December 12, 2020

In the olden days they used to call it indentured servitude

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I still use ride hailing and food delivery services, but the fact is that the core functionality of these apps — despite all their fancy technology — is not significantly different than having a servant. What the technology has done is pool the servants, make them available to more people, make it easier to communicate tasks, and — most importantly — make it possible to not think of them as servants at all.

Source: The Gig Economy Is White People Discovering Servants | by Indi Samarajiva | Medium

When you don’t think of people as your servant you don’t have to think about the implications of servitude— including the linguistics of it, like “master”, “servant”, or “honor”. How long before people find themselves finding themselves in “exclusive contracts” with a specific gig agency?

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The Racist Legacy of Computer-Generated Humans – Scientific American

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The technological white supremacy extends to human hair, where the term “hair” has become shorthand for the visual features that dominate white people’s hair. The standard model for rendering hair, the “Marschner” model, was custom-designed to capture the subtle glints that appear when light interacts with the micro-structures in flat, straight hair. No equivalent micro-structural model has ever been developed for kinky, Afro-textured hair. In practice, the straight-hair model just gets applied as a good-enough hand-me-down.

Source: The Racist Legacy of Computer-Generated Humans – Scientific American

Pixar continues this in their latest film: an epic to the Magical Negro trope, where the Black person isn’t portrayed as black for most of the film but rather as a blue blob.

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