Yo computer touchers: there's a history of Black invention and ingenuity you may or may not know about, *and* a history of Black inventors' ingenuity being denied at a systemic level

🧵

Rayvon Fouché’s research in history of technology reveals that Black inventors were largely excluded from “shop” cultures and “school” cultures where white Americans honed their technical skills through informal apprenticeship or formal education, then finding routes into scientific and industrial cultures where credentialed invention occurred. Even when they invented, though, they were often gatekept out of receiving credit for innovation. 2/

(CW antiBlack racism) 3/

Here’s Fouché describing what happened when an enslaved Black person invented a piece of agricultural equipment:

Why am I talking about hay rakes on a decentralized #openSocialWeb network? This history is at play in some of the arguments we’re seeing about #Fediverse #ATProto #activityPub right now

Whatever one thinks of Bluesky, *the* most innovative cultural and technical experimental space there right now is Blacksky; *and* it’s also the clearest example of decentralized possibility on the AT protocol. When people double down saying “AT isn’t decentralized”, they are denying that Blacksky exists. 4/

Taking the a longer view of Black technological ingenuity, this isn’t just an oversight: it’s an erasure that chimes with historical erasures. And it's not just 19th century history: both Mastodon and Bluesky exist in the forms that they do largely in reaction to Twitter; they’ve been built with the goal of keeping some good things about Twitter & skipping past bad things by doing them better.

Scholars of social media show that Black Twitter was a huge force in innovating social practices, 5/

some of which iteratively turned into technical features. So, upstream, Black collectivities have been hugely impactful in designating as relevant and subsequently shaping the spaces where we’re now associating to talk about #ATProto and #ActivityPub !!

TL;DR erasing Black contributions to the social web is weird behavior, and it’s also wrongheaded in that *it sets all of us up to perpetuate old exclusions, old harms, and old failures* 6/

Have the productive discussions about sociotechnical problems and opportunities you want to have, but #ActivityPub partisans should watch out for antiblackness in how they talk about #ATProto.

How awesome would it be to have these conversations about the good things everyone wants, *while breaking racist patterns*?? 7/

Short bibliography in next posts, then fin/

Some reading:

Brock, André, Jr. Distributed blackness: african American cybercultures. New York University Press, 2020.

Fouché, Rayvon. "Say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud: African Americans, American artifactual culture, and black vernacular technological creativity." American Quarterly 58, no. 3 (2006): 639-661.

Fouché, Rayvon. Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation: Granville T. Woods, Lewis H. Latimer, & Shelby J. Davidson. JHU Press, 2003.

+

Jackson, Sarah J., Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles. # HashtagActivism: Networks of race and gender justice. MIT Press, 2020.

Kiam, R.I. and M.X., 2023. “Blackness in the fediverse: A conversation with Marcia X,” Logic(s), volume
20 (13 December), at https://logicmag.io/policy/blackness-in-the-fediverse-a-conversation-with-marcia-x/

McIlwain, Charlton. Black Software. Oxford University Press, 2019.

(there's one more I am gonna edit in but I can't remember the title or author right now, welcome to my brain)