Fake Knife, Real Ketchup: Brief Comments on Tech's Problem

Credit: Alexas_Fotos at  https://pixabay.com/images/id-1448361/ 

In “Race After Technology”, Dr. Ruha Benjamin’s central thesis is that tech corporations are not doing enough to address systemic racism and society’s racist tendencies.  In many cases, technology is amplifying racist actions through algorithms, machine learning, and intentional design in some cases. Benjamin (2019) states, “This is why we must separate ‘intentionality’ from its strictly negative connotation in the context of racist practices and examine how aiming to ‘do good’ can very well coexist with forms of malice and neglect.  In fact a do-gooding ethos often serves as a moral cover for harmful decisions” (p. 61). This “do-gooding” ethos has permeated much of ed-tech as pointed out by Audrey Watters in her article summarizing “The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade.” Companies generally only care about their bottom line and they follow this line of reasoning to its bitterest ends. Company after company claims that they will ‘revolutionize’ or ‘disrupt’ the industry with their latest-and-greatest product only to change nothing or leave users worse off.

These lamentations remind me of the first verse from St. Vincent’s song, “Huey Newton”:

Feelings flash cards

Fake knife real ketchup

Cardboard cutthroats

Cowboys of information

Pleasure dot loathing dot Huey dot Newton

Oh it was a lonely, lonely winter (Clark, 2013, track 4)

In this song. Clark sings about a world where feelings have been reduced to flashcards; where we live in virtual reality but have real results; where the real has been reduced to cardboard cutouts that are nevertheless cutthroats; and where they live in the age of the wild-west as ‘cowboys’ of information.  These sentiments of reducing the human experience down to simple terms that a computer can understand speaks to the same worries that Benjamin expresses when she speaks of Diversity, Inc.’s building of ethnicities for marketing purposes. The “fake knife, real ketchup” line speaks to Beauty AI constructing an algorithm to determine “beauty” where the bot selects on whiteness--it’s a fake knife that doesn’t mean anything, but the consequences are very real.  And all of these “cowboys of information” highlight the problems that Neil Postman predicted with a culture that overwhelmingly praises, if not worships, technology and all of the information it produces.

    Benjamin is largely concerned with how the design of new technologies will impact marginalized groups, and she very much has reason to.  These questions about design are not being asked in conferences. I recently attended the 2020 TCEA conference in Austin where none of the sessions looked at how technology might be excluding different groups.  Technology innovators are simply not considering these questions about how technology will be a blessing and a burden--in their minds it is all blessing.  As we continue to feed more and more into the information behemoth of the Internet its very design needs to be called into question.  Unfortunately, Benjamin points out, “researchers tend to concentrate on how the Internet perpetuates or mediates racial prejudice at the individual level rather than than analyze how racism shapes infrastructure and design” (p. 90).  Twenty-seven years prior Postman stated, “it is necessary to understand where our techniques come from and what they are good for; we must make them visible so that they may be restored to our sovereignty” (p. 143). We’ve known the solution to inequitable design and hidden agendas, but collective action still has not been taken.

    Watters shows us the constant onslaught of ed-tech on the domain of educators, Postman explains how this phenomenon was not by accident and it has been in the making for decades, and Benjamin details some very real examples of how this infrastructure is damaging and destroying lives.  What now? Where to start? As Clark points out, we’re “entombed in a shrine of zeroes and ones.”

References

Benjamin, R. (2019). Race after technology: abolitionist tools for the New Jim Code. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Clark, A. (2013). Huey Newton [Recorded by St. Vincent]. On St. Vincent [Vinyl Recording]. New York, New York: Republic Records.

Postman, N. (1992). Technopoly. New York: Knopf.

Watters, A. (2019, December 31). The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade. Retrieved February 17, 2020, from http://hackeducation.com/2019/12/31/what-a-shitshow