Emerging from the critical practice and political commitments of digital publication the New Inquiry, Dark Inquiry is a project-driven alliance of technologists, artists, writers, and investigative researchers convened to to deploy a series of situated, confrontational, rhetorically-deliberate experiments that expose the anti-human logic of dominant technological power, and demonstrate the possibilities beyond it. Dark Inquiry calls these experiments “rhetorical software,” (a game, an app, a bot, an API or some other creative use of technology) that produce critique through experience and interaction rather than written language.Their first experiment with this idea was “White Collar Crime Risk Zones,” a reappropriation of a predictive policing algorithm that usually targets street crime, refocused on white collar crime. The Dark Inquiry leadership consists of Rachel Rosenfelt, founder and co-publisher of the New Inquiry; Francis Tseng, co-publisher of the New Inquiry; and Maddy Varner, founding member of the feminist security collective Deep Lab, and contributing researcher at ProPublica, with a focus on algorithmic accountability.
Dark Inquiry2017-2018
