Technofascism and Artificial Intelligence

• In Event: Feminist Intelligence

Abstract

The Acceleration of Racist Accumulation
With the surge of artificial intelligence used to administer an increasing range of human life, there has been little consideration of the intellectual genealogies of artificial intelligence being used. Here I unearth some of the fascist and racial histories of artificial intelligence, offering a genealogy of intelligence accumulation now being inserted into new “artificial” algorithms and machine learning. In doing so, I maintain a transnational focus, and consider how a feminist approach to technoscience offers a crucial lens through which AI is perceived. In particular I look to the AI behind Property Technology, or Proptech, which is now being used to target and even evict tenants in numerous cities worldwide. How do calculations of evictability build upon prior racial understandings of private property, settlement, and imperialism? I also look to IBM’s Watson AI, which I argue rests upon the longstanding imperiality of a company built by accumulating intelligence through the distribution of its interwar-era eugenicist counting machines. Understanding these global histories, I suggest, is dire in an era in which technofascism is on the rise, and in which what I describe as Silicon Valley imperialism accumulates new depths and genres of data. How might other and more critical relationships to technology and intelligence point to techofutures beyond that of technofascism and imperialism?

Author

• Erin Mariel Brownstein McElroy, University of California Santa Cruz