these lines don’t extend my skin
they burn where they cross over.
flesh singed by the latticeworks of the grid.
matter and meaning leave marks on a body
Patterns of the un/fitted.
un/aligned.
un/configured.
dis/enabled.
beings of the chasm,
where silence is codified
into the spatial
somewhere amongst the inbetweens,
of existential perforation,
of matter/ing and meaning.
o v e r a n d o v e r a n d o v e r,
i bleed.
almighty immanence
diffractive infinite.
blood pools and dries,
matters of difference
harden beneath my feet.
Mirrors, Maps and Sameness and the Imperiality of Liberal Representational Models
Representationalism is grounded in the notion that there are pre-existing and absolute boundaries between subjects and objects and that knowledge about the world is made manifest through objectively holding and reflecting upon objects at a distance. Likewise, it assumes that words mirror things, free of distortion and have a linear, mimetic relation to their origin (Barad, 2007 p.89). It operates upon an epistemological and ontological binary that understands relations as interactions taking place between atomized and separate units of agency. The basis for communication in this dynamic relies upon consensus or pure, fixed and determinate meanings read against one another (ibid).
We find it in Newtonian principles and Enlightenment ideals of cartesian subjectivity, that insists on a binary system of knowledge of absolute separation of interior/exterior and words/things, where knowledge about the world is encapsulated in absolute characteristics, pure forms, and indeed “original positions”. Scientific objectivity and instrumental rationality (and their associative practices and tools) emerge as far reaching progeny, of a model of thought that enacts a false cut between subjects and nature, positioning us as outside of the world we seek to understand.We see this in the classification systems that undergird and ground the machine learning processes of search engine algorithms, its present in the network maps that presume relation on the basis of mimesis and sameness, and its binary conceptually orients our knowledge producing institutions as well as social and technological development, by presenting knowing as a secure, measurable and representable force to be defined and accurately replicated—rather than experienced, embodied, relational and ever-changing. It requires an erasure of socio-material arrangements, the local conditions required or closed down during knowledge producing practices, and masks the fact that certain concepts and ideas obtain meaning or significance at the exclusion of others (Barad, 2007, p.89-93). Put plainly, representationalism is about power.
Thus, Barad reminds us that it is not enough to think of variables in scientific practice like gender, race, or class, as merely included in analysis. For the crux of the matter is not representational inclusion, but power and how it is understood (2007, p. 60). How does race, gender, or class come to matter? How do the effects of differences come to matter? As a quantum physics theorist, Barad sees matter and meaning as ultimately always engaged in sets of material-discursive agential entanglements. These material-discursive components act as orientation devices, apparatus that embody particular concepts and values at the necessary exclusion of others, that enact the cuts that produce subject-object distinctions; i.e difference (2007, p. 120). Difference takes on meaning in relation to the agencies of its observation, its measurement practices. An enactment of boundaries and as such, also constitutive exclusions. Such exclusions require us to accountably attend to the indefinite nature of boundaries and the contingency of difference and how such exclusions and absences come to matter in the structure of matter(ing) and meaning (2007, p. 184).
Representationalism’s elimination and subjugation of difference, allows it to disassociate with the way it reproduces inequality, injustice and violence as a knowledge-producing practice. As embedded ontological foundations this enframing, found across interface assemblages—whether it be philosophy, scientific method, or liberal institution--fu[MOU1] [HH2] ndamentally denies the interconnectedness of the world and puts in place a binary logic of self/other, man/nature, here/there. No such distinctions or separations exist in any other place but the mind. Such is the paradox, the illusion; the myth of cartesian subjectivity and it’s absolute separation of interior/exterior, inside/outside, and man/nature dichotomies. Phenomena, of any material-discursive capacity in the world, don’t occur in clearly divided binaries of past/present, us/them, win/loss, right/left, nature/social. Phenomena emerge from relations between and amongst entangled human and nonhuman conditions, the ebbs and flows of the many. It is this relational imperative, this human condition, that makes up our collective existence, our doing here on earth, and likewise in the virtual.
Consequently, when we speak of representationalism’s binary gaze we are also speaking of the power relations and violence that this system of knowledge engenders, as it is this ontological enframing that bleeds through interface paradigms as a regulatory practice of their production. Thus, this section illustrates how the representational language of science is an inherently colonial performance, ignorant to the weight of history, difference, and indeed, accountability. It is crucial to our understanding of difference in a representationalist context, that we recognize this model of thought has developed along the historical axis of power provided explicitly by a colonial and patriarchal system. Dependent upon Us/Them, here/there, Othering ethics of separatism and sameness. This positionality, embedded in all modern technologies and institutions, positions us as always outside of the world we live with in and certifies a certain estrangement from nature (to be understood as both human and nonhuman “others”; their various forms of life and intelligence and our place within such practicing forms of difference and liveliness as necessary, distinct components to its creative energy and life force) by orienting all that we encounter as objects to be conquered, it positions our natural life force and our fundamental relation to it as naturally subordinate to human intelligence and faculties.
Othering Machines & Cartesian Cuts
Representationalism’s ontological foundation extends through and across interfacial components. Embedded within HCI, AI, network, and data sciences, interface becomes the name for a set of contingently enacted network cuts occurring in accordance with sociomaterial design practices that reduce real-world phenomena to nodes and edges and engage the measurable predictability of efficiency and sameness as formal process (Suchman, 2007, p. 268). These processes obstruct and impede communication systems in the following ways: in distancing and severing subjects from the local-conditions and procedures that drive and produce interface experience; artificially estranging publics from collective agency through atomized (dis)empowerment; polarizing interaction through the recursive and segregated pursuit of sameness.
In the freedom-filled but ultimately failed promises of cyberspace digital technologies have not resolved racialized and gendered inequalities (as alleged by silicon valley provocateurs) but instead instantiated new more obscured regimes of social control (Chun, 2006; 2011; Galloway 2012). This logic of “programmability[1]” has both historical and present day manifestations beyond the screen in systems of governance, economics, science, and sociality: where such a habit is problematized by the ways it has become automated, invisible, and deeply personal and affectively charged; drawing attention to the destructive notion of progress presented with every wave of “new media” and additionally, the ways with which at every layer of design, these technologies have default assumptions and discriminatory histories baked into their developmental structures (Chun, 2011; 2016; 2018; 2020).
To begin, this section outlines computational programming languages, data capture and classification systems, and network and engineering principles as they pertain to technical interface assemblages and the aforementioned communication problems they impose. It then pivots to show how these themes should be understood not as isolated computational phenomenon, but rather in relation with, and the far reaching progeny of, the broader cultural paradigm of their emergence—cartesian-colonial subjectivity. Drawing on Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Tara Mcpherson, Simone Browne, Ruja Benjamin, Sherene H. Rozack, Virgina Eubanks, Ariella Azoulay and Karen Barad, it makes the link between the material-discursive components of interface: representationalism and objective universality to the necessary violence of rendering residual,”remanant” or “unruly” categories to the peripheral or ‘past’: a spatial and temporal strategy of imperial logic and the colonial habit, enacted through what Azoulay terms the imperial shutter (2019).
