The readings both deal with the denial of how frontstage and backstage racism work together projecting micro-aggressions. Eubanks, “The Digital Poorhouse” is an interesting piece about automated inequality because this reading aims to highlight how oppression is now digital through digital decision-making systems opposed to human discretion.

The main question the article begins to raise is “so can technology really be racist?” Technology can be engineered racist by engineers who are predominately white. To emphasize, behind the racist code of analytics and algorithms are white engineers. People in the United States have been bamboozled for what is known as artificial intelligence but in actuality racist artificial intelligence may just be an extension of whiteness, maybe if artificial intelligence was called artificial-whiteness then there would have been insinuation for “products by white men catered to white men” in the consciousness of so many Americans who are vulnerable to digital oppression which includes the so-called middle class.

Concerns over digital surveillance, hate speech detection basis, and voice recognition as well as facial recognition have led many conversations around techno-racism. Remember when everybody started saying “go online” for every little thing? Imagine being a member of any marginalized group, asking for job applications and instead of briefly conversing they [insert racist and or sexist oppressor here] just tells you “yeah, go online” is simultaneously coded language that can be used as a blow-off line for discriminatory practices. Arguably, this sort of language is a modernization of the old haunting signs spurring from the segregation era.  

Speaking of old haunting history, the next reading is “We Still Haven’t Learned From Anita Hill’s Testimony” by Crenshaw whose piece deals with colorblind feminism. Does history repeat itself or is it just a cycle? What’s interesting about the internet as a resource for groups like the feminist movement, how well was the internet utilized to learn from women like an Anita Hill? Colorblind feminism has shown its own self-destructive path.

The readings from week 1 reflect disappointment and overly high expectations for the simplistic vision of what was then an uncharted “cyberspace” and the adaption to technology in the imagination of the unconscious mind. Richard Brautigan’s poem “All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace” could arguably be deciphered as a critique on the detrimental environmental effect of e-waste, tying unemployment to automation, and how society’s obsession with technology has transformed into this codependency of aching paranoia. Arguably, Richard Brautigan’s poem deals with different forms of self-destruction in an advancing world of technology. Then there is Rick Webb’s “My Internet Mea Culpa” which highlights the contrast between the so-called internet world and an imagined utopia that Rick Webb was supposedly promised, assumingly a utopia disguised as the “future” but that is the power of marketing and consumerism, and we should’ve known there was an angle to the power of having internet access. Rick Webb may have expected a more sophisticated utilization of the internet globally instead a foreshadowing-like episode of the sketch comedy “Chappelle’s Show” called “The Internet & Moment In The Life Of Lil Jon” embodies the insanity of the internet in the form of a shopping mall by imagining if the internet were a physical place. The episode aired back in 2004. Even though Rick Webb weighs the advantages and the disadvantages of the power of the internet, imagining a “peaceful utopia” is highly unrealistic. For starters, define “peaceful utopia” and secondly don’t put all your faith into future generations as the generation to hopefully get it right, they may be the next generation of pawns unless they are raised to distinguish the differences between internet fantasy and reality. The internet has the ability to reconnect and connect people all over the world (for a monthly bill of course) but it was never intended to work on global warming or social justice, and there is the blatant contradiction, meaning the internet as space and as a commodity is dominated by white corporations.