Technologies of Discrimination

• In Event: Postphenomenology - I: Smart Technologies

Abstract

One way to approach the potential for technologies to have discriminatory effects, as well as their potential to participate in large-scale patterns of discrimination, is to think about them in terms of the postphenomenological notion of “multistability.” First developed by Don Ihde, and further refined by others, this notion points to a technology’s ever-present potential to maintain multiple meanings, to be put to multiple uses, and to fit into a variety of different contexts. It is time to develop this notion further and consider what it means for some of a technology’s stabilities to be discriminatory ones. What does it mean for a technology to encode bias, but to also have the potential to be otherwise? How can a technology work in accord with a culturally dominant way of life and yet at the same time be something the puts vulnerable people at further disadvantage? This presentation considers a number of examples, from the design of everyday household objects, to the pattern of anti-homeless design in public spaces, to the persistent failures to accommodate the disabled, to the examples of discrimination emerging within facial recognition programming used in security camera technologies. Patterns emerge from these kinds of examples, and they reveal different dimensions of multistablity that may be at issue. Here I develop a distinction I see emerging within these various examples between and kind of discrimination within design that occurs along an “axis of individual difference” vs. an “axis of usage.”

Author

• Robert Rosenberger, Georgia Institute of Technology