Antifafi 🖤 🍉🌻✊🏿🔻🌈🌍Oct 17

Check this hopeful TED-talk in which Ruha Benjamin imagines Ustopias. 'Ustopias are built on an understanding that all of our struggles, from climate justice to racial justice, are interconnected, that we are interconnected.'
https://www.ted.com/talks/ruha_benjamin_is_technology_our_savior_or_our_slayer

This is more than imagining, it is possibility thinking.
#Commons #Commoning #SolarPunk #Futuring #Technology #PeopleOverProfit #RuhaBenjamin #FocusOpHetGoede

Ruha Benjamin: Is technology our savior — or our slayer?

TED
Stefanie WuschitzSep 30

"What social groups are classified, corralled, coerced, and capitalized upon
so others are free to tinker, experiment, design, and engineer the future?
How are novel technologies deployed in carceral approaches
to governing life well beyond the domain of policing?" 

Ruha Benjamin (2019) Captivating Technology. Race, Carceral Technoscience, and liberatory imagination in everday life. p.4 
#technoimperialism
#carceraltech
#captivatingtech
#ruhabenjamin
#ethicaltech
#ecofeministrech
#racistai

Stefanie WuschitzSep 30

"In her book 'Dark Matters', for example, sociologist Simone Browne examines how surveillance technologies coproduce notions of blackness, explaining that "surveillance is nothing new to black folks"; from slave ships and slave patrols to airport security checkpoints and stop-and-frisk policing practices, she points to the "facticity of surveillance in black life".
Benjamin (2019) Captivating Technology.

#techocolonialism
#technoimperialism
#carceraltech
#captivatingtech
#ruhabenjamin

Show threadfulanigirlJul 7, 2025
#Abolition #BlackMastodon #BlackTwitter #RuhaBenjamin #Visionaries
I encourage you to read Benjamin’s work. There’s a lot of knowledge packed in it. but it’s short. You can read it in 2 or 3 nights. Try the exercises, decolonize your imagination and strive toward becoming a visionary. If you are interested in learning more about #abolition just search for the posts with that hashtag. 7/7
Show threadfulanigirlJul 7, 2025
#Abolition #BlackMastodon #BlackTwitter #RuhaBenjamin #Visionaries
I try to get those around me to imagine the world they want for their great grandchildren. I am training the 16 year to start thinking about his grandchildren’s world and identifying things he can do now and as he grows up to make that world a reality. In the last chapter Benjamin offers some exercises we can do individually, with our families, and with groups we belong to. She is urging us to train our imagination muscle. 6/7
Show threadfulanigirlJul 7, 2025
#Abolition #BlackMastodon #BlackTwitter #RuhaBenjamin #Visionaries
Benjamin is arguing that we can free our minds and instead of just trying to figure out how we can survive in this broken world, try to also imagine the world of our dreams. If we can imagine it, we can name it, and then we can try and build it. This is the heart of abolitionist thought. My grandson is 16 now. I am trying to envision a world that he and his grandchildren can thrive in. 5/7
Show threadfulanigirlJul 7, 2025
#Abolition #BlackMastodon #BlackTwitter #RuhaBenjamin #Visionaries
That is a colonized mind’s response. The abolitionist would say: can we build a society where people don’t have access to guns that enable a mass shooting? Can we create a society where people have sufficient support and mental health treatment so they don’t have to hold on to hate and rage and hurt others because of it? 4/7
Show threadfulanigirlJul 7, 2025
#Abolition #BlackMastodon #BlackTwitter #RuhaBenjamin #Visionaries
People thought it was naïve to imagine a world where the police were unnecessary for the maintenance of public safety. Just recently the police did something humane. I think they actually kept some people safe from a mass shooter. One of the people here who doesn’t understand abolition posted the next day that it was a good thing we didn’t get rid of the police because they wouldn’t have been there to save those people. 3/7
Show threadfulanigirlJul 7, 2025
#Abolition #BlackMastodon #BlackTwitter #RuhaBenjamin #Visionaries
She quotes many writers and philosophers, but the one that resonated most for me was from Toni Cade Bambara, “The creative imagination has been colonized.” In other words our ability to imagine a more just world has been constrained by a society formed and sustained by colonial ideals of white supremacy and capitalism. When I first started posting about abolition in 2022, I got the usual push back. 2/7
fulanigirlJul 7, 2025
#Abolition #BlackMastodon #BlackTwitter #RuhaBenjamin #Visionaries
This weekend I finished a small tract by Ruha Benjamin entitled IMAGINATION: A Manifesto. Benjamin is a Princeton professor and founder of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab there. And more importantly, she is an abolitionist. Her book is about the importance imagination, play, and dreaming hold in enabling people to envision a world they would want to live in. A thread...1/7