Indicate
This!

A founding
refusal

A debt is not repaired by making the machine more accurate.

This journal begins from a refusal. It refuses to treat the harm as a flaw in the output, a thing to be measured and debiased and then certified clean, and it names the harm as the architecture itself, the factory built the way the first factories were built, on labor it would not author, on land it would not pay, and on water it would not return.

The literature of algorithmic fairness has done patient and necessary work at the level of the verdict, and this journal honors that work. It also insists that you cannot repair a verdict while the courthouse runs on stolen current. The question is never whether the model is fair, but whose work it confiscated to learn the word fair.

Reparation in this age means returning authorship to the people from whom the machine was taught to take it. The planned become the planners; the studied become the ones who build what they study.

So the work of this journal is plain, if not easy. To study what already works in the places the field was trained to overlook. To protect the knowledge that the credential will not stamp. To read repair as a science with its own instruments, its own evidence, and its own standards of proof, written and held by the communities it concerns. We do not ask a manuscript to be neutral, and we do not mistake the absence of a position for rigor.

Five commitments

Contents

The founding issue establishes the position from which the journal will read everything after it: that the harm lives in the factory, and that repair means the return of what the factory took.