Historical Program:
Digital computational developments of the 1950’s-1980’s, emerged within a post-WWII cultural context accompanied by changing attitudes toward race and gendered and militarial computational labor. Tara Mcpherson, makes an explicit connection to this by illustrating the changing attitudes toward race that also took place during this time period. The cold war context, adjacent domestic unrest in the United States, produced a climate where race was instrumentalized in order to maintain support for conflicts abroad. Overt racism was undermining war efforts, and as such, more covert mechanisms of oppression emerged. Both race and computation represent a turn to modular forms of knowledge that privileges fragmentation and separation. More explicitly, it projects a way of seeing and experiencing the world in discrete modules or levels, through the suppression of context and interrelatedness (Mcpherson, p. 52-55). At a structural level, this model underscores a worldview, where disruptive troublesome parts, can be rendered to the peripheral and omitted from larger global processes, as to maintain order of the system (Mcpherson, p.55). When outliers threaten the system as a whole, modularity and encapsulation ensures the management and control of complexity, smoothing out disruptions by “cleanly” segregating one “neighbor” from another. (Mcpherson, p. 66). The dual arrival of the World Wide Web as a mass communication and information resource, computation and the identity politics of the postmodern era (in the theoretical, not prescriptive tense) developed in symbiosis with wider more sweeping efforts to manage the public sphere and populations (Mcpherson, p. 81).
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, makes this link explicit through her analysis of software and computing’s militarial and gendered emergence and its transition from clerical “women’s work” to the sovereign software developer. Illustrating how computation is dependent upon and emergent of “Yes Sir” responses to hierarchal commands made by authority, Chun shows how source code becomes something like judicial process or law, by converting action into language and becoming, “every lawyer’s dream of what law should be: automatically enabling and disabling certain actions, functioning at the level of everyday practice” (2011, p27). This transformation of self-enforcing law privatized by the commercialization of computer programming, is tied explicitly to the shift into neoliberal governmentality: “Software, through programming languages that stem from a gendered system of command and control, creates an invisible system of visibility, a system of causal pleasure” (Chun, 2011, p18), whereby pleasure is derived in explicit relation to the hierarchies embedded within the machine—or more generally those legitimized and carried out historically (2011, p34). Thus, this causal pleasure driven by gamified fantasies of the neo-liberal Sovereign, “that is executive (hence executable)—structures of power” (2011, p28), hoodwinks both programmers and users, master’s and slaves, alike, “through automation as both empowerment and enslavement and through repetition as both mastery and hell” (ibid, p41).
The shift to computing’s professionalization ultimately ushered in the commodification of software and fetishization of computer code, through automatic and higher level programming, of which “erases the vicissitudes of execution and the institutional and technical structures needed to ensure the coincidence of source code and its execution” (2011, p21). Such an erasure is what ushers in the conflation of data and information, and subsequently, information with knowledge. Where source code, in all its commanding authority, creates an environment where the computer, program or user becomes the source of meaning (2011, p53). Thus, software as axiom, or “source code as fetish”, “fastens in place a certain neoliberal logic of cause and effect, based on the erasure of execution” (Chun, 2011, p 49). A self-evident form of propositioning that forecloses other readings and interpretations in the name of its own artificially constructed horizon, a “programmability”, “that itself relies on distorting real social relations into material givens” in the same way capitalism transforms the labor and sociality of individuals into the reproduction of capital (2011, p50). Thus, software, is endemic, and indeed vital, to contemporary trends in neoliberal “modes of “governing” that make governing both more personal and impersonal, that enable both empowerment and surveillance, and indeed make it difficult to distinguish between the two” (2011, p58).
Contemporary society sees the continuation of this program, to its most extreme places. As McPherson and Chun’s work both elude, identity politics finds a certain resolve (or subjugation) in the modular practices provided by the internet. Offering a placating outlet for the confusion and disorientation brought about by postmodernism and the destabilization of ideology to be funneled into and resolved within[2]. The parameters for interaction sanctioned by interface produces an environment where the assumption of the sovereign individual, despite such disorientation, remains secure by atomizing experience and veiling underlying processes in such a way that interactive participation renders experientially, as agency.
Participation & interactivity: master/slave servitudes of the small-s sovereign.
Interactive principles such as direct manipulation and volitional mobility hardwire ideological interpellation by replacing commands with participatory structures (chun, 2011 p.63). Through volitional mobility, users engage in activities of mapping their individual social reality against the totality of “cyberspace” (ibid 2011, 75). This positions individuals as above and outside of the world, rather than implicated by and a part of it. User, as subject, encounters the world, as Object, where the inside/outside binary of cartesian subjectivity is made technical. Direct manipulation provides an illusion of empowerment through the manipulation of cultural and conceptual objects, the chasing of facts and truths hyper link to hyper link; the magical manifestation of social connection and individual preferences concretized through participatory structures, all contribute to the illusion of user’s actions being the transparent cause of interface’s experiential effects. By producing users who believe they are the source of their computers actions, they “buttress notions of personal action, freedom and responsibility” (ibid 2011, p.74), while masking the fact that we are not the only agents contributing to our interface experience. Chun postulates that such interactions have forged upon us certain expectations regarding cause and effect, whilst also offering us experiences of power and pleasure. A “liberating”, or rather seemingly liberating, means of navigating a complex neoliberal context that seduces us into believing its agency, and as we will see, its affordances for cultural sight, is transferable into other contexts (ibid 2011, p.92). This “empowerment” is stimulated by the illusion of individual control, by replacing commands with participatory structures and fostering feelings of mastery (2011, p.62-64). All the while, the central processes for computation, the means with which manipulation is made possible for user experience, are rendered invisible, imperceivably “daemonic” (Chun, 2011 p. 88). So, interface, projects “mastery” as an ideal state that is nonetheless merely an affective relationship with both the creation and elimination of uncertainty (2011, p65). Thus, the shift from the internet as military weapon to mass communication platform, marks, as Chun details, the “ reduction of freedom to control”(2016, p19), as well as, the transition from “they” (or multiple “I”s) into a both singular and plural “YOU(n)”: “Whether or not YOU respond, YOU constantly register and are registered—YOUR actions are captured and YOUR silence is made statistically significant through the action of others ‘like YOU…’ YOU register through YOUR habits” (Chun 2016, p23). As interpellating, participatory structures the programmability of interface technologies then further governs, forecloses, and prescribes user behavior through big data capture systems and network structures, where “[t]the media have imploded the social” and “YOU are [now] a character in a drama called Big Data” (ibid).
Data & Proxies: eugenic roots, imperial face trace
As mentioned previously, interfaces are, an effect, a process. As users in this space we consume and contribute data, in order to participate in interface processes. This data is then fed back to us via search results and other “recommendation” algorithms for things like news articles, social media accounts, and job postings, and structure our timeline feeds and targeted advertisements as well as a variety of other formulations and analysis of which we may or may not know about. The machine learning and algorithmic systems that belie our interface experiences are explicitly generated off what has come to be known as “big data”. “Big Data” relies on the quantification of objects and human behaviors that is often beyond the scope of our awareness, and as the previous section detailed, we are often affectively coerced into contributing. The sheer volume of data that make up our digital trace would be overwhelming, nearly impossible to interpret without technical expertise, and drawn from an unsettling range of data capture systems and practices.
These participatory structures and relational principles become further problematized in an information sphere beholden to a neoliberal market model, where rife with avenues for manipulation, attention (read: user data+participation) becomes the currency with which private intermediaries wage possession-based pursuits upon publics. Networks, by design, capture subjects[3]: in such a dynamic, as echoed by the work of Wendy Brown, we become commodified nodes of abstracted systems of financialized data capture, where our figuration as solely human capital ensures that, “equality ceases to be our presumed natural relation with one another” (Brown 2015, p179). Thus, the YOU(n) hailed by interactive components is always one with which extracts and abstracts upon the liveliness your actions on the sole basis of deriving profit, of funneling, and incentivizing behavior that deepens the divide between corporate companies and disempowered publics.
