In Race After Technology, Ruha Benjamin advances a profound critique of technological modernity by demonstrating that contemporary digital systems frequently intensify racial hierarchies under the guise of neutrality, innovation, and computational objectivity. Rejecting the widespread assumption that automation eliminates human prejudice, Benjamin introduces the concept of the “New Jim Code” to describe the ways in which discriminatory logics become embedded within algorithms, data infrastructures, predictive systems, and technological design. Far from existing outside society, technologies inherit and amplify the historical inequalities of the social worlds from which they emerge. Benjamin therefore challenges the myth of technological impartiality by revealing how artificial intelligence, biometric surveillance, predictive policing, automated hiring systems, and digital healthcare infrastructures reproduce racial exclusion while appearing scientifically legitimate. Particularly significant is her analysis of engineered inequity, through which systems marketed as efficient or benevolent conceal deeply asymmetrical distributions of risk, visibility, and punishment. Examples such as facial-recognition technologies that misidentify Black subjects, predictive policing software targeting already over-policed communities, and automated welfare systems that criminalise poverty collectively demonstrate how digital infrastructures extend older racial formations into computational regimes of governance. Benjamin further argues that racism within technological systems is not merely accidental bias but often the outcome of institutional priorities structured around profit, security, and social control. Equally important is her critique of what she terms technological benevolence, wherein corporations and governments deploy narratives of innovation, inclusion, and humanitarian progress to obscure the coercive dimensions of surveillance capitalism. Yet the book does not conclude in pessimism alone. Drawing upon abolitionist traditions, Benjamin advocates the cultivation of alternative technological imaginaries grounded in collective care, democratic participation, and social justice. The enduring contribution of Race After Technology resides in its insistence that technology is never politically innocent; rather, digital infrastructures constitute contested terrains where racial power is continuously encoded, reproduced, and potentially dismantled through abolitionist reimagination.
URBANISM MEETS ART