Publications
Goodtech, Voice-tech, and Economies of Racial Affects
Under review
2024
The recent emergence of accent-matching voice technology has been understood as a means to mask accents in real time and bridge sonic markers of national, ethnic, and racial difference within call-center work. The marketing of this ‘technology of empathy’ as a key to ending accent-discrimination and empowering workers, speaks to what we call a peculiar alliance between cultures of innovation and DEI, where entrepreneurs, venture capital, and modes of labor-discipline conspire towards ending racism and saving the world. To begin theorizing this historical moment, we draw on affect theory to shore up the techno-fantasies that accompany rhetorics of global empathy, connectivity, and empowerment. Through an analysis of a contemporary accent-matching platform, Sanas, we trace the means by which “DEI-innovation” finds its genre. We forward an affective reading of how Sanas positions itself as ally to the interests of brown workers and as a salve to an originary trauma of discrimination, to address how the rhetoric of affect enters the global politics and affective economy of racial capitalism. Through this discussion, we build on the notion of contaminated diversity to grapple with the cruel optimism of DEI-innovation, where ‘empathy’ turns difference into whiteness and care-work into customer service, where the desire for connection melts into cruel dreamscapes of meritocracy, and where this project of making globalization ‘feel good’ is constantly haunted by the specter of revolt.
“Algorithm”
Under review
2024
The question “What is an algorithm?” quietly presupposes another, one rarely asked outright but nonetheless presumed in anticipation of a particular answer: “What is its essence, its logic, its real object?” This essay considers various historical accounts of the algorithm circulated among computer programmers in the 1960s and 1970s as they sought to locate its “mathematical essence” across time and place—from ancient algorithms to snippets of modern code—just in order to dislocate the concept from its social and historical specificity. It argues that many efforts to historicize the algorithm simultaneously involves thinking them ahistorically. As such, definitional work surrounding the “algorithm” can be neither descriptively neutral nor scientifically autonomous. In its timeless and ideal form, the algorithm is made to do exactly the work of politics: to sanitize its material connection to industrial and feminized labor, to supply an origin for modern logics of economization and optimization and, above all, to lend discursive support for the legibility of a capitalist social formation. To think the algorithm as a political concept is to acknowledge that it has become a cyborg concept. It invokes, at once, a technical artifact, a drive towards ever-more efficient production, an aspiration for a world reducible to math, a metaphor for the neoclassical economic subject. To answer the question “What is an algorithm?” indeed surfaces an essence—but rather than one that unifies origins and objects in the actually existing past, this is an essence that crystallizes capital’s practically-existing metaphysics in the historical present.
Designing for Agonism: 12 Workers’ Perspectives on Contesting Technology Futures
ACM Conference on Computer Supported Work and Social Computing
Peer Reviewed Proceedings2024
Open Access PDF
In this paper, we gather 12 workers from a large technology company, as recent participants of a research initiative on the social impact of emerging technologies, to present a collaborative analysis of the opportunities and limitations of dissensus-based approaches to technology research and design. We introduce a series of speculative and deconstructive probes and present findings from their use in four collaborative design sessions. We then draw on the theoretical tradition of Agonism to identify moments of friction, refusal, and disagreement over the course of these sessions. We contend that this approach offers a politically important alternative to consensus-based collaborative design methods and can even surface new rhetorics of contestation within discourses on technology futures. We conclude with a discussion of the importance of worker-authored research and an initial set opportunities, challenges, and paradoxes as a resource for future efforts to "Design for Agonism."
Towards Labor Transparency in Situated Computational Systems Impact Research
ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency
Peer Reviewed Proceedings2023
Open Access PDF
Researchers seeking to examine and prevent technology-mediated harms have emphasized the importance of directly engaging with community stakeholders through participatory approaches to computational systems research. However, recent transformations in strategies of corporate capture within the tech industry pose significant challenges to established participatory practices. In this paper we extend existing critical participatory design scholarship to highlight the exploitative potential of labor relationships in community collaborations between researchers and participants. Drawing on a reflexive approach to our own experiences conducting agonistic participatory research on emerging technologies at a large technology company, we highlight the limitations of doing participatory work within such contexts by empirically illustrating how and when these relationships threaten to appropriate and alienate participant labor. We argue that a labor-conscious approach to computational systems impact research is critical for countering the commodification of inclusion and invite fellow researchers to more actively investigate such dynamics. To this end, we provide (1) a framework for documenting divisions of labor within participatory research, design, and data practices, and (2) a series of short provocations that help locate and inventory sites of extraction within participatory engagements.
