Author: Amina Kirk and Mae Watson Grote (Change Machine)
Tech’s ability to accumulate and wield power is unquestionable. The dominance of the Big Four tech firms — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google — has commoditized consumer data in unprecedented ways, subjecting all of our online activity to search, analysis, and constraint. These dynamics not only perpetuate existing forces, making...
| More >Author: Ulises Ali Mejias (State University of New York at Oswego)
This paper focuses on forms of discrimination, including racism, that are produced and replicated when the state uses biased algorithms, and when the state fails to regulate corporations that use biased algorithms. The paper specifically asks what happens when the state—whose purpose is to guarantee the rights of...
| More >Author: Veena Dubal (University of California, Hastings College of the Law)
Technology platforms may be understood as the symbolic “cotton mill” in today’s rapidly growing digital economy. Just as the capital-intensive nature of unregulated factory production amidst the industrial revolution expropriated and exploited human labor, today’s platforms—with their venture capital-facilitated...
| More >Author: Fallon Wilson (#BlackTechFutures Research Institute)
Black businesses have been disadvantaged due to racial inequalities, as outlined in what Kapor (2018) refers to as the “Leaky Tech Pipeline,” which examines how intersecting racial tech disparities, such as the lack of access to the high-speed internet, business mentors of color, and non-dilutive capital, affects Black tech...
| More >Author: Shelly Steward (The Aspen Institute)
Platform work, or the use of apps, websites, or intermediaries to connect workers to tasks, is an increasingly common way of arranging work in the tech sector. Platforms weaken the relationship between workers and employers by acting as a mediator between them; workers interact with an impersonal interface rather than a supervisor. These...
| More >Author: Cierra Robson and Ruha Benjamin (Princeton University)
In this paper, we examine the racial dimensions of five recently proposed antitrust bills targeting the tech industry. Racial inequity has always been maintained by formal laws and policies (i.e., de jure discrimination) and informal norms and practices (i.e., de facto discrimination). While the aforementioned bills prevent de jure...
| More >Author: Seeta Peña Gangadharan (London School of Economics and Political Science)
Changes in our technological infrastructures are deepening inequalities and intensifying systemic racism. As society becomes more reliant on computation-hungry technologies such as cloud or software as services, computational service providers are hollowing out public institutions and diminishing their ability to...
| More >Author: Nicol Turner Lee (Brookings Institution)
Structural racism and discrimination have seeped into the aspirations of the digital revolution, perpetuating systemic inequalities against historically marginalized communities and excluding them from the benefits of the online economy. Mass video and data surveillance, algorithmic oppression and biases, and technology companies’ unfettered...
| More >In September 2022, the Convergence Partnership released the first-ever report to focus exclusively on the funding of narrative change, Funding Narrative Change, An Assessment and Framework. The new report was written by two leading experts in the field, Rinku Sen, executive director of Narrative Initiative, and Mik Moore, principal and founder of Moore + Associates. Narrative change has become...
| More >Nashville’s strong and sustained growth has helped make it Tennessee’s largest city and the state’s biggest economic powerhouse, but racial inequities in the workforce threaten the region’s future prosperity. This report, produced in partnership with the Urban League of Middle Tennessee and Lightcast, with support from JPMorgan Chase, offers a comprehensive look at the racial inequities in...
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