[SIGCIS-Members] Is Unix racist?

[JD Fleming]

A lurker asks: "Is neoliberal multiculturalism racist?" 

Also, paraphrasing Davidson: Everything reflects everything else, and that in innumerable ways. 

In short (and though an English prof myself) I am with those who would tend to see an excess of lurid rhetoric in work of this kind. 

JD Fleming 


----- Original Message -----

From: "Bjorn Westergard" <bjornw at gmail.com> 
To: "Luke Fernandez" <luke.fernandez at gmail.com> 
Cc: "Thomas Haigh" <thaigh at computer.org>, members at sigcis.org 
Sent: Friday, 21 August, 2015 14:28:20 
Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Is Unix racist? 

I've been mulling over statements like these in the McPherson paper: 



Another rule of UNIX is the Rule of Diversity, which insists on a mistrust of the “one true way.” Thus UNIX, in the words of one account, “embraces multiple languages, open extensible systems and customization hooks everywhere,” reading much like a description of the tenets of neoliberal multiculturalism (Raymond, 24). Certain words emerge again and again throughout the ample literature on UNIX: modularity, compactness, simplicity, orthogonality. UNIX is meant to allow multitasking, portability, time sharing, and compartmentalizing. It is not much of a stretch to layer these traits over the core tenets of post-Fordism, a mode of production that begins to remake industrial-era notions of standardization in the 1960s: time-space compression, transformability, customization, a public/private blur, and so on. 


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This push toward modularity and the covert in digital computation also reflects other changes in the organization of social life in the United States by the 1960s. 
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So we have several analogies between "the organization of social life" (per the standard Regulation School periodization) and the design of UNIX. But the juxtaposition does very little on its own. We're left wondering what is meant by "layer" and "reflect" above. I'm reminded of a remark in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations : 


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It is, of course, imaginable that two people belonging to a tribe unacquainted with games should sit at a chess-board and go through the moves of a game of chess; and even with all the appropriate mental accompaniments. And if we were to see it we should say they were playing chess. But now imagine a game of chess translated according to certain rules into a series of actions which we do not ordinarily associate with a game—say into yells and stamping of feet. And now suppose those two people to yell and stamp instead of playing the form of chess that we are used to; and this in such a way that their procedure is translatable by suitable rules into a game of chess. Should we still be inclined to say they were playing a game? What right would one have to say so? 
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By a suitable projection, we may "interpret" anything as a game of chess (e.g. a picture of a cloud as a bitstring could be used to choose paths in the decision tree of moves)! And likewise, we can draw an analogy between aspects of some artifact's operation and some human practice. But so what? (Cf. "Could one imagine a stone's having consciousness? And if anyone can do so—why should that not merely prove that such image-mongery is of no interest to us? ") 

So in what sense might UNIX "[reflect]... the organization of social life"? I can imagine, for instance, a UNIX engineer watching locomotive engineers at work and arriving at a solution for a software concurrency issue. But in some instances she would appeal to the practice of the locomotive engineers to justify her decision, e.g.: "see, the locomotive engineers raise this flag to prevent collisions, and we can do something analogous at the operating system level to preserve [some important invariant]". In other instances she may not; it may guide her to a solution which is justified entirely differently; her inspiration is simply of no importance. Just as mathematicians seldom include a record of how they arrived at the theorem initiall in their proof. 

And even when the analogy it is of interest, her appeal to it could only go so far; eventually, the conversation would turn to the design imperatives of the system in question ("yes, but unlike the locomotive case, we have to deal with an arbitrary number of users..."). That is to say: the practice of the locomotive engineers does not play a criterial role for the software engineer by virtue of its role in helping her arrive at the solution. No one tells her that her system is flawed because it doesn't conform to existing locomotive practice! That would require a very strong analogy indeed. 

So if the "reflection" McPherson has in mind is meant to mean something like "inspiration", it's hard to see why this is interesting even if we grant the historical point (that they looked out upon a racist society and returned with solutions to systems programming problems). It would be very interesting if she could adduce some evidence to the effect that UNIX engineers justified their decisions by appeal to some social norm (e.g. the imperative to preserve a racial hierarchy in the workplace). But this is very difficult to imagine. 

On Fri, Aug 21, 2015 at 4:40 PM, Luke Fernandez < luke.fernandez at gmail.com > wrote: 

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Having finally read Tara McPherson's piece (Why Are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation) in the wake of reading this very interesting listserv thread I'm left with a couple of reactions // questions. 



First, I found much of Thomas Haigh's observations helpful. Despite the fact that there are interesting parallels between mid-20th century American segregation and a developing modularity in computer programming there doesn't seem to be much historical evidence that these practices "infected" one another. 



