Frankenstein in the Pipeline: Computational Epistemicide in Facial Recognition
While the eugenic roots of computer vision are well-documented in critical technology studies, less attention has been paid to the operational mechanisms through which this violence is enacted at the level of the pipeline. This paper employs Mary Shelley's Frankenstein not as a metaphor for unintended consequences, but as a diagnostic framework for method: disassembly, reconstruction, and the production of a creature whose legitimacy is asserted by the procedure that made it. I argue that embedding-based facial recognition enacts what I call computational epistemicide, an extension of Sueli Carneiro's concept of epistemicide to the computational domain - by destroying the face as a living...
| Authors | Nina da Hora |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CY |
| Published | 30 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 30 May 2026 |
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