Abstract
I write this review in a context where discussions of structural racism, anti-racist protest, and institutional and societal reform for civil rights have attained a visibility that is all the more striking given that it is occurring in tandem with a global pandemic. These co-existing crises demonstrate the multifaceted nature of social and structural violence; news reports on the disproportionately high rates of infection and mortality among Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) communities illustrate how public health is impacted by the social and economic lived realities of people of colour, including housing, occupation and access to health care (Butcher and Massey, 2020). At the same time, social media platforms have been scrutinized for circulating disinformation about the virus that shift the focus from these contexts of disproportionate suffering and that may contribute to entrenched anti-Chinese racism (Heinrich, 2020).
In this context, it requires wilful denial to fail to see the interlocking nature of the socio-technical systems of oppression that Safiya Umoja Noble tackles in her discussion of racism and Google’s search engine. Noble’s analysis demonstrates the urgent need for widespread critique of tech giants and their role in everyday life as well as what she calls a ‘practical method’, a social justice approach to our information and communication landscape. In the case of Noble’s engagement with Google, this includes concrete recommendations for law and policy, strongly articulated arguments about our academic engagements with social institutions engaged in the provision of information, and creative reimagining of what socially responsible search engines could look like.
Algorithms of Oppression is a formidable work, and a great deal of its significance lies in how it demystifies and clarifies what are often obfuscated as complex technical systems beyond the understanding of everyday users. Indeed, many media and cultural studies scholars may shy away from the apparent impenetrability of ‘artificial intelligence’, ‘algorithms’, ‘big data’ and ‘Internet architecture’. Noble makes critique of these technical systems accessible not by oversimplifying the socio-technical forces that underpin our digital lives, but by demonstrating how critical engagement with these systems aligns with the interrogations that have been undertaken in cultural critique for decades. This includes questions of representation as her searches for ‘black girls’ and the pornographic results returned by Google indicate. It also entails explorations of the political economy of what have become intermediaries whose scale is on par with broadcast news, which leads Noble to argue that democracy’s health is dependent on more effectively regulating ad-driven entities like Google, and breaking up monopolies on information provision and knowledge generation. Indeed, one of the greatest strengths of this book is the clear contextualization of its analysis of Google within rich academic traditions, opening up algorithmic critique to wider scholarly audiences in media, cultural and communication studies.
To support this, in Chapter 1, Noble introduces the basic functioning of Google search, noting the significance of its thorough integration in educational contexts like libraries, schools and universities. The widespread propensity to ‘just Google it’ necessitates a recognition of how the racist, sexist and anti-Semitic results returned by Google are shaped by the platform’s algorithmic narratives about people, which are in turn informed by the market imperatives of the ad-driven, click-based Internet economy. Noble provides concrete examples of how Google discursively manages critiques of its search algorithm through recourse to claims of ‘neutrality’, while simultaneously maintaining their global operations in accordance with specific national regulations. She compellingly links Google’s regulatory manoeuvrings to broader discourses of race neutrality in media representational regimes, noting that a denial of race, including in shaping search results, has a long history in cultural practices and narratives that re-entrench White supremacy.
Where Chapter 1 closes with a call for close readings of the images and stories generated by algorithmic systems, Chapter 2 firmly establishes the theoretical grounding of this work within the traditions of Black feminism, and highlights the power of these traditions for critical perspectives on technology. Here, Noble considers the cultural and economic context of the pornographic representations found in Google searches for ‘black girls’. She links these results to not only tropes and bias within advertising, but also to longer histories of oppression rooted in slavery and colonialism and the commodification of Black women’s bodies as well as critique of the more contemporary lexicon of digital divides, leaky science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) pipelines, and post-racial discourse in Silicon Valley. As this wide-ranging set of contexts indicates, Noble links what are most often framed as purely technical questions to many of the considerations of structural oppression that are at the forefront of cultural studies.
Chapter 3 draws on another case, searching for ‘black on white crime’ and the White supremacist sites that this brings to the surface. Here, Noble explores the consequences of a search mechanism that does not present either the most accurate results (such as official crime statistics demonstrating its largely intraracial character) or a multiplicity of perspectives. A brief chapter, it would have been interesting if Noble had contextualized this case in its broader histories and contemporary practices, considering, for instance, the role of knowledge and information retrieval in American carceral structures underlying crime searches and categorizations of race therein. But in Chapter 4, Noble returns to this valuable contextualizing approach; here, she explores the limited frameworks on which we can rely for dealing with the deleterious impacts of our information on online platforms, including revenge porn and the ‘right to be forgotten’. These are questions of increased significance for marginalized groups as her discussion of mugshot.com demonstrates. When people of colour are disproportionately arrested without conviction, searchable databases of arrest photos create a real need for control over one’s online identity, but paid services for the removal of these images cannot guarantee that inactive links will be removed from Google searches.
In Chapter 5, Noble draws parallels between Google search and cataloguing and classification systems in libraries to show the ideological bases of the ways that information is categorized and then returned authoritatively as answers to queries and to the naming of individuals. She highlights the example of the term ‘illegal alien’ to refer to undocumented immigrants in the Library of Congress’s subject headings, naming that only changed in 2016 due to tremendous coordinated protest. Library classification systems, like the Google algorithm, are shaped by the dominant systems of power we are accustomed to exploring as cultural studies scholars, but some of their power lies in how decision-making around algorithmic design remain invisible, proprietary and unaccountable. She closes the chapter by calling for public search engine alternatives, an urgent appeal underlined by the commodification of user activity and information outlined in the subsequent Chapter 6.
As with more traditional news media forms, the influence of corporate priorities in the online sphere impacts on our information provision, imparting distinct values that shape the legitimacy and credibility of what Google search surfaces, results that are usually taken for granted as the ‘best’ ones. Challenging the fallacy of platform neutrality, Noble contests the colour-blind rhetoric of Google by tracing racial inequities across the entire cycle of digital production, from exploited global labour in coltan mining through to the coding initiatives aimed at Black girls in the United States that conceal the ongoing exclusion of people of colour in tech. Noble closes the chapter with a stark discussion of consequences and self-fulfilling prophecies, wherein exclusionary digital practices contribute to the ongoing marginalization of Black communities at the level of housing and education as well as work prospects.
In her conclusion, Noble ties the ambitious threads of the book under the banner of a Black feminist technology studies approach, dedicating space to the story of Kandis, a Black small business owner who found that the algorithm of Yelp consistently erased the existence of her hair salon. To close, and in line with the creative and critical visions of those working in the area of design justice (Costanza-Chock, 2020), Noble proposes a model for a transparent and ethics based search engine that captures the multiplicity of sources and perspectives in information provision.
As Noble notes, with the study of Google’s search algorithm, as with any research on digital media platforms, insights are susceptible to becoming outdated as soon as they are written (for instance, Google recently changed how long it saves search results (Hern, 2020), countering their previous stance on keeping an unedited cultural record of humanity). But the valuable contribution of Algorithms of Oppression is not to document racism as occurring at a specific moment or in a particular way, but to establish a social justice approach to our information systems as they develop and shift. This future-oriented perspective is essential for addressing how algorithms as socio-technical forms contribute to cultural and economic practices that are profoundly isolating, violent and exclusionary, and for seeking more ethical alternatives for our everyday technologies. This book provides a brilliant invitation for a wide range of engagements in this vein.
