Interview by James Slotta

https://nyupress.org/9781479819157/digital-unsettling/

James Slotta: A couple of decades ago, paeans to the liberatory potential of the internet were common. Since then, the mood has darkened considerably as the capacity of digital media to buttress all manner of domination and inequality has become clear. In this book, you argue that there is truth to both digital optimist and digital pessimist perspectives—that, in fact, it is this Jekyll-and-Hyde quality of digital media that needs attending to. What led you to this ambivalent—unsettled—view of the digital and how does it shape your analysis of digital media?

Sahana Udupa: I have been researching political cultures of digital media and digitalization for about two decades now. It started with my ethnographic study on news cultures in early 2000s when print journalists had started to worry about the “specter of digital media” that haunted them. I explored these tensions in my first monograph, Making News in Global India, observing how digital networks were beginning to reshape the conditions of mediated political discourse. The expansion of interactive social media
amplified the momentum around digital networks as novel constellations for political participation. What form this would take remained an open question, but liberal technocratic ideology advocated especially by Silicon Valley pundits helped ramp up the euphoria around digital media as radical enablers of
civic participation. Although digitial social media have no doubt offered pathways to enter and alter political discursive fields for multiple publics, it became apparent in the later years that the democratizing force of digital media did not necessarily portend a progressive future.

My fieldwork took me to the darker sides of digital discourse and growing incidents of intimidation and abuse on social media. Ironically, abusive exchange had also opened up lines of political participation for a diverse range of actors who had been excluded or found themselves alienated from the serious tone of political deliberation and official centricity. The analytics of “gaali cultures” [gaali is an emic term for vitriol] developed in this work prompted me to collaborate for a global ethnographic inquiry around online extreme speech. Taking a closer look at this phenonmenon in the Digital Hate volume, I started to center decolonial perspectives in ways to emphasize ethnographic and historical sensibility and
to depart from technocentric and leader-centric analyses common in this field of research.

These efforts helped me to open the broader question around decoloniality
and the digital. In a 2020 e-seminar paper, I approached coloniality as a
global unfolding of the interrelated relations of the nation-state, race, and
market, arguing that coloniality continues to shape the macro-historical
structures within which proximate, affect-intensive battles of words are fought
online, often with grave political consequences. Collaborating with Gabriel
ignited more lines of inquiry around varied entanglements and ambivalences of
the digital in relation to decoloniality.  Unsettling for us functions as
a heuristic that helped us to probe the ambivalences but this not a sort of
balancing act. Far from it, it highlights the profound unevenness of the
digital condition. In my view, ambivalence does not just signal transcending an
either/or dyad. It is about the specific ways in which digital networks
entrench, rework and reinforce longstanding and novel forms of heirarchy while
co-creating multifarious conditions to challenge them. We have sought to
advance this approach in Digital Unsettling.

Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan:  I first started writing about digital media in 2011. I had recently begun following a group of emerging hip hop artists from socially and spatially marginalized locations in Delhi. As I watched them develop their aesthetic, creative, and playful audio-visual interventions online, I grew enamored with how these young men were taking up the participatory condition, to borrow a term or concept from one of the major and early proponents of the liberatory potential of the internet, Henry
Jenkins. It seemed, at first glance and from afar, that the otherwise deeply segregated, classed worlds of Delhi were opening up for them in ways that would have been unthinkable just a few years prior, before the advent of 3G networks and flood of inexpensive smartphones in India.  It was only when I started doing on-the-ground fieldwork with various hip hop crews in Delhi that I saw the complicated ways that digital media at once opened new opportunities—social, economic, even political—for these young men even as it reinforced their racialized and classed positions in the city and country. In my first book, The Globally Familiar, I grappled with this contradiction.

From this on-the-ground experience (as well as other ethnographic and personal forays into the worlds of digital media in the last decade) I have developed an increasingly ambivalent position towards digital media and its circuits of flow. As Sahana rightly suggests, ambivalence is not an affective register that marks a transcendence from an either/or dyad. Rather, it is a disposition towards the relationships between online and offline words that locates the distance between what is performed and what is lived and that, crucially, engages with the political economies and histories that frame and engender (social) media production, circulation, and consumption. I approached writing Digital Unsettling with Sahana with this analytical stance.

James Slotta: Beyond analysis for analysis’s sake, the book is
deeply interested in the role of digital media in activist, decolonial
projects. What makes digital media particularly well suited to facilitate such
projects? What dangers lurk for these projects when they embrace the digital?

Gabriel and Sahana: In social movement contexts,
digital/social media enables a way to quickly and efficiently communicate
goals, set agendas, and coordinate action. Digital/social media also creates
opportunities to broadcast interventions and direct action—as we discuss in the
book—in ways that put pressure on institutional actors to change policy and/or
practice by generating public spectacle while creating the potential to spark
or invigorate action across borders.

The dangers to using social media/digital media in service of social movements –
particularly commercial, mainstream platforms – are multiple. Social movement
actors, once identified as such, are under constant surveillance and exposure
can lead to various forms of risk and, potentially, violence and harm.
Mainstream social media companies, as we have seen across national contexts,
have very little motivation to protect individuals (or collectives) given that
their platforms run at the discretion of state interests.

