work i was unsettled by what seemed to be at the time an absence within the field of surveillance studies of the fact of surveillance in black people's lives so later when i set out to do research that would eventually become my first book i wanted to make an intervention in what i saw at least at the time as the under theorization of race within surveillance studies i did this by asking and i've said this numerous times how a realization of the conditions of black surveillance of black life that being the historical the present and the historical present can help social theorists understand our contemporary conditions of surveillance so rather surveillance seeing rather than seeing surveillance is something that gets put into place or inaugurated with new technologies such as backscatter machines at airports or remote warfare by way of drones i wanted to see surveillance as something that's ongoing and by looking at its precursive formations in order to insist that we factor in how racism and particularly how anti-blackness shape our present governing order and now in what is now the united states and beyond that nation's borders it was an attempt to ask of a field of study the question of what happens when blackness enters the frame as desi cryer put it in his now viral hp computers are racist video in other words instead of looking at jeremy bentham's design of the panopticon we must also take into account ben what bentham wrote when he traveled aboard a slave ship or in order to better understand the workings of power as outlined by mikhail foucault through his account of the execution of the regicide that we should pair that account with plantation management and punishment practices lantern laws the branding of enslaved people as early formations of biometric technologies along with the archive of resistance and revolts lantern laws runaway notices biometric technologies and identification by way of branding all played a key role in the historical formation of surveillance but what this archive also reveals are modes of refusal and rebellion moves that were ingenious and inventive that demonstrate an experian insight sorry experiential insight of methods of surveillance in order to trouble to resist and to undo them one thing that didn't make it into that book was in a discussion of a patent issued in 1969 to mary and albert van britten brown for an audio video alarm system for household protection it was designed to include a video scanning device at the door's entrance an intercom an alarm audio recording capabilities and a front door video scanner it also had a bolt that could be unlocked by way of remote control so this closed circuit television system is obviously a precursor to contemporary remote home monitoring systems for the consumer market like video doorbells mary van britten brown was a nurse and i wanted to imagine that she came up with the idea for this device while talking to other nurses who worked the night shift with her i wanted to think that they thought of this technology as a strategy for self-defense another option instead of calling the cops and just maybe that this was device spoke to an earlier iteration of what lisa nakamura in her talk in this series termed an anti-carceral data collection just maybe it seemed to me at the time that there was a certain absenting of this invention in the official genealogy of surveillance technologies sort of like the generalized absencing of black women's contributions when it comes to the ways that surveillance is conceptualized and historicized and i wondered if in any way our relationship to and knowledge about security surveillance and its infrastructures could be altered by remembering that in the late 1960s a black woman from queens new york had a patented role in the development of closed circuit television however mary ben britton's brown's 1969 patent was recently referenced in a patent granted to amazon technologies this past summer it was for a usb audio visual doorbell dongle while i once might have tried to see our invention as a response to a legitimate fear of racist police violence to see this black woman's invention cited by amazon points to how even if such an effort even if it was such an effort a response to anti-black police violence how easily it can be incorporated into the genealogy of ring surveillance hardware this is concerning because as we know amazon has partnered with policing agencies to share footage from its ring doorbell users as well users of the accompanying neighborhood neighbors app can receive in-application notifications or alerts uh when police make requests for their videos amazon only recently introduced opt-in end-to-end encryption feature for their ring video footage but this means that only if users choose to opt in to this video encryption feature would their ring footage be excluded from video sharing requests by the police i later turned to a different archive to think about biometric technologies one held in austin texas woodrow wilson woody bledsoe would come to be known as one of the earliest researchers in artificial intelligence in facial recognition technology he was a mathematics and computer science professor at the university of texas and when he died he left his papers to be archived there not all of his works were there as he was said to have burned some of his records shortly before his death in 1995. in 1982 woody bedso was contacted by a defense attorney from california who sought his assistance as a forensic expert in a robbery case the attorney provided bledsoe with a series of bank surveillance photos as well as photos of his client as he appeared at the time of his arrest and preliminary examination the bank surveillance photos were of low quality and gritty with key features obscured like the eyes hidden