Sep 26, 2020
Processing the untold histories McIlwain’s “Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter”
I teach undergrads. And with few exceptions, most of them are just barely 20, only just aware of themselves, let alone the world, and the histories that have shaped it. Because I teach about computing and information, the gaps in my students’ knowledge become clearest when I speak of my own history with technology: one that started with no internet, no smartphones, no apps, no data. I talk about how my early childhood was one of creative play within limits, because my access to information and games was bounded by my access to libraries, newspapers, magazines, floppy disks, and trips to Incredible Universe. I contrast that with my young adulthood, in which IRC, Compuserve, AOL, and Lycos connected me to meme proto-cultures, chat rooms with creepy adults talking to teens, and the earliest of gender non-conforming online communities. Google was not a given; it was something my peers built together while I went to grad school.
My history, of course, is just one history. Other histories were far more visible: the pop mythologies of Silicon Valley white male founders, for example, which glamorize entrepreneurship and American exceptionalism, while conflating luck and timing with genius and cunning. Journalists tell these stories and their impact; movies portray them them; writers pen books about them. And the founders inspired by those mythologies now use the platforms they’ve built to tell their own stories, with Musks and Bezoses and Zuckerburgs amplifying their primacy as kings of capitalism and American culture one post at a time. And the world responds with more stories of the impact of these founders: how the browser reshaped commerce, how Twitter reshaped journalism, how email reshaped the workplace, and how Facebook reshaped democracy.
But these stories, of course, aren’t the whole story. Other histories of computing, unfolded and interleaved with these histories, shaping the present that we live in now. Charlton McIlwain, Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU, set out to document and share the stories of Black people in the history of the internet in his book Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter, revealing these threads of history that explain the internet we have today. He chose to tell it in two parts: one that mirrors the entrepreneurial spirit of the Silicon Valley mythologies, but centering instead on communities of Black men capitalizing on the opportunities of a networked digital world; and a second story that mirrors the awesome impact of computing, but centering the white men of government and business who used it to build the digital surveillance state that has led to the brutal murder of so many Black Americans by the hands of police.
I won’t summarize the book further—it’s breezy, and so you should read it yourself—but I will share my reactions, especially the emotions I felt while reading and after, perhaps to inspire you to give it several hours of your time, but also to help you parse its strikingly casual tone and pulpy structure.
My first reaction was one of disruption. I’ve held Silicon Valley myths skeptically in my mind for some time, but the absence of other narratives about Internet history mean that they’ve nevertheless served as a foundation for explaining our present. The stories told in this book, however, destabilized that already shaky foundation. I read of inspiring entrepreneurship by Black men, early startup investments by AOL in Black online communities, computer store chains elegantly grown by adorable Black geeks, and powerful meetings of Black men at Georgia Tech, imagining the internet we have today. Seeing a very real past in which Black men in the south—not white and Asian men in California—were doing the same things, just with less money, less support, and a bit of everyday individual and structural racism—was a corrective. It helped me see history differently, and made me wonder about dozens of other untold stories of other communities imagining similar futures for computers in the 1980’s (for example, those of Black women, which McIlwain alludes and points to, but largely omits).
My second reaction was one of surrealism. This was a history I lived through, and yet it was being told through different eyes. I was each of the protagonists that McIlwain recounts—the child mesmerized by the creative potential of a computer, the passionate early adopter of online communities, the community organizer imagining futures of computing without the network or resources to create it—the only (significant) difference was that I was not a Black boy, but a nerdy white and Asian trans girl, similarly removed from the centers of power. These shared experiences and shared dreams gave me an empathetic, voyeuristic way into the experiences of the Black men in this history, helping me imagine my own childhood and young adulthood through their experiences.
My third reaction, largely driven by the second book, was one of urgency. While the first book celebrates the same American spirit that lives in our dominant mythologies of Silicon Valley, the second portrays the relentless pace of casual, racist disregard of Black America in system design, policy, and politics. The chapters just move faster and faster, showing the generational regurgitation of shallow, prejudiced ideas about crime and poverty in political meeting, a design reviews, city council adoptiosn of IBM surveillance technology. Throughout the entire second book, I knew the ending—Black Lives Matter—but I wasn’t ready for the book’s abrupt end. That final blank last page spoke so clearly: disregard, distain, and disgust for Black America is routine and swift, much like the algorithms we make to encode it. What is next? What are you going to do? Because while you’ve been pondering these questions, a legislator, a product manager, and an engineer just made a racist decision that will seal the fate of the next generation of Black American children. Get moving.
Sitting with these three reactions for the past month, I’ve been left with a fourth react that persists: racist choices, even ones we can’t imagine are racist, because they are buried deep within much broader plans, are how we build and maintain our racist systems and culture. And so that means that the choices we make—that I make—in everything I do, whether it is code, policy, process, or priority, must be slowed, and examined, for those racist outcomes, unless we repeat the same mistakes of the past fifty years. McIlwain’s book is historical proof that when they are not mindful of race in our most mundane of choices, we get one of two things: inspiring stories of Black people envisioning futures of technologies whose dreams are dampened by disinterest in Black excellence; or worse, racist systems firmly embedded into our everyday lives, invisible, unchangeable, and propagating the original sins of our country’s prejudiced founders.
I know how to tell understands my history. And I know how to use my history to destabilize their notion of the present, and make it surreal. But I don’t know how to make history inspire urgency and action. I’ll be processing McIlwain’s book for some time, trying to stir the same feelings that it did in me in my students. I recommend you do the same.
