Desde aplicaciones cotidianas hasta algoritmos

complejos, la tecnología tiene el potencial de ocultar,

acelerar e incluso profundizar la discriminación, al
tiempo que parece neutral e incluso benévola en
comparación con las prácticas racistas de una era
anterior. En esta charla, Ruha Benjamin, Profesora
Asociada de Estudios Afroamericanos en la
Universidad de Princeton, presenta el concepto del
“Nuevo Código Jim” para explorar una variedad de
diseños discriminatorios que codifican la inequidad.
Estos incluyen amplificar explícitamente las jerarquías
raciales, ignorar y, por lo tanto, replicar las divisiones
sociales y tratar de corregir los prejuicios raciales, pero
en última instancia, hacer todo lo contrario.

La charla también considera cómo la raza en sí misma

es una especie de herramienta diseñada para estratificar
y santificar la injusticia social y analiza cómo la
tecnología es y puede usarse con fines liberadores. Esta
presentación nos lleva al mundo de los bots sesgados,
los algoritmos altruistas y sus muchos enredos, y
brinda herramientas conceptuales para decodificar las
promesas tecnológicas con escepticismo
sociológicamente informado. Al hacerlo, nos desafía a
cuestionar no solo las tecnologías que nos venden, sino
también las que fabricamos nosotros mismos.

Ruha Benjamin: We acknowledge the reparations

owed to black and indigenous communities and
nations and the impossibilities of return for
generations past. Let's also acknowledge the
ancestors in the room this afternoon as we fight
together for better futures. We are alive in an era of
awakening and mobilization to preserve this planet
and all of the beautiful creation that is no doubt
worthy of this struggle. With that let me begin with
a recent experience I had being a nosy sociologist
walking by two men in Newark International
Airport. When I overheard one say to the other, "I
just want someone I can push around." I didn't
stick around to hear the end of the sentence, but I
could imagine all types of endings.

Ruha Benjamin: It could be in the context of

looking through resumes, deciding who to hire. I
just want someone to push around at work or in the
context of dating or marriage. I just want someone I
can push around in my personal life. The desire to
exercise power over others is a dominant mode of
power that has been given new license to assert
itself. The kind of power that requires others to be
subordinate, though we should remember this is not
the only mode or theory of power. At the time I was
traveling to speak with students at Harvey Mudd
College about issues of technology and power, and
so when I overheard this conversation, I thought
about this article and advertisement from a 1957
Mechanics Illustrated. The robots are coming and
when they do, you'll command a host of push button
servants, and then it says, in 1863, Abe Lincoln
freed the slaves but by 1965 slavery we'll be back.

Ruha Benjamin: We'll all have personal slaves

again. Don't be alarmed. We mean robot slaves, so
much going on on this one little paragraph, we
could spend an hour, I'm sure close reading and
talking about it, but for the sake of time, I'll just
point out two things. One is the date, 1957. A time
when those who were pushed around in the
domestic sphere, wives, domestic servants and
others could no longer be counted on to dress you,
comb your hair and serve you meals in a jiffy, as the
ad says.

Ruha Benjamin: During World War II, many more

white women enter the workforce to take up jobs
formerly occupied by men who left to fight the war
and blacks, men and women, most of whom worked
in agricultural and domestic work also entered
manufacturing workforce. Hence, the desire to
replace those sources of free and cheap labor in the
home with push button robots. The point is, no
technology is preordained, but rather the broader
context make some inventions appear desirable and
inevitable. Perhaps even more telling is that we will
all have personal slaves again, that one little word
tells us something about the targeted audience of
that. Certainly not those who are the descendants of
those who were enslaved the first time.

Ruha Benjamin: The imagined user's gendered,

raced and classed without gender, race, or class
ever being mentioned. Code words in this case and
code interlocking systems of inequality as part of
the design process precisely by ignoring social
inequalities. Tech designers will almost certainly
reproduce it. True in 1957, true today. With that,
let me offer three provocations as a kind of trailer
for the talk. This way, if you have to leave early,
your phone starts buzzing or you get distracted or
bored, you'll know exactly what I want you to
know. First, racism is productive, not in the sense of
being good, but in the literal capacity of racism to
produce things of value to some, even as it wreaks
havoc on others.

Ruha Benjamin: We're taught to think of racism as

an aberration, a glitch, an accident, an isolated
incident, a bad apple in the backwoods and
outdated rather than innovative, systemic, defuse,
an attached incident, the entire orchard in the ivory
tower, forward-looking, productive. In sociology we
like to say race is socially constructed, but we often
fail to state the corollary that racism constructs.
Secondly, I'd like us to think about the way that
race and technology shape one another. More and
more people are accustomed to thinking about the
ethical and social impact of technology, but this is
only half of the story.

Ruha Benjamin: Social norms, values and

structures all exist prior to any tech development,
so it's not simply about the impact of technology,
but the social inputs that make some inventions
appear inevitable and desirable, which leads to a
third provocation. That imagination is a contested
field of action, not an ephemeral afterthought that
we have the luxury to dismiss or romanticize, but a
resource, a battleground, an input and output of
technology and social order. In fact, we should
acknowledge that most people are forced to live
inside someone else's imagination and one of the
things we have to come to grips with is how the
nightmares that many people are forced to endure
are the underside of elite fantasies about efficiency,
profit and social control. Racism among other axes
of domination helps produce this fragmented
imagination, misery for some, monopoly for others.

Ruha Benjamin: This means that for those of us

who want to construct a different social reality, one
grounded in justice and joy, we can't only critique
the underside but we also have to wrestle with the
deep investments, the desire even for social
domination. I just want someone I can push around,
so that's the trailer. Let's turn to some specifics.
Beginning with a relatively new app called Citizen,
which sends you real time crime alerts based on a
curated selection of 911 calls. It also offers a way for
users to report, livestream and comment on
purported crimes via the app and it also shows you
incidents as red dots on a map so you can avoid
particular areas, which is a slightly less racialized
version of apps called Ghetto Tracker and Sketch
Factor, which use public data to help people avoid
supposedly dangerous neighborhoods.

