Tech Won't Save Us - The Creation of a Black Cyberculture w/ André Brock

Episode Date: September 9, 2021

Paris Marx is joined by André Brock to discuss the history of Black people’s online activity, the internet’s association with whiteness, and what Black Twitter can tell us about the centrality of Black people to digital culture.André Brock is an associate professor of media studies at Georgia Tech. He writes on Western technoculture, Black technoculture, and digital media. His award-winning book, Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures, theorizes Black everyday lives mediated by networked digital technologies. You can get if from NYU Press, and it’s available through open access. Follow André on Twitter at @DocDre.🚨 T-shirts are now available!Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald did portraits of the Obamas, while Kara Walker made “A Subtlety” at the Domino Sugar Refinery.Achille Mbembe is a Cameroonian philosopher and social theorist.Janelle Monáe, Sun Ra, and John Jennings are notable people engaging with Afrofuturism.Books mentioned: Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter by Charlton D. McIlwain and Tools for Conviviality by Ivan Illich.Support the show

Mbembe has this really beautiful phrase against the desiccation of modernity. A space of care and self-repair should be somewhere where we rehydrate ourselves, right, where we fix the things that are broken so that they can be used another day. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Andre Brock. Andre is an associate professor at the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech and the author of Distributed Blackness, African American Cybercultures. I'll include a link where you can buy the book in the show notes, but I would also note that the book is available open access and I'll include that link as well. I have no problem admitting that, you know, the

previous reading that I've done on black cyber culture and black people's kind of specific use of the internet is pretty limited. So for me, reading Andre's book was really fascinating and kind of the history and concepts that he outlines are incredibly compelling. And I think you'll find them to be so as well. As I say in the interview, you know, I've heard the internet described as a means of US geopolitical power in the past or of English kind of a tool or an enactment of whiteness and of masculinity in particular. And while that is not a frame that I necessarily considered before, you know, when you think about the general criticisms that we make of the tech industry about how, you know, it's controlled by a group of wealthy white men and has been for a very long time, and the efforts at increasing diversity have been rather limited in their success. You know, I think it's an important frame to add to those other ones that I outlined when we consider

how the internet works and the kind of effects that it has in our world. And I would also say that Andre's book provides this important history as well of how black people have used the internet and expressed themselves online, you know, really since the beginning of digital culture. And while I've read a number of books on those kind of histories, you know, and articles as well on the history of the internet and how that has evolved over time, I have never really read a history like Andres that also lays out specifically what Black people were doing, or African Americans in particular, during these periods, how they were engaging themselves and

making space for themselves online, and what the implications of those different kind of platforms and means of engagement were. So, you know, that's really all just to say that I really enjoyed this conversation with Andre, and I found the book really compelling and would recommend it to any of you if you are also interested in exploring an explicitly Black perspective on the internet and the technologies that we use and rely on every single day. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in Canada.

And you can find out more about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. If you like this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and you can share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And as always, every episode of Tech Won't Save Us is provided free to everybody

because listeners like you choose to support the show through Patreon. So if you enjoy the show and you feel like you learn from these episodes, you can join supporters like Dwayne Monroe from Amsterdam and Tim Paul from London by going to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and becoming a supporter. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Andre, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thank you for having me. Your book has been on my list for, you know, I'm embarrassed to say it, about a year. And, you know, now we finally get to have this conversation. And so I'm really excited to dig into it with you. And so I wanted

to start with, you know, getting kind of an overview of the main concept of the book before we dig into more of those specifics that you discuss throughout it. And so can you give us a brief kind of outline of Black cyberculture and how you see that to kind of set up our conversation? Okay, so the book draws from about 15 years worth of research into Blackness and digital spaces. I've studied weblogs, I've studied video games, web browsers, newspapers, just anything digital that Black people were in. I went to see how they were representing themselves and how they were being represented. And so the book is a culmination of that and then an extension of that. And so in the book, I try to argue that there is something that Black people bring to the Internet that makes it a Black space.

I have a pretty controversial claim in there that Black people are naturally good at the internet because we bring an excess of life to it. And I call that that excess of life Black cyber culture, where we use the tools afforded to us, in this case, social media, digital expertise, whatever you want to call it, and bring ourselves, our cultural commonplaces, and our artistic and literary sensibilities to form a space that is recognizably Black, even in the absence of being able to identify my body in a physical space. Yeah, I love that. And you describe many examples of how that plays out throughout the book, and I want to discuss those with you in this conversation.

