How many black squares does it take to solve police brutality?
Seven months ago during the Black Lives Matter protests, a movement spread across the world pushing people to post a simple black square on their social media accounts in solidarity with the civil rights movement. Millions of agitated slacktivists rallied to their Instagram accounts and posted a black square along with cute hashtags like ‘#blm’ or ‘#endracism’, signalling to their followers that they unquestionably care about systemic prejudice and injustice. This lasted a few weeks, with throngs of Gen-Z drones rushing to engage in what Angela Nagle calls ‘competitive virtue signalling’, throwing their arms up in repugnance at the current state of policing within the United States. What, though, came of this universal ‘act of solidarity’?
A similar phenomenon occurred 9 years ago during ‘Kony2012’, resulting in another act of futile cyberspatial solidarity. Hordes of millennials and Gen-Z’ers pretended to care about Ugandan politics for a few weeks before slipping back into the comforts of bottomless lattes and Hollywood spectacles. Joseph Kony had been accused of harvesting child soldiers for a militia in East Africa, and a film was produced detailing his various crimes. Following the film’s reception, droves of people entered cyberspace to ‘raise awareness’ about the poor, warlike conditions of children in Africa (shocking) along with calling for the arrest of Kony. “On Facebook and Twitter,” says Nagle, “a vast audience of Western young people normally pretty indifferent to the activities of Ugandan war criminals shared the [Kony 2012 videos], with urgent emotional exclamations attached, which we might now cynically call ‘virtue signalling’.” The conundrum of #Kony2012 eventually faded into obscurity, and has now solidified itself as a distant, somewhat humorous memory for many millennials. Joseph Kony remains free. “The US sees him [Kony] as irrelevant,” declared US Army spokesman Lt Col Armando Hernandez in 2017, hammering the final nail in the coffin of hysteria surrounding Kony and his genocidal insurgency.
Maybe we’ll get another hashtag in a few years.
Recognising the vanity of these episodes within cyberspace begins to lay bare deeper issues pervasive within modern activist culture — the corporate domination of the internet, the impotence of casting our frustrations off into the bottomless pit of the internet, and our collective obsession with validation.
The early purveyors of the Net envisaged a utopian future whereby people could escape from the suffering of the material world and recess into enclaves free of any political or corporate bureaucracy. In spite of their idealistic goals, the Net was surrendered to the very forces they sought to distance it from. The Dotcom boom of the 90s and early 00s resulted in a flood of financial capital into corporations that swiftly began to dominate the virtual world. Companies like Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and a myriad of future monoliths began to set up shop in the increasingly popular environment of cyberspace, eagerly grasping at the market potential that the Net held, thereby obliterating any chance of a decentralised, unsurveilled space for the disenfranchised. The death of this dream was followed by an overtly dystopian nightmare, where corporations governed the rules and boundaries within both worlds. Adam Curtis, in his 2016 documentary HyperNormalisation, explores the cyber-hellscape that began to emerge in the early 00s, remarking:
“The version of cyberspace that was rising up seemed to be very much like William Gibson’s original vision — that behind the superficial freedoms of the Web, were a few giant corporations with opaque systems that controlled what people saw and shaped what they thought.”
Since the release of the documentary, the constrictive mechanisms of these corporations have grown ever tighter. Companies that operate within cyberspace reproduce their own existence by cushioning us into ideological bubbles, prohibiting us from seeing things that might estrange us from our political presuppositions. This results in the emergence of a commodified virtuality that generates profits by keeping us algorithmically confined to atomized communities of yes-men. With these oppressive corporate structures in place, activism becomes no more than a meaningless, performative act, generating no improvement—other than a ‘raised awareness’—in the material conditions of whatever marginalised group is being championed. Individuals end up signalling that they care about a particular movement to people who already agree with them, manifesting in a conceited cycle of praise and meaningless reinforcement.
