"Barbara Christian’s (1987) seminal essay, ‘The race for theory’, analyzed the ways in which the academic competition to create a theory of black women’s writing had overshadowed the potent theoretical content of the writing itself. Similarly, this essay examines how the hype over the application of new information technologies to racialized social problems has overshadowed the potent technological content of the communities themselves. Focusing on the black diaspora, we broaden the category of ‘information technology’ to show how traditions of coding and computation from indigenous African practices and black appropriations of Euro-American technologies have supported, resisted, and fused with the cybernetic histories of the West: a potential source for changes in reconstructing identity, social position and access to power in communities of the black diaspora."