Feedback Laundering
Translating powerful personal testimony into neutral or decontextualised summaries that can be used to justify inaction or misrepresent lived-experience consensus.
These are not metaphors. They’re mechanisms. This glossary maps how digital systems harvest lived-experience wisdom as data, dilute it into scalable “solutions,” and lock the originators out of authorship, funding, or influence.
Translating powerful personal testimony into neutral or decontextualised summaries that can be used to justify inaction or misrepresent lived-experience consensus.
Consulting communities for their ideas, then converting those ideas into institutionally owned frameworks, campaigns, or products—often stripped of context and credit.
When frameworks, toolkits, or language appear in new systems that mirror community-created work—but with no credit, backlinks, or citation trail. Authorship becomes untraceable, yet the architecture remains.
When the system boosts extracted insights through professional channels while the original authors remain invisible, unfunded, or de-platformed. This shifts cultural capital to institutions that did not generate the knowledge they profit from.
When lived-experience phrases are lifted from social media, feedback forums, or community spaces and reused in policy, branding, or AI without acknowledgment. This practice erases intellectual labour while monetising the emotional truth of marginalised people.