A Q&A with André Brock, author of "Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures," led by Data & Society’s Director of Research Sareeta Amrute.
This recording is a Q&A with André Brock following his presentation of Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures.
In Distributed Blackness, Brock asks where Blackness manifests in the ideology of Western technoculture. Using critical technocultural discourse analysis (Brock, 2018), Afro-optimism, and libidinal economic theory, this talk employs Black Twitter as an exemplar of Black cyberculture: digital practice and artifacts informed by a Black aesthetic.
Technoculture is the American mythos (Dinerstein, 2006) and ideology; a belief system powering the coercive, political, and carceral relations between culture and technology. Once enslaved, historically disenfranchised, never deemed literate, Blackness is understood as the object of Western technical and civilizational practices. This critical intervention for internet research and science and technology studies (STS) reorients Western technoculture’s practices of “race-as- technology” (Chun 2009) to visualize Blackness as technological subjects rather than as “things.” Hence, Black technoculture.
Sareeta Amrute:
Thank you so much André. That was really fantastic. I am going to take the presenter's liberty of asking you a few questions to start us off. Then I will just some questions from the Q&A. So first off I want to frame a question based on some of the things you said today that were highlighted a little bit more than in the book. And it really comes out of this point you're making about care and self-repair. I'd like to ask you about these two points that I see as being somewhat in tension with one another. One is, the idea that distributed Blackness means that online spaces are spaces of care and self-repair. In that, the Black body is obviously there for critique, but not as available to critique as it is in the street. Right? But at the same time in your talk, you also mentioned that there are these microaggressions that produce a slow death in those same spaces. So could you sync those two points together for us and pull out the care and self-repair piece a little bit?
André Brock:
I can. So if your audience may be familiar with Beverly Daniel Tatum's book, "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?." In that book, she talks about the fact that in order to remember that they are indeed people, to survive the aggressions- macro and micro- from not only their fellow students but from administrators and teachers, these students were gathered together in one corner of the cafeteria and they would joke, they would laugh, they would form hip hop ciphers. They would do all kinds of things to ultimately care for themselves and perform a function of repair to address the ways that the institution and the people around them had tried to tear them down. Right? And so the need for that enclave. And here I'm citing Catherine Squires, of Black Counter Republics, where she talks about the enclave as a space where Black folk can retreat to discuss concerns about the public sphere, or the space that they're in without necessarily worrying about interruption. That type of enclave is something that you'll find anytime you see more than a few people gathered in a space that they feel comfortable in in online spaces, one such as Black Twitter. On the previous slide I mentioned America and asterisks to talk about the matrix of white racial ideology that Black Americans find themselves in. Or Western ideology that diasporic Blacks find themselves in around the world. We are constantly confronted with representations, institutions, and individuals who are intent on stripping us of our humanity.
We are constantly confronted by individuals, 'BBQ Becky,' Anne Cooper, and others, who feel as if we do not belong in spaces that are ostensively public, or even on our own homes as Henry Louis Gates found a few years back, when the policemen arrested him on the steps of his own house. And it always brings to mind that Dave Chappelle joke from "Killing Them Softly," and he talks about two policemen who found a black man in a house and shot him, and then looked around and said, "Look at here at Johnson. He hung up pictures of himself in this house. How dare he." So, we're constantly in these environments where we don't belong, where we are not allowed to be. And so that constant tension, that navigation, is what W.E.B. Du Bois talks about for double consciousness. The awareness that you have humanity in a world which is intent on stripping it from you. But then the of having to negotiate both spaces. Right? So I don't necessarily see it as a counterproductive tension but I think it's necessary to keep it in mind when you're talking about any figuration of Blackness. Not just online, but offline as well.
Sareeta Amrute:
Yeah. Thank you. Another question I had is about the term libidinal. You turn to the libidinal to get away from the deficit and resistance narratives about Blackness and technology, which are totally inadequate in describing Black cybercultures. But, the libidinal is not always good, right? It's not only a drive toward pleasure, or rather, not all pleasures are happy ones. Can you draw that point out for us a bit?
