Monthly Archives: February 2021

Jessa Lingel talks about Craigslist

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Interview by Nazli Azergun

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691188904/an-internet-for-the-people

Nazli Azergun: In your book, you describe craigslist as a precedent to current platform economy, almost as an ancestor platform that isn’t necessarily function like its current day counterparts. You also claim that craigslist is a holdout from the olden days of Web 1.0, enacting an ethics of collaboration and access––like an island in today’s gentrified ocean of Web 2.0 mentality. For those who are yet to read your book, could you tell us about the publics of craigslist? Who are these people who use craigslist today for finding a collectible item, hitching a ride, and whatnot––instead of its function-specific counterparts? Why do they prefer craigslist?

Jessa Lingel: Craigslist has always been home to a number of different publics. It’s been online since 1996, which is a very long time in the context of the Internet. In the early days, its home was the San Francisco tech scene, and the site built a reputation for finding elite tech jobs. Over the next decade, craigslist became incredibly popular, for everything from finding apartments to buying and selling used goods to getting dates. By the time I was conducting research, craigslist’s reputation had slipped somewhat, and many people associated it with seedy personals and bottom-of-the-barrel jobs. But for many folks I talked to, craigslist filled an important niche, helping them find temporary jobs, affordable used goods like cars and electronics, and places to live. All in all, I interviewed dozens of people who used craigslist.  None of them only used craigslist, instead it was part of a constellation of platforms like eBay, Facebook Marketplace and others. But what still draws people to craigslist after all these years is its simplicity, as well as the fact that it’s free from ads.

Nazli Azergun: You also talk about the transition from Web1.0 mentality to a Web2.0 one, which indicates a passage from openness, collaboration, and accessibility towards exclusivity and a world of pay-per-view. What, in your opinion, has caused this transition towards a more gentrified worldwide web? What is it with craigslist that it made it through this transition mostly intact?

Jessa Lingel: If I could point to a single thing that pushed us towards a more gentrified web, it would be Facebook. I know it’s kind of passé at this point to kvetch [complain] about Facebook but it’s difficult to overstate how important Facebook is as a turning point in digital culture. It’s not like there was a clean break, where before Facebook everything was anonymous, free and open, while after Facebook, the internet became commercialized and closed off. But as Facebook became the dominant platform, other modes of being online became less appealing to users, to the point that platforms like craigslist can seem hopelessly backwards or out-of-date. Unlike a lot of platforms, craigslist never went for major platform overhauls or redesigns. Instead it stayed true to the early 1990s internet values of its founder, Craig Newmark and its CEO, Jim Buckmaster. The platform reflects their ideas of what the internet should look like, and because craigslist has been run by the same people for most of its 25-year history, it’s never had to change its appearance or values. It’s never had to gentrify.

Nazli Azergun: You state that you intentionally omitted housing-related craigslist interactions from your book as they did not raise significant tensions among users. I think this is a very significant choice. How do you read this phenomenon, this lack of tensions? What does it tell you about the current state of housing markets, housing-related racism and discrimination, and the precarity of individuals, if anything?

Jessa Lingel: No book can cover everything, and although An Internet for the People is a deep dive into craigslist, there are a number of things I didn’t cover, like the events section, the message boards and housing.  I’m sure there are a lot of tensions to be uncovered about craigslist housing out there, but they didn’t pop up in my interviews. Because housing isn’t a major focus of the data I have, I can only make educated guesses about what craigslist has to show us about the current state of housing markets. One theme that surfaced repeatedly in interviews was the idea that craigslist was part of “the poor people’s internet”, meaning that it was mostly a tool for people who felt excluded from fancy platforms. In terms of jobs, this meant looking for certain kinds of work on craigslist rather than more professionalized sites like Indeed. In terms of housing, the parallel would be that for people on a certain budget, it makes more sense to look on craigslist than on Zillow or Redfin.

One thing that COVID-19 pandemic has shown us is the intense divide between rich and poor in terms of property – while buying a second home has become popular in the midst of a pandemic, millions of poor people in the US are facing eviction and housing insecurity. A platform like craigslist could, perhaps troublingly, see a boom in the use of its housing section as poor folks look to it as a platform that’s geared towards affordable, temporary housing arrangements.

