CONCEPT

Second Sight

Du Bois's name for the paradoxical epistemic faculty of the oppressed—the double vision born of necessity that comes from being forced to understand the dominant society from both inside and outside at once—which predicts, a century in advance, that the communities most harmed by algorithmic systems will also be their most accurate critics.

The Negro, Du Bois wrote in The Souls of Black Folk, is born with a veil and gifted with second sight in this American world—a sight that comes from being forced to understand the dominant society from below and within, while living a reality that society never bothers to learn. Second sight is the epistemic privilege of the marginalised: those who occupy the comfortable centre can afford not to understand the margins, because their survival does not require it; those at the margins cannot afford not to understand the centre, because their survival depends on it. The marginalised often see the whole system more accurately than those who run it, because their lives have required a knowledge the powerful never had to acquire. Applied to artificial intelligence, this suggests that the people best positioned to evaluate these systems are not necessarily the

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