I can brag about being able to type most of the words on the keyboard without looking down at the keys - sans these acrylics - because once upon a time, there was Mavis Beacon, or as you might be more familiar, 'Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing.'
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It was the 1990s. Home computers were on the rise, and despite America’s initial pushback (insert eye roll), the cover of the best-selling instructional typing software in the U.S. featured a Black woman…with acrylics. ‘Mavis Beacon’, as she was fondly called, was so iconic that she taught millennial students around the globe to type, and so deified that I didn’t - until recently - remember that she wasn’t real. That she was, if anything, my first interaction with a digitized persona, or more accurately, the first victim I would come to know of a digitally colonized identity. Because before there was Mavis Beacon, there was Renee L'Espérance.
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From design decisions that turn ads into just another search result, to our collective data being sold often without our knowledge, to the destruction of digital archives - forcing us to pay more to own less, to pushing out technology that helps ensure that the distinction between fact and fiction no longer exists, one of the biggest features within our current digital landscape is choicelessness. We're living through the consequences of a larger society that has deep issues with consent, especially by way of coercion. These symptoms are merely reflections of the people that are currently architecting our technological world, and by extension, experiences. Sometimes, these "people" include us.
