Week 1

Lesson 1 Introduction

• Course Syllabus.
  • Please read through the syllabus

Lesson 2 The Science of Morality

• Pinker (2008). The Moral Instinct.
• Singer, P. (1999). The Singer Solution to World Poverty. New York Times Magazine.
• Haidt (2008). The Moral Roots of Liberals and Conservatives. Ted Talk.

Week 2

Lesson 3 Intro to Moral Philosophy

• Sandel, Michael J. (2009). Chapter 1. Doing the Right Thing. Justice: What's the right thing to do?.

• Sandel, Michael J. (2009). Chapter 2. Utilitarianism.
• Sandel, Michael J. (2009). Chapter 3. Libertarianism.
• Sandel, Michael J. (2009). Chapter 5. Kant.

Lesson 4 Intro to Moral Philosophy (Continued)

• Sandel, Michael J. (2009). Chapter 9. What do we owe one another?

• Sandel, Michael J. (2009). Chapter 6. Rawls.
• Sandel, Michael J. (2009). Chapter 8. Aristotle.

Week 3

Lesson 5 Do Artifacts Have Politics?

• Hilbert, Martin (2015). Technological Determinism & Social Construction of Technology.
• Winner, Langdon (1980). Do Artifacts Have Politics? Daedalus.
• Benjamin, Ruha (2019). Introduction. Race After Technology.
  • Only the introduction is available on Canvas. You may purchase the entire book (recommended), of you can access it online through the Northwestern Library.

Lesson 6 Democratization? Centralization? Shifting Control?

• Jonathan Zittrain (2020). Between Suffocation and Abdication: Three Eras of Governing Digital Platforms (video lecture) . Tanner Lecture (Harvard).

Week 4

Class Cancelled

Lesson 8 Categorization & Classification

• Massey, Douglas (2007). Chapter 1. How Stratification Works. Categorically unequal: The American stratification system.
• Thorn, Abigail (July, 2021). Social Constructs (YouTube Video). Philosophy Tube.
  • Update: On 10/8, I swapped this video with Benjamin, Ch. 1 (which was moved to Thursday). Apologies for the last minute switcheroo!

Week 5

Lesson 9 Categorization & Classification (Continued)

• Hannah-Jones, Nikole (Aug. 14, 2019). The Idea of America. New York Times Magazine.
• Benjamin, Ruha (2019). Chapter 1. Engineered Inequity. Race After Technology.

Lesson 10 Solutionism / Technological Benevolence with Natalie Melo

• Benjamin, Ruha (2019). Chapter 4. Technological Benevolence. Race After Technology.
• Morozov, Evgeny (April, 2020). The tech ‘solutions’ for coronavirus take the surveillance state to the next level.

Week 6

Lesson 11 Surveillance / Exposure

• Benjamin, Ruha (2019). Chapter 3. Coded Exposure. Race After Technology.
• Black Mirror (Oct. 21, 2016). Nosedive, Season 3, Episode 1. Netflix.
  • If you don't have Netflix, you can purchase it for $1.99 on Amazon

Lesson 12 Platforms: with guest speaker Deepa Seetharaman from the Wall Street Journal

• Wall Street Journal Staff (Sept. 29, 2021). Facebook’s Documents About Instagram and Teens, Published. The Wall Street Journal.
  • From Deepa: Please read at least a few of these documents. They are the underlying documents that informed the second story on teens and research.
• The Facebook Files (Pick 2 to Read). The Wall Street Journal.
  • Northwestern has free access to content from the Wall Street Journal. Access it here: https://wsj.com/northwestern.
• Maréchal, Nathalie & Roberts Biddle, Ellery (2020). It's Not Just the Content, It's the Business Model: Democracy’s Online Speech Challenge. Open Technology Institute.

Week 7

Lesson 13 The Internet

• Doctorow, Cory (October, 2021). Competitive Compatibility: Let's Fix the Internet, Not the Tech Giants. Communications of the ACM.
• Lee, Timothy (May, 2015). The Internet, Explained. Vox.
  • (Just skim it)

• Stewart, Emily (Feb., 2020). America’s monopoly problem, explained by your internet bill. Vox.
• Tim Berners-Lee, Jimmy Wales, Wendy Hall and more (December, 2017). The web's greatest minds explain how we can fix the internet. Wired (UK).
• Ford, Paul (2016). Reboot the World: The internet was supposed to be democratic and open to all. Then Facebook and the NSA got their hands on it. Is it too late to reclaim our digital future? The New Republic.

Lesson 14 Data

• Crawford, Kate (2021). Chapter 3. Data. Atlas of AI.
• D'Ignazio, Catherine & Klein, Lauren (2020). Introduction. Why Data Science Needs Feminism. Data Feminism.
  • Read the introduction, but please also skim the chapter titles to get a sense of the book.

Week 8

Lesson 15 Algorithms

• Kantayya, Shalini (2020). Coded Bias. Available on Netflix.
  • Netflix link here: https://www.netflix.com/title/81328723.
    PBS link here: https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/documentaries/coded-bias/

Lesson 16 Design

• Costanza-Chock, Sasha (March, 2020). Design Practices: “Nothing about Us without Us”. Design Justice.

Week 9

Lesson 17 Speculative Design with Richmond Wong

• Wong, Richmond; Van Wyk, Ellen; and Pierce, James (June, 2017). Real-Fictional Entanglements: Using Science Fiction and Design Fiction to Interrogate Sensing Technologies. Dis.
  • Methods for helping everyday people think about values in technology
• Wong, Richmond; Van Wyk, Ellen (June, 2017). Design Fiction Workbook.
  • Supplemental Workbook for "Real-Fictional Entanglements" paper
• Wong, Richmond; Nguyen, Tonya (May, 2021). Timelines: A World-Building Activity for Values Advocacy. CHI.
  • Methods for helping professional designers think about values

Lesson 18 Labor

• The Gravel Institute (May, 2021). How Uber Is Scamming You. The Gravel Institute.
• The Gravel Institute (June, 2021). "The Most Dangerous Law in My Lifetime". The Gravel Institute.

Week 10

Lesson 19 Labor Continued

• Crawford, Kate (2021). Chapter 2. Labor. Atlas of AI.

Thanksgiving (No class)

Week 11

Lesson 20 The Environment

• Crawford, Kate (2021). Chapter 1. Earth. Atlas of AI.

Lesson 21 Course Synthesis

Week 12