Ruha Benjamin: Now, you're probably thinking

what could possibly go wrong in the age of
Barbecue Becky's calling the police on black people
cooking, walking, breathing out of place. It turns
out that even a Stanford educated environmental
scientists living in the Bay Area is an ambassador of
the carceral state, calling the police on a cookout at
Lake Merritt. To paraphrase Claudia Rankine, the
most dangerous place for black people is in white
people's imagination. It's worth noting too that the
app Citizen was originally called the less chill name
Vigilante, and in it's rebranding it also moved away
from encouraging people to stop crime, but rather
now simply to avoid it.
Ruha Benjamin: As one member of the New York
city council put it, crime is now at historic lows in
the city but because residents are constantly being
bombarded with push notifications of crime, they
believe the city is going to hell in a hand basket. Not
only is this categorically false, it's distracting people
from very real public safety issues like reckless
driving or the rising opioid use that don't show up
on the app. What's most important to our
discussion is that Citizen and other tech fixes for
social problems are not simply about technology's
impact on society but also about how social norms
and structures shape what tools are imagined
necessary in the first place.

Ruha Benjamin: This dynamic is what I take up in

two new books. The first examining the interplay
between race automation, machine bias as an
extension of older forms of racial domination. The
second is an edited volume on the carceral
dimensions of technology across a wide array of
social arenas from more traditional sites like
policing and prisons to less obvious contexts like the
retail industry and digital service economy. As just
one example from this volume, a chapter by
Madison Van Oort draws on her ethnography of
worker surveillance in the retail industry where the
same companies pitching products for policing and
imprisonment to the department of corrections are
also pitching them to H&M and Forever 21 to track
employees.

Ruha Benjamin: Even as she shows how workers

are surveilled well beyond the confines of their
workplaces to include even their online activity,
Van Oort also highlights how her coworkers use
technology in ways that counter the experience of
alienated labor, what we might call duplicity at
work. On this point, I'd like to just pause for a
minute and turn to science fiction as part of
expanding our sociological imagination. This clip
that I'm going to show you is from the film Sleep
Dealer by Alex Rivera and it reveals how global
capitalism is ever ready to turn racialized
populations into automator, Mexicans not as
migrant workers but machines that work in the US
without setting foot in this country.

Speaker 5: In this scene you'll see the character as

he crosses the border for the first time. He's in
Mexico, but he comes to America in a new way.

Ruha Benjamin: In this world, migrant workers are

replaced by robots who are controlled virtually by
laborers in Mexico carrying out a variety of jobs in
construction, childcare, agriculture, and more, not
only is the tech invasive as we see, but it also allows
unprecedented surveillance, so if a worker falls
asleep for an instant, the computer wakes her up,
registers the lapse and docks her pay, Amazon
warehouses on steroids. Of course, over the course
of the film Memo Cruz starts working at one such
factory, which are called Sleep Dealers because
workers often collapse of exhaustion when they're
plugged into the network too long.

Ruha Benjamin: In this way, the film reminds us

how the fantasy of some is a nightmare of others
and that embodiment does not magically cease to
matter with automation, but can actually become
more intensified, intrusive and violent. It's worth
recalling that the etymology of the Czech word
robot is drawn from the Slav robota, which means
servitude, hardship and as anthropologist, Kathleen
Richardson observes, robots have historically been
a way to talk about dehumanization.

Ruha Benjamin: Sleep Dealers also brings to life an

idea that inspire the title of the volume that
technology captivates. Fascinating, charming, and
bewitching while potentially subduing and
subjugating people. To engage this tension, we have
to pierce through the rhetoric and marketing of
tech utopianism as we try to understand the
duplicity of tech fixes, purported solutions that can
nevertheless reinforce and even deepen existing
hierarchies. In terms of popular discourse, what got
me interested in this tension was the proliferation of
headlines and hot takes about so-called racist
robots.

Ruha Benjamin: A first wave of stories seem to be

shocked that the prospect that in Langdon Winner's
terms, artifacts have politics. A second wave seemed
less surprised. Well, of course technology inherits
its creators biases and now I think we've entered a
phase of attempts to override or address the default
settings of racist robots for better or worse and one
of the challenges we face is how to meaningfully
differentiate technologies that are used to
differentiate us. Take for example what we might
call an old school targeted ad from the mid 20th
century. In this case, a housing developer used this
flyer to entice white families to purchase a home in
the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles,
which is where my grandparents eventually
infiltrated, which was the language used at the time,
but at this point in the story the developers are
trying to entice white buyers only by promising
them "beneficial restrictions".

Ruha Benjamin: These were racial covenants that

restricted someone from selling their property to
black people and other unwanted groups but then
comes the civil rights movement, the Fair Housing
Act of 1968 which sought to protect people from
discrimination when renting or buying a home, but
did it? Today, companies that lease or sell housing
or jobs can target their ads to particular groups
without people even knowing they're being excluded
or preyed upon, and as ProPublica investigators
have shown these discriminatory ads are often
approved within minutes of being submitted despite
Facebook's official policy.
Ruha Benjamin: Though it's worth noting that in
just the last month, advocacy groups have brought
the first civil rights lawsuit against housing
companies for discriminating against older people
using Facebook's targeted ad system and so in
reflecting on the connection between the past and
present, this combination of coded bias and
imagined objectivity is what I term the New Jim
Code. Innovation that enables social containment
while appearing fair than discriminatory practices
of a previous era.

Ruha Benjamin: This riff off of Michelle

Alexander's analysis in the New Jim Crow
considers how the reproduction of racist forms of
social control and successive institutional forms
entails a crucial socio-technical component that not
only hides the nature of domination but allows it to
penetrate every facet of social life under the guise of
progress. This formulation, as I highlight here is
directly related to a number of other cousin
concepts by Browne, Broussard, Daniels, Eubanks,
Noble and others. Situated in a hybrid literature
that I think of as race critical code studies. This
approach is not only concerned with the impacts of
technology, but it's production and particularly
how race and racism enter the process.

Ruha Benjamin: Two works that I'll just illustrate

are Safiya Noble's Algorithms of Oppression in
which she argues that racist and sexist Google
search results like pornographic images returned,
when you type in the phrase, black girls grow out of
a corporate logic of either willful neglect or a profit
imperative that makes money from racism and
sexism. In a different vein, Simone Browne
examines how the history of surveillance
technologies reflect and reproduce distorted notions
of blackness. Explaining that "surveillance is
nothing new to black folks", from slave ships and
slave patrols to airport security checkpoints and
stop and frisk policing practices. She points to the
facticity of surveillance in black life challenging a
techno deterministic approach she argues, that
instead of seeing surveillance as something
inaugurated by new technologies, to see it as
ongoing is to insist that we factor in how racism and
anti-blackness undergird and sustain the
intersecting surveillances of our present order, and
so to continue examining how anti-blackness gets
encoded in an exercise through automated systems,
I consider four conceptual offspring of the New Jim
Code that fall along kind of spectrum.

