By: Chipo Mapondera

Kuchema

ABSTRACT

The Shona word for grieving is “kuchema”, which also means “to cry”. In the time around grief, there are a number of ceremonies and practices carried out, in service of sending off the deceased with dignity, and holding space for those left behind, to cry. In the community during this time, wailing, ululating, singing and drumming are heard, as part of the healing process.

This project presents a virtual reality healing space, exploring Shona traditional values. It is a site where users can enter, to find solace through sound, space and communal ceremony. The concept is based on a hypothesis that people are struggling with IRL reality imposed by the systems of colonialism, patriarchy and capitalism. This is exacerbated by technology, which impacts users’ emotional and mental well-being. By developing this VR experience, I seek to hack these systems. Furthermore, traditional gaming theory was influenced by Cold War/ Neoliberal ideologies of instant gratification and winning. In my work, I disrupt these values by designing spaces that explore new realities and foster community.

Finally, the work will hack history by presenting an imagined reality of how Zimbabwean society and contemporary culture might have developed, had it not been disrupted by European colonialism. This is done by exploring the rich culture, values and spiritual modalities of our traditions. The project questions how we would implement our traditional healing modalities for modern life, and how our natural spaces would be used. The visitor is cocooned by mist and I’mspiritual beings, and held by a physical and metaphysical community (in the virtual).

Discover the Kuchema Prototype on Spatial. Create and account on Spatial.io and link to the URL, on your computer.
To view on a VR headset, mobile phone or tablet, download the Spatial app, access your account, and search for Kuchema Prototype.

Collaborators:
3D modellling: Joel Chandauka
Soundscape Design: Fungai Nengare

KUCHEMA: THE SOUNDSCAPE

The spirituality of water carries great significance across Zimbabwean cultures. It is no coincidence that we find ourselves on the shores of a sacred water body, in exploring our traditional healing modalities. The Kuchema Soundscape presents interwoven stories and sacred knowledge collected during the development of this project. Oral history is fundamental to the passing down of information in our cultures. Therefore, it is fitting that a primary research method in the development of this project was to consult with guardians and other custodians of traditional and spiritual knowledge.

The audiovisual is a healing experience that will leave a deep impression. It aims to connect the listener with something deep within themselves, and also beyond ourselves. It is best experienced through headphones.

With special thanks to:

SOUND

Sound designer:
Fungai Nengare

Editor:
Chipo Mapoondera

Featuring:
Biko Emcee (Emcee/ Writer/ Academic/ Philosopher)
Mbuya Humba (Spiritual Healer)
Epheas Maphosa (Painter)
Chipo Mapondera

VISUAL

Filmmaker:
Joel Chandauka

Filming Assistant:
Mufaro Mafunga

Choreography & Performance:
Chaleen Chimara
Absalom Chikwezwera
Ngonidzashe Kamudyaringwa
of AfriKera Arts Trust

Costumes:
Sabina Mutsvati

Follow us to find out about the online launch of Kuchema: The Soundscape.

THE CHIRORODZIVA CAVES & KOREKORE INTANGIBLE CULTRES

Chirorodziva or The Chinhoyi Caves, consist of a system of channels and caves located close to Chinhoyi, a town 117 kilometres from the Zimbabwean capital of Harare. The place is a popular tourist site, now run by the Ministry of Tourism. It welcomes hundreds of local tourists on a busy day. 

On entering the National Park, a sign post displays superficial information related to the history of the place. Chirorodziva means “the pool of the fallen”. Legend has it that an incident took place in the 1930s when the Angoni tribe surprised people living near the caves and flung them from the opening of its collapsed roof, down 46 metres to the pool. Another story tells of the outlaw Nyamakwere who murdered many victims by throwing them into the pool. 

The main cave, with its silently sleeping pool, looks and feels quite peaceful, despite the macarbre stories. The myths surrounding the place are murky. The information given by the ministry amounts to little more than that signpost, and a few tales shared by the rangers, when prodded about the place’s spiritual significance. Even at the National Archives there is little to delve into. Despite this, it is generally understood that the space is a sacred one, nzvimbo inoyera. Even when speaking about the project to be undertaken, with writers and archivists of traditional cultures, academics and the like, cautionary tales are shared. Questions are raised on what I think may be drawing me to dig deeper into this place. That there must be an element of the spiritual at play.

It is understandable that such conclusions are drawn, as the spirituality of water runs deep in Zimbabwean cultures. At the ancient city ruins of Great Zimbabwe, totemic statues were found, which became the emblem of the country. A bird, the African fish eagle, or hungwe, perches atop. A fish and a crocodile sit below. The fish and crocodile represent njuzu, the people of the water, water spirits that walk the land. 

Njuzu are not frightening spirits, but one would not want to anger them, or you risk being dragged down into the waters, most likely to your peril. It is ill-advised to throw stones into the Sleeping Pool, or to swim in its waters. According to traditional laws, such actions would desecrate the sacred space. 

Such stories, and accounts of njuzu, are fairly common. Those that are allowed to return from the underwater realm are said to have been called to receive the spiritual gift, or shavi, of the njuzu. This gift bestows healing abilities, most likely linked to water. In our beliefs, water is a carrier of much spiritual energy and healing properties. 

The Korekore people have lived in the Chinhoyi area, and are the guardians of the Chirorodziva Caves. These people are considered a sub-group of the Shona people, an error of the colonial era. During that period the languages of diverse groups including the Korekore, Karanga and Manyika, amongst others, were incorporated into the unified Shona language, based on the Zezuru dialect. Thus many Zimbabwean cultures became homogenised, flattening the nuances and details of tangible and intangible cultures. 

In the National Archives there is a fair amount of information on the different groups, documented during the colonial era. Materials on the Korekore detail their burial rites and ceremonies. Burials were performed on kopjes, either in natural caves or in holes dug under the rocks. A family would have been buried together in a single cave. Although a Chief would have had a dedicated space to themselves. Young children would be buried in damp soil close to streams, in shallow graves (Powell, 1956, p. 7). Solemn ceremonies of prayer and music would have taken place at the grave sites of adults, with hari, or clay pots of water or traditional brew, left at the graves to honour the deceased. 

With its mythologies of death, questions can be raised about how the Chirorodziva space would have been used today, if it was not for the colonial disruption of our customs. Until today The Mhondoro are the preeminent spirit of a clan, embodied in a chosen individual. This spirit bestows rain and other material needs, and decides the chieftainship (Gelfand, 1969, p.38). Until today the Mhondoro visit Chirorodziva for spiritual rituals. It is an active shrine, a space for us to reconnect with vadzimu, or the ancestors, which is vital to Shona religions and customs, as detailed:

“For those in this world, life is incomplete, unproductive and dangerous without contact with the spirits. Spirit life, too, is incomplete without contact with the living.”

(Gelfand, 1969, p.41)

To know and understand more about Chirorodziva and its spiritual significance, one has to trace the steps to the spiritual guardians. The introduction of Christianity has distanced us from this knowledge. However, it is still maintained through a hierarchy of leadership that starts with the head of the village community, or Sabhuku. The Chief is the next in line. Finally the Mhondoro, shares information with those worthy, as the guardian of knowledge straight from the ancestors, vadzimu, and the Creator, or Musikavanhu. 

White colonial era settlers disrupted the beliefs and traditions around Chirorodziva, swimming in the waters and treating them in ways that traditional groups would not have dared. Thus such spaces were demystified and their value diminished. Traditional beliefs were disrupted and foreign ones encoded, which resulted in a loss of identity and connection to our deeper understanding and power. One could say this was one of the goals of colonial programming.  Through this virtual reality experience, I seek to remystify this space, creating an environment that is loaded with spiritual significance. The experience aims to hack the system by codifying it with information that speaks to the richness of our traditional and spiritual diversity. We will metaphorically swim in its depths, by representing the specificities of Korekore rituals and sites of spirituality. We will explore the mythology of water, its healing energy and the opportunities it affords us to enter the other realm, where njuzu, our water ancestors reign. It is believed that this realm, which is intertwined and relies on the realm of the living, is not much different.

It is, however, devoid of suffering, and a place of higher knowledge that we seek to tap into. In this virtual experience, we come to Chirorodziva to connect with our vadzimu, to honour them and receive comfort from them. Thus, it becomes a place of healing and solace, but also one of learning how to empower ourselves. It is time for a new reading of our mythology to represent and make the collective wisdom of our people more accessible. Technology presents an effective way to do this and to disrupt the limited narratives of colonialism, patriarchy and capitalism that I aim to shake up through my projects.

REFERENCES

Gelfand, M. (January, 1969). “The Shona Religion” in Zambezia: A Journal Of Social Studies in Southern and Central Africa, 1(1), 37-45.

Powell, R.J. (1956). “Notes on Burial Customs in the Bushu Reserve” in NADA: The Southern Rhodesia Native Affairs Department Annual, 33, 6-8.

back to the ball

SYSTEMS/HACKING

Editors’ Intro: Issue 2 (2024)

Our systems are broken. Let’s hack them to pieces and sell them off for parts. 

Though a halcyon glaze, hacking has been immortalised as agential resistance against oppressive power structures: David versus Goliath; Greta versus the climate; Cady against the Plastics. Yet a critical survey of contemporary hacker networks finds them entrenched in the existing regimes of power such that archetypal binaries of this nature fall flat. As anthropologist of hackers Gabrielle Coleman rightly observes, “One prevalent way of framing the hacker has been by casting him as the male hero-technologist who conquers the electronic frontier”.¹ Think about the hackers of our age: the so-called good ones like Eddie Snowden or the incarcerated Assange, or the real bad ones: the increasingly AI-generated Zuckerbaby, or Elon the worthless billionaire. What do they have in common? Besides their obvious identity signifiers, there is an undeniable frontier mindset engrained in each. Whether it be the infinite of outer space or the faux-walls of the metaverse, they share the belief that people, place, and everything in between is a data point to be detected, extracted, entrapped and liquified.

Yet in the months since we conceived of this issue, wrote the open call, and put it out into the world, it’s become increasingly clear, if it wasn’t obvious already, that our systems are broken. Could we reclaim hacking as a way to dismantle hegemonic ills to reconstitute a system that runs autonomously, fueled by something other than extractivist practices of devastation?

Since its inception as an illicit remote breaking into computer systems, hacking has undergone a myriad of metamorphoses, fragmenting into a multiplicity of computing practices, or practices that pirouette across the surfaces of computational frameworks and into the terrain of flowing blood and blooming flowers. Its objective, on the other hand, has remained steadfast: hacking uses the tools forged by the system to disrupt, deprive, disassemble that very same system. In this sense, hacking is a way to cultivate knowledges anew, to deviate from the rigidity of systems closed to external input and internal aberration.

Could we situate hacking as an alternative knowledge, a fraying edge on the broad expanse of epistemology? Donna Haraway claims that knowledge “does not pretend to disengagement”;² it always comes from somewhere, not out of nowhere. Karen Barad also insists knowledge is not preexistent, rather, materialised—if we may interject—from and through its system.³ Tim Jordan’s genealogy of hacking demonstrates hacking as “the engagement with redetermining information technologies” and hackers’ “drive to redetermination, to always being in a determinative relationship with information technologies while also always using that situation to change determinations, is a way of expressing and exploiting the rationality of information technology.”⁴ Substitute Jordan’s ‘information technologies’ with ‘systems’, and you get McKenzie Wark’s hacking: “To hack is to differ…The slogan of the hacker class is not the workers of the world united, but the workings of the world untied.”⁵

After all, what are hackers without systems? And without hackers, systems will not reveal themselves for what they are. SYSTEMS/HACKING is an inquiry into this enmeshment, a first step to help the infrastructure break apart, before an inevitable rebuild. 

DiSCo Journal’s second issue features 10 ‘hacks’ that exemplify hacking as a digital and/or analogue mode of intervention or deviation from a system. These hacks are diverse in subjects, methodologies and (re)presentations to reconsider hacking as knowledge, and at times, nonknowledge existing off of sheer irony.

The most prolific hacks cut across embedded processes to guilefully affect systems in ways that resist detection, appearing as a glitch or rupture unattributable to intentional disruption. As explored in Tanvi Kanchan’s experimental essay on performing digital illegibility, ways of glitching to subvert, to “poison the system” transcends the barrier between the physical and the digital to queer the reality it imposes on us. In a related vein, Sam Moore’s video essay and accompanying text on body horror, glitches in the Matrix, and monsters poetically meld together the idea of slippages and the trans body as a way to break binaries, gender, code, and otherwise.

To obfuscate one’s digital presence is another way to hack the platforms that track our every click and comment. Charlotte Lengersdorf challenges writing’s key function to convey meaning in written language through her essay and videos of asemic writing, or a visual form of meaning-less writing, as an abrupt break from legibility. erynn young gets into the weeds of self-censorship practices on TikTok through “@lgosp3@k” strategies, thinking through their implications for subverting and bypassing the social media platform’s content moderation practices. Peter Conlin asks “Have you been on petittube.com, and if not, why not?” He advocates for the French video platform’s search for “the least interesting videos on the internet” as a hack against the hyper-targeted recommendation system of YouTube. 

Yet hacks as a method of subversion have often been coopted by neoliberalism’s efficiency fetish such that the very system it seeks to dismantle enfolds it into its flesh. Cutting through the neoliberal entrails of hustle culture and self-help, Max Oginz writes on the circular temporality of online manifestation, its relation to sleeping and dreaming, and its evolution in the digital age to critique Capital’s mindfulness cult. Relatedly, Rebecca Miller experiments with ways to reclaim sleep via sound therapy in the form of inner tree recordings, capturing its effects on her sleep, and by extension, her creative output.

And sometimes the best way to hack the system is to create your own system from what you already know or possess. Centering sickness and crip theory as methodology, Anna Hughes takes us through her journey as a disabled researcher looking at how ASMR or re-creations of her physical body as digital in Blender enable a digital embodiment that surpasses the physical body. projektado collective presents an interactive media piece exploring the radicality of friendship as an anticapitalist, relational process of learning, living and organising. Entering into the choose-your-own-adventure dialogue with a mysterious, all-knowing figure, the reader can engage in an esoteric conversation that gradually unveils the reader-figure relationship as simultaneously contingent, precarious and precious. Finally, we are welcomed into the cosmology of the Shona people, a tribal community of modern-day Zimbabwe. Chipo Mapondera’s virtual reality (VR) world takes you to the silent sleeping pools of the Chinhoyi Caves, a sacred place IRL defamed by colonial programming. Rather than traditional trappings of gaming culture with its ubiquitous violence, “power-ups” and horseplay, in this VR you can find solace, through sound, space and communal ceremony, offering a glimpse into what technological systems can be.

We are also privileged to present our first artist residency with net artist-cum-urban farmer Heath Bunting. Often affiliated with the ‘90s net.art movement, Bunting worked in the early medium of the internet, parodying the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century. His net art projects toyed with the protocols of the street and the early net, exploring topics on border crossing, identity and data, social protocols, hacktivism and the politics of public space. For the residency, Bunting led the Blockchain vs Foodchain workshop for which he and the workshop’s participants discovered creative radical strategies around Bitcoin mining/investment and growing vegetables to prepare for the then-looming energy crisis instigated by the Ukraine-Russia war. In addition, he has also contributed to the issue homepage’s quirky graphic icons connected by the hashtag next to the articles’ hyperlinks. The icon images are Bunting’s visual interpretations of the articles’ contents, and their function as interventional conduits mimics the tactic of online spam pop-ups, which is, in a way, a sinister mode of hacking a user’s data. The hashtag colonises the homepage like a virus or an ambiguous symbol of nonknowledge, which both forefronts the articles and provides an idiosyncratic levity to the (sorta) seriousness of the issue’s theme. 