behind sunglasses and the ears being covered by a hat therefore it was hard for woody bledsoe to determine the tilt and rotation angles of the face so he was unable to apply his facial recognition program to assess inter-popular distance instead bledstoe performed these calculations by hand noting that quote we cannot expect to prove that the defendant is the robber but we might be able to show that he is not bledsoe made some assumptions around this particular case one being that the axis of the bank's cameras was unknown i want to gesture to his list of assumptions to point out that when it comes to spatial recognition technology by way of executable computer code some important questions to this day still remain namely what constitutes the face in facial recognition does the face include cutaneous biometrics through which pattern recognition could be used to assess identity by way of scars pores wrinkles moles tattoos and other facial markings does it include that which stems from the face like a fallen eyelash or morning breath what about vein visualization apps that make use of infrared cameras and what about effective computing technologies where emotion detection on a live face is used to supposedly machine reading motions at an airport or monitor travelers for blood pressure for sweat or fever body heat or changes in their voices and then assigning a threat category or score to them these kind of effective computing technologies heighten the role of affect which as we know is something that is socially constructed this should get get us to think about who gets marked as angry and who gets marked as innocent prior to any reaction when it comes to the question of what constitutes the face in facial recognition technology we must also account for long distance and non-cooperative iris capture air pattern recognition tattoo recognition remote measurements of respiration rates by way of infrared sensors automated race estimations and the production of composite profiles like parabon labs snapshot dna phenotyping that makes a species claim to accurately predict genetic ancestry eye hair and skin color and face shape of an unknown person from found dna found dna like on a use and a used and discarded coffee cup or a piece of chewing gum that someone might find on the sidewalk in one case in march 2017 the brockton massachusetts police department held a press conference where it stated that the police had used parabons dna phenotyping services to produce a mug shot looking phenotype report of a suspect in a cold case using dna samples found on the victim's bodies the mugshot came with a map of africa with parts of the continent's west coast shaded in red and where the suspect was said to be some 28 european 50 57 west african and 10 percent middle east and north african so in this moment of pauses temporary bands and the facial recognition and biometric technology moratorium act of 2021 which is now with the committee on the judiciary we have the opportunity for more expansive definition of the face to be predictive when it comes to things like high-powered infrared being used to possibly in some near future measure vascular patterns and the human face we need to do this before the toothpaste can no longer be put back in the tube so to speak [Music] but back to bledsoe one challenge that he saw in this particular case of the bank robber was what he termed the problem of the wider nose it seemed that the image of the robber captured by cctv had a wider looking nose by about 20 percent than that of the lawyer's client according to bledsoe's hand calculations he could not account for this unless the bank robber's nose was somehow distorted by way of disguise and bledsoe admitted that he was no expert in disguise his experiments and calculations included using a boxer's mouth guard and stuffing his cheeks with cotton to see if mathematically he could make the nose fit in his notes he suggested that other than the wider looking nose the lawyer's client looks a lot like the suspect and that he felt helpless working with so little throughout his notes there's a tentativeness at times he writes that another picture might help and questions where are the cameras in the bank and he posits that even with his most careful and conservative measurements still give the robber a wider nose importantly he asks himself should i continue should i continue is a question that we should all be asking on matters of surveillance facial recognition technology and other artificial intelligence much earlier in 1965 bledsoe wrote to the dod proposing and to study the idea of whether racial background could be culled from racial from facial photographs other than this correspondence one could easily surmise that there's little reference to race in bledsoe's work or in his archive but race is all around in terms of a prototypical whiteness surrounding whose faces are studied and measured mainly the pictures of the white male students whose bodies and facial features served as the model for his research many of the pictures in the archive are blurred from overexposure in the capture process prototypical whiteness still continues to inform the technocultural logic of biometric identification verification and automation technologies in its development and in its application by design prototypical whiteness and ex by extension prototypical maleness prototypical youthfulness prototypical able-bodiedness etc etc undergirds certain assumptions regarding the human body once it's made into data and applied to surveillance technologies like face recognition systems and iris and gate analysis biometric technologies rely on a truth claim that the body will produce a certain truth about a person's identity regardless of what identity that person's claims as we know this design can