YouSaid · the spoken record

Vann R. Newkirk II

lines on the record: 72
first: 2021-02-09
most recent: 2021-02-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Internet and that platform, and you could see not only what was being produced culturally, but you could see who was benefiting and profiting and the ownership structure was very different for a very short period of time. And so to see that explosion of black culture and black ownership and value all at the same time was certainly, I think, a moment to be recognized and celebrated. But then, you know, come 98, 99, 2000 pretty much, all of that is gone. And what you see that it is the story that is flat from that point on, in my opinion, is the continued recognition of the value of black culture and black cultural products, but without the critical elements of ownership and value or profit that comes back to black creators, entrepreneurs.”
2021-02-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Black Software author on technology’s role in racial justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think something that stayed flat, there's a very specific trajectory here, I think, and some of this is chronicled in the book up to a point. And that is, I used to have a chapter in the book in an earlier version that was titled, Remember What the Internet was Black. And it had everything to do with this moment in time from, let's say, about 1993 to roughly 98. When you looked out on the internet landscape of that day, whether it was through your large Internet service providers like AOL or CompuServe and so forth, what you saw were businesses, properties, creators, many of whom were black or part of the African diaspora who had built profitable businesses in and through the new”
2021-02-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Black Software author on technology’s role in racial justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know how that happened. I couldn't trace that pathway. At the same time, you have other smaller social networks like Clubhouse, which are trying not to make the same mistakes to their credit. They've started, they've given a lot of invites to prominent black people and other people of color. They call them creators. They're going to try to pay them. But it still doesn't feel equitable that the exchange of the black community when it's distributed that easily and that quickly without any sense. The platforms themselves tend to just pull the value out and distribute them, collect that value, not bring it back to the communities it came from. How does that play? Has that gotten better? Am I describing a thing that has gotten progressively better or a thing that has stayed flat”
2021-02-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Black Software author on technology’s role in racial justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the major questions for the dominant social platforms and even some of the ones that are coming up is you have black communities on your platforms. They are creating an enormous amount of culture. That culture becomes everyone's culture in the way that black culture in America tends to become everyone's culture. And it's still like the value exchange still isn't there. I'm thinking specifically of Black Twitter, right? The language of Black Twitter quickly becomes the language of the United States Senate in a way that makes no sense to me. The words cancel culture came out of Black Twitter and now white Republicans in the United States Congress said cancel culture is the biggest threat to America.”
2021-02-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Black Software author on technology’s role in racial justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“See that as folks in 94, 95, 96 began to say, all right, how do we use this new tool? How do we bring people online? They look to the AfroNets of the world and try to mimic that pattern of creating a community in an online space and appeal to black users to try to model that.”
2021-02-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Black Software author on technology’s role in racial justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is a moment towards the early days of the web where people did look back to and say, all right, now that we know this thing called the web and now that we realize that it probably needs a lot of users, most of whom don't have a clue what the hell this technology could or should be used for, they did have a group of people to look back to just two or three years before and that's where I think the folks in the AfroNet who had built that bulletin board system of black users came into play and all the people that were playing in that world of the internet of the 88s and 89s and 90s and what they saw was an ability for black folks to, in the very least, produce community in those and through those networks. And I think it was interesting certainly for me to then.”
2021-02-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Black Software author on technology’s role in racial justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Started to roll out. I think it was easy to just, you know, those folks were so under the radar and not on the map of anyone thinking about, hey, we should pay attention to what these folks are doing, even if all they're doing is sort of tinkering around with things and playing and so forth. There wasn't a sense of A, Black people's role are importance as a sort of a site of innovation or as a potential market later on as we move into the more commercial ends. So I think there was this sense of invisibility that led to the fact that there was no real reason and no sense of a needed feedback loop in the development of the internet and computing. The interesting point, though, on this that I see is that there is a moment where that doesn't end up being the case, meaning”
2021-02-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Black Software author on technology’s role in racial justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think there's a very peculiar story just about the invisibility of users generally, but black folks specifically at that particular time where simply we were not on the map in terms of computing, development, network development, and certainly in that 70s, 80s build up to the commercial web folks were not really a part of that story, not part of the sort of invention story in terms of being at embedded either in government research development centers or private enterprise or science and engineering institutions that were producing and making and building the actual hardware, software, et cetera. But the undercurrent of black folks using these tools when they start to start”
2021-02-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Black Software author on technology’s role in racial justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things I caught from the first part of your book that is back in time is that feedback loop almost didn't exist for the people you're describing, the graduate students who set up the first website for their black students union, the people building the first Afrocentric message boards. They almost weren't seen in a way that the people building the software would accelerate their development. Why do you think that didn't happen? Because that, you know, you talk to somebody who runs a social service today or a social platform today. They are hyper aware that they need to be paying a lot of attention to their users, even if I'll ask them about is moderation decisions. Like they know the positive side of their equation is too. Why do you think that wasn't there at the beginning?”
2021-02-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Black Software author on technology’s role in racial justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And often the conflict is expressed in things like moderation policies or free speech debates, which is sort of a negative expression. There's also a positive expression, which is that if you get it right, the people building the thing can see what the users are doing and they can build tools for them. And that feedback loop accelerates in really healthy and interesting ways.”
2021-02-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Black Software author on technology’s role in racial justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a lot. The book is a lot to take in. The sweep is incredible. One thing that I'm always focused on is I think about communications technologies broadly is that there's what the people who architected YouTube thought it would be, that it would be used in a certain way and for mostly good outcomes. And then there's what it is because of the people who use it, which can be really negative, but is also evolving. And those are radically divergent ideas.”
