Algorithms Of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble, and: Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code by Ruha Benjamin (review)

Against a backdrop of rapid technological advancements and expanded attention to the relationship among algorithmic data, its utilization, and societal structures, discourse about how the roles and responsibilities of big tech companies relate to the data they acquire, as well as to contemporary social justice efforts, increasingly takes center stage.

The neoliberal structures that undergird much of contemporary America (visible through assessment of systems that reinforce conceptions of individual, commodifiable success as somehow contributing to collective efforts toward advancements for marginalized populations) are being baked into algorithmic design by rapidly growing tech companies, which provides those structures the opportunity to proliferate at a correlative rate. Systems that help proliferate unconscious bias are also built into apps, websites, and other resources widely available to the general population, and two recent books centering on race, racism, and technology present a series of complex and example-rich cases demonstrating just how pervasive and pernicious these systems and their influences are. Both works incorporate profuse interdisciplinarity, historical context framing contemporary circumstances, and a degree of self-reflexivity to articulate the ways in which technology further enables racist structures to proliferate and take root.

Sayifa Umoja Noble, an associate professor of information studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, serves as codirector of the Center for Critical Internet Inquiry. In her first monograph, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, Noble argues that internet search engines, particularly the world's most prominent system, Google, are harbingers of data discrimination and are not fundamentally equal in their presentation of and engagement with members from identity groups that are outside of preferred (white and heteropatriarchal) norms. Informed by her previous work outside of academia, Noble takes a perspectival approach to doing research in the technological space: prior to entering academia, she worked for over a decade in multicultural marketing and advertising, aiming to connect corporations with Black and Latinx folks and to protect those corporations from "enacting racial and gender insensitivity." She realized through a 2010 Google search that the tech giant "could completely fail when it came to providing reliable or credible information about women and people of color yet experience seemingly no repercussions whatsoever" (3–4). From then on, Noble was driven to find ways to hold search engines accountable for what she calls "algorithmically driven data failures that are specific to people of color and women" and to present evidence of the structural ways that racism and sexism operate online through what she calls "algorithmic oppression" (4).

Rich with examples and influences from across critical race, internet and information, media, and feminist studies, Noble's book effectively argues that big tech's oligopoly, coupled with those top companies' emphasis on fiscally driven interests, directly results in data discrimination that compounds oppression of already marginalized groups. Throughout the text, Noble illuminates ways in which social and humane elements are often not factored into algorithmic design, primarily using examples from Google searches, with some inclusion of other commercial and noncommercial information portals to fill out a depiction of how online classification mechanisms are imbued with tangible, real-world power. Although the tone and tenor of the examples become increasingly grim over the course of the text, Noble also provides spaces for optimism by presenting calls to action at the conclusion of each chapter. These calls to action are informed by the epistemological framework she builds out over the course of the book: Black feminist technology studies, which she offers as a "new lens for exploring power as mediated by intersectional identities" and which has resistant potentialities (172). One potential critique of the approach utilized in the book is the reliance on Google search, which is unstable and constantly evolving as new (intentionally opaque) operating systems roll...