only work when it relies on the notion that these technologies are infallible objective and have a mathematical precision without error bias on the part of the computer programmers who create data sets and calibrate search parameters and analysts who make decisions based on these calculations and crucial to prototypical whiteness when it comes to biometric technologies is a deliberate absenting of its historical and historically present antecedents that being anthropometry nasal physiology or and cop speak of wider set noses phrenology polygenism psychometrics and the etc of scientific racism this historical president is constitutive of its current order of course not everyone falls for this alibi of technological infallibility and we can turn to the work of the algorithmic justice league and the we won't build it movement for examples or people who take to twitter to protest when a touchless hand sanitizer dispenser won't work for them but works for someone with paler appearing hands or a test proctoring surveillance software that charges them with cheating for non-detection of their face or pulse oximeter that gives me a false reading because of the amount of melanin that's said to be in my nail bed or the dark nail polish making me unmeasurable and unable to register by design it exceeds calculation [Music] exceeding calculation like the blurred composite portraits that make up artist dennis delgado's dark database with this creative work he troubles the very methodologies of facial recognition by using opencv algorithm on motion picture films like do the right thing and training day to make some composite semblance of a face that is unrecognizable it's blurred but it's a blurring technology unlike that which google applies to blur identifiable faces and license plate imagery that are published to google maps street view an anonymization process that company says can't be reversed and that it assumes quite a lot about the face in assigning it primacy over the rest of the body when it comes to identification on street view instead delgado's blurring asks us to think about that which can't be captured by facial recognition and asked us to think about the spectral of ghosts and as he put it the trace of a past colonial crime the past colonial crime is still present or at least it rhymes by mirroring earlier pseudoscientific racist and sexist discord that sought to define racial engendered categories and order humans in a linear fashion to regulate those artificial boundaries that could never be fully maintained like mustard seed filled skulls in crania americana like indexing the human body via bertionage like not in gideon's types of mankind and like the displaying of ottabenga in the monkey house of bronx zoo in 1906 i count delgado's dark database as an example of disruption refusal and a critical biometric consciousness that seems to provide one answer to woody bledsoe's question of should i continue last year in the journal synthesis poet and novelist m norbessie phillip wrote notes towards sealing forensic landscapes in it she recounts that when she first visited africa that she took with her a metal seal embosser that she would use when she was still a practicing attorney to emboss her seal on affidavits after swearing documents she writes in these notes towards sealing forensic landscapes quote i carried that machine with me because i wanted to prove something had happened that my ancestors had been kidnapped and sold away from this continent i was about to visit end quote in this essay phillips tells us quote that we live in the we in the americas live in forensic landscapes and we also inhabit the scene of the crime where evidence is erased and destroyed and a series of quotes i think of philip's words when i look back at the images that i took in 2019 when i traveled to agbo blusher in accra ghana i was interested in the work of self-taught computer engineers and makers who were repairing and building from second-hand consumer electronic equipment taking the infrastructure of cloud computing biometric smart cities artificial intelligence and the processing and storage that those things entail as a starting point particularly when much of the cloud service and the attendant data storage equipment that accompany these technologies are said to have an average lifespan of only a few years what happens when this technology becomes obsolete but not useless aglabloche is part market part electronic waste site homes to schools and other businesses residential area with a population of approximately fifty thousand people it is thought by some to be more toxic than chernobyl ukraine eminor borsi phillip also wrote quote the undersea cables the mining projects that exploit people the sweatshops employing low-wage workers all creating this algorithmic landscape that too is a forensic landscape of sorts special tools are necessary to read the silences of the archive and these tools to quote audrey lord cannot be the master's end quote on the outskirts of aglaboche this algorithmic landscape one of the first things that struck me is this image here on the left it's of a shore banker forecasting the number 57 for the national lottery that week it is the number that this shore banker wants his patrons to bank their hopes and dreams on the desk the numbers and the chalkboard are special tools of this trade in the futures market of the lottery advertising his forecasting skills one of the questions that framed my interest in the problem of electronic waste work is this what happens when alexa goes to a craw this is to say that there can be no big data artificial intelligence ring door bills machine learning or voice console control digital assistants like alexa and siri without the materials and the hardware that make up its uh without the materials