E3W Literature | University of Texas

Martin Kevorkian
Color Monitors: The Black Face of Technology in America
Cornell University Press, 2006
224 pages
ISBN: 0801472784
$17.95

Reviewed by James J. Brown, Jr.

In the first episode of the British TV series The IT Crowd, we are introduced to two IT workers: Roy and Moss. In the words of one of their superiors, they are your “standard nerds.” However, there are also some important differences between these two nerds. Roy’s desk is littered with food and toys, he wears a t-shirt that says RTFM (Read The Fucking Manual), and has a booming voice. Moss’s desk is meticulous, he is dressed in a shirt and a tie, and his voice might remind you of Poindexter from Revenge of the Nerds (1984). One more detail: Roy is white, and Moss is black. In their first appearance on this TV series, we see these two characters dealing with calls from technologically inept co-workers. Roy’s first “troubleshooting” question is: “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” while Moss asks “Have you tried forcing an unexpected reboot?” Roy’s call ends up in a shouting match and a challenge to fight. Moss’s ends in a hang-up: “You see the driver hooks a function by patching the system core table. So, it’s not safe to unload it unless another thread’s about to jump in there and do its stuff. And you don’t want to end up in the middle of invalid memory (laughs) … Hello?”

Martin Kevorkian’s book Color Monitors forces us to view such scenes with skepticism. Why is Roy able to speak in plain English while Moss is seemingly unable to avoid jargon? Why does Roy wear a sarcastic T-shirt while Moss sports the nerd uniform of a mismatched shirt and tie? The differences between these two characters amount to what Kevorkian calls a “strategy of containment.” For Kevorkian, the pairing of technology and the black body in cultural representations often provides a way for White America to deal with two phobias at once. Kevorkian’s readings of film, literature, advertisements, and other cultural texts show how this dual paranoia works: “the black body draws the hazardous duty of keeping the machines from running amok, while the activity of tending technology occupies and develops the growing black body in a civil fashion.”

Kevorkian draws on a broad range of evidence to show that representations of the black technology expert are prevalent and that they should be considered as something more than attempts to give black actors “positive roles.” The most striking example of color monitoring on the big screen is the character Luther Stickell in Mission Impossible (1996). Luther (Ving Rhames) is the hacker that aids Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise). Like many of the other characters that Kevorkian analyzes, Luther plays the role of computer. That is, he is not a problem solver, and he is not expected to make sense of the bits and bytes that fly across his screen. Rather, he acts as a tool for the white male playing the lead role. By pointing to some of Rhames’s previous roles, Kevorkian explains the power of this particular example of color monitoring: “When the man who once played ‘the dreaded Marsellus Wallace’ in Pulp Fiction (1994) and the menacing Garvey in the Afro-centrist Drop Squad (1994) remains passively seated behind his computer screen, the sense of technological bodily containment is all the more palpable.”

In addition to studying film, Kevorkian zooms in on advertisements, media coverage of the digital divide, and popular fiction. In his analysis of these texts, Kevorkian argues that color monitoring can be used in the service of a higher aim—the preservation and reconstitution of a national identity. Kevorkian devotes a great deal of his study to the work of Michael Crichton—an author he credits with catering to America’s “cyberphobia” with techno-thriller fiction. Crichton’s novels and their cinematic adaptations point up the ways in which color monitoring guards national identity: “the characteristic cultural transformation performed in the techno-thriller [is] a retooling of nineteenth-century colonial adventure paradigms, via the instrumentalization of race, to serve the twenty-first century needs of American national identity.” From The Andromeda Strain (1968) to Jurassic Park (1990), Crichton’s techno-thrillers both serve and encourage these twenty-first century needs.

Kevorkian’s study also discusses how American culture puts technology in “black boxes.” Rather than attempting to understand the complicated inner-workings of information technologies, American culture treats technology as Other. These black boxes are coupled with black bodies to form what Kevorkian calls an “integrated circuit”:
The infatuation with the image of the black man as techno-whiz and the desire for black-boxed technological wizardry are mutually informing impulses. The pandering to an aversion to technological knowledge deflates the status of the techno-whiz’s role; the repeated projection of technological expertise onto obliging black bodies tends to racialize the packaging of helpfully black-boxed technology.
Kevorkian suggests that the repetitive use of integrated circuits is evidence of a ritualized practice, and he hopes that Color Monitors offers some ways to examine “the possible logics behind such repetitive designations.” For Kevorkian, the representational practices that set black bodies alongside the black boxes of technology result in technological work becoming racialized. Calling this move “techno-black like me,” he shows how white workers express an anti-corporate narrative and, in turn, adopt “blackness as an identity accessory, the most colorful sign of their hipster ironic pose as digital slaves ‘workin’ for the Man’.” Kevorkian’s readings of films such as Office Space (1999) and The Matrix (1999) and novels like Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs(1996) show how tech workers are presented as “slaves” to their corporate masters.

In his closing chapter, Kevorkian points us to a number of critics and cultural producers that attempt to “think inside the black box.” These authors don’t treat technology as something Other, nor do they pair it with the black body to domesticate it. Kevorkian argues that DJ Spooky (Paul Miller), Octavia Butler, Thomas Pynchon, and various others provide “a coherent counterweb to a cyberphobic imagination that reserves the creative act for the white, tech-free human individual and construes technological networks as antihuman mechanisms of dominating destruction.” Kevorkian hopes that these artists and authors offer models for those in the humanities, who “tend in particular to harbor and even cherish technophobic assumptions.”

It is Kevorkian’s own ability to think inside the black box that might allow us to return to The IT Crowd episode mentioned above. Roy has the freedom to dress as he likes, raise his voice, and ask sarcastic questions of befuddled coworkers such as “I’m sorry, are you from the past?” and “You do know how a button works, don’t you?” Moss is far from physically imposing, speaks meekly, and is tethered to technical jargon. We can read Moss as a way to show the “diminished physical potency” of the black body while also noting that his social ineptitude differs greatly from Roy’s. Roy speaks like a human. Moss speaks like a robot. Moss and the computer on his desk form one of Kevorkian’s integrated circuits.

Kevorkian’s study is confined to American cultural representations, so the example I have provided from British television might be seen as overextending his argument. However, we might also read Roy and Moss as a way to push Kevorkian’s theoretical approach beyond American representations of black bodies and technology. Scenes such as this one suggest that Kevorkian’s thesis may not be confined to the American cultural imaginary.