The Illumination of Black Twitter: Charles Mills, Race, and Digital Media Theory
ANDRÉ BROCK
Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
Abstract
Social networks are simultaneously information and media platforms, but Blackness becomes understood differently depending upon which frame is deployed. While Black media creators have been lauded for their inventive enlivening of digital and social media technologies, Black information users are often considered as lacking technical, written, or mainstream cultural literacies. Mills’ works – from “Alternative Epistemologies” to The Racial Contract to one of his last “The Illumination of Blackness” – go beyond philosophy to inform media theory and science and technology studies. For example, Black Twitter shattered deficit models of Black digital expertise through discourse, affordances, and networked culture. I contend that Black Twitter illuminates the “racialized optics of modernity” (Mills 2021: 18) and of computation through Black standpoint epistemologies mediated by digital practices and discourses. I find that Mills anticipated that Black aesthetics and philosophy are well-suited for alternative visions of digital practice, design, and use.
Keywords
media philosophy, digital media, Black technoculture, Black Twitter, social media
Blackness and the absence thereof
I have long been an enthusiastic fan of Charles Mills’ philosophy of race and racism. A consistent theme – indeed, a warrant – running throughout his impressive body of work is that European philosophy operates on a fundamental contradiction; that the rights of men were somehow not applicable to African men and women enslaved by Western nations. The Racial Contract (1997) brilliantly laid out how race and racism were foundational to the development of Western modernity, yet consistently ignored by continental philosophers. This is unsurprising to those reading this special issue; I suspect that philosophy’s reputation for being apolitical, abstract, universal, and rational is exactly why Mills chose the damning bon mot “epistemology of ignorance” to describe not only Western polities but to also condemn his own discipline. Like other scholars, I have incorporated Mills’ inquiry into the epistemological standpoint of American culture-as-contract theory as grounds for my own interdisciplinary inquiries into Black life, digital technologies, and Western culture.
I have been especially enamored of late by Mills’ (2021) book chapter “The Illumination of Blackness”. I will later discuss why in more detail, but the chapter is a fantastic inquiry into modernity, technology, and antiblackness. One line in particular had me spellbound; Mills writes, “Figuring whiteness [as exclusion] in this way demystifies its chromatic pretensions and the related illusions of the Eurocentric worldview that has biased objective inquiry into the workings of the world” (2021: 18). While much of the focus on race in philosophy of technology revolves around the racism of continental philosophers, few have approached or even considered the possibilities of what a Black Enlightenment could mean for a Black modernity or Afrofuture.
Given the above, I’d like to extend my warmest thanks to the editors of this special issue on ‘Charles Mills and Media Theory’ for inviting me to contribute. You see, my research has been hailed as (digital) media theory, but my training and orientation is information, rather than media. I see my research as critical information studies (Vaidhyanathan, 2005), which is interested in how culture and information intertwine; my research expands upon Vaidyhyanathan’s formulation to study Black digital practitioners, Western technology design and practices, and Black data to critique the scientism, abstraction, instrumentality, and rationality of information and communication technologies. The Western technocultural insistence that computers are “neutral” works to obscure the symbolic/semiotic nature of information. This is increasingly clear during the current artificial intelligence hype cycle, where their capacity to discern information patterns and regurgitate words in human readable form has been promoted as “thinking”.
Information science’s/studies’ emphasis on technical logics, or transmission models of communication, is a clear differentiator from humanities-oriented digital media research, which draws upon semiotic and experiential cultural theories of mass media communication. I understand media theory as more interested in the effects of “mediated forms of communication” (Morley, 2009; Kellner, 2014), or media culture; in performances, audiences, or reception. Even as the World Wide Web employed communication protocols and the compression and encoding of analog media to afford personal homepages, photo sharing websites, and social networking services, it did so in pursuit of Western dreams of a transcendent networked society, where the transmission of digitally-transmitted cultural information was largely presumed to be for white, male, middle class, hetero, Christian users. Black information users were not of interest to an industry intent on creating a technocultural future based on productivity and efficiency.