But I think another key kind of concept that you bring up early in the book to kind of root it and root your analysis is the notion that, and as you write, the internet should be understood as an enactment of whiteness through the interpretive flexibility of whiteness as information. And, you know, I think, you know, obviously I have heard the internet positioned as a means of US geopolitical power. You know, the internet as a means of US geopolitical power, the internet as a means of kind of English linguistic supremacy, I guess, because if you speak English, you'll have access to a lot more things online. But I will completely admit that this is the first time that I had heard of this kind of framing of the internet, and I found it a really compelling one. So can you expand a

bit on that framing of the internet as whiteness? I can. So I'm going to do it backwards. Part of the book revolves around my use of a theory called libidinal economy, which is French structuralism at its finest. And it talks about the idea that there are certain desires and tensions that undergird the political economies of the things that we understand to be active in the world. So political economy of communication has always been interesting to me, the digital even more so. And when you start using a libidinal economy to understand what goes on in Internet spaces, it becomes pretty obvious that there are certain desires, beliefs, and tensions that undergird the things that we call innovations or disruptions, right, that continue to happen over and over again, right? And as an adherent of science and technology studies, reading about things like the Tennessee Valley Authority's dam project or Robert Moser's building expressways and

housing projects in New York City, right, you begin to quickly understand that there is an American tendency to want to control the land, To them, it was pastoral and untouched, even as they were dependent upon Squanto and his homeboys to bring them food for Thanksgiving. And so from that space, and here I'm also referencing Joel Dienerstein, who talks about a technocultural matrix. It's easy to understand, or it was easy for me to argue then,

that whiteness, masculinity, modernity, progress, the future, and religion are things that structure what I call American techno culture. And the two things that stood out the most to me are whiteness and masculinity. And I'm actually writing about this as we speak. And one of the ways that's easiest to understand whiteness and masculinity is the current space race between Bezos, Musk, and Branson, right? And here we have three men who are considered to be quote-unquote geniuses because they've managed to finesse venture capital and our desires for conquering yet another frontier into their own personal vehicles to get up into the lower upper atmosphere of the earth, right? They didn't even make it to space. That's the worst part, right? But we have this thing where we believe that white men in particular are the

geniuses that will lead us to a technological utopia. Like Bezos and I think to a lesser extent Musk are very clear in thinking that Mars is the frontier where inequality will be solved, as opposed to the problems in California being on fire and New York being underwater and the Gulf Coast being washed away, right? And so I argue that that whiteness and masculinity overdetermines the way we think about technology in general, but the digital specifically, in part because one of the drives of white masculinity is to both transcend the body and to control the body, right? When you start thinking of transcendence and control, you start seeing, say, surveillance infrastructures, right? Again, I'm writing on this.

I was just talking about how Amazon's warehouses implemented an algorithmic manager where they took techniques that are literally as old as slavery, where plantation owners used to time how fast their workers could pick a row, how quality their picking was. And it's funny because that same technology has made it to the Amazon warehouses. So they call what they do picking, right? These algorithms measure their picking. They go by the fastest one. They say that's the standard that all workers should be held to. And if you cannot

meet that standard, the algorithm can fire you without human intervention, right? And I'm not making this up, I swear. And so for me, that extension of whiteness, masculinity, wanting to control and surveil others seems to be a natural fit. The other piece of it, because I always try to make sure that I bring both sides. So that desire for control and transcendence is one side. The other side is anti-Blackness, right? And so my mentor, Lisa Nakamura, wrote this beautiful article that said, racism on the internet is not a glitch, it's a feature. And her argument, and one I deeply agree with, I'm writing about misinformation now, is that anti-Blackness on the internet is largely assumed to be irrational behavior on the part of white men and women, when in actuality, it's the way they view the world. It is not an extreme view. It is their

view, right? And so understanding both sides, that there is a dark side to white desires and control, but also an ascetic, like a monk-like, wanting to control themselves and the world, that whiteness and masculinity bring to the ways we understand the digital that we have today. Yeah. You know, I think it's such an important articulation of, you know, technology and of the internet. And I think I speak for all the listeners when I say I'm really looking forward to reading that piece that you're writing right now. So is my editor at Logic. She's like, send it to me today. It's due today. Okay. So Khadijah, I love you. I'm working on this, I swear. Okay, I'm sorry, go ahead. Well, when it finally reaches that point, you know, we'll be looking forward to reading it. But you know, in discussing it that way, obviously, then that provides a particular

