Author: Amina Kirk and Mae Watson Grote (Change Machine)

Tech’s ability to accumulate and wield power is unquestionable. The dominance of the Big Four tech firms — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google — has commoditized consumer data in unprecedented ways, subjecting all of our online activity to search, analysis, and constraint. These dynamics not only perpetuate existing forces, making products and payments accessible to white consumers who are ready adopters, but intentionally exploit and prey upon low-to-moderate income consumers with product placement and ads for targeted services such as payday loans. Without reform, we run the risk of exacerbating inequities — the racism and sexism so hardwired in our society — leading to even further financial insecurity. We must hold all of fintech accountable to wield its power in ways that challenge and change the policies, practices, and beliefs that keep Black and Brown women navigating financial insecurity from achieving their financial goals, much less acquiring or leveraging wealth for economic mobility. We must reform the financial system to intentionally and surgically reverse digital redlining one practice at a time.

Author: Ulises Ali Mejias (State University of New York at Oswego)

This paper focuses on forms of discrimination, including racism, that are produced and replicated when the state uses biased algorithms, and when the state fails to regulate corporations that use biased algorithms. The paper specifically asks what happens when the state—whose purpose is to guarantee the rights of citizens—becomes a political and business partner with corporations whose profit model hinges on exploitative data-driven advertising, platform services, and gig work. The framework of “data colonialism” (Couldry and Mejias 2019) is used to examine the historical roots of these new forms of extractivism. Suggestions are reviewed for how the public can help prevent the deployment of discriminatory algorithms, and hold states and corporations accountable when this happens.

Author: Veena Dubal (University of California, Hastings College of the Law)

Technology platforms may be understood as the symbolic “cotton mill” in today’s rapidly growing digital economy. Just as the capital-intensive nature of unregulated factory production amidst the industrial revolution expropriated and exploited human labor, today’s platforms—with their venture capital-facilitated business models, monopoly and monopsony-guided ideologies, and resistance to regulation—create and rely upon profoundly immoral economies of work. In this article, I argue that firm fissuring practices across the tech economy have created a two-tier system of workers. This two-tiered system has undermined possibilities of labor intervention in the broader, racialized injustices produced through and with digital capitalism. In the face of this, the most vulnerable, racial minority, and immigrant workers—often relegated to temporary labor or independent contracting—have organized to claim both labor power and to produce friction in the production of racially unjust automation technologies.

Author: Fallon Wilson (#BlackTechFutures Research Institute)

Black businesses have been disadvantaged due to racial inequalities, as outlined in what Kapor (2018) refers to as the “Leaky Tech Pipeline,” which examines how intersecting racial tech disparities, such as the lack of access to the high-speed internet, business mentors of color, and non-dilutive capital, affects Black tech businesses’ ability to scale. The lack of digital infrastructure (e.g., access to high-speed internet) to support the growth of non-tech Black businesses into e-commerce further amplifies these disparities while the monopolistic tendencies of corporate giants like Amazon, Apple, and Google use their algorithms to absolve competition from smaller Black firms. Further, by outlining federal policy solutions by which Black businesses can scale and thrive in a competitive online marketplace, including federal policies and recommendations from the Small Business Administration, Federal Communications Commission, and pending antimonopoly legislation (e.g., Ending Platform Monopolies Act), we can exemplify how to help “level the playing field” (e.g., reduce racial tech disparities) for the growth of Black tech businesses in the United States.

Author: Shelly Steward (The Aspen Institute)

Platform work, or the use of apps, websites, or intermediaries to connect workers to tasks, is an increasingly common way of arranging work in the tech sector. Platforms weaken the relationship between workers and employers by acting as a mediator between them; workers interact with an impersonal interface rather than a supervisor. These arrangements provide workers with few career prospects, while offering low wages and few benefits. Existing estimates suggest workers of color are concentrated in these jobs. As such, platform-based work represents the latest iteration of a racial exclusion in the U.S. labor market, which holds workers of color from opportunities for career growth and wealth-building, contributing to the country’s persistent and substantial racial wealth gap. Solutions include policies aimed at improving platform work conditions, and alternative models of platform work, which hold potential to bring a more equitable future of work.