that make up its hardware and its infrastructure and you can think here of kate crawford and vladimir joeller's anatomy of an ai system that mapped the life cycle of amazon echo through the lens of extraction labor extraction data extraction and the extraction of our other planetary resources or the work of nicole starosilski on undersea cables and what she calls the turbulent ecologies of coastal environments where these cables land or ingrid burnington's mapping of submarine cables tapped by british spy agency gchq based on the documents leaked by edward snowden we have to situate questions of accountability and our own complicity when it comes to the health effects of the people that do the loosely regulated or unregulated waste work when it comes to dismantling sorting dealing in scraps burning and sometimes repairing electronics like laptops desktops game consoles and cell phones waste here being the second hand consumer electrics and electronics equipment market that is imported to sites in africa china and elsewhere at the end of life stage or nearly non-functional from europe the uk north america while some of the near end to life products can be reused or refurbished the notion of repair seems to be an alibi for these products being imported where the goal is recycling for copper aluminum rare earth minerals and other materials made raw once again to be exported out of the country to make new devices i met a researcher there who told the story of a cargo of bicycles that was supposed that was coming said to be coming from the uk and when they opened it it was just end of life computer laptops so cell phones televisions small and large appliances like microwaves and refrigerators cars and motorcycle parts tvs computer hard drives are all make part of this um anything with you know available copper uh trace amounts of gold platinum and other elements make up part of this electronic market the u.s government and accountability office released a report last year that's found that cell phone phones contain more precious metals by weight than raw ore and made the claim that one million recycled cell phones can be rendered into thirty five thousand two hundred and seventy port four pounds of copper 772 pounds of silver and 75 pounds of gold so the outcomes of this kind of waste work include toxic exposure to elements such as lead mercury plastics copper arsenic soil soil and drinking water pollution livestock and food supply contamination headaches burns blurred visions respiratory problems so this is not only felt by those who do work in this type of occupation but also by people who reside there who work there who go to school who shop and who go about the business of living in this area of accra so when circuit boards are dismantled by hammer and wires are pulled apart by hand like the third panel um that you see here you can see these like atomized computer parts like glass screens and batteries and acrylic resin all around the particulate matter was like small gold and copper dust clouds of hazardous air acrid air from the burning of high impact thermoplastics were about 200 meters away from this site where this removal was happening i couldn't help but think of respiration and the way that atomized computer parts get incorporated seemingly into the human body the labored breathing of this dismantling process i think is what franz fanon in the wretched of the earth termed combat breathing a breathing in response to colonial occupation an occupied breathing that is a bodily contestation of state violence and disregard through this violent arrangement of disposal of waste of course there are other means by which these nearly non-functional electronics could be recycled or disposed of like through the use of effective microorganisms or by magnetic and ultrasonic means or by robotic disassembly in this case the waste workers are the doing the disassembly they are the automation i should close here now with a hope scenario like a discussion of kenyan artist cyrus kabir series of glasses fabricated out of trash and waist some of it electronic or with a discussion of tamar clark browns and isaac's kiriyuku's installation coding braiding transmissions where they use gopro cameras mounted on a headset to creatively question quote the potential dynamic between braiding hair and coding as a tool for sending encryptive messages and resistive political action end quote we can see from these images black women breathing each other's hair with the idea that the pattern and motions of the braiding style of the of braiding the synthetic human and acrylic hair is captured in some machine-readable way while the shared intimacies knowledge and care of braiding work cannot be truly captured by that technology or by mataluza the hacker in saul williams and anisia uzman's new film neptune forest as as he put it my truth is encrypted and yours is easy to read of course black invention art and creativity point to various ways that black folks uh trouble the very methodologies of surveillance and insist on making ways of imagining and living beyond an anti-black surveillance state to return to amnor bessie phillips on algorithmic landscapes and forensic landscapes she tells us quote special tools are necessary to read the silence of the archive and these tools to quote audrey lord cannot be the masters but i do want to turn to a master's tool for a second to think about repair and reparations that being the us african growth and opportunity act a brawny world is the term used by ghanaians for the market and deadman's dead white men's clothes use clothing and other textiles that end up in ghana rwanda and elsewhere i wonder about the connection between charity clothing drives fast fasten the electronic waste trade and what is sold by the pound to recycling