[SIGCIS-Members] Is Unix racist?
Patricia Galloway
galloway at ischool.utexas.edu
Tue Aug 18 13:48:02 PDT 2015
Tom,
You've got it: epistemological chicken is a difficult bird to cook,
especially when there are whole flocks to consider.
Pat Galloway
On 8/18/2015 3:30 PM, Thomas Haigh wrote:
>
> 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:
>
> "Bydrawing 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
>
> 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>
> www.linkedin.com/groups/STS-Virginia-Tech-4565055
> <http://www.linkedin.com/groups/STS-Virginia-Tech-4565055>
> www.facebook.com/VirginiaTechSTS
> <http://www.facebook.com/VirginiaTechSTS>
>
>
>
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>
>
> --
>
> Matthew Kirschenbaum
> Associate Professor of English
> Associate Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the
> Humanities (MITH)
> University of Maryland
> http://mkirschenbaum.net or @mkirschenbaum on Twitter
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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