We Be Imagining

When discussing machine learning models “Black Box” is typically deployed as a helpful metaphor but from a hardware perspective the term is meant literally. How can we open the inside processors of a phone to verify that what’s inside is actually what we thought was inside? How does the minimalist aesthetic of consumer electronics create the illusion of technology as magic?  Andrew "bunnie" Huang is a hacker, maker, and open hardware activist joining us on the WBI show to discuss these questions as well as share updates on Precursor. Alongside Edward Snowden, he worked on the Introspection Engine, a device allowing journalists to identify if and when their phones are transmitting or receiving information when it shouldn't be. Precursor is the development platform working to push out a new iteration of this device.
Bunnie holds a Ph.D in Electrical Engineering from MIT and is the author of Hacking the Xbox. 

IG + Twitter: @WeBeImagining
Support Us: On Patreon
Host: J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Ilan Mandel
Music: Drew Lewis

Links for the Episode:
Talking with Andrew "bunnie" Huang (AdaFruit)
How ‘Hoverboards’ Epitomize Our Broken Patent System
Half A Million 'Hoverboards' Recalled Over Risk Of Fire, Explosions
Moore's law
The inverted Pendulum: A fundamental Benchmark in Control Theory and Robotics
`GUNG HO` SOFTLY SATIRIZES AMERICAN FEATHERBEDDING
Technology is Not Magic - bunnie Huang, Bitmark Ambassador #2
An Alternative to the American way of Innovation TEDxPickeringStreet
Synchronized violin players reveal uniqueness of human networks
Edward Snowden designed an iPhone attachment that detects unwanted radio transmissions
(@RealSexyCyborg) Thread on IMEs/Signal/Untrustability 
'We found a wiretap' Lyubov Sobol's campaign team head released from custody with bugged cell phone 
nytlabs : Listening Table AKA MEDIA SYSTEM
TrackMeNot
AdNauseam - Clicking Ads So You Don't Have To
Introducing Precursor « bunnie's blog
Precursor.dev

When Nekayba McNeal arrived at the hospital to give birth to her second child, she had no idea that she would never bring her baby home. She never anticipated that she would be incarcerated at Rikers Island until her preschool son was separated from her as well. The clinical team at Cohen Medical Center stated the newborn baby required a blood transfusion due to anemia. When she requested to consult with her partner (and the baby’s father) Eddie Bellas, before giving consent for the transfusion, the hospital made an allegation of child abuse and neglect to the New York City Administration for Children’s Services (ACS).

Joyce McMillan, family regulation system abolitionist and impacted parent, joins the conversation as well, explaining how regularly Black and Brown families find themselves under investigation and separation when attending routine medical appointments. For white and middle class parents, questions posed to physician’s about their child’s care is typically interpreted as evidence that the family is informed and invested in their child’s medical care. For Black, Latinx and recipients of Medicaid, these same questions are interpreted as hostility, aggression and grounds to remove the children from their care. 

This episode does surface traumatic violence at the hands of multiple systems but it also ends with a surprise musical performance by the couple. Their message is one of hope, resistance and refusing to back down from the fight to have their children returned to them on their terms.

IG + Twitter: @WeBeImagining
Support Us: On Patreon

**Note to our listeners, this is one of a series of episodes we have produced on the family regulation system featuring impacted parents and academics. We’re making additional efforts this season to provide a platform as well for former foster youth, adoptees or people who have been in the position of the child when encountering any aspect of the system including international adoption. Please contact us at [email protected] if you’re interested in coming on the show to share your perspective. 

We acknowledge that violence does occur within the family. Our position is abolition must provide restorative justice models and infrastructures of care as we dismantle this system of poverty management and policing. This is not just a theoretical argument and resources for restorative justice approaches are linked in the show notes.

