Charlton McIlwain

This book is great. It tells the story of the civil rights movement and the computer age, intertwined. These happened at the same time, and this book looks for the interplay between them.

For me, in particular, the sections about technology in the 1960s opened my eyes to some realities. For example, this book works through the birth of predictive policing and the SAS machine learning software. In the 1960s, IBM sponsored news coverage of the Watts riots. Coverage treated these as an issue of race war and violence from the Black community. There were other ways coverage could have but wasn't addressed, such as police brutality. IBM at the same time was working to sell software to government, and a big sale was selling predictive policing software through the mood at the time and a congressional committee on policing and safety. That deployment was SAS, a program still in use today. And initially, it treated race of the victim and perpetrator explicitly as a factor for weighting crime. Now, in the present, when a computer analyzes data, we tend to think of that data as "in the wild". This book helped me to think about how there is very little discussion or knowledge about software history, and how these decisions from long ago shaped the data that we now have and are able to analyze.

The book reads somewhat nostalgic for the more recent parts in the 1990s and early 2000s. I don't know that that's the author who is nostalgic, so much as maybe when he researched, the mood came through.

It's well worth the time, if you are interested in how technology shapes our lives and ways to better understand how to use and control technology.… (mehr)