I first began to grapple with and explore concepts of interface during my undergrad. Frustrated first with the expectations and norms surrounding the immediacy of exchange, or framed differently, the invasive access to your time and attention interface technologies provided, and later with the ways this was changing our social relations and interpersonal behavior, I became resistant to social media technologies. Closing my Facebook account in 2013 and upholding an on-again-off-again relationship with Instagram until late 2016 when I ‘left the grid’ completely. Additionally, becoming increasingly alarmed with the way platforms organize and orient user’s in reference to information and news and how both search engine algorithms and timeline feeds themselves seemed to extend and exacerbate already strained social relations by design.

So, really, this project started in 2015. When, after completing our undergraduate studies, some friends and I got together to think about how we would approach the creation of a new information platform capable of not only facilitating more complex critical and creative thinking but also localizing knowledge in such a way that individuals understand the way broader social patterns and events impact them and vice versa. It was equal parts naivety and idealism the kept us meeting and talking about it for about 8 months until the 2016 elections snuffed out all energy and resolve we’d mustered up to that point. the problem just felt like it kept getting bigger. and the lights out punch millennials took to the face after the 45th administration took over scattered us all into our own self-absorbed state of numbness. its an interesting thing to come of age in society only to look around and discover there are literally no fucking adults in the room. just bigots, children, and egos. A quarter century in one thing was clear to me, all the hope and change we’d been promised wasn’t coming. It for sure wasn’t in the room. Change doesn’t manifest out of hope. Change is a collective project. We all have to contribute.

In addition to this growing tension and polarization of public discourse, entering 2016 two things happened in my life that greatly impacted my current trajectory in digital communication studies and have been the motivating factors for this research project. The first, was convincing a friend of mine (and incredible photographer, see here) Mike Moral, in late November of 2016 to drive 20 hours across the country to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation during the height of the NO DAPL water protector movement.

I, like many others, had been following the movement on social media for weeks, though the camp itself had been there for months at this point. Mainstream media had been completely ignoring the water protector conflict while the movement grew and expanded across online communities. The week we arrived was when the tensions between water protectors and militia boiled over, finally, into the mainstream news cycle.

State-sanctioned violence, media blackouts and misrepresentations surrounding environmental and social justice movements like Black Lives Matter or Indigenous led NO DAPL protests, simultaneously suppressed public unrest and polarized civic tensions through the obfuscation of police brutality and industry funded militarized violence and repression. Never had the need for a public sphere anchored in truly public service ideals been more necessary and yet it seemed to be slipping quite rapidly, further and further from reach.

Even while celebrating the ways Indigenous activists were able to organize and mobilize on public platforms at a global scale despite national censorship, I was aware of the ways the platforms themselves were instrumentalized by nefarious actors to problematize and undermine the movement. Interface as the site where activists find their voice but simultaneously become surveilled, policed and harassed; and where activist networks themselves become infiltrated and flooded with misinformation to derail collective agency and community cohesion[1]. It prompted the question: if the internet is supposed to empower us, why does it ultimately operate as a governing force for the perpetuation of inequalities and exploitation?

My experience at Standing Rock camp had a profound impact on how I chose to orient myself toward academic work and endeavors. It propelled me to question and challenge a habit of being that permeates the fabric of our society: one that justifies and remains complacent in the gendered and racialized violence and inequality that acts as the foundation for all modern developments. Technology, be it institutional policy or communication infrastructure, do not escape this historical inheritance. 

[1] See https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/feb/5/dakota-access-pipeline-protest-plagued-by-fake-new/ or https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/feb/06/liberal-fake-news-shift-trump-standing-rock