Safiya Noble
We are on a quest to “curating human information needs”.
Why don’t we practice and promote cross disciplinary involvements and discussions, like in example of this institution?
These capitalistic institutions, such as UIUC, keep us separate. I remember us talking in Interactions I about how difficult it is to double major in two majors that are not from the same “sides” of campus, such as New Media alongside Pre-Med. Trying to schedule classes around these curriculums that are not designed to be flexible between different majors is made even more complicated, when the websites algorithm denies you access of registration in some cases, and is programmed with restrictions that cannot be fixed by anyone but the programmers, and who wants to program a new site if they don’t understand the implications of the old one? Computer engineers, and STEM majors in general, are trained to think critically in terms of “X, Y, Z” ideology and theories, not socially, politically, or communally.
Ruha Benjamin
The idea that Ruha keeps exfoliating is that nothing, especially technological programming, is made without intention. She said that even programs that are portrayed as compassionate and proactive, can be the most dangerous, because they hide the larger inputs’ desires for intentions that are not based around an abolitionist commitment.
This idea that putting out all knowledge ever, “MORE MORE MORE, capitalistic and democratic tendencies of having everything out in the open”, yet there are politics within that that restrict and withhold information. This ideology of more is better and putting it all out there is a homogenous way of thinking about everyone involved, (or not thinking about everyone involved, intentionally judging that all those who participate have shared equity, and not that they are coming from different social environments).
“We can’t lose sight of the larger structures that continue to fuel the problem”, and we especially cannot ignore the programmers and CEO’s fueling the fire. We can try doing this by breaking down how we are taught to think in very systematic ways, and teaching others that you cannot create algorithms for culture and society if you do not know anything about those things.
Lisa Nakamura
Lisa’s presentation was interesting because it talked of how open-game virtual reality is, there are, “no eggs in the basket”, or more so that there are, but they have not been studied to their full extents. She talked about how VR is the “harbinger” of the third industrial revolution, and how it redresses the problem of the second industrial revolution, the “immiseration of humans as machines taking our jobs (…) by making available the last kind of work that machines can’t do, create the right kinds of emotions that humans need”.
She talked a lot about emotional labor, argues that VR, “automates the labor of feeling pain and sadness on behalf of another”. This emotional labor that VR is able to hold, puts into place feelings of compassion and empathy, that creates an “alibi” for “material conditions of labour for racialized and gendered people”, that have always been present. In the case of Travon Martins VR starring in One Dark Night, giving viewers the experience of witnessing how Travon got murdered on that night, Lisa emphasizes that we need to think further of VR than just a source of empathy, shock, or compassion. VR needs to “invite you to be with you, instead of as, in a virtual space/experience”.
NOTES:
First talk (45)


Technology is not flat, it is the construction of human beings, what are those human beings putting in? What are their experiences
Critical race theory
Things that are actionable
Hyper-sexualization is not a product or an observation of the NATURE of these black women
These ideologies are tied to old media practices
Hundred year history
Counter narrative of what its been portrayed as
In these stereotypes of black women as Jezebel
Ofc, There has to be a mass justification for the reproduction of the slave labor force
Part of why that mass justification of the labor force comes into existence as characterizing black women as sexual, women who like sex and who want to give babies to the “labor force”
Racist capitalistic stereotypes used as economic subjugation of black people and women
When the enslavement of black labor force became illegal
How that justification was imagined and instilled
Hyperlinks, that have capital underneath them
They are well trafficked images
We are on a quest to “curating human information needs”.
Why don’t we practice and promote cross disciplinary involvements and discussions, like in example of this institution?
These capitalistic institutions, such as UIUC, keep us separate. I remember us talking in Interactions I about how difficult it is to double major in two majors that are not from the same “sides” of campus, such as New Media alongside Pre-Med. Trying to schedule classes around these curriculums that are not designed to be flexible between different majors is made even more complicated, when the websites algorithm denies you access of registration in some cases, and is programmed with restrictions that cannot be fixed by anyone but the programmers, and who wants to program a new site if they don’t understand the implications of the old one? Computer engineers, and STEM majors in general, are trained to think critically in terms of “X, Y, Z” ideology and theories, not socially, politically, or communally.
———


