‘Good Tech’ and Technologies of Elite Capture
Under review at Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience
2025
This paper examines the utopian fantasies of AI technologies developed for social justice—tools that promise to improve the human condition, empower the marginalized, and bring about a more equitably connected global community—as paradigmatic examples of what Táíwò conceptualized as “elite capture.” ‘Good tech,’ we argue, is a productive discourse that magnetizes a cluster of promises to serve as affective lures that function both as a mechanism of value accumulation and, simultaneously, as a counterinsurgency tactic. We discuss, in illustration of these dynamics, the recent emergence of accent-matching voice technology, which 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 the peculiar alliance where entrepreneurs, venture capital, and modes of labor-discipline conspire toward making globalization ‘feel good.’ We draw on an affect-theoretical reading of these materials to shore up ideals of diversity, connectivity, and non-economic empowerment, as a key cluster of promises whose ‘structures of feeling’ keep us attached to the social reproduction of racial capitalism and the continuation of postindustrial, colonial dispossession.
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