Responding to two points/questions from Luke Fernandez.
Pace Haigh's claim that it's a polemic I read it more as an invitation
Hey, it’s not my claim. McPherson writes “To push my polemic to its furthest dimensions, I would argue that to study image, narrative, and visuality will never be enough if we do not engage as well the nonvisual dimensions of code and their organization of the world. Yet to trouble my own polemic…”
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 Haigh (and others) teach this essay in the classroom. What questions do they pose to the class? And how have engineering majors responded to it?
Well, my teaching consists almost entirely of undergraduate systems analysis and project management courses with no STS content to students in the BS “information science and technology” program. The students are by no stretch of the imagination engineers, being attracted to our particular program in large part by the lack of programming and other challenging technical courses. That’s not a bad thing in itself – most IT jobs aren’t about programming – but it does mean they probably never heard of the UNIX pipe capability and are not particularly interested in coding. However I do occasionally get to teach a seminar on “Information Technology and Organizations” ( <http://www.tomandmaria.com/675> www.tomandmaria.com/675). That attracts a mixture of library science students (mostly from Korea and China) interested to know a little about technical work and undergraduate students interested in a smattering of social issues. The focus is on the relationship of culture to IT, though this is conceptualized more in terms of occupational and organizational cultures than cultural studies. Last time I taught the course I assigned a short essay by Leon Wieseltier from the New York Times, on the relevance of humanities thinking in the digital media age, and tried to fill in the backstory of what happened to the New Republic. They found is very hard to read and relate to. So on a pragmatic level I think my students would struggle with McPherson’s language – things like the “leticular vision.” Not relating to the humanities, they’d struggle with the relevance of the DH framing. They would find the references to post colonialism etc. confusing. The paper assumes grounding in some areas of knowledge and ways of thinking that most people don’t share. So basically I’m not the best person to ask about teaching. However, let’s assume that students have no trouble understanding the paper. Here’s where I see it as fundamentally different to Winner’s classic paper “Do Artifacts have Politics.” In particular the anecdote Luke brought up: Anyone who has traveled the highways of America and has become used to the normal height of overpasses may well find something a little odd about some of the bridges over the parkways on Long Island, New York. Many of the overpasses are extraordinarily low, having as little as nine feet of clearance at the curb. Even those who happened to notice this structural peculiarity would not be inclined to attach any special meaning to it. In our accustomed way of looking at things like roads and bridges we see the details of form as innocuous, and seldom give them a second thought. It turns out, however, that the two hundred or so low-hanging overpasses on Long Island were deliberately designed to achieve a particular social effect. Robert Moses, the master builder of roads, parks, bridges, and other public works from the 1920s to the 1970s in New York, had these overpasses built to specifications that would discourage the presence of buses on his parkways. According to evidence provided by Robert A. Caro in his biography of Moses, the reasons reflect Moses's social-class bias and racial prejudice. Automobile owning whites of "upper" and "comfortable middle" classes, as he called them, would be free to use the parkways for recreation and commuting. Poor people and blacks, who normally used public transit, were kept off the roads because the twelve-foot tall buses could not get through the overpasses. One consequence was to limit access of racial minorities and low-income groups to Jones Beach, Moses's widely acclaimed public park. Moses made doubly sure of this result by vetoing a proposed extension of the Long Island Railroad to JonesBeach.8 As a story in recent American political history, Robert Moses's life is fascinating. His dealings with mayors, governors, and presidents, and his careful manipulation of legislatures, banks, labor unions, the press, and public opinion are all matters that political scientists could study for years. But the most important and enduring results of his work are his technologies, the vast engineering projects that give New York much of its present form. For generations after Moses has gone and the alliances he forged have fallen apart, his public works, especially the highways and bridges he built to favor the use of the automobile over the development of mass transit, will continue to shape that city. Many of his monumental structures of concrete and steel embody a systematic social inequality, a way of engineering relationships among people that, after a time, becomes just another part of the landscape. As planner Lee Koppleman told Caro about the low bridges on Wantagh Parkway, "The old son-of-a-gun had made sure that buses would never be able to use his goddamned parkways."9 So first you’ll see that Winner’s argument is far more accessibly presented. I’ve previously used a less well known piece of his in class, “Mythinformation,” and can confirm that students with no exposure to critical theory had no trouble understanding his argument. Second, it’s supported with a different kind of evidence. Winner is citing Caro’s conclusions, and Caro spent years researching his landmark biography. The evidence and quotes appear to point to racist intent. One could do research to dispute or verify aspects of the conclusion. Maybe Winner is misrepresenting Caro. Maybe Moses didn’t actually veto the LIRR extension, or did so for another reason. Maybe Koppelman had a personal