Ruha Benjamin: Engineered inequity names those

technologies that explicitly seek to amplify social
cleavages. They're what we might think of as the
most obvious, less hidden dimension of the New Jim
Code. Default discrimination or those inventions
that tend to ignore social cleavages and as such tend
to reproduce the default settings of race, class,
gender, disability among other axes. Here I want to
highlight how indifference to social reality is a
powerful force that is perhaps more dangerous than
malicious intent. Coded exposure highlights the
underside of tech inclusion, how the invisibility or
technological distortion of those who are racialized
is connected to their hyper visibility within systems
of surveillance and finally, techno benevolence
names those designs that claim to address bias of
various sorts but may still manage to reproduce or
deepen discrimination in part because of the
narrow way in which fairness is defined and
operationalized.

Ruha Benjamin: For the sake of time, I'm just going

to sketch the last three with examples. Default
discrimination includes those technologies that
reinforce inequities precisely because tech designers
fail to seriously attend to the social context of their
work. Take for example, carceral tools that
underpin the US prison industry as a key feature of
the New Jim Code. At every stage of the process
from policing, sentencing, imprisonment to parole,
automated decision systems are being adopted. A
recent study by investigators again at ProPublica,
which many of you are probably familiar with,
examined the risk scores used to predict whether
individuals were likely to commit another offense
once paroled. They found that the scores which
were assigned to thousands of people arrested in
Broward County, Florida were remarkably
unreliable in forecasting violent crime and that they
uncovered significant racial disparities and
inaccuracies, the outputs of the algorithm, shall we
say.

Ruha Benjamin: What's also concerning, I think is

how the system reinforces and hides racial
domination by ignoring all the ways that racism
shapes the inputs. For example, the surveys given to
prospective parolees to determine how likely they
are to recidivate includes questions about their
criminal history, education, employment history,
financial history, and neighborhood characteristics
among many other factors. All of these variables
have been structured in one way or another by
racial domination from job market discrimination
to ghettoization.

Ruha Benjamin: The survey measures the extent to

which an individual's life has been impacted by
structural racism without ever asking an
individual's race. Color blind codes may on the
surface appear better than a bias judge or
prosecutor, but crime prediction is better
understood as crime production because those who
are making these forecasts are also the ones who are
making it rain. Coded exposure in turn names the
tension between ongoing surveillance of racialized
populations and calls for digital recognition and
inclusion, the desire to literally be seen by
technology but inclusion in harmful systems is no
straightforward good.
Ruha Benjamin: Instead, photographic exposures
enable other forms of exposure and thus serves as a
touchstone for considering how the act of viewing
something or someone may put the object of vision
at risk, a form of scope at vulnerability central to
the experience of being racialized. What I'd like to
underscore is that it's not only in the process of
being out of sight, but also in the danger of being
too centered that racialized groups are made
vulnerable. In Alondra Nelson's terms, this is a
dialectic of neglect and surveillance at work, so that
being included is not simply positive recognition but
can be a form of unwanted exposure, but not
without creative resistance as I'll come back to in
just a minute, but first one more brief interlude.

Lem: Hello? Motion sensors, I'm motioning. I'm

motioning. Please sense me.
Speaker 7: One other thing, Lem mention that
there's something weird going on with the motion
sensors in the lab.

Veronica: Oh yeah, we replaced all the sensors in

the building with a new state-of-the-art system
that's going to save money. It works by detecting
light reflected off the skin.

Speaker 7: Well, Lem says it doesn't work at all.

Veronica: Lem's wrong. It does work, although

there is a problem. It doesn't seem to see black
people.

Speaker 7: This system doesn't see black people.

Veronica: I know. Weird, huh?

Speaker 7: That's more than weird Veronica. That's

basically racist.

Veronica: The company's position is that it's

actually the opposite of racist because it's not
targeting black people. It's just ignoring them. They
insist the worst people can call it is indifferent.

Speaker 9: Nothing. We never should have let that

white guy off.

Lem: We're eight black men in an elevator. Of

course the white guy's going to get off. Veronica. Oh
God, this looks way too aggressive.

Veronica: No, it's okay. I think I know why you're

all here. Well, most of you.

Lem: I have something prepared. Veronica, you are

a terrific boss.

Veronica: Thank you Lem, I'll take it from here.

Let me start by apologizing on behalf of Veridian
for this inexcusable situation.

Lem: I laid into Veronica pretty good. I figured it

was my only shot, so I took the gloves off.
Speaker 10: Well, that sounds great Lem, sounds
like you gave the company a really strong message.

Lem: Oh yeah. She said they're working 24/7 to

make things right. Can you believe this?
Speaker 9: I know, isn't great? We all get our own
free white guys.

Lem: You like it?

Speaker 9: Yeah. Hey, Ty's the best. He anticipates

everything I need. Plus, he picked up my dry
cleaning. Oh, and he got this kink out of my neck.

Lem: Really?

Speaker 9: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Lem: My white guy sucks.

Speaker 9: Well, maybe you're just not using yours

right.

Stu: Maybe it's on you, dude.

Lem: Shut up Stu.

Stu: I got the worst black guy.

Speaker 12: It turned out Lem had also been

thinking about the money issue and he put together
some interesting numbers to show us, and then we
all went to speak to management in a language they
could understand.

Speaker 10: Within a margin of error of plus or

minus one percent. And so if the company keeps
hiring white people to follow black people to follow
white people to follow black people, by Thursday,
June 27, 2013 every person on earth will be working
for us, and we don't have the parking for that.

Ruha Benjamin: All right, so the show brilliantly

depicts how superficial corporate diversity ethos,
prioritization of efficiency over equity and the
default whiteness of tech development work
together to ensure innovation literally produces
containment. The fact that black employees are
unable to use the elevators, doors, water fountains
or turn the lights on is treated as a minor in
convenience in service to a greater good. This is the
invisiblizing side of the process that Nelson
describes as surveillance and neglect that
characterizes black life vis-à-vis science and
technology.

Ruha Benjamin: Finally, some of the most

interesting developments I think are those we can
think of as techno benevolence that aims to address
bias in various ways. Take for example, new AI
techniques for vetting job applicants. A company
called HireVue aims to reduce unconscious bias and
promote diversity in the workplace by using an AI
powered program that analyzes recorded interviews
with prospective employees. It uses thousands of
data points including verbal and nonverbal cues
like facial expression, posture, and vocal tone and
compares job-seekers scores to those of existing top
performing employees to decide who to flag as a
desirable hire and who to reject.

