Humankind can no longer afford to be lulled into complacency by narratives of techno-utopianism or technoneutrality, or by self-assured and oversimplified evasion. Every time we hear the call of a lullaby—soothing words such as“human error,” “virtual reality,” “the Cloud,” or others meant to coax us back to sleep, leaving the “adults” to continue driving—our response should be a warning siren, alarming us and those around us into a state of alertness and vigilance. Every established or emerging norm needs to be interrogated—whether the taken-for-granted whiteness of humanoid robots, the ostensibly“accentless” normative speech of virtual assistants, the near invisibility of the human labor that makes so many of the ostensibly “automated” systems possible, the hegemonic position enjoyed by the English language and the Latin alphabet within modern information-processing systems, the widespread deployment of algorithmic policing, the erosion of publicly governed infrastructures at the hands of private (and ultimately ephemeral) mobile platforms, the increasing flirtation with (if not implementation of) autonomous weapons systems capable of selecting and engaging targets independently, and the list goes on. The long-standing dismissal or evasion of humanistic and social scientific critiques of computing and new media is over. It has to be over,because to allow it to continue is simply too dangerous.