André Brock:
I came to the libidinal through François Léotard and Roland Barthes. I get dragged for that on occasion because I don't go back to Deleuze or Jung but I stuck with Léotard in particular because he talked about a libidinal economy, right? The idea that there are dispensations of energies that drive even the most rational enterprises. And Léotard's libidinal, his signal term, is jouissance, which can't really be translated into English but for Léotard is often sexual. But jouissance stands for me as excess of life. Right? And that excess can be rage, but that excess can also be eros. Right? It really kind of depends on what you're bringing to the situation but then also forms how you will respond to a situation. So one of the ways I talk about it in the book is the ratchet. The idea that there is a particular way that black people will interact with a social situation that doesn't give a damn about the standards of propriety or civility. What they are intent upon is expressing themselves to the fullness of the libidinal energies that they feel, whether that's through style, whether that's through anger, whether that's through a dance battle while Chris Brown flips upside down and then ends up getting shot. The libidinal is all of those things.
I've argued in other talks that without these libidinal energies, this communal attempt to express an excess of life, Black Lives Matter would not have had such a profound impact on American society and politics. Because before you can be angry together, you kind of sort of need to be able to laugh together. You need to be able to cry together. And those energies, that affect, although I hate to use the word, that affect is what I think preexists any moments of political calculation or even rational intention. I'll give it a terrible example. A really good example of libidinal being para-ontological, being before thought, is, they always say never go shopping when you're hungry. It's not that hunger is a conscious emotion, right? But when you go to pick out the various groceries that you "need" for your household to subsist for the next couple of weeks, you often end up with items, or I end up with items like ice cream and donuts and shortbread cookies and the like.The libidinal energy of hunger. And I would argue hunger is libidinal, it's not just an embodied sensation. Leads me to make additional decisions above and beyond my necessity, or for efficiency. How's that?
Sareeta Amrute:
Yeah, that's great. I mean, one of the things I love the most about this book is how not reductive it is. Even though you're talking about a thing that we call Black Twitter, you show us so clearly all the different kinds of signifying, ratchetry, respectability politics, that are happening in those spaces and in communication with each other. So I think that's really helpful. I'm going to turn it over to the Q&A soon, but I do have this curiosity about the term warrant. Provide yourself a warrant to make an argument or do something. Can you tell us a little, methodologically, about how the idea of warrant functions for you and making arguments.
André Brock:
So these are the vestiges of my rhetorical training. But also a little bit about Fanon and the idea of apprehension. Althusser picks this up as well with this concept of interpellation. That at a certain moment you are hailed into being by someone external to you. For Fanon, It was a little boy with his mother saying, "Look mama, a negro." For Althusser, he talked about the apprehension of a person minding their own business by the policemen who suddenly becomes a criminal. And what happens at both situations but it's not always clearly discussed, is that there are warrants, there are reasons why these people address a person in this fashion. And for me, warrant ties really neatly into the libidinal. However, my developmental editor told me to take all instances of warrant out the books and I'm sorry that I did not do so. Which leads me to be in question for this point. But yeah, I'm fascinated by the idea that there are always reasons for questions. Also, in the context of big data, we are very rarely concerned with the warrants behind the collection of data. What are the beliefs and suspicions that lead to certain data being collected? At what questions is it intended to answer before it even gets to an algorithm? And so warrant is something that has been really conceptually profitable for me, that I'm really not good at explaining.
Sareeta Amrute:
Andreé, I think your developmental editor and I would probably have words on that one because it was something that really sparked jouissance for me, in the way that it really does bring together. And as an anthropologist who is interested in the groundings for certain sorts of rationality, I think through Fanon and eros in my own work, it really did bring together for me rationality with the libidinal. In the next book, warrant. Go warrant. So the last question for me is really about this term technoculture. I've been noticing quite a bit that every theorist or every thinker is trying to bring the techno together with something else, because we know that it's no longer enough as an explanatory framework. So, you know, technopolitics, sociotechnical, your own technocultural. Can you give us a sense of why you think these portmanteaus are being wildly generated now? And what for you is specific about technoculture versus some of these other terms?