perspective through which to see the internet and its evolution, right? You know, to see many technologies, but obviously, you know, the focus of the book is the internet. its evolution, right? You know, to see many technologies, but obviously, you know, the focus of the book is the internet. And, you know, what is going on on the internet, especially in respect to how black people are using it, expressing themselves on it, making space for themselves, things like that, right. And so one aspect that stood out to me that I think I want to start with is kind of the evolution of the internet that a lot of people will be used to from the kind of more experimental web 1.0 days to the early web 2.0 of blogs and things like that to kind of, you know,

the social media of now and kind of the platform takeover of the web as we experience it today, right? And so you also describe how Black people use the web in those particular stages of its evolution, I guess. So can you talk a little bit about that development and that kind of evolution, you know, of the web and of Black people's use of the web? The first place to start is digital divide research, right? Because for the most part, it's supposed that minoritized populations, Black folk, rural folk, youth didn't have access to the internet, which is true. It was expensive. Subscriptions to internet services, we're not even talking about broadband, like 56K, CompuServe, right, were stupidly expensive, right? And so it was assumed that Black folk at first didn't have material access, then they didn't have technical

access or financial access, and then they didn't have the literacy, right? And what Charlton McElwain has done in his recent book, Black Software, and I've tried to do in my work as well, is point out that even in those environments, there were still spaces where Black folk carved out things that they could do and would do for themselves, right? So some of the earliest, one of the earliest social networks is a space called Black Planet, right? Which is founded by Omar Wasow and a couple other people, right? And Black Planet is unique in that it prioritized HTML design as a component of Black digital practice. And Wasow has been on the record as talking about when they went to venture capitalists, the VCs didn't believe that Black people would or could do that, right? And yet, nonetheless, within two years of its introduction, Black Planet had 16 million users at the time, which doesn't seem like a lot now,

right? But considering that was 2001, that was a lot of people when most folk didn't even realize that there were only 37 million African Americans in the country at all. So for Black Planet to have 16 million users was a huge accomplishment, right? So the move from hand-coded websites and Web 1.0 or walled gardens and AOL to Web 2.0's lowered barriers of technical access. So I'm thinking Blogger, I'm thinking Flickr, but also Black Planet, MySpace and the rest, right? And the explosion of broadband network penetration into schools, universities, and workplaces meant that more everyday Black people could come online and use it, not only at work, but at home. One of the findings of the third and fourth rounds of digital device studies found that Black parents in particular, minority parents, placed a high

priority on education. So they put desktops, the, you know, the Dells, the, what was the one with the gateway, with the cow, right? The black and white ones. They put those computers in their houses so their kids would have access to this technical, technological future, right? And so what you see in the mid 2000s, I argue following Hurricane Katrina, right? Which was a galvanizing event for a Black web presence, through 2009, which is when Black Twitter is argued to have taken off, was this explosion of Black content, right? While many people understand Paris Hilton as the preeminent gossip blogger, he was one of a cadre of gossip bloggers, including Fresh at cronkatastical.net and Angel Laws at Concrete Loop, which led this expansion

of Black digital culture, right? That Ebony and Jet and Essence hadn't figured out, but these young folk took Black culture and brought it online in a way that was comfortable for the Black folk who were the primary audiences for that content. So you also see spaces like OK Player. And then, you know, social networks blew up in conjunction with the smartphone. And in the phone, right? And so text messaging, Twitter, and as Facebook finally learned to develop a mobile app, God bless their soul, many folk began using the smartphone as their locus for being computational practitioners, for being digital practitioners. Black people were right there with them. We are overrepresented on Twitter, on Instagram, and other spaces, in part because we still suffer from broadband penetration into Black neighborhoods.

But mobile smartphone access has kind of obvi to create this new era of the platformation of now, it's typically described in a negative know, black people are able to produce a lot more content, have this kind of presence, and then through social media, even be overrepresented on that. So I wonder if you see that kind of evolution in a positive way, in a negative way, kind of neutrally, how would you perceive that? Yes. It's far too easy to understand it as a negative. I have been recorded a number of talks and conversations where I'm reminded by my interviewers and interlocutors that, you know, capitalism and commodification are really terrible things for black folk and black content is always taken up and black we've never been paid for our contributions. Why would the internet be any different? But, and that comes down to kind of beliefs about what the internet is. We believe that the internet should be a space where everybody can profit from their ideas. For me, as an adherent of libidinal economy, I ask, why is it so important that everything you do be measured in the money that you make from it? Right. And to me, that's a crucial point. So yes, I would love if black people could

make more money from what they do. But making money is not the only reason why there are young dancers basically performing their hearts out on Triller or TikTok or young teens doing these massively complicated editing effects to show even the most absurd combinations of everyday life and surreal activity, right? Why people are writing 70 tweet-long tweet threads to educate their peers about COVID protocols or natural hair care textures, right? All of these things come into play because we want to express that excess of life in these spaces. And it's unfortunate that it's fucked up, right? That capitalism takes advantage of that, but that's what Western capitalism has always done to Black people. The other part of the Bidinal economy is arguing from a space of anti-Blackness that Black

people are not actually considered human. And so everything they do can be captured as if it was a good or an object, and we don't get any entitlement to that. I don't go quite that far, right? Because I do see that our work in the interstices, right? In the spaces between is really valuable for us to us. And so the answer is yes, it's good and bad. I think that makes sense. And I think that's a really reasonable and understandable answer, right?

