🥷🏼 Are we forming online communities or self-segregating?
Matthew Sun searches for co-liberation, online and offline
📖 An introduction to Reboot and Kernel Magazine
🙋🏾♂️ Kernel Magazine on racial identity online and digital liberation
We’ve been following along with the crew at Reboot, as they’ve grown into a network of thinkers, writers, and advocates. We admire how they’re embracing a radical “techno-optimism” that feels right to us in this moment. And recently, like us, they launched a new publication. It’s called Kernel Magazine, and it’s funded primarily with print subscriptions.
We’re pleased to introduce you to Kernel by republishing “e-raced” by student and writer Matthew Sun. Sun reflects on where we live, both online and off, and how racial segregation can take root even in the digital world. Like in Erik Nikolaus Martin’s piece in our magazine, Sun finds some kinship in niche online communities organized around identity, and wonders if they can offer genuine liberation. Can we build digital platforms that offer the same possibilities of “collective struggle, mutual aid, and social change” that Sun sees in Chinatowns?
The whole cob
To set things up, both Reboot newsletter editor Jessica Dai and I answered some questions. You can find my answers in the most recent email from Reboot.
Tell me about your organization and why you decided to make a publication.
Reboot is a publication and community reclaiming techno-optimism for a better collective future: we're for technologists and by technologists (in the broadest sense of the term). We think that there's something special about the commitment required by the written word. While we've been publishing book reviews, interviews, and original essays since Fall 2020, we're especially excited about the launch of our print magazine, Kernel; the format affords greater depth than is possible in a 1500-word newsletter, and allows us to put pieces in conversation with each other.
Who are your contributors? How did you come together and what links everyone?
Contributors to both the newsletter and Kernel Magazine are Reboot community members; nominally, it means we're part of the same Discord, but practically, it means we've spent time reading and learning together. We've come to the group from all over, whether prior friendships or just following our newsletter/Twitter. Reboot was founded by Jasmine Sun (who currently is the head of the organization) and Jessica Dai (who is currently newsletter editor); for Kernel Magazine, Jasmine Wang is the Editor in Chief and Emily Liu is Managing Editor.
It seems to me like our publications and organizations are on a similar path. What fuels your techno-optimism?
Personally, I see no other option than to be optimistic. Jasmine Sun explains better than I ever could: she lays out Reboot's manifesto of techno-optimism in her essay Take Back the Future, which is also featured in Kernel.
Describe one piece you're especially excited for people to read.
The Kernel contributors all came together to write a collaborative piece titled "The Future Is" — it's more lighthearted and informal than most of the other pieces, but still manages to make some pretty serious propositions. I hope it's as fun to read as it was to write.
How can we support you?
Buy the print magazine or subscribe to our free newsletter here, follow us on Twitter, and send us your favorite reads!
e-raced
Matthew Sun
Read the original at Kernel here
In 1970, the economist Thomas Schelling produced a profound insight into racial segregation using nothing more than some colored pennies and a chessboard. With red and green pennies representing members of different racial groups, he placed each penny on a random spot on the board. He then created a simple rule to govern individual behavior: if at least 30% of a penny’s neighbors shared its color, it would be “happy” and remain in its spot; otherwise, the penny moved to a random empty square. Schelling applied this rule to the pennies one-by-one until each one was satisfied in its position.
As the simulation progressed, highly homogenous “neighborhoods” of same-colored pennies emerged and remained stable, despite the fact that each individual would have been satisfied with 70% of its neighbors being members of a different group. The experiment revealed a hard-to-swallow truth: mild same-group preferences at the individual level could result in stark, persistent divisions at the system level.
Of course, there’s plenty that Schelling’s theoretical exercise fails to consider. The fraction of Asian families in my childhood neighborhood was certainly not above 30%, and yet these families rarely moved out for a variety of reasons: the local job market, the location of well-funded public schools, the fantasy of an American suburban life. Schelling himself noted that the scope of his work was limited to the study of “individual action,” rather than “organized” or “economically induced” segregation. Since the publication of his study, scholars have debated the limits of what his experiment can tell us about the real world, often enriching his model with additional social context and mathematical complexity.
It is too easy, too frictionless to believe that we will all find our perfect communities in an algorithmically curated set of recommendations.