Furthermore, data only becomes a conceptual object when we choose to engage with it. It has no necessary or inherent form, purpose, value or ideology. Data is “capta”, taken not given (Drucker, 2014, p. 128; Galloway 2012, p 82-83). Which makes it inherently subjective and context dependent. This notion grinds up against the automation of data capture systems which apply blanket classification systems that ultimately target intersections of race, gender, class and sexuality (thus, the placating of identity politics) through allegedly neutral proxies (Chun, 2016 p120).
Crucially, processes of data capture and classification systems, or statistical models like correlation, [4]emerged out of a eugenicist fixations with population management and historically emergent out of contexts such as the slave trade, the reservation, or poor houses— in other words against and with the backdrop of colonial white supremacy (Razack; Eubanks; Chun). These undercurrents have not been absolved, but rather incessantly persist across spatial and temporal contexts. Cyberspace has not flattened power, but further obscured it. Their emergence as “public health” measures has been furthered in automated technologies that disproportionately surveil and oppress our most vulnerable populations who turn to governments (and their watchful eye) for support: “marginalized groups face higher levels of data collection when they access public benefits, walk through highly policed neighborhoods, enter the health-care system, or cross national borders.” (Eubanks 2018: 6-7).
We owe the correlation methods that underlie modern data analytics to the discredited eugenicist research of men like Sir Francis Galton, progeny of Darwin no less. Galton, among the likes of Raymond Catrall, Hans Eynsenck and Charles Spearman, produced concepts of biological racism and sexism (Chun 2020, chp 1p). The narcissism of the white European male “intelligence” is what drove 19th century marshalled science and census statistics, presenting an allegedly unmarked and neutral case for racial purity and superiority. This eugenicist history, as Chun points out, is important “because correlation works—when it does—by making the past and the future coincide” (Chun, 2020, chp 1p). Ruja Benjamin (2019), Simone Brown (2015), Virginia Eubanks (2018), Sharene E Razack (2015), and Wendy Hu Kyong Chun (2016; 2020) have all given brilliant accounts as to the ways correlation maintains and extends, through capturing, assessing and predicting (shaping) our behavior, social inequalities and oppression—particularly with regards to Blackness and women.
This is in huge part, as Ruja Benjamin notes from boyd and Data & Society, due to the way “[t]he datasets and models used in [correlational] systems are not objective representations of reality. They are the culmination of particular tools, people and power structures that foreground one way of seeing or judging over another.” (2019 p.36) Thus, in the shift from colonial regimes into liberal democracies and capitalism we see the outputs of such models today in the proliferation of racist and sexist cultural narratives—for instance, in the representations of Black and Indigenous peoples as unhealthy, decaying, or unable to adapt to modern society, From Race After Technology:
“Racial knowledge that had been dominated by anecdotal, hereditarian, and pseudo-biological theories of race would gradually be transformed by new social scientific theories of race and society and new tools of analysis, namely racial statistics and social surveys. Out of the new methods and data sources, black criminality would emerge, alongside disease and intelligence, as a fundamental measure of black inferiority.”(Benjamin, 2019 p32)
Virginia Eubanks shows how automated data correlation methods of today are the progeny of 19th and early 20th century scientific charity and poorhouses, legacy of “regulating” the poor. Eubanks highlights how the scientific charity movement deployed data methods to separate the deserving from the undeserving poor, where, “[e]ach poor family became a “case” to be solved; in its early years, the Charity Organization Society even used city police officers to investigate applications for relief. Casework was born.”(Eubanks. p 21) This distinction was important for scientific charity workers for the same reason it was important to scientists like Galton: “[p]roviding aid to the unworthy would simply allow them to survive and reproduce their genetically inferior stock”, for the breeding of an allegedly genetic elite (ibid p22). The United States in particular was fixated on eliminating “negative characteristics” of the poor, and the first database for monitoring the poor were carried out by the Carnegie Institute in New York, with the explicit aim to gather monitor those in need’s sex lives, intelligence and general behavior, Eubanks details:
“The filled out lengthy questionnaires, took photographs, inked fingerprints, measured heads, counted children, plotted family trees, and filled logbooks with descriptions like “imbecile.” “feeble-minded,” “harlot,” and “dependent.”” (ibid pg 22)
These models then went on to shape contemporary policy and reforms of the welfare state that have deeply sexist, racist, ageist, and ableist undertones (ibid pg 27), most notably sharp and biting when it comes to low-income single women of color with children (ibid 28, _). Sharene H. Razack, In Dying From Improvement, shows how European colonialist narratives in Canada that present indigenous bodies as inherently, “sick, dysfunctional and self-destructive”(Razack, 2015,p17) through early 20th century medical surveys where the justification for Residential schools was: “predicated on the basic notion that the First Nations were, by nature, unclean and diseased[;] residential schooling was advocated as a means to ‘save’ Aboriginal children form the insalubrious influences of home life on the reserve.” (ibid, p18) Were ‘saving’ children resulted instead in the appalling sexual assault, abuse, starvation, torture, and murder of indigenous grade school children, much of which was conducted under the umbrella of colonial grade scientific ‘experiment’ (ibid, 18; Porter, 2017).
Specific to Canada and BC, and as we will see most pertinent to this projects subject and contributions, is also the way colonial Canadian sovereignty certified indigenous populations as unable to cope with the terms of modern colonial society as a means of also stealing and withholding landrights to the claims of the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en: “ Chief Justice Alan McEachern of the British Columbia Supreme court commented on “the relentless energy” of Europeans, with which Indigenous people “would not, or could not, compete,” concluding that if Indigenous people were conquered, it was not by dint of force but simply through the superior capacities of a more resilient group.” (ibid p 4) Razack notes, that the imposition of these, “mythologies of the settler colonial project are comparable across geographic regions” and indigenous populations [5](ibid 19).
In both Indigenous and Black populations in north America colonial “charity” still surveils and impose upon them today, of which Eubanks illustrates through [welfare surveillance of single moms + Razack & statistics on indigenous children and welfare system]. This “wellness” program in tangent with the racialization of surveillance technologies highlighted by Simone Browne show how systemic surveillance and spying upon black and indigenous communities is the premise, not the disruption, of algorithmically enhanced policing and public health technologies. Heat maps and gang databases where, ““criminal”: becomes a proxy for Black, poor, immigrant, second-class, disposable, illegal, alien, unwanted or otherwise disposable un-humans (Benjamin, 2019, p33)” emerge from the same federal system of white patriarchal control that, as Chun highlights, surveilled and infiltrated (FBI and CIA) communities of civil rights activisits and anti-war groups from the 1950’s-70’s through the COINTELPRO program (2020, chp 1 p?)
Chun, has shown most recently, how methods used by Cambridge Analytica during the 2016 elections, were deeply gendered, raced and classed (2020). But more disconcerting, as she highlights, is the way Steve Bannon with the assistance of Christopher Wiley, perverted Crenshaw’s intersectional theory not to bridge publics, but antagonize and divide them. As Chun describes: “Put most bluntly: in an attempt to destroy any and all in common, communities were not being destroyed but instead: planned and constructed. Not happy or pastoral, but ones that divide.” (fix this, 2020 chp 2, p12)
“Through your network neighbors—users deemed to be like you because they like what you like and hate what you hate—you are captured even when you are silent. Through your agitated neighbors, you become predictable and linear. These predictions are wedded at every level to the past. …This form of verification means that if the past is racist and sexist, these models will only be verified as correct if they make sexist and racist predictions, especially if they rely on problematic measures such as standard IQ tests.” (Chun, chp 1 p10)
Thus, both eugenics and their networked data analytic progeny, “treat the world as a laboratory; and both promote segregation.” (chun, 2020. Chp 1 p29) Crucially, we must understand these systems as exclusively dependent upon representations, units of encapsulated and abstracted liveliness that divulge more about the system of knowledge that enframes them than the behavior or phenomenon captured.
