ALBLA

In 2013, I composed a tweet that joked about how we imagine technology is designed, when we find it to clearly be lacking in some major consideration - usually, a consideration that means quite a bit for some of us, but not that much to others of us. I'm talking about a consideration that only has a chance to come to light when certain diversities of understanding and critical lenses are in dialogue or otherwise engaged collectively in some way.

This one tweet, and I realize it was *only* a tweet, had a multi-year lifespan I could not imagine that one evening in my bedroom in Brooklyn when I wrote it. What a sad night that was. I remember the evening so well because it was a classic moment of composing a joke to distract myself from a significant painful personal challenge. I knew I had the making of a joke earlier that week when I was driving my station wagon around Bedford Stuyvesant and heard Google Maps perform the comic, and unfortunate pronunciation of the name of Malcolm X. So when I put the short comment in words, and people laughed, and then shared the tweet widely, it was a very interesting experience for what I thought would be one day, that next day, sitting with friends, to see my phone overcome with retweets from so many people - including some people I found very influential! (Remember, this was 2013.)

But aside from chuckling at my statement, I soon observed people including the statement into academic presentations, papers and panels. By noticing hashtags, and the timing of a flurry of favoriting activity, I could tell when screenshots of the tweet were shown by presenters at a variety of media, technology and programming conferences. And I want to make clear - I was not involved or in attendance at any of these events. Three years after I sent the tweet, I heard an American Public Media personality discuss the tweet on the very popular Marketplace radio program. I had no idea I would be guest appearing on the show. But this tweet was a conversation starter.

So I observed the causes of the cycles behind the persistent viral nature of the tweet. Of course some of this had to do with opportunity - the time of year a particular media/tech conference fell, or when a guest who had knowledge of the tweet was invited to speak at whatever venue. But often, when a technology company made a public fumble involving race, I would see community acknowledgement of the moment of failure through second, third, fourth and fifth very active rounds of sharing this 2013 message. In the wake of news about Google Photos algorithmically classifying black people as apes, the message was shared. When AirBnB was under heavy criticism for denying African American would-be-lodgers housing, wholly based on some human discretion and bias of the AirBnB host, the tweet was launched again. When bathroom faucets, and face-scanning sensing and camera technology could not discern the existence of black folks' hands and faces, rounds of tweet were set off once again. Even instances when decisions about technology did not feel explicitly mis-programmed around race, like the inconsistent wages of Uber drivers (still unfairly exploiting people of color the most) prompted people to recollect this one, simple tweet. When people saw the tweet going around again, they implicitly knew, like I knew, that it was not about some moment from the tweet's 2013 timestamp. Instead, in whatever coded or parallel fashion it may be, retweeting the comment was a comment on the current moment.

I noticed very technical, mostly white, programming communities share, and laugh at the tweet, and note what it revealed about the assumptions that must have been made in development - and for better or for worse, these communities seemed to receive the condemnation via tweet with something resembling open ears, and they seemed to aim to do better. I noticed communities of color lament, relate, and share other related observations. And they pulled in friends to speak about tech, by tagging them in the tweet. The tweet was about seeing them. So the tweet became like a refrain. And that tells us something real about our realities and expectations of technology.

Another moment in my wayback life that went viral...

"Free the Network" for The Awl