Racial Fixes

A racial fix must continually burnish its benevolence, which is made easier by conjuring the noble-sounding ambitions of technoscience. The HBO series Silicon Valley parodies this techno-benevolence to great effect. In a scene that showcases hopeful software developers presenting at TechCrunch, a conference where only the most promising ideas attract top investors, the writers spoof these rapid-fire and painfully earnest pitches (each line designating a different speaker):

We’re here to revolutionize the way you report bugs on your mobile platform!

We will revolutionize location-based news aggregation as you know it!

We’re making the world a better place through Paxo’s algorithms for consensus protocols!

And we’re making the world a better place through software defying data centers for cloud computing!

… a better place for canonical data models to communicate between end points.

… a better place through scalable, fault tolerant, distributed, ACID transactions.

And we are truly, local, mobile, social.

And we’re completely SoMoLo …

And we’re MoLoSo.

We are MoSoLo, bro.27

The scene plays with the connection between buzzwords and benevolence, making fun of the do-good sound bites that characterize the revolutionary culture of innovation: “health,” “safety,” “efficiency,” and even “diversity” mask newfangled forms of classification and control, which often take shape under the rubric of customization and individualization. The scene eventually whittles down the sound bites into virtuous acronyms, where each start-up offers a different configuration of the same three buzzwords – local, mobile, social – exposing how the same features are simply reordered to give the illusion of choice. Indeed, as I explore below, if people do not truly have the choice to wiggle free from the suffocating embrace of techno-benevolence without repercussions, that is a sign of fixity – an innovation that constrains.

Racial fixes are appealing, in part because they come wrapped in an aura of personalization: they are products and experiences specially tailored just for you, goes the marketing mantra. Novel software programs permit businesses to personalize in appealing and creative ways, building on a much longer commitment to “selling identity” that began with the move away from mass market to niche markets. In Shopping for Identity: The Marketing for Ethnicity, historian Marilyn Halter explains:

By the early 1970s, change was permeating the cultural front and the parameters of the American marketplace were shifting quite dramatically … Companies needed to find new ways to hook consumers on their particular brands and to make customers loyal in an increasingly competitive and saturated marketplace. Corporate industry leaders began taking a different tack, turning away from mass advertising campaigns to concentrate on segmented marketing approaches. One of the most successful of the segmenting strategies has been to target specific ethnic constituencies.