grudge against Moses. Maybe most buses were actually only 10 feet tall and got through just fine, or the overpasses in question were actually at or above national average height. (A few years ago, T&C published a bus timetable to Jones Beach, which suggests at the very least that modern buses have been reshaped to get under the overpasses). Maybe Jones Beach actually attracted plenty of minorities and lower income people during the period in question. Whereas McPherson’s conclusion relies on nothing more than the general prevalence of segregation in US society. Her “representations” and “layerings” and “it is not too much of a stretch”es are not vulnerable to the same kind of challenges. I think Winner’s style of argument is more likely to resonate with students outside the humanities. Third, the evidence is evidence of deliberate, conscious use of a technology to achieve a social goal in a way that’s hidden in plain sight and outlives its instigator. So it’s a powerful way of introducing the idea of structural racism hidden in standards. Also of introducing the basic STS idea of mutual shaping – the bridge is shaped by racism but subsequently enforces racism. Jones Beach stays white, which enforces segregation, which reinforces racist thought. Whereas, and Bjorn Westergard, has made this point at greater length, even if McPherson is right that social segregation is what subconsciously suggest the model of processes and pipes to the designers of UNIX it’s not clear why this matters. It’s not clear whether she believes that this ambient ideology led them to an operating system design that was less effective than the possible alternatives. The strongest argument she could make, and I see no evidence for it, is that we all suffer with inefficient operating systems as a result of mid-century racism. Even if that’s true, we’re all suffering equally. In Winner’s argument, racism reproduced itself via concrete and steel. In McPherson’s argument, racism spawned a school of operating system design. The second, and most powerful, part of Winner’s argument has no analog here. The technology here is shaped by culture, but it does not have politics. It’s a very different payoff. The final difference would be in what a student might aim to do after reading and believing the paper. Winner would have us pay attention to the assumptions embedded in technologies to build bridges and code that is more accessible and promotes values of inclusion and diversity. McPherson wants humanities scholars to approach their work differently. The former would be an easier sell to engineering students. There’s an assumption in much of the humanities that because, in a Focauldian kind of way, discourses permeate every part of culture it follows that writing a piece of cultural analysis that decries neoliberalism and diagnoses racism is in itself a brave and effective form of political intervention. Without wishing to cause offence to my friends in other disciplines, I’ll just observe that engineers are unlikely to share this assumption. Best wishes, Tom From: Luke Fernandez [mailto:luke.fernandez@gmail.com] Sent: Friday, August 21, 2015 1:51 PM To: thaigh@computer.org Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Is Unix racist? 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: 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. 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 Haigh (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 <http://lfernandez.org> lfernandez.org On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 2:30 PM, Thomas Haigh < <mailto:thaigh@computer.org> thaigh@computer.org> 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: <mailto:members-bounces@lists.sigcis.org> members-bounces@lists.sigcis.org] On Behalf Of Matthew Kirschenbaum Sent: Tuesday, August 18, 2015 8:43 AM To: Ceruzzi, Paul < <mailto:CeruzziP@si.edu> CeruzziP@si.edu> Cc: <mailto:members@sigcis.org> members@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 < <mailto:CeruzziP@si.edu> CeruzziP@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: <mailto:members-bounces@lists.sigcis.org> members-bounces@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 < <mailto:nasiddiqui@email.wm.edu> nasiddiqui@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 < <mailto:abbate@vt.edu> abbate@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> 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 <http://www.sts.vt.edu/ncr> www.sts.vt.edu/ncr <http://www.linkedin.com/groups/STS-Virginia-Tech-4565055> www.linkedin.com/groups/STS-Virginia-Tech-4565055 <http://www.facebook.com/VirginiaTechSTS> www.facebook.com/VirginiaTechSTS _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at <http://sigcis.org> sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at <http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/> http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at <http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org> http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at <http://sigcis.org> sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at <http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/> http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at <http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org> http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at <http://sigcis.org> sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at <http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/> http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at <http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org> http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org -- Matthew Kirschenbaum Associate Professor of English Associate Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) University of Maryland <http://mkirschenbaum.net> http://mkirschenbaum.net or @mkirschenbaum on Twitter _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at <http://sigcis.org> sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. 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