Exploring AI at the intersection of gender, politics, law, and ethics – because the most important questions about technology were never technical.
The AI conversation is loud, fast, and mostly dominated by technologists. What’s missing are the frameworks that feminist scholars, political scientists, legal thinkers, and ethicists have spent decades developing. The frameworks built for exactly the questions AI is forcing us to ask: Who holds power? Whose bodies and data get classified, extracted, and controlled? What does justice look like when the system making decisions about your life is an algorithm?
This series brings those frameworks to the technology reshaping our world. Each article draws on intersectional feminism, political economy, critical race theory, and legal analysis to cut through the hype and ask the questions the tech industry isn’t asking – or doesn’t want to.
If you’ve ever wondered who builds AI, whose labor makes it possible, or why a facial recognition system can identify a white man with 99% accuracy but fails a Black woman one-third of the time, you’re in the right place.
The Series:
Gender, Power, and the Coded Gaze
1. What Sojourner Truth Can Teach Us About AI Bias Joy Buolamwini put on a white mask to be seen by facial recognition software. Then she wrote a poem about it. What happens when you bring 170 years of feminist theory to the technology that can’t see Black women? Read →
2. The Ghost Workers Behind Your ChatGPT AI doesn’t build itself. Behind every “automated” system are thousands of invisible workers, data labelers earning $2/hour, content moderators developing PTSD, and gig workers who unknowingly built surveillance tools for an authoritarian government. (Coming Soon!)
3. A Sheriff Typed ‘Search for Female’ Into an AI Surveillance System Six words. An 83,000-camera network. A multi-state digital manhunt. How period-tracking apps, location data, and facial recognition are being weaponized against reproductive autonomy and trans identity. (Coming Soon!)
4. AI Doesn’t Need More Engineers. It Needs More People Who Study Power. The AI governance table is full of technologists and lawyers. What’s missing are the people who study power for a living and who know that ‘fairness’ and ‘justice’ aren’t the same thing. (Coming Soon!)
5. Would You Rather Have a Tool That Thinks for You or One That Makes You Think? AI can make you faster. It can also make you dumber. A practical framework for using AI without surrendering your critical thinking, and a hands-on exercise to test your own assumptions. (Coming Soon!)
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