Kaiama L. Glover (KLG): I am going to start off the way I did last time, by asking each of you to reflect on the ideas that are framing our conversation—notably Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s call to consider silence in relation to history and power, and Maryse Condé’s insistence on the creative disorder generated by women. Can you situate yourselves with respect to those two framing ideas?

Kim Gallon (KG): Thank you for inviting me to be a part of this really important conversation. I am so honored to be able to speak a little bit about some of the ideas that I have been working with around technology and Blackness and then more specifically health, and health in the context of Covid-19. Thinking about this notion of silencing and Trouillot’s work, as a historian, and as a Black historian and a historian of Black life, this notion of unsilencing is an incredible way to think about digital humanities and Black digital humanities in this particular moment. We can look at how Trouillot talks about the notion of silencing in terms of the making of the sources, the making of archives, the making of narratives, and the making of history. The work that we do at COVID Black, which is at the intersection of health data, information, the humanities, race, and social justice, anticipates silences, quite frankly. To already expect a silencing in this particular moment, what it means to be Black in this particular moment, and what it means to be human in this particular moment.

It can be really challenging to think about anticipating silencing. To think about how to do that work in the humanities, how to act as an early responder to the silencing. It requires a certain level of agility because of the way that power works, because of the way that silencing works. It is a moving target. So if we think most recently about the [Donald] Trump administration’s demand that Covid data come to the Trump administration before it goes to the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], then what does that mean for the work that we do at COVID Black, or any other sort of work that’s trying to make sure that this present moment isn’t constructed as erasure?

I’ll share just quickly one of the ways that we are doing that at COVID Black, and it is to think about how to recover already lost data, if you will. We have created a huge spreadsheet that takes the lives of Black people that have succumbed to Covid-19 and tries to convert that to what the assistant director of COVID Black, Faithe Day, calls “Black Living Data”—data for and by Black people that captures the essence of Black life and community.1 How do we take these numbers and these names and humanize them? How do we move them to the point of actually thinking of them as Black living data? So, we are painstakingly combing through and collecting the information about Black life and death that we can find online in this time of Covid. We’re trying to think about how to take this information from a spreadsheet and transform it into what will be a digital memorial, to create narratives that can unsilence the active silencing that’s actually going on in the world.

COVID Black is less invested in trying to actually construct the past than it is in thinking about how silencing works. And again, about anticipating that silencing. We are caught up in this multilayered notion of silencing, as Black women who are doing this work—and if we think about Condé’s quote about how when Black women speak, or when women speak, they are being disruptive and disordered, or disorderly, if you will. But it’s interesting. We are in a moment when Black women’s voices, bodies, and presence are hyper-visible in ways that we haven’t yet necessarily seen.

If we even think about the possible pick for the Democratic vice president, several Black women’s names have been floated. Or if we think about the visibility of Dr. Uché Blackstock and Dr. Nomi Blackstock in terms of Covid-19. But the parallel reality is that we can’t get justice for Breonna Taylor’s death. Just to call out her murderers, Myles Cosgrove, Brett Hankison, and Jonathan Mattingly—someone reminded me on Twitter that we need to call out these people’s names in our call for justice.

KLG: Thank you, Kim. Before we go on to Marisa, can I ask you to give us the two-second description of COVID Black?

KG: Sure. COVID Black started with me raging on a Saturday afternoon when the data came out, raging and tweeting. From there, I quickly joined forces with Faithe Day and Nishani Frazier to think about what an early response to Covid looks like from a Black digital humanities perspective. What this looks like is creating digital tools and technologies that respond to the very real crisis that’s being highlighted about the disparities in Black health outcomes. But COVID Black exceeds the notion of Covid-19, if you will, in reflecting more expansive thinking about how the humanities can work in intersectional ways and how to think about Black people’s lives and their lived experiences from a Black health perspective.

KLG: Thanks so much, Kim. All right. Marisa, you’re up.

Marisa Parham (MP): I was thinking about your opening questions and about how we see this question in this moment. If you think back to the earliest days of Covid, combined with the various Black Lives Matter resistance moments around the country, so many Black people and people of color lead with, “This is exhausting.” I’ve been thinking a lot about that, and I’ve been thinking in my work about the real question about what it means to actually live in a differential time and space. That’s just a fancy way of saying that the things that feel really new to some people feel really old to others. Navigating that becomes deeply problematic from the perspective of even the notion of silence or speaking, right? Is one silent because they’ve been silenced or because speaking is experienced as a repetition of harm?

