No wonder the public sphere seems so impoverished in the digital age. The systems that manage the circulation of political speech were often originally designed to sell consumer products. This fact has momentous consequences. Recent scholarship has
documented the disastrous effects of "surveillance capitalism," and in particular how commercial search engines deploy "algorithms of oppression" that reinforce racist and sexist patterns of exposure, invisibility, and marginalization. These patterns of silencing the oppressed are so pervasive in the world that it may seem impossible to design a system that would not reproduce them.
But alternatives are possible. In fact, from the very beginnings of informatics—the science of information—as an institutionalized field in the 1960s, anti-capitalists have tried to imagine less oppressive, perhaps even liberatory, ways of indexing and searching information. Two Latin American social movements in particular—Cuban socialism and liberation theology—inspired experiments with different approaches to informatics from the 1960s to the 1980s. Taken together, these two historical moments can help us imagine new ways to organize information that threaten the capitalist status quo—above all, by facilitating the wide circulation of the ideas of the oppressed.