“End this! End that! End police brutality! Defund the police! End bad things!” shouts the fervent cyber-protestor into a sea of sameness. Raising awareness is obviously crucial, but it falls into the realm of the performative when individuals plaster their internet profiles with platitudes. Banal remarks like “Racism exists” and “Black people shouldn’t be killed by police”, while undeniably true, don’t encourage people to think critically about the malevolent foundations of Western society—the foundations that permitted the enslavement of Africans, the brutal exploitation of millions for profit, and the construction of fundamentalist police states. While cyberactivism shouldn’t be completely abandoned, people simply ought to realise that their change.org petitions, infographics, hashtags and endearing profile bios are fundamentally futile in the pursuit of material change. The only way to effect change for the oppressed and the persecuted is to organise—in the real world—against the institutions that created those conditions.
Under the Net’s corporate oligopoly, the only activism allowed is activism that doesn’t truly threaten the established order. Corporate-authorised political advocacy becomes recuperated by the very institutions that activists seek to confront, mollifying an otherwise radical message and reducing it into a docile state which is then plastered over signs and campaigns to sell a product. This was seen with the plurality of businesses that annexed Black Lives Matter messaging as soon as it became widespread. “We can have no society worth celebrating,” writes Apple CEO Tim Cook, “unless we can guarantee freedom from fear for every person who gives this country their love, labor, and life.” Aside from the obvious irony of Suicide Nets Incorporated™ broadcasting a humanitarian message against injustice, it signifies a deeper sickness haunting contemporary activists—the increasing regularity with which movements are commodified by the very structures that necessitated the movements in the first place.
By merely presenting oneself as a radical instead of actually being a radical, activism is reduced to a mere virtual pseudo-act that feeds into the spectacle of cyberspace. Instead of being a progressive act of compassion, activism becomes a form of narcissistic self-validation along with a way to superficially differentiate oneself from others. Cyberactivism devolves into having only an aesthetic dimension, rather than an emancipatory one. Understandably, the idea of being a ‘cyberactivist’ becomes attractive in a world where humans are constantly being stripped of their genuine individuality in favour of identification with commodities like branded clothes, hair products, makeup, accessories or TV shows. Slavoj Žižek, expanding upon this point in The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, explains that similarly, people nowadays believe that they can attain a form of vindication by consuming the ‘right’ commodities. “Starbucks coffee — I’m regularly drinking it, I must admit it,” says Žižek, with his infamously sniffly Slovene accent, “but are we aware that when we buy a cappuccino from Starbucks, we also buy quite a lot of ideology?” He then goes on to detail that by advertising products with certain philanthropic attachments like ‘environmentally-friendly’ or ‘5% of the proceeds will be donated to charity’, this allows customers to be soothed into a seemingly ‘morally justified consumerism’. Emancipating the marginalised from their long-held agony should begin with attacking the capitalist system that demands their exploitation, not feeding into it.
Up until the dawn of the 21st century, corporations seldom weighed in on current affairs. Now, you would be hard-pressed to find a mega-conglomerate that hasn’t commented on “Pride Month”, or modified their marketing in a more cosmopolitan direction. At what point did it become acceptable for companies like Ben & Jerry’s to give their two cents on matters of the State? Is this not a testament to the absolute inefficacy, the absolute absurdity, of recent cyberactivism? Corporations doing their utmost to scoop up as many consumers as possible naturally harness causes promoted by otherwise apolitical people—ie, the masses—but does this not display the dryness of this form of advocacy? It seems that corporations are now capable of effectively obfuscating the barbarism within their respective industries by deploying progressive smokescreens whenever some injustice hits front-page news. “There’s no room for silence!” declares Swedish clothing retail company H&M, while pulverising their underpaid child workers in Myanmar. “The recent events in the US have left us heartbroken!” they cry. A collective realisation must be made: as long as our activism rests in the passive realm of cyberspace, it will always be subject to commodification.
Painfully navigating the cyberspatial crevices of political activism can be a daunting task. What it reveals, though, is a certain sterility innate within this form of advocacy. ‘Raising awareness’ has its benefits as an activist objective, but resigning oneself to this simple, lifeless campaign has never managed to produce a material improvement for anyone. The youth generations, instead of passionately screeching into empty vacuums, must begin to channel their frustrations into the world, and actually start to effect radical change—this starts with pursuing effective organisational strategies, adopting more revolutionary political messaging barred from recuperation by conglomerates, and most importantly, logging off.