Information and communication technologies have been argued for as mediums for the transubstantiation of Whiteness-as-spirit across space and time in the quest for control over others. Dyer describes this as “enterprise”, where white men have the capacity “of both spirit itself – energy, will, ambition, the ability to think and see things through – and of its effect – discovery, science, business, wealth creation, the building of nations, the organisation of labour (carried out by racially lesser humans)” (1999: 31). James Carey (1975/2008) points out that in breaking the connection between communication and transportation, the telegraph technologized the extension of Western desires for conquest and control over space; as a rationalist, capitalist justification for White imperialist captures of land and other resources to civilize “underutilized” lands and resources. The Nineties saw the opening of the commercial internet marketed much as the telegraph was during the nineteenth century in service to “Manifest Destiny”; the internet was touted as the natural capacity of the computer qua whiteness to expand global opportunities for enterprise and productivity.
While Carey’s argument for communication as “ritual” were immensely helpful in my inquiry into belief and information technologies, I found few other sociological and philosophical works that could contribute to my vision for Blackness and technology, or Black technoculture. My doctorate is in library and information science (“LIS”), which actually compounded my difficulties in studying race and computers. While “library” conjures warm memories of cultural and literary sanctuaries, I found instead that, in a quest to be considered modern, LIS took up organizational sociology and the political economy of information to redefine itself as a managerial approach to library administration, rather than as a theoretical, literary, or historical approach to print and other forms of media. In keeping with its desire to be seen as modern, LIS later grafted the new discipline of information science to itself to appear more scientistic and compete with computer science and computer engineering. While library science retains a modicum of cultural competence in its curricula, information science is atheoretical, disregarding culture to instead focus on “society” and institutions as the locus of information generation and transmission. I earned my doctorate fifteen years ago, yet the political economy of information still persists in information science. One recent example can be found in online disinformation and misinformation research, where information science researchers argued that economic anxiety, not racism or xenophobia, led to political polarization in the West (Kreiss and MacGregor, 2022).
I have written extensively on the constitutive role of belief in technology, focusing specifically on race and the internet (Brock, 2010; 2012; 2018; 2020). To get there, I combed through science and technology studies, particularly sociotechnical approaches to information systems, but found few possibilities for understanding race as a cultural – not just social – element of technology. I finally found research supporting my arguments about belief and technology in Joel Dinerstein’s (2006) ‘Technology and Its Discontents’. Dinerstein opens with a bold claim:
scholars of whiteness rarely engage technology as a site of dominant white cultural practices (except in popular culture), and scholars of technology often sidestep the subtext of whiteness (2006: 570).
Dinerstein continues, “Technology as an abstract concept functions as a white mythology” (2006: 570 [emphasis original]). He later goes on to describe a “technocultural[1] matrix”, which incorporates the qualities of whiteness and modernity alongside masculinity, progress, religion, and the future. This article came to be enormously helpful for my arguments about the absence of Blackness in information technology design and use. Despite no mention of Mills in Dinerstein’s essay, I find that his insight augments Mills’ canonical argument of the Racial Contract as an epistemology of ignorance, particularly where Mills mentions white mythologies dependent upon “misunderstanding, misrepresentation, evasion, and self-deception on matters of race” (1998: 19), as Dinerstein makes no mention of slavery or antiblackness as constitutive of Western modernity. I contend that antiblackness must be incorporated as the seventh quality of Western technoculture; a libidinal intensity infusing whiteness, modernity, masculinity, progress, religion, and the future. Incorporating antiblackness illuminates the libidinal tensions powering chattel slavery, racial capitalism, policing, education, and other modern technocultural practices and processes, revealing their productivity and rationalist ideology underpinning Western whiteness.
Race, philosophy, and technology
When information science does address race and computation, one of the few areas where Blackness is to be found was in the area of digital divide research, especially in the early 2000s. But I quickly learned that digital divide research was structured on deficit models of Black technological use, or Black negation. Study after study – governmental and academic – argued that Black folk were
- too poor
- too technically unskilled
- too illiterate
- or not connected enough
to participate fully in the information society. Few of these social scientific studies made the connection between Black technology use and segregation, Jim Crow, or white supremacist governmentalities. More importantly, these findings were at odds with my personal history with computers, not to mention the visibility of information technologies in the Black communities I navigated as an adult. My theoretical respite from this epistemic violence was critical race theory, which I began to awkwardly suture onto analyses of Black ventures into the newly-born World Wide Web.
