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November 2022, English
13×21 cm, 232 pages, 15 b/w ill., softcover
ISBN 978-3-95679-563-3
Series
On the Antipolitical
Status
Available
Ramon Amaro

The Black Technical Object

On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black Being

Series Editor Ana Teixeira Pinto

To impair the racial ordering of the world, The Black Technical Object introduces the history of statistical analysis and “scientific” racism into research on machine learning. Computer programming designed for taxonomic patterning, machine learning offers useful insights into racism and racist behavior, but its connection to the racial history of science and the Black lived experience has yet to be developed. In this book, Ramon Amaro explores how the history of data and statistical analysis informs the complex relationship between race and machine learning. He juxtaposes a practical analysis of this type of computerized learning with a theory of Black alienation in order to inspire alternative approaches to contemporary algorithmic practice. In doing so, Amaro contemplates the abstruse nature of programming and mathematics, as well as the deep incursion of racial hierarchies.

Series
This series stems from a discontent with the indictment of identity politics as antithetical to “real” politics. The political, in this conception, is aligned with the need to transcend markers of identity that are said to hinder class solidarity and the potential for coalition building. Yet appeals to move beyond identity tend to leave unexamined the gender and racial schemas that undergird the notion of universalism, hence overlooking—and refracting—legacies of violence and oppression. On the Antipolitical aims to confront capitalist hegemony but does not aspire toward an abstract polity. Challenging the persistence of colonial formations in contemporary theory, the series argues that discussions of identity do not subtract or divert from political struggle, but rather add to it. The series is edited by Ana Teixeira Pinto.
On the Antipolitical