Fifteenth International Conference on Technology, Knowledge & Society

Abstract

Beyond Binary: Intersections of Technology, Conviviality, and Community Safety examines the emergence of the Community Safety Database (CSDbase), a convivial tool currently being collectively developed in the San Francisco Bay Area that maps police violence according to a number of taxonomies, while semantically coordinating policing strategies, operations, and technologies across agencies. The CSDbase brings together a wide variety of stakeholders, digerati, and activators to take back community safety against biopolitical state securitization that includes militarized policing and other counterinsurgency strategies. The essay proceeds in three parts. First, we describe the CSDbase as a rhizomatic web infrastructure that generates an interactive web infrastructure through the Giant Global Graph. Next, we examine the CSDbase as a convivial tool, that is, drawing on Ivan Illich we argue the CSDbase is a unique device collectively produced for community regeneration. As a convivial tool, the CSDbase embodies a deliberate moment to structure knowledge production around democratic praxis. The CSDbase makes visible neoliberal securitized counterinsurgency’s reliance on information gathering and investment in increasingly invasive surveillance techniques, countering such technology through a digital regeneration approach that combines network thinking with convivial research and learning and assembly. The third section concludes the essay by narrating how the CSDbase emerged in response to new strategies of a counterinsurgency securitization regime that has become most visible through the rise of police shootings in the San Francisco Bay Area and periphery.