In casting about for theoretical approaches to explaining digital technology’s shaping of people, society, and culture, I stumbled across an elective course titled “Philosophy of Technology”. I had already encountered Andrew Feenberg’s work; this class introduced me to Marx, Heidegger, Claude Shannon, Lewis Mumford, and other stalwarts. I finally found a connection between culture and technology in the humanist technology thinkers Arnold Pacey, Ivan Illich, and Jacques Ellul. Where others in the tradition of humanities philosophy of technology were concerned with morals, politics, or metaphysics, these scholars argued for culture as being inextricable from technology. None of the three explicitly engaged Blackness, however, but my autodidactic nature led me to those who did: continental philosophers of race.
Prolepsis: Black to the future
I first published on Black identity online in 2005, arguing that mainstream websites did little to address the information needs and desires of Black folk. I continued researching Blackness across new media technologies such as weblogs, web browsers, and a burgeoning social media network called Twitter. These articles were grounded in a conceptual framework melding critical race theory, discourse analysis, and science and technology studies. You may have noticed that philosophy of technology is not mentioned. That absence has as much to do with that field’s ambivalence towards race as a constitutive element of technology[2] as it does the relative newness of media studies’ attention to race and the digital.
Modernity, technology, and philosophy
In my quest to situate information technologies as a racialized project, I began to pay increasing attention to the concept of modernity as a defining element of Western technoculture. For European modernity, “rationality” and “progress” are the differentiation between modern and pre-modern societies; Philip Brey argues “Technology made modernity possible” (2003: 33) while Andrew Feenberg adds “no fully coherent account of modernity is possible without an approach to technology” (2003: 79). Neither scholar ever mentions race nor the role that chattel slavery of Africans – as technology – played in European modernity or the European Enlightenment.
These frustrating elisions – if not oversights – led me to alternative perspectives on modernity in Critical Philosophy of Race, which draws heavily upon critical legal studies and critical race theory to make the argument that ideologies such as whiteness and white supremacy operate covertly in the mainstream formulations of ostensibly neutral concepts such as technology. In particular, critical philosophy of race has kept apace with Black studies’ arguments that modernity is premised upon the deliberate rendering of certain bodies as non-human (Goldberg, 1993; Morrison, 1997; Patterson, 1997); I reveled in the works of Linda Martín Alcoff, Lewis Gordon, George Yancy before finally coming back around to Mills.
In writing on antiblackness’ clarifying epistemological backdrop and standpoint to both continental philosophy and to modernity, Mills’ (2021) arguments in ‘Illumination’ warranted my longstanding goal of racializing science and technology studies and the rhetoric of technology. Moreover, as I read through his previous work I realized Mills’ thinking about race and modernity, from as far back as The Racial Contract, could be applied to the Black internet.
From blackness to antiblackness and black again
Mills’ ‘The Illumination of Blackness’ (hereafter ‘Illumination’) is the first chapter in the edited collection Antiblackness (Jung and Costa Vargas, 2021). It builds upon and revises his 2013 Black Scholar essay ‘An Illuminating Blackness’, which argues for Black philosophy as a critical philosophy of race drawing upon the experience of Black racial subordination (2013: 36). The chapter begins by addressing modernity’s unarticulated racialized standpoint, writing that modernity fuses “metaphor, color symbolism, and Euro-identity” to enshrine whiteness as “both enlightenment and of the human bearers of the enlightenment” (Mills 2021: 17). This is not new ground for Mills, but the warrants employed to reach this conclusion slightly differ from previous work.
