David A. M. Goldberg

David A. M. Goldberg is currently a Lead Product Designer for Inclusive Design at Disney. He is a veteran cultural practitioner of hip-hop and a writer, teacher, programmer, and media developer who has used a lifelong interest in art, culture, and technology to transform the means by which people access, assess, and organize knowledge. He has been theorizing, participating in and creating digital culture since the late twentieth century, during the heady days of the web's first explosion in San Francisco. As a founding member of both the Beta Lounge and the Afro-futurism listserv, he connected the innovation and promise of Silicon Valley's most optimistic era with art, technology and science education pursuits. His experience covers across a wide range of academic, mediated, and corporate contexts that include teaching the San Francisco Art Institute, the California College of the Arts, and the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He has worked with Native Hawaiian scholars, artists and cultural practitioners on digital humanities projects, led STEAM workshops for students and teachers, and developed statewide interdisciplinary curricula. Goldberg is just as comfortable wrangling a JavaScript framework and remixing old Soul breaks as he is unpacking the finer philosophical points of Fred Moten and teaching a kid how to use Scratch. He holds degrees in American Studies (PhD, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa), Visual Criticism (MA California College of the Arts 2002), and Computer Systems Engineering (B.S. Howard University 1993). His dissertation: Becoming Digital Chattel: A Media Archaeology of Black Cybernetic Subjectivity and the Plantation Informatics of Internet Culture (whew!) implicates historic and societal lessons learned from chattel slavery in the development of the present’s digital virtuality.