who are they designed for? who is technology for? With the revelation of the disconnect between the human and planetary reality, it becomes necessary to mention that this misunderstanding itself is rooted in capitalist-centric philosophy. The Anthropocene debate reveals that the oikos was always meant for the colonial standard and was achieved by the exploitation of the other. This means that the technology that was developed to exceed the human umwelt, put human space, universally, in danger, even though the technology was developed and deployed by those who have been the oppressors for centuries. At the same time, this technology puts the people in the Global South disproportionately at harm, and is never designed for them. For example, Google Earth as a mapping technology allows one to find the smallest nook in the “developed” world, but as Mayukh Sen puts it,“Google Earth is not a vaccine for everyone’s homesickness. For those of us whose corners of the world are considered ‘remote’ or ‘uncharted’ from an essentialist white, Western perspective, the interface is far from seamless.” He makes this statement after he could easily find his address in New Jersey, but could not find his ancestral village in India.54 Surveillance technology such as facial recognition and genetic testing has allowed the biggest human rights abuses to occur. The Chinese government has close to a million Uighur Muslims in “reeducation” camps and was able to do so through unbridled surveillance technology.55 The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a non-profit was able to find 24 pages of leaked documents proving the existence of these camps that the Chinese government continues to deny, and revealed the use of mass-surveillance technologies to identify and arrest minorities in the country.56 “The ICIJ reports that the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP), a policing platform, is used by the police and other authorities to collate personal data, along with data from facialrecognition cameras and other surveillance tools, and then uses artificial intelligence to identify categories of Xinjiang residents for detention.” “The documents also say that the Chinese government ordered security officials in Xinjiang to monitor users of Zapya, which has about 1.8 million users, for ties to terrorist organizations. Launched in 2012, the app was created by DewMobile, a Beijingbased startup that has received funding from InnoSpring Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley Bank and Tsinghua University and is meant to give people a way to download the Quran and send messages and files to other users without being connected to the Web.”57
54. Mayukh Sen, “Dividing Lines,” Real Life, March 27, 2017, https://reallifemag.com/ dividing-lines/. 55.Catherine Shu, “Leaked Chinese Government Documents Detail How Tech Is Used to Escalate the Persecution of Uighurs, TechCrunch” (TechCrunch, November 25, 2019). 56.Austin Ramzy and Chris Buckley, “‘Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims,” The New York Times (The New York Times, November 16, 2019). 57. Austin Ramzy and Chris Buckley, 2019.
