Informatics of the Oppressed by Rodrigo Ochigame :

Information is power. In pyramids, power is concentrated, so also information, which is hidden or kept to be used at the right time, with a view to accumulating and concentrating more power. In networks, power is deconcentrated, and so is information, which is distributed and disseminated so that everyone has access to the power that their possession represents.

— Chico Whitaker

cc @dredmorbius

Some quotes:

The conflict of interest between advertisers and users has always been evident to the designers of commercial search engines. In 1998, a few months before the incorporation of Google, graduate students Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page presented their prototype of a web search engine at an academic conference. In an appendix to their paper, they commented, “We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.” Indeed. More than two decades after this prophecy, all major search engines, Google first among them, now operate precisely on the business model of surveillance-fueled targeted advertising.

These search engines’ algorithms are optimized for profit. The advertising industry governs the bulk of research and development in the field of information retrieval. Computer scientists and engineers often measure the “relevance” of potential results and test the “performance” of candidate algorithms according to evaluation benchmarks and validation data sets dictated by industry priorities. The predominant systems are designed to maximize ad revenues and “engagement” metrics such as “click-through rates.” Consequently, these systems tend to promote content that is already popular or similar to what users have seen or liked before. Whether the predictions of popularity and similarity are based on simple correlation and regression analysis or on complex machine learning models, the results tend to be predictable and like-minded.

In fact, from the very beginnings of informatics—the science of information—as an institutionalized field in the 1960s, anti-capitalists have tried to imagine less oppressive, perhaps even liberatory, ways of indexing and searching information. Two Latin American social movements in particular—Cuban socialism and liberation theology—inspired experiments with different approaches to informatics from the 1960s to the 1980s.

What happens the day after the revolution? One answer is the reorganization of the library.

In the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Fidel Castro appointed librarian María Teresa Freyre de Andrade as the new director of the Jose Martí National Library in Havana. A lesbian and long-time dissident who had been exiled and jailed by the previous regimes, she had long been concerned with the politics of librarianship. In the 1940s, she had articulated her vision of a biblioteca popular, a “popular library,” distinct from a merely “public” one. Whereas the public library may be a “rather passive” one where “the book stands still on its shelf waiting for the reader to come searching for it,” the popular library is “eminently active” as it “makes extensive use of propaganda and uses different procedures to mobilize the book and make it go in search of the reader.”

In many Latin American countries, including Brazil after the 1964 military coup, authoritarian regimes took violent measures to silence dissidents, such as censorship, imprisonment, torture, and exile. Some of the most vocal critics of these measures were Catholic priests who sought to reorient the Church toward the organizing of the oppressed and the overcoming of domination. A key event in the formation of their movement, which would become known as “liberation theology,” was a 1968 conference of Latin American bishops held in Medellín, Colombia.

The Medellín experience inspired a group of liberation theologians, largely from Brazil, to try to envision new forms of communication among poor and oppressed peoples across the world. Their objective was conscientização, or “conscientization”: the development of a critical consciousness involving reflection and action to transform social structures—a term associated with their colleague Paulo Freire, who had developed a theory and practice of critical pedagogy.