Algorithms: Follow the Purple Light

What do we do about recommendation algorithms? What ethical standards could we use to reshape technology?

Hosts Annanda and Keisha talk to Stewart Noyce, a technologist who helped develop the internet, and Rev. Dr. Sakena Young-Scaggs, an Afrofuturist scholar and philosopher, to understand how we can all navigate recommendation algorithms in a life-giving way.

SHOW NOTES

• Learn more about Stewart’s work in marketing and consulting at StewartNoyce.com

• See IBM promoting their work at the 1994 Winter Olympics in this vintage ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNZ7k9Kgmek

• How do algorithms drive social inequality? Virginia Eubanks explains in Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police and Punish the Poor (St. Martin's Press)

• What’s Afrofuturism all about? Read Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture by Ytasha L. Womack (Lawrence Hill Books)

• Learn about Black entrepreneurs receiving 1% of all venture capital: Sources of Capital for Black Entrepreneurs, Harvard Business Review, 2019 by Steven S. Rogers, Stanly Onuoha, and Kayin Barclay

• Explore more on “life giving and death dealing” from African feminist theologian Mercy Oduyoye in Beads & Strands: Reflections of an African Woman on Christianity in Africa (Theology in Africa), Orbis Press (2013)