Guests: Nekayba McNeal, Eddie Bellas and Joyce McMillan 
Host: J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Ilan Mandel
Music: Drew Lewis

Links for the Episode:
Abolishing Policing Also Means Abolishing Family Regulation
Do We Need to Abolish Child Protective Services?
In New York, Calls Grow to Address Racism in Child Welfare

Racial Differences in the Evaluation of Pediatric Fractures for Physical Abuse
Racial and Ethnic Disparities and Bias in the Evaluation and Reporting of Abusive Head Trauma

Resources
A Practical Guide to Stop Interpersonal Violence (Creative Interventions)
Child Sexual Abuse: A Transformative Justice Handbook (Generation Five)
Reimagine Support (Movement for Family Power)

How can we bring the air of being a local and hospitality to technical design? What does it look like to design a wearable that’s not about surveilling or calculating your life? How would you manifest code in calm computing for a tactical-unplanned assemblage following a mycological (fungal) metaphor? Noah Feehan, joins the WBI show to discuss the NYT Labs Listening Table, agathonic design, the most salt shaker salt shakers and more.

Noah Feehan, is an artist/maker/tinkerer whose creative work is designed to function in other experimental or speculative capacities, augmenting spaces with useful behaviors or holding a weird-mirror to your online personae. Professionaly, his role has taken many shapes and titles over the years, from heading up product strategy at Temboo, leading the critical and hardware research efforts at the New York Times R&D Lab, or building a Fab Lab at a NASA facility.

You can now support the WBI Podcast by becoming a Patreon member!

Please share your feedback and questions! You can reach us at [email protected] or via Twitter and Instagram at @WeBeImagining

Host: J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Ilan Mandel
Music: Drew Lewis

Links for the Episode:
The Coming of Age of Calm Technology
Super Normal
Phd: Exaptation – Jb Labrune (Agathonic Design)
The Repair Association
Sia's movie sidelines the disabled community
Communication page I used to handle that invasive woman I met.
Ekverstania Twitter Thread of blogs/art/scholarship/advocacy by #NonSpeaking #Autistic people
What's the deal with the "Shake to send feedback" on Google Maps for Android?
Kanye Got Kim K a Hologram of Her Late Dad
How Holograms Work | HowStuffWorks
Nudgeables
Sublime.cloud
A Burglar's Guide to the City
DIY IMac Fish Tank : 10 Steps (with Pictures)
Mycodo Environmental Monitoring and Regulation System
Cycling your Jarrarium
Recommendations:
Review: George Saunders' 'Sea Oak' makes a dead-funny TV comedy
The Cooking Gene | A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South

How do we practice the case for reparations? How do we do this land justice movement without being co-opted by the NPIC when people still gotta eat? When you bring Black young adults in to working on the land, how do you resolve conflict when you don’t call the cops? Abiodun Henderson, founder of Gangstas to Growers chops it up on the WBI show on how G2G is grappling with these themes in real time.

Gangstas to Growers (G2G) is a social enterprise focused on building worker-owned cooperatives that provide opportunities for employment, empowerment, and entrepreneurship in agriculture for criminal injustice involved youth.

You can now support the WBI Podcast by becoming a Patreon member!

Please share your feedback and questions! You can reach us at [email protected] or via Twitter and Instagram at @WeBeImagining

Host: J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Ilan Mandel
Music: Drew Lewis

Links for the Episode:
Tupac at Malcolm X Grassroots Movement
Occupy The Hood (@occupythehood.mtl)
Protesters set to 'Occupy Congress'
Truly Living Well Center for Natural Urban Agriculture | Atlanta
Westview Community Organization
HABESHA – Helping Africa by Establishing Schools at Home and Abroad
Center for Civic Innovation
Black Sustainability Network
Ron Finley - Gangsta Gardener for the Urban Community
Southerners on New Ground: Home
Fort Negrita for earth-inspired folks
National Black Justice Coalition |
Green Is The New Black
Metro Atlanta Mutual Aid Fund
SAAFON: Home
High Hog Farm: Home
Recommendations:
No Disrespect by Sista Souljah

Megan Wolff, Chair of Mental Health Policy at DeWitt Wallace Institute for the History of Psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medical College joins the WBI show alongside Dan Bouk, Associate Professor of History at Colgate University and author of How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual. Dan researches the history of bureaucracies, quantification, and other modern things shrouded in cloaks of boringness. His work investigates the ways that corporations, states, and the experts they employ have used, abused, made, and re-made the categories that structure our daily experiences of being human. 