Ruha Benjamin: The sheer size of many applicant

pools and the amount of time and money that
companies pour into recruitment is astronomical.
Companies like HireVue can narrow the eligible
pool of it at fraction of the time in cost and
hundreds of companies including Goldman Sachs,
Hilton, Unilever, Red Sox, the Atlanta Public School
system and Moore have signed on. Another value
added according to HireVue that there's a lot that a
human interviewer misses that AI can keep track of
to make "data-driven talent decisions". After all,
the problem of employment discrimination is
widespread and well-documented, so the logic goes,
wouldn't this be even more reason to outsource
decisions to AI?

Ruha Benjamin: We'll consider a study by

Princeton team of computer scientists which
examined whether a popular algorithm trained on
human writing online would exhibit the same
racially bias tendencies that psychologists have
documented among humans. In particular, they
found that the algorithm associated white sounding
names with pleasant words and black sounding
names with unpleasant ones, which should sound
familiar for those who know the classic audit study
by veteran Mullainathan, so this is building on that
to consider if AI would do better than us, so too
with gender coded words and names as Amazon
learned last year with its hiring algorithm was
found discriminating against women.

Ruha Benjamin: Nevertheless, it should be clear

why technical fixes that claim to bypass human
biases are so desirable. If only there was a way to
slay centuries of racist and sexist demons with a
social justice bot beyond desirable, more like
magical, magical for employers perhaps looking to
streamline the grueling work of recruitment but a
curse for many job seekers. Whereas proponents
describe a very human like interaction. Those who
are on the hunt for jobs recount different
experience.

Ruha Benjamin: Applicants are frustrated not only

by the lack of human contact, but also because they
have no idea how they're being evaluated and why
they're repeatedly rejected. One job seeker
described questioning every small movement and
micro expression and feeling a heightened sense of
worthlessness because "the company couldn't even
assign a person for a few minutes" and as this
headline puts it, your next interview could be with a
racist robot. Bring us back to that problem space
we started with that, but what's worth noting that
some job seekers are already developing ways to
subvert the system by trading answers to employers
tests and creating fake applications as informal
audits of their own.
Ruha Benjamin: In fact, one HR employee for a
major company recommends slipping the words
Oxford or Cambridge into your CV with invisible
white ink to pass the automated screening. In terms
of a more collective response, a Federation of
European trade unions called UNI Global, has
developed a charter of digital rights for workers
touching on automated and AI based decisions to be
included in bargaining agreements. One of the most
heartening developments to me is that tech workers
themselves have increasingly been speaking out
against the most egregious forms of corporate
collusion with state sanctioned racism and if you're
interested, just check out the hashtags, tech won't
build it and no tech for ICE campaigns to get a
glimpse of some of this work.

Ruha Benjamin: As this article published by

Science for the People reminds us, contrary to
popular narratives, organizing among technical
workers has a vibrant history including engineers
and technicians in the '60s and '70s who fought
professionalism, individualism, and reformism to
contribute to radical labor organizing. The current
tech workers movement, which includes students
across our many institutions, can draw from past
organizer's experiences in learning to navigate the
contradictions and complexities of organizing in
tech today, which includes building solidarity across
class and race.

Ruha Benjamin: For example, when the

predominantly East African Amazon workers in the
companies in Minnesota warehouse organized a
strike on Prime Day to demand better work
conditions, engineers from Seattle came out to
support. In terms of civil society initiatives like Data
for Black Lives and the Detroit Community
Technology Project, these offer an even more
expansive approach. The former brings together
people working across a number of agencies and
organizations and a proactive approach to tech
justice, especially at the policy level, and at the
latter develops and uses technology rooted in
community needs, offering support to grassroots
networks, doing data justice research including
hosting what they call disco techs, which stands for
discovering technology, which are multimedia
mobile neighborhood workshop fairs that can be
adapted in other locales.

Ruha Benjamin: I'll just mention one of the

concrete collaborations that's grown out of Data for
Black Lives. A few years ago, several government
agencies in Saint Paul, Minnesota, including the
police department and the Saint Paul public
schools, formed a controversial joint powers
agreement called the innovation project, giving
these agencies broad discretion to collect and share
data on young people with the goal of developing
predictive tools to identify at risk youth in the city.
There was immediate and broad based backlash
from the community and in 2017 a group of over 20
local organizations formed what they called, the
Stop the Cradle to Prison Algorithm Coalition.

Ruha Benjamin: Data for Black Lives has been

providing various forms of support to this coalition
and eventually the city of Saint Paul dissolved the
agreement in favor of a more community led
approach, which was a huge victory for the activists
who had been fighting these policies for over a year.
Another very tangible abolitionist approach to the
New Jim Code is the Digital Defense Playbook,
which introduces a set of tools for diagnosing,
dealing with and healing the injustices of pervasive
and punitive data collection in data driven systems.

Ruha Benjamin: The playbook contains in depth

guidelines for facilitating workshops plus tools, tip
sheets, and reflection pieces crafted from in depth
interviews with communities in Charlotte, Detroit,
and Los Angeles with the aim of engendering
power, not paranoia when it comes to technology
and finally, when it comes to rethinking STEM
education as the ground zero for re-imagining the
relationship between technology and society, there
are a number of initiatives underway, and I'll just
mention this concrete resource that you can
download, the Advancing Racial Literacy in Tech
handbook developed by some wonderful colleagues
at the data and society research Institute.

Ruha Benjamin: The aim of this intervention is

threefold. To develop an intellectual understanding
of how structural racism operates and algorithms,
social media platforms and technologies not yet
developed and emotional intelligence concerning
how to resolve racially stressful situations within
organizations and a commitment to take action to
reduce harms to communities of color. The fact is,
data disenfranchisement and domination has
always been met with resistance and appropriation
in which activists, scholars, and artists have
sharpened abolitionists tools that employ data for
liberation. This is a tradition in which as Du Bois
explained, one could not be a calm, cool, and
detached scientist, while Negroes were lynched,
murdered, and starved.

Ruha Benjamin: From his modernist data

visualizations representing the facts of black life to
Ida B. Wells-Barnett's expert deployment of
statistics in The Red Record, there was a long
tradition of employing and challenging data for
justice. Toward that end, the late critical race
scholar, Harvard professor Derrick A. Bell,
encouraged a radical assessment of reality through
creative methods and racial reversals, insisting that
to see things as they really are, you must imagine
them for what they might be, which is why I think
the arts and humanities are so vital to this
discussion and this movement.

