PERSON
Safiya Umoja Noble
The scholar and institution-builder who proved that search engines are advertising platforms wearing the costume of objectivity, named the harm “technological redlining,” and established that the values encoded in AI systems are always somebody’s values—a question of power, not of mathematics.
Safiya Umoja Noble built one of the most consequential bodies of thought about technology and justice from a single decision: when a search engine returned degradation in response to a search for Black girls, she refused to call it an accident and called it evidence. Fifteen years in multicultural marketing had taught her how attention is bought; doctoral training in library and information science had taught her how knowledge systems reproduce the values of those who build them. The combination let her see what engineers could not: that the search engine was not a neutral information utility but an advertising platform, that its results were not the objective retrieval of facts but the commercial organization of attention, and that the bias in those results was not a bug to be patched but a feature of the business model. Her 2018 book
Algorithms of Oppression introduced the concept of
technological redlining—the digital reproduction of