Networked Homophily: Warping Relationality, Othering difference
Through the network maps of our interpretation grids we cognitively map our individual relation to others. As theoretical projections network maps enact material-discursive cuts in time and space to produce encapsulated slices of connectivity, where connection is generated according to principles such as homophily. Homophily as a network principle engages in the perpetuation of inequalities/discrimination as process, by aggregating consensus and similarity into clusters on the basis of comfort (Apprich et al, 2018, p. 76). This produces what we have come to know as the echo chamber effect in platform communication and its associative worlding practices of You/Other, Us/Them positionality. As a patterning device, homophily produces segregated neighborhoods of presumed individual preference, and names and produces sameness as the basis for relation and connection (Apprich et al., 2018, p.82-83). It can be tempting to read this as an innocuous interpersonal oversight, surely, we can warrant that many friendships and relational ties are due to shared or similar interests and traits? However, drawing on the original analysis of friendship ties conducted by Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert K Merton, a study of two bi-racial social housing projects, that went on to ground and institutionalize consensus around homophily and network science, Chun illustrates that from its very conceptual origins homophily has been actualized through a segregational racial premise, “an implicit assumption that values do not cross racial borders, or if they do, that this crossing is less significant than value consensus[6]” (2020, chp 2, p23). Thus, the presumed individual preference manifest by network neighborhoods is embedded with a, “presumption that there can be no neighbors without common cultural traits.” (ibid, chp 2 p28) This presumption is not neutral, but rather reflects how, “[r]acial codes are born from the goal of, and facilitate, social control” (Bnejamin, p29).
Additionally laden in this initial study, and the flurry of institutionalized citational endorsement that have since followed, like those mentioned by Chun of Easley and Kleinberg from 2010, is the notion that segregation on the basis of sameness (read: race) is a sort of preindividual network state (ibid chp p,28-31). Concurrently, Chun’s work shows how conflict and tenant complaints emerged most often from white community members of the projects and their discomfort with being stigmatized for being in the low-income bi-racial housing. Tellingly, this was not included in Lazarfeld and Merton’s original report, but surely the years of whiteflight can attest, the grounding principle for neighborhood comfort has always been about white (read: colonial) claims to space. We can see then, that by prefiguring segregation as a naturalized claim, institutionalized racism and the history of race-based inequality and discrimination is erased, and as Chun points out:
“If taken as an explanation for gentrification, it portrays the movement of minorities to more affordable and less desirable areas as voluntary, rather than as the result of rising rents and taxes. Further, it completely erases—while at the same time presuming—the desire of some to move into neighborhoods into which one is not a majority. If this model finds that institutions are not to blame for segregation, it is because institutional actions are rendered invisible in it.” (ibid, chp 2p31)
Thus, in the transition to digital space, identity politics, and the solidification of network node characteristics through gender, class and race present socially constructed and institutionally policed categories as immutable divisions with which the imposition of differential identities can be homogenized and pattern discrimination can take place (apprich, et al, i-xi). Homophily effectively sidesteps the disorienting nature of difference, by instrumentalizing it. Deploying techniques for managing, predicting and prescribing it as a measure and marker of sameness. Additionally, this artificial model of connection, unconcerned with the nature, the effects, of connection, has no means of understanding network ties such as conflict, violence, or interrelated dependence (Chun, 2016, p.81). In as such, it reproduces, reinscribes, and extends certain relations or connections over others[7], regardless of the inequality, injustice, or violence its logic ascribes:
“They “train” individuals to expect and recognize this segregation. Instead of ushering in a postracial, postidentitarian era, networks perpetuate identity via “default” variables and axioms. In network science, differences and similarities—differences as a way to shape similarities—are actively sought, shaped, and instrumentalized in order to apprehend and shape clusters.” (Chun, 2020, chp 1 p13)
Through networked homophily sameness becomes the gaze with which we hold upon the world, the habituated lens with which see. Thus difference, or difference sustained in such lenses, becomes disruption, crisis, problem, alien, Other. In short, such principles produce interface as “Othering” machines, beholden to a system of classification and representation takes for granted the interdependencies, the interrelatedness of knowing and being in the world, dealing exclusively in the absolute separation of man/nature, words/things, and interior/exterior states of being.
Such foundational principles of design lack an ability to engage dynamically with difference. In this failure to grapple with the way difference is experienced and produced in practice, it masks the fact that the same map that shows us the world , also traps us inside of it, as Chun puts it, “we are now in a different and perhaps historically unique situation: we are forever mapping forever performing- and so we are told, forever empowered- and yet no more able to imagine, let alone decisively intervene in, the world around us” (2016, p.44). So, while on the surface, the world projected by the network maps of cyberspace, seemed to be shifting towards more democratic possibilities, internally to all of these “new” systems of liberation, are systems of value and models of thought that are ultimately discriminatory, racialized, and imperial shape perception and serve to construct (or warp) user reality.
The institutionalization of the imperial shutter: Science is fiction. History is a technology.[MOU3] [HH4]
What the collective work of these critical data and critical media scholars show, is the problem of interface is one of an institutionalized set of knowledge-producing practices, whose orientation toward knowledge and conceptual frameworks are gendered, racialized, classist and imperial. Rendering them incapable of engaging with systemic violence and inequalities by very design. Leading critical algorithm studies scholars such as Ruja Benjamin to point out that these emerging technologies do not overcome the feedback loops of inequity, as the founders of this “new frontier” have alleged, but more accurately enact something like a “New Jim Code: the employment of new technologies that reflect and reproduce existing inequities but that are promoted and perceived as more objective or progressive than the discriminatory systems of a previous era” (Benjamin, p.28). Just like homophily’s seemingly innocuous and naturalized claims that project (and manifest) social ties through segregated sameness, “[t]he view that “technology is a neutral tool” ignores how race also functions like a tool, structuring whose literal voice gets embodied in AI” (Benjamin, p54). Thus, the point I am emphasizing here focalizes around the notion that normative orientations toward knowing and being, in all stages of technological and social development, are the by-product of the invisibly visible colonial gaze. Where the only thing rendered imperceptible and unseen is power and the imperiality of whiteness; where all else, defined against its neutrality, become sub-human cultural signs.
Deconstructing the violence of this binary, its infrastructural positioning and critiquing its implications is essential to undermining its authority. However, the gap in question remains in how to move beyond its seemingly ubiquitous reign. It is not enough to draw attention to the violence and include excluded categories or conditions for subjectivity, for the pattern persists across time and space and the voices implicated by its violence, the indigenous, slave, woman, child, Other, have again, have always been present and wailing. To intervene in representationalism requires engaging in its colonial history. Without contending with its emergence from this cultural trauma any intervention or solution will remain ineffective—this is something critical theory and philosophy of technology has largely overlooked. This can be seen by examining the work of scholars like Andrew Feenberg, Simone Browne and Ariella Azoulay.