Finally, but certainly not least, a huge kudos to our fabulous web designer Andrea Elena Febres Medina for all her work and time in to the redesign, and to our wonderful editorial committee* who helped us actualise SYSTEMS/HACKING.

It’s easy to fall into hopelessness and despair at the state of current affairs, as our institutions, from education to government, continually betray our voices. Cynicism abounds as small acts of resistance, tiny hacks resembling papercuts, are dismissed for their impermanence and insignificance. What does blocking celebrities who have stayed silent in the face of genocide really do, one might ask? One small act may do next to nothing, but the collectivised hacks that inch towards change may add up. What does commenting, unfollowing, or blocking do? Could it confuse the algorithms, could it affect their bottom line? The cables of cause and effect are not so simple as to allow one to claim these hacks, both big and small, both digital and physical, to lead to definitive, systemic change. Yet a million papercuts will bleed you dry. And this system, broken as it is, deserves to wither.

Let the hacking commence

<3
Sandy Di Yu
Sarah Hwang
Tanvi Kanchan
Craig Ryder
[DiSCo Journal Managing Editors]

*Sarah Molyneaux (Birkbeck)

REFERENCES

1. See Gabrielle Coleman and Peter Jandrić, “Postdigital Anthropology: Hacks, Hackers and the Human Condition”, Postdigital Science and Education Vol 1 (2019): 525-550. ︎
2. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: the Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991), 196. ︎
3. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (London: Duke University Press, 2007), 361. ︎
4. Tim Jordan, “A genealogy of hacking”, Convergence 23, no 5 (2017): 541. ︎
5. McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), [003] and [006]. ︎

back to the ball

By: Rebecca Miller

The Future of Sonic Tree Medicine

About 1 in 3 adults sleep less than 7 hours per night, which can increase the risk of both mental and physical health conditions as well as the likelihood of accidents, injuries, and even possible death.¹ For the sake of daily functionality, humans need adequate levels of sleep, because “sleep services all aspects of our body in one way or another: molecular, energy balance, as well as intellectual function, alertness and mood.”² As explained by Dr Merrill Mitler, a sleep expert and neuroscientist at National Institutes of Health. “Loss of sleep impairs your higher levels of reasoning, problem solving and attention to detail”.³ Getting an adequate amount of good quality sleep can lead to benefits such as creative problem solving, improved performance, enhanced learning, and a better mood. But it’s a privilege reserved only for those who are not homeless.

In Grants Pass, Oregon, in April 2024, the Supreme Court leaned heavily in favour of passing local ordinances to ban sleeping and camping by unhoused people in public spaces. In defence of not criminalizing unhoused individuals, Justice Elena Kagan argues that “Sleeping is a biological necessity. It’s sort of like breathing. I mean, you could say breathing is conduct, too. But presumably, you would not think that it’s OK to criminalize breathing in public, and for a homeless person who has no place to go, sleeping in public is kind of like breathing in public.”⁴ This leads to the question, is the Supreme Court criminalising the dreams of the unhoused community? Or even depriving unhoused people of their human right to dream?

Scientists and artists throughout history have reported that their ingenious intuitions came to them while they slept. Among the most notable was Mary Shelly, who said the concept for her Gothic novel Frankenstein appeared to her in a dream. There is anecdotal evidence that Hypnagogia or N1, the earliest stage of sleep, is an incubator for creative ideas. Anne Trafton, life sciences writer at the MIT News office, recounts, “Thomas Edison often took advantage of this state. When struggling with a thorny problem, he would sit down for a nap while holding a metal ball in his hand. Just as he fell asleep, the ball would fall out of his hand and wake him up, and when he woke, he often had a new solution in mind.”⁵

METHODS

One of my cherished memories from childhood in California was going to Girl Scout camp in the summer. My favourite was Hidden Falls established in 1957, in the Redwood Forest of Soquel in the Santa Cruz mountains. Hidden Falls is a 90-acre gem populated by giant California Redwoods. This is also the site of the recent CZU Lightning Complex fires that burned through the Big Basin Redwoods State Park. In August 2020, a series of lightning strikes from a major thunderstorm struck Santa Cruz and San Mateo counties, initiating one of the most destructive wildfires in California’s history. The fire covered over 86,000 acres of land, homes and forest, including 97% of the state park which is home to ancient coastal redwoods ranging in age from 1,000-2,500 years old.⁶ Yet despite this recent history of destruction, these trees have long captivated those who wander amongst their ancient bodies. “The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always… From them comes silence and awe. It’s not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time.”⁷

On one memorable occasion, my oldest sister Sile and her best friend went to camp with me. In the evening we rolled out our sleeping bags under the majestic giants and slept underneath their graceful canopies. There was one night I was woken up in my sleep by some older campers who were disguised as Fairies. They said they were taking me to a Fairy party, and took me to a clearing in the woods where there were a few of the other campers. The Fairies danced and laughed and encouraged me to join in. They gave me a cupcake, and it tasted delicious. The Fairies sprinkled glitter over me and the other guests at the party, and when the party ended they led us back to our sleeping bags. I slept happily and soundly that night. In the morning I tried to find the other campers that were there with me. I asked my sister if it was her who took me to the Fairy party, and she denied it. None of the other campers besides the ones at the party knew anything about it either. I still had glitter in my hair for the rest of the day. I wondered about the night for a very long time, and occasionally I would pester my sister about her involvement in that night. She would consistently insist that she knew nothing.

Since that event, I have drawn a connection between trees and sleep. This was the initial inspiration to develop an experimental sleep hygiene routine to hack sleeplessness, improve sleep and foster creativity. This project is a prototype for sonic tree sleep medicine and could contribute to the development of an evidence base for nature prescriptions as outlined in Koselka et al.⁸

I propose that the interior sounds of trees could help with sleep; for example, listening to a recording of the interior sounds of trees before bedtime is part of a good sleep hygiene routine. The interior sounds of trees are in a different category from green noise,⁹ a type of noise designed to mimic the sounds of the natural world such as a bubbling stream, an ocean breeze, or the rustling of leaves, synthesized by focusing on midrange sounds. Although green noise may be popular, the green noise produced for sleep is not naturally occurring. Sleep product expert Ben Trapskin says, “Some green noise products may contain artificial or synthesized sounds, which can be less effective than natural sounds. It’s important to choose a product that uses high quality, natural sounds for the best potential sleep benefits.”¹⁰ Sara Silverman, a holistic sleep doctor and behavioural sleep medicine specialist, says green noise may help with sleep onset: “Overall, there’s limited data on green noise and sleep, but there is some evidence that it may potentially aid with improving sleep onset rather than sleep maintenance.”¹¹

For this sleep experiment systems hack on the nervous system, I sought out the highest quality recordings of the interior sounds of trees. Using the interior sounds of trees is important for this study and distinguishes it from the small evidence base of green noise that focuses on the external noises of nature. Although there are many recordings such as birds, water sources, and wind blowing through trees, there are not any investigations into the impact of the interior sounds of trees on sleep.

A study at UNSW Sydney indicates there is a connection between the proximity to green spaces and how much sleep people get.¹² Their research article Does Sleep Grow on Trees? is a longitudinal study to investigate the potential prevention of insufficient sleep with different types of urban green space. Professor Thomas Astell-Burt hypothesised that “parks, woodlands and other nearby green spaces might actually help us to nod off. Green space might counter impacts of noise and air pollution, and cool local heat islands, all of which can make sleep difficult.”¹³ The study found lower odds of developing insufficient sleep in areas where 30% or more of land cover within 1.6km had tree canopy. This research supports my speculation that digital recordings of the interior sounds of trees could provide the benefits that sleeping under a tree canopy could provide.

I procured six minutes of inner tree recordings from Jez Riley French, the field recording artist for this experiment. Made using hand-built contact microphones by French and his daughter Phoebe Riley Law,¹⁴ one recording was from a Corsican Pine tree in Broxa Forest in North Yorkshire and the other was from a Spruce tree in the Forest of Dean. I was not able to access a redwood tree for the recording as I now live in the UK, but I was able to find the next best thing. Because my sleep quality is generally poor, I performed this preliminary sleep experiment on myself for two weeks. Before bedtime, I rolled out my yoga mat, laid down on it in Savasana or Corpse pose and listened to the recording with headphones on repeat for 15-20 minutes with the lights dimmed. I heard the sap quietly moving up through the trunk, the water taken up by the roots and pulled through tube-like straws up to the leaves. To track my sleep quality, I kept a sleep journal to record my dreams, reactions and thoughts that materialised during the listening sessions. I asked myself: How did I sleep last night? What was my sleep like? I allowed for spontaneous impressions of the tree recordings and their impact on my sleep experience to be included.

DATA

Each morning after waking, I wrote for 10 minutes in my sleep journal. I wrote about the quality of my sleep, my dreams and how I felt. For this study, I have extracted the key elements relating to falling asleep and the quality of my sleep.

Sleep Journal Extracts

9/1/2024 – The sounds were more like rhythms. It felt relaxing to listen through the speakers on my laptop. It would be interesting to listen through headphones. The two recordings are about 15 min together.

10/1/2024 – I replayed the sounds of the interiors of trees. I allowed my thoughts to travel sonically inside the trees. Then I was woken up at 4:00 am by the frightening sound of foxes mating. It lasted a long time, and I could not go back to sleep so I folded laundry.

11/1/2024 – Each time I listen to the recordings I hear new things. I feel like I am travelling and drifting along the sounds of the interiors of the trees. I drifted off lightly to sleep.

12/1/2024 – I listened to the recordings, and I slept very deeply. I feel as though I just shut off. I did not remember my dreams.

13/1/2024 – When I listen to the recording, I start to recognize sections and parts that stand out such as in any time-based media. I lay down on my yoga mat in Savasana pose and listen. By the end, I have drifted off into a light sleep. I am prepared to go to bed.

14/1/24 – I listened to the sounds of the water being sucked up the tree through the roots. I dropped off to sleep quickly. I cannot remember any of my dreams or the feelings of my dreams.

15/1/24 – I did not listen tonight, and I had a terrible night’s sleep.

16/1/24 – I slept average nothing remarkable. I am still not remembering my dreams. I woke up a couple of times. What I am finding is when I listen to the recordings for 15 min, and I lay down on the floor on my back in Savasana pose with the external speakers streaming from my computer, I drift off into a light sleep. This makes it easier for me to fall asleep when I am in bed.

16/1/24 – I listened to the recordings. I am now familiar with the sounds. I had a bad night’s sleep. I missed my alarm and had to throw on my clothes and run out the door with my kids.

17/1/24 – I listened again for 15 min before bed. I had another difficult night’s sleep.

18/1/24 – I decided to use my watercolour paint in green and paint lines of different opacity on watercolour paper. I did this while listening to the recording. I think I will make a relaxing and meditative video with these ideas. I fell asleep swiftly. I dreamt about colours and the feeling of trees. 

19/1/24 – I did not remember my dreams. I painted concentric circles while I listened to the recordings. The circles remind me of the cross-section of a tree. What it looks like when you see the top of a tree stump. I have been researching the properties of Corsican pine. And soon I will research Fir trees. I bought some pine needle essential oil. I burned some in a diffuser. This helps to create a multi-sensory experience.

20/1/24 – When I was listening to the recording in the dark with headphones on and pine oil burning, I felt like I was taken deeper into myself. The recordings feel like an interior space, cave-like. Listening to the recordings is a calm restful preparation for sleep. This is a sleep exploration. It could be helpful to compare the tree recordings with a recording of the wind rustling through the leaves of a tree. My dreams were more like feelings. I woke up with more resolved feelings about directions I wanted to go in. I feel guided towards certain directions. Otherwise, I have not had any visual dreams. I woke up with no recollection, everything goes black, I unplug the screen.21/1/24 – Last night I had a full cinematic dream in parts, part 1, 2 and 3. It felt like lucid dreaming. When I listened to the tree sounds it felt like more intimate sounds of trees flowed through. It could be interesting to recreate or isolate the individual sounds I am hearing. How is the sound directly from the interior of trees different from any other sound from nature? The direct sound from the tree not a sound that sounds like leaves rustling. Not synthesized.

RESULTS

Before I began this study, I felt that I was not getting enough sleep. I would sometimes have trouble falling asleep and staying asleep without waking up several times in the night. When I listened to the inner sounds of trees before bed, ten out of fourteen nights of sleep were positively impacted by the experiment. I fell asleep more easily and slept deeper and longer. I only experienced poor-quality sleep four out of fourteen nights. A spontaneous creative impulse to paint emerged for two out of fourteen nights. I picked up the most immediate materials I had near me, which were watercolour paint and paper. I simply and loosely painted an image of circles and trees. I added a woman reclining on her back. It felt like automatism to me, “bodily movements that are not consciously controlled like breathing or sleepwalking.”¹⁵

It is possible that listening to the recording of the trees in combination with lying in the Savasana pose could have a positive impact on falling asleep and staying asleep through the night. However, listening to the sound of the trees was important in helping me focus and through it I felt more connected to nature and the earth.

CONCLUSION

It is evident that listening to trees could contribute to a good sleep hygiene routine. As a hack for sleeplessness, it has been effective in relaxing my nervous system, which has helped me with the quality of my sleep. By intuitively exploring alternative sonic tree sleep medicine I was able to design a unique sleep hygiene routine which produced positive effects. 

Research implications suggest that there could be situations when listening to sonic tree medicine digitally in areas where there is no green space or tree canopy could assist with better sleep quality. Digital technology, which is so often seen as the opposite of nature, can be used to bring us closer to nature by allowing us to experience sounds of nature that we wouldn’t ordinarily be able to hear.
Creativity was a surprising affordance in this study. I speculate listening to a variety of the interior sounds of different trees could lead to a range of unexpected creative outcomes. The same study could be done for releasing creativity or assisting with creative blocks. There are ways that technology can harness the power of nature to solve human problems that are currently being researched. Over the past five years, the US Defence Department has spent large amounts of money to study the white-crowned sparrow, “to discover ways to enable people to go without sleep and to function productively and efficiently,”¹⁶ looking for a way to use the biology of the white-crowned sparrow to engineer a way to create a sleepless soldier. In contrast to the sleepless soldier outcome, sonic tree medicine is a viable way to collaborate with nature to promote health, well-being and creativity through better sleep for humans and hopefully a counteragent for the sleepless soldier.

BIO

Rebecca E. Miller – multimedia artist, arts-based researcher, and educator. I studied fine art at the San Francisco Art Institute as an undergraduate and completed my PhD in Art and Computational Technology in the computing department at Goldsmiths University of London in 2020. The Arts in Health movement and participatory arts-based research influence my work. My research explores the intersection of digital and analogue processes. I use different types of digital media, analogue media, and traditional art materials to express and produce the concepts that I am working with. I investigate my subject matter in experimental and playful ways. 