Nazli Azergun: Based on your book, I get the sense that craigslist has a particular ethical orientation regarding the monetization of user data and user anonymity. It exclusively seeks transparent monetization and considers anonymity as a useful tool instead of as a dangerous way of being online. How do you situate craigslist in the current universe of discussions around user data and privacy, especially in the context of competing approaches from the likes of Facebook, which seek infinite monetization at the expense of users’ rights, and the likes of EU legislation, which aims for transparency and user protection?

Jessa Lingel: Companies like Facebook would have us believe that user privacy is dead, and that their business models are the only ones that are sustainable. In terms of platform politics and privacy, the most important thing about craigslist is that it provides an example of how a platform can be successful and profitable without exploiting user privacy and turning people into data points. I am very much in favor of federal legislation for Big Tech, but I’m not sure EU legislation really goes far enough. Living in the US, I’m impressed by the willingness of the EU to go after Big Tech when it comes to anti-trust and the Right to Be Forgotten, and the EU General Data Protection Regulation has done some work to increase literacy around cookies. But ultimately, users are mostly just given a notification that their options are either to give up their data or not use the site. In the US, I’m hopeful that legislation around anti-trust and privacy will surface, without sacrificing the important protections of CDA 230, which protects websites from being held responsible for the bad acts of individual users. I don’t think the answer to needing more robust forms of content moderation should come at the cost of user privacy or platform experimentation.

Nazli Azergun: Finally, I think your work is an important piece of Internet history and many appreciate you as a successful historian of the Internet and digital culture. Could you give some tips on how to conduct good historical research on digital culture? What are your approaches to archives and methods?

Jessa Lingel: Thanks, I’m really glad you see the book that way. The most important thing with this book was getting Craig Newmark on board. Journalists haven’t always been kind to him or craigslist in the past, and so I wasn’t entirely sure he’d want to talk to me. But he wound up being the very first person I interviewed. He was very generous with his time and put me in touch with folks who’d been involved with craigslist during its early days. From there, my challenge was making sure I could talk to a range of people who had different perspectives on craigslist, because I didn’t want to be totally beholden to Craig’s views.

Aside from getting insiders on board, the best piece of advice I could give for digital history of a particular platform is to be really expansive in the initial literature review. It took me a long time to figure out the structure of this book, and what took shape grew out of reading widely on anything and everything related to craigslist – academic work, journalism, legal scholarship, as well as how-to guides for buying and selling online, true crime novels and even erotica. After categorizing the different themes that emerged across these sources, the book’s structure started to become clearer to me. It was both a blessing and a curse that there are no other monographs out there on craigslist – it meant I had total freedom to do what I want, but it also meant that there wasn’t much to contrast with. Reading widely was essential for helping me figure out what questions I should ask about craigslist, and what questions about the internet craigslist could help me answer.

Vanessa Diaz on her new book, Manufacturing Celebrity

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Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood

Interview by Sandhya Narayanan

https://www.dukeupress.edu/manufacturing-celebrity

Sandhya Narayanan: One goal of your ethnography is to delve deeper into the ways that celebrity, and its close relative, fame is manufactured and circulated. Yet one opposing undercurrent throughout the book is the recognition that aspects about the lives of the so-called rich and famous should be hidden, secret, and unknowable.  Could you say more about this relationship between the dissemination of revealing photos and scoops with the ways in which celebrities also manage their allure through keeping certain aspects of their life unknowable?  How is the looping of fame with privacy managed similarly or differently by Latinx, male, paparazzi photographers, and white, female, celebrity reporters?

