Why DIY?

Reporting body: Southern Union for Memory, Unity, and Dignity (SUMUD)

Affiliation: High Commissioner’s Office
Period of research: 2080—82
PART 1 of 3
Date: 25 March 2082*

Abstract:

In October 2023, following the crisis of Covid-19, the world was decimated by another pandemic. Historical records describe the disease as an “intellectual deficit” and “a compromise in communication”, whose victims came to be known as the Silents. Reported symptoms included “losing the ability to understand words or read”, leading to “loss of speech” and a “decline in moral norms and conventions”. These symptoms eventually lead to unimaginable violence, oppression and eventually the slaughtering of the Silents by states who saw an opportunity for military action and minimising populations. Blood thirsty policing and politicians, of what was then known as the Global North, created a system of apartheid, segregating the sick from the healthy, proceeding to organise and execute a genocide of their own citizens. Mass graves found across major cities in the USA, UK, Canada, Australia and Western Europe indicated the extent of the massacre, with victims buried in median strips, beaches, and parks. Several attempts were made by survivors of the illness, who were still able to speak, to call out and stop the execution of the Silents, including via use of the era’s dominant technology, social media. The rise of this body of activists, using social media to highlight the graphic truth of the horrific suffering of the Silents, is known today as the Mis-users.

Keywords: pandemic, silence, genocide, apartheid, Global North, social media

Context and purpose of the report:

This report presents findings of the SUMUD team, composed of archaeologists, sociologists, human rights lawyers, poets, media scholars, musicians, and communication experts from the Southern Union (SU). Formed in 2034, the Southern Union is a strategic alliance between South Africa, Namibia, Algeria, Tunisia, Pakistan, the Maldives, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Malaysia, Indonesia, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Oman, Ireland, and Indigenous people in North America, Australia and New Zealand. SUMUD is a special research unit for investigating Global North political, economic and military movements and events between the years 2023-24. It is widely viewed as a counter-narrative response to Western (media-led) historical accounts. The report investigates the relationship between the (mis)use of communication technologies and the decaying and fall of dominant systems of power. This is Part 1 of 3, focusing on the period between October 2023—December 2024.

Social Media Censorship:

From October 2023, records note a dramatic increase in censoring and curtailing social media content relating to the pandemic, reaching its peak in the months that followed as the attack on the Silents began to take place and to be reported by activists across the world. From the United States to Europe to India, content critical of governments’ management of the pandemic and eventual slaughtering of their own citizens, is actively reduced and many users’ accounts are suspended or “shadowbanned” (the act of muting a user or their content on a platform without informing them). Those who are not silenced by the disease are muted by major media platforms who, in collaboration with the government, develop algorithms for the filtering and identification of keywords and images shared by activists to expose and criticise genocide. Under the guise of “violating community guidelines” and “handling misinformation about the pandemic and state response”, media corporations are crashing content being labelled as "terrorism", "hate speech", and "misinformation". The digital rights of social media activists are eliminated overnight, along with the human rights of the Silents. Forty eight organisations, including NGOs, experts, advocates and academics working on Social Media Advancement, issue statements urging tech companies to stop the disproportionate censorship of these voices through content takedowns, hiding hashtags, and removing followers, among other violations. “These restrictions on activists, civil society and human rights defenders represent a grave threat to freedom of expression and access to information, freedom of assembly, and political participation.” In contrast, the official government narrative of the Global North is promoted heavily by the genocidal algorithm.

Social Media Uses and Misuses:

Noting that prior to the disease predominant use of this technology involved marketing and promoting products (for businesses) and selves (for individuals). Social media was a powerful tool for businesses to track customer patterns and target individual preferences and user-generated content predominantly involved around consumerism. Its original purpose was presented as "connecting friends and family" and operating in a "dialogic transmission system" (i.e. many sources to many receivers). However, with the dramatic expansion of the Internet, social media spaces became increasingly corporatised and, in their final stages, authoritarian government tools. Prior to the Silents pandemic, the technology was largely criticised for its connection to teenage anxiety, depression and suicide. Users’ age varied, but social networking services were predominantly used by young people, often even under the age of 13 (for example in the US) despite policies against it. During the first phases of the pandemic, social media platforms played a role in communication during a time of isolation. As the killing spree intensified so did the protesting, both digitally and physically, with the development of new global communities centered around activism and resistance. Young people (10-25) were particularly active in the use of the technology as a weapon against state suppression, which included the invention of a new practice called ‘algotrap’. Algotrap entailed using keywords and image or video that was deemed algorithmically attractive (for example, semi-naked selfies or #travel hashtags) as a decoy for luring the algorithm to boost up anti-oppression content, escaping silencing and amplifying their voices. Incessant content creation and reporting from the ground, showing detailed and horrific imagery of the massacres was one of the means which we are focusing on this report.

Other methods, for follow-up analysis, comprised of: boycotts and divestment (including of mainstream western media, touristic destinations and cultural events and institutions, and corporations sponsoring the genocide); regular organised marches, vigils and blockades; donating and crowdfunding; smuggling food, medical and communications aid; using art, music, speeches and text to counteract state propaganda, and other.

Case studies:

Prominent social media mis-users quickly started to emerge reporting from the ground on their countries own version of the genocides. Indicatively, mis-users Nasib, Raul, Zomat, Touran and Lewa, spanning North America, the Middle East, Europe and Africa, were among some of the most followed and most outspoken. Their work helped create solidarity and community, fueling resistance groups across the world and threatening the existence of the status quo. Their influence on social media seems to have gained such momentum that the Global North axis declared a state of emergency and armies were ordered to run major cities in desperate attempts to secure existing governing powers, which became weaker by the day. One by one these users-cum-journalists were eventually targeted and killed by soldiers within the first year of the oppression.

