ABSTRACT
In some ways this book is a kind of digital jeremiad, or at least a response to the call of Black jeremiahs throughout our history. Martin Luther King, Jr. warned us nearly 40 years ago. Many of us slept as the signs changed telling us that the world we knew had changed from an industrial one to a digital one. Many of us who were awake might as well have been asleep subject to only the most BASIC of understandings about what technologies could do, could be, the purposes to which we would put them, and the relationships we would have with them. The broader challenge is exactly as he identified it in 1968-the challenge of transforming our technologies as we gain access to them, and that we use those technologies toward the larger project of transforming the nation, of justice and equal participation for Black people and all people. The truth that has been the bedrock of the African American jeremiad and the reason for its central role throughout African American rhetorical traditions remains: either we accept the hard work and sacrifice of this challenge or destroy ourselves in attempting to run from it.
