The Digital Articulation of Black Lives Matter
The Black Lives Matter protests of summer 2020 saw the engagement of what was likely the largest population of supporters in any American movement historically. At the same time, the response by public officials largely took on symbolic gestures, as opposed to the fulfillment of popular slogans and local organizations’ demands. The problem arises about what to do with this tension between Black Lives Matter’s popularity and its failure to fulfill material policy.
At the national level, the demands of the movement can be generalized to the defunding of police departments, the end of qualified immunity and other abusive police practices, and the investment into Black communities. No matter the other symbolic demands of this new generation of pop public intellectuals, these were the fundamental material demands of the movement in most local permutations and at the national level.
Nationally, the moment of politicians in kente cloths and statue razing has subsided today, where it would be hard to argue that the architecture of Black lives has changed all too much. The momentary defunding of police departments in some 20 cities was followed by the refunding of these same cities and increased funding of police departments nationally in 2021. While local threats were made to police power, no state abolished qualified immunity. And, in cities such as Philadelphia, posited community investment became business investment, little impacting those most affected by over-policing.
A trend has arisen where political enthusiasm for the movement’s demands in 2020 is met with stalled efforts in the following years. Brooklyn Center, Minnesota proves a clear example of this at a local level. Demonstrators responding to Duante Wright’s death in mid-2021, with rollover enthusiasm from the last summer’s mobilization, originally proposed relatively large reforms (e.g. police defunding, reduction of police power, and mass funding of Black communities) with political support, but by late 2021, resolutions passed were scaled back to the extent that protestors believed the policy might hurt further attempts at reform. This negotiation and reduction of demands by public officials have been observed at the national level as well. After the 2020 summer in which Democratic politicians protested alongside demonstrators, activists have been continually pushed out of political discussions. For example, after Senator Cory Booker’s proclamations against police misconduct, his police reform bill has become watered-down in the eyes of activists.
From the other side of history, these 2020 protests, while making substantial developments in local communities, look to have widely incorporated anger at police brutality into the general way of things, both by Democratic politicians and capital.
Here is a clear example of interpassivity, where well-intentioned, middle-class liberals and progressives, allowed their economy of social capital and virtue to stand in for a sustained political movement. The overemphasis of virtue through cyber-spatial engagement and protest as a commodity meant that our “being on the right side of history” transmuted into the narrative that history had in fact progressed.
What is of interest here is how internet engagement, using conceptualizations of cyberspace and the aesthetics of politics, makes the mass protest of Black Lives Matter sterile despite its visible popularity.
Understanding Cyberspace
Political participation within the BLM protests largely took on a virtual character. Events such as Blackout Tuesday overwhelmed physical protest but had no associated material impact. By June 2nd, 2020, more than 28 million Instagram users had posted a black square with the #blackouttuesday hashtag, while participants in the summer’s protests were estimated to be anywhere between 15 and 26 million.
Understanding how our preference for internet activism over sustained, physical protest requires more tools than just the near-fetishistic use of “performative activism”: it requires an understanding of internet use through a concept of cyberspace. Blackout Tuesday and attending BLM protests with hand-painted “HELLO KITTY SAYS ACAB” signs might be obvious examples of performative activism, in that they served more to satiate liberal-progressive virtue and social hygiene than to produce black liberation; but the naming of these actions as such says nothing about the absolute pervasiveness, even preference for, such actions during the summer of 2020.
The term ‘cyberspace’ refers to the way in which communication networks have an associated virtual plane of human activity. It is the space between computers. While the Internet refers to a technology itself, cyberspace describes something like our folk use of ‘internet’ when we say “He’s always on the internet”: that is, a plane of living accessed through the internet and similar communication technologies.
