Transforming the Culture: Internet Research at the Crossroads

The topic of justice, fairness, bias, labor and their relation the products and practices of technology and internet companies has been a subject of our concern for nearly a decade. We see these challenges– from the organizing logics of the technology sector with respect to algorithmic discrimination, to labor practices in commercial content moderation, as key pathways into better understanding the creation and maintenance of problems made by the technology sector that cannot be solved with techno-solutionism. While our work has been closely aligned to research and advocacy broadly construed in the domain of ethics and AI, we seek to expand the conversations about sociotechnical systems beyond individual, moral and ethical concerns to those of structures, practices, policies which would allow for interdisciplinary frameworks from the fields of critical information studies, sociology, and the social sciences, and the humanities. To make legible the paradigm-shifting work we think could be taken up by scholars at colleges and universities, we will outline the contours and specifics of institutionalizing these approaches through a research center, the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2) and its activities, By making visible the need for such a space, and our experiences and values, our hope is that it will make transparent the process and possibilities for centering justice and fairness in the world, rather than the prevailing technosolutionism we see emerging within conversations and initiatives focused on ethics and technology.