Where Black Culture Meets Digital Power, Platforms, and Places: Or, “Afrotechtonics”
When does Black heritage shape how platforms merge with cities? The joyful streets of LA may have some answers, as offered in my new chapter.
Cyberspace has been one of the most disruptive, algorithmic shifts in contemporary life: from the ballot to the buffet. Despite “digital divides,” Black scientific contributions and cultural inventions were foundational to the formation of the Internet’s infrastructures in the United States and around the world. But does this creative heritage and capacity shape what the contemporary dynamics of digitalization— from the Internet of Things (IoT) to artificial intelligence — is imagined to do for the diasporic world today?
Do Black spatial imaginaries help construct how “smart” cities are going to continue emerging into platforms for digital “Fifth Estates”? Are articulations of Black belongingness, becomingness, and beingness baked into where urbanites live — online and otherwise?
Black Americans are one of the largest consumer groups in the global economy and that also applies to digital social media (i.e., X — formerly known as Twitter), which they have pioneering been since the earliest periods of information technology development. Smartphones now steer how (Black) consumers decide where, when, and how they will participate in the cultural economy. Due to Black residential dispersion to regional outskirts plus reduced economic mobility, the meanings and mechanisms of being (dis)connected have changed.
Black entrepreneurs’ ability to market their own products and services, for example, is even more mediated by technological access and algorithmic knowledge. These digital realities elevate the interlocutors who can streamline and curate preference-savvy advertisements to direct ever-mobile economies of attention. Put differently, the Yelps, Grub Hubs, and Postmates of the world have become the new Yellow Pages for matchmaking people with places.
Geography, new media, and urban studies have offered too few original concepts to spotlight these meaningful interactions between race, place, and taste: how Blackness travels as a global cultural identity embodied, commodified, consumed, and reproduced through technology. In my book chapter, “‘Need Black Joy?’ Mapping an Afrotechtonics of Black Gathering in Los Angeles,” in The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity by geographers Camilla Hawthorne and Jovan Scott Lewis (available by Duke University Press), I quantify and briefly qualify the locations where the tastes of an under-mapped spatial group — Black young people and digital natives — manifest in urbanity. Through experiences marketed toward and by Millennials in the city-region of Los Angeles, I sketch these dimensions of everyday dynamic forms of cultural gatherings constituting Blackness as desirable and distinctive urbanisms.
I find that Blackness is a capacious, global technology itself: offering zones to struggle over domination, exploitation, and segregation as much as joyful sites for Black resilience and leisure. Conceptually, I position two terms — “Afrotech” and “Black joy” — as both traits and technologies of Black public spheres. Through them, I propose my own term that unites and spatializes them as “Afrotechtonics” to gesture toward a conceptual agenda that surpasses the limitations facing them individually.
Afrotechtonics is where “anticipatory design” of cities meets the “networked consciousness” of Afrofuturism facilitated through the “fifth estate” of digital life.
Only used once in reference to an analysis of a Black sculptor, “Afrotech” has not been rigorously defined in a scholarly sense. Using the notion of Black public spheres, I define “Afrotech” as a neologism representing Black economic justice around information-communication technology industries, liberation for the Black digital commons, and cultural self-determination through Afrofuturism and speculative design.
Without considering space explicitly, Afrotech cannot facilitate the fullness of Black belongingness especially when the very grounds upon which technopower is designed and deployed — cities — need shaking and shaping. Thus, perhaps Afrotechtonics can restore the essence of what technology and public space are meant to do for urbanism. Specifically, Afrotechtonics is where “anticipatory design” meets the “networked consciousness” of Afrofuturism facilitated through the “fifth estate” of digital life.
By applying shared values of Black spatial imaginaries to communications industries and digital economies, Afrotechtonics illuminate geographies capable of righting what has gone awry with consumerist “smart” city schemes, infecting cities who have either been surveilling for data to mine or make “open” for business. Afrotechtonics can “Blacklight” the otherwise hidden possibilities of an already-existing, parallel commons that was latent all along to more deeply connect people to more people and places, not merely platforms.
Considering the potentialities of Afrotech and challenging the spatialities of doing Blackness in the urban economy, what can we say about geographies of Black joy? Where does the mundane techno-hegemony leave gatherings for Black expressive culture and practices of joy? Where do Afrofuturism and Black speculative movements manifest in/through geography? How do digital place-shaping practices and spacemaking processes steer Blackness? How are tastes steeped in Black heritage and Afroindigenous practices augmented and affected by the architectures of digital networks, aka the “fifth estate”?
Understanding these answers has become central to the project of democratizing technopower and transforming urban praxis. This piece begins to sketch some answers and possibilities but leaves much more to be explored.