Ruha Benjamin: One of my favorite examples of a

racial reversal in the Bellian tradition is this parody
project that begins by subverting the anti-black
logics embedded in new high tech approaches to
crime prevention. Instead of using predictive
policing techniques to forecast street crime, the
White Collar Early Warning System flips the script
by creating a heat map that flags city blocks where
financial crimes are likely to occur. The system not
only brings the hidden but no less deadly crimes of
capitalism into view but includes an app that alerts
users when they enter high risk areas to encourage
citizen policing and awareness.

Ruha Benjamin: Taking it one step further, the

development team is working on a facial recognition
program to flag individuals who are likely
perpetrators, and the training set used to design the
algorithm includes the profile photos of 7,000
corporate executives downloaded from LinkedIn.
Not surprisingly, the average face of a criminal is
white and male. To be sure creative exercises like
this are only comical when we ignore that all of its
features are drawn directly from actually existing
proposals and practices in the real world, including
the use of facial images to predict criminality.

Ruha Benjamin: By deliberately and inventively

upsetting the status quo in this manner, analysts
can better understand and expose the many forms
of discrimination embedded in and enabled by
technology, and so if as I've suggested at the start,
the carceral imagination captures and contains that
a liberatory imagination opens up possibilities and
pathways, creates new settings and codes new
values and builds on critical intellectual traditions
that have continually developed insights and
strategies grounded in justice. May we all find ways
to contribute to this tradition. Thank you.

Speaker 13: Questions. I'll let you talk about.

Ruha Benjamin: You can ask questions, but you

can also offer brief reflections too in terms of
anything that speaks to the work that you're doing,
the things that you've been thinking about. Most
Q&A's, they say, don't comment, just ask a
question but the main reason why I wrote this book
is to provoke conversation and thinking and so it's
really useful to me to hear what you're thinking
about even if it's not formulated as a question, so
that said, keeping it brief.

Speaker 14: My background might be a bit unusual.

I'm the only algorithm officer I've ever met and on
my resume at one point I claimed to take partial
credit for online advertising or at least one way of
measuring it, but from my sort of Antarctica of
theoretical physics there, the problem can
ultimately be distilled to if you measure a few
things, if you take a few numbers instead of a whole
live person, which is made of millions of numbers a
second, and you start processing it, selecting it, that
already produces these results, it's not necessarily
an ism. It doesn't even have to exist in the human
brain. The mere process of taking in data, having a
metric and optimizing by itself can yield all of these
awful results, which is mathematically chilling, but
in some sense releases us from having to think there
are a lot of evil bad guys actually wanting people to
suffer.

Ruha Benjamin: No, so the first part of it in terms

of the underlying reductionism, that's part of the
process. I would agree and partly what I'm trying to
sort of demystify is this idea that you need a racist
bogeyman behind the screen. I'm trying to insist
that even non technologically mediated racism is
not necessarily animated by animus and that's the
emphasis on indifference and the way in which the
codification of various practices just by clocking in
and out to institutions doing our job well, we can
reproduce these systems and so on that last point, I
would agree with you.

Ruha Benjamin: People looking for the boogeyman

really trying to hinge the analysis on the
intentionality to do harm. It doesn't serve us. It
hasn't served us when we looked at old school kinds
of structural racism and it doesn't serve us when we
look at computer mediated structural racism, and
so when we realize that it really is about thinking
about what the underlying assumptions, even if the
assumption is that reducing people to these data
bytes is a good thing, that is an assumption.

Ruha Benjamin: It's prioritizing one thing over

another, and so I think that we're on the same page,
but it sounds like in some ways you could offer that
comment as a way for us to throw our hands up and
say, "Well, there's either nothing we can do about it
or this is inevitable." Or you could offer that as a
way to say, "Let us question those ground truths.
Let us question whether we want to engage in this
mass scale reductionism." And so I think that same
insight could lead to two different pathways in
terms of whether we want to do something about it
or not, what that might be but I think on that point
we agree.

Speaker 15: Thank you for your brilliant talk and I

don't use that word very often.

Ruha Benjamin: Thank you. Thank you for your

amening and throughout. I really appreciate that. I
can always tell when the audience has more black
people because there's like talk-balk throughout.
Usually it's like no one laughs at the clip. I'm like,
this clip, why aren't you laughing. So thank you.

Speaker 15: It's nice to hear from the amen corner.

I have a really quick question and then a comment.
The real quick question is that clip you show from
what looked like a TV series or something.

Ruha Benjamin: Yeah, from a show called Better

Off Ted.

Speaker 15: What is it called?

Ruha Benjamin: Better Off Ted.

Speaker 15: Better Off Ted.

Ruha Benjamin: ...and that episode is called racial

sensitivity and it's playing off of the charge brought
against people who bring up issues of racism that
you're being too sensitive, but it's also thinking
about the lack of sensitivity. The technology doesn't
sense blackness in that clip and so you can find that
online.

Speaker 15: Better Off Ted. Okay.

Ruha Benjamin: It's off the air now though. It was

too-

Speaker 15: Too deep for that, huh.

Ruha Benjamin: It was too subversive.

Speaker 15: Okay. Well, I come in to this from a

totally techno doofus standpoint. I'm an English
major, retired journalist, singer, blah blah. Don't
know tech from anything but I want to learn.

Ruha Benjamin: Awesome.

Speaker 15: ...but you know, I was sitting here

thinking what, how wonderful it would be if the late
great Octavia Butler could be sitting here right
now.
Ruha Benjamin: You're talking my language.

Speaker 15: ...watching this and I read a lot of

science fiction as a kid. That's what got me through
kind of a rough underpinning of growing up but
I'm just... I don't even know what to say to your
presentation because it's just so atomically deep but
I'm going to be chewing off of this for a long, long
time and I want to thank you for even us techno
doofusis, which I might be a minority because I
know you guys are in the school and I'm not, but
you know, because the future is here, it's here right
now, and I've been running around telling people
about facial recognition ever since the ACLU did
that study that showed all the members of Congress
whose faces were thrown up as criminals, right, and
I just feel like I'm older, I'm in the last trimester of
my life, so I hope I'm around long enough to really
see some of these things but it's like they're already
here and the last thing I need to say is I keep a very
low profile with social media, about as low as you
could be and not be a CIA agent.