The point of contention as it pertains to the cartesian-colonial habit, is not merely the representation of something abstracted as material or concrete (though the critique of absolute truths and representationalism’s logic on this front is to be sure, very much a part of this project), but rather the fact that cartesian subjectivity, has from its outset, presented and abstracted upon the world from the over-representation of Man as human. And while from Marcuse to Feenberg alike, the notion of the human condition and experience is central to any liberation from this rationality, the irony in Critical Theory is its inability to engage the human condition beyond the subjective (and imperial) vantage point of Man, and in doing so keeps ‘waiting for the realization’ of excluded values as if they weren’t already at present, and continuously, wailing and in resistance. In doing so the fruits of critical theory of technology and the field of critical theory largely overlooks the differential complexity of “modern” regimes of power as well as its ontological predicates.
For example, Andrew Feenberg’s concept of the technical code reflects both the technical function and its meaning expressed through language, of any given technical artifact (2010). Technical codes, Feenberg says, reflect the design standards of a given set of social actors involved in technical development. These standards carry with them the embedded social needs and values of these actors (Feenberg, 2010). These ideals become embodied, and as such, enacted, through technical design but are often implicated by what Feenberg terms “formal bias”:
“critical theory of technology introduces the concept of “formal bias” to understand how a rationally coherent, well designed, and properly operated technical device or system can nevertheless discriminate in a given social context. The concept of formal bias also sheds light on notions such as institutional racism and serves much the same purpose, name, to enable a critique of socially rational activities that appear fair when abstracted from their context but have discriminatory consequences in that context. Today justice requires identifying and changing formally biased technical codes.” (2010, p.69)
Feenberg also suggests that, “the democratization of technology is about finding new ways of privileging excluded values and realizing them in new technical arrangements” (2005). But here, Feenberg sidesteps the historization of this claim, making generalized points about democratically constituted alliances that take into account the imposition of certain feedback loops on disempowered groups (2005). In doing so misleadingly, through this ambiguity and nondisclosure, notions of gender, race, and coloniality are presented (through their muted nonpresence) as values or actors merely excluded from technological design through “formally biased technical codes”. This bypasses the fact that not only are instrumentalization, objectification, and technocratic tendencies explicitly gendered, racialized colonial phenomena, but philosophical and scientific thought itself is predicated on absented and exploited bodies of Black and indigenous peoples, and women.
Such absences are never empty “waiting to be realized”, but definitive, constitutive and didactive (and presently resistant) to the subsequent teleological violence of technological development. The notion that socially rational activities can appear fair when abstracted from their context but nonetheless discriminate in that context is to speak of such activities from the position of privilege and unmarked neutrality. From the position of that which is not experiencing the system as fundamentally discriminatory, unjust and violent from the outset.
Feenberg’s assertion that technical action provides a temporary escape from the human condition provides perhaps the most realizable opportunity to consider these absences, where his position:
“[distinguishes] the situation of a finite actor from a hypothetical infinite actor capable of a “do from nowhere.”([8]) The latter can act on its object without reciprocity. God creates the world without suffering any recoil, side effects, or blowback. This is the ultimate practical hierarchy establishing a one way relation between actor and object. But we are not gods. Human beings can only act on a system to which they themselves belong. This is the practical consequence of being an embodied being. Every one of our interventions returns to us in some form as a feedback from our objects… Technical action represents a partial escape from the human condition. We call an action “technical” when the impact on the object is out of all proportion to the return feedback affecting the actor…So the technical subject does not escape from the logic of finitude after all. But the reciprocity of finite action is dissipated or deferred in such a way as to create the space of a necessary illusion of transcendence.” (2005),
Considered in parallel to the works of Simone Browne or Ariella Azoulay, this “do from nowhere” implicates how technology, in both historical and contemporary contexts, is memetic to the colonial gaze of whiteness, of which imposes and places demands upon objectified bodies of the conquered. This “do from nowhere” echoing Haraway’s claim regarding “the conquered gaze[9]”, is made explicit by the work of Simone Brown in Dark Matter, who shows how the disembodied gaze of surveillant tech is explicitly a racialized technique, “a gaze that is always unmarked, and therefore already markedly white and male” (Browne, 2015,p49)
Such looking relations have much to expose, as Browne highlights through the work of Patricia A. Turner, “only a subject can observe or see” (2015, p58). Such optical oversight has no concerns with reciprocity, and as Browne’s work on the historical racialization of surveillance technologies through things like lantern laws for slaves walking after dark, is rather about rendering racialized bodies as “outside of the category of the human, un-visible” (2015, p68).
“In situating lantern laws as a supervisory device that sought to render those who could be, or were always and already, criminalized by this legal framework as outside of the category of the human and as un-visible, my intent is not to reify Western notions of “the human,” but to say here that the candle lantern as a form knowledge production about the black, indigenous, and mixed-race subject was part of the project of a racializing surveillance and become one of the ways that, to cite McKitterick, “Man comes to represent the only viable expression of humanness, in effect, overrepresenting itself discursively and empirically” [and as Brown adds, technologically] and namely, “overrepresenting Man as the human” (2015 p79-80).
Likewise, she highlights how artifacts of slavery such as The Book of Negroes, expose, “[a]n early imprint of how the [racialized] body comes to be understood as a means of identification and tracking by the state” (2015 p.97). In tandem with lantern laws, lit candles as supervisory ‘prosthesis’ devices, these examples illustrate early forms of corporeal racialized knowledge production anchored in making racialized Other, visible (and thus, un-visible), knowable, and locatable (Browne, 2015 p110). Put more plainly, it exemplifies how early technologies, be they bookkeeping, breeder documents, or lantern, were manifest explicitly from a desire to manage, control, and exploit certain bodies over others. Racialization and imperial logic grounds the very act of documentation, classification, and policing (as detailed further in other sections of this work). The problem is not the nonpresence of marginalized groups but that they have already been embedded into design processes from their very beginnings. As inferior Others; as slaves, ‘Indians’, Negroes, and women.
Ariella Azoulay’s Potential History offers an understanding of how imperial conditions standardise productions of meaning while simultaneously shaping the phenomenological field with which they are manifested (2019, p301). A photography and visual theorist, Azoulay is very much concerned with the reopening of images to renegotiate what they show, foregrounding the dynamics of power and emphasizing the role of the spectator in bearing responsibility towards that which the camera either does or does not allow us to see. In Potential History, Azoulay applies this arraignment to suggest and engage a reopening of history. Azoulay foregrounds how liberal forms of knowledge constitute and extend what she terms a differential body politic through the imperial shutter. The imperial shutter enacts spatial, temporal and bodily divisions through various imperial technologies such as: borders and nation states; and their associative documents, tools and rights of citizens, and archives, museums and laws; and their imperial sight, language and politics. Such an ontology operates to render the common world as no longer something shared to care for, but scattered enclaves to possess and protect.
