Mass-ive Protest: Petition, Assembly and Algorithmic Transparency

• In Event: STS Alter-ed: The Production of Otherness in Technoscientific Enactments (II)

Abstract

In their contribution to the recently revised Handbook of STS, Breyman et al. demonstrate the fundamental connection between STS and the larger social movements that arose alongside the discipline, what they describe as the “many activists, thinkers, and writers whose critiques of science and technology emerged in contexts of social struggle and conflict.” Indeed, STS positions itself at the nexus of science and technology on one hand and the society to which it applies on the other. At the center of this exchange lies the authority and institutional leverage of states, scientific disciplines and technology corporations against the collective, assembled power of everyday people. Recently, petition and assembly have been used to challenge state violence and the big tech corporations that enable it, protesting both immigration policy and policing in the US and pressuring companies to sever ties with the US government.

This paper will consider the role of petition and assembly as a fundamental tool for shaping both state and corporate policy as well as specific research agendas in computer science and engineering. Drawing on political theory and the history of rights of petition, I will argue that what I call massive publics are both essential and anathema to the development of computer vision algorithms like Amazon’s Rekognition tool. Such tools represent the state of the art in AI and computer vision (having trained on millions of images) and yet their use is controversial. Bowing to intense public pressure, Amazon temporarily barred police departments from using the technology, but in the absence of legal policy and sustained scrutiny, it remains unclear how lasting this victory will prove to be.

Author

• Kris Fallon, University of California, Davis