Another piece that stood out to me in thinking about that kind of history was this kind of history was this kind of debate, especially that you described with like the Blackbird web browser around kind of the desire to have products and spaces for Black people, designed for Black people, or just to have Black people using kind of the same services and tools as everybody else. And how, you know, on one hand, there was clearly a desire for something that was designed around the needs and interests of the black people who would be

using the web. But then on the other hand, there were people who thought that, you know, this was kind of a way of excluding black people from everything else that was going on online. Can you talk a little bit about that kind of divide and debate about how Black people should be using the web? So I won't go so far as to say how Black folk could use the web, but the argument you talk about where either we should congregate for self-sufficiency and self-care, or should we participate in the wider economy knowing we're going to be exploited, that conversation is as old as abolition, right? And in many cases, you know, it's really easy to point to instances like Tulsa, the Greenwood Massacre, or the 1919 race riots,

or the New York City draft riots, or the 1968 Watts riots. Like there have been plenty of occasions where whiteness has risen up because it was unhappy with the ways Black people were arguing for their freedom or demonstrating their success. And so that argument is pretty old in an informational context. And I'm coming from library studies with this perspective. There's still a debate in library studies, like where do you put collections for minoritized groups? If you're thinking about books for LGBTQ youth, right, do you put them as a separate collection where everybody can watch these kids who may not have come out, walk to this stuff and pick this up, or do you spread it out

across the entire collection, right? And that's really interesting as a debate for the internet as well, because people will, well, nobody can see when you go to an internet site. We know that that's not the case, right? But also when you segregate that information to a specific place, that doesn't necessarily speak to Black people's desires to also be part of a wider global community, right? And so it's a really tough one, right? Do you protect the information resources needed for Black people to thrive, or do you allow them to also have those resources spread out in wider spaces that they can find? Like I talk about the Negro Motorist Green Book, right? They can find spaces of rest and relaxation along the pathways that they travel, right?

That may not necessarily be as friendly to them. It's an interesting problem, problematic, I guess I should argue for, because it's not something I think that can be solved, right? But it's something to consider nevertheless, especially given how many attempts have been made at making spaces by black people for black people, there have been at least three incarnations of Africana dot com. The Root, I think, is and the Griot are direct descendants of Henry Gates' initial effort with MSNBC to build a space for Black people, right? That promoted a certain way of being Black online. And in many ways, it was a respectable version of Blackness, an elite version of Blackness. And many Black folk, they were like, oh, that's cool, but I'd rather go over here to this gossip site where we get to

talk about Beyonce, right? So there's also this additional thing, like who gets to decide what Blackness is in that space to be shared, to be promoted, to be distributed, right? And so those conversations are ongoing as well. Again, it becomes a problematic, right? What Blackness is the best, or should we just go with the heterogeneous Blackness? It's a tough question. Yeah, but I think a lot of the kind of issues that you're describing there are also present in Twitter and Black Twitter, which makes up a big, you know, portion of the book and a big focus of yours in the book, at least, you know, the questions of respectability, the questions of the degree of interaction with,

you know, broader communities outside of the Black community. So can you talk a bit about, you know, Black Twitter, who kind of makes up Black Twitter, because it's not every Black user of Twitter, as I understood from the book, and what the importance is of looking at this group of users on this platform that so many of us are using. So both Jack Dorsey and Chris Sacco have said that Black Twitter is the use case for Twitter, in part because of its topical coherence, but also its appearance of community. I don't go as far to call Black Twitter is the use case for Twitter, in part because of its topical coherence, but also its appearance of community. I don't go as far to call Black Twitter a community, in part because that term is so problematic in sociology and internet studies. But I think of it as a collective,

right, made up of multiple neighborhoods of Black young folk, Black educated folk, Black older folk, aunties, uncles, hoteps, anime nerds, and any combination of all of those, right? The key, I think, that pulls it together is that they are pretty much united in arguing for their right to be Black in that space, right? Which is not something that has been easily afforded in prior information technologies. Like, can you imagine a blog, right? How much traffic could a blog bear that would allow so many Black people to participate at one time? Not much.

