Bias of Impartial Things

A pervasive bias where human creations—institutions, systems, artifacts, knowledge—are treated as if they were impartial, objective, and free from the human interests that produced them. The Bias of Impartial Things projects neutrality onto things that are anything but neutral: science shaped by funding and paradigm, technology embedded with values and assumptions, culture carrying centuries of history, economics built on particular theories of human nature, law encoding power relations, secularism reflecting specific historical struggles. The bias treats these human products as if they fell from the sky, as if they weren't made by particular people in particular times with particular interests. It's the ultimate fetishism: forgetting that humans made the human world, and treating that world as natural, neutral, inevitable. The smartphone isn't impartial; it's built with minerals mined by children, designed by engineers in Silicon Valley, powered by algorithms trained on biased data. But the Bias of Impartial Things sees only the device, not the world that made it.

"The algorithm is impartial—it just processes data." Bias of Impartial Things: treating a human creation as if it weren't human. The algorithm was trained on historical data full of bias, designed by engineers with assumptions, deployed by companies with interests. But the bias sees only code, not context. The thing seems impartial; the world that made it disappears. Impartial things are never impartial; they're just things whose making we've forgotten."

Bias of Impartial Things by Dumu The Void March 8, 2026