Episode 07: Digital Bypassing

Is technology racist? Most of us believe that technology is neutral— a fair and equal space for all to exist freely. Many scholars including Ruha Benjamin, Safiya Noble, and Joy Buolamwini highlight the many ways that this is not true, and particularly illustrate how technology perpetuates racism. In this episode, Prerna synthesizes the work of these Black women and shares examples of bias that has been coded into a wide range of our technological systems. She introduces the term digital bypassing to explore our tendency to avoid facing the reality of injustice in the digital space and challenges us to be better for the sake of true freedom.

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Shownotes

• Digital Bypassing*, a phenomenon like spiritual bypassing, which is the tendency to believe in the neutrality of technology to avoid awareness of the inequities that exist within it and subsequently evading responsibility when it produces biased outcomes.

  *©Prerna Manchanda

• Ruha Benjamin | Safiya Noble | Joy Buolamwini

• Race After Technology book by Ruha Benjamin

• Algorithms of Oppression book by Safiya Noble

• Coded Bias film by Joy Buolamwini

• Enlightenment explained

• John Welwood Spiritual Bypassing

• A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace by John Perry Barlow 

• Algorithmic Justice League

• Coded Gaze

• AI Beauty Competition

• Speech recognition Apple

• Henry Davis

• Google Black Girls / Safiya Noble

• Safiya Noble TED - how racism exists from Google to E-waste

• Ruha Benjamin on COVID-19 and racial inequality

• Black people = gorillas according to Google

• UCLA facial recognition surveillance technology

• 1% venture capital = black women founders

• History of police