And in the case of the project I mentioned above, the tech is used to find those patterns in order to avoid them. Entrenched oppressive structures aren’t only about conserving patterns. They’re about preserving specific patterns and dampening others. For example, if this tech were available during the AIDS epidemic, there would have been plenty of data which revealed just how prevalent gay culture was in certain areas whereas the dominant ideology would insist that gay people were rare and unnatural. That data and the resulting analysis in the hands of police officers would have had very different outcomes from the same data/analysis in the hands of gay activists