companies to get dumped in africa clothing electronics and otherwise we could look at the history and the implementation of the african growth and opportunity act which has been renewed until 2025 where charity donations charity and scare quotes are shipped in bulk to countries in africa and where second-hand clothing bans by certain countries are met with restrictions so products like oil coffee diamonds can be imported to the us duty-free or with reduced tariffs however any move to increase tariffs on used clothing being dumped there from the u.s is mets with intense pressure from the used clothing lobby and then retaliation in the form of increased tariffs when we think of the labor rights of waste workers so this is around maybe like a five dollar a day type of job so reparations are in order but any examination into the occupational health and safety risks associated with the exposure to sector the second hand uh consumer electronics uh market is particularly during the dismantling process has to take into account the colonial underpinnings of this aspect of the supply chain and contextualize it within the legacy of imperialism and inequities associated with global capitalism some questions need to be answered about this garbage imperialism like who is operating in in untraceable ways to get these minerals like copper out of agabloshi and to build new exactly what technologies who are the lobbying industries based in extraction and dumping and what role if any does the african growth and opportunity act play how is the politics of refusal being enacted by countries that are refusing these garbage drums and what role does sending countries freight shipping companies and technology producers play here we must all interrogate the seemingly planned obsolescence of computers phones and airpods that can't be repaired and encourage invention and innovation in recycling such as the use of effective microorganism a process called bioleaching where electronic waste is dissolved using a bacteria and to extract the metals from it and that is my series of small comments in no particular order on invention innovations that trouble surveillance and its various technologies and that are means of preparation for imagining and living black life beyond the surveillance state thank you [Music] thank you so much simone that was so interesting covered so many things i don't i hardly know where to start every time i had a question you answered it in the next three or four minutes um we have a question uh why don't we start with the question from from a viewer who asks whether we see states pushing back on anti-surveillance techniques such as the use of anti-facial recognition masks whether we see states doing that so i didn't see the question yeah their pushback on as people are developing things like masks to defeat facial recognition our states or we might broaden it and say are are any uh civic levels states cities countries pushing back on on that attempt to evade facial recognition um i would say in canada um there had been a not necessarily a reauthorization but um an increased focus on um anti-masking acts and i think zac blast's work um on facial recognition has um uh discussed that a bit further um and i would suggest that uh people looked to that um but i think that we're in an opportunity now um especially um you know uh in the us and particularly you have the facial recognition and biometrics uh technology moratorium act that is with the senate judiciary committee right now and you know those questions that i asked about the assumptions that um broadening not woody blood so because this was in the 60s but how we need to take this opportunity to have a more capacious um understanding and definition of the possibilities of what facial recognition could do when it comes to the human face so not just about measurements and planes but things like dna respiration um infrared tech but what this act also um uh names is not only facial recognition but they're talking about emotion recognition as well too other gait recognition other ways in which patterns of the body uh and not necessarily only the face uh that the federal and the state governor and the state level um should have some oversight on that and i think there's also another um opportunity with the um office of science and technology policy are having right now a call for um i think it's called rfi something so a call for people to annotate and uh and to really bring their expertise and their concerns um to the us state around what should happen now with biometrics not only at the federal and state level but at the private level as well too and so those are at the same time there might be a push and a pull uh there uh there might be a kind of reauthorization of uh very much uh islamophobic um acts around anti-islamophobic sorry islamophobic acts around failing um in spaces like france um but at the uh you know it's uh i think it's just still uh uneven in which um these technologies uh and the policing of these uh technologies and the use of them in policing get applied to different communities and so we have to take these opportunities to bring a multitude of voices into uh really challenging uh facial recognition technology and its various manifestations it's interesting to er it is such a push pull where um we have these acts and and and leaders who are saying we need some regulation of this space and and companies for that matter saying please regulate this space um and yet at the same time uh i i feel like there are those who would who would respond to some of the concerns i love your your questioning well what is a face right how do we even measure what is a face and and where does it stop um i can imagine people saying and i'm not one of these people but i can imagine people saying well