Imagination is a contested (to gain power) feel of action




People that create tech companies aimed to help out social causes like Jayz in Promise, those who don’t have an abolitionist commitment(..)
Seen as empathetic to the cause because his decarcerarion startup addresses the problem of pre-trial detention, but his app sells their GPS data (gps is in business with them) that tracks those individuals, trapping them further in the industrial prison complex surveillance system.
Promise exemplifies the new jim code
It’s insidious because it’s packaged as betterment
AI drone strikes more effect
ICE CONTRACT – microsoft, They basically said – we will not work alongside these people that support development of warfare and surveillance in the war.
Workers efforts to sway the industry- we can’t wait for them to change the system.
Professionalism, individualism, and reformism
to contribute to radical labor organizing


Racism is not the “white-boogey man” that everyone thinks is hiding behind the screen
She is trying to distinguish that racism can indulge systematic oppressions by having ulterior motives
(Are they trying to be racist?***notes)
You cannot design something without intention…
Someone designed the thing to have intentions, and perhaps by not being aware of the political and social environments they are entering by creating these technologies, these make for things like… (weapons of warfare!)
*Its about large and small inputs that cater to the metainterface entrapment of surveillance capitalism.
Its not a singular person that is out to get someone through an app or computer screen, that is what is “malicious”, but its the thoughts and patterns and predictions of the person who is intending this algorithm to have certain behaviors that are based off desires or gains, and/or ignorance, of race, gender, class, economy, professionalism, capital, politics, etc. etc.
We can’t lose sight of the larger structures that continue to fuel the problem




…because if the ways it can be MISUSED and TURNED against them

The idea that Ruha keeps exfoliating is that nothing, especially technological programming, is made without intention. She said that even programs that are portrayed as compassionate and proactive, can be the most dangerous, because they hide the larger inputs’ desires for intentions that are not based around
This idea that putting out all knowledge ever, “MORE MORE MORE, capitalistic and democratic tendencies of having everything out in the open”, yet there are politics within that that restrict and withhold information. This ideology of more is better and putting it all out there is a homogenous way of thinking about everyone involved, (or not thinking about everyone involved, intentionally judging that all those who participate have shared equity, and not that they are coming from different social environments)
“We can’t lose sight of the larger structures that continue to fuel the problem”, and are the main culprits. We can try doing this by breaking down how we are taught to think in very systematic ways, and teaching others that you cannot create algorithms for culture and society if you do not know anything about those things.

Don’t leave it up to the technicality nerds to let us know what is ethical

“Thin description”
Bio’s?



Whether exposure of their practices is necessarily the most prudent way of going about that” – student
_____

Invite you to be with you, instead of as, in a virtual space

Emotional labor
The third industrial revolution
Norbert Weener; Fred Turner
Facebook and Oculus Quest
VR as a harbinger of the third industrial age
Redress problem of second Industrial Age
Immiseration of humans as machines take our jobs, and to create the (…)by making available the last kind of work that machines can’t do, create the right kind of emotion/feelings.
Empathy and compassion, is:
Valuable and fundamental, as perceived by (Lauren Berlin)
VR takes the place of the progress of rights and resources
Refugee women of color disabled seek to not white men proxied in VR to find human recognition
Norbert Wiener
Claims: compassion is something u can make, u can do that.
Automates the labor of feeling pain and sadness on behalf of another.
Empathy into the realm of non-human virtual witnessing and connection, or non-virtual witnessing and connection


Before

Lisa’s presentation was interesting because it talked of how open-game virtual reality is, there are, “no eggs in the basket”, or more so that there are, but they have not been studied to their full extents. She talked about how VR is the “harbinger” of the third industrial revolution, and how it redresses the problem of the second industrial revolution, the “immiseration of humans as machines taking our jobs (…) by making available the last kind of work that machines can’t do, create the right kinds of emotions that humans need”.
She talked a lot about emotional labor, argues that VR, “automates the labor of feeling pain and sadness on behalf of another”. This emotional labor that VR is able to hold, puts into place feelings of compassion and empathy, that creates an “alibi” for “material conditions of labour for racialized and gendered people”, that have always been present. In the case of Travon Martins VR starring in One Dark Night, giving viewers the experience of witnessing how Travon got murdered on that night, Lisa emphasizes that we need to think further of VR than just a source of empathy, shock, or compassion. VR needs to “invite you to be with you, instead of as, in a virtual space/experience”.