REFERENCES

1. Ashley Valentine, “44 Surprising Sleep Statistics That Will Remind You Why Sleep Essential”, CNET, February 7, 2024. np
   https://www.cnet.com/health/sleep/44-sleep-statistics-you-probably-didnt-know-that-will-surprise-you/ ︎
2. Vicky Contie, Alan Defibaugh (Illustrations), Dana Steinberg, Harrison Wein,
    “The Benefits of Slumber Why You Need a Good Night’s Sleep.” NIH (National Institutes of Health) News in Health, April 2013. pg1
     https://newsinhealth.nih.gov/sites/nihNIH/files/2013/April/NIHNiHApr2013.pdf ︎
3. Ibid np ︎
4. Abbie VanSickle, “Supreme Court Seems Poised to Uphold Local Bans on Homeless Encampments.” The New York Times, April 23, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/22/us/supreme-court-homeless-case-oregon.html?smid=url-share ︎
5. Anne Trafton, “That Moment When You’re Nodding Off is a Sweet Spot for Creativity.” MIT news, May 15, 2023. np
   https://news.mit.edu/2023/sleep-sweet-spot-dreams-creativity-0515  ︎
6. Christopher Potter, “Impacts of the CZU Lightning Complex Fire of August 2020 on the forests of Big Basin Redwoods State Park”, California Fish and Wildlife Scientific Journal, 12 April 2023, http://www.doi.org/10.51492/cfwj.109.1. ︎
7. ”Beyond Your Wildest Dreams: Redwoods.” Santa Cruz County.org, May 1, 2024.np
   https://www.santacruz.org/blog/beyond-your-wildest-dreams-redwoods/ ︎
8. Elizabeth Koselka, Lucy Weidner, Arsniy Minasov, Mark G. Berman, William R. Leonard, Marianne Santoso, Junia N. de Brito, Zachary Clark Pope, Mark Pereira, Theresa H. Horton, “Walking Green: Developing an Evidence Base for Nature Prescriptions”
   International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, November 2019 np
   https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337092325_Walking_Green_Developing_an_Evidence_Base_for_Nature_Prescriptions  ︎
9. Susan Writes “What is Green Noise.” Medium May 1, 2024. https://medium.com/the-daily-cuppa/what-is-green-noise-20574ff81644 ︎
10. Ben Trapskin, “The Soothing Sounds of Green Noise: How it Can Help You Sleep Better” Yawnder, January 17, 2024. np
    https://yawnder.com/the-soothing-sounds-of-green-noise-how-it-can-help-you-sleep-better ︎
11. Casey Clark, “Is ‘Green Noise’ The Magical Solution to Better Sleep?”
     Huffington Post, April 15, 2023. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/is-green-noise-the-magical-solution-to-better-sleep_uk_643967afe4b0a7592625e596 ︎
12. Thomas Astell-Burt, Xiaoqi Feng, “Does sleep grow on trees? A longitudinal study to investigate potential prevention of insufficient sleep with different types of urban space.” SSM – Population Health Volume 10, April 2020. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352827319301703 ︎
13. Thomas Astell-Burt, Xiaoqi Feng, “More green, more ‘zzzzz’? Trees may help us sleep.” UNSW Sydney Newsroom, March 16, 2020.np
    https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2020/03/more-green–more-zzzzz–trees-may-help-us-sleep ︎
14. Jez Riley French “C-Series Pro + Contact Microphones.” September 24, 2023. np
    https://jezrileyfrench.co.uk/ ︎
15. Automatism, “Art Term.” Tate, May 1, 2024. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/a/automatism ︎
16. Jonathan Crary, “24/7 late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep.” Verso, 2013, 10. ︎

back to the ball

By: projektado collective

we are you: radical friendships and relational realities

back to the ball

By: Peter Conlin

Improbable: Hacking the Predictive System

We live in a time obsessed with forms of prediction, wherein prediction, despite its integration into computational technologies and its presumed rationality, is often indistinguishable from something like fate, especially if one is on the wrong side of the uncertainty circuits. It is fundamental to financial capitalism with its ‘modes of prediction’¹ wherein investment risk, directed by predictive abstractions, replaces labour as ‘the fount of value’,² and is central in the strategic decision-making of corporations and state agencies through a full suite of predictive technologies; however the focus of this commentary is on the predictive within the everyday and intimate levels of the self. In any of these dimensions we should not take prediction on its own terms (i.e. the domain of mathematics installed into digital systems, a fine-tuned instrument of data science, etc.). It is larger than this, and in a way, less than this, as it is bound to the mundane, as well as to mythical currents and powers of authority. The crux of the predictive lies in the zones where data-science meets the drawing of lots, and then disappears into the weird psyches of 21^st century lives. If there are points to hack, it is where and when a probabilistic system transmutes into an ambient condition. What if a trace of indeterminacy is injected into these points? And if no such transformation or sabotage is possible now, at least this could be a site to hone aleatory guile? These are the areas and ideas I want to explore in this speculative and generative text, which will delve into the web project Petit Tube (petittube.com) as a specific case.

For those in societies with an intensive integration into digital technologies, probabilistic calculations seep into how we think, act, and interact. In yet another layer of machinic living, underlying both production and social reproduction, prediction is produced through digital stochastic reasoning, that combines huge volumes of data with mathematical processes (e.g. Markov chains) to convert randomness into likely outcomes, and quantifies the degree and type of uncertainty. The data-quantification of our lives puts us into the probability circuit, with the naive ideal of better living (‘the more of social life that can be translated into metrics and measured over time, the better the decisions, products, or services provided by companies, political actors, and governments will be.’³) Work, health, security and cultural systems are increasingly driven by processes that govern through stochastic variables. The fact that many of these predictions fail or are unreliable doesn’t lessen the obsession and involvement of our energies into quantitative anticipation in any way—it’s not that kind of prediction. We aren’t disappointed or surprised if they ‘come true’ or not, but we might change platforms. These are predictions without a future as such, and shift experience from specific dread or promise into a ground force that manifests as a type of pressure and reconfigures motivation and expectation. 

As I will elaborate, prediction is perhaps one among many other figures leading into a social-temporal assembly or a source of social gravity. The crux of what I am calling prediction lies in our relation to contingency, which is especially heightened in turbulent times. As such, probabilistic rationality is one figuration (dominant, digital capitalist, supposedly technocratic) among a related set identified by Matthew Fuller and Olga Goriunova including: ‘luck, fate, fortune, providence, destiny, necessity, risk.’⁴ In this light, prediction is—despite the hyper-rational association—a technologised incorporation of the contingency-fate complex, connecting the corporal to abstract realms and altering the reality process. Perhaps a new being has emerged—‘homo probabilism’—a term coined by Ivan Ascher⁵ to describe the culmination of financial capital but which I see as extending more generally across dimensions and experiences of life.

A longer history of probability and a tentative call for reclaiming indeterminacy

Most histories of probability⁶ begin with games of chance—the literal rolling of bones, coin tosses and the attempts to observe patterns and manage chance, whether to improve odds and/or to develop the analysis of random probability distribution itself. If probabilistic calculation is central to social life now, as I believe it is, then we cannot downplay the significance of games of chance in the cultural and social logic of this conjuncture. Predictive living is indicative of a deep gamification whether we see ourselves as players or not. Maybe stochasticity, itself, was a hack long ago—a playful subversion of scholasticism and final causes, perhaps a form of early-Modern pranking. Wasn’t it strange to posit this speculative condition of foreknowledge with inescapable practical applications that could out-manoeuvre deterministic chains? But it quickly lost its smile and through the centuries became its own dire system. This appears to be a recurring pattern. We could see the hijinks of programmers and hardware engineers of the 60s and 70s as giving a crucial energy to the development of the surveillance society, preemptive policing, conspirituality, new realms of commodification and other Fred Turner⁷ nightmares. A cautionary note is to see hacking as having the tendency to contribute to the very entity it seeks to foil and unwittingly enhance new inaccessible systems. And to momentarily get way ahead of myself, what about the hacks of hacking, what of those projects? The self-negating way forward or a deathly serious play of fire leading into impossibly complex systems with sinister logics? Soon we will reach the end of hacking in the finite limits of life. But these are only figures of capture and betrayal of the true spirit of hacking? All of the above. Hack that.

In many ways this is the story of the ascent of the statistical into higher (or is it lower?) levels of reality—the full diffusion of stats into our lives in synergies between psychometrics, capitalism and digital technologies with the self as ground zero. ‘The system’ here is much larger than digital data and networks of the past few decades, and extends back to the 17^th century if not further. It has subsequently gone through several different phases of which ‘the algorithm’ and AI are but instants or a manifestation. However emergent or ‘digital’ all this might seem, this condition nevertheless arises from well known areas of contention within the social sciences around the representational nature of statistics and their constructive and normative functions. Following Alain Desrosières’⁸ terms, the predictive operates within the fraught relationship between the thing being measured and the measuring process, and how social entities may be, themselves, statistical constructs for the purposes of measure. Values, meaning and experience are reshaped in this quantification process. ‘Numbers create and can be compared with norms, which are among the gentlest and yet most pervasive forms of power in modern democracies.’⁹ At almost every moment when using digital devices we are within the deep web of this ‘gentle’ power. The complexities of these relations are so ubiquitous and far-reaching, it is easy to forget that data is an element of measure, and that a datafied society is a fully and obsessively measured one. Who or what is doing all of this? Why have we entered this vast realm of measured living? Can there or should there be a way out?

Prediction developed by probabilistic statistics seems to imply carefully produced knowledge, within a rigorous scientific method for gauging uncertainty and producing reliable information of future events. However, this is not our probability. There are post-probability pronouncements of moving from prediction to pre-emption, from classical frequentist statistics (probability in terms of the frequency of objective properties sampled) to Bayesian approaches (probability as a measure of believability that a statistician has about the occurrence of an event), and from a kind of knowledge to the production of correlations outside of human comprehension but certainly within the competitive advantage of businesses.¹⁰ In these shifts prediction might appear to be recast as self-interest with only an operational level of truth, and that we are no longer in the science of prediction but in the drama of pre-emptive action. But the goals and function of quantification have never been merely descriptive and are ‘part of a strategy of intervention.’¹¹ Classical statistical norms have always been creating qualities they are meant to dispassionately measure. As well, to think probability in the movement from reason to irrationality, from centralised public planning to ad hoc opportunism of private interests misses the fundamental double-nature of probability as Ian Hacking saw it.

The condition I am exploring is lodged within two theses by Ian Hacking, philosopher of probability and science, and are pivotal in coming to terms with probabilistic reason. These ideas long predate digital technologies, but I argue that they have been augmented in the politics of automated probability. The first is the dual nature of probability—it combines the search for stable frequencies to gauge uncertainty with assertions of belief on the occurrence of future events. ‘Probability…is Janus faced. On the one side it is statistical, concerning itself with the stochastic laws of chance processes. On the other side it is epistemological, dedicated to assessing the reasonable degrees of belief in propositions quite devoid of statistical background.’¹² The second thesis is that the rise of probability from the 19^th century onward (outlined in Hacking’s Taming of Chance) saw a departure from deep deterministic understandings, and an entry into an indeterminate view of the world. However, this did not result in a radical openness and social entropy, but on the contrary, in ceaseless surveying and calculating. In the development of statistical measures of control (in fact, measure as control), indeterminacy becomes increasingly synonymous with managerial quantification. Chance from this time on is taken seriously in social life as it is converted into statistical laws based on data and distribution curves, hence the titular ‘taming of chance’. From this, I am proposing—in a tentative and exploratory manner—a project of reclaiming indeterminacy in the 21^st century and a re-envisioning of predictive data as belief. I am not casting all probabilistic functions as pure belief or arbitrary plays within an anything-goes social entropy. But we cannot lose a feel for the indeterminant, nor can we be blind to all the epistemological investment in what is presented as data-driven likely occurrences.

Imagine we find ourselves wandering around the edges of a vast predictive system. Maybe we abhor it but we are nevertheless of it, either in spite of ourselves or through an all-out embrace. But in any account, from the right vantage point there is a fascination with the transactions and communion. After all these years there is still the imaginary of the cybernetic dream of an X (singularity entity, artificial superintelligence) that knows us beyond how we know ourselves, and not only knows the future but can pass into impending moments, distorting temporal boundaries like the poets sought. But instead of enriching vitality, we can feel it draining away into temporal homogeneity. So it would appear to be no easy hack—how to hack a dream of techno-omniscience and data-driven time machines? They’ve ruined randomness, so it must be reinvented. How to get lucky when contingency has become the exclusive domain of ‘data science’? How does one hack statistical fate in the 21^st century?

Artificial Futures (AI as AF)

I am working with the supposition that whenever we are in a situation modulated by digital technologies—specifically the array of machine learning techniques, algorithmic functions, extensive data processing, automated functions frequently labelled as ‘AI’—we are necessarily within a predictive realm, even if we don’t want to be. Almost all the machine learning techniques and functions associated with Artificial Intelligence are driven one way or another by a predictive logic, underscored by the dubious assumption that prediction and intelligence are somehow synonymous. As such, they are not only data processing and information technologies, but time technologies orientated to modelling future events (within the statistical sense of an ‘event’); given that prediction is a temporal function, these technologies are not only about data and processing but alter the experience and conceptualization of time. This is complicated by the way that such an engagement with the future (as a mathematical abstraction, from a system which is using prediction as a means of  control and to shape outcomes), usually has a de-futuring effect rendering what is to come as merely a projection based on existing patterns of the present and data sets without the alterity and sense of open possibility of The Future; and thus as stated, making predictions without a future.

Another way to say this is that the predictive condition I am exploring is a temporal expression of quantification. By framing data collection and analysis within the larger enterprise of prediction, I am foregrounding the temporality embedded in measure. Prediction is the time of measure, and its expansion into the time of everyday life. To be imbricated into digital networks is to enter this time, with our actions and expressions are variables of capacities and performance. This ubiquitous and quotidian aspect of digital media should be seen as a time technology altering to the future, whether it is cancelled or reassigned.

The opposite of prediction

So what would it mean to ‘hack’ this temporality of predictive living? My view is to not leave it at subsuming probability into the service of the collective (Red AI), or to democratise the modes of prediction, merging stochastic reason with social justice. These are fascinating projects, hopefully already well underway, however, for me a hack means opening these systems (and ourselves as we are enfolded in them) to the improbable. What does unpredictability or the improbably really mean at this point in time? This is what we must open ourselves to, this is part of the hack. We can ask, to begin with, why the obsession with prediction in such unpredictable times? The ostensible answer is that probabilistic relations to the future are an attempt to mitigate uncertainty and achieve a degree of control and governability. But the predictive modes I am addressing here never seem to stabilise and usually add to uncertainty. It’s time to investigate the opposite of predictability, whatever it might be.

As prediction is oriented to likely outcomes of what will happen, then the hack could mean that the great wheel of ‘what’s next’ breaks down—slows or jams shut. In life without systemic anticipation, what are we going to do indeed? How will anything function anymore, will the structures of temporality unravel? In this light, maybe the opposite of prediction lies in moments when time stands still. A bit of spiritual hacking would do us all some good. For such temporal hacking, the experience of randomness is one way to start.

Aleatory visions (Petit Tube)

If the prediction system began in games of chance, then we should return to its origins of play and indeterminacy. In a data environment where everything is incessantly trying to predict what we want, randomness can be political. So we need to relearn how to inhabit chance and develop aleatory sensibilities. From deep within the prediction economy (political and libidinal), ‘chance must be prepared.’¹³ If John Cage prepared pianos, then we need to prepare platforms. ‘The suggestion here is that these discussions offer the development of a sensual and political understanding of chance that establishes it as the grounding condition for modes of being and one that is perversely synthetic in its ethico-aesthetics.’¹⁴ In a time attempting to irradicate improbable actions through measure and probabilistic calculations, we can no longer take chance for granted. We must cultivate ourselves to chance because no one is born lucky in a universe proceeding under the sway of probability.