The imperial shutter fragments time into an illusion of past, present futures, allowing for the erasure and depoliticization of precolonial or anti-imperial ways of knowing. History is a series of expulsions, separation and colonization that set in motion a long process of dispossession and violence. Azoualy highlights, how this embedded ontology of the imperial plunder, in this sense, has come to shape how we relate to our common world and narrate living together. The “New” world manifest post 1492 across different geographical places times, and contexts has been used to justify the destruction of what exists in the name of “modernity” and “progress”. Azoulay draws our attention to the way “modern citizenship” privileges are built and dependent upon the worldlessness of others that emerged from this imperial project:
“Given the fact that the violence used to inscribe privileged citizens’ rights is deployed through the extraction of the material wealth of others from whom the same rights are denied, the nature of rights inscribed in these objects and their entitlement cannot be determined with categories of ownership. These categories enabled the accumulation of differences between those from whom these objects were expropriated and from whom rights were denied, on the one hand, and those who used others’ craftsmanship for their statecraft. Citizen’s privileges depended on the near worldlessness of others.” (2020 p30)
In her discussion of the historical archive, Azoulay shows how the imperial shutter serves to close down the multiplicity of experiences in the world only to subsume them under one homogenized cultural narrative where persons and their worlds, become abstracted, and thus extracted from the colonial history of time, through seemingly neutral and objective language of universal procedure, that is nonetheless and unequivocally violent. Here, she says, is where the “theaters of imperial violence” reproduce and legitimize particular fictions regarding relationality, subjectivity, and the human condition,
“what is being reproduced throughout these centuries is the distribution of subject positions such as citizens, subjects, the indigenous, non-citizens, slaves, illegal workers, infiltrators, and so on. Despite what actors who embody these positions see, create, say or dream, even while opposing the evils of imperialism, their actions, interactions, and speculations remain bounded by its very condition.” (32)
Azoulay, drawing on several examples like the mass rape of German woman by the allies during the fall of Berlin in WWII, as well as Hannah Arendt’s report in Eichmann in Jerusalem and the virulent reproach received on behalf of the unapologetic account of ‘history’, read: in her refusal to only account the past from a victim’s perspective and emphasize the role of unquestioned obedience to the centralized power of Jewish Council’s Azoulay highlights how, “Arendt did not blur the distinction between perpetrators and victims, but she did question the total identification of all Jews with victims and all Germans with perpetrators”(p313). It was thus this imposition of meaning that caused backlash and rejection of Arendt’s accounts as legitimately historical and philosophical (309-313). Arendt’s exposure of the dangers and consequences of the organization and archivisation of a community is the additional layer of context and meaning to the events of the war that she sought to keep open against the theater of imperial history (313).
In highlighting WWII’s implications for race, human rights, and equality Azoulay shows how even our most “progressive” liberal signposts and principles are anchored in what Maldanado-Torres terms a non-ethics of war, but what Azoulay is framing as the violence of imperial history. However, Azoulay suggests that not only is this violence reversible, but that we ought to refuse the shutter as a means of beginning to practice potential history:
“Potential history is a form of being with others, both living and dead, across time, against the separation of the past from the present, colonized peoples from their worlds and possessions, and history from politics … Potential history is not the account of radical thinking, of explicit ideological struggles against imperialism, but a rejection of imperialism’s conceptual apparatus altogether.”(1)
Crucial to this practice, for Azoulay, is understanding how the human conditions is the object of imperialism’s assault as well as the bedrock of resistance to it. The human condition, for Azoulay, is not defeatable nor does it need to be invented, “a free gift from nowhere” (32), it cannot progress as it is already the basis with “which human life is given and renewed” (32) and thus does not operate within the realm of linear temporality. Thus the human condition supersedes and subsists the imperial shutter and offers a shift from colonial temporality’s beginning, end, or post conditions. It subsumes axis and markers of colonial power, instead provides spaces for regeneration, reparation, and reviving on the basis of “precolonial patterns and arrangements ungoverned by Man” (31). And fervently presences itself within and against the destructive wake of progress, to remind us of our own very connection to nature and as Azoulay puts it, “asks not to be ignored for the sake of future utopias” (31); Azoulay drawing on Hannah Arendt, shows how imperialism exchanges this “free gift” for something it’s made itself instead[10]. This involves making those bracketed away or rendered to the dustbins of history and the archive during Man’s construction of history and imperial reality, their memories, moments and potentialities legible, perceptible and redistributed; as well as, a firm rejection of neutrality, newness, and the progressive project.
This includes liberal institutions and the propagation of its tools. Part of the naturalization of imperial differential rule, as Azoulay highlights, is tied to the way institutions draw on the historical archive to propagate both material and discursive objects: “After a few centuries during which imperialism institutionalized its modalities of violence and imposed them globally, these modalities could appear as the “political and historical a priori” of human experience. This fabricated field is defined by and defines both the master’s house and the tools used to dismantle it; that is, it limits what we can see as problems, what we can use as tools, and when we can use them.” (302). Drawing on Audre Lorde, she exemplifies this through feminist theory and the tendency to construct alternative histories still beholden to the master’s house and his tools:
“Lorde associated tools with racial patriarchy, the regime that transforms humans into raw material and asks them not to escape the question: “What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy?” …Lorde confronted her audience of white women directly and called on them to exit their dependency on the master’s house, their trust in it…“What is the theory behind racist feminism?” Lorde asked them, implying that those who use these tools are incapable of recognizing themselves as exercising violence…Disavowed whiteness, that is, simply feminism, in the American context is one way racial origins are sealed as “past,” and emancipatory politics can be envisaged as color- blind. Lorde regarded white feminists as the protégés of the master’s house who continue to operate its tools against others. However, she didn’t give up on the hope that they would recognize their interest in collapsing the master’s house and find “the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charts.”” (299)[MOU5]
To act where there are no charts, requires not a crafting of a new plan, place or project, but a rigorous engagement with the here and now of past/present/futures, as “the only temporality in which a community persists against the tools that threaten its freedom to exist” (299). Because alternative histories still work within the imperial narrative and operate in-service to and remain defined by binary settler worldviews, this has the effect of rendering, “those who struggle against the archive as victims to salvaged from the archive rather than as allies in a common struggle”(195). Azoulay thus suggests we engage in not alternative histories, but nonimperial grammars. A process by which we “unlearn what one’s ancestors inherited from their ancestors as solid facts and recognizable sign posts—in order to attend to their origins and render the imperial plunder impossible again”(13). Nonimperial grammars are intimately tied to the human condition, shared (and stolen) worlds, and the rejection and resistance to the authority of imperial shutters.
To engage in nonimperial grammars she suggests a form of co-citizenship: “a set of assumptions and practices shared by different people—including scholars—who oppose imperialism, colonialism, racial capitalism and its institution of citizenship” (16). It explicitly deprivileges these accounts and agencies to retrieve instead an interaction and resuscitation of the many refusal and precolonial modes of sharing the world inherent in peoples’s public performances, diverse claims and repressed aspirations. Crucially, not as objects of study or discoveries but as collaborators and companions in partnership against imperial citizenship and the process of unlearning imperialism (16-17):
“Unlearning is a way of disengaging from political initiatives, concepts, or modes of thinking, including critical theory, that are devised and promoted as progressive and unprecedented. Instead, it insists that finding precedents—or at least assuming that precedents could be found—for resistance to racial and colonial crimes is not the novel work of academic discovery. Unlearning is a way of assuming that what seems catastrophic today to certain groups was already catastrophic for many other groups, groups that didn’t wait for critical theory to come along to understand the contours of their dispossession and the urgency of resisting it and seeking reparation” (17)
Such grammars engage not disciplinary predecessors but present actors; not hidden nor new accounts but lived realities of the here and now, more pointedly it is a, “[refusal] to be complicit, to claim that justice is due, even after a long time”(526) that understands this, as well as caring for a share world, as preconditions or premises to living and belonging within a global community. It is a refusal to engage as the perpetrators of imperial colonial violence by acknowledging our fundamental interconnectedness and shared human condition; our relational responsibility to one another. It is rejecting the disassociation from violence provided by the socially constructed parameters of the imperial shutter.
