The Illumination of Black Twitter

Social networks are simultaneously information and media platforms, but Blackness becomes understood differently depending upon which frame is deployed. While Black media creators have been lauded for their inventive enlivening of digital and social media technologies, Black information users are often considered as lacking technical, written, or mainstream cultural literacies. Mills’ works – from ‘Alternative Epistemologies’ to The Racial Contract to one of his last, ‘The Illumination of Blackness’ – go beyond philosophy to inform media theory and science and technology studies. For example, Black Twitter shattered deficit models of Black digital expertise through discourse, affordances, and networked culture. I contend that Black Twitter illuminates the “racialized optics of modernity” (Mills, 2021: 18) and of computation through Black standpoint epistemologies mediated by digital practices and discourses. I find that Mills anticipated that Black aesthetics and philosophy are well-suited for alternative visions of digital practice, design, and use.