Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness by Dr. Simone Browne

Dr. Browne is accomplished beyond comparison. An associate professor at UT Austin, I bought my copy of this book from Duke press.

She has focused on tech equity, algorithmic harm, and the racism inherent in the data constraining the progress needed in these fields.

Dark Matters highlights a range of surveillance across the oppression of black people, from slave ship panopticons to modern facial recognition technology.

Others in this space include Ruha Benjamin and Timnit Gebru, and their works are very much worth investigating.

The loudest voices in social spheres are sometimes the furthest fringe or the most extreme. There has not been enough focus in finding reliable tools to confidently exclude vile data from the AI systems being built.

Here we have three incredibly talented, poetic, and diligent researchers producing valuable resources for us to learn from, but the promises of silicon valley are too shiny for investors to ignore.

While the red flags are going up, under all the rigor of outstanding ethic, pipe dreams are flying off the shelves in the form of market shares and the cost of our freedom.

2023-10-18