Second, I also found Matthew Kirschenbaum's email helpful. It may be true that we can't find much evidence of racism in UNIX. But that isn't really ultimately what the essay is about. Pace Haigh's claim that it's a polemic I read it more as an invitation to contextualize the study of institutions within the larger society in which they are situated. As McPherson puts it: 


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We must develop common languages that link the study of code and culture. We must historicize and politicize code studies. And, because digital media were born as much of the civil rights era as of the cold war era (and of course these eras are one and the same), our investigations must incorporate race from the outset, understanding and theorizing its function as a ghost in the digital machine. This does not mean that we should simply add race to our analysis in a modular way, neatly tacking it on or building digital archives of racial material, but that 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. 
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This doesn't necessarily mean that the triptych of race, class and sex can explain everything. But it does mean that they are important categories of analysis and we shouldn't dismiss them in the study of code. If we take umbrage at that invitation (as some of us have) it's worth recalling McPherson's reference to "patterned isolation" in the university (a term that I believe Veysey coined in his classic text The Emergence of the American University) and that we can't really explain its emergence comprehensively without also referencing the triptych of race, class, and gender politics that grew the university in the 20th century. Contrast for example Veysey's study of the university against Levine's The Opening of the American Mind and the lesson becomes clear: Veysey's institutional history is a classic. But Levine's is a worthy compliment in that it shows how curricular developments weren't just driven by internal bureaucracies or by disciplinary beliefs but were also influenced by the fact that the university began to cater to a much more diverse public. So in the same way Levine enriched the study of the university by looking at it through the lens of race, class and sex, we can potentially do the same thing when we write histories about the development of code. That doesn't mean that we can always give an affirmative answer to a question like "Is ____ racist?" But the question is worth posing nonetheless. 



Third, I'm left with a question. Is it really true that an essay like McPherson's is impractical to teach to engineers as Haigh and Ceruzzi seem to feel? I would think that like say Winner's essay "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" it poses an important set of questions that are worth raising if we want to understand the relationship between politics and code. To that end I'd be interested in knowing how Kirschenbaum (and others) teach this essay in the classroom. What questions do they pose to the class? And how have engineering majors responded to it? 



Sincerely, 



Luke Fernandez 

lfernandez.org 

On Fri, Aug 21, 2015 at 1:59 PM, Thomas Haigh < thomas.haigh at gmail.com > wrote: 

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Thanks Bernard, 

Looks like the discussion is moving in a productive discussion. 

Matt, I didn't mean to lead a charge of virtuous historians against the infidels of English. Why, some of my best friends are English professors. The argument I was making was basically one about the social construction of scholarly knowledge, which is something you'll find STS scholars and historians of science and technology are often quite familiar with. I was struck that some on the list found the paper in question unequivocally terrible, whereas others thought it to be good enough to assign in class and thus make it something students might pattern their own narratives after. 

I do believe that these judgments reflect the aesthetic preferences of different disciplinary communities. From a broadly Latourian perspective, we are all in the business of producing texts in which claims and evidence are strung together. We learn how to do this as grad students and junior faculty, and only those who can do it very well become tenured professors. These aesthetic preferences for one or another kind of narrative become thoroughly internalized. Papers that don't follow the rules won't get published and people who don't follow the rules won't get hired. 

But the rules for are different in different disciplines and sub-disciplines. That's a feature, not a bug as otherwise we wouldn't need more that one discipline. In this case the games are like American Football and Rugby. There are some familial resemblances, but moves that would win points in one context would be called as fouls in another. Of course there are a range of permitted styles within communities, and Matt himself writes with admirable cogency and clarity even from my own viewpoint. 

Abundant evidence suggests that McPherson is doing a fine job when her text is evaluated by members of her own disciplinary communities. She works at a much better university than me, her chapter made it into the DH volume, it has been assigned for courses, etc. So, in all probability, was the professor who gave the talk at Penn long ago. According to the standards of other communities their arguments had gone off the rails. To use Kuhn's term, the standards for truth and excellence are incommensurable. A paper that could be published in Social Text would not be publishable in Technology and Culture, or vice versa. It's not a case of caring or not caring about getting things right or being truthful, but the most fundamental idea of STS is that standards for truth and proof are socially constructed and differ between communities and traditions. If we believe that's true of Unix and the technical communities we study then we need to eat our own dog food and admit that it's true in our own disciplines and of own work. 

