The following paper offers a political and philosophical reading of ethically informed technological design practices to critically tackle the implicit regulative ideal in the design of social media as a means to digitally represent the liberal public sphere. The paper proposes that, when it comes to the case of social media platforms, understood along with the machine learning algorithms embedded in them as algorithmic technologies, ethically informed design has an implicit conception of democracy that parallels that of Jürgen Habermas’ procedural (...) democracy (Habermas, J. (1994). THREE NORMATIVE MODELS OF DEMOCRACY. Jurgen Habermas, 1(1).). That is, that democratic practices are encodable as procedures that produce valid discussion forums. Opposed to this, this paper suggests a turn to philosopher Jacques Rancière’s conception of politics as a guiding attitude towards technological design. This is done by, on the one side, using Rancière’s notions of “disagreement” and “distribution of the sensible” as the political starting point for the practice of design of algorithmic technologies. And, on the other, inspired by Karen Barad’s theories on agential realism (Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), 801–831. https://doi.org/10.1086/345321), by putting forward a political ontology of algorithmic technologies that reconceptualizes them in terms of how they assemble open-ended practices between human bodies and technological devices. (shrink)

Data about the accessibility of United States municipalities is infrastructure in the smart city. What is counted and how, reflects the sociotechnical imaginary of a time or place. In this paper we focus on features identified by people with disabilities as promoting or hindering safe pedestrian travel. We use a regionally stratified sample of 178 cities across the United States. The municipalities were scored on two factors: their open data practices, and the degree to which they cataloged the environmental features (...) that persons with disabilities deemed critical for safe movement through urban spaces. In contradiction to the dominating narrative of too much data and not enough analyses, we find that when it comes to data points that might be useful to persons with disabilities, data are lacking. This data gap has consequences both politically and materially—on one hand data could help enforce compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, on the other they would allow for safe route planning. We find that reading these data formats and collection patterns from the perspective of critical disability studies—particularly those whose work disrupts notions of “normal” —helps answer questions about potential benefits and harms of data practices. This lens has the potential to promote analysis that is as disruptive to injustices as it is practical. (shrink)