Vanessa Diaz: Thank you for this very layered question. So my research led me to understand that it’s not necessarily that the lives of celebrities should be hidden, secret, or unknowable, but rather that celebrities themselves want to be able to strategically control and monetize these disclosures. The laws that have been put in place to protect celebrity children from paparazzi imagery isn’t because celebrities do not want photos of their children in the press. Rather, it’s because the celebrities want to control the supply of those photos, which can be highly lucrative. As I explore in the book (in chapters three and seven in particular) an exclusive photos of a celebrity’s child can be hugely valuable and can yield millions of dollars. Information and imagery about celebrity lives is valuable currency, and celebrities want to retain as much control over that currency as possible. And I discuss this as relates to various forms of capital in the book as well (especially chapter seven).  Regarding the last question about how fame and privacy are managed similarly or differently by Latinx, male, paparazzi photographers, and white, female, celebrity reporters, there are also interesting distinctions here. The reporters are generally seen as operating more from the inside, as part of the more formal channels of celebrity media production. And this leads to them being understood as more on the side of the celebrities. In the book, I point to several examples of celebrity-focused stories where reporters discuss paparazzi with celebrities in adversarial terms during interviews, despite the fact that the article the interview yields is peppered with and relies on paparazzi images of that celebrity! So this perpetuates and even amplifies the precarity of paparazzi who are working outside of the formal celebrity media production processes. Because of this, paparazzi don’t have to necessarily be seen as being on the side of the celebrities in large part because the celebrity narrative has been one that strategically manufactures a dynamics in which paparazzi are celebrity adversaries, rather than celebrity promoters. As I discuss in the book (particularly in chapters two and three), however, paparazzi have developed their own ethical codes to do what they can to stay on celebrities’ good sides, even if it’s outside of the formal production processes. I think the issues of visibility and invisibility that I discuss in the book are also wrapped up in these dynamics (e.g. see page 60).

Sandhya Narayanan: You point out in your ethnography the ways that rising or lesser-known celebrities rely on the coverage provided by paparazzi and celebrity reporters to launch themselves into the spotlight. Yet at some point, these reporters, especially the paparazzi, are framed as enemies who are bent on destroying the lives and careers of our most beloved celebrities. Could you say more about this shift, and the role that consumers of celebrity news and gossip (that is, people like me who enjoy reading the tabloids as they wait to pay for groceries in the checkout aisle) play in also making or breaking this transition. 

Vanessa Diaz: A goal of the book is to really pull the curtain back on these specific dynamics that you’re highlighting in this question, precisely because they are dynamics that consumers do inevitably play a role in. It’s important to understand that this shift is largely one that is manufactured by the celebrity-industrial complex itself. And I explore why this is in the book (particularly in chapter three), where I discuss the idea of celebrity empathy, which helps us understand how media can strategically cultivate affinity with certain people while strategically denying it to others. Being pursued by paparazzi to the degree that it can be presented as an annoyance is something that demonstrates a certain status or level of celebrity. So, performing annoyance, or even anger and disgust at paparazzi signifies importance. This is a way to assert and even flex celebrity status. However, it’s important to remember that even most A-list celebrities still rely on paparazzi for exposure. So, even someone like Jennifer Aniston who claims paparazzi keep her in a state of “false imprisonment” (pg 101 in my book, chapter three), also still uses them when she needs to strategically promote things like Smart Water, for which she is a paid spokesperson (pg. 113 in my book). So if you actually put together the pieces (which is what I hope my book offers), you can see how this shift you discuss is largely a shift performed (often by professional actors!), that, again, has to do with control and capital. Consumers are looking at and buying the magazines because of the celebrities they love, or love to hate, and not because of the paparazzi. And so it’s natural that the consumption of celebrity media, which is generally meant to celebrate, support, and help consumers get to know celebrities, leads to deeper celebrity empathy and, subsequently, increased demonization of figures like the paparazzi.

Sandhya Narayanan: Your work with paparazzi photographers was based primarily in LA. Yet, wherever a celebrity goes, there you would also find a paparazzi photographer. At one point, you also mention how one of the paparazzi photographers you were close with was shooting photos in New Orleans? Given the precarious nature of their work, how were these photographers able to travel across the country? How were they able to go on assignments out of the country? And is there some informal international network of paparazzi photographers?