This is something I have become very aware of with my personal shifts of disciplinary context from computer science to history/STS to information studies. While my personal preferences are fairly clear, spending my life in a school where few of my colleagues share my assumptions about what a paper should look like, what counts as evidence, etc. has made me much more aware of the parochial nature of my own preferred traditions. McPherson would doubtless see the kind of history I enjoy reading and try to write as plodding, woefully under theorized, blind to its own class and gender privilege, etc. and by her own standards she'd be quite right. One of the nice things about SIGCIS is that we bring a diversity of scholarly traditions together, in fact a broader range than our parent society SHOT. 

Best wishes, 

Tom 

On Aug 20, 2015, at 4:20 PM, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan < bernard.geoghegan at hu-berlin.de > wrote: 


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Hi All, 

After Matthew threw in his two bits tom Tom's comments, I feel compelled to add something too. Tom wrote: 
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. . . 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. 

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I'd put it a little differently, by saying that a stricter code of what can be considered causality governs much (though not all) academic historiography. The world is full of interrelations that are quite important but slip through the grid of standard academic historiography, which often favors certain kinds of narrative causality, and in anglophone contexts especially, certain kinds of intentionality or human agency, and so on. So I'd agree with Tom that it's about different notions of evidence and causation. However, because academic historiographic it's so bound up with matching a certain set of professional codes, it's not actually about "history" in the very first instance, but rather about shared standards that we can work around to "write history." In this regard, I think that sometimes adjacent fields -- sociology, media studies, literary studies, philosophy, even literature -- can in certain instances get closer to the messy interrelations that "make history" or "are history," even though they are not the stuff of "historiography" in its disciplinary, academic iteration. 

To take an example relevant to the UNIX case: I did an oral history with an engineer who worked at Bell Labs from the 1950s through the 1970s, and he told me that working there was great, it was like a sleepover camp, they frequently worked all night and over the weekends. Then, he claimed, it all changed in the 1970s when they started "hiring womens and foreigners." In his account, the social life (I think Tom called it a "bromance" broke down. Not too long after, UNIX started becoming a big deal in the Labs. What does this mean? How do we map these interrelatedness of gender, race, and communication engineering that is suggested here? It's damn hard. Folks on this list such as Light, Medina, and Ensmenger have helped us start mapping out those relations historiographically. And yet, so much there will forever escape rigorous historiographic method. Does that mean those relations cannot be considered? Or that they cannot be considered empirically? Not at all, it seems to me. It is probably helpful that some folks from English or media studies can investigate these interrelations without worrying about the models of causality that govern mainstream disciplinary approaches to History. That's why so many of the major historiographic innovations don't originate in academic history, but instead migrate from other fields. 

In that regard, and like J. Abbate, I think the McPherson piece is a wonderful provocation, an occasion to think further, and think historiographically, about problems are difficult to think about with established historiographic methods. (That's also why I like this list so much --- its grab-bag methodological character!). 

Best, 
Bernard 



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I don't this is an especially helpful anecdote, other than perhaps a very low-resolution snapshot of the general embrace of indeterminacy that characterizes much of the academic humanities. By contrast, and given that my scholarly training is in English literature and that my professional activities take the form of "media studies" (including what we term book history, itself a form of media studies in my view), I feel very comfortable in asserting the following: 

English professors (and media studies scholars) are interested in being right in so far as what reasonable people would understand getting their facts straight to mean. 

English professors and media studies scholars are interested in primary sources and the archival record. 

English professors and media studies scholars do not think anything goes, that one point of view is just as good as any other, or that it's all just, like, your opinion anyway, man. 

I do think, as Tom, notes, that we are generally *more* interested in close reading and the ambiguities and sensitivities of language as evidence of historical phenomena, and more willing to place pressure on seeming contradictions or ambiguities which manifest at a linguistic level as evidence of same; and that we are generally more sympathetic to social constructivist (as opposed to techno determinist) arguments. These are huge sweeping statements of course, and my own intent is less to throw down the gauntlet with any single one of them than to offer a general corrective to the notion that the difference between media or cultural or literary studies on the one hand, and the work of an historian on the other is that the one is concerned with getting it right and the others just want to put on a good show. 

I don't think Tom really thinks that either, btw, but I have been a little concerned to see it taken up as an acceptable explanation for whatever shortcomings people perceive to be at work in the essay that kicked off the discussion. Disciplinary differences are very real to be sure, but they can't be reduced to anecdote and caricature. 

Best, Matt 


-- 
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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-- 
Dr. Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan
Institut für Kulturwissenschaft
Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin www.bernardg.com 

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-- 
J ames Dougal Fleming 
Associate Professor 
Department of English 
Simon Fraser University 
778-782-4713 

Burnaby -- British Columbia -- Canada. 

Th'ascent is easy then 







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