By Erica Orange & Jared Weiner, The Future Hunters, and Eshanthi Ranasinghe, Exploration & Future Sensing, Omidyar Network
Erasure refers to the “practice of collective indifference that renders certain people and groups invisible.” It is used to describe how “inconvenient people” — ethnic, religious, and racial minorities, women, the LGBTQIA community, lower classes, servants, and slaves — are dismissed in recorded history; and how their contributions, struggles, and achievements are ignored, removed, or undone. Groups have long been written out of history. The Roman decree damnatio memoriae, ‘‘condemnation of memory,’’ punished individuals by destroying every trace of them from the city. It was considered a fate worse than execution. If history is written by the victors, then it is the group that sits most in power whose perspective prevails, especially in formal institutions or structures of power. In many ways, technology, with its distributed networks and information, has allowed for more perspectives to emerge and flourish, alongside a general move toward more inclusion in storytelling. But in recent years, we see indications of this trend toward erasure reemerging, and coming to encompass something far greater and more ethically nuanced than it has before, at the intersection of technology, culture, and public policy.
Technology is amplifying a bifurcation where, on the one hand, more stories are emerging and being told from the perspective of people who would otherwise have been erased; but on the other hand, it is now easier to dismiss people we disagree with and views that make us uncomfortable.
Rise of Cancel Culture: One way we see erasure manifesting is through the rise of cancel culture — “a movement in which the goal is to seemingly reject, through avoidance and erasure, things that many have deemed unacceptable or problematic.” Although done in earnest, to show protest or disagreement, even solidarity for a group that one feels is being treated unfairly, the result is often lost dialogue and connection to those who disagree, leaving no room for growth and evolution. It can even have an antithetical impact on the movements that are trying to bring the issues to light, and break down important allegiance as, in great irony, “You can really only be cancelled by your own side.” Former US President Barack Obama recently urged young people to leave cancel culture behind. A mob quickly rose to the defense of cancel culture, sprinkled with a bit of “OK, Boomer” judgment.
Cancel culture now turns thoughtless comments into firing offenses where flawed humans face swift and immediate erasure at the impulse of modern morals. The cancellation of flawed women from the internet, in a “trial by Instagram,” is another troubling manifestation. As Elle Contributing Editor Pandora Sykes writes, “When a male celebrity screws up, he is duly lambasted, before rising, a few weeks later, from the keyboard’s ashes. But when a woman screws up, her error is used as a calling card for her total erasure. Her mistake is no peccadillo; it is proof of her worthlessness.” And just how far will the judgment of other people’s morality go? How do you un-cancel the cancelled?
Erasure from Social Media: This type of erasure takes many forms. It is common practice for people to erase posts, even remove contacts, when they see content or opinions they do not believe in or subscribe to. Far-right activists are increasingly getting kicked off platforms like Twitter, erasing their presence, history, and connection to the network, which emboldens them as martyrs among their supporters. Memes shared on social media also reflect cultural erasure (and cultural appropriation), especially when shared across social media channels. The internet is now more aware of the damage done by majority cultures borrowing elements of minority cultures and brands exploiting marginalized consumers.
Personal Privacy and Erasure as a Right: Originally, data erasure referred to how “personal data must be governed, collected, processed, and erased.” For the first time, the right to be forgotten is found in the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), in addition to the right to erasure. And data subjects are entitled to revoke consent (and access) at any time. Social media accounts of children should be automatically wiped when they reach 18, according to a new study. A report by the London School of Economics (LSE) into kids’ attitudes toward the internet found that they “overwhelmingly wanted a ‘grand erasure’ of their online footprint to stop childhood mistakes from affecting their future.”
The 2019 Ethiopian Airlines crash counted among its fatalities passengers from 35 countries. But in the aftermath of the tragedy, many Western media outlets “stripped their reporting of emphasis on Africa almost entirely, framing the tragedy chiefly in terms of its impact on non-African passengers and organizations.” In her 2016 book “In the Wake: On Blackness and Being,” Tufts University professor Christina Sharpe argues that “black people in the US and around the world exist in a state of nonbeing and constant erasure.” The long-time erasure of black women led to the #SayHerName movement, which drew attention to black women believed to be victims of police brutality. Missing black and brown children receive much less media coverage in the US than their white counterparts, while black men are overrepresented as perpetrators of crime in US media.
