Esra'a (@alshafei once said that we shouldn't settle for exclusively white tech, and she wasn't talking about BigTech or the likes of OpenAI.
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Esra'a (@alshafei once said that we shouldn't settle for exclusively white tech, and she wasn't talking about BigTech or the likes of OpenAI. And I've really been thinking about these words since. Not sure what about her words really stuck with me.
But why should we support exclusively white tech just because its not BigTech? Any time we mention this, we're seen as not team players because if we're not doing stuff in BigTech, we're all supposed to be in the same team.
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Timnit Gebru (she/her)replied to Timnit Gebru (she/her) last edited by
@alshafei But if those with alternatives are doing the same thing of transferring generational wealth to white dudes, while discussing how they're better, and excluding the global majority completely (e.g.) why should we support that?
If their products are just as racist (and sometimes more so), why should we support that?
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Esra'areplied to Timnit Gebru (she/her) last edited by
@timnitGebru We're expected to settle for tech that's just marginally better - where data exploitation is reduced but the overall experience remains toxic because non-white communities are excluded from the design and development process, with this myth that we can't fully grasp the "complexities" of building platforms or protocols.
The results are products that fail to meet the needs of users who don’t look like them or face the same challenges, and remains inaccessible or even harmful.
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. I was just talking about this on another thread with regard to the new SWF. On the one hand @[email protected], their Executive Director, makes some great points about the potential value of a corporate-backed non-profit to help address equity and harm reduction in the Fediverse and more broadly. But in its current form, the W in SWF very much stands for White. And the initial projects and program their (white) research director has proposed don't discuss anything about equity or safety. Funny how that works.
That could change of course -- and Mallory, I was very glod to see you're planning a listening tour; Esra'a and Timnit would be two great people to talk to if they're not already on your list. But it really highlights the historical and current whiteness of fediverse institutions.
More positively, have any of you been tracking what Rudy Fraser's been doing with Blacksky? https://blog.rudyfraser.com/blacksky-part-three/ gives the best sense of the vision -- I think of it as a really interesting approach to community in "big-world" all-public social network that (in principle) could be very complementary to the scoped-visibility aspects of today's mostly-ActivityPub Fediverse. Of course Bluesky is not without its problems but their AT protocol is a much better protocol than ActivityPub for big-world apps (and their architecture and the simplicity of the protocol are much easier for developers to deal with than AP) so especially with the big influx there of Brazilian software engineers and researchers over the last month there's a lot of momentum in the ecosystem.
@[email protected] @[email protected]