BOOK: Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, from the Afronet to Black Lives Matter

Another exciting and much awaited publication: Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, from the Afronet to Black Lives Matter, Eso Won Books. The book will be of interest to anyone following racial justice activism, and anyone interested in the relations between digital technologies, opression and resistance.

The book is first and foremost a powerful way of writing internet history, against both the world of white supremacy and the whiteness of internet studies. How is the power of computer technology build, and who does it destroy?, asks Charlton D. McIlwain. How can we account for long, and continuously silenced, histories of US Black liberation (including with the help of communicaiton technologies - a history that is much longer than Black Lives Matter)? And simultaneously, how can we account for the depth and breadth of anti-Black violence, carried out with, through (and despite) internet technologies?

In between these two versions of black software - the kind that positively impacts black people's lives, and the kind that destroys them - lies a most significant question, not about recently popularized concepts like computer bias, or fair algorithms, or platform inequality, or digital ethics. No, the question goes to the heart of the matter that these concepts merely skirt around: will our current or future technological tools evern enable us to outrun white supremacy? After all, this is not just our country's founding principle. It is also the core programming that preceded and animated the birth, development and first uses of our computational systems. (p.8)

To read in conjunction with

Algorithms of Opression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, NYU Press.

Dark Matters: on the Surveillance of Blackness, Duke University Press.

Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, Polity Press.