Hacking algorithmic recommendation systems can be one way of doing this, and the web project Petit Tube (petittube.com) is an example. It randomly filters YouTube videos that have very few views and presents itself as offering ‘the least interesting videos on YouTube.’ Click play and the aleatory and enigmatic viewing of content begins. In an algorithm vs algorithm scenario, it selects videos which have been ignored, forgotten or otherwise outside YouTube’s predictions. The experience for me is surprisingly freeing, generating both a receptive energy toward the multiplicity of images, and a space from which to reflect and rewire our experience of predictive systems. Launched in 2011, the project was developed by Yann van der Cruyssen, a polymath based in France, who works on the borders of art, video game creation, music and wallpaper invention.

What is it like? It’s both ordinary and subtly weird, maybe an infraordinary of media. More of a simple side-step than anything psychedelic or mind-bendingly entropic. On a typical viewing one might see a used car advertisement set in a North American dealership with dirty late-winter snow, an office party in a generic business environment, fingers slowly rotating an opal stone, a presentation from the Antelope High School career counselling team, a clip from a video game reposted from Twitch, a Birthday party in a South-East Asian home. So this is the great unwatched. In fact, only a small minority of videos on YouTube are actually watched in large numbers, and most of these are music videos (especially songs for children), followed by how-to videos and product demos, and then more distantly by videos from popular content creators. What about the rest? I have been exploring Petit Tube for several years, and there appears to be what I characterise as an ‘outlook’. After months of revisiting the site, it can feel like beachcombing—walking the same stretch of coast but each time finding something perplexing has washed in. It’s like some kind of media therapy or deprogramming process to work free from ultra-curated content, personalised algorithms, known pleasures, and the worn grooves of one’s own tastes reinforced by a predictive media system. It sometimes feels calming, even though the content is a haphazard assortment typical of so much of contemporary media culture, not particularly meditative onto itself. So we have not quite reached the end of the media universe—rather a cul de sac that at times seems like a worm-hole.

The overall feel is game-like, in a simple and slightly clunky interface that is both underwhelming, and in a way, mysterious—something of a Bermuda Triangle of online content. The videos have disappeared in the sense that they have almost never been viewed, but through this random selection, they still can be seen on the threshold of a media void. Perhaps even the person who uploaded the content is no longer interested or even aware of their own media. It is a site which, momentarily, makes lost content reappear. We watch them, and then we watch them disappear all over again. We watch the blinding insignificance.The larger context of this is, on the one hand, a media ecology seeking to eliminate chance through predictive systems that already know who we are and what we want to experience; and on the other hand, a larger psychosocial environment that is increasingly animated by uncertainty. This hack offers a media universe wherein video waste functions like a filtering process rather than degradation. Disinterest and abandonment function as a prism through which something presumed as trivial might reach a kind of plenitude in spite of its staggering banality. In these refractions, Petit Tube works as a distrusting agent of YouTube. It is only by way of an improbable filtering of content that no one is interested in that we might finally drop out of the supposed affirmative preemption of contemporary image culture. What we lose in expectation of the visual we might gain in hope. If this kind of randomness forms a mysterious triangle, then it is formed in the interdependence between what exceeds our grasp, the mundane and lucidity.

BIO

Peter Conlin is a writer and researcher based in Birmingham (UK) and works as a Teaching Associate at the Department of Cultural, Media and Visual Studies, University of Nottingham. He is the author of Temporal Politics and Banal Culture: Before the Future (Routledge).

REFERENCES

1. Ivan Ascher, Portfolio Society: On the Capitalist Mode of Prediction (New York: Zone/Near Futures, 2016). ︎
2. Ascher, Portfolio Society, 26. ︎
3. Andreas Jungherr, Gonzalo Rivero and Daniel Gayo-Avello, Retooling Politics: How Digital Media Are Shaping Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 165. ︎
4. Matthew Fuller and Olga Goriunova, Bleak Joys: Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 78. ︎
5. Ascher, Portfolio Society, 85. ︎
6. F. N. David, Games, Gods and Gambling (London: Charles Griffin, 1962); Rüdiger Campe, The Game of Probability: Literature and Calculation from Pascal and Kleist (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2012); Brian Everitt, Chance Rules (New York: Springer Science & Business Media, 2008); John Haigh, Probability: A very short introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). ︎
7. Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture (London: University of Chicago Press, 2006). ︎
8. Alain Desrosières, The Politics of Large Numbers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). ︎
9. Theodore Porter, Trust in Numbers (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 45. ︎
10. Mark Andrejevic, Infoglut (London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2013), 96-110. ︎
11. Porter, Trust in Numbers, 42. ︎
12. Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 12. ︎
13. Fuller and Goriunova, Bleak Joys, 83. ︎
14. Fuller and Goriunova, Bleak Joys, 83. ︎

back to the ball

By: Sam Moore

Untitled (A glitch in the matrix)

“It was a cliche thought, but Maria had always sympathised with the monster.” This throwaway line from Imogen Binnie’s Nevada (2013, p.22) is an echo of a common thread of trans thinking that can be identified everywhere from Susan Stryker’s seminal 1994 text on Frankenstein, to Preciado’s Can the Monster Speak? (2019). The relationship between monsters and trans bodies can even be encountered in art by cis creators, as exemplified in the many films by David Cronenberg. The similar trope of monster as outsider has existed in the DNA of popular media since Shelly’s Frankenstein: Or, Modern Prometheus (1818), and James Whale’s cinematic adaptation from 1931. Frankenstein’s Monster is also a glitch, something that exists beyond the confines of the world as normally understood; they’re uncanny, uncertain, a body that exists on the fringe. When Dr. Frankenstein has Igor flick the switch and, in a bolt of lightning his creation is (re)born, that same creation is also glitching out, finding a way to exist beyond and between the boundaries of the real world. 

The first glitch that I remember was from playing the PS2 game The Simpsons Hit and Run (2003). I remember driving Professor Frink’s rocket car and falling off of the edge of Springfield, somehow ending up beneath the map itself. I twisted the camera to look up at the town while I existed outside of it, a moment of slippage. I remember finding it strange, uncanny, but still somehow tempting. I kept looking for ways to fall off the edge of the map. 

In Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020), Legacy Russell argues that the binary body itself exists as a way to limit us, and that the idea of the glitch instead allows us to “consider the in-between as a core component of survival — neither masculine nor feminine, neither male nor female, but a spectrum across which we may be empowered to choose and define ourselves for ourselves.” (p.11) Russell uses the term “fissure” as a way to consider how this glitch is something through which we can fall – like the map in Hit and Run, like the messy body horror transformations of Cronenberg’s horror films – what Russell calls “new possibilities of being and becoming manifest”. 

The Creature in Frankenstein is a glitch in between the most existential binaries of all: that between the living and the dead. In the essay Why Frankenstein’s Monster Haunts Queer Art (2017), Charlie Fox writes about how Shelley’s tale “shape-shifts to suit any number of freaky interpretations”, its meaning fluid in a way that allows us to find whatever we may want from it. This, in theory, is one of the ways in which Frankenstein works as a trans text, a trans glitch: we can transform it into whatever we desire. Fox even references “the possibilities of male birth” inherent in how the doctor is able to create life, blurring the lines between the ways in which we understand not just gender as an idea, but also the gendered body and the meanings innate to it. 

The trans-ness of body horror is rooted in this idea of what the gendered body is; its meaning, limits, and boundaries. In horror, the body is constantly, relentlessly gendered, in a way that often falls prey to binary, almost essentialist ideas: the Final Girl is historically cis; the body is sexualised in binary ways – this is exaggerated in contemporary, meta-horrors like The Cabin in the Woods (2011) that gender their archetypal characters – stoner, slut, virgin, jock – along gendered lines. But these ideas are often challenged in body horror, narratives that are driven by transformation that pushes against the limits of how we understand the body; pushes up against the limits of the map like a glitch in The Simpsons Hit and Run. In Videodrome (1983), Max Renn’s body transforms in a way that is at once gendered and a refusal of gender as a slit emerges in his stomach and he pulls a firearm from it. This is a temporary transformation, one that comes just as soon as it goes – possibly caused by the strange signals of the Videodrome broadcast itself – as Max finds himself briefly outside of the lines of the boundary. This is to say, Max’s transformation, Max’s (trans) body is a glitch. 

In Glitch Feminism, Russell argues that the glitch is a space – which, in video gaming, it so often is; that strange world off the edge of the map – one that allows us to “innovate and experiment”, something that exists in digital spaces and allows us to explore, transform, “faster than AFK mores or the societies that produce them under which we are forced to operate offline.” (p.12)

This distinction between digital and physical realms also has an inherently trans undertone: in Nevada, Maria references the difference between cyberspace and meatspace in Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). This difference is where trans-ness enters The Matrix (1999). 

When Neo is freed from The Matrix, the computer simulation created by machines IRL as a way to turn humankind into batteries, there is a strange freedom that comes from the ways in which he returns to The Matrix; his newfound knowledge gives him access to superhuman feats and, in the film’s final act, he’s able to see and manipulate the source code of The Matrix itself. It’s like hacking, or cheating in a video game: he can learn kung-fu at a moment’s notice or transform his aesthetic into something idealised. When he and Trinity return to The Matrix to wreak havoc, they end up looking like a leather-clad T4T couple. The Matrix is also a world where glitches matter – deja vu is referred to as “a glitch in The Matrix”, a sign that something within the code, the world itself, has changed. This is another moment of slippage. 

A glitch in The Matrix feels akin to the trans slippages of (body) horror, a slippage between boundaries and binaries. A glitch in The Matrix serves as a reminder that it’s a construct, something being manipulated like the product of a videogame level editor. The Matrix, this constructed reality, is nothing more than a pile of code, an endless stream of 0s and 1s; a binary, repeated eternally. It’s ironic, then, that Neo becomes known as the one when he is, in reality, a glitch. This notion of The One – a defining aspect of the mythology of The Matrix – is surprisingly fluid, with meanings that are both messianic, and deeply romantic. For Trinity, Neo is the one because she falls in love with him, and it’s this act of love that produces a glitch in the system of The Matrix, a way for Neo and Trinity to understand themselves anew, breaking down boundaries both within The Matrix, and IRL.

Sam is a writer, artist, and editor. They are the author of All my teachers died of AIDS (Pilot Press, 2020); Long live the new flesh (Polari Press, 2022); and Search history (Queer Street Press, 2023). They are one of the co-curators of TISSUE, a trans reading and publishing initiative based in London.

back to the ball

By: Max Oginz

Manifestations (No Set Future)

In 2023, fashion Vlogger Tristan Payne moves through Manhattan streets as light washes the scaffolding around him. Between asking people “what are you wearing,” he speaks directly to the camera on the importance of authenticity and self-composed historicity. “I wanna speak the truth, I want it to be different, I want to show y’all what’s really going on…I don’t think about this as short term, I think about it as my legacy…so I think y’all should do the same.”¹ The atomized moment Payne walks through, in which what people are wearing is also “what’s really going on,” is characteristic of a specific post-pandemic logic of achievement, where objects, people, and time is given based on what might be called at best good habits, and at worst, good behaviour. Without a message, Payne presents himself to the world, and that presentation is an effective enough legacy. Self-presentation, finding oneself, self-realization, these are the abstractions that manifestation, a nebulous self-help term, serves. The purpose of this essay is not to trace manifestation to its origins, nor is it to provide a serious critique of a term that became a viral meme at the outset of the WFH era. Instead, manifestation serves as a window into contemporary visions of temporality. Manifestation is an imagined moment of mastery over time and capital, one that is particularly suited to the parasocial time of platform life. Such a mastery, I argue, expresses the circularity of time spent online, in which the system that distracts and allows one to live outside time is also the hack that offers users an opportunity to bend time–to 5 easy habits or a five-second countdown, or a special state of transcendent sleep. This circularity presents a particular vision of nowness that should be contextualized within the uncertainties of Anthropocene living. In a time where the prophecy is imminent material collapse, the importance of planning, and of manifesting, gains ironic and paramount appeal.

Since late 2020, manifestation has dominated meme pages and news feeds, variably used sincerely as a tool to improve mindfulness, and a joke parodying the notion of achieving goals simply through visualization or affirmation. In a YouTube video from 2022, self-help author Mel Robbins explains that “manifesting is preparing your mind, body, and spirit to take action.”² This preparation is a mental one with material outcomes. The mental system of manifestation varies from user to user, but manifestation has explicit predecessors in the late 19th and early 20th century “New Thought” movement. At its centre, manifestation is the notion that cognition is a system that can be controlled through the bending or refiguring of certain abstract rules of thought. 

From its outset, the practice was highly gendered and centered around a handful of self-help authors who appropriated hermetic, Vedic, and transcendental thought. These authors persist as apocryphal figures in online forums and instructional videos, with multiple personalities and pennames, each co-opting distinct theological frameworks. In sum, these authors, such as Prentice Mulford and William J. Atkinson, proposed a “mind-cure,” in which patterns of thought had a direct influence on material events. By changing thought, one could change circumstances. Philosopher William James, who provides a “psychological” account of self-help doctrine, wrote in 1902 that “Systematic healthy-mindedness, conceiving good as the essential and universal aspect of being, deliberately excludes evil from its field of vision.”³ The modulation of thought becomes the primary object of both New Thought and the online self-help doctrines that are promulgated on Reddit threads and YouTube videos. Abstraction is modulated to achieve an intended outcome. Where one might be introduced to their romantic partner by chance, work hard toward a promotion, or achieve financial success by making some calculated if risky investment, manifestation locates all these capitalist success stories within a mindfulness practice that imagines the outcome already achieved. In other words, manifestation is a way of remembering the future in the hope that it might become the past. Reddit user SpacewithinSpace writes:

A lot of other people that I knew were struggling to get a job too. So i decided to manifest it. First I spent the first two weeks every morning working on my self concept using affirmations and by putting myself in the mindset and feeling of a person who would be earning money. Then when I was used to that feeling and it felt more natural, I visualized every night before bed. Then on a random day, my brother texted me telling me that he referred me to a manager that he knew at the airport to convince them to give me an interview. This was random and out of the blue which is how i knew i manifested it.⁴

In identifying manifestation’s imaginary, a few characteristics stand out in this post, the first of which is the specificity and purpose of the manifestation in question. The specific aim here is a singular outcome: a job for the user. Mentions of exterior circumstances are absent: no family to provide for, nor family history, no mention of class. Second, a divine randomness is transposed onto an intended, planned-for outcome. The manifestation of the job is specific, but the proof that it was manifested is in its divine random out-of-the-blueness. Finally, the singular outcome is transposed on a collective intervention: it’s the user’s brother who helps him achieve the manifested outcome. Taking the outcome of a collective action as an outcome solely for and by the user is central to the certain future proposed by manifestation.

