Certain modes of racial visibility and knowing coincide or dovetail with specific technologies of vision: if the electronic underwrites today's key modes of vision and is the central technology of post-WW II America, these technologized ways of seeing/knowing took shape in a world also struggling with shifting knowledges and representations of race. Various scholars have tracked the emergence of a 'race-blind' rhetoric after the second world war, a discourse that moves from explicit to more implicit modes of racism and racial representation.   These implicit modes coincide historically not only with the rise of an articulated movement for civil rights but also with the growth of electronic culture and the birth of cybernetics (with both -- cybernetics and the Civil Rights movement -- born in quite real ways of World War II).  I'm interested in how certain aspects of modularity, fragmentation, etc., that are endemic to code and to digital media also structure the more covert forms of racism and racial representation that categorize post-Civil Rights discourse.   I am not so much arguing that the two are causally related, but, rather, that both represent a move toward fragmentary knowledges, knowledges increasingly prevalent in the second half of the 20th century. 

 

This paper will examine the emergence of digital computing, looking in particular at the origins of UNIX in the late 1960s.  Here I'm especially interested in why particular styles of programming gain favor at this moment and in what larger epistemological drives are implicit in a move from analog to digital formats.   I point toward powerful feedback loops between the fragmenting logics of implicit racism and the structuring principles of digital computing.  I am suggesting that digital computers rise to dominance after the 1950s not because they are inherently better computational systems but because their very operating logics coincide with other emerging patterns of knowing, including those that unfold in response to an organized call for social justice and civil rights, and to an increasing focus in the world of product and communication design on modularity, globalization and automation.  Such a shift has implications for how we understand today's digital media ecologies and for our focus in much of media studies on issues of representation at the surface of the screen.