11 Potential Reboot

Since I started publishing about issues of algorithmic accountability and algorithmic justice in 2017, there has been a wholesale revolution in how people think about these issues. Safiya Umoja Noble told me that when she was in graduate school, drafting the work that became her groundbreaking 2018 book Algorithms of Oppression, people thought she was crazy for writing about how technology could be racist. Similarly, Shalini Kantayyaa, the director of the documentary Coded Bias, told me that for years she had trouble talking to people at parties because they would ask what she was working on and she would say “a film about racist robots” and they would look at her like she was nuts. Kantayyaa and I met at a dinner party and spent most of the time talking about racism and robots. For both of us, it was the first time we'd run into someone at a party who understood what we were concerned about. Now, Safiya Noble has been awarded a MacArthur “Genius Grant.” Meghan Markle is reading Algorithms of Oppression; Joy Buolamwini is in the 2021 Vogue September issue as a model for Black women in STEM; and Coded Bias is streaming to millions on Netflix. For this amount of change to have happened in just five years is unprecedented. It bodes well for the future.