The Unexamined 'We'

In The You On AI Encyclopedia

The concept's power is its specificity. It does not ask the builder to abandon the we. It asks the builder to examine which we her tools actually construct. The training data's we is not everyone's we. The language the amplifier speaks best is not everyone's language. The epistemological categories through which the system organizes the world are not everyone's categories. The intended audience and the actual audience diverge, and the divergence is not a bug to be patched but the structure of the system. Acknowledging this is the beginning of honest building rather than its abandonment.

The concept emerged from Segal's sustained encounter with Spivak's work during the composition of this volume. His account in the Foreword is explicit: he named the barriers that the developer in Lagos faces — connectivity, hardware cost, English-language fluency — and believed he was being honest. Spivak's framework showed him that honesty was necessary but not sufficient. He named the symptoms. He had not examined the disease. The disease is that the tools were built without the developer in Lagos, and extending the system to reach her is not the same as building a system that includes her.

The concept has practical consequences for how builders conceive their work. Building within an unexamined we produces systems that extend existing asymmetries while narrating their extension as inclusion. Building within an examined we — one that acknowledges its own partiality — produces systems whose limitations are visible to their users, whose design choices are made with awareness of whom they serve and whom they do not, and whose governance structures can be reformed because the need for reform is built into the system's self-understanding rather than obscured by its self-congratulation.

The Epilogue's formulation is the concept's load-bearing statement: the 'we' must grow larger. Not as aspiration. As architecture. Aspiration is a property of authorial intent. Architecture is a property of what gets built. The distinction is the distinction between the democratization narrative and democratization as structural reality, and naming it clearly is the gift Spivak's framework offers to the builder willing to receive it.

Origin

Donna Haraway

The concept is articulated directly in the Foreword and Epilogue of this volume, but it draws on a longer tradition of feminist and postcolonial critique of the universalist pronoun. Donna Haraway's critique of the god trick, Sandra Harding's analysis of strong objectivity, and Chandra Mohanty's work on Third World women each interrogate the structure of the pronoun that claims to speak for all while speaking from a specific location.

Segal's specific contribution is to apply the critique reflexively to his own work — to read You On AI against its grain and acknowledge what its we systematically excludes. The reflexivity is itself a Spivakian move; it demonstrates the framework's application by applying it to the demonstration.

Key Ideas

The pronoun is not neutral. Every we constructs an in-group, and the architecture of the construction determines who is inside.

Generous intent, partial architecture. The intent of the builder can be genuinely inclusive while the system's architecture remains exclusive; the two are not the same question.

Aspiration vs. architecture. Growing the we as aspiration is easy and ineffective; growing it as architecture is hard and necessary.

Self-application as ethics. The builder who turns the framework on his own work performs the move the framework asks of him; the turning is the ethical gesture.