[SIGCIS-Members] Is Unix racist?

Tue Aug 18 13:30:53 PDT 2015

Hmm. I agree that it’s an interesting discussion, and one that reflects the increasing breadth of the SIGICS community as we have been broadening our participation from Ph.D. historians both into the English/DH crowd and into software developers. So the list is bringing together a cross-section of people who would otherwise be unlikely to be in conversation.

The headline “Is UNIX Racist” reminds me of the journalistic maxim that the answer to any question posed in a headline is “no.” Otherwise they’d run it without he question mark. (Although the real question surely is “Is UNIX shaped by racism?”)

More seriously, I think Kirschenbaum is right in highlighting the passage he does. However I find it less convincing than he does. That’s probably because I’m trained in history, rather than English or media studies. There’s a difference between the kind of arguments that are allowed in the two fields, specifically with respect to evidence and claims about causation. Scholarship in English tends to be more self-consciously performative, and more concerned with joining up apparently unconnected things in a provocative or original way. I’m reminded of a workshop at Penn where Rob Kohler asked a visiting English professor “How would you know if an argument of this kind had gone off the rails and fallen off the cliff?” His suggestion was that you couldn’t, that the aesthetic standards at work meant that almost any connection of conclusion to evidence would be equally valid. 

In this case the claim is that UNIX has a compartmentalized architecture and that so was U.S. society at mid-century. According to McPherson, it is “at best naïve” to think that this is a coincidence.

Call me naïve, or worse, but I think it’s a coincidence. Say UNIX was not modular but highly integrated and centralized. Well, that clearly would reflect the hegemonic power of late-capitalist ideology and the domination of white elites. If UNIX used a system of rings and permissions for processes, rather than the simpler model that it adopted.  Clearly that would reflect rigid racial and class hierarchies in mid-century society. So whatever architecture UNIX had adopted, one could make an equally plausible case that it was shaped be ambient racism. Without having at least a counter factual sketch of what an OS not shaped by a racist society would look like I find any of these arguments unconvincing. 

McPherson appears to starts out with the assumption that a racial answer will give the deepest and best explanation and works hard to hold onto this faith wherever else the evidence may lead: “we must understand and theorize the deep imbrications of race and digital technology even when our objects of analysis (say UNIX or search engines) seem not to be about race at all. That will not be easy. In writing this essay, the logic of modularity continually threatened to take hold, leading me into detailed explorations of pipe structures or departmental structures in the university, taking me far from the contours of race at midcentury.”

Maybe UNIX is compartmentalized because of the addressing scheme of the process it was developed for. Maybe UNIX is compartmentalized because of the need for portability, which was unusual in operating systems of the period. Maybe UNIX is compartmentalized because this reduced the need for managerial coordination of the loosely coupled team working on it in the quasi-academic world of Bell Labs where it was to a large extent a volunteer project. Maybe UNIX is compartmentalized because that let a small team get more done more quickly. Remember, Unix is explicitly an alternative to MULTICs and the problems the project ran into with a different design philosophy. Maybe, if we follow McPherson into big-picture cultural explanations, UNIX is compartmentalized because of the lingering influence of “separate spheres” gender ideology and the mid-century exclusion for women from the workforce during the 1950s.  One can also connect it to the well-publicized travails of OS/360, and the interest in this period in developing software engineering techniques that would work better than the “human wave” approach chronicled by Brooks. (MULTICS fans: I know it did many wonderful things and has a rich technical legacy).

So where I find McPherson unconvincing is in implicitly dismissing such explanations, to convict those who might give them credit of naivety “or worse.” In this respect I think the article undercuts its own agenda – a call to “historicize and politicize code studies” with which I very much agree. She wants to convince us that technical innards matter, and that we need to do the hard work to map social and political factors onto the internals of the black box – which many on this list would recognize as a classic STS move (though she reaches for Gramschi rather than Winner or MacKenzie). But she doesn’t do that. She picks one technical feature, doesn’t explore it in depth, and jumps straight past all the possible social explanations to the giant, fuzzy fact of racism in society. It’s an explanation that doesn’t explain, at least by the personal aesthetic standards I apply to scholarly arguments, which are shaped more by social history than cultural history or cultural studies.

