Algorithmic systems deepen racial inequality by rendering rather than erasing racialized bodies

Evidence

In Imagined Communities, the iniquitous aspect of spectrality, beyond forming collective identity and “shared fatality,” lay in obscuring the “actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail” within the nation (Anderson 1991, 7). Speculative communities draw their own veil over power asymmetries in the vast networks of computational code, sensors, and backend analytics. Consider, for instance, how the deployment of algorithmic technologies (from Google’s search code, to Apple’s virtual assistant program Siri), which purport to redress discriminatory “human systems,” often deepen existing racial inequalities, not by erasing racialized bodies but by making them more “visible”—a process that sociologist Ruha Benjamin (2019) calls “The New Jim Code.” — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 93

Categorization

• XREF: Benjamin’s New Jim Code connects to the reader’s broader interest in how market-technical systems reproduce stratification, echoing the sacrifice article’s account of how ritual stabilizes hierarchy. — connects to: Social software can promote inequality rather than counter it. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 19; Algorithmic discrimination affects real people despite targeting only probabilistic data doubles. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 408
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does the visibility-mechanism account offer a lever for the left’s counter-speculations, or does it concede the terrain?