Digital Racial: Algorithmic Violence and Digital Platforms

This book explores the relationship between race and technology, arguing that digital platforms perpetuate racism through their technical and affective architecture. It examines how platform capitalism rewrites and redistributes racial logic in new ways, connecting it to power, Western rationality, and the prevalence of technologies in everyday life. The book proposes an alternative and decolonial approach to technology studies, focusing on the ways in which technologies collaborate with racial capital to produce and sustain difference.

Format: Hardback
Length: 186 pages
Publication date: 24 February 2023
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

This comprehensive book delves into the intricate interplay between race and technology, exploring how digital platforms perpetuate and exacerbate racism through their technical and affective architecture. It posits that technologies act as both tools of social control and instruments of violence, perpetuating and mimicking the processes of racialization. By examining the current configuration of platform capital and its modes of re-abstracting race into its very fabric, the book sheds light on the ways in which racism is re-territorialized within the human spheres of social, economic, and political life.

The book argues that platformization and digital capital rewrite and redistribute the racial logic in novel ways, reconfiguring social and economic relations through data, machine learning, algorithms, software designs, and automation. It highlights how racism in the digital age becomes intimately intertwined with power, Western rationality, and the pervasive presence of technologies in everyday life. The book challenges the notion of non-hominization of alterity, arguing that the sustained production and oppression of the "inferior other" is facilitated by the co-opting of automaticity and technologies, perpetuating our fascination with and understanding of human progress as reliant on machines.

Furthermore, the book underscores the configuration of power and White supremacy through their co-enterprise with technologies, aiming to disrupt and dismantle these systems of oppression. It offers insights into the potential for resistance and transformation, emphasizing the importance of collective action, ethical considerations, and the reimagining of technological systems to promote equity and justice.

Overall, this book is a vital contribution to the field of technology and society, providing a deep understanding of the complex relationship between race and technology and offering actionable insights for a more inclusive and equitable future.

Weight: 454g
Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781538165287