Black Planet, the social networking services, buckled multiple times under the weight of people trying to jump on. Like when Solange introduced her album a few years back and brought Black Planet back to life, the servers crashed because too many Black people came on the time. Twitter has at least, for the most part,

solved its problems of distribution of scale. We don't see the whale as often anymore we don't see the whale as often uh and if it does go down it's usually amazon's fault uh because amazon web services right but uh the collective activities the billions of posts a day that Black people generate just to explain and highlight and complain and bemoan their circumstances, their life is a really interesting slice of everyday life of Blackness that I think is really possible only on Twitter, right? Which is, I think, why I've stuck with it as long as I have. I used to be the researcher that said, every time something new technology comes out, I need to study it. But Twitter, it just remains fascinating to me. The book is more interested in understanding what Black people do to and for themselves than it is in trying to explain Blackness to the white world.

And that was an intentional move. There's not much research at all that theorizes what Black people on the internet does, right? They describe what Black people on the internet do. They might catch a phenomenon or a topic that say, hey, Black people responded to this, but I tried my best to theorize what it meant to think about being Black from a philosophical perspective and how that translated to Black digital practice. Results may vary, but I think in that way, it's a fairly unique contribution to trying to think through, like, what does it mean to be Black without a body, right? Instagram offers a slightly different perspective because of its visual focus. But I think even Instagram has struggled. First, they deprecated likes. That didn't work. They've tried to refigure the comment section.

That doesn't work because they format it terribly andigure the comment section, that doesn't work because they format it terribly and it's hard to read, right? Instagram is not nearly as an intuitive a community as Black Twitter is, right? In part because of that prevalence of the visual. Same thing for Facebook. Facebook is a much more intimate parasocial network, right? It's friends of friends, where Twitter, I have people who follow me that I've've never met that I don't know, I won't know. And I follow people who I've never met. I don't. Although it's nice to meet you, Paris. And that I get to know. Right. And so that heterogeneity, what Mark Granovetter calls weak tie associations, brings me a wider view of the world, but also paradoxically, a more intimate view where black people who are not like me yet experience the same thing can come together and talk about it in that space.

It's great to meet you as well, I would say. You know, I think that is a fascinating description of, you know, Black Twitter and this particular, you know, collective, as you say, that has, you know, formed on Twitter and how, you know, Twitter is kind of a unique space for this kind of collective to inhabit, I guess. You know, it was interesting to read in the book about how this collective had formed on Twitter and only kind of came to the attention of like the wider Twitter public, I guess, you know, with the hashtags that they were kind of coalescing around. And I feel like the hashtag,

you know, obviously, it's not the only piece of your analysis that goes on in the book. But I feel like it's an important piece of this collective and of understanding black Twitter. And I was interested if you could talk a little bit about the use of hashtags. And I was also interested in asking you, have you noticed this use of hashtags evolved? Because I remember from my use of Twitter that I feel like hashtags used to be much more prevalent a number of years ago. And I feel like you see them far less on Twitter now, or at least the Twitter that I use. And so I wonder if the use of hashtags on Black Twitter has changed as well, or if they remain kind of an important piece of that collective. I agree with you. I think hashtag usage has decreased in part because networks are more

fully mature. What hashtags did in the beginning was identify people who wanted to discuss a similar topic. And now a lot of those people follow one another, so they don't necessarily need hashtags to connect them with those people. Also, when hashtags were new, one of the things that people really, I wish people would have talked about more is how many banal hashtags there were. One of my first Twitter services was one that featured six hashtags, love, hate, like, dislike, or whatever. And it would just pop up tweets from people who would use those specific things. And those are those banal hashtags. You don't see those as much anymore, right?

Nobody puts, well, maybe they still do on Instagram. That's not my space, but people don't put hashtag love, hashtag mom, hashtag four words put together to indicate this thing, right? Our communicative practices have evolved beyond that in part because these micro blogging services have given us more space in which to express ourselves,

right? So hashtags counted against the 140 for Twitter, which made it remarkable that people use them in addition to cramming the other stuff like a name and the content in there. But with 280, I'm seeing people actually revert to longer form discourse. Right. If not the seven tweet thread that 280 characters, people have become really skilled at communicating complex concepts, not me, but complex concepts in that little bitty space, right? To go backwards, hashtags were initially interesting to me in part because I argue in the book that for Black discourse, they serve one function And for Twitter itself and computer mediated

communication, they serve a couple of more. So for computer mediated communication, hashtags serve as a hyperlink to archive of a discussion, retrieval and archive of discussion, right? They have a semantic function where it assigns a particular folksonomic, meaning not necessarily something that a computer generated, but people said is a way to organize this discussion. So they serve that. But for signifying, hashtags added an additional layer of what Black people love to do, which is do wordplay, witty wordplay, and add that additional function on top of that. So yes, it is a semantic marker, but it's also a cultural marker of things. And so the hashtag that I use, and I apologize if this offends your audience, but I don't really care, is nigger Navy. not necessarily about naval practices or etiquette. It wasn't even about necessarily Donald Trump.

