Nancy Ettlinger

Increasing attention paid to the far right commonly glosses over transnational activity, which reflects an imperial strategy to globalize far-right thinking and its attendant discursive and physical violence against others. Empirically, I focus on far-right transnational linkages among ordinary people (not state officials) between the United States and Europe and across Europe, and between India and the Indian diaspora especially in the United States to present variation in organizational strategies. Transnational far-right activity's under-the-radar status is due to dated assumptions that presume transnational linkages occur on a top, down basis, and emanate from the formal political sphere, overlooking significant transnational material and immaterial linkages forged online by ordinary people who carry messaging through the far-right online ecosystem to affect political decision-making and societal discourses more generally. In the case of the far-right Indian diaspora, public-facing self-presentation aligns with Hinduism, which embraces peace and coexistence, despite the pursuit of the opposite, and this multicultural guise complements the bottom, up flow of far-right messaging to render Hindu nationalism, Hindutva, difficult to see. The far right throughout the world unites around casteism, the embrace of a fixed and “natural” societal hierarchy, and is fueled emotionally by the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. Both casteism and replacement theory are adaptable to different contexts to enable unity across contexts despite internal diversity among far-right groups, notably in the United States, and diverse targets of hatred. Far-right unity-in-diversity obviates constraints on transnational activity based on nativism and enables different in organization and psychosocial and cultural practices.

Educational institutions shape knowledges that students learn upstream and apply downstream in everyday life, notably in workplaces. Based on a critical synthesis of interdisciplinary literatures, the paper argues that current pedagogy datafies knowledges through the edtech industry, prioritizing skills and circumventing contextual and conceptual knowledges. The pedagogical orientation inculcates technocratic, non-relational thinking, obscures the effects of applications to which workers bring their learned skills, and prefigures deepening social and data injustice in a world beset with intensifying societal tensions and deep inequalities. Although scholarship on current educational trajectories presumes that the new, purportedly ‘disruptive’ digitalized technology has prompted a new pedagogy, I show that the so-called ‘new’ pedagogy has a history that would have predicted the wide-ranging problems evident in non-relational thinking and lack of critique in the data sciences and among its users.

This chapter asks why data scientists persistently produce methods capable of harmful applications, despite abundant evidence of destructive effects, and responds by examining thinking among AI scientists. Following a brief definitional introduction to AI intended for readers outside the field of AI, including the context for the development of AI in the United States, goals, and assumptions, the chapter identifies the regime of truths to which AI scientists subscribe. These truths – the assumptions underlying sophisticated methods – help explain problematic results insofar as they ignore issues of context that mediate intended effects. This section makes use of Thomas Kuhn’s influential scholarship, which argued that scientific paradigms – modes of knowing the world – evolve to a point of normalization in which assumptions become so ingrained that they become taken for granted and no longer receive scrutiny. I suggest we have arrived at this point. The following section, which makes use of Kuhn’s later scholarship, examines the governance of research mainly in US universities and in the private sector, and finds that research across all disciplines, including AI, are protected from external criticism, that is, criticism emanating from outside a discipline. This point helps explain the dogged persistence of wide-ranging problematic research applications.

The abundant evidence of harmful effects of digital technologies prompts the question how society tolerates damaging applications. This chapter argues the pervasiveness of technocratic thinking, fostered by prevailing educational pedagogy that inculcates technocratic values, shapes knowledges narrowly and cultivates a blind eye to injustices. The spread of technological advance to the US education sector enables ways to scale learning through the new ‘edtech’ industry, which targets large numbers of people in the US and worldwide for profit and replicates societal-wide problems such as the erosion of privacy and predictive profiling. The US private sector capitalized on struggles of traditional postsecondary education and precarious circumstances of a population that lacks time and money required for traditional universities. Scholarship casts edtech as ‘disruptive’ and represents the ‘new’ pedagogy as following new educational technologies. However, historicizing the pedagogy shows that its seeds were sown in the mid- to late 20th century when general problems emerged that presaged the digitalization of longstanding dilemmas. As evident in the strategic data-science industry, which has applications that affect everyone, the pedagogy upstream prepares students for jobs downstream by focusing on skill acquisition, but subjects lack knowledges to critically evaluate their work and its connection to societal problems.

This book examines the digitalization of longstanding problems of technological advance that produce inequalities and automated governance, which relieves subjects of agency and critical thought, and prompts a need to weaponize thoughtfulness against technocratic designs. The book situates digital-era problems relative to those of previous sociotechnical milieux and argues that technical advance perennially embeds corrosive effects on social relations and relations of production, recognizing variation across contexts and relative to entrenched societal hierarchies of race and other axes of difference and their intersections. Societal tolerance, despite abundant evidence for harmful effects of digital technologies, requires attention. The book explains blindness to social injustice by technocratic thinking delivered through education as well as truths embraced in the data sciences coupled with governance in universities and the private sector that protect these truths from critique. Institutional inertia suggests benefits of communitarianism, which strives for change emanating from civil society. Scaling postcapitalist communitarian values through communitybased peer production presents opportunities. However, enduring problems require critical reflection, continual revision of strategies, and active participation among diverse community citizens. This book is written with critical geographic sensibilities for an interdisciplinary audience of scholars and graduate and undergraduate students in the social sciences, humanities, and data sciences.