Politics without Privacy, Review of Debrabander’s Life After Privacy
Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology
Book Review2022
Open Access PDF
Digital platforms stand to open new spaces for political assembly and enable social movements to materialize at unprecedented speed and scale. Yet, this promise has largely fallen short of its goal, as networked movements have thus far failed to produce the sustainable modes of collective action that early and mid-twentieth century labor and civil rights movements had delivered. Why can we not muster digital communities with the same power and contestational force?
Answers to this question arrive one after the other and, often before the ink can dry, new political ruptures emerge, demanding our ever-renewed analysis. Amidst this flurry, one particular answer demands pause, if only at first for its unexpectedness: Indeed, collective action has been disarmed in the digital agora but it is our fixation on privacy that is to blame. This provocation, delivered quietly in the closing chapters of Firmin DeBrabander’s Life After Privacy, follows a broader meditation on the historical emergence of our modern entitlement to privacy. It is written against common liberal democratic narratives that tell us that privacy is an essential condition to political autonomy and self-determination—that it forms the basic foundation of our democracy. On this story, it is no wonder that in our age of mounting digital surveillance, we lack the protected spaces necessary to nurture the independent spirit which previously drove democratic engagement and political organization before the emergence of digital media. DeBrabander’s position on the matter, however, flies in the face of our apparently deep historical relationship to privacy.
Research Themes
AI & CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY
My dissertation explores the politics of historical thinking about technical objects like the algorithm, the computer, the automata, and so on. It approaches these objects not as technical artifacts but as, first and foremost, political concepts. Drawing on Marx and his readers of Capital, I explore the untimely quality of these concepts, in that even as we speak of their invention, discovery, and development in an empirical past, they are also crystallizations of how we imagine them to figure into contemporary value creation and economic production.2022 – present
PUBLICATIONS
in preparation
UNTIMELY ALGORITHMS
The politics of historical thinking about technical objects
Felicia Jing
under review 05–2024
‘ALGORITHM’
Political concepts: a critical lexicon
Felicia Jing
THE TECH INDUSTRY’S LABOR PROBLEM
The responsible technology space frequently invokes conceptions of ethics, responsibility, diversity, inclusion, transparency, accountability, fairness, and so on... but too often in the absence of labor. This project explores the ‘AI ethics’ industry’s labor problem. It brings a range of critical theoretical resources—affect theory, Marx and Marxisms, feminist STS, black radical thought—to bear on the political aspirations of ‘tech for good.’ I also use participatory and speculative design methods to pilot alternative modes of collaboration in technology design processes.2022–2024
PUBLICATIONS
under review 05–2024
GOOD TECH, VOICE-TECH, & DEI
The management of racial affects in circuits of salvage accumulation
Juanis C. B. Sandoval and Felicia Jing
ACM FAccT 07–2023
LABOR TRANSPARENCY
in situated computational impact research
Felicia Jing, Sara E. Berger, Juanis C. B. Sandoval
ACM CSCW 11-2024
DESIGNING FOR AGONISM
12 workers’ perspectives on contesting technology futures
Felicia Jing et al. (11 others)
Journal of Responsible Innovation 06-2024
ONTOLOGIES OF TECHNOLOGY
Multidisciplinarity in assessments and evaluation
Juanis C. B. Sandoval, Felicia S. Jing, Adriana Alvarado Garcia, Sara E. Berger, Heloisa Candello, Caitie Lustig
THE AESTHETIC POLITICS OF DATA
This project explores the aesthetic politics of data through case studies of: the aesthetic drive towards consensus in data practices (collection, labeling, benchmarking); mimetic representation in generative AI; the distribution of sense in data compression technology; the construction of concepts like ‘redundant’ and ‘excess’ data; the politics of data silences; the politics of eliminating dissensus and disagreement in datasets.2024 - present
PUBLICATIONS
EASST-4S | 07–2024
AN EXCESS OF NOISE
The politics of machine listening and construction of ‘redundant’ audio data
Felicia Jing
12–2024
ALGORITHMS OF COMPRESSION
Literarity and the ineradicable ‘excess of words’
Felicia Jing
About Me
EDUCATION
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD
PhD Candidate, Political Theory
Reed College, Portland OR
B.A. Philosophy
EXPERIENCE
IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights NY
Research Staff Member (Research Scientist)
2023-present
FELLOWSHIPS
Cornell University, School of Criticism and Theory
Fellowship, Summer 2021
Johns Hopkins University, SNF Agora Institute
Student Fellow, 2020-22
GRANTS
IBM-Notre Dame Tech Ethics Lab, ‘The Ethics of Large Scale Models,’
2024-2025 (co-PI w/ Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal)
National Endowment for the Humanities, ‘Machine Listening in the Age of AI’
2024-2025 (contributor)
Socials
Research Sites
Contact