Vanessa Diaz: The question of travel for paparazzi is actually an important one, and one in which you can see the value a good paparazzo has. Yes, all of the paparazzi I worked with on my research were sent by their agencies to shoot specific celebrities in specific locations outside of Los Angeles, precisely because they are known to get good shots. I don’t think there is space here to fully explain the structure of paparazzi employment, which I explore in depth in chapters one and two of the book. But, essentially, most paparazzi are freelance and work for specific photo agencies who have complete control over the sales of paparazzi photos. Paparazzi rely on the agencies to give them the cut of the image sales that they are promised. Even if the paparazzi are freelance, an agency might pay for them to travel if they know it might yield valuable exclusive photos. For example, in chapter seven (pg. 222-223), you can see a beautiful photo of Angelia Jolie, Brad Pitt, and their children shot by one of my main paparazzo collaborators, Galo Ramirez, in New Orleans. He was sent there by his agency and that photo ended up being a spread in People magazine, and several other of his images ended up in other outlets. So it literally paid for the agency to send Galo to New Orleans. And, as I explore in chapter two, the paparazzi only receive a small percentage of the total of their image sales; it’s the agencies that are really profiting from these images. Another way that paparazzi end up getting to travel is instances like the one I explore in chapter two (pg. 82-83), where a celebrity, in this case the entire Kardashian family, gets paid to work with an agency to have a paparazzo come shoot their entire family vacation. This guarantees an exclusive set of photos for the magazine (which they believe will translate to sales and, thus, they can recuperate the investment), and also guarantees coverage for the family.  So, again, you can see the ways in which much of the coverage of celebrities, including and perhaps especially paparazzi shots, is about offering increasing control to celebrities. And yet they still often perform the irritation with paparazzi invading their space, even when they are often specifically invited into that space. Finally, there are certainly international paparazzi as well in various locations. And various agencies will work with international paparazzi as well.

Sandhya Narayanan: An interesting aspect about celebrity media production is the way it provides some degree of inclusion for amateurs and individuals with little to no experience in celebrity media creation and production. At times, this type of amateurism is at odds with individuals who are more established in the field. But more recently, we also see the rise of cellphone technology that can let anyone take a good shot or recording. How do you think these technologies, which have the potential to allow anyone to produce celebrity news content, might affect the livelihoods of paparazzi and celebrity reporters?

Vanessa Diaz: It is definitely unique and interesting that paparazzi have been able to break into the industry without formal training prior to them entering the field. However, as I explore in chapter one in the section “Skill, Training, and the New Paps” (pg. 57), a lot of the notions about professionalism is steeped in racist tropes and stereotypes about unskilled Latinx labor. The reality is that it is a myth that anyone can do paparazzi work. That doesn’t mean that paparazzi come in knowing how to operate the incredibly expensive and complicated photography equipment. But, as Galo explains, they have intensive on the job training. Yes, smart phones make it so that anybody standing next to Justin Bieber can get a photograph and that photograph has the potential to sell. But it is an illusion that valuable shots can all just be done on cell phones.  There is certainly skill required in getting the exclusive, most valuable photos. Many of the most valuable, and frankly beautiful, paparazzi images entail the paparazzo having the skill to use complicated specialized equipment, like telephoto lenses that are sometimes several feet long (there are a few good examples in chapter one in the section “(In)Visibility and the Racialized Paparazzi,” which begins on page 60, as well as elsewhere in the book). Getting these shots also requires intel, which means you have to be a part of the network and have access to information so you know where to be to get the shot.

Sandhya Narayanan: I was struck by your assertion that celebrity reporters and photographers have created some of the most culturally significant and recognizable content since the turn of the new millennia. Yet, you point out that celebrity reporters do not think of themselves as journalists, nor do the paparazzi necessarily frame their photographs as photojournalism or art. This suggests that there is something going on in the structuring of media platforms within the US. Where does celebrity media fit in relation to other types of information media within the US? How can this positioning help us understand the inequities and precarities that paparazzi photographers and female celebrity reporters face in the industry? 

Vanessa Diaz: As I explain in the book, any distinction between entertainment and news media at this point in American culture is simply a function of a public imaginary—that there should be a difference between hard news and entertainment news. It appears that we are in the final days of the first reality star presidency, but perhaps not the last. And I think the Trump presidency has done a great deal to even further blur any potential distinction between hard news and entertainment news precisely because he treated political news reporters in the same fashion he and other celebrities have always treated (and disregarded, belittled, and even abused and assaulted) entertainment media producers.

In terms of celebrity reporters not always considering themselves journalists, and paparazzi not necessarily thinking of their work as photojournalism or art, I think that it is, again, an extension of this public imaginary I discussed above, which is steeped in hierarchies and cultural elitism around ideas about news. At this point, fake news has become everyday language, and we can understand celebrity media as the original fake news. Celebrities have been denying celebrity news reporting for a century, whether the reporting was true or not. What I think is different about the present moment is that celebrity news and hard news and journalism are increasingly blurring together both in terms of the subject matter of the coverage and the way the media producers are viewed and treated.

Thandeka Cochrane takes the page 99 test

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In the middle of the page a line jumps out:

“Nthanu telling, therefore, encapsulates a moral performance”.