that's that's a technological problem right we're just too early in the process and and what we need is we just need to train on more kinds of bodies and more kinds of people and then and then everybody will be equal in this kind of um surveillance state and what is what you must encounter that kind of of thinking and i'm wondering what your response is um i've heard of that thinking i think i possibly could encounter it i'm for um not only a moratorium but really questioning what is the use value of these things and to say that we need more people to be entered into a technology um that is that is over determined in how it uh it is used around policing especially with um racialized folks black brown and indigenous folks i don't think the idea of inclusion or larger training sets or whatever you know tech washing uh kind of way that these um uh technologies and their research and development gets authorized is um uh necessarily um the best step but i think the perhaps an uh one way to to aside from what i gave you just to have a politics of stop and refusal and don't necessarily um uh need these things is also to to look at out you know i guess what are the intentions around these technologies and not to say that we need better training but things like our better training data but things to be predictive about um something like parabon that i mentioned where it's this quite specious claim that a face could be um uh speculated uh producing large mug shots from some chewing gum or like dna that's found it's like it's work that i think and why why artists work is so important is but because like the work of uh heather dewey hagsburg um on dna with found dna um has really um troubled the the the claims that this technology is um absolute a science and that these could be possibly you know real faces uh that criminalize you know various uh populations and so um uh no no more no more no more like propaganda no more speculation um of all of these things i think it's time for uh the folks that uh and people who are not only uh who they who are basically the the sites in which these technologies get trained on in the public um that have some um uh insight some not insight but some ways in which they can be in communication and challenge uh the various manufacturers and researchers and developers that these things don't happen in a black box and that technology is not outside of ideas around uh policing terrorism citizenship the state and that we all have insight to add and uh stakes to claim in those in the development of those things there's a couple questions in the chat and i'm going to get to them but uh you just let in gave me too good of an entree into a question that i wanted to to ask which is i i i love the way that you're incorporating art into your analyses um i have encountered back to people who think in that way i sometimes i encounter people in social sciences or even humanistic uh critical sorts of social sciences who just don't know what to make of art um and and i would love to hear you speak to why you think art is important and why it's important to consider art alongside say these historical records and documents that you work with what for you is the value in art as a object of study other than it's a place where people trouble stuff which is obviously worthwhile it's troubling but it's they also anticipate i think um futures that could be uh more just and more free than what we have now and and futures around questions of climate uh disaster and catastrophe um as well too and so in the title of the talk i had um the word blue and the blue actually comes from uh two artists uh well the first is uh sabley smith um and it's a this work that she does uh with these large-scale sculptures like they're about like 14 feet high made of aluminum uh about prison architecture um furniture and the the space of the um waiting room um and the she wants us to think about the very incremental and quotidian and the ways that violence is made ordinary um incarceral spaces the visiting room in which um families loved ones and others come to meet those uh that are incarcerated and uh and and why that is the visiting room as a space if that allows us to think about that space and to get us to a space of uh of of imagining and then acting on abolition to think about um you know in the last two years uh of of covid and the ways that um you know uh visitation has been um done now by way of zoom and other telecommunication uh companies um and it's it's all it's said to be convenient you know using the language of zoom it's said to be um uh you know basically tech washing and so you know at all of these so i just to say that the moment of that visiting room is important because of you know there's a report in the intercept a couple years ago about uh voice recognition training being done uh you uh using incarcerated folks voices um as as you know it's so that's that's the thing on telecommunication a bit uh and the other artist is um american artist and uh they have a collection of work uh some that looks at policing and the thin blue line the various uh mythologies and pedagogies of uh police training um but i would start off first with and it makes me think of you know that really the colonial underpinnings of um what happens when alexa goes to accra what happens when our phones are turned into electronic waste and i think the title of the work is like don't boil your iphone in coca-cola and to get us to think about that dismantling process um here and the ways that perhaps these technologies have a certain planned obsolescence um to them and so also yes i do think that this the work that um american artists does on predictive uh policing my blue window um it's an immersive and interactive piece of uh you know you're basically in a cop car with a screen