Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Appetel, Editor in Chief of the

Verge, and Decoder is my new podcast about big ideas and other problems. On

today's episode I'm talking to Trouten McElwain, a professor of media, culture,

and communications at NYU, and the author of Black Software, the Internet and

Racial Justice from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter. There is 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 in a

part of that story and yet that story had been largely untold. As 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

is an eating the world, it's eating it. Professor McElwain's book ticks 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. Now I spend a lot of time thinking about software and

culture. That's my job. And I was excited to talk to Professor McElwain 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

...