As another prominent mis-user and activist, Raffaj, quoted, “social media was not created as a tool for social justice but for surveillance, the theft of our attention, and corporate profit. Social media became important for our activism and we were able to reimagine and repurpose them for resistance, but within these spaces we’re always at the mercy of these large corporations who want nothing more than to ensure that the hyperindividualism of the capitalist structure continues… Power lies only in the collective.”

Social Media Bans:

Despite attempts to control social media users and the type of usage allowed, mis-users succeeded in surpassing algorithmic oppression as demonstrated by consistent recorded spikes in pro-Silent content in the months following October 2023. Social media platforms were accused by mainstream media and western politicians of promoting said content and "brainwashing our youth’" However, it is evident that the flooding of social media with anti-genocidal content was not because but despite of social media companies attempts to stop it. As three of the biggest platforms announced in a joint statement at the time, “Attitudes among young people towards supporting the Silents seems to be rising despite efforts to contain hate speech, terrorism and misinformation”. Data linked to their release showed that sympathy towards the apartheid system and genocide was higher among older generations, but the millennials side with the diseased.

Initially, state efforts to turn around pro-Silents content in favour of government strategy focused heavily on pressuring corporations to develop algorithms to this end. By December 2024, complete failure to control the unintended use of social media for resistance led to the creation of legislation banning the use of these platforms across the Global North. More than a year after the start of the pandemic, the irony of States turning against some of their biggest allies in the massacre, was not lost on the mis-users. In previous years, users had been urging governments for comprehensive legislation on social media companies to prevent them from turning users into profitable products for corporate trading, to no avail. Therefore, official reasons for the ban invoking “users rights”, “privacy and security concerns” and “customer protection" were also widely dismissed among activists who stated “These strategies to distract us are futile and will not prosper. We want a permanent end to the killing of the Silents and will not stop fighting for justice until we get it.” Leaked audio from private conversations between politicians and lobbyists confirmed the reason behind the implementation of the bans to be an inability to control their usage and overwhelming pro-Silent content creation and sharing. Famously, then Director of the US Office for Public Affairs Mr Greenbarff said to the President: “We have a social media problem”.

Aftermath of the Ban:

By the time the ban came into place, the world had already seen images from a genocide that could not be unseen. The healthy would share, expose and speak out for as long as they physically could. The Silents had been injured, starved and killed in plain sight and the outspoken ones had lost friends and family or had just been awakened from their consumerist coma by witnessing these scenes. Western states’ barbarism and inhumanity had been unveiled and by the time they managed to ban social media usage, users had become united beyond their digital connectivities, from merely questioning their lifestyles to organising to dismantle them. The masks had dropped on so many other dimensions of oppression in the self-professed ‘free world’ and the masses could not be silenced anymore, everything in their way of life had to be rethought. Social media and Big media, state and governance, power and democracy, the relationship between the West and "the rest", had all collapsed and new systems had to be built.

Conclusion:

There is considerable proof, from the very inception of traditional media formats like television news, that corporate media in the Global North was dominated by propaganda favouring status quo oppression. Nevertheless, from the first months of the outbreak, it became clear that increasing connectivity among people worldwide via social media platforms made it more difficult to create, disseminate and control false narratives. The technology that was originally invented to merely (re)connect people who already knew each other, and quickly moved on to sell their information to companies for profit and surveillance, became a space for unplanned mis-use and repurposing by its users. During this extremely violent time, social media technology prevented western governments and corporate media from concealing the genocide of the Silents. Despite their wealth, power and technical skill, they were outmanoeuvred by users broadcasting the annihilation of their silenced co-citizens by subverting the same pro-fascist tech. Whereas older historical events of destruction and oppression could have happened behind closed doors, in 2023 authoritarian regimes’ actions were conspicuous for everyone to see. The power of the collective and shared empathy against oppression, took governments and corporations who had invested in hyperindividualism and consumerism as highest values for westerners by surprise. During the first stage of the period we are studying, social media played the most important role in exposing the crimes of fascist governments and building resistance movements. Users-cum-misusers also surprised themselves with how collective and creative uses of technology could help to unmask how unfree, unjust and oppressed the white western world actually was; and equally become a tool to begin to imagine freedom outside this system.

References

Darwish, M. (2010). Journal of an Ordinary Grief. Archipelago
Freire, P. (2017). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Penguin Books
Hooks, B. (2018). All About Love. William Morrow & Company
Lorde, A. (1984). Sister Outsider. Penguin Books
Brown, A. M. (2017). Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. AK Press

Bio

Eleni Ikoniadou is Reader in Digital Culture and Sonic Arts at the Royal College of Art; founder and co-editor of the Media Philosophy series (Rowman & Littlefield); co-editor of Unsound: Undead (Urbanomic, 2019); and author of The Rhythmic Event: Art, Media and the Sonic (The MIT Press, 2014). Recent art projects include: The Passing (Plasmata Onassis Stegi, Ioannina 2023); Future Chorus (MAENADS/ Hypermedium 2023); The Lamenters (Sound Quests, Turin 2022); Hydrapolivocals (MAENADS Weaving Worlds Deree exhibition, Athens 2022); and Red Chorus (Theatrum Mundi, London 2020).

https://www.eleniikon.com/