Introduction: Probing the System: Feminist Complications of Automated Technologies, Flows, and Practices of Everyday Life

Abstract

This Special Section presents diverse scholarly voices examining the silenced, underexposed, intersectional forces that fortify science and technology platforms in their work to automate public abidance. The articles probe, from diverse global locations and perspectives, the contemporary work of various “platforms,” understood broadly as technology and software, health, social media, and policy platforms. The articles probe these systems and platforms with attention to the assumptions and practices embedded in their algorithms, protocols, design specifications, and communications, and, in turn, the political, cultural, governance, and mediated practices they make possible. The research studies and practice-based work herein expose the complex and shifting sociopolitical codes and contexts that condition technology, artificial intelligence (AI), surveillance, health, social media, and state platforms that support systems of care, news, communication, and governance. These exposures show how platform craftiness works differently in different spaces to privilege and damage, often with ghostly obscurity. Attentive to how platforms operate in complex contemporary viral modes, the section seeks to locate and expose these traces, draped in what communication scholars Sangeet Kumar and Radhika Parameswaran (2018, 345) refer to as “chameleon cultural codes” that, in changing and transforming into unrecognizable forms, feed global imaginaries.

Ethics for the majority world: AI and the question of violence at scale

“…The automation of violence is assisted by the substitution of labour by mechanical duties and the introduction of intelligent technology into public administration, social care systems, information and communication networks (Gardner and Kember, 2021). Predictive systems and the algorithmisation of bureaucratic organisations (Meijer et al, 2021) implement the carceral imagination (Benjamin, 2016) and strengthen the patriarchal punitive State.…”

“…. asymmetrically favour culturally dominant subjects' (Gardner and Kember, 2021), neoliberal ideals and algorithmically repeat historical violence (Onuoha, 2018). Social automation is facilitated by carceral imagination, which maintains the patriarchal punitive state and contributes to the global capitalist, colonial and patriarchal project.…”

“…The automation of productive and social processes, i.e. the automation of life, leads to the development of surplus value in economic, behavioural (Zuboff, 2019) and epistemic dimensions: “Bred in post capital, empire-fortified spaces, automation enacts and reinforces a concise set of neoliberal values: efficiency, compliance and transparency and carries legacies of gender, racial, ethnic and nationalist bias (Gardner and Kember, 2021). Automation is key to capitalist accumulation.…”