In the wild west of Web 1.0, it was possible to conceive of the internet as primarily a tool for human communication and knowledge. Today, few would still maintain the internet is principally a tool. The invasion of a Y2K bug ended this paradigm. As the 21st century bore Web 2.0, two changes occurred: the internet was centralized through a few “Big Tech” firms, and cyberspace replaced the technology of the internet. More and more, the internet became a place of social habitation, through developing social networks and so Web 2.0 became primarily a cyber-spatial arena. Today, it even becomes hard to think of Web 2.0 simply as a space of living; rather virtual social networks become a part of ourselves. The pompous and Luddite warning of Italian theorist Bifo becomes important here: the natural conclusion of our current concept of the internet is “the wiring of the human mind in a network continuum of the cybernetic type destined to structure the fluxes of digital information by means of the nervous system of all the key institutions of contemporary life.” Every day we spend much of our day in cyberspace; at its extreme, this behavior takes the form of young adults spending upwards of three days doing else but gaming. Bifo’s warning describes a world in which this extreme instance is distributed across all of society so that our lives are completely consumed by the virtual. What will politics look like when it has been replaced by the virtual?
Mark Fisher describes this “capitalist cyberspace” as the development of cyberspace along with a profit motive. In Web 2.0, the fundamental logic of the web is based on profit and data accumulation; in this way, internet reality is constructed by the drives of capital in a way that is unimaginable in physical space. According to Fisher, while the Frankfurt theorist Herbert Marcuse feared culture’s openness to capital in the mid-20th century, the unprecedented access the market has to people’s lives today was unimaginable in Marcuse’s time without a fully developed cyberspace. If our whole persons are partly submerged in cyberspace, fundamentally dictated by profitable algorithms and logics, then cyberspace becomes the most prominent actor in continuing our postmodern cultural-political malaise.
Postmodernism, as the “cultural logic” of accelerated capitalism, describes the way in which today we are incredulous of metanarratives, obsessed with revivalism, and stuck at political standstill. In the West today, our culture is defined by skepticism towards religion and dogma; our media reproduces franchises and images of the past (compare Star Wars: The Force Awakens to A New Hope, and you find an almost identical plot); and large-scale political conflicts have been replaced by motionless cultural debates (compare the Civil Rights era to 2021’s debate over Mr. Potato Head). All these elements describe our culture today, which theorists title ‘postmodernism’ and connect to contemporary accelerated capitalism. Importantly, this form of culture relies upon a structure of disavowal (i.e. the mental distance we put between ourselves and a belief, allowing our actions to maintain that belief). Virtue and personal intent are overemphasized, so that, in Fisher’s words, we may “fetishize money in our actions” as long as “we have already taken an ironic distance towards money in our heads”. This impulse continually seizes us as we submerge farther into a capital-augmented cyberspace. Our navigation of society and ourselves relies upon social hygiene and postmodernism’s overvaluation of virtue. Thus, it is logical, that many or most of us should choose simply to post #BLM because it feels like the right thing to do. In cyberspace, we construct our virtual selves but also our real selves. This relies upon this exact overvaluing of virtue. As long as we have posted an infographic on police violence and maintained our social hygiene, we may continue in our physical actions to consent to police violence. The post, the sign of virtue in cyberspace satiates the impulse to produce change and thus no referring material action needs to exist.
The German artist Hito Steyerl ponders the way we should understand politics when “the technology through which … crises are represented to us is more or less the same”, when “spread events, be it a virus or … a period of rebellion or demonstration or the spread of fake news … can be simulated using the same kind of mathematics”. It seems that under Web 2.0’s capital-augmented cyberspace, most cultural objects are placed into a system of equivalency, wherein their value is based upon virtue and profit. This understanding of culture and politics vindicates Kendall Jenner’s 2017 “Live for Now” Pepsi commercial, featuring a scene where amidst protest Jenner hands a police officer a can of Pepsi. If the May ’68 generation were the “Children of Marx and Coca-Cola”, in an internal conflict between two autonomous and contradicting objects; it seems today a generation of children to protest and Pepsi have resolved this contradiction: both may, through cyberspace, signal virtue-profit. Under Fordist production (when work was centered on the factory which has all but died in the West, replaced by a society of freelancers), parts of one’s life (private, work, social, political) were compartmentalized. Now, however, with a constant openness to capital (through the internet), these lines are blurred. Our lives and most importantly our political activities such as protest, become production, acts of social capital accumulation.
