What if new technologies sold to solve social problems are simply ill-suited to the complexity of the environments where they are introduced? What if, sometimes, the answer isn’t technology?

applied to complex dilemmas surrounding social issues such as policing, criminal justice, health care, education, immigration, and social services.

“Corporate victimhood deflects attention away from the true victims: those who suffered from defective products, negligent medicine, investor fraud or unreasonably risky financial activities,” write Michael L. Rustad and Thomas H. Koenig.

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Throughout all this, ordinary Americans had few affordances with which to meaningfully engage with the dominant narrative. They could attend a protest. They could change the channel, cancel a subscription, or write a letter to the editor—though those options provided minimal agency. By and large, Americans were largely passive consumers of a top-down information machine.

the public consensus was clear: Seventy-two percent felt that America’s invasion of Iraq was justified.7

• 230(c)(1), which states that “[n]o provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”• 230(c)(2), which shields providers and users of an interactive computer service from civil liability with regard to any action that is “voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable” or “taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access” to such material.• 230(e)(3), which states, inter alia, that “no cause of action may be brought and no liability may be imposed under any State or local law that is inconsistent with this section.”

In 2005, only 5 percent of Americans reported using social media; today, that number is 72 percent.11Close Seven in ten Facebook users report daily use of the platform.12

The dominance of the tech industry extends far beyond economic markets, shaping how people work, vote, socialize, learn, shop, and communicate.

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Insulating the tech industry from liability for extremism, abuse, and misinformation has threatened free expression, worsened existing inequalities of gender, race, and class, and gravely undermined democracy.

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In exchange for the illusion of free expression, multi-billion-dollar corporations extract troves of personal data from individuals to be used for marketing, advertising, and surveillance purposes.

Tech companies invoked the laissez-faire principles of the First Amendment to justify their failure to address extremism and abuse, elevating passivity into a virtue. Perhaps most seductively, companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter appeared to provide “free speech” in a dual sense: free from censorship and free from cost.

During a September 30, 2021, Senate Commerce Subcommittee hearing on Facebook and mental health harms, Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) stated that “Facebook is just like Big Tobacco, pushing a product they know is harmful to the health of young people.”1Close Comparisons between big tech and big tobacco have proliferated in recent years, as journalists, scholars, and legislators note the similarities between two massively profitable, largely unregulated industries that knowingly inflict harms on the public. One major difference between the two is that the tobacco industry was eventually subjected to extensive regulation, through both agency oversight and lawsuits. The tech industry, by contrast, remains as yet virtually untouched by either administrative rules or by tort law.

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Cul-de-sacs, despite their prominence as a marker of segregation, are not the only kind of barrier in Beverly. The same Metra route that separates Auburn Gresham from Beverly curves along Longwood Drive, separating West Beverly from Morgan Park. Though Morgan Park is interconnected with Beverly in some ways, such as housing the Chicago police station that services Beverly and Mount Greenwood, its demographic varies greatly from those of its neighbors. Morgan Park is more than 60 percent Black. Its local high school is more than 99 percent students of color, with 97 percent of those students being Black.

In maps of the Black population in the area in 1930 and 1960 from a Virginia Tech exhibit on redlining, the thick black line that curves furthest east, running from north to south, represents railways that were formerly owned by the Illinois Central Railroad and are now operated by Metra. These train tracks, like many others in the city, create physical barriers that are clear markers of segregation. The 51st/53rd Street Metra station that services Hyde Park sits atop a viaduct that sections off some of the aforementioned area that was the last to be annexed by integration. Even today, this viaduct and train track serve as a clear divide between the more expensive lakefront homes and the rest of the neighborhood, while Hyde Park as a whole has remained nearly 50 percent White, almost twice its Black population, in the midst of the majority Black communities surrounding the area. Despite this, Hyde Park is considered one of Chicago’s most diverse neighborhoods. (1) The 51st/53rd Street Metra Station viaduct. (2) The Hyde Park Metra Station on 51st/53rd Street. (3) Viaduct that leads to the Hyde Park Metra Station. Photos by Leonel Hernandez “For the university, there have been natural boundaries,” said Ben Austen, author of High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing. “There’s a kind of perception. Don’t cross Washington Park, you know, stay above 55th Street.” The University of Chicago Police Department is not restricted to those boundaries, however. Currently, the university police patrol borders extend south from 37th to 64th streets and east from Jean-Baptiste Point DuSable Lake Shore Drive to Cottage Grove Avenue The university recently increased both campus police as well as Chicago Police Department vehicles and foot patrol.