The edited collection arrived at a moment when Afropessimism, a controversial and powerful conceptual framework arguing that Blackness is incommensurable with the West and modernity, brought the concept of antiblackness to prominence in the academy, in activism, and in policy circles. In ‘Illumination’, Mills shifts his analytical lens from “racism” to “antiblack racism”, a specific epistemological standpoint affording a striking claim that Blackness-as-identity emerges in antiquity, even though it is only in the “systematized racial subordination” (23) of European modernity that creates Black folk both as a category and a radical anti-racist philosophy capable of carrying out the actual promises of the European Enlightenment.
Mills has long acknowledged that the US – and many other Western countries – are racial polities. In doing so, he employed critical race theory and history to highlight that chattel slavery financed European modernity, in the process crafting a durable, flexible concept of “race” to justify control, coercion, and colonialism. In keeping with much of the literature at the time – particularly Orlando Patterson’s (1985) controversial concept that slavery configured enslaved Africans within social death – Mills only briefly considered Black indigeneity prior to slavery. Like his contemporaries, Mills argued for Blackness as beginning with the Middle Passage[3] and thus a construct of modernity. In ‘Blackness Visible’, Mills cites Lewis Gordon’s argument for “existence in Black”, rather than Black existentialism, to argue for a conception of Blackness that is not a deviant relationship to a world that is founded on racial privilege (2021: 10), but this argument still lingers in the Midde Passage Epistemology. In ‘Illumination’, Mills makes his clearest connection between modernity and a Black philosophy of technology by referencing Ellison’s Invisible Man to argue for a Black Enlightenment as a “‘black light’ analogous to a penetrating X-ray vision into the workings of Euro-created polities and related patterns of Euro-cognition, both factual and moral” (2021: 26). I have found that Black Twitter provides a similar insight into the workings of computers and society, leading to my formulation of the concept of Black technoculture.
The combination of Blackness and Twitter represents a paradigm shift from modernity’s materialist “existence in Black” to a Black technoculture afforded by the digital’s capacities for virtuality, simulation, and interactivity. I first encountered Twitter in 2008 and Black Twitter in 2009. This is not to say that Black folk weren’t using Twitter in 2008. Instead, this is an acknowledgement that the online collective now known as “Black Twitter” came to be in the interstices of Web 2.0’s non-black online spaces. Indeed, it’s fair to say that Black folk were not – and never have been – at the forefront of Silicon Valley design thinking or investment, which makes Black Twitter’s triumphal, libidinal existence all the more extraordinary. Black Twitter revealed a Black digital expertise that was previously only known in the segregated “niche” areas of the internet where Black folk congregated and minded their Black-ass business. Moreover, Black Twitter came to prominence as a para-ontological phenomenon preceding and warranting ‘respectable’ and ‘modern’[4] Black collective activities such as political and social justice movements like Black Lives Matter.
I am not the first to link Mills and the Black digital, of course. Safiya Noble’s outstanding Algorithms of Oppression (2018) cites Mills as a warrant for situating algorithms within a white supremacist digital racial order. Noble’s work fits within a long Black studies tradition of studying Black negation; my uptake of Mills differs. While writing Distributed Blackness (Brock, 2020), I argued for a libidinal economy[5] of Black technoculture, focusing on Black life-with-technology instead of centering oppression and resistance[6]. I knew, thanks to The Racial Contract, that the liberal philosophies powering Western modernity neatly ignored the constitutive and libidinal energies of chattel slavery. But I set The Racial Contract aside for a time because I considered it as a precursor to Afropessimism’s (Wilderson, 2010; Sexton, 2012; Moten, 2013) structuring concept of antiblackness. For those unfamiliar, antiblackness is argued for as the libidinal tension behind Western culture and modernity, where blackness is incommensurable with the project of modernity, neither capable of being or humanity. Indeed, Sexton (2012) writes “which didn’t satisfy my monograph’s inchoate arguments for Black Optimism”[7].