André Brock:
Coming from information science, one of our initial canonical readings is Shannon and Weaver's "Information Theory." And you know, they talk about a receiver with content and noise,. And in many ways, hypertext protocols, but a lot of the mechanics and protocols of the internet are shaped on that particular thing. There are certain things that are responsible, that the network should transmit. And there are other things that should be discarded. In many ways that particular approach also led to, at least for my field, the ignoring of any cultural elements and Mumford calls this "techno-rationalism." Any cultural or social elements that seem to be extrinsic to the message itself should be discarded. But over the last 20 years or so, especially with the rise of web 2.0 but I guess we could even say prior to that- but I'll just pin it at that point- people began realizing that the human element, and we could talk about Latour as well here, is inextricable from the network and the device. And so that's where I think these portmanteaus started arising. The sociotechnical. I come out of a field called social informatics. And many of these formulations, they focus on institutions. Or individuals as the progenitors of technological services and devices. And I had a problem with that too, because I have a problem with lots of things. Because 'social' doesn't necessarily capture the cultural manifestations that are happening in us and other space.
So it's strange that you can talk about social in an institution where women, and white women, happen to be the people who handle the majority of the information work, while they are working for white men who are the executives and who they're doing this work for. But social only looks at their activity as administrative assistant and executive. And I'm like, well, where's the influence of whiteness? Where's the influence of gender? Those things require, to me, a cultural outlook. And so I've been talking for a few years about critical cultural informatics. In part because museum studies stole cultural informatics from me. Critical and cultural in that you must interrogate the cultural background. Why are we not looking more at why racism is an inextricable part of Silicon Valley and information technology practice? That's not a social phenomenon. That's a cultural phenomenon that happens to escape social institutions. So for me, sociotechnical doesn't quite do it, although I respect the work that they do. I went to technoculture and I was deeply influenced by James Carey, Clifford Christians, and Ivan Ilitch. All these people who are talking about the influence of culture. Arnold Pacey is my signal formulation here of culture on technology, use practice, and design.
Sareeta Amrute:
That is great. That leads straight into a question from the Q&A chat. Which is, does Black Technoculture need Black technology infrastructure?
André Brock:
Nope. Alright, I'll be fair. It doesn't need it. And in some cases it's a hindrance. I wrote an article about 10 years ago about this browser that was designed, well actually modded, by black entrepreneurs called Blackbird. And Blackbird was specifically designed for Black information seekers. They even had a targeted Google search, which you could purchase at the time from Google, that Safiya Noble talks about algorithms of oppression and how, in Google search, if you typed "black girls" you would get black porn. This targeted search for Blackbird didn't do that. Which was kind of an amazing development in 2010. But the black people who came across Blackbird were not necessarily fans, for two reasons. One, black people have this deep antipathy towards being perceived as a common homogenous mass. They always say that black people are not all one person. There's a heterogeneity to blackness and they felt that by using this informational artifact, they will be compressed into the perception of blackness as one type of person. And so drawing from that, they were like, who are these black people to say what kind of black person I am? Who did they consult? That comes with the problem of saying, "I'm creating something for black people." Black people always want to know, "Well who all did you come with? How do we know your interests in blackness are the same as mine?" The second piece is, and I think this is a really good one, they were concerned that by only having access, or by being primarily directed to Black information resources that would segregate them from the wider internet. And this is a really interesting point to me because Black folk are American, and they are information citizens, so they want access to the Googles, the New York Times, and Wall Street Journals just like everyone else. We just also want news that portrays us in a humanistic light. And so their concern was that something that was specifically only for black people would segregate them from the wider world, which I think is an important concern.
Sareeta Amrute:
Yeah. That answer that leads into another question up on the Q&A, which is about enclaves. Okay. So the question is, "In response to this need for enclave, can you talk about the persistence of the white gaze in online communities created for and by black people? What strategies are there to mitigate the risk of this?" You probably need to turn that question around a little bit.