Revisited today, perhaps Schelling’s study is best interpreted not as an explanation for observed patterns of residential segregation, but as a cautionary tale for a new realm that would emerge in the following decades: the internet. Indeed, the appeal of the internet is often sold to us through stark contrast to the difficulty of achieving a sense of belonging offline: on the internet, we are free — and increasingly, algorithmically guided — to join meaningful communities and make new social connections, unbound by geography or capital or backwards institutions. Describing the process of physical relocation might require far more than colors and pennies, but moving from one digital community to another asks little more of us than following a new set of accounts, creating a new profile, shedding an old username. What could possibly be less frictionless?
I’ve always been a bit envious of people who have strong feelings about the neighborhoods where they grew up. To have either contempt or nostalgia for a place is to at least be connected to it, to situate your memories in a story of opposition against your environment or nurtured by it. Even ambivalence is too strong a descriptor: it implies the presence of contradictory feelings, opposite forces acting on one’s psychic center of gravity.
In contrast, I never formed much of an emotional attachment to the suburbs of my childhood at all. The streets where I grew up evoke familiarity, but not much else. Perhaps the reason I hesitate when people ask me how I feel about my hometown is that, as a minority, I never felt like it was mine to begin with. My family was a lone red penny in a sea of green — separated from the neighborhood, despite being within it.
Instead, the drama of childhood was strictly bounded by the walls of my family home. It’s inaccurate to chalk this up to the trope of the insular Oriental clan; if we retreated into our home, we retreated from racist encounters and microaggressions. Stories of passersby shouting slurs at us — and once, bruises from physical aggression — loom specter-like in my family’s memory. Outside the home, I was simultaneously uncomfortably visible and constantly overlooked, particularly in predominantly white activities (Boy Scouts, sports camps, swim club). At home, at least, the cognitive burden of managing how others perceived me disappeared.
But the dull ache of failing to be seen again and again exacts a psychic toll, no matter how much comfort one’s home provides. I wonder if that’s why I found so much comfort in fantasy worlds, where I would devour stories about children who had adventures in magical lands and stay up playing Pokemon on my Nintendo DS long after my parents fell asleep. But the characters I obsessed over were imaginary, and escape was always temporary. They never filled the void where a vibrant community beyond the family should have been.
When a penny in Schelling’s simulation decides to move, where does it move to? Intuitively, Schelling’s methodology of random assignment seems unrealistic. In general, families might experience greater costs the further that they move; consider the difference between moving to a house a few blocks away and moving to a different state across the country.
Unlike physical reality, however, where traveling between locations involves real costs, users in the digital world essentially teleport from location to location when they close a tab and open a new one. Indeed, since William Gibson, seen by many as the father of cyberpunk, first coined the term “cyberspace” in 1982, myriad internet manifestos have breathlessly extolled the emergence of a digital society that would transcend borders, liberating individuals from geography itself. In 1996, John Perry Barlow, a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote a document titled “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” and within just nine months of its publication, an estimated 40,000 sites on the still-nascent web displayed a copy of the declaration. In it, he proclaimed the internet would be the “home of Mind” beyond the reach of governments, those “weary giants of flesh and steel.” Immediately after stating that “ours is a world that is...not where bodies live,” Barlow declares that “we are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.”
Barlow never makes clear how exactly individual “minds” aggregate to form the collective “Mind” of his fantasy internet. As media studies scholar Lisa Nakamura notes in Cybertypes, the tension in this utopian vision is that the internet will usher in a new age of diversity while also simultaneously erasing all differences between individuals. It was not subjugation on the basis of difference that techno-optimists hoped the internet would eliminate, but difference itself. Idealists hoped that the internet would circumvent, rather than directly dismantle, existing hierarchies of domination, by allowing users to shed the visual signifiers of race, gender, and class. But as philosopher George Yancy writes in “Whiteness and the Return of the ‘Black Body’”, what is whiteness if not an all-consuming command into sameness, an implication that anything besides itself is to be pitied or conquered?
Just as urban ethnic enclaves like Chinatowns, carved out by enclosures of legal and economic segregation, also became sites of collective struggle, mutual aid, and social change, so too might we reappropriate the communities occupying digital platforms
Setting aside whether the paradoxical erasure of difference in order to promote diversity was problematic in and of itself, Barlow’s vision of an internet without “prejudice accorded by race” was doomed to fail. As Schelling’s experiment makes clear, even in a setting where one attempts to disregard power dynamics or history, social categories are stubborn: when individuals are marked by their group status and act accordingly, social segregation arises. And in fact, if the costs of travel are essentially zero on the internet, we should expect to see the digital world become not Barlow’s post-racial utopia, but rather devolve into segregation shockingly quickly.
