Apryl Williams (@aprylw) is talking with Allissa Richardson about “Surveillance and Black Digital Publics”  at a Harvard Berkman Klein Center event. Here’s a paper by Apryl on the topic.

I am live blogging, and thus making so many mistakes you could plotz. Mistakes of every sort: Missing points. Getting points wrong. Paraphrasing everything, and doing so in ways that don’t match the person’s content or tone. Day dreaming for a moment and missing an entire idea. Making articulate people sound choppy in my retelling. OMG, it’s just a mess.

Allissa begins by playing some Karen memes from The View, [Here are some others – dw] and asks whether “laughter is the best medicine,” as someone on The View concluded. She raises a case, one of thousands, in which a white person’s words were taken over those of Black people. “Those days haven’t really ended.”

Apryl says there’s a long history of Black people nicknaming white people who call the cops for offenses that wouldn’t be offenses if done by white people. Before “Karen” there was “Becky.”

AR: A lot of what we’re seeing isn’t meant to be funny. There’s underlying rage.

AW: Yes, there is. It’s easier to laugh if you have some distance from it. But for the people it’s happening to, it’s horrifying. If it happened to me, I’d feel lucky to walk away alive from an encounter with the police. There’s always a possibility for a Black person that she won’t. But there’s also the idea that humor helps us cope with trauma, especially as a collective. There’s lots of research that shows that humor can help us cope with physical and emotional pain. I like to think of these memes as a collective release of stress. The memes also act as a stand-in for media reporting where otherwise there wouldn’t be any.

AW: There were memes that preexisted the Internet – coded images that have a lot of intertextuality. To decode a meme you have to be embedded in that culture.

AR: In one of the memes we just saw, you’d have to know about Wakanda.

AW: Definitely.

AR: You’ve been curating Karen memes this year. Any favorites?

AW: Shout out to [Ack. I didn’t catch the name. Sorry about that! – dw ] who helped. We have about 60,000 memes that comment on around 15 incidents. My favorite is Barbecue Becky, a woman in Oakland who called the police because a Black group was using a grill in a park. Becky was “worried” that they wouldn’t dispose of the cinders safely. In the 911 call, she is very clear that it’s a Black family, but when the dispatcher asks her own color, she doesn’t want that to be part of the conversation.

AR: That incident spawned a meme within a meme.

AW: Yes, in celebration of this resistance, the people of Oakland had a BBQ in the same spot on the anniversary the next year. And maybe the year after that.

AW: It’s very interesting that as Oakland becomes gentrified, it’s white women who want to assert themselves. Black women experience Karens everyday, which is why these memes are so important., Why can’t white women just mind their own business? Because surveilling and policing Black people is their business, and that’s the problem. They Were Her Property by Stephanie Jones-Rogers is about the myth that white women did not take part in slavery, that they didn’t own slaves. But that myth is false. Women benefited from slavery, and white people benefited from maintaining the power differential that said that Black people are “less than.” A lot of those same ideologies underlay the Karen practices: the idea that white people are superior and there should be some natural order, or Black people are born bad and deserved to be patrolled. White people are socialized via the media that Black people are dangerous, giving rise to the idea that Black bodies are a threat. White women are compelled to perform this racial fear.

AR: “Perform” harks back to Amy Cooper [who thought she was in danger from a Black bird watcher]. Are memes meant to just point something out, to punish, to organize dialogue…?

AW: Everyone who’s Black has their own way of being Black. [I missed who Apryl was talking about] took it so far, but I’m here to take it all the way. We can see that Amy Cooper was performing this danger, saying that this Black man is threatening me. A lot of the fear white women have of Black men goes back to slavery and racial perceptions of Black men as animals. We owe a big debt to the people who are creating these memes. because they’re helping us have this dialogue about “casual” racism, which isn’t really casual. And they’re often calling for restitution. Often with a meme people are saying that the person should be fired. Amy Cooper did lose her job. Permit Patty, the CEO of a cannabis company had to resign after calling the police on a Black child who was selling water bottles “without a permit”.

AR: Have you seen Asian or Latinx women engage in this type of behavior?

AW: Yes, it’s not just white women. Some people who are “white adjacent”, as I like to call them, engage in this performance because it displays power. And it reinforces the racist idea that Black women are the lowest on the social ladder.

AR: People see a meme and wonder if maybe they’re a Karen…

AW: That’s good. You should stop and ask yourself why you even think that might be the case.

AR: Where do you intellectually anchor your work in surveillance scholarship?

AW: Simone Brown did groundbreaking work on blackness and surveillance, including at the state level. Her work focuses on blackness as a key identifier and a marker of difference … a reason to surveil. And there are studies in which the tech fails because it wasn’t designed to work with Black bodies. The truth shows up in the glitches, as Ruha Benjamin says.. And even though Michel Foucault is not without problems, his work about the surveillance society resonates with me: the Panopticon. When you’re surveilled so heavily, you start to behave as if you’re always surveilled. If Black people are always thinking they’re being watched and are concerned about their safety, that means we’re never free.