Ken Stauss’s reaction was not politely phrased, and we do need to keep discourse on this list civil. However, McPherson does describe her aim as polemical, and the polemicist writes with the expectation of causing offense. The style and content of the article are calculated to appeal to faculty and grad students in the humanities, and beyond that community it does not translate well. To be fair, any scholarly work is framed within the norms of a particular disciplinary community and tacitly excludes those outside it.

What I would love to see is a paper on gender in UNIX, particularly masculinity. There’s the name, which surely invokes “eunuchs” (as in an emasculated MULTICS). Commands like “finger.” Or a paper on whether the libertarian philosophy that Raymond has claimed for Linux was really present or articulated in the original design and spread of UNIX. (I’m a little wary to see her quote it as evidence of “the UNIX philosophy.”) Is UNIX sexist? Very probably. Is UNIX homophobic, in the manner of a bromance movie? I’m ready to be convinced. Here’s a title for someone: “Gay Kernel Panic: The Uneasy Masculinities of UNIX.” 

Best wishes,

Tom

From: Members [mailto:members-bounces at lists.sigcis.org] On Behalf Of Matthew Kirschenbaum
Sent: Tuesday, August 18, 2015 8:43 AM
To: Ceruzzi, Paul <CeruzziP at si.edu>
Cc: members at sigcis.org
Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Is Unix racist?

This has developed into an interesting discussion, at least in so far as it exposes some of the disciplinary rifts and boundaries amongst the many different constituencies and communities claiming some purchase in the history of computers and computing. Like the Doubloon nailed to the mast in Moby Dick, here sits Tara McPherson's essay with its provocative title, "Why are the Digital Humanities so White?" under an even more provocative listserv subject line, "Is Unix racist?" Not surprising many of us feel compelled to weigh in.

I suspect some are reading the essay through something like the following framework:

The author, starting with a bold and perhaps overdetermined thesis, sifts what historical evidence she can find, comes up short, and so stumbles and fumbles her way toward an unsatisfying conclusion. Alas, there is no smoking gun to prove that UNIX developed out of overtly racist motivations after all, but we can still salvage a publication and an English professor qua digital humanist can maybe toss some red meat to students.

But that's not what's going on in the essay, I don't think. Instead, I see the decisive passage as this one:

"By drawing analogies between shifting racial and political formations and the emerging structures of digital computing in the late 1960s, I am not arguing that the programmers creating UNIX at Bell Labs and in Berkeley were consciously encoding new modes of racism and racial understanding into digital systems. (Indeed, many of these programmers were themselves left-leaning hippies, and the overlaps between the counterculture and early computing culture run deep, as Fred Turner has illustrated.) . . .  Nor am I arguing for some exact correspondence between the ways in which encapsulation or modularity work in computation and how they function in the emerging regimes of neoliberalism, governmentality, and post-Fordism. Rather, I am highlighting the ways in which the organization of information and capital in the 1960s powerfully responds—across many registers—to the struggles for racial justice and democracy that so categorized the United States at the time. . . . Computation is a primary delivery method of these new systems, and it seems at best naive to imagine that cultural and computational operating systems don’t mutually infect one another." (149)

The core thesis, then, is that cultural and computational constructs influence one another. Indeed, the very division is suspect, precisely the "modularity" of which McPherson speaks. 

Who here would seriously disagree? Which is to say, I can well imagine specialists in the history of Unix (or the history of American social relations in the 1960s) disputing this or that aspect of her subsequent discussion and analysis. That's called scholarly communication. But the kind of rhetoric some here have deployed, questioning her credentials and the terms of her employment? That's something else entirely. Best, Matt

On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 9:11 AM, Ceruzzi, Paul <CeruzziP at si.edu <mailto:CeruzziP at si.edu> > wrote:

Well, we know that BASIC was developed at Dartmouth College, which at the time was all-male and quite the macho place. Dartmouth was founded to train Native Americans for the Christian ministry—enough about that. It was also the inspiration for the movie _Animal House_. What this has to do with BASIC I have no idea, but when I think of Dartmouth BASIC, I think of John Belushi in the cafeteria (a scene that was totally ad-libbed by the way). What for me in most interesting about Dartmouth BASIC is that it was designed for a time-shared system, but it was adapted by the PC community for the Altair and other PCs. That was a radical re-definition of the language. For example, you could not have commands like “Peek” and “Poke” in Dartmouth BASIC, if you’re running it on a time-shared mainframe. You’d crash the system. But Peek & Poke were absolutely necessary for the personal computer, given the limitations of memory they had. (Also “usr.”) Kemeney & Kurtz did not approve of the way BASIC was modified, but it had to happen. Who came up with those changes?—it may have been at DEC for the PDP-11.

