Session Chair: Amelia Faith Johns
Presentation 1
Protocols of Whiteness: Universalism, Individualism, and Control in the AT Protocol
Sarah Florini
Arizona State University, United States of America
Bluesky BPLLC is a public benefit corporation that is currently developing a new protocol for creating federated social media, the AT Protocol. Proponents of federation cite decentralization as a key benefit, asserting that it combats many of the dangers created by centralized corporate-owned platforms. Bluesky aims to utilize the decentralization federation to “turn social media into a shared public commons” that supports democratic society (Bluesky Team 2023). However, as Alexander Galloway demonstrates, decentralization is not the removal, but simply the relocation, of control. Control continues to reside in the protocol on which the network is built (Galloway 2004). Part of a larger project examining federated social networks, this paper argues that the AT Protocol mirrors key logics of whiteness, particularly the bifurcated relationship between the universal and the individual. Thus, the AT Protocol – both technically and discursively – perpetuates whiteness as a primary locus of control in the resultant networks.
Presentation 2
A People's Community Control of Technology: A Historical Analysis of Decolonial Tech Advocacy
Brooklyne Gipson
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, United States of America
This study examines the connection between the Black Panther Party’s (BPP) 1960s activism and current discussions on technological misuse. It highlights the BPP’s foresight in its struggle against oppressive colonial technologies, a concept echoed in modern theories like surveillance capitalism (Zubhoff, 2019) and data colonialism (Couldy and Mejias, 2019). The paper uses historical analysis and archival research to explore the BPP’s collaboration with the April Third Movement (A3M) against Stanford University's Vietnam War-related projects, foreshadowing today's debates on digital surveillance and exploitation.
The BPP amended its Ten Point Program in 1972, showcasing a shift towards revolutionary intercommunalism, which underlines global decolonial solidarity and critiques capitalist exploitation across oppressed communities. This revision also explicitly called for "people's community control of modern technology," presaging current concerns over technology’s role in societal control.
The paper argues that the BPP’s early warnings against Stanford University's involvement in defense-funded projects like ARPAnet—the precursor to the internet—were prophetic. The BPP recognized the potential of technology to act as a colonial tool, a stance initially dismissed but now seen as insightful given Silicon Valley’s emergence from these protested sites.
By placing the BPP’s technological critiques within anti-colonial contexts, the paper advocates for recognizing historical activism’s role in shaping today's digital rights discourse. It urges a reevaluation of technology's societal role and supports a future where technology benefits all communities instead of perpetuating exploitation and control
Presentation 3
Stuff (is something) White People Like: On White Prototypicality of Facebook
Sean Rutherford McEwan
UNC, United States of America
This project examines the life and death of Facebook’s “ethnic affinity” targeted advertising category. The category was the subject of several lawsuits that alleged it violated the Fair Housing Act, by allowing advertisers to exclude protected classes from the audience of an advertisement. It argues that the category serves to negotiate tensions between the supposedly “post-racial” aesthetic of web platforms, and the political economy of targeted advertising online. Using media genealogy as a method, it traces the introduction, transformation and eventual removal of “ethnic affinity” from Facebook’s interface. It reads across several archives that span a variety of stakeholders in the production and circulation of “ethnic affinity” in order to reconstruct how the category is understood, both as a technical object and as a discursive formation. It argues that technical discourse obscures the persistence of racial discrimination in algorithmic targeting by highlighting disparities between Facebook’s instructions to developers, its public-facing statements, and how advertisers understood its technical changes. “Ethnic affinity” is then best understood as a racial technology, one that constructs and enforces the boundaries of race. I argue that this has historical antecedents in the deployment of colorblindness as justification for racial disparity. This project contributes to studies on the relationship between technologies of racialization and platform capitalism.
Presentation 4
PLATFORMIZATION AND THE EMERGENCE OF DARK INDUSTRY OF MOBILITY AND SMUGGLING
Kaarina Nikunen(1), Sanna Valtonen(2)
1: Tampere University, Finland; 2: Tampere University, Finland
Due to hardened border practices in EU, migrants and asylum seekers seeking refuge in Europe have to rely on various smuggling services shared on social media platforms and entrepreneurs who advertise services online. Our paper explores the emergence of this dark industry of mobility that operates on social media platforms. Based on interviews with migrants and refugees in Finland, the paper maps digital sites of smuggling and explore the ways in which the migrants, in their highly precarious situation, engaged with smuggling and dealt with the challenges they faced. The aim is to gain a more nuanced understanding of the complications of digital markets around mobility for the people concerned, and most importantly offer insight into the ways in which platform economy shapes migrant mobility and safety of migrants. Moreover we discuss how both platformization and European migration policies are intrinsically connected with the emergence of these markets.
