Viewing technology in the longue durée foregrounds how slavery undergirds conditions of contemporary extraction, surveillance, and the insistence on positing knowledge as outside of those arrangements—practices that produce today’s technologies. Contributors to this issue of Logic(s), “Out of Place,” challenge the logic that racism is contaminating and disabling the pure disembodied model, or that race is principally a site for enumerating harms that can be subsequently extinguished.
Rather, the analysis throughout these pages underscores how race is constitutive of how models are developed and deployed. Beyond this, the vulnerability to premature death that digital infrastructures enable, is due to the ways those of us rendered out of place are disciplined into the flows of projected outcomes—or, if noncompliant, wholly removed from the dataset (and society).