Review: Charlton McIlwain, ‘Black Software’
Race and technology: How the Digital Age Contributed to Racial Oppression and How Blackness Used Technology as Instrument of Resistance
Review of Charlton McIlwain’s Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter (Oxford University Press, 2020), 272 pages.
Abstract
Given the revolution that has taken place in digital technological over the last few decades, it was only a matter of time that this medium would be pressed into the service of racial injustice. Charlton Mcllwain charts the impact of this revolution on blackness which he frames around three main theses. The first is the invisibility thesis which refers to the way in which blackness was effectively written out of digital technology. The second argues that under the guise of law-and-order, digital technology was actively applied as a weapon of racial oppression. The third unearths the little known pioneering work of black software designers who used the medium to promote black culture on the Internet and in doing so turned technology into an instrument of resistance to oppression.
Reviewed by Gabriel O. Apata
For an academic piece of work, Charlton McIlwain’s new book Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter is rather unusual. The narrative reads like a work of literary fiction, the prose like poetry: short, crisp, jargon free sentences with hardly rigorous arguments or close engagement with known scholarship, while the quotations are written in the form of reported speeches, mainly in italics. Yet this is a serious piece of academic research covering 300 odd pages, spread across 17 chapters and built around three main arguments.
We begin with context. Over the past few decades, the philosophy of technology has attempted to revise the old thinking that placed emphasis on the primacy of reason in human affairs and the dualism that separated the human subject from and the external world. From Heidegger’s Question Concerning Technology (1977) to Simondon’s On the Mode of the Existence of Technical Objects (2017) and Stiegler’s Technics and Time, (1998, 2009, 2010b) these thinkers have in various ways argued for the primacy and significance of technology not as a distinct or separate object but as an integral part of what it is to be human. Technology shapes us, argues Kittler (1999), or as he puts it ‘media determine us’. If technology reflects human nature, it is bound to reflect all that is good and bad in humans. However, there is also a sense in which technology is not merely an extension of human nature but coeval with the very idea of the human.
While there is no doubt that technology has made life a lot easier, processes simpler and speedier and productivity more efficient, inherent in the medium are enduring ambiguities, paradoxes, a Janus-faced process of human creativity and destruction, nihilism and hope, good and evil, oppression and resistance. As Hughes (2004) has pointed out ‘technology is full of contradictions, laden with human folly, saved by occasional benign deeds, and rich in unintended consequences.’ Stiegler (2013b), borrowing from Plato and Derrida, describes this phenomenon as pharmakon which at once makes it a virus or poison and a remedy or a cure.
Mcllwain does not address the wider concerns that the philosophy of technology raises – he does not need to do so, - but this context allows us to see how far the book answers the question that it poses within the wider debate on technology. His primary focus is on digital technology as a tool of racial oppression as well as an instrument of resistance to racism, which explains the subtitle of the book - The Internet and Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter. While there is nothing new in this technology-as-instrument-of-racism argument, inherent in his thesis – even though he does not explicitly pull this out – is the ambiguity of technology, a Stieglerian pharmakon that sees digital technology both as a source of, as well as a tool that perpetuates racism (the virus) and also a corrective or resistance to racism (the cure).
So, what exactly is black software? ‘Black software’, according to Mcllwain, ‘refers to the programs we desire and design computers to run on. It refers to who designs the program, for what purpose, and what or who becomes its object of data.’ Black software is ‘a story about how computing technology was built and developed to keep black America docile and in its place - disproportionately disadvantaged, locked up, and marked for death’ (7). He further writes that:
People design software to target and solve a specific problem. Antivirus software, for instance, is designed to identify malignant code on a computer. It isolates it from the system, removes it, and then prevents future infections. This was the crack code, used to identify, isolate and remove America’s greatest problem: black people. (150).
So, black software consists of three aspects: the designers, the programmes they design and the purpose for which the programmes are designed. Black software is essentially about computer programmes but more importantly it is about the people behind the programmes – the designers and engineers, mainly white racist engineers – and the way they encode these programmes with racist ideas. This is the first thesis of the book, which opens the space for Mcllwain to present black designers (the good guys) as offering a counterpoint to the racism of the software designers. However, this emphasis on racist and anti-racist software designers though has some merit but it is also problematic as we shall later see.
The history begins in 1960s America. While the Civil Rights movement was waging the battle for racial equality, the burgeoning world of digital technology under the control of white-owned tech companies was already undermining the achievements of those struggles, doing so by scripting new ways in which racism could be maintained more efficiently. Or, to put it another way, this is the digitalisation of racism. First, few black students were studying engineering subjects, ostensibly because they did not make the grade, while Tech companies in turn were refusing to employ black engineers because there were few black engineering graduates to employ. The truth is that racial discrimination rather than lack of intellectual ability was the reason for the under-representation of black people in the tech industry. For example, there was Derrick Brown, a gifted young black man who despite his scientific brilliance struggled for acceptance into engineering departments in universities. As Mcllwain explains: ‘MIT decided that spring of 1964 that a single-digit number of Negroes was as many as the institute could handle. They, like the officials at most elite science and engineering institutions at the time, made the de facto decision to exclude Negroes from designing, building, or deciding what computing systems would be built’ (21).