We know, for instance, that if we are thinking about this from a trauma studies perspective, we are thinking about the difference between a person being “silent” and a person going unheard because they carry a plaint or complaint that is in some way inadmissible, unacceptable, or fundamentally unspeakable in the moment of response. I really like the #UnsilencedPast hashtag because the “silence” in Trouillot’s formulation to me feels very active, and pairing it with a hashtag foregrounds silence as something that might thrum below mainstream epistemologies. There’s no such thing as silence in most settings. We’re all almost always emitting or expressing some kind of transmission, and the forms and possibilities of those transmissions are deeply contingent upon whether or not there is a person in that space who knows how to hear it. Even a person who’s actively not speaking might still be saying something, but it’s information on a different register, what the poet Bob Kaufman might have recognized as knowledge emerging from the space between beats, or what in Invisible Man Ralph Ellison articulates as ultimately transmitted on a lower frequency (Kaufman). It goes unspoken, but it also speaks volumes, if you know how to hear it. In my recent work I foreground unsilencing by using digital methods to demonstrate how the very terms and forms of my speaking are often discursively differential. In expanding what we’ve inherited from Black art, its attention to this difference, how might we use our digital scholarship to counterbalance hegemonic discursive frames, both by unlocking what feel like self-authorized possibilities for utterance and also by offering improved modalities for listening?

I’m also thinking about the difference between speaking and responding. There’s always that moment when you are having a difficult conversation with someone—this happens at institutions all the time—who wants to ask you a question about racism or about misogyny or “your experience” or etcetera, and they frame it immediately as a debate. In that setting, I’m always like, “This is not really me speaking because you are merely using me so that you might summon forth your imagination of me. I’m simply being called to the floor to somehow respond to your needs, not to tell you what I actually think you need to hear.”

Of course, there are all kinds of moments when we want to make valuable responses. So I’m thinking also about this and what it means for scholarship to develop digital tools and experimental techniques to “get at a way of telling,” to use Simone Brown’s distillation of one of the artist Mendi Obadike’s use of digital work to reveal painful truths. I am really interested in taking deadly seriously Condé’s call to develop representational tools that actually represent our ways of being in the world, even as we also navigate how digital tools, like the colonial languages we nonetheless transform through our use, also potentially echo the roots of various state oppressions. Condé’s “creative disorder” isn’t only about our presence and its effects; it’s also about the often subtle tools we hone in the name of unsilence.

So it is incredibly critical to carefully interrogate how our moments of speaking are enabled, so that they don’t end up reproducing the terms through which our silence first came into being. With digital tools, that can be particularly difficult. I’m thinking, Kim, about your team’s spreadsheets. The work of accounting, tabulation, carries its own terrifying histories in the Americas. At the same time, in many cases the needs of contemporary communities cannot be addressed without a proper accounting of our presence and how we are impacted by various forces—impacts that otherwise go unnamed, thus leaving us to express symptoms, while the causes are left to a kind of constant misprision. Much as silence is actually rare, the power of unnaming or refusing to name is the more active version of refusing to listen or hear. This is where Trouillot is again so useful. The notion of silence itself is simply about a certain kind of state apparatus. It’s a configuration of power, and what constitutes speaking and silence are themselves configurations of power.

If I could summarize, then, what I am interested in is thinking about how we can use digital tools to identify and disaggregate those kinds of workings, and to enable me to self-express, and the people around me—other Black people—to be able to self-express in ways that feel germane to their way of being in the world, rather than being locked constantly into a modality that requires response to questions that we don’t actually get to write.

KLG: This is precisely why I was so excited to have the two of you speak to one another. Already, in the course of this conversation, and in the work that you do, you are in dialogue with one another around both tools and technology, and the cost of those tools—both capital cost and the emotional cost. What you both have come to is this question of health and well-being. So let’s probe a bit more into this deep concern with the digital humanities, both as methodology and as object of study. Let’s look at the ways in which your work is both invested in responsibly and ethically using digital humanities to get to the bottom of things and at the same time invested in querying and refashioning and refusing and inventing the tools and the methods that are available.