Another danger, of course, is the appropriation and commodification of social movement
symbols, methods, and intellectual projects. As we briefly discuss in the
introduction, decoloniality has suffered from its pop discursive success in
online circuits and academia in ways that have taken away from materially
grounded, historically rooted struggles where decoloniality has been developed
as a rigorous praxis.

Finally, creating online affinities towards addressing social issues doesn’t necessarily
translate into embodied forms of action. Often, liking a protest or commenting
on a movement agenda offers a way to feel like one is doing something while not
necessarily putting anything on the line.

James Slotta: The book moves across an impressive array of settings—from campus protests to content moderation to right-wing movements to your own online lives. Why did you decide to bring all of these different contexts together here? Is there something about digital media that compels such a multi-sited approach?

Gabriel and Sahana: There are three key factors, we think, that produced the montage of sites/settings/encounters in Digital Unsettling. First, each of us brought a different set of cultivated research relationships and inquiries to the table. Sahana has been working with content moderators and on right-wing movements for several years. Gabriel had been engaging with campus
movements and various, heterogenous online (creative) knowledge projects. As we
began to discuss the book we felt these different sites/relationships/encounters spoke to each other in important ways, ways that gave shape to the kind of unsettling that the digital has engendered in the
last decade.

The ethnographic method we developed to theorize these multiple unsettlings
works by placing events and spaces each of us have encountered in our
respective long term projects—similar to a timeline on a social media site—into
radical juxtaposition. Our reimagining of comparison as digital method puts
distinct locations in productive relation with each other in ways that hold the
potential to reveal the enduring structures that connect contexts.

As important was our decision to bring a reflexive, personal engagement to
the book. We were, in the tradition of feminist approaches to ethnography,
committed to creating a text that offered a rigorous view from somewhere, that
sincerely located each of us in the contexts we analyzed and in relation to one
and other.

Finally, the pandemic shaped our approach and writing. The majority of this
book was written in 2020 and 2021, when forced quarantines, lockdowns, and
rising death tolls seismically impacted the world. It seemed fitting and
appropriate that, as we watched this unfold on our respective social media
timelines, we took up a multi-sited approach to this project.

James Slotta: Throughout the book, you stress the need to decenter
the perspectives and experiences of white male elites when researching digital
technologies. What do we gain when we bring other perspectives to the center of
our analysis, such as those from the global South?

Sahana and Gabriel: The digital has touched the lives of
millions of people around the world, especially in the global South, and staying
close to how it unfolds in the lived worlds of diverse actors is an essential
approach to any grounded study. This is not just an empirical task but also an
epistemological challenge.

In the book, we emphasise that decentering hegemonic perspectives is a critical step
towards unsettling the conceits and deciepts of liberal thinking. One example
in our book comes from the Capture chapter. We begin the chapter by revisiting
the vastly popular Netflix production, “Social Dilemma.” The docudrama
highlighted how big tech firms have imbedded polarization as part of the
business model, driving democracies to the danger point where animosities are
hardwired into the business models of mega corporations rather than spilling
out as unintended effects.

While laudable for stirring public consciousness around the pitfalls of internet
communication—at least among its audiences—the film nonetheless diverted
attention from the diverse stakes of the political economy of digital
capitalism. At the outset, by reproducing the white, male, tech elite as the
central moral subject and eventual savior, it reinstated the terms of debate
within the European-Enlightenment racial paradigm of the reflexive interiority
of the white subject as the bearer of the authoritative view of the world and
concomitant curative capacity. By pinning the focus on well-meaning white guys
whose passionate creation has now transformed into Frankenstein’s creature
beyond the original intentions or control of its creators, the film, despite
its title, ironically had little to say about “the social”—the entangled
complex of histories, institutions, interests, and mediations—that compose the
actual grounds on which technology emerges and expands, in turn deepening and
disrupting the grounds that seed it.

Such an analytical turn opens up a range of questions that liberal elite moral
consciousness tends to obscure—vast global disparities in content moderation,
pronounced effects of extreme speech upon historically marginalized
communities, domination exerted within the nation state structure, and so on.
In other words, this analytical approach—what we call a decolonial
sensibility—helps us to recognize that digital data practices have not affected
everyone uniformly in a presumed post-political state of brute oppression.

James Slotta: This book is the result of what appears to be a close
collaboration between the two of you. I’m curious how the book would have
differed if each of you had written it by yourself. How did the collaborative
nature of this project shape the outcome?

Sahana and Gabriel: Perhaps the book would have tilted more
toward the darker side or the hopeful side, depending on who wrote it. What we
have accomplished together with a theory of unsettling has emerged from
continous exchange to nuance our own theoretical assumptions and conceptual
frames. As a result, we have been able to excavate the potential of digital
participation by tracing its vastly diverse and contradictory outcomes while
staying steadfast in highlighting the reality of (neo)colonial structures that
shape them.

Working together has also yielded a range of examples and experiences to think with. We
critically engage with the digital in this book as the two of us—each from our
distinct positions—have seen, heard, and felt the deep push for change and
reckoning with the past that has created our present and our visions for the
future, alongside the effects of political, economic, social, and
epistemological formations that continue to immiserate the racialized poor and
expropriate resources for the few.