Sublime

Instead, he turned to one of America’s rising corporate rogues, and a once-indicted felon, Thomas J. Watson. With a reputation for ruthlessly crushing rivals and stealing their business, Watson became CEO of CTR in 1924, and he changed the company’s name to IBM, short for International Business Machines.

Enter IBM, once again, with digital technology in the service of racial classification and racial domination.

In 1980, IBM had 207,000 employees, 18,000 of whom were Black. That’s roughly 8.7 percent of IBM’s total workforce, and that includes employees in nontechnical and nonmanagerial positions.

Using Hollerith machines, IBM—under the leadership of Thomas J. Watson Sr.—had pursued such a strategy with punch cards, first in Jamaica in 1928 and then in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. Now, under a new Thomas J. Watson, the founder’s son, IBM pursued a remarkably similar strategy in support of apartheid, with an even more powerful arsenal of d

Here, IBM is more than willing to lay claim to the actions of a relatively insignificant predecessor company when it serves the purpose of establishing IBM as a leader in diversity and inclusion. But the company has been unwilling and unable to publicly take responsibility for the actions of Herman Hollerith’s Tabulating Machine Company—one of the

When IBM has spent close to $20 billion on analytics-related acquisitions, it’s a permanently changed ball game.