André Brock:
Little bit. It kind of builds upon the answer I just gave. In this modern surveillance society, there are a few spaces where black people can congregate without the white gaze being intrusive at some point. I've mean contact tracing, which is being talked about really heavily right now, is dependent upon tracking GPS signals and using Bluetooth beacons to find when you came in contact with people. That technology already exists. The idea that you will be forever free of the white gaze is a pipe dream. As long as we're part of white society, that's something that will continue to define us, right? And the mitigation of risk is something that black people already do. We are welcoming to people who come to us with the intent upon understanding who we are, and we are inimical or unwelcoming to people who come to us on false pretenses, or come to us with enmity. Right? And that's the communal aspect I talk about. And that's not necessarily specifically to Black communities, although those are the ones that I study. And many online communities, and here I'm citing Ray Oldenberg's "Third Places," the great, the good, and the... I can't remember the third part. But he talks about these discourse communities, these third places, which regulate themselves by restricting membership to people who can perform in a way that is conducive to the care and self-prepare of the community. In many cases for black people, we do that recognition based on your skin color, and your allegiance to Black identity and the difficulties that entails. And those are the strategies that we already use to mitigate the risk. As far as the technical strategy, I'm not quite sure how to answer that.
Sareeta Amrute:
Yep. So a question that will push back on what you just said a little bit is about what's happening on Black Twitter. The poster rights. "I feel that Black Twitter is a corner of the internet that always responds to popular culture and always amplifies white media, and may in fact be beneficial to the acceleration of white Western hegemony." And the speaker also asks, "Is Black technoculture really an existential heel to the dominant culture?Or is it just living in the margins in a nonthreatening way?"
André Brock:
It's not nonthreatening at all. Anytime more than three black people are in a space, that space gets considered less valuable, and more available for sanctioning and control. So it's not nonthreatening.
Sareeta Amrute:
Even in online space.
André Brock:
Even in online spaces. Just a Omar Wasow and Gary Dauphin talk about when they were pitching BlackPlanet to VCs and highlighting BlackPlanet's really innovative feature before Myspace of being able to create your own web pages using your own HTML code. And the VCs didn't believe that black people could do that, would do that. They didn't think we had the capacity. So we're always conceived as a threat and as less than. It's not a heel either, anymore than being able to brush your teeth every morning is a heel, anymore than being able to dap your boys, or hug your girls, when you see them is a heel. It's just yet another space that we can enter and relax in, that allows us to navigate the inequities of everyday life. It's not so much a palliative as it is a strategy for a living. A celebration of black agency and humanity. So I pushed back on the idea that it is nonthreatening or a marginalized space. In some ways, Black Twitter has been understood as the definitive use case for Twitter. I would argue Black Instagram is similar for Instagram. And in many spaces we define what the way to work in a particular technical space is, to that space. And so, again, this is why I came up with libidinal economy. I don't want to focus on resistance, right? I don't want to focus on oppression either. What I do want to focus on is how we navigate both those things using the communal bonds and jouissance. The excessive life that we bring to every other situation.
Sareeta Amrute:
A question that follows right on there might refer to something you didn't get to talk about today as much. But Thanksgiving. Okay. The question is, "You mentioned categories of racism, ratchet, and respectability. How do you view representations of joy?"
André Brock:
Joy is a complicated emotion. Right? Joy is not always happiness. Joy is sometimes relief. Right? It's deeply contextual. What is joy for one will not be joy for the other. And so I need to police myself better. But I do see black joy as essential in articulating a passion for life, a passion for living. Using invention and style and black communal allegiance. So I mentioned often Jalaiah Harmon, the inventor of the Renegade dance on TikTok. And how, while it ended up being commodified and taken over by this young white women who got invited to the NBA All-Star game to perform it. When Jalaiah originally came up with it, you can see the joy and the passion she has for dance in her every movement. Right? She didn't originally create it to be paid for. She created it so people could appreciate how good she was at what she was doing. And it is that kind of embodied cognition, joy and self ,that I try to highlight in this particular analysis of technological use. It's not productivity. It's not making a dollar. It's more bringing a passion. And this is not something that's specific to Blackness. But I find one of the carceral ideas that tend to prohibit the expression of Blackness online is that we always have to be doing it for something. We always had to be doing it towards some political or civil goal. And I think it's much more important to understand that we do it for us. Right? For our own care and repair.