A major study on diversity has found that Hollywood is still “under-representing women, disabled people, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people and those from ethnic minority backgrounds, both on screen and behind the camera.” These findings show that the erasure of different groups is still tolerable to some. Hollywood is also under fire for the whitewashing and erasure of East Asian characters. However, the media can also have the opposite effect. For instance, the internet has made transpeople more visible. Few marginalized groups have experienced such a profound change of fortune during the last decade. But some argue that it has also made them more vulnerable in the so-called “culture wars.”
New forms of erasure are emerging at the intersections of technology, surveillance, government-centralized control, and policy.
Africa: Kenyans are being asked to choose between legal erasure and “being commodified as data by their own government.” The Kenyan government recently mandated DNA-linked national IDs void of data protection. “This mass registration exercise would see the issuance of new digital ID cards for all Kenyan residents. Many Kenyans refused to register, either because of concerns over privacy and data security, or simply as a protest to the government’s threats, coercion, and bullying tactics.”
Asia: China has wiped memories of Tiananmen Square off the internet. The Chinese military killed as many as 10,000 people during Beijing’s violent suppression of pro-democracy protesters 30 years ago. But today, those victims and the gruesome events in Tiananmen Square have been virtually wiped from China’s collective memory. Beijing has “achieved this mass erasure through an unprecedented crackdown on all forms of public speech in the streets and online, relying on advanced technology to automate much of their efforts.” Add to this the fact that the Communist Party wants to construct a unified nation by erasing differences in culture, religion, and ethnic identity. Uyghurs and Tibetans, who together still make up most of China’s westernmost regions, bear the burden of these systematic efforts to erase ethnic identity. And in Hong Kong, ongoing protests against a controversial extradition bill is leading to the steady erasure of the Hong Kong identity.
US: The United States once stood up against the erasure of intellectual freedom. But the lukewarm response of the Trump administration to the murder of Saudi critic Jamal Khashoggi is an example of why the global defense of freedom of the press and speech is no longer an American priority. As Hannah Arendt argues in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” the erasure of truth, facts, and standards of reference furthers the collapse of democratic institutions.
Several issues surrounding erasure loom ahead of the 2020 US Census. In what some have referred to as “paper genocide,” the erasure of Native people from the US census “amounts to a systematic destruction of Native identity by reclassifying people into non-Native racial groups on government records.” An LGBT category will also not be featured on the 2020 Census. This perceived erasure matters for both practical and symbolic reasons, as it shows that the fight for LGBT equality is historic and continuing. Immigrant communities also fear erasure with the proposed addition of a citizenship question on the Census.
Erasure is also making its way into legal statutes to counteract recognitions of identity to groups whose populations were decimated by repeated attempts to deny rights and identity. For example, the US Indian Child Welfare Act, enacted in 1978, made it very difficult for non-Native parents to adopt Native children, a counter-measure to “correct” decades of forced removal and conversion of Native children that made obsolete their Native American heritage and identity. This law is being challenged, leading some to fear cultural erasure and endangerment of affirmative action laws and tribal rights.
For all the progress being made, erasure is leading to a war against memory through the rewriting of past narratives and the espousal of revisionist history (e.g., Holocaust denial, the separation of Muslim history from Indian history, censoring the US confederate past). Alabama, along with many other former Confederate States, is struggling with how to teach children about its slave history. Holocaust history is being rewritten in parts of Eastern Europe. Anyone suggesting that Poland was complicit in the Holocaust could face fines or even imprisonment of up to three years under a controversial new law. In 2017, Marine Le Pen tried rewriting France’s history by questioning the country’s role in the Holocaust.
The concept of erasure is even going the way of “fake news,” being twisted to apply to contexts that are, if anything, attempting to the do opposite. For example, US conservative commentators were calling the removal of Confederate statues an act of erasing the past, rather than an attempt to de-valorize men who committed atrocious acts against enslaved people, despite the fact that no history was being rewritten or denied.
Where does the cleansing of memory stop? In a world where the lines between fact and fiction become increasingly blurred, what impact will this have on historical erasure? How will this affect what children learn, or are taught, in school? What laws could be undone? Will history be viewed as something malleable rather than factual? Context and interpretation will take on greater urgency.
This is Trend #2 of 5 in Omidyar Network’s Exploration and Future Sensing 2020 Trends to Watch. View the full series here.
Consider Explorations an open space for discussion. We welcome new perspectives — especially those rarely heard, contradictory, relevant, and tangential — and most of all, conversation and partnership to build the future we want, one that includes and empowers us all.
