Personalization, Fairness, and Post-Userism Robin Burke Abstract The incorporation of fairness-aware machine learning presents a chal- lenge for creators of personalized systems, such as recommender systems found in e-commerce, social media, and elsewhere. These systems are designed and promul- gated as providing services tailored to each individual user ’s unique needs. How- ever, fairness may require that other objectives, possibly in conflict with personalization, also be satisfied. The theoretical framework of post-userism, which broadens the focus of design in HCI settings beyond the individual end user, provides an avenue for this integration. However, in adopting this approach, developers will need to offer new, more complex narratives of what personalized systems do and whose needs they serve. 1 Introduction The turn toward questions of fairness in machine learning (Barocas and Selbst 2016; Dwork et al. 2012; Mitchell et al. 2021) raises some important issues for the understanding of personalized systems. Researchers studying these systems and organizations deploying them present a common narrative highlighting the benefits of personalization for the end users for whose experience such systems are opti- mized. This narrative in turn shapes users’ expectations and their folk theories (working understandings) about the functionality and affordances of personalized systems (DeVito et al. 2017). Fairness requires a different kind of analysis. Rather than focusing on the individual, fairness is understood in terms of distribution: how is harm or benefit from a system distributed over different individuals and/or different classes of individuals? These distributional concerns take the focus at least partly away from the end user, and thus the implementation of fairness concerns in personalized systems requires a re-thinking of fundamental questions about what personalized systems are for and what claims should be made about them. R. Burke (*) University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA e-mail: robin.burke@colorado.edu © The Author(s) 2022 H. Werthner et al. (eds.), Perspectives on Digital Humanism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86144-5_20 145