Lying at the centre of page 99 this line also lies at the centre of the chapter that holds it, chapter 2, ‘Speaking Stories: Declining (m)orality? Orature, schools and elites’. The chapter tries to understand the purpose and role of a particular form of oral literature, nthanu, in rural village communities in northern Malawi, the small African country where I spent 18 months doing my fieldwork. In this chapter, and over the thesis as a whole, I am trying to solve a puzzle:

What do stories do, I wonder? Why do we tell stories to children? What does it do to us to grow up with particular kinds of stories? How do stories create the people(s) we become?

My thesis starts with a quote by the Nigerian novelist Ben Okri, in which he warns, “Beware the stories you read or tell: subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.”

This is what my thesis is trying to understand, how the stories we encounter as children, quite veritably our ‘children’s stories’, alter our world.

Initially, I had gone to Malawi to study early childhood development centres (ECD) – specifically the English language children’s fairytale books that are brought to these centres as donations. But, as is so often the case in anthropology, the village landscape that was to be my fieldsite had dramatically changed since I had last been there. The ECD centres were gone, and so my fieldwork inevitably shifted, from the centres to the books themselves. In searching for these books, I discovered a hidden world of village libraries, some beautifully built and stocked full of thousands of books, some barely remembered, filled with tattered books and dust motes lying behind crumbling doors.

In exploring children’s books in libraries, I also encountered the rich world of oral literature of the communities I lived in, in particular the stories used for teaching children, nthanu. Like in many societies across the world, nthanu, were fireside stories, told to huddled groups of children and adults who would sit around listening to them after evening meals. These days, very few tell the stories – something that was perceived by many I spoke to as a bitter loss. These stories, people told me, were enormously important. Not just for entertainment, but for building who they believed they were.

For my interlocutors, children’s stories were, and are, the means through which they create a moral community of belonging. They were, and are, also the means through which the political, social and moral codes of the society are transmitted. As one young woman told me,  “[nthanu] taught us how to live in a society, it taught us how to live, how to communicate, it was stories that told us what was life […] that’s what it taught us: oneness […] Gogu’s (grandmother’s) stories wanted to relate to us that this world is not just for us”.

These oral stories, therefore, transmit an entire moral and social code that lies at the heart of not just sociality, but at what it means to be human. Telling children stories at night is telling them who they are.

What then does page 99 tell us about my thesis? It is a somewhat convoluted, slightly over-technical discussion of what the performance of oral literature could mean in a rural village setting in northern Malawi – fitting for a thesis that sometimes loses itself in over-theorisations. But it is also a page that suggests one of the central arguments of my thesis; that the stories we tell are a fundamental part of the creation of our moral universes. And if we alter the stories we tell, we will alter our moral universe.

Thandeka Cochrane. 2020. Epistemic entanglements in an age of universals: literacy, libraries and children’s stories in rural Malawi. University of Cambridge, Phd. thesis.

Jenny L. Davis on her book, How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things

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How Artifacts Afford

Interview by Kevin Laddapong

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/how-artifacts-afford

Kevin Laddapong: Reading How Artifacts Afford is very refreshing. You have proposed a way forward for analysts and practitioners to think critically about technologies through the notion of affordance. However, as you mentioned in the book, the concept has traveled widely from discipline to discipline. It sometimes is undertheorized, and sometimes overtheorized. Could you please discuss what are the watershed moments shaping how scholars have approached the concept of affordances that has led to the current analytical landscape?

I’ll start with a working definition of affordance, for those who are unfamiliar. Affordances are how the features of a technology—its technical specifications—affect the functions of a technology. This includes direct utilities (what people can do with the technology) and social outcomes (what the technology does with us).

It’s unusual for a concept tot operate so fully between and across disciplines, as ‘affordance’ has. However, as I say in the book, cross-disciplinary travels can lead to conceptual blurriness and overworking.  Chapter 2 of the book provides a full intellectual history of the concept, which I’ll distil here into three general epochs

JJ Gibson introduced the concept of affordance in 1979 with his book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Gibson was an ecological psychologist who defined affordance as a relationship between organisms and environments. This was empirically derived from Gibson’s efforts to understand how WWII pilots interacted with their airplanes, and theoretically based in Gibson’s opposition to gestalt psychology (the du jour of the time). For Gibson, affordance represented an intrinsic relationship between people and objects, and his use of the term served a theoretical agenda to convey human-environment interaction as direct rather than representational

In the 1980s/1990s, Don Norman made affordance practical and tangible. Norman brought the concept to design studies with his canonical book The Design of Everyday Things. Norman positioned the designer as a psychologist, tasked with communicating to users, through design, how those objects ought to be used.

