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- Convenors:
-
Norma Möllers
(Queen's University)
Pinar Tuzcu (Queen's University)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
This panel invites papers that discuss the roles of racism in frameworks of the coloniality and racial economy of digital capitalism. By bringing together empirical and conceptual accounts, we wish to contribute to clarifying the relationships between digital colonialism and digital capitalism.
Long Abstract:
This panel invites papers that discuss the roles of racism in emerging frameworks of the coloniality and racial economy of digital capitalism. Emerging debates on the coloniality of data and the digital have been useful to capture the extractivist logic and uneven fallout of digital capitalism. However, whereas racism played an outsized role in historical colonialism for organizing what populations and lands could be deemed exploitable and expendable, the roles of racism(s) in contemporary accounts of digital capitalism’s colonial character are less clear. In a similar vein, accounts of digital capitalism have not paid much attention to racial capitalism as an organizing framework. We are interested in bringing together accounts of how racism shapes the extractivist logic and uneven fallout of digital capitalism, including but not limited to:
- the racial economy of digital supply chains and infrastructures
- the dispossession of Indigenous communities in the context of mineral mining
- the environmental racism related to resource consumption for information infrastructures and machine learning
- the exploitation of data labor and resources from the Global South
- bordering technologies and the economy of the border
- the silencing of subaltern knowledges
- data colonialism in settler colonial contexts
- organizing and resistance based in anti-colonial and racial justice frameworks
By bringing together empirical and theoretical accounts of the role of racism for digital capitalism, we wish to contribute to clarifying how racism organizes digital capitalism, how analyses of racism are used to understand the extractive logics of digital capitalism, as well as clarify the relationships between digital colonialism and digital capitalism.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Michelle Pfeifer (TUD Dresden University of Technology)
Long abstract:
In this paper, I probe how smart border infrastructures have been employed for migration control, border policing, and asylum administration on a planet where global displacement has become a new norm. I analyze three instantiations of media technological border control in Europe; database, voice recognition, and smartphone data extraction; to theorize the relationship between so-called “smart borders” and racial capitalism. When people move, so does their data. However, migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and non-citizens, summarily described as people on the move, are especially made vulnerable to the collection, policing, and surveillance of this data. Drawing on 18 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Europe, archival research, and critical documents, policy, and discourses analysis, I demonstrate that data-driven projects that are framed as governmental reforms purportedly meant to fix the perceived crises of migration function to deepen racial inequalities and enhance border policing. Specifically, I show how the data of people on the move is valorized in two ways. First, data-driven technologies work to classify people and their origin and thereby rely on the racial, gendered, colonial, and eugenic histories encoded in digital technologies. As a result, conceptions of personhood, humanity, and testimony are reimagined, and the experiences and histories of people on the move are abstracted into data points. Second, borders and migration are often used as incubators and testing grounds for media technologies more generally, and the data extracted from people on the move becomes used for technological and governmental innovation.
Philippa Metcalfe Philippa Metcalfe (University of Warwick)
Long abstract:
The turn to data-driven technologies in contemporary migration governance in Europe has created a complex web of corporate actors that are now instrumental in shaping the life-chances of displaced populations across Europe's external and internal borders. From biometrics to mobile communication, private computational infrastructures increasingly underpin the processes by which people on the move are recognised, racialised, assessed, tracked and controlled by border technologies. When considering this, it becomes imperative to explore how histories of racial capitalism impact upon lucrative AI markets through the investment of capital in border security industries that work to further stratify regimes of mobility. To interrogate the ways in which racial capitalism becomes implicit to understanding practices of technologically aided border security, I will discuss the coloniality of Europe’s (datafied) borders. I will present findings my previous doctoral work as part of DATAJUSTICE project, as well drawing on ongoing investigations as part of an ESRC funded research fellowship conducting policy analysis of European discourses of securitisation. My findings uncover how processes of racialisation and the entrenchment of colonial hierarchies of humanity become key to the continued investment in border technology markets, where illegalised migrants are depicted as a security problem to be solved through the reliance upon private actors. These insights allow us to better understand the intricate political economy of the increasingly privatised, profit driven, and punitive border controls in Europe.
