Hackers have a bad reputation, as shady deployers of bots and destroyers of infrastructure. Maureen Webb would like to offer another view. Hackers, she argues, can be vital disruptors. Hacking is becoming a practice, an ethos, and a metaphor for a new wave of activism in which ordinary citizens are inventing new forms of distributed, decentralized democracy for a digital era. Confronted with concentrations of power, mass
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Join City Lights, the Goethe-Institut San Francisco, and Gray Area for Revisions, a week-long festival exploring how technological bias shapes our cultural realities.
Our trust in mediated experiences has never been lower. Governed by algorithms that perpetuate the biases and weaknesses of their developers, our cultural consumption is increasingly shaped by undetectable forces that determine our reality. Images play an important role here: fake photos and videos created with deep neural networks threaten privacy, democracy, and national security. Vision recognition systems skew gender, race, and class differences and become vehicles of discrimination. Underdeveloped AI models misrepresent the health disparities faced by minority populations.
How can we illuminate the algorithmic bias embedded within technology and counter the perpetuation of bias? What innovative approaches can we develop to strengthen inclusion, diversity, and sustainability in technology?
This festival brings a network of luminaries together to share new perspectives and rewrite new visions advocating for justice and reclaiming power.
The festival is part of the project IMAGE + BIAS that critically engages with the cultural realities being increasingly determined by imperceptible technologies.