Karen Barad argues that with the discovery of the quantum particle, a cell that can exist in multiple temporalities, time takes on a newly volatile dimension, in which the linearity of spacetime is challenged, and the Newtonian physics of progression is troubled. By her description, the evils of colonialism now travel by spacetime, and their effects are felt across temporalities. In addition to challenging any linear conception of time, she challenges the neutrality of the sciences, argues for a beyond-Derridian deconstruction of science,⁵ and proposes a collective alternative to linear spacetime.⁶ As a system for manipulating temporality, manifestation exploits the disjuncture of atomic time to produce outcomes of capitalist success and excess. It serves as a counter-appropriation to collectivity–a singular but polyvocal encounter with time. Unlike the collective quantum time proposed by Barad, manifestation is a singular quantum time, in which people, objects and outcomes are manipulated as particles existing partially in mind and partially in the world. Or more accurately, partially in the world and completely in the mind. This reaffirms Barad’s call for the production of “collective imaginaries that undo pervasive conceptions of temporality that take progress as inevitable and the past as something that has passed and is no longer with us…”⁷ The abstract certainty of manifestation, its inparticulate, individual randomness, is its selling point.

Rising out of the work-from-home moment, labour and leisure are merely linear temporalities to transcend through thought. This, of course, is not the radical queer reimagining of temporality and quantum physics that Barad argues for. Instead, we are left with a cultish particalization of what otherwise, in Barad’s critique/reconsideration of linear spacetime, are actors neutralized by mathematics and natural science. The images of manifestation – often stock footage culled from paid services, overlaid with subtitles in the voice of a spiritualist proponent of self-help, imbues images with an aspirational appeal. We see astronauts, people in nature, meditation, and nostalgia-tinged evocation of childhood trauma, in which a child and adult, silhouetted against sunset, hold a paper cutout of a house. 

While the trajectory of manifestation’s logic, from have-not to have, is a linear mode of material advancement, the instrumentalization of thought and image for material gain suggests new, nonlinear forms of capitalism. To achieve the ends of accomplishment where it otherwise seems impossible, in the irreversibility of global economies, manifestation employs a pseudo-quantum science that turns thought material, renders habits ‘ atomic’, and privileges the act of visualization. This visualization, as Derrida’s Given Time helps us locate, need not be in the waking world of labour and leisure. 

In the logic of manifestation, there exists a space outside time, in which a transcendence of the physical is possible. This space is accessed through sleep. According to Prentice Mulford, an early 20th-century author of Christian New Thought, “the last thought before going to sleep is the one most likely to remain with on leaving the body…That is, it will be the first clew towards the recognition of your real self when you away from your body.”⁸ Manifestation proposes a zone outside of time, or in the case of Mulford, sleep, in which thought itself is transformed into a natural resource. As an impossible space, the state of sleep becomes ripe for observing the flows of capitalist data from thought to action. The impossible time observed in the state akin to sleep responds to time’s invisible encroachment–it is an abstract response to an abstract state. In Given Time I: Counterfeit Money, Jacques Derrida writes of time as a non-phenomenological non-object. For Derrida, there is no outside time. He writes that “time…gives nothing to see. It is at the very least the element of invisibility itself.”⁹ Manifestation, resistant to Derrida’s framework, the non-visible, non-material nature of time–the event’s constant inside–renders time as a natural resource in use even at rest. By Mulford’s logic, why sleep if not manifesting? Here, an appropriation of Vedic and Buddhist meditative transcendental practice becomes all about producing results in waking, ephemeral life. In sleep, the thought is a natural resource. Each page of Mulford’s turn-of-the-century text, Your Forces and How to Use Them, is printed with the declaration (disclaimer, agitprop?) that “thoughts are things.” Tellingly, Mulford associates this atemporal thinking with technology. “A thought is as real a thing as a telegraph-wire.”¹⁰ Here, we have the formation of a proto-datafication that foretells of the real datafication of habit in the form of surveillance capital. Outside time, thoughts become concrete things to be mined for profit. The purpose of manifestation becomes the extraction of material wealth from habit. In this way, systems of manifestation transcend the simple notion of healthy living or mindfulness, stepping into the economy by stepping outside of time. Derrida associates time with a kind of economic circle, in which given time and time taken are in constant conversation. The gift of time would have to be outside time itself–perhaps in sleep. Manifestation puts sleep, too, under anaesthetic. In his book on sleep in the age of digital media, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the End of Sleep, Jonathan Crary writes that “sleep poses the idea of a human need and interval of time that cannot be colonized and harnessed to a massive engine of profitability, and thus remains an incongruous anomaly and site of crisis in the global present.”¹¹ At the dawn of the 20th century, already sleep itself was becoming capital, defending itself through communion with angels: “the thought of yourself as a spirit, as a being distinct and apart from your body, will serve as this clew…It will be the telegraph-wire ‘twixt you and them, because they will not stay permanently with you in your gropings on the cruder stratum of life.”¹² The state of sleep in which manifestation is made possible forms a contradictory logic of thought and reality. 

Here, thoughts become reality as a future that can be imagined–and thus transformed into visual material. The online spaces of manifestation, its Reddit threads and YouTube comment feeds, corroborate this transformation. As new technologies cannibalize old ones, thought for manifestation purposes move from telegraph wire to fibre optic cables. Visualization becomes one step in the vehicle for manifesting: “I’ve been manifesting for a month. I got my boyfriend back and he said all the things I’ve ever wanted to hear. Someone posted a video about writing your names together and folding paper then placing it under your bed. I did that. I imagined what our new life will be like. Then when I was used to that feeling and it felt more natural, I visualized every night before bed.”¹³ Manifestation, then, is imbricated with the visuality of online culture–our ability to be seen and see. Crary writes, of the visual situation that “…the demand for mandatory 24/7 immersion in visual content effectively becomes a new form of institutional super-ego.”

As both joke and doctrine, manifestation performs the role of the platform’s economic circle, in which time spent on the platform is time regained through the logic of achievement–which in turn leads us back into the leisure time of surveillance capital. The circle produces certainty, whereas time remains a non-phenomenological, non-object. The question of manifestation is easily construed with a whole slew of other questions that one is likely to be bombarded with when spending time on platforms: techniques to reclaim time from procrastination, distraction, negative self-talk, etc. But what force does the state of sleep reclaim time from? Manifestation reclaims time from the platform itself. It produces a state of certainty where there is simply the flow of time, the endless wastes of time that can be engendered by a scrolling feed. The feed of time.

Capitalism’s mindfulness cult, when considered in light of Anthropocentric clocks, promises to reclaim time we don’t have. Through the capture of what captures us, I aim to take seriously the multiple meanings of manifestation: the manifesto, the presence of a ghostly other, the appearance and reappearance of specific persons and things, and the trace of difference between the sign and object (in which one semiosis is a “manifestation” of another). Manifestation is a window into the platform’s metabolic circle of time lost in distraction and time gained through the achievement of financial certainty, corporeal well-being, and spiritual transcendence. Manifestation’s system of certainty is recoded into an aleatory flow of desires made public, spectral encounters mutating the virtual landscape, and hallucinatory experiences diffused across virtual material.

BIO

Max Oginz is a PhD student in Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz. His writing and films interrogate the literary, ecological, and cinematic implications of technologically mediated life. His writing has been published in Sleepingfish, Fanzine, Cinemedia, Senses of Cinema, and is forthcoming in the edited volume, Future Spaces of Power: The Cultural Politics of Digital and Outer Spaces.

REFERENCES

1. Tristan Payne, ‘What Are People Wearing in New York City? Midtown, Bowery, SoHo (EP.62)’, 13:27, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHCjINBU-eE&list=PLWHh-nTVQ-uTTJSisV-fDhuC4Vlk3i0fY&index=16&ab_channel=TristanPaine ︎
2. Mel Robbins, The 5 Second Rule (Post Hill Press, 2017). E-Pub, 62. ︎
3. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: a Study in Human Nature (1902; repr., New York, NY: Routledge, 2002), 73. ︎
4. SpaceWithinSpace, “6 Years of Manifesting – Manifesting is Very Easy and Simple!” March 2023. https://www.reddit.com/r/lawofattraction/comments/12pku6g/comment/jgn58h1/. ︎
5. Karen Barad, “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/Continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-To-Come,” Derrida Today 3, no. 2 (November 2010): 240–68, https://doi.org/10.3366/drt.2010.0206. ︎
6. Karen Barad, “Troubling Time/S and Ecologies of Nothingness: Re-Turning, Re-Membering, and Facing the Incalculable,” New Formations, no. 92 (September 1, 2017): 56–86, https://doi.org/10.3898/newf:92.05.2017. 62. ︎
7. Ibid. 57. ︎
8. Mulford. Your Forces and How to Use Them, “Where You Travel When You Sleep,” 6. ︎
9. Jacques Derrida, Given Time. I, Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 6. ︎
10. Ibid. 7. ︎
11. Jonathan Crary, 24/7 : Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (New York: Verso, 2013). 15. ︎
12. Mulford. 7. ︎
13. Dependent-Painter-59. “It worked! So, So Well.” March 28, 2024. https://www.reddit.com/r/lawofattraction/comments/1bqchv8/it_worked_so_so_well/ ︎

back to the ball

By: Tanvi Kanchan

Performing digital illegibility

“A body that pushes back at the application of pronouns, or remains indecipherable within binary assignment, is a body that refuses to perform the score. This nonperformance is a glitch. This glitch is a form of refusal. Within glitch feminism, glitch is celebrated as a vehicle of refusal, a strategy of nonperformance.”

Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020), Legacy Russell, p.8

What in-between spaces do we inhabit and what fissures do we cleave open when we perform deliberate acts of digital illegibility through subversive performances of gender, sexuality, aesthetics, and languages? Can we subvert digital systems that seek to discipline, categorise, and regulate us?

“I think the negotiations that I do on a social media platform is so similar to the negotiations that I do on a daily basis [as a queer/trans person] in life itself. Because there are so many things that you’re in conflict with, but then you still have to make do. For example, if I’m also a very anti-capitalist person, but then at the end of the day, I’m also feeding into the capitalistic logics of society, you know. So there’s this constant conflict that I’m making… I’m trying to find, trying to draw my line, how much I can make peace with and how much is a total no-go.”

Conversation with Z, 2023

I’m on a train from London to Bath. The internet on my phone is spotty. I ask to connect to the train Wi-Fi and it redirects me to a sign-up page. I sigh. The ask is transactional; I knew I would have to pay in some way for the pleasure of getting online, if not in money (my train fare notwithstanding). The form wants to know my name. It wants to know my age. It really wants to know my gender, and whether I live in the UK. It’s going to need an email address from me, sorry, if I really want to get online.

I’m not in the mood to comply. Refusal is already bubbling up through my throat, and my fingers pause over the keyboard, twitching and annoyed. So I don’t. The name I put down is nonsense, a keysmash; the surname is too. My date of birth becomes the 1st of April, 2004, nowhere close to my real one. (I know all the system really needs to know is that I’m above eighteen. I feed it what it wants, but give it nothing of value.) There are only two options for gender – man, woman – I pick one at random. My email address is an old one formed during my pre-teen online flash game heydays, a combination of the words ‘game’, ‘master’, and a string of numbers. It doesn’t really matter.

The system is satisfied. I answered its questions. It lets me get online. I feel, for a moment, triumphant at my refusal, my participation in the system in order to subvert it. I then immediately feel silly. It’s just a web form for a Wi-Fi connection. It’s not a big deal. It doesn’t really matter.

“Well, being trans and being queer means… (laughs). Well, I think of it in a certain way. It’s like when you are playing a game. Some simple options are handed out to you. OK, well, how far do you want this slider? Like, four or five sliders are given to you. How do you want to manage your life and how do you want to customise your life, if you will. Being queer feels like living life on advanced settings. It’s so many things you have to check and options, and you have to manually reset and set and check and think about what you have never thought about in life, which many people don’t have to think about in life. Because it’s already taken care of for them. It’s already good for them. Why do they want to change? But I don’t blame them for not wanting to change it. But I also can because they – they did not want anybody to access those advanced options. So yeah, that’s how I kind of view queerness. It’s kind of this juggling of, like, multiple sliders. Like I want this much, and I want that much… I want to breathe this much air. I want to walk like this. I want to talk like this. Things that people don’t really have to think about because it is prescribed to them.”

Conversation with R, 2023

Legacy Russell looks at glitch feminism as a form of dissent, as a refusal, as a “pushing back” against capitalism. Glitches, she says, can “show us the machinic limitations”, give us a “sense of where we might hack further in pointed undoing”.¹ If to glitch against the system deliberately is to hack, then to hack is to queer. Reappropriating Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s words, it is to “open [up the] mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning”.² Its potential lies, as Cathy Cohen reminds us, “in its ability to create a space in opposition to dominant norms”.³ To queer our digital presence is to enact “a body that is inherently fluid, a body emancipated from ever being asked to register its traces online”. It is to “render [ourselves] useless as a subject of capital’s regime of mining and profiting from data”.⁴ It is to resist categorisation by becoming, if not invisible, then at least indecipherable; illegible; unreadable to the system whose goal is to extract, to define, determine, categorise and exploit.

In the grand scheme of things, my refusal on the train ride was trivial; a moment of childish stubbornness rather than conscious political praxis. It reminds me of what @park_slope_arsonist, an online comedian whom I’ve been following for many years, always says: I love to lie online. Why wouldn’t you lie online? she asks. Why wouldn’t you confound, contradict, create a persona that may or may not have anything to do with who you are when you’re not online?

I wanted to get online – something stood in the way – I resented it for standing in the way – I messed with it in turn, while still getting what I wanted out of it. But perhaps these small moments of refusal, of a lack of compliance, pave the way for more deliberate acts of illegibility, of gaming the system to escape it, of thwarting surveillance. A month before I was on that train to Bath, I was back home in India, attempting to organise a Palestine solidarity reading circle with some friends while evading governmental scrutiny and a police shutdown, which had increased manifold for anything Palestine-related over the last several months. We planned to spread the word about the reading circle online (carefully). There existed a thin space where we could play with this. It had to be immediately obvious what this was about to those we wanted there, without tipping our hand in a way that was legible to those we didn’t want there. We had to play in the space of symbols and icons. A poppy in the colours of the Palestinian flag. A watermelon against the background. A reading circle that was about “solidarity”, without explicit mention of any word or phrase that would tip off content moderators, cops, or right-wing troublemakers. A piece of digital ephemera that would expire after a period of time, and not subsist in perpetuity.

“I guess with [platforms like] Instagram, it actually doubles your chances of being moderated in a particular way, because it’s image and text. So you have to be careful on both fronts of like, what will be seen as offensive or what will be seen as not meeting the guidelines. However, people are innately deeply creative when they want to share something. And, of course, again, that goes both ways in the good, bad, whatever. I think people have kind of learned that they have to be creative. And there’s a combination of creative and careful that is being played with, constantly both in words and in image, in order for content to be seen, important content to be seen, important content to reach the right people. But I think because it shifts so fast, it’s also a steep learning curve because the learning curve doesn’t end. Like we have to keep up with all the things that are being looked at and seen as offensive or inappropriate.”

Conversation with A, 2023

In Sayan Bhattacharyya’s piece on Epistemically Produced Illegibility, they point out how material in non-Western languages that are nonetheless presented in Roman script suffer a sort of invisibilisation. “Data that is epistemically heterogeneous,” they say, “can become illegible within a representational scheme that enforces standardization.”⁵ They argue that our knowledge production structures need to be interrogated and reformed, to account for these oversights.