In Web 2.0’s cyberspace, a site of immediate exposure to capital, the postmodern overemphasis on virtue and intent completely subsumes our response to real violence. “The capture of consciousness and human existential being via capitalist cyberspace” closes any avenues for material response, as we participate in this virtual economy of virtue.
Mass Protest and Articulation
An element of this sterility has to do with contemporary mass protests’, especially the case of BLM, articulation. Searching #BLM and #blacklivesmatter on Instagram in summer 2020 resulted in a swarm of black squares and infographics to the point where they overpowered other modes of communicating the protests. The black square is at its heart the purest form of postmodern production (production no longer centered in the factory but decentralized into personal life and gig work): black squares are produced as identical, mechanical images decentralized into individuals’ social lives. German filmmaker Hito Steyerl problematizes the production of images as being necessarily political. For example, the portraiture of 17th century Europe was deeply tied to themes of monarchy and bourgeois affect; thus, Steyerl argues that no protest could be made using the same visual articulation: every image is produced from a political atmosphere and every articulation reproduces its guiding logic. In the same way that a democrat in the 17th century could only perpetuate the system of monarchy by using regal portraiture, the same can be said of Blackout Tuesday’s articulation through the logic of capitalist cyberspace.
Steyerl interrogates the reproduction of a protest’s enemy through the movie Showdown in Seattle’s use of the hegemonic device of montage. Today, where the digital is the default image, the mechanical production of black squares, infographics, and resurrected 1960s aesthetics recreate the basic logic of the web in the same way Showdown in Seattle’s use of montage reproduces the regime it fought. As an offensive front for opposing institutions of Black oppression, the flurry of data produced in cyber-spatial engagement only submerges us further into our digital hyper-reality and away from the material. This articulation fundamentally aids a detachment from the material and epitomizes an emphasis on virtue.
The convergence of these effects of cyberspace and ascending, in-person protests resulted in the brevity of the Black Lives Matter movement at the national level. While early June 2020 saw over 3000 demonstrations related to BLM nationally, by the time the first fall leaf had fallen, there were around 10 or fewer demonstrations each day. This seems to indicate the reactive nature of the summer’s protests. The protests appear to be an outburst of energy that could not be sustained by the very nature of its existence. BLM as a mass protest was primarily disseminated through capitalist cyberspace and thus its popular aesthetics and the cultural engagement in its protests were subject to profitable logics.
In the contemporary U.S., the mass protest (one with broad coalitions, large numbers, and large spectacle) has been culturally centered in the political sphere. In 2020, for example, a friend of mine questioned my politics after I said I had not yet attended a protest. For many young Americans, to be politically engaged can only be understood in terms of protest and the vote. This development is largely the result of perceived institutional illegitimacy, political polarization, and the popularity of social media. These factors are all cultural derivations of postmodernism: our distrust of the public sphere and metanarratives; our pseudopresent of cultural polarization; and our hardwiring into the drives of capital. Every year there is a mass protest that accelerates, yet they all seem sterile. In the U.S., this trend is deeply tied to cyberspace and the postmodern despondency it catalyzes. The logic of cyberspace seems to translate into mass protest with its cycles of virtue and social hygiene. By fall 2020, the American cultural consciousness felt it had done right by Black Americans. Individuals had at the level of intention clarified their virtue and that was enough.
Thus, through the use of the concept ‘cyberspace’ and particularly Fisher’s analysis, the contradiction between the popularity and malfunction of 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests may be somewhat understood. Mass protest converted into mass cyberspatial engagement, beholden to an intensified postmodern culture.