Right. What it became was access to a wild universe where people took that term and just ran with it with pictures of women sitting underwater in full scuba gear talking about, I'm waiting for my man to come home from his tour in the nigger Navy, right. To a picture of LeBron, Bosch, Wade, and Chris Paul on a floaty in Miami Harbor talking about here comes the next version of the USS niggas. Right. And so like to take that level of signification and add on to the mechanical, the electronic, the retrieval functions of a hashtag to me was just something remarkable to watch happen in real time, right? We had one last year with World War III when we thought Trump was going to send us into the Third World War. And that brought up some of the older Negro Navy hashtags, but also took it to the next level. My favorite one was the one where they took the Mayan apocalypse,

which was supposed to happen December last year, and they made it into the Negro apocalypse. Somebody said, what if Black people get their powers on this day? And people were going so far as to say, what if I have too much white heritage to actually not get my powers? Or what if my powers are being delivered by a Black postman and therefore they're going to be late? And so just all of these things that can be taken up under the rubric of hashtag discourse, right? But go far beyond the rational, productive, or even political or resistance speech that we see. And that's not to discount stuff like Black Lives Matter or Feminista Jones' UOK Sis or Kashawn Thompson's Black Girls Are Magic, which later

became Black Girl Magic, because they do really important things as well, right? But I find, and I argue in the book over and over again, that simply limiting what we do to resistance to oppression or fighting against oppression doesn't speak to enough of what we find ourselves in the world. I think it's such a good explanation of the importance of hashtags and how the hashtag can still be like an important tool to build community or collective around and to make those jokes and just to have fun, right? But I think that also kind of extends into another question that I had for you, because you talked a bit about respectability earlier, right? And the notion of trying to make black people fit into a certain idea of what a black person should be,

right? And in the book, you also talk about, I feel like kind of the opposition to that, maybe like ratchetry and the desire to, you know, just kind of be black, you know, as you say, online on Twitter, wherever, right. And, and to be proud about that. Can you talk about those two different concepts and how those play out on black Twitter or online more generally? So in the book, I make the pithy claim that ratchetry and racism are the components of respectability. Right. And for the uninformed, ratchetry, at least the way I describe it, goes back to this idea of the economy where it's an excess of life. It's where black folk don't necessarily care about being modern or civil or appropriate because they are basically determined to express themselves as loudly, as wildly, as aesthetically possible without caring what the consequences are, right? Now, my grandfather would say, you're not allowed

to do that, right? And that's part of where respectability comes in. It wants to control the ratchet, right, in order to make Black folk palatable to a white civil order, a white juridical order, right? But as my Black Twitter timeline has pointed out, Martin Luther King got shot in a three-piece suit, right? So telling Black boys to pull their pants up because it's not an appropriate style of dress doesn't really do anything but impose a carceral slash racist perspective on what it means to be Black online, right? And so respectability is, I would argue, one response. I don't want to say it's necessary, but it's one response couched in survival terms of what we need

to do in order not to be subjected to the terroristic nature of whiteness, right? And terroristic at its extreme, but now discrimination at its slightest. So watching white people continually try to deny Black people access to public spaces or buildings in which the black people actually own property. Right. We get the barbecue Becky's and the Karen's and the rest. Right. Where whiteness feels as if it always should be in control of these spaces, of these places, and is intent upon denying black folk access to it. Right. That part is part of something that respectability, unfortunately, can end up leading to. That respectability proponents don't always see that end being part of their means, right? Also, our use of social media

in many ways is deemed inappropriate or not respectable, right? It's something that the kids are supposed to do, right? So now you see articles about old people on TikTok, right? Old people are not supposed to be on TikTok because we're supposed to have jobs and do a program like TikTok is fun, right? It's a great distraction. And it works in multiple directions too. So my timeline recently has been infected with people saying, I don't understand why people over 30 still use Twitter. And I'm like, wait, what? Without us, you wouldn't have a Twitter. Like, what are you talking about? Right. But the idea that social media in particular, but anything that is not Microsoft Teams or Zoom or email is deemed inappropriate behavior because it does not advance the