It strikes me as a sort of epistemic injustice, drawing on Miranda Fricker’s work.⁶ It reminds me of Causevic and Sengupta’s argument that the internet itself is built on a sort of digital epistemic injustice. They remind us that the “knowledges of the majority of the world – women, people of color, LGBTIQ+ folks, indigenous communities, and most of the Global South – have been marginalized, undermined, exploited, or ignored by historical and contemporary structures of power and privilege,” and that “nowhere is this more starkly obvious – and simultaneously hidden – than in the digital worlds of the internet”.⁷

Their arguments ring true to me. There’s a stark disparity: we undoubtedly live in an age of digital colonialism, a devaluing of knowledge that is not Western, not normative. But I also want to ask: what if we were to use epistemic illegibility as a way to hack a system that commodifies and co-opts?

“We’ve created a kind of liminal space where people just get to be themselves and get to create their own selves and get to understand themselves in the context of who they are, and understand their identity in the context of their experience, and not vice versa. It gives birth to a very beautiful chaos, in the middle of Instagram posts that are like very ‘Get Ready With Me’ and like, ‘girls, you should do this’ and ‘boys, you should do that’.”

Conversation with L, 2023

What if digital epistemic illegibility became a way to resist and subvert, to slip between the cracks of a system that never existed for us in the first place? Drawing on James C. Scott’s Seeing Like A State,⁸ I want to ask, what happens to digital knowledge production when queer and trans communities refuse legibility so as to become more ungovernable? What if we game the algorithm, refuse its discipline, dare to exist beyond its logics?

It’s a difficult trick to pull off. I might do all my browsing on incognito tabs and I might have spent a lot of time trying to confound the system so that it never serves me a relevant ad, but I’m still trying to subvert a system that wields massive amounts of control over me. It decides who I reach, how I reach them; it decides if I’m too much; it decides if I deserve the platform I have; it decides whether my reach is suspended. It decides whether to call the police. It decides whether to muzzle, to amplify, to dampen, or to simply leave me alone. More importantly, I’m trying to game a system with tools that are also available to those with oppositional political interests – tools that they can also harness towards their own interests.

“What happens is Indian trolls are very clever that way, they make homophobic, transphobic posts in regional languages [in English script]. And robots don’t understand the most nuanced transphobic insults that are there in Bengali. I have seen so many posts about me, which are in Bengali, which are trolling me. I have reported them time and again. I have also asked for – you know, there is an option of subjective review, by a person. That has also happened and I’ve got the reply that this doesn’t go into our community guidelines. And I’m like, you fucker, you do not even know my language, how would you even do it? Or you’re using Google Translate or you are a person who is not… I don’t know how they do it. There are thousands of languages in India itself. And I feel that language plays a very important role in it. Since it is easier to address things if they are in English, because I’ll get a lot of eyeballs. But when they’re done in regional languages, it’s very difficult. And also, you know, weird way that it is, I don’t know what happens, what goes on, behind the workings of these platforms, but there are more reported posts being taken down when the person who is posting is a marginalised person.”

Conversation with E, 2023

I’m also trying to game a system that would sooner curtail and fail me than it would those who bring it eyeballs and thus revenue whilst sticking to the status quo. In India, authoritarian governmental aims dovetail with corporate moderation measures. The right-wing Hindu nationalist government is aware of the mobilising and organising power of social media as a site for dissent; they saw it in action during the 2020-2021 farmers’ protests. Social media platforms must now comply with content take-down notices from the government, or risk being held legally and financially liable.⁹ India is too big of a profit-making market for social media companies to not comply.¹⁰

As such, platforms censor marginalised users – particularly Dalit Bahujan Adivasi (DBA) and Muslim users – and take down their content disproportionately, or ignore their reports of hate speech and discrimination, with such experiences heightening at the intersection of caste, class, race, gender and sexuality.¹¹ Platforms are more likely to take down the accounts and posts of DBA users calling out casteism or presenting dissenting views, than they are to curb the users spreading such bigotry. Contextual ignorance is a defence these platforms simply cannot claim anymore – by now, we all know that polarised reactions and content deliver the most attention and engagement, and thus bring these platforms the most money. It’s simply not in these platforms’ financial interest to curb such a windfall, and their lines of censorship align along state-corporate lines of power and surveillance.

“No one sees people saying Jai Shri Ram and giving us gaalis as hate speech, you know, like, that’s not something that they understand as hate speech or like, even would conceive of that as such… What we are doing is more hate speech in the eyes of Instagram, than what the comments are.”

Conversation with N, 2023

And yet, we continue to be illegible. We hack. We glitch. We resist and subvert, we deliberately obfuscate, we poison the system with ‘bad data’, we perform invisibility in open sight, and we blur and muddy the waters, signalling to those we care to signal to, and turning away from those we don’t. As Russell reminds us, “glitch moves, but glitch also blocks. It incites movement while simultaneously creating an obstacle. Glitch prompts and glitch prevents. With this, glitch becomes a catalyst, opening up new pathways, allowing us to seize on new directions”. To perform digital illegibility, then, is to “celebrate failure as a generative force, a new way to take on the world”.¹² To become digitally illegible is to become force and obstacle all at once, all together, in a system that would rather you did not exist, or if you did, that such existence would only serve its interests. It becomes a way to exist in a world that commodifies and co-opts. We do it because to do so is to hack the system, and to queer it, and to play in that space of dissonances and resonances that Sedgwick talks about, to revel in those “lapses and excesses of meaning.” We do it because we can, and we do it because we must.

Conversation snippets come from research interviews conducted in early 2023 for my doctoral fieldwork.

BIO

Tanvi Kanchan is a PhD candidate and graduate teaching assistant in the Department of Politics and International Studies at SOAS University of London. Their research sits at the intersection of gender, sexuality, nation-statehood, political economy, and digital media. They hold an MA in International Journalisms from SOAS University of London, and a BMM in Journalism from University of Mumbai. They are Co-Managing Editor of the CHASE AHRC DiSCo (Digital Studies Collective) Journal and work as a tutor with The Brilliant Club. They have previously worked in research communications and as a journalist covering gender, sexuality, politics, music and culture, and digital justice.

REFERENCES

1. Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (London and New York: Verso, 2020), 102. ︎
2. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (London: Routledge, 1994), 7. ︎
3. Cathy Cohen, “Punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens: The radical potential of queer politics?,” GLQ 3 (1997): 438. ︎
4. Russell, Glitch Feminism, 123. ︎
5. Sayan Bhattacharyya, “Epistemically produced illegibility,” in Global debates in the digital humanities, eds. Domenico Fiormonte, Sukanta Chaudhari and Paola Ricaurte (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022). https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/global-debates-in-the-digital-humanities/section/aa256742-ea03-4aaf-a1c7-5b925ccc22ac#ch01 ︎
6. Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing (Oxford University Press, 2007).  https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198237907.001.0001 ︎
7. Azar Causevic and Anasuya Sengupta, “Whose knowledge is online? Practices of epistemic justice for a digital new deal,” A Digital New Deal: Visions of Justice in a Post-Covid World (2020). https://itforchange.net/digital-new-deal/2020/10/30/whose-knowledge-is-online-practices-of-epistemic-justice-for-a-digital-new-deal/ ︎
8. James C. Scott, Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). ︎
9. Katitza Rodriguez, Sasha Mathew and Christoph Schmon, “India’s strict rules for online intermediaries undermine freedom of expression,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, April 7, 2021. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/04/indias-strict-rules-online-intermediaries-undermine-freedom-expression ︎
10. Kumar Sambhav, Nayantara Ranganathan and Shreegireesh Jalihal, “Inside Facebook and BJP’s world of ghost advertisers,” Al Jazeera, March 15, 2022. https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/3/15/inside-facebook-and-bjps-world-of-ghost-advertisers ︎
11. Anirban Kapil Baishya, Darshana Sreedhar Mini and Thenmozhi Soundararajan, “The anti-caste alter-network: equality labs and anti-caste activism in the US,” Communication, Culture and Critique 16, no. 2 (2023): 99-106. https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcad011; Shakuntala Banaji and Ramnath Bhat, Social media and hate (London and New York: Routledge, 2022); Nilesh Christopher, “TikTok is fuelling India’s deadly hate speech epidemic,” Wired, August 12, 2019. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/tiktok-india-hate-speech-caste; Thenmozhi
    Soundararajan, Abishek Kumar, Priya Nair and Josh Greely, “Facebook India: Towards the tipping point of violence”, Equality Labs, USA, 2019. https://equalitylabs.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Facebook_India_Report_Equality_Labs.pdf ︎
12. Russell, Glitch Feminism, 30. ︎

back to the ball

By: erynn young

@lgosp3@k: C0mmun!c@t!0n H@ck!ng on T1kT0k

Introduction

On TikTok, a platform notorious for algorithmic content moderation¹, there is an emerging phenomenon of strategic communication hacking, called algospeak for algorithm speak. Algospeak provides users with a seemingly limitless yield of communication hacks in response to content surveillance and policing. Algospeak is situated in a specific digital, interactive context (TikTok), where appropriate content is defined through mobilisations of politics of politeness (e.g. no hate speech), neoliberal sociopolitical ideals (e.g. no racist ideologies), and existing sociocultural hierarchies of marginalisation (e.g. moderation of sexual content).² Through the enforcement of its community guidelines, TikTok establishes a bounded system that targets inappropriate users/communication for censorship via algorithmic content moderation. Algospeak communication hacking enables TikTok users to subvert these interactive constraints; it disrupts this system.

Guidelines = Discourse = System

TikTok is a multimodal social media platform, providing users with audio, visual, and written communication channels, expanding opportunities for interaction and content generation. All platform interactions are moderated, predominantly through automated/algorithmic content moderation systems; TikTok remains opaque regarding specific operational details.³ Users are instead provided with a collection of community guidelines that circumscribe TikTok’s dos and don’ts (mostly don’ts): this is TikTok’s proclaimed attempt to foster an inclusive, welcoming, and safe social space. Do: treat fellow users respectfully. Don’t: incite violence. Don’t: depict sexually explicit activities. Do: express yourself. Don’t: discriminate based on religion, race, gender identity, etc. Don’t: harass others.

Users must comply with these guidelines or risk having their content removed and their accounts banned. The algorithmic content moderation systems that enable TikTok to constantly surveil its users contribute to users’ maintenance of the pervasive fear of censorship (e.g. studies investigating behaviour and communication chilling/silencing effects of surveillance).⁴ Despite the consequences of content violations, TikTok’s community guidelines are not explicit in how inappropriate content is made manifest in users’ communication practices. Many guidelines indicate that TikTok does not allow X, Y, or Z, but do not elaborate on which words are violative. Users must assess their own communicative content within TikTok’s systemic context and its definitions of inappropriate content, correcting when necessary, to avoid algorithmic scrutiny. Algorithmic content moderation thus coerces users into anticipatorily self-censoring.

TikTok defines its ‘safe’ space through a bricolage of sociocultural, political, and legal values, ideologies, and conventions. It establishes the rather vague boundaries of this system (or discourse, in the Foucauldian sense)⁵ through content guidelines and (re)definitions of what it means to be appropriate and eligible for TikTok audiences predominantly through language censorship.⁶ Survival within TikTok’s system translates to platform access (i.e. non-banned accounts) and visibility (i.e. content distribution/circulation). This survival is predicated on a confluence of factors. First, users must successfully internalise TikTok’s community guidelines; they must translate what these guidelines mean in terms of restricting particular language use and put these understandings into practice. Users must also develop (and reference) perceptions of how extensive they believe TikTok’s algorithmic surveillance capabilities to be – termed users’ algorithmic imaginaries.⁷ These imaginaries drive varying defensive digital practices, including severe self-censorship or speech chilling⁸ if algorithmic surveillance is perceived/believed to be comprehensive. Users mobilise these perceptions/beliefs through subsequent self-moderation⁹ and communication hacking. Algospeak, a medley of (written, video, audio) communication manipulation strategies, is one such defensive digital practice, protecting users within TikTok’s surveilled system by providing them with creative, innovative, and crucially, adaptive means of (communication) resistance.

Hacking Strategies

Developing research into algospeak on TikTok has illuminated numerous possibilities for communication subterfuge that algospeak users exploit in challenging TikTok surveillance, culminating in a rich toolkit of communication hacking strategies.¹⁰ Algospeak-as-hacking is a perpetually ongoing process of system disruption by which users take back some expressive agency. The informing research underlines algospeak strategies themselves as tools for successful and sustainable communication hacking rather than specific algospeak forms that might be considered as constitutive of a coded language. This is because the boundaries of TikTok’s system can and do shift – for example, their content moderation capabilities adapt – and users are better prepared to respond to the system’s fluidity with equally fluid hacking strategies rather than lasting (and therefore more moderate-able) words/forms. The algospeak strategies¹¹ below demonstrate a broad range of users’ approaches to communication hacking.

Censoring obscures content through strategic content substitution; text, sound, or image censors disrupt content filters that are triggered by linguistically meaningful words and recognisable imagery.

Users can also manipulate letters/characters within words or phrases. Visual coding (also l33tspeak¹², hackers’ language,¹³ rebus writing¹⁴) and typos disguise word forms while maintaining intelligibility through users’ abilities to treat non-alphabetic characters as if they were alphabetic. Users can convey and understand meaning through these hacked spellings by making meaning where it does not exist; automated word-detecting filters cannot.

Visual cues exploit recognisable cultural themes/artefacts for audience comprehension but can also encode meaning through the intertextuality or memetic culture of digital communication.¹⁵

Emojis exploit the fuzzy boundaries between visual and written channels. Emoji use can be representative (or literal); it can also integrate implied phonetic (linguistic) material, as in the case of the emoji homophone for ‘fuck.’ Users’ digital literacies regarding evolving emoji meanings also play a substantial role in subversive emoji communication.

Users use visual gestures to convey sensitive content without triggering text or sound filters.

Language gestures and performances skirt the boundaries between gesture/performance and speech by strategically removing or manipulating parts of conventional communication; this includes withholding audio content (e.g. mouthing), separating a word form (e.g. spelling), and using associative sounds to indicate particular words (e.g. onomatopoeia). 

Users sometimes change the phonetic makeup of their communication while maintaining intelligibility, mostly by relying on similar sounds to keep the intended meanings retrievable for audiences.

sects, a phonetic substitution of ‘sex,’ substitutes -X with -CTS, which achieves a similar pronunciation. Adding consonants -HM before the vowel – a variation of shm-reduplication from Yiddish¹⁶ – results in a minimal difference: /seks/ becomes /ʃmeks/. Heaux’s,¹⁷ a homophone, is identical in pronunciation to its target word ‘hoes’: /hoʊz/ remains /hoʊz/. This approach to communication hacking can be extended to unexpected word endings, which substitutes new word endings to potentially violative words and relies on context to convey the intended meaning.

Multilingual/-dialectal creativity reveals how TikTok’s system boundaries are conceptualised by users – what is and is not considered at risk of moderation – and how these boundaries are transgressed by users in their English interactions.

Users highlight how inappropriate content is socially/culturally/etc. specific. In other words, a word’s inappropriateness shifts depending on the language variety in which it is communicated and local social/cultural customs, norms, and conventions. Users can manipulate either one of these aspects by integrating multiple language varieties. Loanwords for (English) algospeak functions like typical loanword use; a word is borrowed from another language variety and integrated into English language content. The loanword’s non-Englishness becomes subversive, helping users evade filters meant to track locally (i.e. English) violative words. Users borrow sounds (phonetics) from other language varieties, using multilingual homophones like phoque (‘seal’ in French) instead of ‘fuck.’ Phonetic similarities facilitate audience comprehension, and borrowed phonetics exploit the lack of situated (English) inappropriateness; phoque is not violative in French.

