Core Post 4: Imaginations of Others

An appropriate set of readings to follow Professor Ruha Benjamin’s inspiring talk on machine bias, systemic racism and discriminatory design! All of the authors this week invite us in one way or another to confront the reality that we are living in the imaginations of others, and as Professor Ruha Benjamin also reminds us, that is a very dangerous place to be in. Cheney-Lippold elaborates in detail upon the “measurable type” (p. 47) constituted through data mining practices, bringing our attention to the problematic and dangerous erasure of subjectivities that emerge from conflating algorithmically construed identities with vastly more complex ‘real-life’ (for lack of a better phrase) ones. Rather than reiterate what many of the authors have already eloquently shed light on, I would like to bring our attention to what Cheney-Lippold is perhaps only implicit about in his chapter and what Couldry and Mejias sort of touch upon, which is that a collective awareness of and consequential resistance to the measurable type’s allegiance to data can forge new relationships between the self and ‘self’ in which the aforementioned conflation becomes as ‘real’ as it is problematic. I’m thinking here of data-driven self-curation practices in which the awareness of a ‘quantified self’ regulates an individual’s behavior to self-present through a strategic appropriation of datafication. While this may not be very salient when the imagined audience of the curating individual is an ambiguous corporate “they”, when platforms like Spotify or now dated Last.fm render visible patterns of behavior like music consumption, which are themselves knotted in numerous interpretations of identity and cultural capital, to other members of an indfividual’s specific social group, the measurable type becomes something absurdly ‘productive’ to the quantified individual. Here, the very possibility of the measurable type can urge the individual to regulate his/her/their behavior, sort of like a Foucauldian technology-of-the-self, to perform and strategically produce a ‘desirable’ algorithmic self, as problematic and reductive as that might be. The conflation thus becomes somewhat ‘real’ – the present reality of hyper-mediated online communication is that these reductive algorithmic identities have already extended beyond their corporate and institutional use for categorization and targeted advertising / objectifying / killing etc. by powerful players like Google and the US government, and have become self-adjacent objects through which individuals themselves are forced to navigate and unpack their self-concepts. To this end, in addition to the reproduction and quantified congealing of oppressive and discriminatory systems through which a normative vision of the human past is reinscribed and projected into the future (Crawford & Joler), algorithmic processes are also equipped with a Foucauldian capacity to actually police and newly regulate future behaviors and self-concepts of individuals.