With COVID Black, for example, when we see this data, when we see those names, the first thing that comes to mind is: How do we think about sharing and surveillance when those become, as you said, Marisa, surfaced? And maybe Marisa, if you can take this opportunity to talk about your various means of resisting erasure, and also your refusals to work within the bounds of what’s offered. I’m thinking of your research pockets, your microsites.2 This came to mind when I was reading Saidiya Hartman’s beautiful essay, in Artforum, where she talks about Du Bois’s imaginative capacity and commitment to experimentation as “lines of flight,” away from something and toward something else, something self-determined.

KG: I want to start where Marisa left off in talking about the state apparatus. I’m going to come back to the spreadsheet in a second because it is related. But it made me think again of the Condé quote about what women’s voices mean. She says whenever women speak out, they displease, shock, or disturb. It made me think, yes, that’s true, but what are the responses? How do women in general, and Black women specifically—what are the ways that their relationships to institutions and state apparatus bring to bear the responses to their voices?

Again, there have been lots of Black women speaking about, for example, Breonna Taylor and a whole range of things. But these institutions and state [apparatuses] act in bad faith in the sense that they don’t hear Black women’s voices. There’s a willful neglect or dismissal of their voices. So no longer can anyone suggest, if they ever have been able to say, “We can’t hear these women’s voices. We didn’t understand. We didn’t know. We were unaware.” It makes me think about this notion of surveillance and the ways that that data puts a spotlight on Black life in a way that can create vulnerability.

But starting from the standpoint that this data is not for the consumption of the state, and this data is not for the consumption of the institution that I may work for—that this data, this information, these stories, these narratives, come first and foremost from a deeply personal space. . . . As a Black woman, to think about recovery as a very personal act and a very collective act of Black people—I wouldn’t suggest that starting from that standpoint doesn’t mean that there will not be mistakes, flaws, or missteps that might create vulnerability, particularly from a privileged position as a Black academic. But thinking about this notion of information or data less as about needing to convince or provide evidence of these disparities, or the way that power works, and more about what this data and this information does for creating narratives and stories for Black communities to memorialize, to grieve, to mourn, to recover what it means to be Black in this moment, is a very, very different position.

I don’t have any answers yet to what this actually looks like in digital form or as digital technology. We have to start off in some ways from the dehumanizing part of the spreadsheet to get the list, to get the numbers, to create order out of the information that’s very disparate. But then how do we go from dehumanization to the humanity of Black people? That’s the beauty, I would argue, of the digital humanities—that it requires that curiosity and both the breaking and using of digital tools and technologies.

MP: I’m thinking, Kim, about what you are saying about that willful neglect thing, the willful neglect of Black women’s voices. I would even argue that what we see in the current moment, and previous moments, is actually—and this is in huge quote marks—“real love” for Black women’s voices, a real craving for Black women’s voices, a real seeking out of Black women’s voices. It just doesn’t feel that way to me as a Black woman because this love really just emerges out of an imagination of Black women’s voices; this desire is not attached to any actual person.

It comes down to the multiple ways we’re often asked to be signatories upon some social moment, some kind of social understanding. But the one thing that is not actually being sought is our presence. In the Black intellectual tradition we have generations of rumination on the desire for Blackness without Black people. That’s all I’m saying, to be clear. But I’m also thinking about what heuristics we can use to tilt that to the side that might help us most broadly imagine our relationship in digital humanities to data itself, as the desire for Black people’s voices or Black women’s voices with no Black presence is a desire for data that can be carried immediately to abstraction, ignoring the messy burden of what happens between the extraction of data and the abstraction of its meaning, the “creative disorder” that also generates information. It is the desire to ask Black people to offer themselves up as a data point that can be reconfigured, cut and pasted for purposes positive and negative, but regardless disconnected from its source. I think there’s some really interesting stuff to do here around catachresis, when data is understood as useful by virtue of the distance between the spreadsheet and the site of its extraction, between datum as an object and the unruly subjecthood from which is it is derived.

These, I think, are the kinds of challenges clarified by the multiple kinds of discursive and numerical inclusion that interventions like Kim’s project require and thus make possible. Kim, I know you have done the deep work of evaluating what it means to scrub (organize, regularize, rectify) data and to think of that in relation to what’s lost, and of thinking about data that is processed in the interest of return to its source, its people. So I won’t rehearse that anymore because you can say it better than I will. This is all just a way of saying that one place my work in electronic lit and experimental scholarship intersects with yours in data and recovery in digital and health humanities is via this notion of when society wants voices without bodies or bodies without voices, and how we create communities of scholarly intervention and transformation that can dismantle the hegemonic impulses of order and control that enable extractive data practice.

