Event overview
What is the relationship between the resurgence of white supremacy and the latest boom in artificial intelligence? At the level of code, we can look to the algorithms that amplify racialized extremism on 4chan. At the level of discourse, we can look to tech moguls calling for the ethnic cleansing of San Francisco, the colonization of Mars, and their sick obsession with white population growth. Even predictive policing and the automated targeting of Palestinians are further symptoms of statistical brutality bleeding into everyday life. As such, cultural theorists have argued over what this present regime of power should be called. Is it still Neo-Liberalism? Is this Data Colonialism, the New Brutality, or so-called Late Fascism? Following this line of questioning, I argue that despite the differences in these techniques, what creates the historical continuity in the accumulation of power is the ever more abstract formation of whiteness embedded within racial capitalism. Still, in popular discourse, whiteness is undertheorized and often overdetermined as solely a labor investment in privilege. As such, this talk aims to gather preliminary materials for a theory of whiteness within the logics of automation. This talk moves through 3 theses. First, I begin with Tiffany Lethabo King’s contention that white anxiety creates the social a-priori of fungibility. Second, I argue that whiteness insulates itself from social movements and eases economic crises in the mid-20th century by declaring itself the general equivalent in cybernetic economies. And third, I conclude with the present collapse of white anxiety into an ouroboros – a materialist revolt against its own behavioral abstraction. I argue that these three historical movements of whiteness provide a genealogy of AI model collapse. The hope for this talk is to map the shifting grounds for anti-racist and anti-capitalist action against AI realism.
Brett Zehner is a writer and critical theorist. His research centers on the transnational rise of white supremacy and racial capitalism in relation to big data, abolitionist aesthetics, and critical theories of subjection. He is currently working on his manuscript Capital and White Anxiety. This text provides a critical genealogy of artificial intelligence and white anxieties through various crises of capital accumulation and social struggle. His work has been published in Que Parle, Media-N, and he has exhibited at Transmediale in Berlin. He is currently Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence and Communications at the University of Exeter. He lives in London.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 13 Feb 2025 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
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