BECOMING DIGITAL CHATTEL: A MEDIA ARCHAEOLOGY OF BLACK CYBERNETIC SUBJECTIVITY AND THE PLANTATION INFORMATICS OF INTERNET CULTURE
BECOMING DIGITAL CHATTEL: A MEDIA ARCHAEOLOGY OF BLACK CYBERNETIC SUBJECTIVITY AND THE PLANTATION INFORMATICS OF INTERNET CULTURE
Date
2021
Authors
Goldberg, David Albert Mhadi
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Eagle, Jonna
Department
American Studies
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Abstract
As surely as the prison industrial complex developed in the wake of US chattel slavery, the twenty-first century digital subject is an object of surveillance, commoditization, simulation, mediation, and algorithms that extend slavery’s information-management, control, and representational strategies. This project conceptualizes the roles that information and data processing played in dehumanizing captured Africans and their descendants, and also proposes a more than analogous relationship between US chattel slavery and contemporary, technologically-determined, social configurations. The resulting centuries-spanning complex, what I call Immaculate Slavery, connects past to future, and Africa’s Gold Coast to California’s Silicon Valley. This interdisciplinary project braids various threads of media history, Black studies, materialist philosophy, Internet culture, and software engineering methodology. I analyze how chattel slavery’s anti-Black stereotypes and ideological concepts survived Abolition to inhabit and animate artifacts of symbolic slavery: derogatory literary caricatures, cartoons, toys, corporate mascots like Aunt Jemima, and household objects. This material and media culture has been supplanted by digital objects such as racist animated GIFs, avatars that perpetuate anti-Black stereotypes, and photorealistic Black digital puppets created for cinematic visual effects and video games. I attend to the ways that a historical Black reliance on “positive” media representations in media such as film and comic books is destabilized by the use of Black avatars and other racial prosthetics online, and by media that ostensibly criticizes Immaculate Slavery through the depiction of traumatized Black characters. I argue that even though the presence of Black characters can often counter anti-Black stereotypes, they do not always function as objects of symbolic liberation. Instead of portraying the agency and creativity that facilitated Black survival to complicate these dystopian narratives, Black characters are reduced to Black Digital Icons that are deployed to shock and horrify the audience, thereby revisiting the horrors of slavery via technology-driven allegories. As a result, Immaculate Slavery is portrayed as inescapable and if a Black character can’t escape in a work of fiction that is supposed to criticize reality, then neither can those who live the reality that is being subject to criticism. Ultimately, I propose the conception of alternative forms of Black cybernetic subjectivity that, on the one hand are not based on many-to-one representations (hero identification), and on the other not dissolved in the many-to-many representations of social media. The Black avatar as I am imagining it is not an anthropomorphic representation of an idealized protagonist or social configuration, but an interface for massively complex software objects that are built with Black-aligned storytelling platforms, design tools, GitHub repositories, Stack Exchanges, programming languages, database schemas, and machine learning algorithms. This project does not imagine a “separate but equal” cyberspace, but a separate and radically different one.
Description
As surely as the prison industrial complex developed in the wake of US chattel slavery, the twenty-first century digital subject is an object of surveillance, commoditization, simulation, mediation, and algorithms that extend slavery’s information-management, control, and representational strategies. This project conceptualizes the roles that information and data processing played in dehumanizing captured Africans and their descendants, and also proposes a more than analogous relationship between US chattel slavery and contemporary, technologically-determined, social configurations. The resulting centuries-spanning complex, what I call Immaculate Slavery, connects past to future, and Africa’s Gold Coast to California’s Silicon Valley. This interdisciplinary project braids various threads of media history, Black studies, materialist philosophy, Internet culture, and software engineering methodology. I analyze how chattel slavery’s anti-Black stereotypes and ideological concepts survived Abolition to inhabit and animate artifacts of symbolic slavery: derogatory literary caricatures, cartoons, toys, corporate mascots like Aunt Jemima, and household objects. This material and media culture has been supplanted by digital objects such as racist animated GIFs, avatars that perpetuate anti-Black stereotypes, and photorealistic Black digital puppets created for cinematic visual effects and video games. I attend to the ways that a historical Black reliance on “positive” media representations in media such as film and comic books is destabilized by the use of Black avatars and other racial prosthetics online, and by media that ostensibly criticizes Immaculate Slavery through the depiction of traumatized Black characters. I argue that even though the presence of Black characters can often counter anti-Black stereotypes, they do not always function as objects of symbolic liberation. Instead of portraying the agency and creativity that facilitated Black survival to complicate these dystopian narratives, Black characters are reduced to Black Digital Icons that are deployed to shock and horrify the audience, thereby revisiting the horrors of slavery via technology-driven allegories. As a result, Immaculate Slavery is portrayed as inescapable and if a Black character can’t escape in a work of fiction that is supposed to criticize reality, then neither can those who live the reality that is being subject to criticism. Ultimately, I propose the conception of alternative forms of Black cybernetic subjectivity that, on the one hand are not based on many-to-one representations (hero identification), and on the other not dissolved in the many-to-many representations of social media. The Black avatar as I am imagining it is not an anthropomorphic representation of an idealized protagonist or social configuration, but an interface for massively complex software objects that are built with Black-aligned storytelling platforms, design tools, GitHub repositories, Stack Exchanges, programming languages, database schemas, and machine learning algorithms. This project does not imagine a “separate but equal” cyberspace, but a separate and radically different one.
Keywords
African American studies,
Web studies,
American studies,
cybernetics,
digital media,
internet,
slavery,
surveillance
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271 pages
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