Author: Cierra Robson and Ruha Benjamin (Princeton University)

In this paper, we examine the racial dimensions of five recently proposed antitrust bills targeting the tech industry. Racial inequity has always been maintained by formal laws and policies (i.e., de jure discrimination) and informal norms and practices (i.e., de facto discrimination). While the aforementioned bills prevent de jure anti-competitive behavior, they do not completely address de facto discrimination. Drawing upon the concept of opportunity hoarding (Tilley 1998), in which members of privileged social groups monopolize valuable resources to maintain their advantage over subordinated groups, we argue that workplace discrimination stifles opportunities for Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) talent within the tech industry and is, therefore, relevant to tech policy debates. To advance racial equity, advocates must address how workplace culture perpetuates opportunity hoarding, and proposed legislation must be combined with systemic efforts to directly address racism in the tech industry.

Author: Seeta Peña Gangadharan (London School of Economics and Political Science)

Changes in our technological infrastructures are deepening inequalities and intensifying systemic racism. As society becomes more reliant on computation-hungry technologies such as cloud or software as services, computational service providers are hollowing out public institutions and diminishing their ability to administer basic democratic duties and to serve populations. For members of marginalized communities, this transformation adds to the challenge of getting the state to adequately address economic disparity, cultural violence, and political power imbalances, further obstructing paths to racial justice and equity. This paper argues that the rise of computational power warrants new ways of demanding racial equity and justice above and beyond familiar interventions focused on equitable access, diversity, and inclusion. To build out this argument, the paper looks at historic ways that race intersects issues of technology governance and identifies blind spots that overlook the outsize influence and wealth of technology companies. The paper then explores Big Computing, differentiating between computational power and the kinds of power associated with networked or platform technologies. Computational power often works around democracy, and its problems encompass more than the typical ones of access, bias, privacy, or free expression. Advocates for racial justice and equity face a unique opportunity to lead debate on computational infrastructure and its broad implications for equity and justice.

Author: Nicol Turner Lee (Brookings Institution)

Structural racism and discrimination have seeped into the aspirations of the digital revolution, perpetuating systemic inequalities against historically marginalized communities and excluding them from the benefits of the online economy. Mass video and data surveillance, algorithmic oppression and biases, and technology companies’ unfettered access to online consumer data perpetuate digital inequities while depriving people of access to opportunity. These realities are worsened by the absence of clear policy guardrails on technology and the lack of current and future interpretability of existing civil and human rights laws. This paper calls for policymakers, industry, and civil society leaders to establish a comprehensive civil rights framework in the digital economy that prevents the regression of progress that historically disadvantaged and other vulnerable populations have made in civil rights.

In September 2022, the Convergence Partnership released the first-ever report to focus exclusively on the funding of narrative change, Funding Narrative Change, An Assessment and Framework. The new report was written by two leading experts in the field, Rinku Sen, executive director of Narrative Initiative, and Mik Moore, principal and founder of Moore + Associates. Narrative change has become a popular focus with growing urgency to change public narratives around issues like racial justice, health equity, abortion rights, and rights for trans people. But because this area of work is relatively new for funders, the work is often siloed, leading to a lack of meaningful results. The report’s authors propose a framework for funders and practitioners to shift narratives via mass culture, mass media, and mass movements.

“We will not make significant change without building all three kinds of narrative power, hopefully operating in concert with each other for maximum impact. Our audiences should not be able to go anywhere without encountering our ideas and stories. That kind of saturation, combined with clear paths to action, will change the environment and make more ambitious policy achievable and enduring.”

It’s a must read for funders and practitioners who want to ensure greater efficacy in their narrative change efforts. 

Nashville’s strong and sustained growth has helped make it Tennessee’s largest city and the state’s biggest economic powerhouse, but racial inequities in the workforce threaten the region’s future prosperity. This report, produced in partnership with the Urban League of Middle Tennessee and Lightcast, with support from JPMorgan Chase, offers a comprehensive look at the racial inequities in workforce outcomes that have long persisted in the Nashville metropolitan region. It also underscores how the Covid-19 pandemic is impacting these dynamics and how automation is projected to affect industries and workers in the area. Our in-depth analysis of disaggregated equity indicators and labor market dynamics found that only about 41 percent of the region’s 915,000 workers hold good jobs, that white workers with only a high school diploma earn higher median wages ($17/hour) than Black workers with an associate’s degree ($16/hour), and that eliminating racial inequities in employment and wages could boost the Nashville economy by $9.5 billion a year. The report concludes with actionable solutions to advance workforce equity across the region, informed by these findings and shaped by local leaders. Download the report.

Media: Here's a Blueprint for How Nashville Can Achieve Workforce Equity (The Tennessean)