Maveme has this really beautiful phrase against the desiccation of modernity.

A space of care and self-repair should be somewhere where we rehydrate ourselves, right,

where we fix the things that are broken so that they can be used another day.

Hello, Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Andre Brock.

Andre is an associate professor at the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech,

and the author of Distributed Blackness, African American Cybercultures.

I'll include a link where you can buy the book in the show notes, but I would also note that the book is available open access, and I'll include that link as well. I have no problem admitting

that, you know, the previous reading that I've done on black cyberculture and black people's

kind of specific use of the

internet is pretty limited. So for me, reading Andre's book was really fascinating and kind of the

history and concepts that he outlines are incredibly compelling. And I think you'll find them

to be so as well. As I say in the interview, you know, I've heard the internet described as a means

of U.S. geopolitical power in the past or of English kind of linguistic supremacy. But Andre also

describes it as kind of a tool or an enactment of whiteness and of masculinity in particular.

And while that is not a frame that I necessarily considered before,

you know, when you think about the general criticisms that we make of the tech industry, about how,

you know, it's controlled by a group of wealthy, white men and has been for a very long time.

And the efforts at increasing diversity have been rather limited in their success.

You know, I think it's an important frame to add to those other ones that I outlined

when we consider how the internet works and the kind of effects that it has in our world.

And I would also say that Andre's book provides this important history as well of how black people have used the internet

...