Jess Bier (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Long abstract:
In this paper I examine an online platform for scheduling the work of ship pilots in the Port of Rotterdam. I analyze how algorithms are being enfolded into existing systems of labor in ways that streamline racial capitalism. Industry professionals often claim that digital infrastructures will make maritime shipping more sustainable and efficient. But digitalization also builds on the kinds of apps made infamous in firms like Amazon and Uber, as well as on related forms of unjust circulation and extraction. In Rotterdam highly trained ship pilots, mostly comprised of local white workers, are a key component in the new platform. However the platform is designed for the corporations who are shipping the goods, and so far the algorithm is less useful for the pilots themselves.
Even more notably, the algorithm doesn't mention the seafarers aboard the incoming ships, many of whom are Asian workers from countries such as the Philippines and Indonesia. In contrast to the pilots, seafarers are subsumed under the ship for the purposes of the algorithm, not even appearing visibly as human or living labor. Seafarers only show up briefly elsewhere in the port’s digital systems, and only then as potential security threats in relation to migration controls. Examining how algorithms are being enfolded into port regions makes it possible to attend to the differential effects these transformations have on workers. This is especially apparent in relation to how digitalization reiterates racialized definitions of the human in ways that exacerbate injustice within and beyond ports.
Nelly Y. Pinkrah (TU Dresden)
Long abstract:
«Modern logistics is founded with the first great movement of commodities, the ones that could speak.» (Harney & Moten 2013: 92) Although this speech/capacity to speak was not registered as such, it is precisely this historical configuration whose recursive character emerges in contemporary infrastructures of digital cultures and political action. I want to offer a reformulation of a history of technology rooted in the experience of the trenches of modernity, one that resulted in resistance and liberation: «Since speech was forbidden, slaves camouflaged the word under the provocative intensity of the scream.» writes Édouard Glissant in Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (1989: 123-124). The Revolution in Haiti in 1804 redefined geopolitical and social relations and has long served as the origin story of freedom and liberation. It also, importantly so, yields questions of language, expression and articulation, their conditions and modes of possibility.
When Harney and Moten refined our understanding of the generation of the supply chain, supposedly a mere technical operation, and described «logisticality» as the social capacity emerging from the discrete historical experience of the transatlantic slave trade, they conceptualized logisticality as transcending the pervasive logic of contemporary capitalism. The cargo or commodity «that could speak» is the simple description of the co-operation between what is now deemed to be cognitive, digital, racial capitalism, all of those or neither, and racism and both of their foundations in empire and colonialism. Through this historic lens I want to look at this co-operation today in relation to „our capacity to speak».
Mitali Thakor (Wesleyan University)
Long abstract:
Drawing on analysis of Soul Machines, Replika, and other companies offering AI-generated “people” as digital laborers, this talk discusses the racial politics of affect and authenticity that haunt productions of so-called fake labor. Much concern has been generated about the harms deepfakes might enact, especially in the cases of sexually weaponized and political deepfakes. The crafting of deepfakes is only made possible by the ongoing extractive practices of artificial intelligence—where personal data is captured into public databases from which face-sets and other features can be generated. Such extractions are unevenly distributed across the racial topographies of digital capitalism, from the whiteness of images most over-represented to the non-whiteness of human labor moderating AI-generated content, from India to Kenya to the Philippines. Despite concerns over the regulation and moderation of user-generated deepfakes, many companies have begun marketing “official” fakes to perform customer service, health care, and intimate and sexual labor, often with the explicit participation of a celebrity and their likeness. Building upon scholarship critically examining the postcolonial and racial dimensions of digital labor, microwork/ghostwork, and outsourcing more broadly, I consider questions of consent, harm, and desire brought about by generative AI, which I term “extractivist erotics”: What forms does consensual data extraction take, and what new social contracts does it bring into emergence? What violences continue to be enacted to present the illusion of seamless, “artificial” intelligence-driven labor? And finally, what sorts of desires for authenticity, racial or otherwise, do we continue to demand from those who perform digital labor?