Are the terms “peek” and “poke” sexist? Probably, but we do know that among the computer companies of the 1960s, DEC was one of the most progressive in hiring women.

As for the Is UNIX Racist discussion, I am disappointed that some of you use that paper in coursework. But there are so few alternatives, and the topic is sorely in need of further study. I talked about this at the SIG meeting in Dearborn. We need to address the topic in a more fundamental way. I recommend a recent book by a colleague of mine, Richard Paul, _We Could Not Fail_, about African-Americans who worked for NASA in southern NASA Centers, during the hey-day of the Space Race. Around the same time, IBM established a major facility in Atlanta, and the company had to remind the Atlanta political and real-estate establishment that its employees were to be treated fairly. When the Braves moved from Milwaukee to Atlanta, Hank Aaron expressed some concern about the move. The issue was real. What about the effort by Ken Olsen at DEC and William Norriss at CDC to establish plants in inner city neighborhoods, in St. Paul, Boston, and Springfield, Mass.? What became of those plants?

As I said, this topic merits serious discussion, but the UNIX paper? Maybe not so much.

Paul Ceruzzi 

From: Members [mailto:members-bounces at lists.sigcis.org <mailto:members-bounces at lists.sigcis.org> ] On Behalf Of Andrew Meade McGee
Sent: Monday, August 17, 2015 8:19 PM
To: Nabeel Siddiqui
Cc: Sigcis
Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Is Unix racist?

On a semi-related query, has there been much race-, gender-, or class-related discussion around the cultural logic or social context of the development or reception of BASIC?

I could imagine that fitting into a larger conversation on class, institutions, social action, and (possibly) accusations of paternalism given its Sixties-era development and Dartmouth origins. Just curious -- I admittedly know far less than I should about the dissemination of programming languages. 

Best,

Andrew

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
Andrew Meade McGee
Corcoran Department of History
University of Virginia
PO Box 400180 - Nau Hall
Charlottesville, VA 22904

On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 5:55 PM, Nabeel Siddiqui <nasiddiqui at email.wm.edu <mailto:nasiddiqui at email.wm.edu> > wrote:

I assign it in my course to discuss race with students, but it does have its problems, specifically correlation vs causality.  While the article doesn't get into it, I think it adds to David Golumbia's Cultural Logic of Computation on how computation provides a set of ideas and metaphors for people to think about the world around them.  The Digital Humanities part is actually a part that was tacked on and doesn't really add much to the article.  

Originally, the article was release as "U.S. Operating System at Mid-Century" in Race After the Internet, edited by Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White. Link to the original article's pdf here:  <http://history.msu.edu/hst830/files/2014/01/McPherson_2012.pdf> http://history.msu.edu/hst830/files/2014/01/McPherson_2012.pdf

On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 4:57 PM, Janet Abbate <abbate at vt.edu <mailto:abbate at vt.edu> > wrote:

Anyone seen this piece by Tara Mcpherson? It starts with some interesting questions, but I found the follow-through to be disappointingly ahistorical. Again and again she argues that there must be a connection between the modularity of Unix and the compartmentalization of race within American culture, but then immediately admits that she has no evidence for any direct connection. As far as I can tell, the only reason she singles out Unix is because it coincides conveniently with the US Civil Rights era. I'm curious to know what others think.

"Why Are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation."
http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/29

Janet

Dr. Janet Abbate
Associate Professor, Science & Technology in Society
Co-director, National Capital Region STS program
Virginia Tech
www.sts.vt.edu/ncr <http://www.sts.vt.edu/ncr> 
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Matthew Kirschenbaum
Associate Professor of English
Associate Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH)
University of Maryland
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