Recently asked about algorithms and AI and new perspectives on both. Some of what I shared:
and
Timnit Gebru’s interview on the Institute for Black Imagination Podcast:
and
Desmond Patton’s interview over at JustTech about algorithms of grief:
“We don’t have a robust understanding of Black grief, and we don’t have a robust understanding of Black grief expressed digitally. What has happened over and over again is that someone memorializes the life of a person online: they may place an image of that person, they may post a picture of them with friends and family members with the picture of the person on a T-shirt. They may write something to that person as if they are still alive. They often communicate to a person as if they’re still alive. The challenge comes when people within and outside of your network begin to comment, begin to make fun of, or begin to disrespect what you are saying online. That disrespect can lead to 600 comments, back-and-forth. That is amplified and becomes hypervisible within the context of whatever social media platform you’re on, consistently crossing lines over and over and over again.”
Beyond that….some more Black data moodiness:
This book and its conception of the world-ship is haunting me:
"Yes, there is also an ecology of the enslaved, of those transshipped in the European trade, an ecology that maintains continuities with the indigenous African and Amerinidan communities but is not reducible to either of them. An ecology that was forged in modernity's hold: a decolonial ecology." Malcolm Ferdinand, A Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World
and
"The turn to the transatlantic slave trade and colonial slavery, to confining human and non-human beings to the world's hold, to the "Negroes," also makes it possible to describe this geological era as a Negrocene." Ferdinand, 21
Congratulations to Autumn Womack on a powerful new text. Started it, looking forward to finishing!
"Mounted on stages and in photographs, and surfacing in technical missteps and strategic narrative decisions, the dissonant interface between blackness and data is animated by the project of squaring the vitality of black life with data. This data crisis, as it were, finds expression in aesthetic innovation at the historical juncture when racial data was as much an experiment as was black freedom." Autumn Womack, The Matter of Black Living, 3