Algospeak word creation has garnered considerable attention on and beyond TikTok,¹⁸ owing in part to the novelty of such neologisms as well as their seeming emblematic of algospeak as a coded language.

This strategy follows existing rules for word creation; for example, unalive is created by adding a negating prefix (e.g. UN-) to an adjective (e.g. ALIVE) to convey meanings regarding death or killing. The resulting word is unconventional but shares semantic qualities (i.e. literal meaning) with the word(s) it replaces. Unalive’s accordance with word creation conventions and its use of a binary opposition to convey a familiar concept facilitates audience comprehension while its unconventionality disrupts the system’s expectations.

Removing part(s) of users’ communication – from vowels to entire words – is also an effective form of algospeak.

These strategies rely on context for communicative success; audiences must fill in the blanks with contextual knowledge they gather throughout the interaction. Users’ heightened sensitivities to communication and content on TikTok – driven by the centrality of TikTok’s content guidelines and moderation – contribute to the success of such partial language as hacked communication by encouraging users to anticipate implicit messaging. 

Algospeak euphemisms and dysphemisms are alternative words/expressions for at-risk communication that also reduces or increases negative connotations, respectively. One subset of euphemisms frequently used for hacking is the innuendo – owing to TikTok’s conspicuous moderation of sexual content.¹⁹ 

Conventional euphemisms, innuendos, and dysphemisms rely on broad, cultural intelligibility while non-conventional alternatives require audiences to access context and cues to key into the intended meaning.

Algospeak metaphors involve mapping potentially inappropriate concepts onto new words/expressions that share some common threads of meaning or symbolism so audiences can figure out what is being communicated.

Metaphors, as well as allusions, retain one or more salient characteristic(s) of the original word or concept. In envelopes/envelopians for ‘White people,’ the salient characteristic is whiteness. This enables audiences to make inferences based on conceptual continuity between the intended meaning and the algospeak form. The eggplant emoji , used metaphorically on and off TikTok for ‘penis,’ illustrates the role of conceptual continuity in comprehending hacked communication. This continuity can rely on cultural artefacts (e.g. memes²⁰) to ensure audience comprehension, like the meme-ification of algospeak itself (e.g. le dollar bean’s alluding to le$bian/le$bean²¹).

Users’ contextualisation attempts show direct, dialogic engagement with TikTok at the system level. Users attempt to negotiate with (i.e. appeals, real contextualisation) or challenge (i.e. fake contextualisation) TikTok’s content evaluation and moderation practices. These strategies function in tandem with the potentially violative content, which remains uncensored.

These strategies represent a continuum of users’ willingness to be more or less subversive. On one end of the continuum (i.e. appeals, authentic disclaimers), users directly confront the potential inappropriateness of their content. On the other end (i.e. inauthentic disclaimers), users are deceptive about the nature of their content, following the internal logic that content that is not real cannot be a real violation.²² 

Discussion & Conclusion

Algospeak is a process of communication hacking that has developed in the face of TikTok’s algorithmic content moderation systems, which threaten users’ platform access and visibility, as well as their communicative agency. The manipulative strategies that comprise the algospeak toolkit for subversive communication enable users to hack their lines of code to achieve their goals: literally altering segments of (language) code to embed, disguise, imply, hint, and covertly convey their intended meanings. These strategies reach across communicative channels (i.e. written, audio, visual), media types (i.e. cultural allusions), geographies and languages varieties, cultures, and time (i.e. 90’s l33tspeak) to helps users keep their communication safe from moderation, remain selectively comprehensible among intended audiences, and embrace creativity and adaptability. Algospeak strategies provide users with rich and diverse ways to hack their communication and manage and restrict comprehensibility, allowing them to survive within TikTok’s algorithmic surveillance state and remain visible to fellow users. These seemingly paradoxical functions of algospeak – self-censorship or self-moderation to expand content reach – mirror the double-edged nature of TikTok’s algorithmic capabilities. TikTok’s algorithms moderate and remove undesirable content; they also promote desirable content to broader audiences, expanding content visibility (e.g. viral videos). With communication hacking, users can simultaneously keep their content safe from algorithmic scrutiny and eligible for mass, algorithmic distribution. Algospeak is simultaneously communication hacking to avoid algorithms and to benefit from algorithms. Thus, algospeak – or algorithm speak – is speaking for and against algorithms.

It is crucial, however, to reckon with the implications of algospeak as a communicative phenomenon, as well as algospeak research and heightened visibility more broadly. First, contending with algospeak in the digital hands of differentially motivated users is necessary. While it is a resourceful collection of language hacks that help protect users from having their communication unfairly moderated,²³ it is also accessible for strategic uses in covertly conveying harmful, discriminatory, violent communication. For example, it is possible to protect hate speech or threatening language – which are both unequivocally in violation of TikTok’s community guidelines – from content moderation through algospeak communication hacking (e.g. racist dog whistles as a kind of metaphor/allusion). Though no instances of such algospeak application were encountered during this research process, hacking is (inevitably) a tool accessible to a diverse range of users.

Additionally, it is also necessary to reconcile the risks associated with maintaining algospeak discourses, among its users online and in other domains including media journalism and academic research. Heightened algospeak visibility can backfire and unintentionally push content moderation systems like those operating on TikTok to adapt, improving moderation capabilities by integrating more complex forms and styles of communication. It is not implausible to anticipate that subversive, algospeak communication is someday soon explicitly targeted for moderation, at which point algospeak use by platform users will invite rather than avoid surveillance and (algorithmic) scrutiny. It is difficult to predict exactly how such evolutions to TikTok’s content moderation practices would come about, if at all. But perhaps some solace can be taken in the historical successes of subversive communication observed: for example, Lubunca, a repertoire of secret slang (an argot) for various queer and sex worker communities in Turkey.²⁴

TikTok surveils, moderates, and controls content and user behaviour through language. And it is through language that users disturb systemic expectations and norms. Users reassert their control, negotiating their communicative and expressive agency by pushing boundaries, manipulating language, and subverting community guidelines. They resist in the face of TikTok’s threats of censorship and deplatforming/banning. They exploit the weaknesses in TikTok’s algorithmic armour by playing across communicative channels: their human and creative communication skills outsmart and outpace current content moderation systems.²⁵ They layer manipulations, blend strategies, juxtapose and converge communication channels: innovate, innovate, innovate. Users are resilient against the imposition of content moderation through algospeak, creating new possibilities for communication, expression, connection, and ensuring digital survival. However, as algorithmic content moderation practices adapt in response – for instance, integrating popular or widely used algospeak communication into content filters – users will need to continue to generate and deploy innovative, increasingly complex and/or creative strategies for communication hacking to stay one step ahead.

Acknowledgements: The author declares no conflict of interest.

BIO

I was born and raised in the United States of America, where I completed the majority of my undergraduate studies (in French language and linguistics). I have recently completed a research master’s in Linguistics and Communication at the University of Amsterdam. I am currently located in and conducting independent research out of Amsterdam, Netherlands. Previous and ongoing research interests include critical (technocultural) discourse analysis, argumentation analysis, communicative and interactive phenomena on digital platforms, deliberate linguistic manipulation as user agency negotiation/resistance, and communication practices language users engage in to represent/perform/negotiate their positionalities/identities.

REFERENCES

1. Danielle Blunt, Ariel Wolf, Emily Coombes, & Shanelle Mullin, “Posting Into the Void: Studying the impact of shadowbanning on sex workers and activists,” Hacking//Hustling, 2020; Faithe J. Day, “Are Censorship Algorithms Changing TikTok’s Culture?,” OneZero, December 11, 2021; Taylor Lorenz, “Internet ‘algospeak’ is changing our language in real time, from ‘nip nops’ to ‘le dollar bean’,” The Washington Post, April 8, 2022; Kait Sanchez, “TikTok says the repeat removal of the intersex hashtag was a mistake,” The Verge, June 4, 2021. ︎
2. Blunt, Wolf, Coombes, & Mullin,  2020. ︎
3. “Community Guidelines Enforcement Report,” TikTok. https://www.tiktok.com/transparency/nl-nl/community-guidelines-enforcement-2022-4/ (accessed March 2023); “Community Guidelines,” TikTok. https://www.tiktok.com/community-guidelines/en/ (accessed March 2023). ︎
4. Elvin Ong, “Online Repression and Self-Censorship: Evidence from Southeast Asia,” Government and Opposition, 56 (2021): 141-162; Jonathon W. Penney, “Internet surveillance, regulation, and chilling effects online: a comparative case study,” Internet Policy Review, 6 (2017). ︎
5. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972). ︎
6. Tarleton Gillespie, “Do Not Recommend? Reduction as a Form of Content Moderation,” Social Media + Society, 8 (2022). ︎
7. Taina Bucher, “The algorithmic imaginary: Exploring the ordinary affects of Facebook algorithms,” Information, Communication & Society, 20 (2017): 30-44; Michael A. DeVito, Darren Gergle, & Jeremy Birnholtz, “’Algorithms ruin everything’: #RIPTwitter, folk theories, and resistance to algorithmic change in social media,” Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2017): 3163-3174. ︎
8. Ong, 2021; Penney, 2017. ︎
9. Nadia Karizat, Dan Delmonaco, Motahhare Eslami & Nazanin Andalibli, “Algorithmic Folk Theories and Identity: How TikTok Users Co-Produce Knowledge of Identity and Engage in Algorithmic Resistance,” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 5 (2021): 1-44; Daniel Klug, Ella Steen, & Kathryn Yurechko, “How Algorithm Awareness Impacts Algospeak Use on TikTok,” WWW ’23: The ACM Web Conference 2023 (2023). ︎
10.  Kendra Calhoun & Alexia Fawcett, “’They Edited Out Her Nip Nops’: Linguistic Innovation as Textual Censorship Avoidance on TikTok,” Language@Internet, 21 (2023); Klug, Steen, & Yurechko, 2023; young, 2023. ︎
11. In this article, algospeak hacked communication is in italics, its glosses (non-hacked forms) are in ‘single quotes,’ and gestures/performances are underlined. ︎
12. Blake Sherblom-Woodward, “Hackers, Gamers and Lamers: The Use of l33t in the Computer Sub-Culture” (Master’s thesis), (University of Swarthmore, 2002). ︎
13. Brenda Danet, Cyberpl@y: Communicating Online (Routledge, 2001). ︎
14. David Crystal, Internet Linguistics (Routledge, 2011); Ana Deumert, Sociolinguistics and Mobile Communication (Edinburgh University Press: 2014). ︎
15. Calhoun & Fawcett, 2023. ︎
16. Andrew Nevins & Bert Vaux, “Metalinguistic, shmetalinguistic: the phonology of shm reduplication,” Proceedings of CLS 39, 2003 (2003). ︎
17. This form also uses multilingual borrowed phonetics, borrowing eau(x) and its pronunciation from French. ︎
18. Ellie Botoman, “UNALIVING THE ALGORITHM.” Cursor, 2022; Alexandra S. Levine, “From Camping To Cheese Pizza, ‘Algospeak’ Is Taking Over Social Media,” Forbes, September 19, 2022. ︎
19. Blunt, Wolf, Coombes, & Mullin, 2020; Mikayla E. Knight, “#SEGGSED: Sex, Safety, and Censorship on TikTok” (Master’s thesis), (San Diego State University, 2022). ︎
20. Calhoun & Fawcett, 2023. ︎
21. Ibid. ︎
22. Charissa Cheong, “The phrase ‘fake body’ is spreading on TikTok as users think it tricks the app into allowing semi-nude videos,” Insider, February, 8, 2022. ︎
23. Blunt, Wolf, Coombes, & Mullin, 2020; Calhoun & Fawcett, 2023. ︎
24. Nicholas Kontovas, “Lubunca: The Historical Development of Istanbul’s Queer Slang and a Social-Functional Approach to Diachronic Processes in Language” (Master’s thesis), (Indiana University, 2012). ︎
25. Day, 2021; Robert Gorwa, Reuben Binns, & Christian Katzenbach, “Algorithmic content moderation: Technical and political governance,“ Big Data & Society, 7 (2020). ︎

back to the ball

By: Anna Hughes

The Cybercrip

The summer before I started my practice-based PhD a mysterious sickness struck me. Determined not to let it get in my way, I carried on. I presumed that these symptoms would resolve themselves somehow, but they never did. Instead, my illness developed. Eventually, I realised I could not carry on as before any longer. I needed to adapt. I needed a different way of working because making large sculptures was becoming too much of a strain on my changing body. In research, well-considered methods are essential. A method is how something is done, and these choices need a particular logic. Sickness involuntarily became a part of my methodology because it helped shape why I do things in a certain way. My body not only affected my way of doing things but also nurtured my ability to respond creatively to this body’s influence. As a way of continuing to make art and my research, I turned to digital media. Digital space operates differently from analogue space because I can do so much with minimal bodily movements. Embodiment is now a fundamental part of my methodology, yet my methods centre around me “using” my body less. Despite its apparent disembodied ephemerality, cyberspace is a vital form of mobilisation, creativity, work, and socialisation particularly for sick and disabled people. With my research, I emphasise not only the creative utilisation of cyberspace within disabled and chronically ill communities but also the importance of these voices in developing cyberspace as an embodied encounter. We have learned to adapt with and for our bodies, becoming adept at a genuinely hybrid, digitally augmented body, and the methods we develop can be learned from. The cybercrip.

Using the computer graphics software program Blender I learn to make things differently. Sculpture no longer feels accessible to me. I need to limit how much I move my own hands to make artwork. Digital making is a way in which I can open up space, and continue with my research project. My body is no longer a passive object in the decisions I make concerning methods. I soon realised that this form of making offers me more than a substitute for working with my hands: I can use this software to add more space and open up different understandings of the things I make. In Blender, I make myself a digital hand. I endeavour to recreate the creases and folds of my own hands creating an object that looks realistic. Crafting these details myself, I spend time with this new creation. I know this hand. I perfect the skin material that covers this severed hand, careful to accentuate the depth of the skin surface by including the “dermis” layer which appears red and splotchy on the hand. With this hand, I can reach out in cyberspace. The digital hand is not my avatar, it is a digital prosthesis that allows me to interact in digital media. The uncanniness of this digital hand does something to me, making it more than a representational object. The uncanny is what pulls me into this bodily appendage, and not its ability to become a “real” hand. I feel through it, as I use it to touch and interact with other materials in my digital artworks. With this digital hand, I learn how embodiment manifests in cyberspace, and nurture my relation to embodiment in general as a sick person. I learn both the science of my body and the effects bodies have on one another. Cyberspace does not need to be a space of disembodiment.