A: There’s a somatic concern in how our bodies take in that stress, of doing ordinary things and being punished for them. How about Bell Hooks‘ work?

AW: [I missed a sentence or maybe two.] Memes serve as a counter-surveillance. The memes hold up a mirror, saying just as you are patrolling us, we’re patrolling you. We won’t allow you to harass and terrorize our neighborhoods. What you’re doing isn’t just casual racism. It’s harmful and should be punished. “Your’e the one wasting tax payer money because you won’t say what you’re wearing or what your race is and you’re in a park full of people.”

AR: There were women on the frontlines in the Capitol invasion. Can you talk about how white supremacy has been upheld by women?

AW: White women were very much complicit in it. Jennifer Pierce’s Racing for Innocence is not just about women standing by their men, but women upholding the idea of the patriarchy. Jesse Daniels writes that white women are invested in the patriarchy because it supports them. In American society, women represent mythological ideologies about motherhood and nurturing. In the Capitol we saw that their ethos is that when a wrong is committed they feel the need to step in, even though in this case there was no wrong. The white women felt they had to uphold those values, and white entitlement made them feel comfortable doing it and feeling that they’d get away with it.

AR: A lot of this goes back to memes expressing rage in a humorous way even though there can be real danger.

AW: There’s a Caution Against Racially Exploited Non-emergencies (CAREN Act) proposal in California that would make it a crime to make Karen calls to the police. It passed in Oregon. I spoke with the woman who got it passed there and she said she was able to do it because she did it quietly. She herself had been Karen’ed.

Q&A

Q: Do these memes do more harm than good by trivializing the behavior?

A: They raise awareness.

Q: As James Baldwin says, isn’t this a white person’s problem?

A: Yes. Racism is a white invention. But it impacts us. For us it’s a fight for liberty and sometimes a fight for life. We need white people to take up their burden.

AR: What do you say to people who say that “Karen” is a slur?

AW: Black people are not trying to say that all people named Karen are bad. For me it’s just shorthand for white entitlement. If white people take it out of context, that is a white people problem, too.

Q: Foucault’s panopticon reminds me of the time that the police came because someone reported a Black person on the premises. I’m in a wheelchair, and am often invisible. Can you talk about how we can take all of this into a space of peace? [I’ve done a particularly bad job capturing this. Sorry. – dw]

AW: Black history has to be about moving forward as well as remembering the history of oppression. Black people thrive even as white people try to limit our agency and our joy.

Q: Can you talk about the white mainstreaming and coopting of memes started by Black people? And the use of Black audio by white teens on TikTok?

AW: Let’s talk about cultural appropriation and exploitation. I’ve been thinking all year about responsible ways of studying TikTok. Black creators are making all of these great sounds and memes, but often get no credit. It’s digital blackface: people performing blackness because it’s cool, but they wouldn’t want to be Black because being Black is hard.

Q: We often don’t give the LGTBTQ and ballroom culture credit for all they’ve given us that we use online.

AW: Much of that was started by queer Black people. But we should always remember to give credit and give back to those communities. And the idea that people should be respected no matter what they look like benefits everyone, not just people in those bodies.

Q: What can be done by tech policy and practice to help activists fight back?

AW: There are so many examples of activists fighting back. E.g., people painting their faces so they can’t be identified from images of them at protests. Black technologists are calling for that same tech to be used on the Capitol insurgents; if it can be used on peaceful BLM protestors, it can and should be used on the insurgents.

Q: Are there failed memes because they pushed the envelope too far?

AW: I’m sure there are failed memes. Some are maybe too scary to be funny. And when events happen too close together, one meme can overshadow others.

What should be the role of Asian-Americans, especially in the development of surveillance tech?

I appreciate this question a lot. The myth of the model minority is really damaging; whites think of Asian-Americans as the “good” minority. There’s already a lot of research showing the racism of Asian communities. Everyone working on tech needs to take a step back and question what their project is doing.

Apryl says she has been working on the role of race in online dating, and a book should be coming out soon.

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I’m at a ThursdAI talk (Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and MIT Media Lab) being given by Neil Gaikwad (Twitter: @neilthemathguy, a Ph.D. at the MediaLab, in the Space Enabled Group.

Markets and institutions are parts of complex ecosystem, Neil says. His research looks at data from satellites that show how the Earth is changing: crops, water, etc. Once you’ve gathered the data, you can use machine learning to visualize the changes. There are ecosystems, including of human behavior, that are affected by this. It affects markets and institutions. E.g., a drought may require an institutional response, and affect markets.

Traditional markets, financial markets, and gig economies all share characteristics. Farmers markets are complex ecosystems of people with differing information and different amounts of it, i.e. asymmetric info. Same for financial markets. Same for gig economies.

Indian markets have been failing; there have been 300,000 suicides in the last 30 years. Stock markets have crashed suddenly due to blackbox marketing; in some cases we still don’t know why. And London has banned Uber. So, it doesn’t matter which markets or institutions we look at, they’re losing our trust.

