How can we all thrive as we navigate technology, automation, and AI in the Information Age? What have technologists, philosophers, care practitioners, and theologians learned about the innovations and worldviews shaping a new century of unprecedented tech breakthroughs and social change?

On Moral Repair: A Black Exploration of Tech, hosts Annanda Barclay and Keisha McKenzie talk with tech and spiritual leaders. Their conversations inspire curiosity about tech while showcasing practical wisdom from the African continent and diaspora to nurture wellbeing for all.

Moral Repair expands mainstream tech narratives, celebrates profound insight from Black philosophy and culture, and promotes technology when it serves the common good. Listeners leave each episode with new ways to think about tech’s impacts and apply practical wisdom in their own lives.

Starting October 4, new episodes launch every 1st and 3rd Wednesday wherever you listen to podcasts. Moral Repair is for people creating, using, and being shaped by tech, wondering about its implications, and questioning what they can do about it.

Rev. Annanda Barclay is a death doula who explores life well-lived, a non-sectarian chaplain, and a Stanford researcher of moral injury and repair as it relates to tech.
Dr. Keisha E. McKenzie is a technical communicator, strategist, and advocate who applies humanism and systems thinking to questions of well-being, public good, and ecology.

In Season 1, episode themes range from recommendation algorithms and a Black ethical standard for evaluating tech to interactive holograms and hip hop as cultural memory tools. Other episodes explore moral repair, ideologies and philosophies shaping Silicon Valley, AI ethics, inclusive design, and tech well-being.

Guests include Aral Balkan (Small Tech Foundation), Dr. Scott Hendrickson (data scientist), the Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III (pastor, filmmaker, storyteller), Stewart Noyce (technologist and marketer), Zuogwi Reeves (minister and scholar), the Rev. Dr. Sakena Young-Scaggs (Stanford University’s Office of Religious & Spiritual Life, Judith Shulevitz (culture critic), and Dr. Damien Williams (professor and researcher on science, technology, and society).

Moral Repair is part of PRX’s Big Questions Project, which supports new podcasts exploring discourse with exemplary thinkers focused on humanity's most profound questions. This season is supported by the John Templeton Foundation and PRX Productions.

What do we do about recommendation algorithms? What ethical standards could we use to reshape technology?

Hosts Annanda and Keisha talk to Stewart Noyce, a technologist who helped develop the internet, and Rev. Dr. Sakena Young-Scaggs, an Afrofuturist scholar and philosopher, to understand how we can all navigate recommendation algorithms in a life-giving way.

SHOW NOTES

• Learn more about Stewart’s work in marketing and consulting at StewartNoyce.com
• See IBM promoting their work at the 1994 Winter Olympics in this vintage ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNZ7k9Kgmek
• How do algorithms drive social inequality? Virginia Eubanks explains in Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police and Punish the Poor (St. Martin's Press)
• What’s Afrofuturism all about? Read Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture by Ytasha L. Womack (Lawrence Hill Books)
• Learn about Black entrepreneurs receiving 1% of all venture capital: Sources of Capital for Black Entrepreneurs, Harvard Business Review, 2019 by Steven S. Rogers, Stanly Onuoha, and Kayin Barclay
• Explore more on “life giving and death dealing” from African feminist theologian Mercy Oduyoye in Beads & Strands: Reflections of an African Woman on Christianity in Africa (Theology in Africa), Orbis Press (2013)

Tech companies have access to an immense amount of data about each of us. How are we all being affected in a world where no one can be anonymous? Keisha McKenzie and Annanda Barclay talk to data scientist Scott Hendrickson, PhD, about data and consent, ways colonialism shows up in tech development, and more cooperative ethics we can learn from nature.

SHOW NOTES

• For the next episode: tell us about your nostalgic tech memories! Find us at @moralrepairpodcast on instagram, @moralrepair on Twitter/X, or moralrepairpodcast at gmail dot com
• How did Cambridge Analytica use 50M people’s Facebook data in 2016? ( Knowledge Wharton)
• California bill makes it easier to delete online personal data ( LA Times)
• “Churches target new members, with help from Big Data” ( Wall Street Journal)
• In the film Enemy of the State, characters uncover all the ways they’re being tracked—it’s a lot.
• Digital safety for people seeking reproductive care ( Digital Defense Fund)
• How redwood trees communicate ( New York Times): “The Social Life of Forests” feat. Professor Suzzane Simard
• “Thieves Use Tech Devices to Scan Cars Before Breaking Into Them” NBC Bay Area
• Scott has recommended a few books for our audience:
  God Human Animal Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O’Gieblyn

Impromptu: Amplifying our Humanity Through AI by Reid Hoffman

The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in an Age of Neurotechnology by Nita Farahany

• Prof. Alondra Nelson in “ The New Norms of Affirmative Consent: Alondra Nelson on the New Yorker Radio Hour”
• Prof. Yvette Abrahams on social ecology ethics in “ Thank You for Making Me Strong”

Have you ever considered the moral dilemma of a hologram narrating someone's life story for them? Dive into the latest episode of Moral Repair as we interview Otis Moss III about the interactive AI hologram of his father Civil Rights Leader Otis Moss Jr. showcased at the Maltz Museum in Ohio. Discover Zuogwi Earl Reeves how the black wisdom of hip-hop plays a pivotal role in the moral repair of narrating our tales authentically. Tune into the episode and embark on this thought-provoking journey with us.

Otis Moss III pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ https://www.trinitychicago.org/rev-dr-otis-moss-iii/

Public Theologian Zuogwi Earl Reeves work https://www.zuogwiearl.com

• About the Maltz Museum exhibit on Rev. Dr. Otis Moss, Jr.: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diHzrepVY_U&t=19s ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diHzrepVY_U&t=19s)
• About aiEsther, the bot based on Esther Perel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSF-Al45hQU
• About museums and human remains: https://theconversation.com/us-museums-hold-the-remains-of-thousands-of-black-people-156558; see also https://www.science.org/content/article/racist-scientist-built-collection-human-skulls-should-we-still-study-them about the U of Penn Museum
• About Hologram-2Pac at Coachella with Snoop Dogg: 2012 NPR story with still from the performance
• About the Henrietta Lacks family settlement: <https://www.statnews.com/2023/08/01/henrietta-lacks-family-settlement-hela-cells/ ](https://www.statnews.com/2023/08/01/henrietta-lacks-family-settlement-hela-cells/)

This Episode Annanda and Keisha Explore The Big Question of, is it worth the expense to go to Mars given the needs on Earth? And what would it be like to live on Mars or in space? They interview Kai Staats, Director of Research for SAM at the University of Arizona to get the space tea.