Ep. 378: Ruha Benjamin on the Digital Divide and the "New Jim Code"/Did You Know That People are "Racist" Against Black Robots?

There are two guests on this special January 2023 fundraising episode of The Chauncey DeVega Show.

***Your generosity and support help to sustain the podcast and to keep it free, not behind a paywall and available to all listeners.***

Ruha Benjamin is a sociologist and a Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of several books including Race After Technology and Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want.

She explains how technology is not socially or politically neutral and actually does the work of power and maintaining inequality along the color line through what she has termed “the new Jim Code”.

Benjamin also highlights the ways that technologies such as search engines, algorithms, “big data”, the surveillance society and other digital tools have disproportionately negative impacts on black and brown and other marginalized communities.

She also encourages us to take back our agency by finding ways to use these new technologies to do the work of creating a more humane and just society.

Christoph Bartneck is an associate professor in the department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Canterbury where his research focuses on human-computer interaction, science and technology Studies, and visual design.

He explains how racism and other forms of animus influence how human beings treat “black” and “brown” robots much worse than “white” robots.

Bartneck also reflects on the human-machine interface and how algorithms and other technologies inevitably reflect the biases of their designers, engineers, and programmers. He also shares his thoughts on artificial intelligence,  “the Singularity”, and the exaggerated and fantastical claims that are made by many futurists and technologists.  

On this episode of the podcast, Chauncey DeVega honors two people who recently passed away and who meant, albeit in very different ways, a great deal to him.

Professional wrestling star and ROH World Tag Team Champion “Jay Briscoe” (Jamin Dale Pugh) was killed in a car accident on Tuesday Jan 17 in Laurel, Delaware.  

Chauncey’s cat nephew Stoli passed away last week on Monday Jan 23.

Episode 378 of The Chauncey DeVega Show is dedicated to both of their memories.

Chauncey reflects on grieving, emotional ups and down, and how he is being weathered and assaulted by dark and other unjust forces during these last two weeks – and how he will overcome them and get his bounce back.

As part of that effort Chauncey shares an animal friend story about a turkey person who is being unfairly maligned and harassed by the humans in her neighborhood.

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