From surveillance to racist algorithms, the internet has routinely been used as a tool of global capitalism and white supremacy.
From surveillance to racist algorithms, the internet has routinely been used as a tool of global capitalism and white supremacy to enact violence. Thanks to social distancing, we’re more attuned to the vast possibilities of our digital landscape. Work-from-home models that were previously thought of as impossible are now in place, while much-needed intimacy can look like dancing the night away with your friends at a 48-hour Zoom party. My iPhone’s weekly screen time report is just another reminder of my intensified digital presence and the physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion that often follows. As we increasingly spend more hours online, especially during these times, how can the internet become more of a restorative space Ja’Tovia Gary’s 2020 sculpture, Citational Ethics (Saidiya Hartman, 2017), uses bright purple neon lights to feature the words of African American literature and history professor Saidiya Hartman, “Care is the antidote to violence.”
Pain necessitates medicine, and data healing—a concept championed by guerilla theorist and curator Neema Githere—alchemizes the trauma enacted by the internet into new technologies. Data healing is born from data trauma, a term created by media artist and programmer Olivia McKayla Ross, to describe the compounded effects of navigating digital infrastructures created to exploit, categorize, and discard personhood. “There’s digital encounters like not being able to find information about yourself or the stages of grief after being hacked, but how do we talk about the violence of being counted, of being sorted–and of not being counted, of not being sorted?” Ross told Bitch. “E-capitalism has taken movements and watered them down because once you label something, you limit what it can become. Predictive analysis limits our human potential for growth.”
Information can be used to harm people: For instance, Ross cites a trans teenager being outed by the targeted ads drawn from their search history, or survivors of eating disorders receiving triggering ads based on their previous searches. “I find that one key aspect of data trauma is when you’re treated as a set of habits, as a user and not as a person who can evolve and change their mind.” Ross also points to the language of the internet, with words such as submission on digital forms describing the power differentials when giving away information to faceless recipients and questions referring to the “cloud” when in actuality, the internet is a tangible network of cables and wires rooted in the earth, in our water, and in our walls. In summer 2019, Githere was introduced to the concept of data trauma in Drafting Neo Cyber-Feminisms, a gathering facilitated by Ross and New York–based collective BUFU.
“In this space, people were thinking about how predatory the internet was, but still working within it, endeavouring to see things from this techno-optimist perspective,” Githere told Bitch. “That led me to data healing—if there is data trauma, then there must be data healing. We deserve our pathways to bliss.” Githere, formerly known across the internet as findingneema, has been working with and on the internet for years. I first found her through digital diasporas, a project whereby she traveled around the Black diaspora and documented how the internet was being harnessed to “art-iculate” new identities online. She’s since created Divest from Instagram, a call to queer Black and Brown creators to leave the platform that profits from their creativity. Through community classes and online engagement, Githere has critically exposed the power dynamics behind data politics—the way our digital footprints are valued, extracted, and monetized.
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