In this article for Algorithm Watch, Nicolas Kayser-Bril highlights an important issue facing Europe in the fight against racist technologies: we lack the words to talk about racism. He shows why Europeans need a new vocabulary and discourse to understand and discuss racist AI systems. For example, concepts such as ‘Racial Justice’ have no part in the EU’s anti-discrimination agenda and ‘ethnicity’ is not recognised as a proxy for race in a digital context. The lack of this vocabulary greatly harms our current ability to challenge and dismantle these systems and, crucially, the root of racism.

Over the past couple of years, devices like our phones have become much harder to repair, and unauthorized repair often leads to a loss of warranty. This is partially driven by our manufactured need for devices that are slimmer and slicker, but is mostly an explicit strategy to make us throw away our old devices and have us buy new ones.