Sareeta Amrute:
Thank you. We have time for one more question, but I'm just going to sneak in two. The first one is asking you to comment a little bit on facial recognition technology and racism, referencing Joy Buolamwini's work. So could you expand a little bit more on that? The second question is, "How would you like to see your method, CTDA, applied by other scholars?"
André Brock:
Hello, Tanya Sutherland. I love you. So the facial recognition and surveillance. Joy's particular approach to it has been critiqued by people smarter than I. I'm specifically referring to Ramon Amaro's article, "As if." In "As if," Amaro critiques the idea that we need to be recognized by computer vision algorithms at all. What does that bring us? Right? What does it mean for us to be recognized by a system that is predetermined that we are a carceral subjects? And if in many ways the pandemic has been helpful to countervailing black surveillance, because I don't know if you saw how many looters had on masks at Target the other day. Right? And so not necessarily for looting, but just in the idea of being able to evade, or at least confuse, surveillance algorithms and facial recognition capture in order to proceed about everyday life without worrying about becoming a criminalized subject. I cannot really see a positive purpose for surveillance algorithms of facial recognition. And so the idea that we would construct a black technical object, and this is Amaro's term, not mine. A Black technical object that is better apprehended, and that word is intentional. Better apprehended by these carceral technologies is problematic to me. Why make it better? I don't necessarily understand the point. That's not to say Joy's work isn't great. It is great. It's hugely necessary. But the ends to which it will be put, are not the ends that I think she imagines when she's trying to make sure that we can be seen by this training data and by these algorithms. The other question was CTDA?
Sareeta Amrute:
How should other scholars apply it?
André Brock:
This is something that I watch with fascination as people begin to take it up. My only concern for CTDA when people use it, is that you must put at the forefront, the philosophical perspective of the group that you're studying. So if you're studying the way native Hawaiians address social media posts on tourism and Nextdoor, you must start from a native Hawaiian philosophical perspective. And there are writers in each culture that are faithful and true to how that culture perceives the world. Not from a white Western gaze, although it may be informed by the principles of anthropology and sociology, but from a deep respect for the ways that that hurt those people regard time, space, property, selfhood, gender, sexuality, and the like. So that should be at the forefront. And that that philosophical perspective, so in my case I talk about Blackness, be applied to both the technology and to the people that are discussing themselves or understanding themselves through the technology. For Blackbird, I'll return to that, I took a critical cultural look using a Black identity to look at how the interface and the practices of that Blackbird browser, reified, or managed, or maintained Black identity. And similarly, I looked at both white and black perspectives on how that enactment worked out. It's complex. For those of you who are using CTA to write articles, good luck, because they're always going to tell you that there should have been two analyses. But for SIS, because that holistic perspective, where you get the way users understand the technology with the way technologies try to discipline who the users are, getting that holistically provides a really deep interrogation of what a technology means, rather than just is, to the people that are using it.
Sareeta Amrute:
Thank you, Andre. That's fantastic. Are there any more thoughts you'd like to leave us with today before I close this out?
André Brock:
For open access, to distributed Blackness, please go to opensquare.NYUPress.org. For graduate students and people who are unaffiliated, or broke people, if you want a PDF of my preprint PDF, I will, if you DM me on Twitter, send you a copy free of charge.
Sareeta Amrute:
Brilliant, André, thank you. Thanks everyone for joining us tonight and thank you again to André Brock, whose book distributed blackness is available to NYU press and the waste that Andre just laid out. Take out the chat window for an open source book link and how to continue these conversations online and a link to sign up for the data society events list. We welcome your feedback on the cement and suggestions for future programming. Thank you. And take care.