Description
- We were inspired by Ritual Design, Donna Haraway, Ethics of AI, Data Feminism, Cyberqueer Movements, Lesbian Technologies for Liberation, Indigenous Protocols for AI, the point was not to talk about ethics, but rather to embody it.
- Against binary differentiation
Further information
Among Indigenous North American culture, Two-Spirit refers to individuals whose spirits are a blending of male and female spirit. Two-Spirit is essentially a third gender recognized in many Indigenous cultures. (Pasca et al. 2020).
The Two-Spirit value refers to gender but it goes beyond, to do with inclusion and representation. Complicating, entangling and problematizing binary differentiation: male/female, West/East, North/South, right/left, pros/con, etc. can help challenge other hierarchical (and empirically wrong) classification systems. To enter in the binary way of thinking does not just accentuate polarizations (injustices and violence) but also invisibilises (enslaves, colonises) all the spectrum in between, that is chaotic, temporal, simultaneous and contradictory.
It also refers to codependence and entanglement – life, emotions, weather, histories, realities, imaginations and even futures are so much more than static data. Barad (2007), has named this intra-action, a term that we like because it considers the inseparability between objects, peoples, ideas and systems.
In terms of designing AI, we propose a move from “interaction design” to political intra-action, because it opposes the one directional mode of ‘interaction’ – a human tweaking its pre-existing, inert, neutral things. Intra-action emphasises humans and things (nature, dreams, communities,
values etc.) becoming together through on-going productive encounters. That cannot, and is not, considered in the binary programming system. This is a call to make emphasis not on the force of the relation in between (humans and data), but on the power within the infinite possibility of becoming
in the encounters with the difference: gender, race, politics, age, nationality, etc.
The shift from interaction to intra-action is an urgent one, while we don’t transition to a different discourse that informs classification systems there will be little room for data justice, and so we quote Audre Lorde, who wrote with more beauty and passion:
- ‘What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow parameters of change are possible and allowable… survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.’
Resources
- D’Ignazio, C. and Klein, L.F., 2020. Data feminism. Mit Press.
- Cyberfeminism Index