In other words, I am also thinking back to that notion of lines of flight, Kaiama, and the evasion of erasure. How do you create a world in which you are always making new things, breaking what you have, but not also becoming exhausted? How do you find a freedom? These are not just rhetorical questions, of course, and they’re not actually negative. At the end of every project, I ask myself, “How does this help us get free?” I am thinking about what it means to instantiate that question earlier in scholarly processes in ways that really influence our use of technology itself.

KLG: I am going to ask you to pick up on something that I am hearing come through both directly and indirectly. Phrases like the desire for data and voices without bodies. You are both demonstrating this incredible fluency in technology, paired with an insistence on the human and the corporeal and the intimate and material. So I’m going to pop in a few keywords, to borrow a term of our times, and ask you to play with them a little bit. Recovery. Sustainability. Speculation. Value. Any one of those four things. I think they are resonant with what you’re bringing to us now. Do any of them intrigue you enough to think about them a little bit more out loud?

MP: I was thinking how, in “.break .dance,” a digital essay I published with archipelagos journal, so much comes down to the various ways that Black writers are picking up the notion of speculation.3 I love the word speculation, even as it also terrifies me because it is also a financial term, and we must insert a pause whenever we are thinking about Black life in the Americas through terms that carry these other simultaneous histories, like data, like speculation.

At the same time, acts of Black speculation are also an assertion of value, of belief in the self and its capacity for both personal and collective transformation; “freedom” is a speculation, a gamble, often of faith without evidence.

Throughout “.break .dance” and many of my other digital “pockets,” interventions that step in, out, and across time, I find myself constantly looking for a way to balance the speculative and the evidential, which I find necessary because the drive to evidence can itself violate my rights as an individual, if I can refer back to my comments above about speaking versus responding. We all have much we can prove, but feeling that I “must” or “should” provide proof can sometimes feel like something very different: “I don’t want to feel made to tell you this, but I do want you to know it.” Thinking about this as a modality in digital spaces has become a different way of thinking about recovery. Sometimes there’s some real sleight of hand. I just bury things. I’m not a religious person, but I do have these moments where I’m like, “Well, if God wants my reader to find this otherwise unspeakable thing, they’ll find it. If they weren’t meant to see it, they won’t see it.” Working digitally and experimentally can enable and enact modalities of unsilence, modalities through which one can offer up the things that can’t necessarily be hyper-articulated, but at the moment of presentation nonetheless resonate with the viewer or the reader or the listener in ways that enable them to make their own speculations about the relationship between their own experiences and the ones I write about. One thing we learn in the balance between digital work, trauma studies, and in the enduring power of Black joy is a kind of possibility for expression and connection that doesn’t just rely on denotation and bare, easily fungible, evidence.

When Kim, for instance, is working with COVID Black’s spreadsheets, we need those spreadsheets because that data must be organized. But when we think about what that data becomes, that’s the place where the special touch of her hand from her own experience produces newly rich opportunities for that data and its impact. Producing opportunities for that data to actually sing. The difference between a line item and something that sends out an actual call to communities is a thing that we have to always be thinking about.

KG: That’s great. I love that. So first, for me, those keywords made me think of grant applications. Sustainability. This notion of value. This idea of exhausting the text or language to demonstrate value for funding, to quantify our work and in many ways, quantify ourselves. Maybe we’ll come back to this, but thinking about what Black women’s work or Black people’s work means in this moment when we see many organizations and institutions funding a variety of projects to intervene, and how Black women’s voices particularly, in terms of trying to demonstrate their value, are still not being heard in the ways that other voices are heard.

But I also think about this notion of pleasure and how pleasure is operating at this moment for me in very complicated, very difficult ways to navigate. The pleasure of being in community with other Black women doing this work, the pleasure of working with Black women and hearing their voices—particularly Black women, but Black people in general—through these social media spaces, and creating these really interesting communities that were unbeknownst to me before COVID-19. This notion of pleasure is sitting alongside what it means to be Black in this moment, with the over-policing, the voter suppression, the dying from Covid-19, and am I even allowed, as a Black women, these moments of joy and pleasure while doing this work and meeting with my COVID Black team and working in this sort of space? What does it mean for me to think about my own humanity and to recover what it means to be a Black woman in this moment?

