Infrastructures of Exclusion: Whiteness and the Algorithm

• In Event: Networks of Empire: Borders, Racialization, and Social Reproduction through Algorithmic Systems

Abstract

This paper uses a technical discussion of the linear reduction of algorithmic processes, alongside ethnographic analysis of a site of voluntary participation in police surveillance (a community garden in Detroit), to theorize how surveillant algorithms express agency and material tendencies, and in the process, becoming complicit with white supremacist and carceral logics. I extend conceptions of whiteness as phenomenological (Ahmed 2006, Sullivan 2019) to argue for whiteness as an ambient environment of complicity through which different actors move, to varying degrees and at different times, producing an orientation towards anti-Black racism and support for carceral justice that aligns with codes and classifications as distributed across the urban landscape. Within epistemologies of classification inherent to algorithmic processes I detail themes of exclusion and abstraction, themselves foundational to both whiteness and legal codes associated with the racialized production of territory, protection of property, and spatialization of power rooted in slavery and colonialism (Harris 1993, McKittrick 2013, Mirzoeff 2021, Peake 2002). Extending contemporary theorizations of race and technology (Browne 2015, Coleman 2009, Nakamura 2008), I trace the interrelationship between this production of algorithmic whiteness at the scale of the body, the code, and the city, arguing that processes of abstraction, exclusion and linear reduction are common across these varied modalities and contexts.
Theorizations of infrastructure encompass the tension between local and universal, between heterogeneity and systematization, that parallel the inherently conflictual and multiscalar nature of racialized, capitalist geographies of contemporary urban space (Larkin 2013, Bosworth 2022, Harvey 1987). By conceptualizing this instance of surveillance within the site of the garden as infrastructure, its informational, material, spatial, and social components can be understood as constituting an interrelated and mutually-reinforcing assemblage. Algorithmic processes, articulated through the physical objects of the cameras, layered on top of the material elements of the garden and organized around legal conceptions of property, engage in ongoing, dynamic forms of racialization through individual and subjective engagement. This becomes an infrastructure of exclusion and whiteness, cosigned by the logics of alleged justice and fairness as interpreted by the American carceral state. Framing this instance as infrastructural also destabilizes a conception of digital technology as something apart from the physical and material components of the space and environment of the garden and the city. Instead, the logics that underwrite these informational components stem from the long trajectory of white supremacy, empire, and carcerality that is found throughout earlier iterations of the combined informational-social-physical American environment. If, following Siegert (2015), the historical form of the Jeffersonian grid served to both implement and iterate upon conceptions of white supremacist colonial violence, the algorithm, as an organizing device, performs a similar function within the space of the garden, as a microcosm of the contemporary American carceral state.

Author

• Rebecca Smith, Lawrence Technological University