Blackout Tuesday, Social Media Activism and the Corporately-Owned Platforms That Control Our Tools

Behind-the-Episode: Blackout Tuesday x Platformization

Over here at Witch, Please Productions we’ve been having a lot of conversations about using the internet to do activism. That probably won’t come as a surprise to those of you who follow us, since we are 1) a queer feminist organization with a commitment to antiracism and decolonization who are 2) doing all of our collective work, as a group, via digital channels like Instagram, Substack, and Patreon while 3) witnessing Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza, part of a decades-long colonial occupation of Palestine funded by our Canadian and US tax dollars. 

In this moment, like so many others, we have been asking ourselves: what can we do? And what should we do? 

This question is different for us as a collective than it is for us as individuals. As an individual I, for example, have been reading and learning via activists and organizers I trust (Ijeoma Oluo has been a really vital Instagram follow for me), calling and writing to my representatives to call for Canada to withdraw support from Israel and call for an immediate ceasefire, and donating to Palestinian relief funds. As a collective, we fundraised for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, have been working on a bonus episode in which Marcelle and I discuss her article “Comic relief: the ethical intervention of 'Avodah 'Aravit (Arab Labor) in political discourses of Israel–Palestine” (episode coming soon, including a non-paywalled copy of the article!), and released a statement of solidarity that articulates why we are calling for Palestinian freedom. 

And, because we believe that there is value in thinking about how culture works–so much so that we, as academics and writers and creators, have chosen to dedicate our professional lives to it–we also recorded an episode about social media activism (coming out on Tuesday!). 

We wanted a little bit of distance from which to consider questions of how social media has reshaped our understanding of activism, and what it means that “posting” has become a kind of shorthand for political action, so we chose as our object of study Blackout Tuesday: that day in June 2020 when a whole bunch of people posted black squares to social media, and then a whole bunch of people deleted those posts shortly afterwards. 

We go into the history and context of Blackout Tuesday in much more detail in the episode, explaining how it began with music executives Jamila Thomas and Brianna Agyemang trying to draw attention to the way Black artists in the music industry are financially exploited, and the problem that emerged when social media users piled onto the campaign, collapsing it with the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests (to which it was of course related but not synonymous) and flooding platforms with their use of #BlackLivesMatter to the point that the hashtag became useless to the people actually using it to organize actions.

When it came time to offer some theory, I was faced not so much with a research journey as a crisis of selection. I wrote my dissertation on literature that bears witness to what I called “distant suffering,” mediated atrocities that white people living in the West know we are complicit in and yet struggle to understand how we can intervene. I teach courses on publishing and social change, trying to help students learn how they can use simple publishing technologies to advocate for causes that are meaningful to them. Questions of bearing witness through mediated technologies, of navigating the murky waters of corporately-owned digital platforms as we try to speak to each other; these are the things I’m grappling with on a regular basis. Faced with the need to choose a theoretical frame for this episode, I was overwhelmed. 

I ended up focusing on Jia Tolentino’s essay “The I in the Internet,” which is also the first essay in her essay collection Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion. In it, Tolentino argues that the social internet–one dominated by corporately owned social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok– is “defined by a built-in performance incen­tive” because, according to the algorithmic logics of the feed, as soon as you stop posting you disappear. That incentive drives all kinds of ludicrous behaviours, from unhinged hot takes designed to generate engagement to the development of outright dangerous conspiracy theories. And, because these platforms are built to incentivize posting and engagement, because that’s how they monetize our attention, social media demands constant speech–in the form of posting–lest your silence be read as complicity. 

Tolentino is pretty pessimistic about the whole state of affairs. She writes: 

“I’ll admit that I’m not sure that this inquiry is even productive. The internet reminds us on a daily basis that it is not at all reward­ing to become aware of problems that you have no reasonable hope of solving. And, more important, the internet already is what it is. It has already become the central organ of contempo­rary life. It has already rewired the brains of its users, returning us to a state of primitive hyperawareness and distraction while over­loading us with much more sensory input than was ever possible in primitive times. It has already built an ecosystem that runs on exploiting attention and monetizing the self.”