From the early 2000’s to present, with the rise of digital technologies and automation, affordance has conceptually exploded. Scholars in communication studies and other related fields have scrambled to understand a changing technological landscape and how technological developments integrate into, and affect, social life. Affordance is an effective tool in this regard due to its characteristic balance between technological determinism and radical constructivism.

In the book, I build on this history to transform an overloaded concept into an operational model. The model I present is called ‘the mechanisms and conditions framework’.      

Kevin Laddapong: The book requires us to reframe the question about technologies from what to how, for whom, and under what circumstances, which bring us to the Mechanism and Condition Framework.  For the blog readers, could you describe this framework, and discuss how it would lead to a different approach to the technologies around us?

Jenny Davis: The mechanisms and conditions framework shifts ‘affordance’ from a single concept to an operational model. The mechanisms of affordance address how technologies afford, and the conditions address for whom and under what circumstances?

The mechanisms map onto a series of categorical hooks: request, demand, encourage, discourage, refuse, and allow. These mechanisms are conditioned by three interrelated dimensions of perception—what someone knows about the functions of a technology, dexterity—one’s skill and capacity to operate a technology, and cultural and institutional legitimacy—how socially supported someone is in technological engagement.

The framework does two things. First, it gets outside binary renditions of human-technology relations. Technologies don’t just afford some action or not, but push and pull with varying degrees of force. This variable pushing and pulling is captured by the mechanisms of affordance (request, demand, encourage, discourage, refuse, and allow). Second, the model does away with implicit assumptions about universal subjects. Technologies function in myriad ways across circumstances and between individuals. The conditions of affordance specify how contextual factors come into play (e.g., for whom does the technology request and for whom does it demand?) 

Kevin Laddapong: Another major contribution of this book is its approach to politicizing technology. How can readers use the Mechanism and Condition Framework as a strategic and critical tool for thinking about technologies in everyday lives?

Jenny Davis: The book begins with the assumption that technologies embody human values and affect social relations. This assumption overlays the mechanisms and conditions framework with a critical lens that centralizes politics and power in socio-technical systems. Centralizing politics and power creates an entry point for interrogating whose interests existing technologies represent, how those technologies (re)produce structural social patterns, and how to build new technological implements that trouble the status quo.

The mechanisms and conditions framework provides a simple vocabulary for mapping not only direct technical functions, but also flow-on social effects of technologies as they interact with diverse subjects across a range of circumstances. With the mechanisms and conditions framework, analysts and activists can hold technology makers to account for what is, while reimagining what could be.

Kevin Laddapong: In order to make a direct impact, how could public and business sectors, such as tech companies, policymakers, and the media industry appropriate the framework in practice? Would you see any benefit to having these other actors engage with the framework as well?

Jenny Davis: I tried to make the book highly accessible for the very reason that I think the framework can be beneficial to those outside of academia, like the groups you mention in this question. The stakes of technological design are too high to keep ideas about design processes and outcomes cordoned off within academic circles.  Technologies have social effects. This is something we should all care about, and it is something that tech companies, policymakers, and the media industry can directly impact.

Corporate and government actors can use the framework to systematically plan how their creations will function both technically and socially, within a diverse, dynamic, and multifaceted world. Although it’s easy to criticize tech companies and governing bodies for their continued missteps, it’s also important to acknowledge how challenging it is to build something new and to imagine all the ways that new thing will affect the world and the people in it. The mechanisms and conditions framework helps put complex considerations on the ground such that social goals can be the start point, from which developers build. For example, those who develop and regulate technological systems can specify how their system will encourage autonomy and equity, and identify sub-populations for whom those social goods are refused.

The framework can also be a tool of empowerment for those who seek to hold corporate and governing bodies to account. If technologies do bad things, then everyday people can use the framework’s vocabulary to show, unambiguously, what those bad things are and how they distribute along intersecting lines of power, identity, and inequality.