In ‘Illumination’, Mills paradoxically gains the interpretative flexibility to reconsider “Black” as a pre-modern identity by employing antiblackness as a lens on the whiteness of continental philosophy. I say “paradoxically” because, as I have argued in my own work, racial identity does not exist in a vacuum; it is a discourse between the in-group and out-group where both groups talk, feel, and act as if the in-group is a separate group (Hughes, 1963/1985, cited in Brock, 2020). Without Blackness as a boundary against which to define itself, or anti-blackness, whiteness would not exist. Mills’ genius move is to retrofit historical formulations of antiblackness, going as far back as the ancient Greeks, to recuperate Blackness as an ontologically valid, hierarchical, racialized identity preceding European modernity. This move enables a claim for Black philosophy and crucially for a Black modernity. He continues, “Blacks have been well placed to theorize, from the underside…the actual material and normative topography of this racialized world” (Mills, 2021: 25).
The digital’s simulation and virtuality of space also has a discursive, material, and normative topography; thus, Mills’ use of antiblackness to ontologize Blackness in a racialized world has been enormously helpful for my arguments for the internet as a space for Black technological existence. I believe, however, that antiblackness is necessary but insufficient for articulating Black life in modernity, as oppression and resistance are not the sole determinants of Blackness or Black culture. Mills would seem to agree, suggesting in ‘Illumination’ that
the negro, the Black, the n*****, had to rethink and reinvent and re-assert himself or herself as a person of equal moral standing, not through the attempt to escape the taint of Blackness, the racial sign of the natural slave …but through its revalorization and resignification [emphasis mine] (2021: 33).
Resignification and revalorization
Twenty years after the publication of The Racial Contract, Noble’s (2018) Algorithms of Oppression, alongside Benjamin’s (2018) Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, must be understood as a minor paradigm shift incorporating the insights of The Racial Contract for computer science, software engineering, and information science. Each author argues compellingly for the antiblackness inherent to computer science and its offspring: algorithms and artificial intelligence. But even as these brilliant works generated new research areas such as algorithmic justice and critical algorithmic studies, those disciplines still see race and Blackness as orthogonal to their research and profit motives.
I find that Mills’ use of antiblackness to warrant Black modernity signposts a third way to understand Blackness and, from my perspective, computation. Gordon neatly captures the essence of my argument for this third way, or Black Technoculture, writing that while antiblackness configures Blackness as a problem, Black modernity “emerges from realizing the distinction between being a problem and having problems” (Gordon, 2014: 101). Where Western technoculture is structured by modernity’s structuration through antiblackness, Black technoculture registers the realities of antiblack oppression, the necessity for Black resistance and resilience, but is oriented towards a mode of Black life.
Consider Twitter. From the perspective of technology-as-racist oppression, the service was not designed for or about Black users. From a resistance perspective, any activity undertaken by Black Twitter users is often argued for as resisting technological erasure or commodification. But the internet – particularly in the form of social networks/media – is not amenable to the same social constraints as physical space. In The Racial Contract, Mills argues that “the white social contract characterizes European space as presociopolitical (“the state of nature”) and postsociopolitical (the locus of “civil society”). But this characterization does not reflect negatively on the characteristics of the space itself or its denizens” (1997: 42). This figuration aptly describes the internet; or, to be specific, the libidinal economy of the internet. While it’s easy to argue that today’s internet/social media is dominated by surveillance algorithms, engagement algorithms prioritizing strife and radicalization, or outright commodification and commercialism, many internet users still move, think, and act as if the Internet is presociopolitical and the locus of civil society. For Black Twitter, civil internet society becomes a Black cultural space, structured by collectivity, networks of care, and the Black mundane. For the Black digital, as Mills notes, “There is nothing innate [emphasis original] in the space or the persons that connotes intrinsic defect” (1998: 42). The disembodiment inherent to digital spaces accrues to Black virtuality as resignification; where Black existence coheres and codifies the domestication of a previously undeveloped technical space (e.g., #BlackLivesMatter) in contradistinction to the hypermateriality of Black bodies in physical spaces.
Revalorization, for Mills, builds upon the contention that an oppositional Black consciousness is energized through tensions between stigmatizing representations of Blackness and material structures of racial domination (2018: 23). This opposition becomes a libidinal energy powering Black Being under modernity, but I don’t agree that it energizes Black Modernity itself. I find that Mills originally had a more expansive take on Black Being in ‘Blackness Visible’:
ontological without being biological, metaphysical without being physical, existential without being essential, shaping one’s being without being in one’s shape (Mills, 1998: xiv).
