Fans pick 100 books like Race After Technology

W.E.B. Du Bois is widely acknowledged as the leading activist for racial equality of his generation. But until very recently little had been known of his deep commitment to the pursuit of equality within and through data technology. As Du Bois was preparing notes for his famous 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, he was also preparing an exposition of what we would today call “infographics” (or what the editors of this volume aptly call “data portraits”) for exhibition at the 1900 Paris Exposition world’s fair. This volume handsomely reproduces for the first time a full-color complete set of Du Bois’s charts, graphs, maps, and ingenious spirals. A beautiful book to live with, it also subtly transforms one’s understanding of the history of racial progress and inequality in America.

This book paints a vivid picture of the symbiotic relationship between 19th-century Southern slave masters and the people they enslaved. It also underscores the fact that for oppressed Black people, allies and enemies came in all colors.

The protagonist, Hiram Walker, is a child prodigy whose intellect and ambition make him poorly suited for a life of servitude. Significantly, Coates speaks to the obligation to “reach back” which those who have achieved a measure of physical, spiritual, or intellectual freedom owe to those who are still enslaved.

Harriet Tubman plays an important role in his narrative because she embodies that ideal.

Harcourt’s Exposed takes the reader inside the contemporary social, political, and legal configurations that haunt our online lives by paradoxically pulling on the strings of our desires and wants. Harcourt exposes how the insidious technologies of mega-cap high-tech coax out of us a desire to expose ourselves, that too-familiar desire to share so much (and so often too much) online. Harcourt is one of the leading voices in contemporary critical theory and at the same time a practicing death-penalty lawyer. He knows both the inside of our political-legal systems and can gain a broad view of the wider social dynamics of social media. 

This book dazzles me every time I read it. It will change the way you think about files and how such humble little documents can help rule our lives. Vismann’s Files is not the easiest going, but it is filled with enough history and detail that one can just join for the ride and follow along. The late Cornelia Vismann died too young but she still managed to leave us with this truly transformative account of the relation between law and the data systems upon which all law always relies. Through a careful history that stretches from parchment scrolls to mid-twentieth-century secret intelligence files to the desktop computer, Vismann excavates the way in which the ethics, politics, and legality of social systems are highly dependent upon data designs.

This book offers a beautiful data portrait of one of the most energetic polyglots of the first half of the twentieth century. Otto Neurath is famous among philosophers for his monumental effort to unify the sciences in an encyclopedic presentation. His metaphor of science as a massive flotilla out at sea repairing itself as it goes beautifully encapsulates the self-correcting enterprise of the sciences. This book offers another angle into Neurath’s life and work. Isotype was conceived by Neurath and collaborators as a universal picture language that can transcend borders, tongues, and divisions. Another grand dream of early-twentieth-century unification, with all its inevitable failings, is beautifully reproduced in this book.

I fell in love with this book as a young graduate school student at the University of Iowa. Curled up in my tiny 500-square-foot apartment, I devoured the book, not realizing morning had turned into afternoon and then evening.

At a time in the early 2000s when "serious" scholarship largely included Black people using technology in condescending and pathologizing ways, I read Everett sharply responding with counter-evidence of Black publics' involvement at every turn of media developments.

The book, I remember, made me feel like writing a counter-history that places "us" at the center is not only possible but transformational.

As a young Black and West Indian academic and, importantly, an avid early Twitter user, I finally saw myself in the world of nonfiction works about technology when I first read this book.

Before I even got through the introduction, I dog-eared every other page and ran out of room in the margins for my notes (most of which included an embarrassing number of exclamation points on my part). Digital Black Feminism’s wit and historical heft weaves through multi-generational negotiations with Black feminism and beautifully writes Black women’s contributions back into existence.

I grew up with Miss Lou, or the famous poet Louise Bennett. With wit and humor that is simply unparalleled, Miss Lou’s writing taught me about the importance of language.

In this collection, Miss Lou shows rather than tells the importance of “labrish” or “gossip”, a quintessential Jamaican practice. While the book, on the surface, isn’t about the Internet, the foregrounding of language, culture, and community here is directly related to the digital practices that I know and love.

This book made me feel hopeful, sad, angry, and most of all, secure, knowing that it was okay for me–and others like me–to hold all of that and let it go.

Resmaa’s book is one of the more influential books for me.

Though his focus is on racialized and generational trauma, he begins by helping the reader understand where biases, fears, and oppression become lodged in the nervous system–generations before us–and how this shapes the way we interact with anyone who is different than us.

Mixed in with excellent content are effective practices for the reader to find a sense of grounding and safety in their current surroundings which is key in being able to resolve the trauma that is living in our bodies. 

I love this book not only because of the hard truths it tells in relation to racial whiteness and racism but also because of how Rankine’s writerly voice reverberates through one’s mind long after finishing the book.

As someone who sometimes finds it hard to sit still to finish a book, I did not have that issue with Just Us partly because of how diverse and stimulating the content is. In addition to including poetry and prose within the text, there are many images to see and study as one internalizes the urgent points made by a witty, seasoned author whose overall tone demands that readers be part of and sit with this “American conversation” that asks us to think deeply about power, privilege, inequality, whiteness and more.