An article in New Scientist asked what we can do to regain this trust. For black box AI, there are questions of fairness and equity. But what would human-machine collaboration be like? Are there design principles for markets.?

Neil stops for us to discuss.

Q: How do you define the justice?

A: Good question. Fairness? Freedom? The designer has a choice about how to define it.

Q: A UN project created an IT platform that put together farmers and direct consumers. The pricing seemed fairer to both parties. So, maybe avoid intermediaries, as a design principle?

Neil continues. So, what is the concept of justice here?

1. Rawls and Kant: Transcendental institutionalism. It’s deontological: follow a principle for perfect justice. Use those principles to define a perfect institution. The properties are defined by a social contract. But it doesn’t work, as in the examples we just saw. What is missing. People and society. [I.e., you run the institution according to principles, but that doesn’t guarantee that the outcome will be fair and just. My example: Early Web enthusiasts like me thought the Web was an institution built on openness, equality, creative anarchy, etc., yet that obviously doesn’t ensure that the outcome will share those properties.]

2. Realized-focused institutionalism (Sen
2009): How to reverse this trend. It is consequentialist: what will be the consequences of the design of an institution. It’s a comparative assessment of different forms of institutions. Instead of asking for the perfectly justice society, Sen asks how justice can be advanced. The most critical tool for evaluating any institution is to look at how it actually realizes how people’s lives change.

Sen argues that principles are important. They can be expressed by “niti,” Sanskrit for rules and institutions. But you also need nyaya: a form of social arrangement that makes sure that those rules are obeyed. These rules come from social choice, not social contract.

Example: Gig economies. The data comes from mechanical turk, upwork, crowdflower, etc. This creates employment for many people, but it’s tough. E.g., identifying images. Use supervised learning for this. The Turkers, etc., do the labelling to train the image recognition system. The Turkers make almost no money at this. This is the wicked problem of market design: The worker can have identifications rejected, sometimes with demeaning comments.

“The Market for Lemons” (Akerlog, et al., 1970): all the cars started to look alike and now all gig-workers look alike to those who hire them: there’s no value given to bringing one’s value to the labor.

So, who owns the data? Who has a stake in the models? In the intellectual property?

If you’re a gig worker, you’re working with strangers. You don’t know the reputation of the person giving me data. Or renting me the Airbnb apartment. So, let’s put a rule: reputation is the backbone. In sharing economies, most of the ratings are the highest. Reputation inflation. So, can we trust reputation? This happens because people have no incentive to rate. There’s social pressure to give a positive rating.

So, thinking about Sen, can we think about an incentive for honest reputation? Neil’s group has been thinking about a system [I thought he said Boomerang, but I can’t find that]. It looks at the workers’ incentives. It looks at the workers’ ratings of each other. If you’re a requester, you’ll see the workers you like first.

Does this help AI design?

MoralMachine has had 1.3M voters and 18M pairwise comparisons (i.e., people deciding to go straight or right). Can this be used as a voting based system for ethical decision making (AAAI 2018)? You collect the pairwise preferences, learn the model of preference, come to a collective preference, and have voting rules for collective decision.

Q: Aren’t you collect preferences, not normative judgments? The data says people would rather kill fat people than skinny ones.

A: You need the social behavior but also rules. For this you have to bring people into the loop.

Q: How do we differentiate between what we say we want and what we really want?

A: There are techniques, such as “Bayesian Truth Serum”nomics.mit.edu/files/1966”>Bayesian Truth Serum.

Conclusion: The success of markets, institutions or algorithms, is highly dependent on how this actually affects people’s lives. This thinking should be central to the design and engineering of socio-technical systems.

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A press release from the Department of Unwanted Efficiencies:

Huntsville, AL – June 1, 2009 – Cabinet NG (CNG), provider of document management and workflow software, today announced that Limestone County, Alabama is using CNG’s document management software to enable a unique Video Hearing application. By processing new jail inmates through CNG’s Secure Access Filing Environment (CNG-SAFE), all the necessary legal forms and other court paperwork is instantly available during the video hearing process. Limestone County can now get the most out of local government resources in a time of fiscal restraint and challenging economic conditions by streamlining the preliminary hearing process while protecting a defendant’s constitutional right to participate in the legal process.

David Seibert, Limestone County’s Commission Chairman, said, “We are committed to putting into place technology that allows us to better serve Limestone County citizens. Enabling electronic preliminary hearings by integrating document management with videophones eliminates the manpower, transportation and time needed for trips between the Limestone County Jail and the courthouse.”

Added Mike Blakely, Limestone County Sheriff, “There are public safety benefits to conducting preliminary hearings without transporting inmates, and we can process more inmates through the system this way, saving the county time and money.”

…[T]his Video Hearing solution is a unique integration of electronic document management and Videophone technologies that can be applied in a number of environments. For example, any face to face process requiring the processing of documents can be liberated from the physical constraints of appearing in person.

If you want face time, don’t do the crime.

[Tags: document_management jails justice video_hearings ]

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