This online STS muhabbet, friendly but critically engaging conversation that took place between Yetiskin and Lovink will walk you through the stages of identifying the problems, threats, and possibilities that media technologies have brought to the table of not only users but also social science researchers who are mostly outside the current modes of technical knowledge production. It is a frank discussion on the biases of codes and algorithms upon which social media platforms have been built, the lack of technological awareness in academia, and the effect of this lack in terms of centralizing governance structures. Yetiskin and Lovink not only elaborate on the embeddedness of the political, economic and cultural in the technical but also the embeddedness of technical means in the way that we think and express ourselves. They also discuss the ways of politicizing the contemporary technologies, making them the matter of concern for both the users and the social scientists, and opening the black boxes of them i.e. making visible the invisible: media infrastructures, biased filters, the firewalls against the democratization of technologies. Enjoy your STS muhabbet!
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During an interview at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service one student questioned Prime Minister Rutte about an official apology for slavery. The Dutch Prime Minister assured that each island-nation to whom the Kingdom apologized “has full power to decide to leave the Kingdom. They are not colonized. They are independent.” Rutte described the current role of The Netherlands as that of a “gateway” to bring their products to Europe. The emphasis on trade relationship smacks of neo-colonial interests. Rutte’s portrayal of The Netherlands acting as the “in” to the European market for the former colonies is far from the recovery that one would expect for the descendants of the enslaved. In fact, the Slavery Past Dialogue made a number of recommendations to the Dutch Kingdom, including “active prevention of discrimination and institutional racism throughout society” and “the establishment of a Kingdom Fund […] for structural and sustainable financing of recovery measures.” The Dutch Prime Minister’s comments belie a singular focus on trade with the Caribbean nations rather than a holistic approach, looking at non-pecuniary interests involving the well-being of the descendants and the societies in which they live today. The “republicanization” serves as a backdrop to the years-long journey during which the Dutch government (and the Dutch crown) seemingly dragged their feet, refusing to issue a formal apology for the trade of Africans by the Dutch West Indies corporation. That much-solicited apology was finally issued in December 2022, despite warnings that any gesture that excluded reparations would not be favorably received by the Dutch Caribbean nations.
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This is a critique of how designers deal with contending histories and multiple presents in design to speculate about socio-technical futures. The paper unpacks how embedded definitions and assumptions of temporality in current design tools contribute to coloniality in designed futures. As design practice becomes implicated in how oppression extends from physical systems to global digital platforms, our critique rejects the notion that it is only AI that needs fixing and it dissects the Futures Cone used in speculative design to make these issues visible. As an alternative, we offer a hauntological vocabulary to aid designers in reorienting their speculative tools and accommodating pluriversality in anticipatory futures. To illustrate the benefits of the proposed metaphors, we highlight examples of coloniality in digital spaces and emphasize the failure of speculative design to decolonize future imaginaries. Using points of reference from hauntology, those that engage with uncertain states of lingering or spectrality, and notions of nostalgia, absence, and anticipation, this paper contributes to rethinking the role that design tools play in colonizing future imaginaries, especially those pertaining to potentially disruptive technologies.