You can now support the WBI Podcast by becoming a Patreon member!

Please share your feedback and questions! You can reach us at [email protected] or via Twitter and Instagram at @WeBeImagining

Host: J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Ilan Mandel
Music: Drew Lewis

Links for the Episode:
The Myth Of The Actuary: Life Insurance And Frederick L. Hoffman's Race Traits And Tendencies Of The American Negro
A Review of Hoffman's Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 1
Fact Sheet: The Impact of Pandemic Disease on Mental Health
Life Insurance And COVID-19: All You Need To Know
Medicalizing Blackness | Rana A. Hogarth | University of North Carolina Press
The Health and Physique of the Negro American
Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media By Jacqueline Wernimont
The Emotional Epidemiology of H1N1 Influenza Vaccination 
The Condemnation of Blackness — Khalil Gibran Muhammad

Recommendations:
Megan: “The Birchbark House” Series by Louise Erdrich
Dan The Beautiful Bureaucrat — Helen Phillips, 
The Need — Helen Phillips,
Census Stories, USA | Reading the stories in the data.

How do you get freshman undergraduates to take on complex immunological research? How did colonization enable the spread of HIV in Central Africa and Haiti? Does the militarist language of immunology- ie “fighting the war against viruses” undermine the complexity of the human immune system which is more comparable to tending a garden?

Brianne Barker, Associate Professor of Biology at Drew University with expertise in vaccine development, HIV biology and understanding immune responses to viral infection joins the WBI show. She shares that the privilege of working at a non-R1 institution solely with undergraduate students is an opportunity to pursue your research interests relatively autonomously and without the same external pressure to publish. 
Brianne is also the co-host of the Immune podcast, part of the TWIV (This Week In Virology) podcast suite that inspired our show. We cover a lot of ground in this show, from pattern recognition receptors to science pedagogy and a discussion of the Barker Lab’s recently published paper, Polyglutamine binding protein 1 (PQBP1) inhibits innate immune responses to cytosolic DNA

Please share your feedback and questions! You can reach us at [email protected] or via Twitter and Instagram at @WeBeImagining

Host: J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Ilan Mandel
Music: Drew Lewis

Links for the Episode:
Colonialism in Africa helped launch the HIV epidemic a century ago
The Impact of Globalization on Infectious Disease Emergence and Control
The 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine - Press release
Interferon discovery and ferret flu
HVTN Studies
Black in Immuno
Immune 37: Black in Immuno | Immune

Recommendations:
Pandemic by Sonia Shah
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Spillover by David Quammen

Assistant Professor of Communications at Hamline University, Endalkachew Chala joins the WBI Show to share his research on digital surveillance, content moderation and mis/disinformation in Ethiopia. 

Transcript Linked Here

**This interview was conducted in August 2020 as part of an deeper investigative look into the history and political climate of Ethiopia as it intersects with data and tech policy. In particular, We Be Imagining is concerned about the role of mis/disinformation on social media platforms like Facebook which fail to provide adequate content and context moderation. However, the slow scholarship this requires was outweighed by the urgency of the current political moment so we are sharing some of the stories recorded then. 

Please note, inclusion in this series in now way indicates agreement among each interviewee or is fully comprehensive of the political history, we  simply aim to provide more nuanced and thoughtful insight given the dearth of coverage. Links and notes are subject to change.