This epigraph highlights a Black phenomenological aesthetic from which Black being can arise. From a digital media theory perspective, it also articulates something poignant about Black online identity. In digital spaces, freed from material constraints of embodiment and phenotype, yet articulated semiotically through discourse and information, Blackness becomes visible through a digital praxis of critique, catharsis, and collectivity. Mills’ epigraph has been instrumental for my formulation of Black Technoculture: a matrix of Blackness, intersectionality, invention/style, diaspora, modernity, and the future. Mills even anticipated my claims for Black digital being, writing “Public selves and private selves, the self as socially constituted and the self as internally socially resistant, appearance and reality… What could be more “metaphysical” than that?” (Mills, 1998: 13).
Mills and a black digital metaphysics
Drawing upon Squires’ (2002) arguments for Black “counterpublics”, I have described Black Twitter as a satellite digital counterpublic, conducting cultural discourses that occasionally touch upon politics and capitalism but are largely concerned with navigating everyday life. This counterpublic deploys media artifacts as part of their discourse, but the same could be said for Black and African-descended peoples for the last five hundred years. While media theory does much to constitute how Black cultures are performed and received, I contend that attention must be paid to the information and information practices afforded to Blackness by computation, the digital, and online networks, as those illuminate Black futurity and Black modernity, or Black technoculture. Black Modernity, illuminating as it does the problematics of today’s information infrastructure, goes beyond media theory to illustrate alternative digital epistemologies contravening whiteness and Euromodernity’s desires for extraction, exploitation, or coercion. Without Charles Mills, these insights would have taken much longer to come to light.
References
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Notes
[1]Technoculture is the interactions between, and politics of, technology and culture. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technoculture
[2] The 2022 Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Technology, which has a chapter on postcolonialism, has no mention of race, culture, or Blackness in its index.
[3] Proponents of the “Middle Passage Epistemology” argue that Africans did not hold “Black” as a racial identity, instead grouping themselves by kinship, geography, religion, and governmentality. It is only once forcibly transported to the Americas and forbidden from expressing pre-confinement languages, beliefs, or practices that the category of “the Black” came to be.
[4] In Distributed Blackness, I argue that Black respectability is a libidinal economic desire to make Black folk “modern” with the goal of qualifying for participation in economic and civic life.
[5] I was introduced to “libidinal economy” through Wilderson’s (2010) treatment of Afropessimism and antiblackness. Wilderson, citing an unpublished note by Jared Sexton, writes that libidinal economy “is the whole structure of psychic and emotional life” (7); a “dispensation of energies, concerns, points of attention, anxieties, pleasures, appetites, revulsions, and phobias capable of both great mobility and tenacious fixation” (7). I center these definitions within Lyotard’s claim that “political economy is a libidinal economy’ (1993: 104) to argue that the political economy of Western technoculture is driven by the libidinal energies of antiblackness and necropolitics (Brock, 2020: 226).
[6] Noble’s work also focuses on Black life, but Algorithms of Oppression has been rightly celebrated for its inquiry into the antiblackness of search engines.
[7] A brief explanation is necessary here: I contend that Black Optimism comprises the resources – care and self-repair, in part – for thriving as a palliative against the “desiccation of modernity” (Mbembe and Goldberg, 2018) and late stage capitalism. My formulation derives additional energies from Moten’s (2007) unpublished essay “Black Optimism/Black Operations” and Gordon’s (2018) incisive arguments for Black aesthetics to focus on the potential of the Black digital as praxis for conviviality, political inquiry, and community.
André Brock is an associate professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. He writes on Western technoculture, Black cybercultures, and digital media. His scholarship examines racial representations in social media, videogames, weblogs, and other digital media in New Media & Society, The Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, Media, Culture & Society, Information Communication and Society, and Games and Culture. He has also published influential research on digital research methods. His award-winning book, Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (New York University Press, 2020) theorizes Black everyday lives as Black joy, mediated by networked digital technologies.
Email: abrock35@gatech.edu
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