productivity and efficiency aims of American technoculture, of labor capitalism, right? So, I mean, in its most extreme form, not Black respectability, but now you have employers saying, you know, I think workers are much happier in offices, right? Because that's the place where they can control and surveil us. It doesn't mean better work gets done. It means managers can then justify their salaries based on their coercion and control of their subordinates. Right. And so for me, respectability has a lot to do with modernity is to abstract everything, specifically humanity, and you may recognize Heidegger in this, right? But specifically humanity into a standing reserve to be operated on by capital or technology, right? And respectability did this, at least in its earliest forms, by saying Black people who were coming up from the South, from rural towns in the South, where basically their life was tending livestock, raising children, doing agriculture.

When they got to the city and they no longer do that, they had to bathe. They had to raise their children properly. They had to keep their house in order because that was what it meant to be a modern Black person, right? And those things still kind of percolate underneath respectability, right? As to whether or not a woman can be respectable if she desires to have pleasure outside of the confines of marriage. As to whether or not a Black man can be respectable if he does not wear a suit, right? There was a recent image of 35 Black men walking in suits,

looked like in downtown Atlanta, 90 degree heat, right? And they were supposedly showing how Black men can be distinguished, but what they ended up doing was getting clowned because they're like half the suits don't fit. Y'all look like y'all got them from men's warehouse. Right. Some of them are too tight. Why does that one man have on a vest with no shirt? Like what kind of suit assemblage is this? And so that's to me the interesting part about respectability in online spaces is that where once the church and educators and politicians had a one-way microphone where they could do a top-down thing and say, you should be modern, what Twitter has done specifically, but other social media as well, has allowed us to talk back to those people and tell them that, hey, you got outside kids, preacher so-and-so. You should not be sitting up there talking about

morality. You rail against homosexuality, Reverend so-and-so, but you have had relationships with men and young boys in your congregation for the last. And I hate to pick on the church because we could talk about Republicans who believe in right to life, but have mistresses who get abortions. We could talk about all that. And so the idea of modernity is a particularly American one. But for black people, it becomes a carceral modern American wine. Sorry. Again, digressions. No, don't apologize.

Like, it's a great digression, and it adds to the conversation. And I actually want to build on what you were saying there, because in the book, you describe how Black people can be enthralled by the promises of technology as much as anyone else in the United States or around the world, right? But you write that, however, where the West dreams of domination, Black folk dream of liberation. And you write that Black cultural beliefs and technology as progress must also be viewed with a suspicious eye. So can you expand on that a little bit more and on those issues with the ideas that we have generally of technology and how they are problematic for black people as well? So if the aims of modernity is abstraction and modernity is tied tightly to progress and the future, what type of people will we become?

Especially once you throw capitalism on the back of that. What type of people would you become if you believe in an unfettered progress? Progress, according to white standards, doesn't really have space for black agency. Right. If you emulate whiteness and you say, well, I want to be the richest black man on the block, I want to be Jay-Z. Right. What does that mean? In the end, a billionaire is not a moral position. I think that most people, well, once they're rich enough, they don't care, right? But morally, it's a really terrible position to be in because your wealth is based on the extraction of abstraction, right? Over and over and over again,

you get to take out 0% loans on properties that you own, but have not paid taxes on because you haven't sold them, right? It's just like, so, okay, take a step back. So then if it's not modern progress, if it's not capitalistic progress, then what is the mode of liberation for blackness? And for me, I am wary. Liberation is definitely a goal, but liberation to what end? Liberation for whom? And so I have been influenced by Latin philosopher Ivan Illich, and he talks about tools for conviviality, right? And conviviality has become really important as I begin to build out what I call Afro-optimism. It's Illich, it's Cliff Christians, who has done cultural continuity,

it's Akil Mbembe and other African philosophers who talk about mutual aid and care and self-repair. So my idea is that for Blackness, it's not so much liberation as it is building spaces that sustain and support us regardless of what environment we find ourselves in. And sustainment beyond mere survival, perhaps that's a liberatory move, right? But also sustainment in the way that we can make moves from the iniquities of one day to the promise of the next day. Right. Without losing any part of ourself. And so recently I've been taking advantage of this video that this young poet put up where he talks about the black farewell. Right. As a promise of tomorrow. Right. You're saying goodbye. I'll see you later.