Digital-era technological advance promises efficiencies of automated governance while digitalizing uneven power relations, neglecting contextual issues, and seducing digital subjects into technological dependence to relegate thought to the machine. Resistances endeavor to subvert algorithmic affordances to serve communitarian purposes. Postcapitalist projects in which the boundary between postcapitalism and capitalism is porous especially are encumbered by the tension between techno-economic goals and those of inclusion and wellbeing. Lack of synergy between apparently oppositional strategies produces problems. It is helpful to reframe the overarching dilemma of antagonistic processes that paradoxically require agonism in terms of a dynamic process of continual change in mode of governance whereby the field of power relations shifts back and forth between indirect governance and the finality of direct, absolute sovereign power that precludes negotiation. This approach recasts precarity from an objectified condition to a process of continual slippage between fields of power. This understanding cannot itself produce change; the value lies in the prompt for continual reflection to open processes to revision by developing proactive strategies that respond to problems productively and inclusively. Otherwise, relinquishing thought to the conveniences of automated governance threatens prospects for resisting normalization, which numbs the mind to reflexive critique.

This chapter situates digital-era dilemmas relative to those of previous socio-technical milieux, focusing on US urban residential and work life from the early 20th century through the present. Organizationally, it sets the context for ensuing chapters with referents to problems and processes, and substantively, it elicits general similarities among objectifying and subjectifying effects of technological advance over time, recognizing different context-specific processes. The approach shows that despite new efficiencies, each step of technological ‘advance’ carries corrosive effects on social relations and relations of production, although vulnerabilities vary, as do responses among subjects across socio-technical milieux, and at any one point in time, relative to entrenched racialized, classed, and gendered hierarchies. Further, subjective effects of technological change intensify over time, and cumulative effects have produced unprecedented feelings of alienation and dependence on technology. Objectifying effects that differentially affect populations persist, but effects are more visible than ever with the advent of mobile devices and social media, enabling ordinary citizens to document and display crimes against racialized populations. Old modes of marginalization continue alongside new, digital-era capacities, deepening inequality. Yet, some subjects refuse the relegation of thought to machines and act on their marginalization by weaponizing thoughtfulness to harness affordances of algorithmic governance towards their needs.

The perennial dilemma of technological ‘advance’ is a tension between neoliberal efficiency and economic growth, and social, psychological, and environmental wellbeing. Despite apparently oppositional values, these priorities are complementary because each needs the other, in different ways, with destructive consequences when strategies lack consideration of both. Visibilizing dilemmas of technological advance across contexts and scales highlights the need for continual revision of plans and space for negotiation in designs that efficiently should deliver inclusion, wellbeing broadly construed, and deliberative processes sensitive to different perspectives. Yet digital technologies have been enlisted in automated governance, which robs subjects of agency and critical thought and methodologically is based on decontextualized correlations that ignore uneven power relations governing on-the-ground relations. Normalization crystallizes processes so they seem natural, without need for scrutiny, rendering subjects implicitly complicit in the closure of systems to much needed change. Following a book overview, the chapter discusses wellsprings, including lived experience as well as literatures on critical race theory and racial capitalism, critical data studies, digital geographies, digital humanities, science studies, feminist scholarship on agency, the anthropological and feminist strategy of ‘studying up,’ Michel Foucault’s scholarship on governance and ethics, critical geographic inquiry, and feminist epistemology articulated by Donna Haraway.

Institutional inertia suggests societal groups protesting injustices and demanding change from government and firms more fruitfully might adopt communitarian sensibilities, which embrace relative autonomy from institutions to produce change emanating from civil society. Communitarianism aims for inclusion, sharing resources, and prioritizing use value of productive activity instead of the conventional prioritization of exchange value for profit. Following a synthesis of traditional types of communitarianism, which exist in ‘corners’ of cities and regions worldwide, the chapter examines prospects for, and problems encountered in, the digitalization of communitarianism in ‘community-based peer production,’ CBPP, which aims to scale communitarian values to systematize communitarianism beyond small and bounded spaces. CBPP projects aim to encompass material production and consumption to develop sustainable, relatively autonomous communities across space. Semi/automating governance, select CBPP projects demonstrate innovativeness and thoughtfulness yet face dilemmas producing and protecting postcapitalist communities within capitalism while harnessing algorithmic affordances of a market-based system towards communitarian values. Some problems resemble those in conventional digital-era systems against which CBPP projects position themselves. The fundamental challenge is to resist the comfort of normalization by adopting a fluid approach to governance to accommodate continual revision, multiple modes of organization, and active participation among diverse community citizens.