Sometime during elementary school, I discovered YouTube. The hints of sociality were tantalizing: watching the same video that millions of other people were watching felt like participating in a massive shared cultural experience. YouTubers spoke to me when they looked directly to the camera, and actively cultivated (parasocial) relationships with their fans. In retrospect, I wonder if I subconsciously gravitated towards the popular creators who looked like me: KevJumba, Ryan Higa, Natalie Tran, Freddie Wong, Wong Fu Productions, AJ Rafael, Sam Tsui. They became the neighbors I didn’t have growing up, successful Asians for whom increased visibility seemed to lead to money and fame, not the discomfort of being perceived as other.
YouTube seemed to transcend the whiteness of Hollywood. It was a medium where identity seemed irrelevant to your success. Except, as I realized years later, that wasn’t quite true: there seemed to be nothing more profitable than Asians making fun of themselves. Much of the humor was nuanced — perhaps even subversive — but in my elementary school days, the lesson I absorbed was that talking about race was okay, so long as it avoided seriousness at all costs. I picked up the language of racial humor, retelling jokes from YouTube on the playground to win laughs from kids who weren’t as online as I was. Looking back, it’s hard not to be embarrassed by the subtext of those interactions: You don’t have to feel anxious around me — I get the joke, I think Asians are weird, too!
Ryan Higa’s most infamous video is “How to Be Ninja,” uploaded on July 25, 2007. Rewatching the video, I can’t help but wince at Higa’s exaggerated East Asian accent or the instruction that ninjas should be able to act like a “fag.” The video has garnered 55 million views to date. Today, there are about 19 million Asian Americans in the United States. Had Higa’s viewers been gathering in person, I wonder if I would’ve realized sooner that the community of funny, popular Asians I imagined existing online was not so much a neighborhood as it was a circus, performing for an audience whose members almost certainly consisted mostly of non-Asians. Like the pennies in Schelling’s simulation, circuses are designed to hop from one community to the next, welcome only for as long as their audiences can sustain a laugh.
Segregation is not merely the result of individual decisions, devoid of history or power relations. Schelling himself concedes that individual decision-making might be less pertinent than de jure or economically induced segregation and, furthermore, that “the lines dividing the individually motivated, the collectively enforced, and economically induced segregation are not clear lines at all.” Take, for example, the role of real estate agents in perpetuating residential segregation today, more than fifty years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act. Real estate brokers regularly make assumptions about their clients’ racial preferences before steering them away or towards certain neighborhoods, arguing that it “facilitates the sales process.” Under market incentives, the responsibility for segregated outcomes is thus deflected onto individual consumers.
Like real estate agents who curate the possibilities their clients can access, today’s algorithms selectively recommend online content in the name of increased convenience for users and, of course, larger profits for tech companies. Increasingly, behind every webpage and application is a massive network of third party trackers, logging devices, and cookies designed to capture and mine user behavior, a process Shoshana Zuboff describes in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Making assumptions about what users prefer and how they will behave is fundamental, rather than incidental, to the profit engine of surveillance capitalism. The vision of an internet that offered unparalleled freedom to its users has given way to one that surveils, predicts, and steers them instead.
Digital platforms have the ability to intervene in users’ lives far more than real estate agents ever could: they can suggest content and nudge users towards particular communities, without users ever having expressed a desire to find something new. If real estate agents make assumptions about individual preferences, algorithms assert the power to reshape our preferences in the image of profit. The idea that these algorithms perform a kind of racial steering is not unheard of. Black creators on YouTube and TikTok have pointed out ways in which the algorithmic systems invisibilize their work by promoting white influencers following trends over the Black creators who invented them. So long as tech companies claim to be simply following market incentives — incentives in markets they themselves are responsible for creating — they must be held accountable for reproducing and intensifying racial fault lines.
The other day, I logged on to Twitter and read a few tweets by economists and activists debating optimal tax policy. After a year of quarantine-induced scrolling, I felt exhausted, but I reminded myself that it was important to know about these things, even if they felt so far away from being relevant to me. I kept scrolling. I read a few tweets about the rising number of AAPI hate crimes. I felt exhausted, but I reminded myself that it was important to know about these things, even if they hit too close to home. I closed Twitter, and lay motionless on my bed, thinking about what to do next.