It is an incredibly difficult time for everyone, but being Black and human in this moment—and that is the cornerstone of the humanities as far as I’m concerned, the question of what it means to be human—I think Black people are ground zero for asking that question. So what does it mean for the humanities to be in crisis when we’ve had—and I’m writing about this now—a discourse from at least the 1940s and 1950s, right after World War II, that the humanities are in crisis. But that crisis of the humanities does not mention Black people, or the lived experience of what it means to be Black. You see that this notion of crisis and the humanities are intricately connected at the moment when Emmett Till was murdered, when you have the dehumanization of Black people in all sorts of ways—we can go on and on and on when we’re talking specifically about that moment.

By aligning the corporal and the technological, we can look at how Black digital practice brings those two together and helps to ensure that Black people are not further dehumanized in the moment of a crisis. Blackness and technology and the digital and the humanities all sit at the intersection of those concepts and ideas.

KLG: Thank you, Kim, for bringing pleasure and intimating play into this conversation. I appreciate that enormously. I think that’s what was in my mind when I was thinking, Marisa, about your microsites, for example, and running through those and feeling the joy of the flexibility and the unboundedness that’s present in the fact of doing that kind of work. I also want to highlight what you said, Kim, [about] this question: What does it mean to be human—and the particularly generative response that can come from the digital humanities and the Black digital humanities? Just to add, perhaps, that to entertain this question not from a position of defensiveness, like to prove oneself human, but rather from a position of creativity, brings me back again then to Condé [and] this notion of disorder as creativity. It’s not about proving that we are human but showing how to be human in ways perhaps unexpected or unimagined.

KG: I love that. I still sometimes come from a very defensive posture, of wanting to protect and keep Blackness safe, rather than thinking about Blackness as opening up and expanding. So I really appreciate this notion of the expansiveness of a Black positionality. I’ve been telling my colleagues, and this is probably impolitic to say, but if there’s ever a moment to be unapologetically Black, it is this moment right now. Both in a very pleasurable way, but also in a very necessary way, to foreground the expediency and the value of a Black positionality—not just for Black people, but for everyone.

KLG: Pleasure, pleasure, pleasure. That, too, can be part of our conversations.

MP: Yes. And with that, and thinking about the humanities in general, every moment of crisis is also, Kim, as you point out, concurrent with a moment of opening up.

At my previous institution, every course description seemed to precipitate some sort of crisis. It was never “will this be a good class?” Or “will students take it?” It was always, “Will this destroy our curriculum?” I was like, “I’m glad you’ve imbued me with so much power to destroy the humanities.” It was always framed with those sorts of stakes. I do, for instance, a lot of work in environmental humanities and the intersection between the environmental and digital humanities around race. At some point, I had a course description include the term “deep time.” I got a response like, “If you use that term in relation to your work, I’m not sure it would have meaning anymore.” I was like, “Damn. I’m very powerful.” So, in thinking about this and thinking about pleasure, also in response to that notion of defensiveness, and thinking about that in relationship to the difference between owning that power and transforming it into an actual real power that’s not just a precipitate of other people’s paranoia—it seems like when you are working with COVID Black, Kim, you feel the pleasure of not just getting the work done but of getting it done on your terms.

KLG: I promised to be more responsible about time when I ended last week. So this is going to be my last question. It’s a plea to help with something that, I would imagine, crosses many of our timelines and many of our thoughts. The frame is how pedagogical uses of the digital humanities can, in fact, endanger actual humans. I’m thinking in particular of the story that ProPublica broke regarding the fifteen-year-old girl who was sent to a juvenile facility for not having completed her online homework, which was a condition of her parole for another criminal offense. So, as we celebrate the digital—and that’s part of what this series is, a query of digital—an opportunity arises to really think about its material impacts and specifically its material impacts on women and girls. There are not two better people I can imagine helping us think through what to make of this.

KG: I don’t know if I have a good answer, but I have been thinking about this in terms of institutions. I have been studying a lot about the construction of the humanities and the institutionalization of the humanities after World War II. Then putting this in a conversation with Condé—I want to read this quote. She’s asking herself about the West Indian writer and she says, “Although West Indian literature proclaims to be revolutionary and to be able to change the world, on the contrary, writer and reader implicitly agree about respecting a stereotypical portrayal of themselves and their society. In reality, does the writer wish to protect the reader and himself against the ugliness of the past, the hardships of the present, and the uncertainty of the future?”

