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Taking a step backward from overt digital practices, this chapter looks at a digital artifact so widely used that it has become communicative infrastructure: the web browser. Its framing of our entire online information content and practice shapes digital identity through interactions with online services, while its customizability encourages perceptions of individual, rather than social, technocultural identity. This chapter looks at the Blackbird browser, specifically targeted to Black users, to unpack how browsers can shape Black identity from a technocultural framework. While digital interfaces are so mutable that they encourage beliefs of universalism and individualization, this chapter argues that racial digital practices can and do shape information design and behaviors.

Black digital practice reveals a complicated mix of technological literacy, discursive identity, and cultural critique. Taken together, it offers glimpses of the multivalent Black communities’ political, technocultural, and historical commonplaces to the outside world. These can be understood as three topoi shaping Black digital practice—ratchetry, respectability, and racism. This chapter examines ratchetry and racism as interlocking libidinal frames powering Black digital practice. Black digital practice, which the author once characterized as ritual drama and catharsis, can also be understood as digital orality—an online space encoded by folk culture and racial ideology, and undergirded by a libidinal discursive economy, producing pungent, plaintive commentary on matters political.

Black Twitter’s most visible moments—such as #BlackLivesMatter—can be understood as a political representation of Black online identity. But whose politics and to what ends? Twitter’s mutable nature engenders technocultural uncertainties about what Twitter is good for; similarly, the service’s performances of Black online activism also contribute to volatile in-group and out-group discourses on whether Black folk are “appropriate” technology users alongside whether Black political concerns can be properly articulated online.

This chapter closes out Distributed Blackness by extrapolating from Black digital practice to a theory of Black technoculture, examining Black cultural discourses about technology’s mediations of intellect, sociality, progress, and culture itself. In doing so, it reviews various approaches to theorizing Blackness, Black bodies, Black culture, and technology. These approaches include Afrofuturism; but this chapter supplements Afrofuturism by suggesting that Black technoculture is invested in the “postpresent” rather than speculating about Blackness’s future within some yet to be established sociopolitical technological reality. Black technocultural theory insists that the digital’s virtual separation from the material world still retains ideologies born of physical, temporal, and social beliefs about race, modernity, and the future.