Host: J. Khadijah Abdurahman
Music: Drew Lewis

Links for the Episode:

How the murder of musician Hachalu Hundessa incited violence in Ethiopia: Part II
In Ethiopia's disinformation epidemic, the crumbling ruling coalition is the elephant in the room
How Ethiopia's ruling coalition created a playbook for disinformation

Senior Lecturer at Keele University and political analyst, Awol Allo shares his journey from ardent advocate of Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed to most vocal critic. Through assassinated Oromo musician, Haacaaluu Hundeessaa’s hit song Malan Jira (What Existence is Mine?), Allo thinks out loud about the Oromo Protests, the motivations of those who allege Qeeroo are committing ethnic cleansing and the cloud of mis/disinformation that hovers over the political discourse. 

Transcript Linked Here

**This interview was conducted in August 2020 as part of an deeper investigative look into the history and political climate of Ethiopia as it intersects with data and tech policy. In particular, We Be Imagining is concerned about the role of mis/disinformation on social media platforms like Facebook which fail to provide adequate content and context moderation. However, the slow scholarship this requires was outweighed by the urgency of the current political moment so we are sharing some of the stories recorded then. 

Please note, inclusion in this series in now way indicates agreement among each interviewee or is fully comprehensive of the political history, we  simply aim to provide more nuanced and thoughtful insight given the dearth of coverage. Links and notes are subject to change.

Host: J. Khadijah Abdurahman

Music: Drew Lewis

Links for the Episode:
Haacaaluu Hundeessaa: A towering musician and an Oromo icon
Why I nominated Abiy Ahmed for the Nobel Peace Prize
What is Medemer?
Ethiopia PM Fires Defence Minister, a One-Time Ally, in Major Reshuffle
Ethiopia's Abiy wins Nobel Peace Prize for resolving conflict with Eritrea
Why Abiy Ahmed's Prosperity Party could be bad news for Ethiopia

Getu Teressa, Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine and political analyst joins the WBI show to share his insight into Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s “Medemer”, his insights into the existential and material crisis of the Oromo people and the weight of Oromo musician and activist, Haacaaluu Hundeessaa’s assasination.

Transcript Linked Here

**This interview was conducted in August 2020 as part of an deeper investigative look into the history and political climate of Ethiopia as it intersects with data and tech policy. In particular, We Be Imagining is concerned about the role of mis/disinformation on social media platforms ie. Facebook which fail to provide adequate content and context moderation. However, the slow scholarship this requires was outweighed by the urgency of the current political moment so we are sharing some of the stories recorded then. 

Please note, inclusion in this series in no way indicates agreement among each interviewee or is fully comprehensive of the political history, we simply aim to provide more nuanced and thoughtful insight given the dearth of coverage. Links and notes are subject to change.

Host: J. Khadijah Abdurahman
Music: Drew Lewis

Links for the Episode:
The media's crisis on Ethiopia
Abiy Ahmed—a Philosopher King or a Sophist? By Getu Teressa
Haacaaluu Hundeessaa: A towering musician and an Oromo icon
What is Medemer?
Ethiopia PM Fires Defence Minister, a One-Time Ally, in Major Reshuffle
Ethiopia's Abiy wins Nobel Peace Prize for resolving conflict with Eritrea
Why Abiy Ahmed's Prosperity Party could be bad news for Ethiopia

Phd student of oral archival traditions, silences in written records/archives, and anti-colonial struggles, Ayantu Ayanna joins the WBI show to discuss the assassination of Oromo musician Haacaaluu Hundeessaa in June and what it means to contest official state narratives of Ethiopia through the archives. 

Transcript Available Here

**This interview was conducted in August 2020 as part of an deeper investigative look into the history and political climate of Ethiopia as it intersects with data and tech policy. In particular, We Be Imagining is concerned about the role of mis/disinformation on social media platforms like Facebook which fail to provide adequate content and context moderation. However, the slow scholarship this requires was outweighed by the urgency of the current political moment so we are sharing some of the stories recorded then. 

Please note, inclusion in this series in no way indicates agreement among each interviewee or is fully comprehensive of the political history, we  simply aim to provide more nuanced and thoughtful insight given the dearth of coverage. Links and notes are subject to change.

Host: J. Khadijah Abdurahman
Music: Drew Lewis

Links for the Episode:
The media's crisis on Ethiopia by Ayantu Ayanna