This session is facilitated by Jamie Garcia, Hamid Khan
About this session
We will open the session with an ice breaker to engage participants in understanding how their bodies are becoming legible to state actors through the data-fication of our lives. A presentation will be offered to explain what is meant by the Algorithmic Ecology and Digital Segregation. We will break into groups to discuss who is benefiting from algorithms in our own communities and how is the landscape changing in our local community. Collectively we will discuss various tool used to expose actors in the Algorithmic Ecology and how to intersectionally build community resistance and self defense to digital segregation.
Goals of this session
The goal of this session is to collectively unpack key players in the justification, development, and deployment of algorithms used to socially control our lives- we refer to this as the Algorithmic Ecology. This framework explores mathematical models as more than dirty data and biased algorithms. Using the framework of the Algorithmic Ecology we see more insidious impacts of predictive analytics and this session’s focus is “digital segregation”.
Centered in the US and then moving the conversation internationally we will explore how the State has moved toward predictive analytics to “digitally segregate” communities from highly needed resources. We will unpack how this landscape cannot be centered on the algorithm but includes technologists, academia, and state actors as complicit in inflicting harm on the most marginalized communities. The session’s end will leave participants with tools for organizing within their own communities as well as personal self defense tools.