But in the midst of recording this episode (we had technical troubles so we recorded the first and second half over a week apart) I started reading Naomi Klein’s new book Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World. Klein is a different kind of leftist writer, every bit as attentive to the technological infrastructures that have reshaped our contemporary public spheres but more rooted in a communist ethos of direct action. She compares social media to the enclosure of the commons; we have allowed tech companies to privatize the public sphere, she argues, and the results have been devastating for democracy, public education, and mental health, to name only a few ways that Twitter X (fuck off Elon) and Instagram are ruining our lives. Klein is also not naive enough to suggest that we all simply exit the internet. Instead, she calls for the deprivatization of the public sphere, for the building of social media platforms that are not run by truly sinister corporations. But, like so many other thinkers about the consequences of social media, she also wants us to consider what endless hours staring into the void of the internet is doing to our brains. 

The question of digitally-mediated witnessing is the other topic I considered for our Blackout Tuesday episode, one that ultimately felt too big to take on, both because I’ve been thinking and writing about it for over a decade and because it feels fresh and raw in the midst of the genocide in Palestine. But if the question of how and why we bear witness is something you’ve also been thinking about, I want to share some thoughts and, more importantly, some books. 

The possibility of bearing witness via media has been central to the emergence of a new form of global politics particularly in the era of post-WWII U.S. imperialism. Photojournalists bringing home photographic evidence of the U.S. military’s atrocities in Vietnam spurred the rise of a significant anti-war movement, with photographic evidence not only showing Americans what their own elected government was doing, but also withdrawing the luxury of plausible deniability: you could no longer pretend you didn’t know. Since then, not being able to pretend you don’t know–a twisty double negative, for sure–has been central to how some segments of the left have built political movements, and according to this logic it is every individual’s job to both look and to encourage looking. “Don’t look away,” we hear time and time again. Because looking away too often means a retreat into performed or willful ignorance. We have to look now, and we have to record our looking, so that in ten or twenty years those in power can’t say “nobody knew what was happening.” 

But many excellent scholars have theorized the complexity of the politics of looking, of bearing witness, of rendering the suffering of others a spectacle of sorts for the political awakening of people living far from the wars and famines and genocides that their government is funding. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag asks what photography can really do, when so much of its meaning is about its political framing in the first place; images do not speak for themselves, and rely on other beliefs to underpin their political efficacy, including, to paraphrase Judith Butler, the grievability of those whose suffering we are witnessing. 

An even more vital book on the topic of witnessing is Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, which demonstrates the violent dehumanization that underpins the spectacularization of violence against racialized bodies. Does looking at the suffering of Black bodies prompt white people to intervene into violence, or does it further enshrine a binary in which white people are subjects who look at and understand things, and Black people are objects who are looked at and acted upon, for pleasure or terror or political awakening. 

Hartman’s work in particular has been in the back of my mind as I see calls online for a form of witnessing that collapses political action into looking at videos of Palestinian children dying. Would you want a video of your own child’s death recorded, shared, spread across the internet? Is the spectacularization of Palestinian suffering a necessary precondition for our political mobilization? How has the role of photography and video in global political mobilization changed in the era of platformization, digital siloes, misinformation, and AI-generated images that increasingly undermine the relationship between visual media and reality? 

I don’t have answers to any of these questions, but I do have an abiding discomfort with how much of our conversations about political action on the left have become about performing your politics correctly on corporately-owned platforms that 100% do not have our best interests at heart. It’s when I see the collapsing of one’s social media presence and one’s activism that I am reminded to be suspicious of who that collapse serves. And so I’ll leave you here, muddling through, residing in complexity, and getting ready to handwrite a letter to the prime minister because someone on Instagram said that’s more effective than email. 

Reading List

Blair, Kelsey. “Empty Gestures: Performative Utterances and Allyship.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 35.2 (2021): 53-73. 

Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London & New York: Verso, 2009. 

Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. 

Klein, Naomi. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2023. 

Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. 

Tolentino, Jia. “The I in the Internet.” CCCB Lab 19 February 2020. https://lab.cccb.org/en/the-i-in-the-internet/ 

Tolentino, Jia. Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion. New York: Random House, 2019.