There are a lot of thoughts swimming through my head after this reading. In one of my other classes, we talk about all the different ways that technologies can perpetuate different systems of oppression in a theoretical / anecdotal way, but this book takes it to another to show how Google actively perpetuates racist, sexist, etc systems. Reading about Dylann Roof was terrifying because of what happened. Considering that most of the people who built the internet and are continuously building the technological tools that everyone is either using or beginning to use are white (and increasingly Asian) men, it is not unexpected that the tools they construct have their biases embedded in the technologies. Talking about Google as a tool of American Imperialism was something I had never thought about before either. When I am thinking about the pervasiveness of American technological tools on a global scale, I’m now thinking of all the different ways that the -isms that exist in American and Western cultures are being shared throughout the world.

Something else that was also extremely interesting was learning about long tail words. Everything one types onto the internet, especially in a search bar, is collected as data. How does this work with search engines that are not google? In Noble’s work, she writes that search results for “Asian girls” and “Latina girls” still contain a lot of sexually implicit or explicit content compared to “Black girls” after Google took some steps to reorganize the results. When I searched these terms on Duckduckgo (which is the search engine that I use) and Ecosia (another search engine that uses the money they make to plant trees), the results that come up are sexualized women.

I went to high school with a lot of people who now work at different tech companies (Facebook, Google, Snapchat, etc). They’re definitely the problematic Asians that Noble references here and there in the books. I’ve been thinking a lot about how to politicize my peers and how to get them to think critically about the tools that they are building because technology is never apolitical! It is also not possible to be apolitical if they tools that are being built have a political agenda being attached to them. I don’t know. This is definitely something that I need to think more about. How can we imagine a world past all these different systems of oppression if the people building and constructing them don’t even know that they are perpetuating these systems?

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