Online Resistance

My sick body extends into cyberspace. I turn this movement into a creative output. Cyberspace has been designed by and for capitalist greed. Capitalism profiteers from disability while it uses us to benchmark the limits of normality. Disabled people, therefore, need to hack these capitalist systems to gain any benefit from using their digital facilities. This disruption is a practice in itself. Legacy Russell coined the term Glitch Feminism.¹ Russell argues that the glitch can be utilised as a means to disrupt.  Reclaiming the error as something agential is useful for my body that is being consumed by unexpected sensations. The error is a creative endeavour. Preset algorithms dictate interactions in cyberspace; therefore, the error creates difference and produces much-needed alternative pathways. In a system without error, we see much repetition, even if this system grows in a feedback loop. The error is a new way forward. The error is innovation despite whether it is a positive or negative interruption. Without an interruption (error, anomaly, breakthrough, or shift in a system, even a system of thought), momentum is contained to a predetermined path, meaning invention is only possible through deviation. Illness diverts us in the course of a “healthy” path. Instead of thinking of this change in direction as something to be corrected, we need to leave room within our systems for change; without the assumption that things should and will achieve expected results (a healthy/”normal” body) and function in expected ways. Creativity, then, would be built into and cultivated within a system. The sick body is a creative body, and with it, we find different paths forward and different methods of being and being with others. This creativity stems from the body while it creates symptoms, mutations, disease and more. It also creates the need for a change in method. Ultimately, disruption is critical to combat the marginalisation capitalism shapes. 

The collective Laboria Cuboniks introduces such tactics in their manifesto Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation.² This manifesto expresses optimism for technology to disrupt the patriarchal, capitalist practice of marginalisation. The manifesto strongly rejects “essentialist naturalism.”³ Essentialism is a harmful prospect for those who differ; it posits a fixed expectation despite its unattainability. In this instance, nature is thought of as possessing an undisputed sanctity. Naturalism itself is not the problem. The problem is the proposition that things possess inherent qualities. In this way, there is a quintessential human from which all others deviate, creating a hierarchy of perfection. In contrast, crip theory does not form itself around a central figure (the perfect human) from which any difference creates deviation. Crip theory decentralises what it is to be human, allowing for deviation to create a multiplicit picture of humanity (as well as non-humans). Crip theory puts the power of collective difference into practice, allowing for the integration of variation through finding common goals, desires, and needs. Most importantly, crip communities are formed through subjective decisions to include oneself in this group, as opposed to being made a part of a group through exclusion, which the essentialist human dictates. 

For disabled people, essentialism is a frightening, othering prospect. All this fixity completely bypasses the reality that “nature” is composed of change. Medical care can be thought of as either the proof that bodies are malleable, autonomously changing and liable to being changed, while, on the other hand, medicalisation has long reflected a desire to correct and indeed eradicate disabled people. The medical model of disability has been widely criticised for its problematization of disability. The medical model of disability focuses on the impact of an “impairment” or illness on the individual and emphasises the need to medically intervene with the intent to cure disability. The medical model frames disability as a negative thing to be corrected, therefore emphasising the “deviance” of the disabled person. This model fails to see disability as a viable difference, where disability can cultivate thriving culture, joy, skills, knowledge, and creativity. Importantly, the medical model focuses on the individual at the expense of acknowledging how one’s society is designed in such a way as to disadvantage disabled people, which reflects society’s disregard or prejudice towards disability.

To counteract the medical model, the social model of disability has become the preferred ethos for the majority of disability rights campaigners today.⁴ The social model of disability argues that society actively disables a person and not that their body disables them. The need for accessible buildings and the eradication of stigma is crucial for this movement. This model does not seem perfect to me, however. If society is the one barrier that causes disability then it also posits that disability can be eradicated with social changes. I am disabled; all the bodily difference, knowledge and experience have made it a crucial part of who I am. I do not know who I am, or if I will be me anymore without disability. Furthermore, there are certainly social changes that would make things easier and less symptomatic for me, but having a genetic disorder means that my body creates symptoms and functions in a way that disables me. Social attitudes also impact the politics around medical care, which greatly affects my disability. The social model is important to consider because social design hugely affects disabled lives, but there needs to be more to it. Disability is a “complex embodiment” one that combines the social and the embodied, as Tobin Seibers would argue.⁵  Medical intervention can be vital, while society causes its scarcity, neglect, abuse, and malpractice. Disability need not be cured, and Alison Kafer argues that the assumption of cures in the future assumes a better world is one without disability, while it undermines the need to plan for disability in the future.⁶ Disability is neither positive nor negative; it is a reality that creates different ways of being. Disability is a way of being as a body, as well as with other bodies.

 Medical intervention does not need to be framed as a correction, or a cure for disability. Medicine should be the creation of technology that relieves difficulties and suffering. Medicine is not always necessary for all disabled people, but it should be treated no differently from innovation in assistive devices/aids or accessibility features: something that is available and prioritised when needed or wanted. Medicine and assistive technology are both creative responses to the body. In the text, ‘Crip Technoscience Manifesto’,  Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch argue that

“Disabled people design our own tools and environments, whether by using experiential knowledge to adapt tools for daily use or by engaging in professional design practices. Crip technoscience conjures long histories of daily adaption and tinkering with built environments.”⁷

Technology gives agency if we use it to deviate beyond the “norm” as opposed to preserving normality through medical corrections. Bodily “hacking” through medical intervention is given as an example of technological disruption in Cuboniks’ cyberfeminist manifesto.⁸ Cuboniks explains that the black market distribution of hormonal pharmaceuticals resists the gatekeeping of gender affirmative care.  The internet provides us with medical knowledge as well as access to structures of exchange. Cuboniks acknowledges the dangers of unregulated medical markets but argues that these underground practices model a better way forward, calling for a “free and open source medicine” platform.⁹ Open source software holds the user-focused advantage of being free, but it also provides the user with the source code, enabling them to modify the program. This open-source model brings into question the withholding of vital care that pharmaceutical profiteering creates.

The project Get Well Soon by Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne serves as an online archive of well-wishes from GoFundMe campaigns for medical care. They state that “it is an archive that should not exist.”¹⁰ As Cuboniks identifies, people are assembling and taking healthcare into their own hands online. The well wishes archived may offer hope for society’s capacity to care and help others, yet this archive only exists because of a lack of state-provided medical care;¹¹ a result of inconsistencies in society’s capacity to care for all. This charitable crowd-sourced system is vital for particular individuals but without the fair contribution and distribution of these medical provisions. 

All the well-meaning messages in this archive do show that care can be easily distributed online, as Laboria Cubonix points towards open-source-style medical care. The sporadic distribution of the GoFundMe campaigns means crowd-sourcing individual care is not the most ethical way forward because it inevitably selects and excludes people for varying reasons including bigotry.  Cuboniks calls for a form of “health communism” exemplified by open-source medical care and considers fair distribution, unlike a crowd-sourced charitable model. This argument goes beyond the socialism of our current NHS system in the UK (putting aside the point that the NHS is being systematically decimated through austerity measures, driving the appeal of private treatment). The NHS’s main principle of being available to all is important, but we could enhance this system beyond simply funding it properly: the open-source model is not only about universal accessibility (free to use), but it also provides an infrastructure where individuals can contribute knowledge and agency to a collective endeavour.  In this way, patient care becomes both medical and social at the same time. Agency and subjective knowledge become crucial in this new way forward that includes new systematic technologies and a collective responsibility to care and share with others in a community. 

We can take from these well-wishes the prospect that care can be accumulated and distributed online but we must remember that medical distribution systems need to move on from individualised empathy.

Crip Cyberspace

Cyberspace is equipped for the user-based self-inclusion that characterises crip theory. Crip theory focuses on self-assembly and fluid definitions, forming a coalition of crips drawn to the other through a commonality in being disabled. Robert McReur uses queer theory in his introduction to crip theory. He explains, “able-bodiedness, even more than heterosexuality, still largely masquerades as a nonidentity, as the natural order of things.”¹² For McRuer, disability and queer theory originate from what he calls “compulsory able-bodiedness” and “compulsory heterosexuality.”¹³ Both disability and homosexuality arise as other to the “norm.”  Crip theory identifies disability through commonality. This commonality does not need to be exact symptoms; it could be a commonality in being othered or marginalised as a body. The act of reclamation involved in using what was once a slur (queer or crip) gives the group agency; disability is not to be seen as positive or negative but a legitimate reality in need of acknowledgement. Although instigated through marginalisation, a crip community still forms itself by affirmation of those who are drawn together when previously classification was given to them without consent.

Touching Bodies at a Distance

Cyberspace enables me. It assists me, or moreover, it facilitates my movements in a more accessible format for me. Digitally, I can create whole worlds, be they expressed visually or conceptually. My expressions of this embodiment create a world. However, in cyberspace, this world is open. Creating different worlds is an invitation; a form of reaching out to others so they can encounter something new. The mobility of cyberspace is built into its functionality and material composition. With this in mind, other practitioners in cyberspace can be learnt from. How do others utilise the “affective” potential of cyberspace?

An online phenomenon I have been drawn to is ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response). ASMR videos feature sources of sensory stimulation, isolating and intensifying particular sounds (triggers), visual and material properties, often being manipulated in some way by hands or other objects, as well as sometimes just using whispered speech. The desired effect is a tingling at the back of one’s head, or simply, relaxation. 

A YouTube video created by ASMRMagic has garnered an astonishing ninety-two million views to date (2024).¹⁴ In this hypnotic footage, the creator delicately interacts with an array of objects, evoking sensory responses in viewers. I find myself entranced as manicured fingers trace the surface of a glitter-covered mannequin head, the sound of the glitter crackling beneath each gentle stroke. My body absorbs this sound, and I feel this crackle at the back of my head. I feel a resonance with this sound as it transforms and amplifies itself on my own skin. A side effect of a medication I take called Midodrine (for Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome) is a tingle at the back of my head. When I feel this sensation I know the medication is taking effect. This medication helps pump blood around my body. A nurse was surprised when I announced that I liked the tingling the first time I tried the drug. This tingling reminds me that my body is working to be me. Similarly, ASMR instigates this tingling sensation. The phenomena that I encounter outside my body, reverberate with me. These sensations collapse traditional notions of proximity because I am no longer so separate from the screen. Paradoxically, something outside myself has produced such strong sensations in my body. Illness produces a similar outcome in that it forces me to feel my body. Relief from these symptoms does not need to be a neutralisation of the body, but it can be something that therapeutically produces its own effects, like warmth, tingling, or euphoria. Illness is creative in this way and is perhaps why I seek sensation from all that I consume. 

Digital software has given me the means to create things in an accessible medium for me. Online media platforms give a means to share and interact with things created. Digital/digitised art is formatted in such a way as to be compatible with this form of presentation and dissemination. Before becoming sick, I did not fully understand the importance of this formatting: with digital media I can reach things now rendered out of reach. I can reach out to others and find ways to resonate with them. This is particularly liberating for those unable to reach out in “physical” ways. Beyond individual efforts to reach out in cyberspace, digital media gives the means to collect and mobilise embodied knowledge that is often under-represented, particularly in medical settings. I have participated, and learnt from others with my medical conditions in dedicated forums. Without such knowledge, I would never have solved the mystery of my illness when doctors could not diagnose it. Digital media allows us to find each other through embodied commonalities. Art-making is an attempt to reach out to others and find these resonances, and digitisation broadens this reach. As with the example of ASMR, digital art requires another body to feel something for it to reach its potential. Artist and theorist Simon O’Sullivan explores this potential of art to instigate “affects” in those who encounter it.     

“Affects can be described as extra-discursive and extra-textual. Affects are moments of intensity, a reaction in/on the body at the level of matter.”¹⁵

In making digital art, I draw from things that resonate with me as a body in the hope that another body might respond to it. It is not the outcome of this reaction that is meaningful for me as the artist, but the thought of this potential. Like when I have participated in online forums, I have resonated with others despite such a seemingly indirect mode of connection: one body putting their knowledge “out there” for others. The potential that art, or a shared phenomenon holds excites me. 

ASMR is a good example of what I can do with the specificity of cyberspace. Using cyberspace as a disabled person is more than an alternative method in response to a loss of access to the “original” method. With digital media, I can make things without straining my body, and I can use it to reach others, whether I consume the material of others or contribute and interact socially with an online community. Illness has instigated my use of digital media as an art-making method, but it also inhabits the work I create. Illness has taught me that my body is present in everything I do, only before, I did not notice it: my body was quiet in the background. I know now that making artwork is an embodied move; a move that is both practical and knowledge-based. Digital media has given me the means to both directly express what it is to be this body, as well as how to produce as a body. Illness and embodiment have become a framework for my art-making methodology. The methods I have adapted with come with their own methodology and techniques designed and instigated through/for digital media. There is a reciprocal relationship between developing methods in response to the body’s needs and the media that facilitates these methods. A feedback loop that creates difference because the body autonomously diverts my study away from repetition. I must adapt and change with this volatile body. Cyberspace gives me particular abilities, while my body contributes to how and what I make using these new abilities.

The Cybercrip

The cybercrip acknowledges that embodiment is key to disrupting capitalist systems online. My theory of the cybercrip is not necessarily aimed at sick and disabled people; we already know that the embodied subject cannot be superseded by “rationality” and that cyberspace can be a useful tool when “physical” access is not possible/viable. The cybercrip is to affirm the vital knowledge of cyberspace that disability/sickness/non-normativity nurtures; we are bodies who have learnt to find alternative methods, ready to adapt, divert and disrupt dominant platforms in cyberspace, bringing forth embodied practices using this seemingly ephemeral augmentation.

BIO

Born 1990, UK. Anna is a visual artist, writer and researcher based in London. She has recently completed an art practice-based PhD titled Sickness in Cyberspace: Sensual Encounters in Digital Media Towards a Radically Embodied Future, supervised by Melanie Jackson and Tai Shani at the Royal College of Art, London. Anna also completed an MA in Sculpture at the RCA in 2014. Her work has been exhibited with institutions across the UK and abroad including Southwark Park Gallery, Beaconsfield Gallery, QUAD (Derby), Outpost (Norwich), Hackney Picture House, Flattime House and Art Copenhagen.

REFERENCES

1. Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (London New York: Verso, 2020). np. ︎
2. Laboria Cuboniks, ‘Laboria Cuboniks | Xenofeminism’, accessed 16 September 2019, https://www.laboriacuboniks.net/. ︎
3. Ibid. np. ︎
4. For an example of these campaigners see Disability Rights UK, ‘Social Model of Disability: Language | Disability Rights UK’, accessed 1 February 2023, https://www.disabilityrightsuk.org/social-model-disability-language. ︎
5. Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory, Corporealities (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 25. ︎
6. Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Indiana University Press, 2013), 1–2. ︎
7. Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch, ‘Crip Technoscience Manifesto’, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5, no. 1 (1 April 2019): 5, https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29607. ︎
8. Cuboniks, ‘Laboria Cuboniks | Xenofeminism’. ︎
9. Ibid. ︎
10. ‘Get Well Soon!’, accessed 13 October 2020, http://getwellsoon.labr.io/. ︎
11. The project, Get Well Soon! was made in the US, so the lack of medical care is amplified compared to the UK. Still, in the UK, the NHS is running insufficiently due to austerity which forces individuals to seek private care and fundraise. ︎
12. Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, Cultural Front (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 1.
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13. Ibid, 2. ︎
14. ASMRMagic ‘ASMR 50+ Triggers over 3 Hours (NO TALKING) Ear Cleaning, Massage, Tapping, Peeling, Umbrella & MORE – YouTube’, (YouTube video, 3:16:49, 2018) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXp0hTkXiks&t=2187s.
    ︎
15. Simon O’Sullivan, ‘THE AESTHETICS OF AFFECT: Thinking Art beyond Representation’, Angelaki 6, no. 3 (December 2001): 125–35, https://doi.org/10.1080/09697250120087987. ︎

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