I can't wait till next time, even though, you know, the possibility, as you say goodbye to a young black man or black woman that they may get caught up in police foolishness, right? Or drive by shooting, but you're still believing in the possibility that there is another day for them to, again, congregate and convene. I also think of it in terms of what Fred Moten calls the funereal, right? And the funereal is really important to me because it's not so much that we are celebrating death as we are recognizing that death gives us another chance to bring our memories to life of a person as they were, as we wanted them to be to us. Right. And that really became evident recently. Jesse Jackson and his wife had COVID. And some enterprising young reporter said that Jesse Jackson's wife was going home after a long battle with COVID. Now for Black people, if you say they're going home, that means they passed away. They're on their way to the

afterlife, right? And many people called them out, right? But think about it, right? As final as death is, for death to be a place where you consider a restful place as opposed to an end of life is an Afro-optimist moment to me, right? It's not so much saying that you're no good to us because you are no longer able to participate in everyday society, but your memory of us, our memory of you as an ancestor, as a child, as a sibling, as whatever is important to us and will be held close to our hearts as you move on to the next phase, right? So it's an Afro-optimist perspective. A black future to me was much more important as a place for Sikor, as a place for self-repair. Mbembe has this really beautiful phrase against the desiccation of modernity, right? The way modernity likes to suck us dry. A space of care and self-repair should be somewhere

where we rehydrate ourselves, right? Where we fix the things that are broken so that they can be used another day. And so to me, that's the post-present, right? That I refer to in my book. I just think that's a beautiful kind of description of a future and, you know, something to be working toward and to be striving toward and to be thinking about. I do want to build on that future question a little bit

because I think people will be familiar with the concept of Afrofuturism, right? Which is, you know, something that has been present even in the broader culture. More recently, the work of Janelle Monáe comes to mind. And you offer, you know, I guess a slight criticism of Afrofuturism in laying out the idea of Black cyberculture as post-present. So can you talk a little bit more about the criticism of Afrofuturism, but also how you see, you know, an Afro-optimism and the post-present in relation to that? And this book and another article, I've talked a little bit about this, where I don't have a problem with Afrofuturism. I never have a problem with us dreaming of a better future. But the way that Afrofuturism really kind of heavily depends upon art and literature

to talk about dreams of a future, to me, are sometimes a little too utopian, right? Artists are bound to dream of futures that are dramatically different from the ones that we are in because slightly different is fiction. It's not really, you know, it's like if it is perhaps surreal, it's speculative, right? Which are things that are part of Afrofuturism, but I feel like the artists that are most heavily cited, Janelle, right? Sun Ra, the work of John Jennings and other spaces are those that are the furthest out, right? And so for me, I wanted to focus on the ways that a technology that we were not perceived to have been a part of, the digital, is something that we use to articulate possibilities for

and catharsis about the world that we live in today. And so that's why I love to talk about the post-present, the idea of making a dollar out of 15 cents or going back to Kashawn Thompson's Black Girl Magic, the idea that everyday people manage to make things beautiful out of 15 cents or going back to Kashawn Thompson's Black Girl Magic, the idea that everyday people manage to make things beautiful out of the limited supplies that they have in order to at least have a little bit of beauty for themselves, right? And like an archaeologist, I prefer to go through the trash dumps of social media to find those moments of everyday joy and life, as opposed to looking to the creations of, say, the people who did the presidential portraits of the Obamas or the woman who did the Domino

Factory sugar one. But as opposed to those high theory, high concept artistic works, let's look at the everyday poetry that Black people come up with, right? The hashtags, you know you're Black when, right? Or how to say that you're black without being black or Thanksgiving with black families. Those hashtags really to me are evocative of moments where black Twitter serves as memory work, right? And memory work of a future that may not have been altogether perfect, but serve to constitute the ways that we maneuver and walk through the world. And so for me, Black technoculture is complementary. Like there's still artworks to be had, right?

Rashida Phillips and the Afrofuturism Collective, other folk who are doing that type of work. But there's also the mundane, right, that does this work as well. And I think that is as evocative, if not more important than the highfalutin artistic works. I think that's really important. And I love it just as much as I've really appreciated this conversation with you and to be able to dive into the ideas that you explore in your book. And obviously, I would recommend every listener to go pick up the book because, you know, I think it really is a fantastic read. Andre, thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it.

No problem. Thank you for having me, Paris. This was great. Andre Brock is an associate professor at Georgia Tech and the author of Distributed Blackness, African-American Cybercultures. You can follow Andre on Twitter at at Doc Dre. You can follow me at at Paris Marks and you can follow the show at at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network

and you can find out more about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. And if you want to support the work that I put into making the show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash techwantsaveus and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.