Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life ed. by Ruha Benjamin (review).

Abstract

Reviewed by: Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life ed. by Ruha Benjamin David Theodore (bio) Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life Edited by Ruha Benjamin. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. Pp. 416. The scholars in this edited collection merge American race and ethnicity studies with science and technology studies. The book's title plays on the word capture: technology is captivating, editor Ruha Benjamin suggests, in that it takes hold of both bodies and imaginations, imprisoning us in deleterious mental, physical, and social structures. In his foreword, sociologist Troy Duster evokes social construction, writing that algorithms and robots can be racist because racist societies constructed them. Benjamin's premise is more pointed: the technology that enthralls us in our daily lives is precisely the technology that enables social control of racialized people. Technoscience embeds and extends carceral states. Sometimes multiauthor collections don't hang together well. This one does. The project began with a symposium Benjamin organized at Princeton University in 2015, entitled "Ferguson Is the Future." Four presenters from that symposium are in this book; three of them, Benjamin and sociologists Alondra Nelson and Dorothy Roberts, contribute interviews rather than studies. Sprightly curated into three sections, the twelve chapters move from physical imprisonment to digital surveillance to speculation about a postcarceral future. One binding theme is the practice of including the author in both the scholarly framework and the narrative arc. The leitmotif here is Duster's aphorism, "Scratch a theory, you find a biography," laid out in his interview with Benjamin in the book's fourth section. Andrea Miller, for instance, begins a chapter on drones and policing by recounting a 2016 visit to a lasershow at Stone Mountain Park near Atlanta. Mitali Thakor's analysis of how police use digital tools to track child pornography began with three years of ethnographic fieldwork. Madison Van Oort probed the fastfashion retail industry by working in it. Another theme is that activist scholarship should take inspiration from art. Benjamin cites novelist Octavia Butler in the introduction, bluntly assessing fiction writers as kin to STS scholars. Thus liberated, the writers range wide in their sources. R. Joshua Scannell looks at Stephen Spielberg's film Minority Report to address the sociological harms of anticipating crimes before they happen. Anthony Ryan Hatch cites the television show Chopped in his plea to cut the link between corporate food production and prison life. And Christopher Perreira uses a 2008 Chicano novel by Alejandro Morales to understand racialized medical care in a Southern California tuberculosis sanatorium. [End Page 867] As a result, the authors invoke history often but rarely have historical questions or arguments. Neither race nor science nor technology develops or changes over time in any meaningful way; digital surveillance through data tracking is no different, conceptually, than physical imprisonment. Britt Rusert for instance, takes the concept of "laboratory life," applies it to the colonial plantation, and then uses that rubric to analyze black biopower in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. To get a view of the questions about race and technology posed to historians, scholars might read this collection alongside archive-based studies such as Benjamin Wiggins's Calculating Race (Oxford UP, 2020), which traces the twinned histories of race and actuarial risk, and Charlton McIlwain's Black Software (Oxford UP, 2020), which covers racial justice and the development of computing technology (both books were reviewed in the July 2021 issue of this journal). Still, the optimistic commitment to creative activist scholarship makes any concerns about historiography pedantic. The word "liberatory" in the subtitle is a vector. The authors suggest that existing states of affairs can serve as foils for imagining the future. Lorna Roth discusses the liberatory potential of Shirley Cards, the reference photographs created by Kodak for verifying skin color balance. Tamara K. Nopper's chapter on credit scores and the harms of digital profiles urges action. Ron Eglash theorizes a generative form of technological antiracism. And Nettrice R. Gaskins coins the term "techno-vernacular creativity" to explain how underrepresented ethnic groups use technology for cultural production through adaption and remixing—making new by making do with what's available here and now...