Speaker 15: I do occasional email, I don't do

Facebook, I don't do any of that stuff. I know what
it is and I talk to people all the time and I get
clowned a lot, but I'm a retired journalist. I have a
deep and abiding suspicion, always have about data
collection and on my way here they were handing
out pizza to young people on the quad who were
willing to give up their data and I sort of checked
that out and thought, do you guys know where
that's going, what they're doing with that stuff?
Anyway, I'm not really making a whole lot of sense
but I'm just...you could speak to what I'm saying.

Ruha Benjamin: No, there's a lot. No, you are. It's

perfect. There's so much there, so much I would
like to reflect on and comment on. I mean, let's start
with... I'm a student of Octavia Butler first of all
and her work Afrofuturism speculative fiction
really animates especially that last strand in the
trailer the through line about understanding that
imagination is a battlefield and so just having
visited her papers at the Huntington Library a few
months ago and seeing the way that she was
engaging scholarly work on medicine embodiment
and so on, but then deciding in her journals that the
best way for her to actually seed a critical
understanding of science and technology was
through her novels and so she made a very
deliberate choice.
Ruha Benjamin: She took... there's a syllabus there
of her taking like a medical sociology class and then
collecting all these headlines from newspapers
about epidemics and then sort of pivoting to say,
okay, she's going to take all of this and actually
embedded it in her work as a creative and so
certainly that continues to inspire me and influence
me. On the issue of being a techno doofus, I mean
partly what I'm trying to do with this work is to
draw in a broader public people who don't
necessarily identify as tech savvy because all of
these developments are impacting everyone but only
a small sliver of humanity is empowered to actually
shape the digital and material infrastructure and I
think that is really one of the things that we have to
address so that you are my intended audience in
that way and so I'm really glad you're here, but also
in part I'm trying to question the very idea of what
we think of as innovation.
Ruha Benjamin: I feel like that idea of who are
innovators, what is innovation, has been colonized
by a very small set of people and practices and so
we think about the fact that black people are just
alive and here today we have had to do a lot of
innovation, technological and otherwise to be here
and wonderful and thriving, right? And so in part
what I want to say is that there's all kinds of social
technologies, ways in which we have had to innovate
in terms of living and surviving in this environment
that is devalued and yet still appropriated in
various ways.

Ruha Benjamin: I want us to question the whiteness

of innovation, the whiteness of technology and to
understand all of the ways that we have been part of
that and question that and challenge that and that's
also why I draw upon Du Bois and Ida B. Wells-
Barnett and the last point about walking over and
seeing the students getting the pizza, you know, I
don't know many of you saw the headlines about
Google last week. Having their contract workers
target homeless people in Atlanta, specifically black
homeless people in order to take facial images to
diversify their facial recognition system because
their new phone is coming out and so it's just... that
whole set of decisions who was sitting around the
table to say that's a good idea. Yeah. Go after
homeless people.

Ruha Benjamin: Just thinking about one, the fact

that they didn't have enough black people at Google
working there to do it tells us something but also the
fact that science and technology often been built on
the backs of the most vulnerable population, and so
the fact that that whole history from Marion Sims
and gynecology to prison experiments, you know,
Acres of Skin, if you haven't read that book.

Ruha Benjamin: Henrietta Lacks, Tuskegee. I

mean, medical apartheid. The fact that we sort of
have this collective amnesia about how vulnerable
bodies have been the input for so much that in this
case, the desire to build an inclusive product which
on one level is a good development, right, we would
think, okay so this research has come out to show
that facial recognition is not that great at detecting
people with darker skin and out of that grows a
desire and an awareness and an intention to build
an inclusive product but to get to that inclusive
product, we have a coercive process, right? And so
we need to think not just about the ends but the
means and what's sacrificed in the process, and I
would call that not just ethics, but the politics of
knowledge production and technology development.

Ruha Benjamin: That's just one episode in this

much longer history and I do think that we need to
look at the way that students in particular are
enrolled. I believe I saw some months back, a
similar recruitment strategy in Miami or in Florida.
They were going after college students and they
were giving them similar like little gift cards for
coffee or something in order to get their facial
images. Again, that goes back to the part of the talk
about really thinking about what my colleague
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor recall, Predatory
Inclusion, right? That inclusion is not a straight
forward good and we should think about what are
the systems we're being included in and not just
seek out that inclusion but to be able to step back
and question what we're being enrolled in and so
there was a lot there.

Chad: Hello?

Ruha Benjamin: Hi Chad.

Chad: You have a great memory.

Ruha Benjamin: Yeah, I don't usually, but I

remember. Yeah.

Chad: Thank you. I work at the Oakland Impact

Center and we are developing a program to get at
risk youth to learn how to code but piggybacking
off the gentleman's concerns and understanding
that we're kind of all indoctrinated into systematic
oppression, it seems like even having young black
coders doesn't seem like it would even help the
problem, so what is a solution because it seems like
it's an infrastructure problem like we have to erase
systematic oppression to erase the systematic
oppression in coding. What would you give as a
solution?

Ruha Benjamin: You know, we've seen in the last

few years a big push. Girls Who Code, Black Girls
Code, Everybody Code and it's not to knock that,
but it's to say that just building up technical
capacity is, not even not enough but it can easily be
co-opted and so I would say in this case, yes, train
these young people to get these skills, but integrate
into that not only the technical capacity, but the
critical capacity to question what they're doing and
what's happening, right.
Ruha Benjamin: To me it's not true empowerment
and unless people can have the power to question
how these skills are going to be used and so in any
coding program, I would say it's really not enough
to think that that in itself is a form of empowerment
if you don't have the sort of social, cultural toolkit
that goes along with the technical toolkit, right, and
that goes for other... there's all kinds of camps in
the summers for kids and all kinds of STEM fields
and I would say that's true, not just of coding
camps but all the other things in which like true
education is about being able to shape your reality
not just fit into the reality created by others and to
be a cog in that machine.

Ruha Benjamin: Although I painted a very big

picture that the problem is structural and
contextual and like it's big, but what that means is
that there's almost like nothing we can't do that can
in some way contribute to questioning and changing
it because the issues are so vast and coming to us
from so many different directions, that means we
can all find a way to plug in and to be able to
redress this and deal with this. I hope that you don't
walk out of here, none of you feeling like
overwhelmed that there's nothing we can do. The
take home is that there's everything that we can do.
We just have to find our piece of it, right? And then
link arms with others who are working in other
areas. I hope that you feel more emboldened to find
your part in that.