and all driving around various places um in new york um get us to see that that work that you know that that's that these predictions are just that um based on a particular type of police training that is historically um you know uh anti-black and and also to to see that that the way cities get immersed um in this kind of um uh you know predictive way and so i don't know i just i just feel like in general the artists uh do really the heavy lifting and you know some of the it's it's it's really some of the stuff is really depressing and there's something about the joy of the like the possibility of something more that i think that um the that that this work reveals i love that great answer awesome um let me turn to fewer comments uh kate crawford asks uh thank you for this brilliant talk simone can you tell us a little bit about if there are forms of solidarity to be found between workers in different strata of information capitalism and what barriers stand in the way um i mean i feel like this is kate crawford's work as well too in um atlas [Laughter] um and uh so what are some of the the barriers i think i i don't know right and so um i would i would first say that i'm uh a a student of the people that are doing organizing work around uh labors around labor around capital around the environment and i think that i would hope to see that there's a continuing uh recognition around um uh fair wages um uh housing uh these things and and to see the kind of transnational um uh connections uh that can be made and so rather than thinking about electronic waste work in the philippines india china ghana and other sites you know what is happening um here around um uh people who are who are said to be um essential workers in um a you know basically a factory like uh amazon distribution center and what kinds of what are my own relations to labor when it comes and that kind of labor um when it comes uh to that so uh maybe that i i'm not quite sure um the barriers but uh maybe that's the answer that i have and to continue to look at um you know the kind of we won't build it movement and other folks that are really um uh refusing uh whistleblowing um and calling attention to um uh the kind of uneven and the inequities in uh when it comes to labor relations and technology or tech thank you uh we have a question from anna valdivia sorry if i said your last name wrong anna uh from king's college of london who thanks you so much for this fascinating talk um i think you may have spoken to some of this but but i i i'm there's a bit here i'm not sure that you have so nowadays we're witnessing an increasing concern toward biometrics and demographic bias and as a result researchers and biometrics are designing systems to identify subjects in a more fair way avoiding discrimination um and she goes on to ask given that these systems are implemented in sensitive context such as border or asylum applications do you have any thoughts about a critical approach toward fairness in biometrics and i i know you've said uh you know stop it's like but haven't elaborated on that at all i'm sure there's some place um some fantastical place where that's happening but like is it really being done in a fair and what and isn't fair something that um is like socially produced and understood as like who is fair and i know that there was years ago and perhaps uh still now there was a pilot project out of the uk that was using dna around asylum seekers uh to differentiate asylum seekers from kenya from somalia and we know that uh that that dna is not um a nationalizing technology but when we have these types of projects that produce it as such as producing certain truths about citizenship birth uh whatever it is um then it gets authorized um just as such so i don't i don't know if those i mean i'm should we have borders be honest know uh be fair i don't know i i do appreciate um that question but i think for me um it's especially now especially as we see with um you know uh quite intensive um changes in climate and people move uh and uh and have and should have rights to do so um the question of uh of of how borders and i think it may be at the beginning of like my talk when the canadian minister held up this card which won awards is the most secure card in the world but it got authorized by saying that the canada border has to be protected from sri lankans basically with that imagery and so uh in many ways that this this this idea around states borders um is is is racist and we'll have to contend with this uh you know a lot more and we see that uh people uh uh are on the move even more because of you know uh climate uh devastation and catastrophe so nyle dougherty um thanks you for an amazing talk and and i think it follows up he he he's thinking about the tension of the socially constructed configurations of the body being made measurable through computation um and he's wondering uh if if you think there's ever a way for measurement to be inclusive and in particular perhaps as this relates to something like precision medicine or healthcare and even something as important as like it might i have so many of them those oxymeters that i bought at the time i had to use it once and it had nothing to do with covid but mixing cleaning products um just anyways that's an aside uh you know when i was looking at these documents from uh woody bledsoe in uh the 60s or so and why i highlighted it when i mentioned it to you on the talk is when he talked about this wide set nose um and that is you know the language of um cop speak you know how how power gets um you know rationalized and gets uh made through language is saying things like the wide set knows and i and and and that that same phrasing um you know came up in 2016 when philando castile uh was killed by a cop and said you know they look like