What does this have to do with this young woman and the horrible punitive actions against her for not doing her homework? It occurred to me that—again, this is thinking about Black women’s relationships and Black people’s relationships to institutions—part of our job is to protect these institutions, to obscure the ugliness of the past, to obscure even the ugliness of this moment, and certainly to obscure the uncertainty of what the future may hold for our positionalities in the institutions. It takes a lot of effort to start from the position that we are going to place Black people at the center of our work—not the institutional frameworks, not the institutional metrics of what work looks like or what success looks like. When we are thinking about digital humanities and thinking about digital pedagogies, who are we really teaching and who are these pedagogies, and who are these courses or this work for? It can’t be for the institution if we want to use this work to actually liberate people. It has to be centered in a Black lived experience and grow out of that.

I’m going to talk about user experience for a second. Thinking about developing personas or developing a particular sort of archetype or user. It can be very dehumanizing, in some sense. But if we think about, again, who we are working for and why we are doing what we are doing, I think it creates—not that there’s not going to be harm—but it creates some safeguards, perhaps, to make sure that digital humanities and digital pedagogies are not either unwittingly or explicitly harming the very people that we hope that they’re for.

MP: Thinking about the things we make and, in summary, how not to be part of the problem. I have to say also, as a former juvenile delinquent, that we have to remember that the structures through which the ProPublica situation emerges are structures that were in place long before the digital. If it hadn’t been this, it would have been something else, because she was already under the state’s surveillance before the turn to online learning. The ProPublica example gives us a frighteningly common story of structural incompetence masked as state concern. No amount of cleverness, no canny perspective, would have saved this girl from incarceration. Thinking about that particular young person’s life actually requires us to think about what it means to live in a world where everything is deadly all the time, and about the strategies through which people survive that deadliness. Until they don’t.

So more Ellison, “change the joke and slip the yoke,” and with a nod to Zora Neale Hurston’s attention to strategic implementations of culture: there’s a transformative power in constantly being able to find ways around the rules (Ellison; Hurston). I come from a world where everything about survival is about getting through in ways that flip things to your advantage. There’s no straight line. There’s no right way to do things. It’s not on the table for you. Because even if you were to do everything right, they would just change what has to be done. At the same time, there have to be actual structural solutions. I’ve been thinking more and more about what that means. In the ProPublica case the resonance with the digital is most in how her situation results from a carceral logic that is fundamentally algorithmic. Once she was brought into the system, onto that platform, almost every aspect of her physical and psychic life became a possible site of reinscription. There are real pleasures and radical possibilities in digitality, but there are also briars, dead ends, and the terror of automation.

Kim, there was a great conference you organized a few years ago at Purdue, where I made an off-the-cuff argument that I’ve been playing with a lot in some recent work, about bots and AI [artificial intelligence] in relation to representing Black people. I made the argument that one reason it might prove difficult is because Black people have mastered changing so constantly and so quickly, because we’re such a profoundly linguistic culture in every sense of the term. I know it’s Pollyanna, intentionally so. It was intended to remind us of the pleasure in resistance against the deadly automation that characterizes so much of Black life in America. Black youth can master TikTok and other forms of social media, but what would it mean for Black youth to bring that pleasure and transformation to other technologies, for instance mesh networking or minimal computing or wearables?

I know it’s problematic to make an argument about tools of oppression and surveillance by bringing forth more tools. At the same time, I think there’s something at stake in realizing the ways in which the “average person” doesn’t have access to very simple tools. Understanding how to use the basic building blocks of web communication, rather than merely the constant overlay of services, actually matters. This goes beyond just imagining that “everyone should code.” I’m also thinking, for instance, about when online schooling first started and the kids were intentionally crashing the learning apps by downloading too many things, or the joke we have about the person who figures out that they can just put a picture or a video of themselves up during a Zoom meeting, and it looks like they’re there.

We joke about these things, but there’s something very radical about thinking about what it would mean for a young person to have access to ways of thinking intentionally about technological oppression. Everyone doesn’t need to know how to code, but they should have a sense of what it means to hack digital formations. Because it means that they would actually have access to understanding how the things that they own, the tools they interact with, are problematic but also subject to reinscription, because they also belong to them. They have that understanding about books, about history, about classes, about teachers. What would it mean to pass that over to thinking about digital tools as well? I do wonder what would happen if more people understood all the various ways that resistance could be played out digitally.