The Summer 2021 season of the Otherwise School is structured with a few concrete goals in mind. A major objective that this program is tasked with is contributing to a Special Issue on Design and Democracy for the ACM Interactions magazine. We are grateful to Dr. Daniela Rosner for this incredible opportunity. With this publishing goal in mind, our program will cover three main themes with respect to technology and power in the four regions across the globe—platform governance, surveillance, and movement communication.
Weekly Breakdown
Week 1&2
Showing Up
Talks, workshops, and learning from people’s movements from several regions of the Global South. Understanding current needs that an examination into tech and power can help resolve.
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Week 3 & 4 & 5
Making
Working closely with mentors, speakers, community organizations to iteratively develop tools and techniques serving the transnational agenda of counter-fascism, especially serving the regional movements participating in this school. The tools, artifacts, and/or writings emerging during this period are going to be archived in the Design and Democracy issue of the ACM Interactions Journal.
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Week 6
Showing out
Showcasing of writings, artifacts, ideas, and demonstrations from the previous three weeks over a series of webinars to be held on the week of July 23. We will arrange a panel of scholars and practitioners to provide feedback on the projects coming out of this summer program.
Themes
Platform Governance. Social media is not just the site at which “speech happens”, moving beyond questions of free speech, we will investigate the layers of internet infrastructure not always visible to the end user. What is the difference between content and context moderation? What are the benefits and limitations of existing affordances of major social media platforms’ interface (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook). Current platform governance discourse heavily emphasizes policing in the form of identifying bad actors or harmful content for removal with the acknowledgement that enforcement is subjective and highly limited outside of the west. Using an abolitionist lens, how can we expand a vision of “good governance”, how can we draw on indigenous and otherwise ways of knowing to develop new forms of platform governance?
Surveillance and Dark Sousveillance. Drawing from Simone Browne’s Dark Matters, we will examine both the histories of digital surveillance in the “low tech” surveillance of the middle passage where Black people were marked, managed and monetized (as well as how they resisted, circumvented and dismantled these forms of surveillance). Beyond CCTV cameras, we’ll also turn our attention to recent (and some not-so-recent) surveillance technologies being deployed by local and regional governments worldwide, such as, “Smart Cities” in rural areas, biometrics, and immigration technologies. Browne’s dark sousveillance is “a site of critique, as it speaks to Black epistemologies of contending with antiblack surveillance where the tools of social control in plantation surveillance or lantern laws in city spaces and beyond were appropriated, co-opted, repurposed, and challenged in order to facilitate survival and escape.” (p 21, Dark Matters) This is where we will begin thinking about how to “watch the watchers” and build up counter-models to surveillance.
Movement Communication. It is crucial for us to be reflexive about what we choose as our everyday technologies in our movement spaces and how we design our communication practices around them. Sometimes the most efficient communication technologies available for us are also produced by (and therefore they themselves are) operators of global fascism. For example, while community organizations default to Facebook as a movement communication tool because of its sheer reach and quantitative impact, we cannot afford to overlook how Facebook is also a key sponsor of the fascist matrix of domination many of these communities are up against. To bring the history and politics of Facebook (and other tech enterprises) back into our analyses would require us to think how, when, and to what extent we want to use corporate social networks going forward. Can we imagine social networking and other movement communication technologies that actively resists the monopoly of Facebook, Google, Microsoft and other Big Tech? What would movement communication and internal organizing work look like with technologies built otherwise?
Guiding Principles
We do not ascribe to any particular political party or suggest any particular political program. However, we have a set of guiding principles that inform the curriculum and the summer institute experience. The Otherwise School is not going to be a neutral space, we will challenge strongly held assumptions about power, technology, race and justice. Politics is relational, rhetorical and policy oriented. As facilitators of this project, we are intentionally centering Blackness. From Black Radical Traditions particularly we borrow a mode to think otherwise about gender, sexual identity, neurodiversity, geographies of “progress” and solidarity. Below are some of the guiding political values that we aspire to practice this summer. All of these will inform how we approach technologies of the past, present, and hopefully, a liberatory future.
De-centering the West, Centering the South. Much of data and tech policy is hyperfocused on the United States and the limited attention to the Global South is dominated by NGOs or other kinds of humanitarian organizations. This will be an opportunity to examine the locally situated impact of technologies including social media, search, surveillance and biometrics, including the ways that they are similar and different in each regional context. To learn from their experiences and theorization of various characters and enablers of global fascism—genocide, incarceration, hindu nationalism, etc. We will unpack terms like humanitarian technology, how do we differentiate between technologies that are designed to monitor the behavior of aid recipients ie UNHCR biometrics vs technologies designed to verify claims of state violence and/or genocide against civil society. How do we understand race as technology in environments where geographies are also indexed by ethnicity, religion and/or caste? What are ways that social movements can use technology to disseminate information among their base, amplify moral appeals to actors/institutions outside of their context vs what does it make visible when we center the role of technology in our political analysis?
Intersectionality & Black Feminist Thought at the Front & Center. When we speak of oppression and global fascism, we do so with the framing of intersectionality in mind. Here, we are drawing from centuries of intersectional analyses rooted in the struggles led by Black women particularly in the context of the United States. As intersectionality suggests, “when it comes to social inequality, people’s lives and the organization of power in a given society are better understood as being shaped not by a single axis of social division, be it race or gender or class, but by many axes that work together and influence each other.” This multi-axes analysis of power and oppression holds true transnationally, and can also be applied to other more localized systems of oppressions (e.g. caste system in India). We acknowledge there are also needed critiques of how intersectionality is practiced by Western academia and hope this institute will catalyze further discussion around post-intersectionality.
Abolition as a methodology. Black women in the United States have been integral in bringing the demand to abolish all forms of policing into the forefront of civic discourse. There is an ever expanding body of work examining the carceral continuum from the school to prison pipeline, the family regulation system and the prison industrial complex. How do we apply these central tenets of the Black Radical Tradition in thinking about genocide in the Global South where accountability is often sought through prosecution of “war crimes”? How do we take seriously the need to mitigate harm in a war and occupation context without expanding policing and incarceration? What does abolition mean for those displaced into refugee or internally displaced peoples (IDP) camps? Particularly outside of the west, we feel these questions of abolition have been under attended to.