In the latest Civic Signals newsletter, Andrew Small interviews Charlton McIlwain about his book, Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter. (I’ve once again used the Bookshop affiliate link of site editor Kevin Chau; those commissions get donated.)
That was the first commercially successful web community within AOL and it was built by black people, premised on black cultural products and content. It was black folks who were filling this space to show “this is what people will come to this new medium for.” To think about that as an origin story for the web blew me away, that black people and black content were the foundation on which this new web was built. It was revolutionary, but it’s certainly not the story that we’ve ever told about the history of its development