Thus, reading Azoulay through contributions of critical algorithm and media studies, and feminist science and technology studies, shows how science and history as socially constructed practices that necessarily bracket away (and thus depoliticize and delegitimize) pre- and anti-colonial ways of knowing, are hegemonic narratives conceptually, methodologically and epistemologically oriented along a racialized, gendered, and classed axis of imperial colonial powers (Chun, 2020; Oneil, 2018; Browne, 2016; Benjamin, Eubanks; Barad 2007; Azoulay 2020). Where “seeing” in the scientific sense, involves a bracketing of practices that obscures how science and history as social practices extend certain assumptions and habits of being over others. Thus, what is needed is a shift in orientation towards these voices and ongoing resistances to representationalism’s imperial optics. In the context of reconfiguring ontological horizons to deposition the cartesian binary with regards to interface technologies, knowledge production, and the habitual cultural gaze, recent interventions have been made by Lizzie O’Shea in her work Future Histories.
So where to begin with interface?[MOU6]
O’Shea’s Future Histories offers one point of entry into what processes of unlearning with companions might look like in critical media studies. Though not a critical media scholar, but rather a human rights lawyer, O’Shea writes about how historical social movements and thinkers are relevant to current discourses and debates surrounding interfaced networked culture. O’Shea makes several claims throughout her chapters that are fruitful considerations for this project: one is her discussion of digital trace and Fanonian self-determination discussed in Black Skin White Masks, the second is her reading of the Maori iwi and the Whanganui River in New Zealand [11] and other indigenous epistemological interventions alongside the notion of digital space as an environment we ought to care for.
O’Shea connects the insatiable inertia of progress, to the assumption of an unusable, depoliticised past. A past “without living value”, heralding a set of assumptions that renders it “static and dry [in] our consciousness” (2019, p p7). She goes on: “Historical experiences build up in our heads over time, with a persistent hold over the present” (ibid p13), further convoluted and compounded by the small-s sovereign illusions of interface technologies that manifest, “a history of our sense of self that is tightly bound up with the market” where, “the space of our mind is increasingly being defined by our consumption, for the purposes of further consumption…integrating itself further into our personal spaces, political communities and workplaces, each advance is used to learn more about us at more intimate levels and map the contours of our psyche more intricately, often without our knowledge.” (ibid p 14) This assertion speaks to the aforementioned principles of design that daemonically drive and shape our online experiences. They provide us our search results for, “COVID-19” and “BLM”, for “conservative” and “liberal”. They sharpen and narrow our perspective with prediscriminate data relating to our location, race, gender, and sexuality, within a system designed to aggregate us into “similar” clusters, and then with incessant and increasingly intrusive measures, they agitate us. Force us to speak and capture us even in our silence. Harvest every ounce of attention they can glean from our presence only to puke back up its expectations of us for us to consume and so the cycle proceeds. O’Shea describes how interface operates as a, “system of observational intelligence, scattered across the web” of which, she states, “is then used to curate our singular sense of self, that is, our real-world understanding of our own personalities.” (ibid p 25)
This forces us into what O’Shea calls “reputational silos”, that “have the effect of entrenching the distance people feel between one another …shared public space begins to vanish” (ibid p, p28).. These abstract identities driven by extracted data from a system premised on manipulating your interests to extract your attention, then create a history of your Self to influence you. O’Shea details: “You are stripped of your agency; lacking the capacity to control what is known about you and by whom, your ability to make decisions for yourself is impaired” (ibid p, p21-22).
Understanding O’Shea’s point is important because it suggests we “think about the internet as a place rather than a service” and in doing allows us to see how interface format “[processes] of abstract identification” that are not only disempowering but, ”[cause] fragmentation and distance between people”—these are the pastoral clusters that divide mentioned by Chun (ibid p, p29) If we hang out and frequently dwell in places that are imperialist, racist, sexist, and discriminatory, we have to understand this has an influence on how we understand the world and identity. The relational imperative we are engaged in by current interface systems is of an imperial colonial ontology. The “New Frontier” offered by cyberspace, its colonial excursions via Explorer and Safari in all their clean front facing authority, gets us to exploit ourselves as conquests. This is not to suggest we as users understand the violence experienced by the colonized and to conflate them as experiences, but rather illustrate how colonialism extends in “modernity” itself through technical interface processes. Thus, to engage Fanon is to not just take his accounts of colonialism and white supremacy seriously but rather a way of working within his vitally important insights into the workings of colonial matrices of power. It’s to gain a deeper more acute understanding of his experience of being made “out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories”, that produced a perception of himself fragmented by the demands of white supremacy.
Where, as O’Shea writes,
“the experience of being black was, by virtue of being black, not an experience. Racist logic rendered it nonexistent—defined by others, the subjective experience of the black person could not be bridged or translated into the real world. There as no agency in how his identity was determined, no way to escape the judgments about him, no glimmer o autonomy. His identity was “fixed”: “I am overdetermined from the exterior. I am not the slave of the ‘idea’ that others have of me but of my appearance.” This is the theoretical basis of colonialism, and it is how the idea of race is socially constructed” (ibid p, p200)
O’Shea connects this to how we are rendered online as abstract identities, where shunted into reputational silos, we are produced and “fixed” by data mining industries and governments who predetermine our virtual identity by managing the path-dependent wheelhouse of identity objects, orientations, and worlds made available to us: “channeling us into a particular future”. (ibid p, p200-203) The reason why it is discriminatory and imperialist is because this is the basis of the social systems that made them. Read: if this sounds like the effects of colonialism its because it is, they are, thus O’Shea heeds: “This is not a consumer choice problem: the terms of service are imposed upon us rather than freely entered”. (ibid p, p206) She goes on,
“How do you separate your own desires from the hatred heaped upon you, which you invariably heap upon yourself? It requires us to think about who controls us, who writes the history of our sense of self and tried to determine its future. If such control was stripped away, what is it that we would want? For the person that has been colonized or oppressed, there is a split between a subjective desire (what we might want) and reality (what our social structure tells us we want). Our engagement with digital spaces can create similar conundrums. We often use these platforms to seek connection and escape, only to find ourselves chained to the logic of gratification, buying things we cannot afford, spending time we do not have, becoming people we do not feel we are…This mutates our sense of self but also our capacity to relate to one another” (ibid p, p211)
O’Shea suggests we ought to conceive of the internet not as a possession or thing, but a space, an environment. Drawing on recent law precedents in New Zealand to recognize provide reparations to and respect not just Indigenous claims to land but more fundamentally, listen, learn from and center the insights and perspectives offered by Indigenous epistemologies.