Speaker 17: Hi. An example of something going on

on campus, so with gene editing, right? We have
some people here and we're trying to cure sickle cell
with the understanding that the demographic that
has to deal with sickle cell primarily and we're
engaging with conversations with them and
understanding what do they think of the technology
but even if it works, what do you do with a $1
million treatment? We're here creating it but they
can't even afford it and so by doing good are we still
propagating inequality?

Ruha Benjamin: Yeah. That is a question. That

really it comes... my first book engage some of that
we had... at that point, we weren't dealing with
CRISPR yet, but whatever the newest techniques,
genetic techniques are, the sickle cell community is
always the first line in which people try to hone that
new technique on this patient population. There's a
long history of that. We look at Keith Wailoo's
work and others and so it's good that you're already
in conversation with communities, but I do think
this larger issue of the health disparities and once
something is developed, even if it is developed how
people won't have access to it, so what is your
responsibility in that or your research community
responsibility in that?

Ruha Benjamin: I mean, partly in my more utopian

moments, I feel like we all have our professional
hats, but we all are also kind of members of this
society and we should think about like what kind of
advocacy work we can do as in use your legitimacy,
use your sort of capital as researchers to advocate
for this larger... whatever this larger kind of
structural issues are that you know that the
community that you're trying to help is not going to
have access to this, so what does that look like?

Ruha Benjamin: One of... I was talking to a student

earlier today, and one of the sort of examples of this
to me that I think is a model for rethinking like who
we are as researchers and academics is the
movement called the White Coats For Black Lives
and so this is a group of medical students across the
country who are in medical school and realize that
their medical schools aren't training them to be
responsive physicians and healthcare practitioners
because they do a very poor job of addressing issues
of racism and equity in the medical school
curriculum, and so they have linked arms and one
of the things that they do among many is to issue
report cards on their medical schools to say, you got
a C, you got a D in terms of actually incorporating
training to understand and mitigate the harms of
racism in the health professions.

Ruha Benjamin: That's an example of students

understanding that they're not just students and not
just consumers of knowledge, but they have a
responsibility to think about like, what is this
profession that we're being trained into, and it kind
of goes back to this example as well, but what does
that look like in all of our little corners of research
in academia and so in that case, what is the
responsibility of people who are doing research
meant to serve a particular patient community to
only focus narrowly on the kind of scientific medical
question without taking in some way engaging as a
professional community on these larger issues that
you're describing and I think there's just more we
can do.
Ruha Benjamin: It's not a lot of incentive to do it,
right. Like these students, White Coats For Black
Lives, they're taking time out of the other things
that they could be doing, but they understand the
importance of it and so that's one example that I
think can serve as a model for others.

Jasmine: Hi. My name is Jasmine. I'm an

undergrad visiting scholar from Hong Kong. I'm
really impressed by what you... like all of the
information and your insights.

Ruha Benjamin: Thank you.

Jasmine: ...kind of sort of eye opening and it's

interesting because yesterday I attend Berkeley
forum. It's a guy who also talked about relationship
between humanity and technology. For me to be
honest, personally I feel a little bit overwhelming
because like I am from a background of literature
and sociology, which I have no knowledge for like
not at all professional knowledge about technology
and it's a common problem that most of the time we
don't really aware of the potential risk and threats
behind why we're using technology and I really
appreciate that you raise it up. My concern is,
because I'm going back to Hong Kong after-

Ruha Benjamin: Not much going on there.

Jasmine: Well, I can't tell in perspective for... as a

Hong Kong citizen there. There are so many
manipulation with social media and technology and
at some point we just feel helpless because like
there's nothing much we could do. I feel like... but
now like after your empowerments, after previous
inspiration that the take home is, we actually have
something to do and it's just about how you
personalize which smallest piece that you could only
do, so I'm saying... I'm actually doing research
related to police brutality and also criminal justice.
I just kind of like want to seek your advice. Like
how can I glocalize.
Ruha Benjamin: What's that word?

Jasmine: Glocalize. Like I don't know... glocalize,

like globalized but glocalized, like bring something
localized. I mean this is like a globalized thing. Like
you kind of bring the partner perspective into
somewhere narrow and then it's always worse, the
best when it become localized. I'm just thinking
about how can I bring this conversation into Hong
Kong, somewhere like I'm more attached to.

Ruha Benjamin: Yeah.

Jasmine: Yeah, and I also once... if you have any

tangible reminder for me as a poor student when I
pass by some booth, they give you free gift or free
pizza because I was starving when I came in here
because I was too busy on my research and I do not
have time to pick any lunch, so it's a great
temptation for me in such a situation. How would
you suggest me to remind myself, selling your data
to someone. Just leave a piece of pizza, no.
Ruha Benjamin: Two things. To the last point, you
can remember the well known line, there's no such
thing as a free lunch and even when you think about
the idea of having access to something, access to
technology, access to free some... if you have access
to something, it has access to you, right? And so if
you think about just in the context of educational
technologies, a lot of people are starting to realize
that yes, putting a laptop in front of every kid, they
have access to that but the technology also has
access to all of this data that's also being fed and so
just thinking about this two way, this line, and it's
not a horizontal line in terms of these data-driven
systems.

Ruha Benjamin: I'm thinking for example, about

these growing sort of revolts, local revolts against
this kind of access, so I think about these Brooklyn
students, high school students who were sitting in
front of this Facebook educational technology
system for I don't know how long, and they only
had like 15 to 20 minutes of time with a human
teacher a week, and they walked out and they
revolted, and there's a whole town in Kansas, for
example, there was another system that this school
board adopted and the parents, the students,
everyone sort of rose up against this.

Ruha Benjamin: I think your intuition is right in

terms of local movement and action and I would
suggest one of the first things that you can do going
back is to pick up a book if you haven't seen it yet,
called Twitter and Tear Gas by Zeynep Tufekci.
She's actually been in Hong Kong these last few
months. She studies the role of social media and
technology in these movements. She did a lot of
work in the Arab Spring and in her native Turkey
but now she's... and you can actually get the book
but also follow her on Twitter because she's sort of
live tweeting her reports from this and read that
book and then as you're reading, think about how a
lot of the concepts that she's developing there apply
when you go back, so that would be what I would
say for you and good luck. Yeah.

Speaker 19: Hi.

Speaker 20: Just yeah, thank you so much for this

talk. I used to be a English professor and I started
working with nonprofit organizations around these
issues because I was getting depressed and feeling
useless and one of the things that I loved about this
talk was the way that you linked imagination and
critical thought and gave a place for literature and
artistic renderings of all of this and it just made me
think, oh, maybe I can-

Ruha Benjamin: Absolutely.

