30 | New Scientist | 25 January 2020Book
Black Software: The
internet and racial
justice, from the AfroNet
to Black Lives Matter
Charlton D. McIlwain
Oxford University PressExhibition
W. E. B. Du Bois:
Charting black lives
House of Illustration, London
Until 1 MarchDECADES before the creation of
social media and the birth of the
#BlackLivesMatter movement,
early adopters of the internet were
using precursors of email, user
forums and the web to organise
black communities in the US and
beyond and push for racial justice.
In his book Black Software,
Charlton D. McIlwain at New York
University highlights the lives
and histories of those pioneers
who explored and used the
internet for digital activism,
creating a space for the African
American community.
McIlwain has made excellent
use of his position as the founder
of New York University’s centre
for critical race and digital
studies. In the book, he combines
first-person interviews with
historical online and offline
correspondence and other archive
materials to bring the stories
and perspectives of these
forgotten figures to light.
Over five decades, beginning
in the 1960s with the rise of the
civil rights movement in the US
and the start of the computingBlack data
matters
Civil rights go hand in hand with access to
information technology, says Lilian Anekwerevolution, McIlwain traces a
path from this “vanguard” to
present-day activists, campaigners
and organisers.
In the first half of the book we
learn how black entrepreneurs,
engineers, information
technicians, hobbyists, journalists
and activists connected with each
other, using new technologies
as they emerged: bulletin board
systems and the Usenet network
in the 1970s, file-sharing and
CD-ROMs in the 1980s.
The Universal Black Pages, a
comprehensive online directory
of African American-related
internet resources, was launched
in July 1994. McIlwain describes its
rise and fall, along with websites
such as NetNoir and AfroNet. This
was an experimental era, which
ultimately fell victim to the
dotcom bust in 2000.
In the second half of the book,
McIlwain delves deeper, back to
the origins of the computing
revolution, showing how the
technology was put to use to
“set America’s principles of white
supremacy loose to run amuck
in new computational systems”.
This culminated, McIlwain
argues, in the development of
law enforcement applications
that applied computing power
to areas such as crime analysis,
fingerprint identification and
resource allocation. We think of
the use of algorithms by police
forces as a new phenomenon;
McIlwain describes how these
technologies were in use by police
forces as early as the mid-1960s.
These information systemsViews Culture
about, and deprived of access to,
the very technology that would
go on to shape their lives.
“Black people were not hired
as technicians to process the data.
Black people certainly did not
design the systems... were not
at the table to contribute to
conversations about how to
deploy the outputs,” he writes.
It may have started as “an alien
technology destined to... grind
them into submission and exert
racial power over their entire
existence”, but change was
ushered in, as members of the
African American tech vanguard
encouraged others to get online,
harnessing the power of the
internet to shape their lives.
McIlwain quotes one activist:
“We... who were ignored by the
industrial revolution, cannot
afford to be bypassed by the
multimedia communications
revolution inherent in theand connected databases later
developed into automated
policing systems and crime
prediction tools which “began
to lock black people up at
skyrocketing and racially
disparate rates”.
This was only possible, McIlwain
argues, because black people, “by
and large, didn’t have access to thetechnology being used to profile,
target, and forecast their tendency
toward criminality”. The early
computing industry’s lack of
diversity and resistance to
attempts at inclusion meant
that black people were effectively
©^ W excluded from conversations
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“ We think police
algorithms are new;
but these technologies
were in use by the
mid-1960s”