Drawing on the insights of Australian Aboriginal writer and award-winning novelist Melissa Lusashenko, O’Shea, like Azoulay, asks us to consider what turning towards and thinking within precolonial epistemologies can teach us about the state of the world and that structures relationships between people and the environment through the lens of conquest (ibid p, p219-220), she goes on: “[u]nderstanding and appreciating Indigenous approaches to governance is an important task, not just as part of an attempt to right historical wrongs or as a way of coming to terms with the cultural significance of land”, though this is certainly important and a part of it, O’Shea also notes, that “[u]nlike capitalism, Indigenous concepts of governance explicitly place limits on the ideas of growth and exploitation” (ibid p 220). The insatiability of current capitalist structures offers little framework or understandings for how to justly approach sustainability because land has always been framed as something to be had rather than cared for, turning to Australian Aborginal scholar Irene Watson, O’Shea highlights Indigenous epistemologies relational difference on this front, Watson is quoted “We live as a part of the natural world; we are the natural world. The natural world is us…We take no more from the environment than is necessary to sustain life…Settler societies have lived on Nunga [First Peoples’] lands and taken more than is needed to sustain life and the resut, as we know, is the depletion of ruwe [the territories of First Nations Peoples] and the exhaustion of natural resources” (ibid p 220)
O’Shea highlights, through Indigenous voices and knowledge, how these principles and ways of knowing and relating to the world carry important resonance and relevance to how we approach regulation (and dwelling) in collective digital spaces (ibid p 220). Her reading, she states:“is an attempt to avoid assuming the centrality of European traditions of law and governance, and to admit how these assumptions have crowded out other perspectives.” (ibid p 220) Namely, for O’Shea perspectives crucial for comprehending the internet as a shared collective resource:
“The Internet is a resource—both a history and a future—that we ought to hold in common. It crosses national borders and provides collective value and wisdom. It demonstrates the power and value of interconnectedness and interdependence. But it is also vulnerable to exploitation and the insidious consequences of privatization. It is an environment that needs to be care for.”
She goes on,
“It is also the environment in which we increasingly live…Like the natural environment, the digital network is a shared infrastructure that we all utilize, and how it is governed will have implications for how we relate to each other socially. If we think of the Internet as something physical that must be regulated and protected in the material world, there is a lot to learn form the history of environmentalism and the way in which Indigenous communications relate to land in places like New Zealand, Australia and Canada.” (ibid p 221)
Thus, this project concerns itself, in part, with some of O’Shea’s concluding questions: “What other forms of knowledge have we lost as a result of privileging specific forms of representations? When everything is mapped by Google in a Cartesian framework, what nuances and alternative possibilities are excluded from our understanding of the world?” (ibid p 237) If “digital technology has the potential to accelerate our appreciation of alternative perspectives, but it requires an openness to and respect for diversity”, it takes seriously the notion of thinking within, creating and learning from these perspectives (ibid p 237) by theorizing from nonbinary and decolonial creative practice. It contributes to, extends and transforms all of the aforementioned contributions by engaging their insights through embodied writing practice, through poetics, fiction and storytelling as interface, as cultural device and knowledge filter. Doing so allows me to resist the typical deliverables afforded standard research thesis practice, and reject the authority of scientific language and imaginaries; undermining scientific measurement and representational methods as the sole means of objective knowledge production. It begins from the position that if coloniality is embedded in interface, it is also embedded within the self.
If interface are at the moment, technologies of the conqueror, intimately woven into our identity and general being within the world, we cannot talk about them in the abstract. We cannot talk about identity or ontology without being inside of it in all its messy and intimate entanglement. Oppression is personal. It is not abstract. It is not isolated within black, brown, indigenous and female bodies. It does not occur out there against others, because it begins with ourselves. To ignore this, to ignore how our daily practices and relations further colonial violence is to ascribe inequality as purely a representational problem, and to ignore how it is very much embedded within who we are and what we do in every moment; in identity as daily performance: habit produces ontology. Contending with imperialism and the coloniality of being means radical humanizing, through a return and embrace of the human condition, to a centering of our shared relation to the world, to embodiment. Thus, this project employs poetics and fiction in its imaginings about interface, it writes and researches, with the body; through engagement with the queer performativity of disorientation and diffraction as educative and transformative practices.
NOTES:
[1] Chun illustrates how computing technology evolved in response to an already preconceived fixation with a biopolitics of rationalization and optimization of human populations and capital; of which, evolving alongside and within its contemporary neoliberal context, this fixation finds its basis in enlightenment rationality, “that knowing leads to control”, whereby the internet and computers have exploded enlightenment thought “by literalizing it” (2011, p.6). Liberal principles of blind self-interest and freedom produce certain forms of governmentality that operationalize biopolitical power through (executively and scientifically) institutionalized action. This stimulated the conception of computing technology as a central mechanism for institutionalized population management.
[2] Drawing on the work of Frederic Jameson, Chun illustrates how postmodernism experienced as spatial dysfunction, has a certain disorienting and disconcerting effect on our means of modeling and comprehension (2011, p.72). Such effects, amplify the already cumbersome and challenging feat of understanding the relation between authentic experience and truth (2011, p.72-73).
[3] These subjects, however, are never manifest in isolation either: “but rather by a plethora of YOUs: by the very interconnections between various YOU’s” (ibid118) where, “every interaction is made to leave a trace, which is then tied to other traces and used to understand YOU, where YOU is always singular and plural” (Chun, 2016, 119). How YOU’s become correlated is determined by network science principles like homophily, of which we will get to momentarily.
[4] Bowker and Leigh Star footnote
[5] Crucial to understanding the way indigenous peoples have been made to be “remnants” of a dying culture across contexts is also the way colonial governments withheld resources and land rights pivotal to the well being and health of an unforgiveable amount of indigenous groups. Razack details how in Canada, due to food and tuberculosis crisis brought about by the European colonies, the Cree peoples during negotiations of Treaty 6 were forced to negotiate for medical aid and famine relief. But the Cree resisted, “Facing extreme reductions in food rations, a withholding of rations until young girls were procured for government officials, and increasingly harsh living an climactic conditions, Indigenous and Metis people rebelled. Punishment was swift and extended: chiefs were hung and imprisoned, a pass system was instituted to keep Indians away from white communities, and a relentless surveillance (involving policing and a suppression of religious practices) was instituted. By 1886, Daschuk reports, all Indians found of reserve were questioned. The devastation of this period was extensive. By 1889, less than half the pre-rebellion population of the Battleford reserves, for instance, survived” (Razack, 2015, p21)
[6] “Lazarsfeld and Merton examined and modelled the racial attitudes of Hilltown’s white residents. To do so, they focus on answers to the following two questions: “Q25. Do you think black and white people should live together in housing projects?” and “Q26: On the whole, do you think that black and white residents in the Village get along pretty well, or not so well?” Based on the answers, they divided the white residents into three camps: liberals, who “believe that ‘colored’ and white people should live together in housing projects and who support this belief by saying that the two racial groups ‘get along pretty well’ in Hilltown”; illiberals, who “maintain that the races should be residentially segregated and who justify this view by claiming that, in Hilltown, where the two races do live in the same project, they fail to get along”; and ambivalents, who “believe that the races should not be allowed to live in the same project, even though it must be admitted that they have managed to get along in Hilltown” (Lazarsfeld and Merton 1954: 26). They ignored the responses of black residents: they removed them from the analysis of value homophily because there were “too few illiberal or ambivalent Negroes with friends in Hilltown.” Thus, at the heart of value-homophily lies an initial racial segregation, an implicit assumption that values do not cross racial borders, or if they do, that this crossing is less significant than value consensus or conflict within a race.” (Chun, 2020, p23)
[7] Taine Bucher illustrates this in, If…Then Algorithmic Power and Politics. Algorithms as material-discursive phenomena steer and curate connection and relation; in virtual space the ways with which we relate to each other as “friends” are determined in accordance to what platforms determine are more “worthwhile” or “promising” connections (2018, p.6-7). Thus facilitating or fabricating some “relational impulses” over others (Bucher, 2018, p. 9).
[9] “the “god-like trick of seeing everything from nowhere”, an optics that “fucks the world” (Haraway, ref)
[10] Lucie Suchman quote on man creating the miracle of life through the machine
[11] Insert footnote explaining this
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