Speaker 20: ...it is something that I can do back,

and what I used to do. I mean, I'm happy doing
what I do with the nonprofit organizations, but the
other thing that I wanted to say and the question
that I want to ask, and it's sort of your question, it
sort of links with your question. I've been thinking a
lot about privacy nihilism and as I have been
working with young people and parents around
screens in schools and there is that sense, like, well,
they've already got me and so I just want to give up
and so I feel now after your talk and I can't wait to
dig more into your book. I feel like I'm going to be
better equipped to address that attitude but I'm
wondering, I wanted to ask you right now if there is
anything that you could say to kind of get the
wheels turning more fast, more quickly.

Ruha Benjamin: Yeah. Some of those examples I

just mentioned in the last comment, but also I'm
looking at my colleague, professor Desmond Patton
sitting right there who's the expert on young people
and families and technologies, so can you raise your
hand, yay. He's actually speaking tomorrow if he
can come back to campus, at what time? You don't
know. Okay. We'll find out. Does anyone know?
4:00 P.M. That's okay but one of the things I
learned through his work is that yes, nihilism might
be part of it but also there is a design... like in terms
of using technology and surveillance as a way to
keep parents as thinking of it as a way to know
things about their children, to keep them.

Ruha Benjamin: There's also a desire for it if the

other alternative is to have no information or no
feeling like you have no control and so I'm probably
misrepresenting exactly what the takeovers are, but
all I know is that it's... I think it's more complicated
than just a binary between just kind of top-down
surveillance and a kind of liberatory approach but
there is a middle way in which people actually feel
like they want to use these technologies to enact
some forms of safety in data collection, and so I
would say look up Desmond Patents work and
maybe, I don't know if they're live streaming the
talk or not, but this... I'm really thinking about the
bottom up demand for certain ways to track in the
name of security and safety, so that's not as helpful
but that's my go-to. Do we have time for one more
question. Anyone have the mic? Yes, go ahead.

Speaker 21: All right. I'm a computer science

person. I don't spend... I haven't spent time really
thinking about fairness, although I know that like
some of my colleagues do including..., do you know
Moritz Hardt?

Ruha Benjamin: I don't.

Speaker 21: Okay. He's on the faculty here. His

office is in this building.

Ruha Benjamin: Awesome.

Speaker 21: They have this actually organization

called FAT/ML, which is fairness, accountability
and transparency. Transparency in machine
learning and again, so I'm not an expert. I don't
know if... is Moritz in this room right now? But they
taught a course on some of the papers they'd been
writing in the space and I guess one of the things
that I saw from one of their lectures was, you can
imagine trying to come up with a mathematical
definition of like what it means for let's say an
algorithm to be fair.

Speaker 21: Like you might say. Some of the

pictures you showed the app failed to identify that a
person was there, the dark skinned man, somehow
that's unfair to black people. The app is unfair or
where they give scores that are higher to one group
that's unfair so they tried to find like, what does it
mean to be fair and one of the definitions was, I
think... I may get it wrong again, it's not my area of
research, but predictive parody. What's the
probability that you say they're going to default on
the loan given that they're actually going to default
on it? And what is that for white people, what is it
for black people.

Speaker 21: Do you get the same kind of accuracy

for both? And then another one was like false
positive rate, was like they had another, and also
the negative what's the probability that you say
they're not going to default given they're not going
to default and if you get that the same for different
like groups like blacks and whites, let's say you say
that it's fair for predictive parody and then there's
like false positive parity, which is like do you have
the same false positive rate for blacks and whites?

Speaker 21: And then the theorem is like, no

mechanism can have both. It's like mathematically
impossible for any machine learning algorithm to
achieve both. That's a negative result. Of course
people are still doing research in the area and that
you can get some other positive results but when I
see that, I guess I want to ask you as a sociologist
like, what should they do like... or what would be a
success?

Ruha Benjamin: Yeah, no, I think that's an

important question and that question is actually
arisen within the FAT* community in terms of the
conference that they hold every year and so one of
the things that's evolved is a questioning of those
narrow definitions of fairness and so this year
coming at the conference, they've developed a track
that... I won't know exactly what the acronym
stands for, but it's craft. It's a critique and a
evolution of the conversation within that field to say
that we can't just limit ourselves to trying to hone
these very narrow definitions of fairness when the
larger context that we're trying to model is so
deeply unjust.

Ruha Benjamin: If you just take like the crime, the

risk scores and if the attempt is to get... to make
sure that the predictions match the rate of crime in
the larger society as one of the particular forms of
fairness, but that crime rate itself has been
produced through racial profiling and policing then
if the model is simply just mirroring the social
reality, and by that definition you say, okay, we
have a good model without questioning what the
underlying crime rate that you're trying to match
is, then that presents a very narrow field of action
and so within the FAT*, FAT/ML community, there
is now a number of proposals. I was a reviewer for
it and a number of panels and proposals came in.

Ruha Benjamin: I'm trying to think about how

people who are trained in the data sciences can
actually contribute to a larger rendering of what
fairness and equity is and many of those proposals
that I looked at had built into it some form of
community partnering. Whether it was an ACLU...
working with the ACLU in one state or working
with an organization in another state, it was
understanding that you can't just define fairness
with technical definitions.

Ruha Benjamin: I have a colleague at Princeton

Arvind Narayanan who many of you may know
who is... I think his book is out now or will be out
where he has developed like 26 definitions of
fairness and if you follow him, you can see again the
same conundrum that if... you can't meet all of
them, it's like a trade-off and so what that might
mean is that rather than playing the game of like
deciding which one of these definitions to step back
from it and one of the proposals that I read was
interesting that I will just sort of end with.

Ruha Benjamin: I don't know if we have time for

another question, but had in... I think it was a team
from Microsoft actually, but part of the proposal
had to do with how do you equip people within
organization or a company to when they see that
whatever they're designing or building is likely to
have X, Y, and Z harms or effects, how do you
actually refuse or stop the process? And so rather
than a trade-off like should we do this or that,
maybe we don't build it at all and so really thinking
about what refusal looks like and rather than just
trading off between more or less harms is an
interesting way to think about what it would mean
to actually equip people, especially people who
might be low on the totem pole in a various
organization to actually be able to speak up and
stop particular things.

Ruha Benjamin: That is a long way of saying that in

the upcoming meeting at FAT*, you're going to
have this track and opportunity to pose those
questions and think about alternative ways to move
forward. Yeah and that evolved from within the
community, which I think is a good thing. Are we
out of time? All right, thank you all. Take care.