Tanmaie Kailash
Short abstract:
This paper examines modern examples of AI model training labor models and employs an extended case study method to look at the ways in which surveillance capitalism continues the logics, ideologies, and power structures of colonialism.
Long abstract:
While many academics, including Ruha Benjamin and Joy Buolamwini, have shown how racism persists within the technological and AI systems that undergird what Shoshana Zuboff refers to as surveillance capitalism, there is a dearth of scholarship that centers surveillance capitalism and how it is situated within colonialism. By placing the works of Benjamin and Zuboff in conversation with thinkers such as Anibal Quijano, Karl Marx, Pierre Bourdieu, and Gilles Deleuze, I examine modern examples of AI model training labor models and employ an extended case study method to interrogate the ways in which surveillance capitalism adheres to and continues the logics, ideologies, and power structures of colonialism. Moreover, I also explore how the oppositional construction of different laborers- afforded by the methods and technologies employed under surveillance capitalism- impedes the formation of a shared class consciousness by cleaving recognition of shared habitus. This furthering of colonial logics has material and epistemological consequences for how labor is valued, and extends colonial hierarchies while removing the possibility of the renegotiation of their resultant harms through the employment of ‘objective’ machine automation and the subsequent obfuscation of the human.
Kailey Walker (Queen's University)
Long abstract:
Drawing on environmental media studies, theories of data colonialism, and Povinelli’s (2016) geontologies, this paper analyzes discursive strategies deployed to legitimize AI extractivism in Canada. In the face of anthropogenic climate change, Canada has made substantial investments into both AI and ‘green’ mineral industries. Research has widely documented the environmental consequences of AI supply chains, including the toll of mineral extraction projects on communities and the natural resources data centers and machine learning consume. To justify the socio-environmental costs of these extractive sectors, discursive strategies of social licencing are adopted to green extractivism: AI is conflated with climate solutions to rationalize the devastating effects of digital supply chains. The aim of this paper is to clarify the colonial logics that underpin green extractivism in Canada. This is addressed by a critical discourse analysis of dominant narratives of ‘green AI’ and ‘tech minerals’ as advanced by the state in policies and public statements, and Big Tech corporations in environmental reports, press releases and other sources. I argue that justifications of AI extractivism significantly depend on colonial ontologies which devalue the natural world as Nonlife, raising questions about the Western epistemological frameworks that underpin environmental discourse. In doing so, this paper emphasizes how green extractivism depends on the ongoing suppression of Indigenous knowledge about Land and Life – while simultaneously demarcating what and who is expendable in the quest for green futures.
Robel Afeworki Abay (Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences Berlin) Karen Soldatic (Toronto Metropolitan University)
Long abstract:
This paper will centre questions of disability, race, class, technology and society in relation to recent advances in technology, such as AI, ADM, and generative AI and its impact on disabled people from culturally and racially marginalised groups living in Australia and Germany. The comparative approach taken will sit at the intersections of Disability Studies & Critical Race Theory (DisCrit), and the colonialities of rule across divergent (post, de, anti, settler) colonial regimes. The paper will explore and examine core questions of agency in everyday life for highly marginalised disabled people as they are often forced to utilise advance technologies to navigate inherent structures of racism, classism and ableism, particularly when interfacing with the welfare state as it continues to digitise its citizen interface on the neoliberal principles of self- sufficiency, responsibilisation and austerity. We argue that everyday technologies offer a complex interplay of individual freedom, a minimisation of inter-personal stigmatisation while simultaneously, they can potentially reinforce a risk of intersectional vulnerabilities by collecting personal data that can be utilised for coercion and surveillance.