The second thesis discusses the way in which tech companies forayed into politics, law enforcement and the criminal justice system in general. Mcllwain points out that ’the negro – America’s greatest – would be the new computer society’s first major problem to solve. Government, industry, and higher education institutions collaborated, designed, built, and deployed automated policing systems, networked databases, and algorithmically driven predictive policing imperatives’ (249). The authorities invested massively in technological systems such as the ‘Criminal Justice Information Systems’ that specifically targeted black people, where in Kansas for instance, new software and algorithms such as ALERT II were designed to track patterns of crime in specific neighbourhoods based on a weighting system. It was the city’s ‘solution to the social, political, and criminal threat posed by black people in Kansas’ (231).
This brings us to the third thesis of the book, where Mcllwain delves into the archives to unearth the little-known pioneering work of black software designers and activists who helped to promote black culture on the internet and in doing so turned digital technology into instrument of resistance to racial oppression. Apart from the likes of Derrick Brown, there were others like William Murrell, Melvin King, Robert Snelsire, Shirley Jackson, Kamal Al-Mansour, (Afrolink, formerly Mac Africa) Ken Onwere (AfroNet), Malcolm CasEelle (NetNoir), Farah Chideya (PopandPolitics), Ken Granderson (Blackfacts.com), Barry Cooper (Black Voices), Earl Pace (Black Data Processors Association [BDPA]), Brown, Lee Bailey, Mike Holman and others. There was GoAfro Universal Black Pages (UBP), the Soc.culture.african.american group, the African American Cultural forum, the national association of Black engineers and Mrs. Anita Brown who ‘founded Black Geeks Online to promote computer literacy and educate others about the power of information technology ‘ (248). The endeavours of the likes of David Ellington and Malcolm CaSelle in creating Netnoir opened a forum for black cultural exposure comparable to the achievement to the freedom of Juneteenth 1865 when the slaves of Texas finally realised, they had been freed. These achievements would not have been possible without the contribution of black politicians and activists, such as Adam Clayton Powell, Philip Randolph, Donald Michael - author of Cybernation: The Silent Conquest (1962) and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Here we find echoes of Mirzoeff’s The Right to Look (2011) in this book, where Mirzoeff examines the denial of visuality to the Other, from the slave plantations to Imperialism and through systems of military surveillance - all of which rely on technology as instrument of oppression. Just as Mirzoeff argues for ‘countervisualities’, Mcllwain sees black software designers as offering a countervisuality that insists not only on the right to look but the right of blackness to be seen in a positive ontological light rather than as an invisible other. Thus, the technology of colonisation becomes the tool of decolonisation and resistance.
This is the point at which black software turns into the instrument of resistance, where the transformatory effects of black software designers on black lives and society in general can now be compared to that of previous times. Few would remember the names of the many young black men lynched by white mobs in time past. What is remembered are images of their bloodied bodies hanging from trees, their badly disfigured faces and eyes bulging out of their sockets, their hands tied behind their backs. They were dispensable because their lives did not matter. The savage beating of Rodney King by the police in Los Angeles in 1991 famously captured on tape made little difference to attitudes to race in the US. Here was a name and a recording of police brutality, but the analogue form of the recording with its grainy images became a matter of contest in court, leading to the acquittal of the policemen charged in that case. In 2014 George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin – a young black man - and as in previous times, the jury acquitted him of criminal culpability. But the spate of police killings of young black men that followed: Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, Breona Taylor and many others began to turn the tide. The names of these individuals became symbols of racial oppression while their deaths came to be associated with the towns and cities in which they were murdered – Ferguson, Charlottesville, Minnesota and so on. Indeed, the killing of Castile was streamed live on Facebook. Something had changed; digital technology had made black lives and black deaths visible, which in turn gave birth to the BlackLivesMatter movement which began as a Hashtag started by Alicia Garcia, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi. Then came possibly the most famous killing of a black man in recorded history, the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, the entire event captured by digital technology. For the first time in US history, a police officer, Derek Chauvin, was convicted of the racist murder of a black man and sentenced to a term of imprisonment. Mcllwain’s argument is that none of these would have happened without the contribution of black software engineers.