After picking myself up off the bed, I walked downstairs to the kitchen, cracked open a few eggs, and stirred them into a bowl. I steamed them gently, attempting to follow along with both my memory and a video from a Cantonese cooking channel on YouTube. When I finished, I sent a picture to my mom to show her my attempt at steamed egg custard. It looks even better than mine, she replied, and suddenly a lump began to rise in my throat. As the tears fell, a few moments passed while I figured out why exactly I was crying. When it hit me, I texted her back with the simple explanation: It tastes like home.
My feeds today look nothing like Barlow could have imagined, and more like what Schelling might have predicted. Instead of an egalitarian utopia of anonymous sameness, the digital world is hyper-fragmented, with a dizzying multiplicity of trends, memes, and tribes of varying exclusivity. Anyone who has felt isolated by the offline world and its crumbling institutions is usually just a few clicks away from discovering that they’re not as alone as they thought they once were; however niche we think our interests might be, there’s always a subreddit, or YouTube channel, or TikTok hashtag that somehow suits us perfectly. It is likely that as long as society continues to fail to meaningfully include people of color, so too will we navigate the internet to find alternative narratives that affirm us, so too will the tech capitalists surveil us as we do so to classify and target us for profit.
From real estate brokers to tech companies, our desire to find a sense of home has been hijacked by the agents of racial capitalism. As renowned political theorist Cedric Robinson wrote in Black Marxism, the “tendency of European civilization through capitalism was thus not to homogenize but to differentiate — to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into ‘racial’ ones.” If the internet enlists us in an endless march towards gleaming, new homes, each more beautiful and individually tailored than the last, we should be skeptical. It is too easy, too frictionless to believe that we will all find our perfect communities in an algorithmically curated set of recommendations. I see these as communities of consumption, in which the soothing feeling of a shared identity is hijacked as a tool for maximizing engagement. To be clear, I am not opposed to the flowering of communities organized around identity on digital platforms; I myself have found comfort in the digital milieu of Asian American and other minority creators. But the tech industry’s constant repetition of platitudes about “connection,” “community,” and “engagement” risks forgetting that these words have historical meanings and political implications, too.
In 1968, the owners of the International Hotel near San Francisco’s Chinatown attempted to evict its elderly Filipino tenants. In what became a historic milestone in housing advocacy history, 150 elderly Filipino and Chinese tenants responded by beginning a nearly decade-long fight to protect their community, eventually joined by a coalition of thousands of people, spanning students, LGBTQ+ activists, and trade unions. If I can find the familiar taste of community in egg custard tarts in Chinatown, I can also find there a history of community that was not taken for granted, nor solely inward-looking. Instead, forming coalitions and finding solidarity with other groups was essential to preserving the existence of the community itself through a process of co-liberation.
I wonder about what it looks like to move beyond communities of consumption and towards communities of co-liberation in the digital realm. Just as urban ethnic enclaves like Chinatowns, carved out by enclosures of legal and economic segregation, also became sites of collective struggle, mutual aid, and social change, so too might we reappropriate the communities occupying digital platforms designed for profit to instead serve a vision of a more just future. Like the tenants who fought together for the I-Hotel, these communities would be strengthened through collective action rather than shared passive consumption. They would become lively spaces for dissent and discourse, as members weighed different strategies for achieving shared goals. And through participating and contributing to them, individuals might find not only a feeling of belonging, but also a newfound sense of agency.
I myself am searching for these communities of co-liberation, online and offline. But perhaps it is not enough simply to search, to take for granted that they already exist, waiting to be discovered by the perfect permutation of keywords entered into Google. Instead, to orient myself homeward, I must also orient myself towards an attitude of active construction, rather than simply passive consumption. The idealized communities we yearn for will not simply be found through freedom of movement on the internet and ever-improving algorithmic curation. Instead, our collective imagination must serve as the blueprint to build them.
Click here for complete Acknowledgments and Works Cited
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Query Log: Working Remotely
If you live in a bubble like mine, it felt like “everyone” was sent home at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. Data shows this was far from the case. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in May and June 2020, when teleworking because of Covid was at its height, about one third of US workers reported working from home due to the pandemic. That’s a lot, but it still represents a minority of workers. The number of people working from home has declined since then, so where would you guess it is now?
According to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, what percent of workers are still working from home due to the pandemic? Find the answer here.
Thinking “Facebook 2: Electric Boogaloo” is the best choice,
Josh
Images courtesy of Reboot and Kernel Magazine. Kernel cover design by Olivia Tai, website design Jacky Zhao and Anson Yu. Photo by Josh Kramer.
New_ Public is a partnership between the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas, Austin, and the National Conference on Citizenship, and was incubated by New America.
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