Even after the Black population began to integrate further east of Cottage Grove, beyond the Black Belt, there was a small portion of the area between 51st and 60th streets that remained mostly White in the decades that followed. What was so special about the area? The University of Chicago, along with houses and apartments that lined the lakefront, gave the well-off and White residents who remained in the area beautiful views of Lake Michigan and access to the beach.

In order to understand the physical barriers that segregate Chicago, they must be traced back to when Black people first moved to Chicago in large numbers. The Great Migration – the mass movement of Black Americans from southern states to cities in the North, East, and West – spanned approximately 1916 through 1970. An estimated six million Black people traveled in hopes of finding work and safety from racial violence, with a half-million moving to Chicago. The city’s Black population more than doubled, and since Black Americans were allowed to occupy only certain areas and choose from limited resources, the few neighborhoods where Black folks were welcomed were soon overcrowded.

Vance Guerra views the train tracks in South Chicago as creating a similar division between the Black and the Mexican communities. The tracks are located on her block on Baltimore Avenue, and to the west, on the other side of the tracks, are the Germano Millgate Apartments, which consist of more than 300 affordable housing units with mostly Black renters. When Vance Guerra was distributing toys from a Bridges//Puentes toy drive, she also noticed a cul-de-sac cutting through on 89th Street and Burley Avenue. The apartments are fenced in and cannot be accessed from the east via Baltimore Avenue, since train tracks pass through the area. To exit the affordable housing apartments, tenants can do so only through Burley Avenue.

Last summer, One Lawndale also invited the muralist Sam Kirk to paint a mural at 27th and Lawndale – with the guidance of local youth who have been involved in the peace circles – in hopes of “breaking that segregation within the communities, at least in our pocket of the city, and [at] least in our little world, of Little Village and North Lawndale.” Residents also painted the words “One Lawndale” close to the viaduct near Cermak and Kedzie. He said these murals are a “visual reminder of what our intentions are, what our plans are, [and] what we’re fighting for.”

These difficulties are compounded by the community’s lack of access to public transit. With no nearby ‘L’ stops, Vance Guerra said the 26 South Shore Express bus runs north in the morning from 4:14 AM to 3 PM and south from 1:15 PM to 10:33 PM during weekdays. The bus begins picking people up at 103rd Street and Stony Island Avenue, makes two stops along the way, then goes express to the Loop, making it difficult for people to get outside the Southeast Side industrial fortress when not commuting to and from work. This bus route also leaves out the industry-heavy neighborhoods such as South Deering and communities bordering Indiana. Currently the only bus that connects people downtown from the far Southeast Side is the 30 South Chicago bus, which doesn’t go past the 69th Street Red Line stop. When members of Bridges//Puentes were working on vaccine outreach in South Deering, Vance Guerra said it was difficult to get around even by foot. “It is just walls of industry, and you can’t cross. The houses are overshadowed by all the industry,” she said. They had to plan around the limited bus transportation.

While bridges may appear to be purely utilitarian, Vance Guerra went on to say she believes bridges around the Southeast Side act as barriers that segregate communities from one another. In fact, the reason she and others founded Bridges//Puentes was to bridge the divide between residents from all over the Southeast Side: South Chicago, East Side, Hegewisch, South Deering, and elsewhere. She points out that these bridges form markers between neighborhoods, not reliable connections between them. Vance Guerra said many of these bridges are at times not even in service, such as the 106th Street Bridge over the Calumet River in East Side, as well as the 100th Street Bridge in South Chicago: “People who live in South Deering can’t even get to the east side of the East Side.”

“It is very common all across the country – not just [using] highways...to segregate, but also siting highways just generally through low-income communities of color that didn’t have the political capital to oppose them,” he said. The Dan Ryan is a clear example; originally slated to run directly through Bridgeport, it was rerouted east of the neighborhood, displacing more Black residents instead. Though many Americans might see displacement as an inevitability, Glover points to how many European highways don’t cut through cities, but instead wind around them. Though spatial segregation exists in Europe in its own ways, “If you want to actually get into [a European] city,” Glover said, “you have to take a local road or use transit.”

The City of Chicago began the construction of the Dan Ryan Expressway in 1961, a project that cost more than $282 million to build – an estimated nearly $2.6 billion in today’s dollars. Like the Eisenhower Expressway, the Dan Ryan and other highways were built to provide primarily White residents from newly built suburbs with fast and easy auto access to the Loop and back home. In the process, those expressways reinforced existing boundaries between communities.