the suspect we were looking for because of the wide set nose and so the can bodies be measured in some equitable way why do bodies need to be measured like outside of like uh you know bertianage and colonial management uh say fingerprints uh in india um at the time of a british occupation and a colonization of that space is there i i just don't see like what is the use value for all of this measurement and should should we have other ways do people need to be measured against something or each other um i think those are the questions i'm not like a social theorist and i don't really have you know uh sometimes i might have some policy uh concerns but my question is like why why why measurement is uh you know necessary especially when we know um you know the the histories and the present uh that these kinds of measures um uh uphold and come out of yeah it's so hard to back off measurement once there's a technique with which to measure because we don't want to lose it all that work but there's a number higher yeah yeah uh paula who uh doesn't leave a last name says so much new information for me thank you what has surprised you most from your research and what has been most validated from your research oh oh that's a good question and i probably don't have an i probably think of some answer um in a bit what surprised me most is that like it's the changing same if we just look at like facial recognition technology this was like the same stuff that was coming out of r d in you know research that i was reading in the early 2000s with the same type of really um archaic language around race around physiology and whatever other types of etc of scientific racism and that it continues um today and so this is something that was seen coming was known that this was and how it got authorized maybe 30 20 years later and what it will do in the future that is um surprising i think another thing that's been interesting is even the challenges to these technologies i mean i studied branding and enslavement and the afterlife of it but to think about how uh and the branding of biometric technologies in films and other kinds of uh you know product placement but to think even that the contesting of these technologies to get heard needs to be branded as well it speaks a lot to the kind of capitalist system in which um uh we uh live in so that that's actually been my surprise that i actually don't mention that but like i should have saw it coming like you got to brand your critique some way make it bite legible yeah right if it's not it's not tic-tac-friendly forget about it yes uh let me pose what's probably a last question and i'm sorry not you've gotten to everybody's question from jay davis uh former msr intern hi jade um you know jay yes best we all love jade jade says thank you simone this was wonderful for those of us who are in positions to teach or run workshops to help young adults critically engage with these ideas have you seen any artistic interventions that are easily doable outside of boiling iphones in coca-cola with a group of students um teaching tips in general okay so i might have to think about that one but i do um and actually i learned some of this from uh the folks at deep lab i think some of them are on the top but these feed projects that i do with my class to have them do some type of speculative thinking around technology around an app around um you know a black mirror or those kinds of things that could be done um in in the short short time frame in a class um to get them to think about the social implications of these texts what could be the terms of service possibly what could be the possible harms and outcomes um and uh you know who is being um uh not included in these technologies and i think that's one way in which i've uh at least in the classroom uh to to have uh students think uh speculatively but also in concrete ways that it could imagine um a future different than uh you know the technologies that we have now yeah it's interesting i see people turning more and more to speculative speculative future projects to try and break out of our ways of thinking uh we have 60 seconds left and i want to there's some good questions here and i wish we could keep on going but but we are coming up on the end of the hour um so i'm afraid we're gonna have to let these let these lie thank you for watching thank you for asking questions thank you for your engagement and thank you simone for an amazing and provocative talk that i it's so interesting the way that i was uh back channeling with you during it the way that that you echo a lot of themes that have been coming out in the talks already that we've heard and and in some that are that are yet to come um eleanor uh buxton has left in the live q and a chat uh reminder that the recording for this talk is going to be available so if you love it and you're sad that your friends missed it you're going to be able to point them to it later on uh and we have a bunch of speakers coming up in the series yet we're going all the way through june so even more awesomeness to come uh november 17th we will have andre brock from the university of georgia he's got a fantastic book called digital blackness which is racking up awards left and right and he's a super fun speaker so we're really looking forward to that and a reminder also that the past talks from folks like i'm gonna forget somebody's name if i start naming them but they're all amazing and they're all there for your viewing so uh send your friends send your students send your colleagues send everybody and we'll see you november 17th and thank you again so much simone thank you nancy and thank you everyone this has been great microsoft thank you our pleasure our honor thank you

2021-11-12 15:39

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