Technology and Culture

Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter By Charlton D. McIlwain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. 260.

Charlton McIlwain's Black Software is a groundbreaking history of the intersection between technology and race in the United States. Black Software is composed of two books, each interweaving multiple narratives. The first book examines "the Vanguard," a diverse group of Black early technology adopters who produced substantial Black discursive communities online. The second book focuses on "the Committeemen," a group of power brokers who worked to connect computation to racist state projects like apartheid and policing. The juxtaposition of the Vanguard and the Committeemen reveals the complex relationship between technology and race, with members of the Vanguard advocating for digital community and Black representation online, while members of the Committeemen were simultaneously working to restrict Black access to technological literacy and implementing computers as tools of race-based poverty and marginalization.

In the first book of Black Software, McIlwain traces the lives and contributions of early Black technology adopters, including hobbyists, entrepreneurs, digital organizers, evangelists, activists, and knowledge brokers. As McIlwain notes, "The Vanguard positioned black folks, black content, and black culture to occupy the leading edge of the Internet's popular social development" (p. 7). These early adopters created things like CPTime Clipart, Who We Are, AfroNet, "the Universal Black Pages," GoAfro, NetNoir, "Black Voices," and Black Geeks Online, all early attempts to highlight Black content and build Black community online. In a refreshing and accessible writing style, McIlwain seamlessly blends the voices of his research subjects with his own writing, highlighting a community that has often been left out of histories of the internet. He further demonstrates a point made more recently by André Brock (Distributed Blackness, 2020): the popular narrative of the digital divide and the lack of technological literacy in Black communities is misleading.

In book two, McIlwain turns to the efforts of the Committeemen in leveraging technology for white supremacist projects. The Committeemen, composed of government officials, law enforcement officers, scientists, [End Page 896] and other power brokers, worked to enmesh law enforcement and technology. McIlwain unearths new historical research on IBM and its entanglement with the Committeemen, looking at IBM's production of a racist documentary on the Watts Riots, its production of an identification and tracking system for the South African government during apartheid, and its work to convince police officials and legislators to produce "automated criminal justice information systems" (pp. 204–5). In the context of that national information system, McIlwain traces MIT's efforts to study propaganda and psychological warfare and IBM engineer Saul Gass's development for the company of a crime model that profiled Black people as "high threat" (p. 225). Recognizing the violent legacy of overpolicing and police brutality on communities of color, McIlwain contrasts the hope of the Vanguard in book one with the totalizing despair of the Committeemen's reach in book two.

While McIlwain does not aim to leave us in despair, he poses an uncomfortable question: "Can we ever outrun our history?" (p. 260). Still, Black Software introduces a longer history of Black people's relationship with technology—an archive that will prove useful as we continue navigating both the promise and danger of technology for Black communities. McIlwain has established a fruitful methodology for future studies that could incorporate more robust critiques of class and capitalism or factor in other intersectional axes of analysis. Perhaps McIlwain's analysis could be extended to the aftermath of the dot-com bubble. Still, in the wake of the worldwide protests in support of Black lives, a global pandemic disproportionately affecting Black people, and renewed focus on Black civic disenfranchisement in the southern United States, texts like Black Software offer more than simply a nuanced exposition of what has been. McIlwain's archival study of Black technology can help...