Source
James, A., Hynes, D., Whelan, A., Dreher, T. & Humphry, J. (2023), LIT-1342, read in NOTE-1041.
What was actually shown
An argument with illustrations:
- Access. LinkNYC’s kiosks were offered as free Wi-Fi for poorer neighbourhoods and read, after Green (2020), as a way to collect and monetize users’ data. Smart kiosks and poles “can increase the visibility of groups and even entire neighbourhoods through their interactions and data traces.” The paper concludes: “Access is generally angled ‘up’ … Access is however bidirectional, and access ‘down’ for powerful players is politically consequential.” It quotes Benjamin on being “included, and hence more accurately identifiable, in an unjust set of social relations”.
- Transparency. Under Robo-debt, the automated recovery of assumed welfare overpayments, “No credible claim to transparency was made …, though transparency was arguably demanded of welfare recipients through the ‘reverse onus’”, the requirement that recipients disprove the debt. The scheme was eventually ruled unlawful. Elsewhere, procedural transparency is said to hide “the contractual relations through which these technologies are developed”, where proprietary algorithms “often cannot be scrutinised”.
What this does not say
- Not how often. The cases were chosen to illustrate. Nothing in the paper estimates how often access or transparency remedies run backwards.
- Not that transparency or inclusion is harmful as such. The paper says such remedies are insufficient and open to reversal. Its recommendation is refusal, not opacity.
- Not a measurement of legibility. Neither direction is quantified. The connection to TERM-064’s directed relation is the record’s.