Setup

• Thinking about Black technology use in a way not framed as lack, deficiency, or digital divide
• Not a comms background; info & lib sci PhD from UIUC (same as Roberts; Leigh Star, Lisa Nakamura used to be there); same Georgia Tech dept as Ian Bogost, Fox Harrell
• Google Scholar good for tracking down a particular scholar's work; citation number standards vary across fields, can't tell if cite means love it or critique it; books aren't represented well

Meta

• Audience: academics; specialist language; lots of hat-tipping to others
• Assumes people know political economy, perhaps more useful in a dissertation
• Intervention for scholars of media and for scholars of race
• How authors deploy different voice and style, maybe anticipating how they'll be read

Positivity round

• Care for reader by explaining theory, who he's engaging with, etc; thoroughness
• Frequently engaging with whiteness and other concepts, not taking stuff for granted
• Thoroughly justifying the browser synecdoche, recognizing its technical inaccuracy; represents his broader interest in beliefs

• Do identity-based communities like Blackbird make them targets?

  • P2P live: identity as content; yeah but sometimes we want to opt in and be visible in this way
• Well-organized methods

Oops I took a call lol

Discussion

• What do we need to pay more attention to in studies of race and technology?
• jouissance (more than affect) — we're missing energy and vibes
• Approach reading like you're riding a wave; hang out and see where you come out on the other side

Libidinal economy

• Not about instrumentality, rationality, productivity
• Freud really got us to take the unseen seriously; tapping into the unseen as a powerful modality in social experience
• Whole bunch of stuff of our lives, offline and online, not getting dealt with; by not having these on the table, you might come away telling really weird partial stories
• "This feels so much like Jose Munoz's excellent twist to queer joy in queer studies"
• There are different ways to use technology
• It's not that we can't talk about exclusion, but that we need a framework to talk about the other stuff, that take the libidinal as legit
• See the present for the vibrancy that's there; not the deferral of Afrofuturism