20 Indigenous and/or queer people discussed Google
These are the results:
Google deepens, perpetuates, and expands settler colonialism.
Google’s algorithmic structures are stabilising settler colonial data relations in information environments. Google does not connect the term ‘Aboriginal’ to any data that speaks to Indigenous excellence, and comparing Indigenous to ‘settler’ searches demonstrated the propagation of colonial/modern knowledge and deficit data.
Google Maps naturalises the dispossession of Indigenous lands.
Google’s representation of place that upholds and naturalises the dispossession of lands while also providing the technical infrastructure for racist engagement with place-names. Maps also provides digital access to sacred sites.
Google’s perpetuates gender/sexual dimorphism.
Google’s autocomplete suggestions contribute to settler colonial attempts to stabilise identity categories by continually reiterating associations across multiple years. This contradicts gender and sexualities’ “own performative fluidity” that also “serves a social policy of gender regulation and control” (Butler 1988, 528).
Google commodifies AI ethics.
Google’s ethics are positioned as the standard for AI. However, their imprecise and adaptive corporate rhetoric that emphasise specific narratives around its technologies and possible solutions, for example, ‘access,’ ‘inclusion,’ and ‘diversity’ can cause more harm than ethical practice—such as ‘inclusion’ referring to surveillant and extractive data practices.
Google’s removal of discriminatory results is insufficient.
The longevity of discrimination in Google’s systems shows that removing visible ‘problematic’ recommendations only addresses the surface of data linkage and sorting systems, and alternative methods are required to create a safer online environment.
Resistance is possible.
There are various ‘refusal’ practices that challenge Google’s position of the inevitability of ubiquitous AI. Abolition, digital disengagement and self-defence, reparation, and technological sovereignty support Indigenous and queer refusal/liberatory futures.