Now we return to the wider context with which we began, namely the philosophy of technology. One problem with Mcllwain’s line of enquiry is that while there is millage in focusing on the motives of racist software designers, the question of purpose, motive and intentionality in the context of digital technology is not straightforward but fraught with difficulties. No doubt technology has purposively been used as weapon of racial oppression, but digital technology does have a mind of its own, beyond the control or intentions of its designers, as Dr Frankenstein found to his cost. While some software programmes may have been designed to embed racism, others may yet produce unintended racist outcomes. For instance, when Hughes talks about the ‘rich unintended consequences’ of technology, he was referring to the way in which technology works in mysterious ways, growing legs and walking off in directions that were not intended. In which case both white and black engineers could equally design racist programmes without the intention to do so. For example, Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology (2019) sees technology as reflecting the racism that exists in society but argues against the intentions of software designers, seeing technology not necessarily as operating under the control of a racist designer or as a neutral means to a racist end but as a potentially a racist medium in itself – the ‘racist robots’, the racist algorithms, the ‘Jim Codes’ and so on. Technology operates in ways bigger and larger than the racism of its designers, an argument that loops back to the works of Heidegger, Stiegler, Kittler and others. We are all implicated in this rather complex world of digital technology, affected by its various means and ways, shaped by its processes and consequences.
Thus, the world of technology is a complex and dynamic with many intervening variables or factors interacting to produce unpredictable results. Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression (2018) also sees digital technology and its ‘oppressive algorithms’ as reproducing and reinforcing racist, sexist and gender stereotypes. Type in words like ‘black girls’ on search engines and a torrent of racist and pornographic associations pop up. But these results are not a permanent fixture of search engines but do change from time to time. So, type in ‘black girls’ on the internet now and you get different results. Still, there is no doubt that digital technology overwhelmingly marginalises certain groups of people: blacks, women, Muslims, the disabled, the poor and so on. For instance, Virginia Eubanks’ Automating Inequality (2018) examines the way in which technology has widened the gap between the rich and poor, disadvantaged and disenfranchised minorities and suppressed the voices of the unrepresented. Vilissa Thompson (2019) on the other hand calls attention to the negative effect of technology on the disabled, particularly the invisibility of black disabled people.
The question is who or what is responsible for generating these outcomes and how can these negative impacts be corrected? The answer is far more complex and cannot be reduced to mere motives, even if that is sometimes the case. While the human factor in the development of these programmes cannot be discounted, it is difficult to determine where human factor ends, and the life of technology begins. The ghost in the machine is a many-headed hydra that grows a new head just as one is cut off or grows like the rhizome of Deleuze and Guattari.
But how do we resolve these problems? One suggestion is to empower minorities by providing access to technology. But this initiative though helpful is of limited benefit. The answer is not simply more technology, more designers or even access but how we use technology. This is a question that Stiegler poses and which he answers by distinguishing between knowledge and mere information. For Stiegler, there is nothing deterministic about technology and so a remedy for its poisonous effects can be achieved through ‘collaborative technologies’ or ‘relational technologies’ that empower people by providing them with real knowledge that leads to savoir vivre rather than mere information that produces savoir faire. We can choose to be slaves to technology or free ourselves from its enslavements.
While Mcllwain is right to shine a light on this aspect of race and technology, an effort that is commendable; this book must also be located within this wider context of the discourse on technology. The point here is that there is a limit to how much digital technology can be used to resolve the many problems of racism, inequality, sexism and discrimination that it has helped to create and perpetrate, and by implication black software designers are just as limited in their ability to correct what is fundamentally the problem of society. Like the effects of climate change or the Covid-19 pandemic, no one group on its own can resolve these problems; rather, it would require the concerted efforts of the collective to resolve. For example, Fry (2018) who cautions against placing too much faith in technology advocates government intervention through legislation to curb the negative impact of technology on people’s lives. While the efforts of software designers have been useful in combating the racism in digital technology, the measures required to deal a serious blow to its negative effects ultimately transcend the work of black software designers. It is a problem for the whole of society to resolve.
References
Adas, Michael (1989). Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology and Ideologies of Western Dominance. Ithaca: Cornel University Press
Benjamin, Ruha (2019) Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tool for the New Jim Code. Cambridge: Polity
Eubanks, Virginia (2018) Automating Inequality: How High Tech Tools Profile, Police and Punish the Poor. New York: St Martins Press
Fry, Hannah (2018) Hello World: How to be Human in The Age of Machine. New York: Random House
Hughes, Thomas (2004) Human-Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture. Chicago Illinois: University of Chicago Press.
Kittler, Friedrich (1999) Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas (2011) The Right to Look: A Counter History of Visuality. Durham: Duke University Press.
Noble, Sofiya (2018) Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: New York University Press
Simondon, Gilbert (2017) On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Stiegler, Bernard (2013b) What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology. Cambridge: Polity.
Stiegler, Bernard (1998) Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford USA: Stanford University Press.
Stiegler, Bernard (2009) Technics and Time 2: Disorientation. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Stiegler, Bernard (2010) Technics and Time 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Thompson, Vilissa (2019) “How Technology is Forcing the Disability Rights Movement into the 21st Century.” Catalyst Feminism Theory Technoscience 5 (1) pp.1-5, DOI:10.28968/cftt.v5i1.30420
Dr Gabriel O. Apata is an independent scholar and researcher whose works cuts across the humanities and social sciences. His research interests include Race and Ethnicity, Philosophy, Aesthetics, African philosophy, History, Aesthetics, Politics and Diaspora Studies.
