Daniels’ Cyber Racism

Daniels’ Cyber Racism illuminates how “white supremacy has entered the digital era” while acknowledging how those “excluded by the white-dominated mainstream media” also use the Internet for grassroots organizing and antiracist discourse.31 In so doing, she challenges both those who say that technology is only a “source of danger” when it comes to the active presence of White supremacists online and those who assume that technology is “inherently democratizing.”32 Daniels echoes Nakamura’s frustration with how race remains undertheorized in Internet studies and urges more attention to the technology of structural racism. In line with the focus on glitches, researchers tend to concentrate on how the Internet perpetuates or mediates racial prejudice at the individual level rather than analyze how racism shapes infrastructure and design. And, while Daniels does not address this problem directly, an investigation of how algorithms perpetuate or disrupt racism should be considered in any study of discriminatory design.

Architecture and Algorithms On a recent visit that I made to University of California at San Diego, my hosts explained that the design of the campus made it almost impossible to hold large outdoor gatherings. The “defensive” architecture designed to prevent skateboarding and cycling in the interest of pedestrians also deliberately prevented student protests at a number of campuses following the Berkeley free speech protests in the mid-1960s. This is not so much a trend in urban planning as an ongoing feature of stratified societies. For some years now, as I have been writing and thinking about discriminatory design of all sorts, I keep coming back to the topic of public benches: benches I tried to lie down on but was prevented because of intermittent arm rests, then benches with spikes that retreat after you feed the meter, and many more besides.

Like the discriminatory designs we are exploring in digital worlds, hostile architecture can range from the more obvious to the more insidious – like the oddly shaped and artistic-looking bench that makes it uncomfortable but not impossible to sit for very long. Whatever the form, hostile architecture reminds us that public space is a permanent battleground for those who wish to reinforce or challenge hierarchies. So, as we explore the New Jim Code, we can observe connections in the building of physical and digital worlds, even starting with the use of “architecture” as a common metaphor for describing what algorithms – those series of instructions written and maintained by programmers that adjust on the basis of human behavior – build. But, first, let’s take a quick detour …