2021-02-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Black Software author on technology’s role in racial justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Moment of the 1960s, then I'm probably going to find a story that connects all these people. And sure enough, I did. And then ultimately, I felt the need to connect all of this, really, you know, that moment of the 60s and what happened at the dawn of the computer revolution, at the height of the civil rights revolution to what's happening today in terms of the fight for racial justice and somehow fit in everything in between.”
2021-02-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Black Software author on technology’s role in racial justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I remember having that moment of what the hell do you mean by this? What does it mean to you to be online in 1978? And so eventually that story came out. But that was a push for me to say there's a story here that goes well beyond our current moment, well before the dawn of the internet as we know it way back into the very earliest parts of computer networking where black people were very much connected and a part of that story and yet that story had been largely untold. And I remember a very particular moment after William just sort of saying in my mind, if I'm already back to 78 in this question in this part of history, I have a sense that if I go back even further to tumultuous.”
2021-02-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Black Software author on technology’s role in racial justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I started to get a picture of that and had a sense of, you know, wow, this is something I've never seen in the history of the internet, the history of civil rights, the history of black invention. Nowhere have I seen these people. And so that started to become a story that needed to be told somewhere through there, I met a man named William Morell. And all of my conversations began the same way. I started off with a simple question. I thought I knew the answer to, when did you first get online? And, you know, and so I knew the answer, right? It had to be 94, 93, maybe 92, you know, for some. And I talked to William and out of the gate, I asked the question. He sort of just, you know, I don't know. Well, let me think. And they can, what does this take? You know, this can't be that hard. And finally, he said, you know, I'd say we first went online in 70.”
2021-02-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Black Software author on technology’s role in racial justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That would lead to this current moment. So that's where the book started. And from that beginning, as I started to find people, talk to people, this story started to move further and further back in time. It started kind of in the 90s where I thought, you know, this was my go-to. This is where we have the start of the internet as we know it in the early 90s. And I got there. And number one, I found an amazing group of people that I had never known about and that were that was a group of black creators. Some of them were simply hobbyists. Some were engineers. Some were lawyers. Some teachers, et cetera, all of whom were in this digital space creating content, networking across the country and the world through new computing tools and devices and so forth. So what they built through the”
2021-02-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Black Software author on technology’s role in racial justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“System and have that atop the public agenda and to stay there for a period of time. So this all happened and it seemed to come out of nowhere. It seemed to very much be pushed by what people were doing online in social media spaces and other connected technologies networked environments that they were working in to propel this movement. I want to understand where it came from. I had at least enough sense to know that even though Black Lives Matter as a hashtag started in 2012, that there had to be something before our current moment that was a precursor that was a push, that was a kind of foundation for Black Lives Matter to launch itself from. So that's where I really started this book. Where do we have that genealogy, that digital genealogy that we're computing genealogy?”
2021-02-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Black Software author on technology’s role in racial justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Indeed, and I think that represents kind of my journey in writing this book, which for anyone out there who has written a book knows the strange anxiety of thinking about and starting with a story that you think you know, pitching that to a publisher, getting a contract and a deadline and then discovering somewhere along the way that it's a completely different story than you imagined. And that's kind of how this book went. It started off really narrow. I wanted to understand where Black Lives Matter came from. Here was a movement that seemed to come out of nowhere, that had an impact that was something that we hadn't really seen since literally the late 60s, early 70s, meaning their ability to produce sustained attention to issues of racism, racial justice, race, and the criminal justice.”
2021-02-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Black Software author on technology’s role in racial justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm really excited to talk to you. You read a book a few months ago called Black Software, the Internet and Racial Justice, which really tells a pretty big story about how Black people in the United States have actually been a part of networked communication from the beginning. They've been part of the tech industry. There's a pretty deep historical dive for the first half of the book. And the second half of the book connects all of that to what we've seen in this country over the past, I would say, year, year and a half with the Black Lives Matter movement, with the movement for racial justice and how that has been largely expressed online. Give me a sense of how you began this project, because that is two very different stories. They feel connected, but each half of this book could be a book unto itself, really.”
2021-02-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Black Software author on technology’s role in racial justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One thing to pay attention to in this conversation, and this feels like a lesson I just keep learning over and over again, is that while modern internet culture always feels new, like we're experiencing all these problems for the first time, it really isn't. There are long patterns that stretch back across decades of people using computers and software to build communities and talk to each other. And we don't often stop and think about what we can learn from them. It's time we start. Okay. Dr. Charlton McAwain, author of Black Software. Here we go. Charlton McAwain, you're a professor of media, culture, and communication at NYU. Welcome to Decoder.”
2021-02-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Black Software author on technology’s role in racial justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, I spend a lot of time thinking about software and culture. That's my job. And I was excited to talk to Professor McAwain about how he sees that feedback loop between black communities using software and what software gets made and how it gets made. And I've always been curious about why it seems like social platforms so quickly amplify black culture and how those platforms might return some of that value to creators, which is not something that's happened historically.”
2021-02-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Black Software author on technology’s role in racial justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've gone through the pandemic. I've been really thinking about how much of our lives are now happening on screens and through software. I'm using software to record this podcast. You're using software to listen to it. We use software to connect with our friends, to play games, to move markets, to catch criminals. Software isn't eating the world. It's eaten it. Professor McAwain's book takes a hard look at the long relationship between the black community in America and software from the early pioneers building online communities in the dial-up era. He calls them the vanguard to the relationship between software, the civil rights movement, and the police, all the way to today's social platforms, which amplify and distribute everything from TikTok dances to the Black Lives Matter movement.”
2021-02-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Black Software author on technology’s role in racial justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a story here that goes well beyond our current moment way back into the very earliest parts of computer networking where black people were very much connected and a part of that story and yet that story had been largely untold.”
2021-02-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Black Software author on technology’s role in racial justice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT