Abstract
The livestreaming of terror, its co-production through live consumption and the massacre of lives as ‘entertainment’ propelled us into another long abyss of ethical challenges in the case of the xenophobic terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019. Livestreaming, as part of the convergence of technologies, enables narration in ‘real’ time, dragging us into a new ‘banalisation of evil’ where terror and torture can be co-produced by inviting audiences to consume through the vantage point of the perpetrator. This article examines the Muslim ‘body’ through JanMohamed’s notion of the ‘death-bound subject’ where the continual threat of death foreshadows the Muslim body, imbricating it within a political and ideological archaeology wherein both its possibility of death and the performance of death enter into a realm of theatrics of production incumbent upon invoking new moralities around consumption and its residues as a screen image. The ‘wretched of the Earth’ and their residues as immaterial matter online as the ‘wretched of the screen’ connote a new architecture of violence conjoining the temporalities of liveness with the sharing features of ‘semiotic capitalism’.
Introduction
Frantz Fanon configures the ‘wretched of the Earth’ as the colonial subject imbricated in violence in order to break the very cycle of violence imposed by colonisation. For Fanon, ‘The violence of the colonial regime and the counterviolence of the colonized balance each other and respond to each other in an extraordinary reciprocal homogeneity’ (Fanon, 2008: 50). Today the wretched of the Earth have morphed into a category where their suffering and their performance of death do not relinquish them from this violence but solidify it by elongating it through a screen culture of consumption and sharing. The wretched are not only a site of violation but one that performs its death for the screen where it enters a second life of virality through the sharing economy of digital capitalism. The wretched of the Earth are immaterial fodder in the virtual realm. This ‘shadow archive’ (Sekula, 1986) of popular images co-produced through the convergence of technologies and the sharing economy is amenable to the ‘theatricalisation of violence, a space for imperial spectacle and neo-fascist entertainment’ inscribing the ‘violent enmeshment of the flesh and blood of the body within the geopolitics of war and empire’ (Pugliese, 2007: 271–272) to be enacted and manifested through the screen. Fanon has employed a ‘racial optic’ (Bhabha, 2004) lens to analyse European colonisation and its subjects as the ‘wretched of the Earth’. In the digital age, the racial optic acquires renewed resonance as the screen becomes the site of its amplification.
Fifty-one Muslim worshippers were killed by an alleged right-wing terrorist in a Christchurch mosque and the massacre was livestreamed on a GoPro camera attached to the gunman’s head (Regan and Gunter, 2019). The original video of the attack was viewed 4000 times before it was removed but people copied and reposted versions of the video across the Internet, including on Reddit, Twitter and YouTube with news organisations airing some of the footage as they reported on the slaughter (BBC News, 2019; Lapowsky, 2019). As the massacre metastasised across platforms, even the most technologically advanced companies were impotent in quelling the online dissemination of the killings for mass consumption (Timberg et al., 2019). This massacre was made for sharing.
This massacre is a ‘live event’ fabricated for a convergent viral economy manufactured through co-creation, sharing and calling attention to the ‘unfathomable’ elevates terror production into a composite architecture of temporal violence enacted for the screen and for instant gratification. Here, man and machine coalesce into an invisible and material force for amplifying and spreading horror in which violence becomes unbound from the event to be re-enfranchised online as a category which delivers the victims as the ‘wretched of the screen’. The amateur images enter a transaction economy online where these can be shared, reposted and archived – enmeshing with algorithms and digital capitalism thriving on content that spills, leaks, leaps platforms and floats ad infinitum, remaking the ‘horrific’ incomplete by emptying out terror from the terrified and objectifying them through a sharing economy and the non-erasure of the Internet. The wretched of the Earth are remade for the screen as the ‘wretched of the screen’ where death provides no closure to their wretchedness.
Selective erasure is a condition of the wretched where Australia and New Zealand’s own violent history of state-sponsored terrorism against Aboriginal peoples has been whitewashed out of official existence in discussions of contemporary acts of terror to be chronologically repositioned as the ‘first’ or hierarchically ranked as the ‘worst’ in the nation’s history (Pugliese, 2007: 264; Smith, 2005: 177). The Internet’s non-erasure of horrific images of torture produces a ‘shadow archive’ (Sekula, 1986) of imagery online that co-exists with a ‘generalized inclusive archive’ while encompassing an entire social terrain that positions individuals within that terrain. Allan Sekula (1986: 10) posits a shadow archive as an all-inclusive corpus of images that situates individuals according to a socially proscribed hierarchy. The shadow archives of prosumer imagery today conjoin with Guattari’s ‘semiotic turn’ of capital where surplus value is not simply the monetary profit extracted from labour time, but is also the continual development of the mechanisms controlling the production and reproduction of subjectivity (Zepke, 2011) fostered through machines coalescing through human senses and affectivity. This makes the coalition amoebic in formation where it is not possible to locate where one starts and the other ends. Donna Haraway’s (1991) notion of the ‘cyborg’ then captures blurring boundaries and interactions between the human and non-human elements in which machines seek to assert agency over the biological.
This article looks at the wretched Muslim body as a palimpsest of the televisual spectacle of disaster, bound through screen theatrics of its devastation of White humanity and, as such, a target of its own demise since 9/11. This leitmotif for unleashing terror constructs the Muslim body through a visual economy where it is bound to death in its various guises. Drawing on Abdul JanMohamed’s (2005) notion of the ‘death-bound-subject’, this article examines the visual contamination of the Muslim body as a subject bound with death and yet unbound from its ability to succumb to death when envisioned through the architecture of the Internet and its projectile violence on the screen. It then considers how the convergence of technologies can unleash new modalities of violence where there is a banalisation of evil through an incessant sharing culture. Third, the article reviews the prognosis of elongating live horror online where violence has formed a new relationship with the temporal frames of instantaneity and the ineradicability of the digital architecture, mutating the death-bound subject as a part of an algorithmic sharing economy, translating live terror as that which is made for sharing and perverse entertainment. The ‘wretched of the screen’ is then ‘twice victim, once as wronged and a second time by effacement’ (Laruelle, 2015: 64).
The Muslim body as the ‘death-bound subject’
The Muslim body, as an entity rife with suspicion and a suspect figure set to disfigure Western civilisation and its democratic ideals co-located through secularism, has been a resonant strand in the Western psyche. Through time, the Muslim world (as enmeshed through the Crusades or Orientalism) has been manufactured through both its alterity and threat. The Middle East, enshrined through its cultural dwarfism, atavism, religious fanaticism and lack of democratic ideals, while imminently imbued with the mythic wealth of oil that will power the world meant it had to be both contained and exploited. The apocalyptic burning of the Twin Towers marked a turning point in the cartography of struggle against Islam and the Muslim body. It was no longer contained through its own geography after 9/11 and the ‘war on terror’ unleashed the birth of a new Muslim body imbued with violence and the populist constructions of its holy war or Jihad on Western soil (Ibrahim, 2007). Death layered the Muslim body in a myriad of guises where it projects death onto others in White urban spaces while seemingly possessing the capacity to sacrifice its own body for the promise of paradise. These mythical and popularised readings of the Muslim body entrapped within death, where death can be imposed, appropriated through its suicide-bombing tendencies or denied through illegal incarceration produced an incestuous heuristic with death. In Guantanamo Bay, for example, the Muslim body may be kept alive against its will through force-feeding where its ability to ‘own’ death is denied (Ibrahim and Howarth, 2019). Invoked as the ‘monster-terrorist’ (Puar and Rai, 2002) through the temporal framing of Islam in the crisis since 9/11 and the ensuing ‘war on terror’ (Ibrahim, 2007), the Muslim body is not amenable to human configurations and is manufactured as an entity which has to be continually surveilled, disciplined or incarcerated in ‘zones of indistinction’ where citizenship, civil rights and liberties are suspended.
The female counterpart, imagined through the hijab and other garments which make its corporeality less evident to others, is a body which is not entirely human. Problematised equally through its hypervisibility in the urban spaces of modernity and its pull to violence through media constructions of the ‘Jihadi Bride’, the female binary of the Muslim terrorist is subsumed through ambivalence (Ibrahim, 2019). Positioned as a turbulent body, it is depicted as turning its back on Western civilisation to embrace the cause of its male counterpart, the ‘monster-terrorist’. Death is a constant in the configurations of this body, in its ability to embrace violence and to repudiate its own humanity. As a ‘death ascribed’ body, it is a ‘socially dead’ body where its flesh is configured through the heuristics of death rather than the living. I draw on Abdul R JanMohamed’s (2005) notion of the ‘death-bound subject’ to construct the visual and material depictions of the Muslim body since 9/11 and the ensuing ‘war on terror’ where the Muslim body is screened and conjoined through violence, without closure to this incestuous incorporation.
Abdul R JanMohamed, in writing about the African-American subject as a death-bound subject from the historic dispossession of slavery, envisions this Black body as hovering between two modes of death: to remain a slave or die. Employing the concept of ‘social death’, JanMohamed conceives the slave’s powerlessness as the extension of the master’s power and consigning the slave as subject to death at any moment. The death-bound subject is posited through an ideological and political prism where the way a particular group is racialised determines the type of death they experience (Verinakis, 2007). By examining the oppression of African-Americans from slavery to the Jim Crow era, JanMohamed traces the continual threat of death through the effects of terror in the formation of the death-bound subject. As such, the death-bound subject is characterised by the need to avoid the possibilities of life as well as the possibilities of death (JanMohamed, 2005: 67). ‘This state of social death is nearly overwhelming, overpowering victims of bare life with a hopelessness born both of the external forces of racialized sociopolitics as well as of the internal forces within victims that are implanted in them through sustained social messaging that one’s self and body are potentially “meat” in a racially violent society. An internal, psychological struggle is thus interlaced with the sociopolitical one’ (Taylor, 2009: 316).
JanMohamed expands Giorgio Agamben’s notion of ‘bare life’ into a socio-political sphere where the death-bound subject is amenable to different forms of abuse and torture producing a subject who is ‘socially dead’ (Liew, 2010). Those reduced to ‘bare life’ are biologically alive, ‘lacking almost all the rights and expectations that we customarily attribute to human existence’. They exist in ‘a limit zone between life and death, inside and outside, in which they are no longer anything but bare life’ (Agamben, 1998: 159) and this socially dead subject does not have to be killed to be dead as racism and violence serve to politically suppress identity. Weheliye (2008), in countering Agamben (1998), contends that the concept of ‘bare life’ creates a notion that such a category precedes racialisation by premising on the ‘mere and biological’. In effect, it references the techniques by which the abject are transformed into bare life through extreme racialisation such that their expulsion appears both deserved and natural.
Weheliye contends that bare life distinguished through ‘group differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death’ operates in tandem with the norms of modern politics, not because it transcends race but because it is nothing other than race. As such ‘racism, whether in the colony, the concentration camp, the plantation, the prison, or in Guantanamo Bay exhibits no dire need for a legal state of exception’ (2008: 70). This barring of the subjects that belong to the species of Homo sapiens from the category of humanity for Weheliye is dependent on the workings of racialisation (differentiation) and racism (hierarchisation and exclusion) wherein the two are indistinguishable. Similarly, in defining racism as ‘the state-sanctioned and/or extra-legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death’, Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2002: 26) premises racism through the field of bare humanity, forging a co-location between homo-sacerisation and racialisation. Gilmore (2002: 243–244), in delineating racism as the ‘ordinary means through which dehumanization achieves ideological normality’, conjoins the practice of ‘dehumanizing people in the production of racial categories’.
Hortense J Spillers (2003: 206–207) in relating to Agamben’s bare life offers the ‘flesh’ rather than the body as a means to illuminate and reflect on the violence suffered by the captured, displaced, colonised, violated and always already vulnerable. Bare life is implicated in the gendered, sexist, colonial and racist configurations of the political and, in tandem, the different forms of violence it suffers (Ziarek, 2008: 89). Modern politics then entails the search for renewed racialised and gendered targets of exclusion, for the ‘new living dead’ (Spillers, 2003: 130) such targets multiply with astonishing speed and infiltrate bodies down to the cellular level: from refugees, illegal immigrants, inmates on death row subject to suicide watch, comatose patients on life support, to organ transplants and foetal stem cells (Ziarek, 2008: 92). With specific relevance to the Christchurch massacre, Spillers’ notion of pornotroping puts the emphasis on the scopic encounter in the production of the tortured body.
The Muslim body is invoked through its karma of death. It is historically co-located through both the doom and destruction which underpin it within the category of the ‘living dead’ where both its corporeality and spirituality are denied. As Joseph Pugliese (2009) points out, even when Agamben conjures the figure of the ‘Muselmann’ (literally the Muslim) as an unworthy entity which both life and death forsake in equal measure in the Holocaust camps in the Remnants of Auschwitz (2002), he digresses from its racist thrust. As a pejorative figure stereotyped through its fatalism and head bandages that could resemble a turban, the Muselmann, as depicted in the discourse of Primo Levi (1985: 77), is an embodiment of the living dead. Beyond pain, suffering or bodily needs, it was a figure not given to this life or the next and, ‘every group thought only about eliminating them, each in its own way’ (Agamben, 2002: 43). As Manzoor (2001: 6) concludes, the Muslim body is brutally invoked in the Holocaust but ‘neither in the name of the executioners, nor in that of the victims, but as the victims of the victims, invoking them in the name of the living-dead, the non-men whose death cannot be called death’.
Joseph Pugliese contends that Agamben, in failing to ‘name the racism that inscribes this term, specifically the Islamophobia and Arabophobia that constitute its very condition of enunciation and signification’ (Pugliese, 2013: 117) in Europe and the West means that ‘whoever is designated as a Muselmann/Musulman/Muslim is compelled to wear the burden of absolute alterity’ (Macura-Nnamdi, 2018: 118). Auschwitz as a site of unprecedented bio-political experimentation where ‘the most absolute conditio inhumana ever to appear on earth was realized’ needed the Muselmann as the spectral image as a limit figure of a radically new kind inhabiting the ‘threshold between the human and the inhuman’ (Jarvis, 2014: 708). Though Auschwitz marked the ‘exceptional’ it was a visitation upon European soil of the spirit and practice of slaughter and subjugation that Europe had long visited upon colonial ‘others’ (Césaire, 1955). Similarly, Fouzi Slisli (2008: 97) contends that there is an elephant in the room in Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth for it is Islam and its anti-colonial tradition in Algeria which Fanon continuously cites and exalts, but sidesteps. Instead, Fanon explains the acts of resistance and applauds the culture of Algerian peasants, but he does not name the tradition of Islamic resistance to colonialism. Death, liminality, alterity and invisibility inscribe the Muslim body while absolving it of political intelligibility, resilience or agency.
Agamben’s Muselmann of the death camp is a recurring phantom of the screen in contemporary politics through his projectile imagination from the burning towers to his boiler suit image of captivity in Guantanamo Bay to his ability to blow up his environment as the suicide bomber. His screen death manifests his social death where he needs to be surveilled constantly as the suspect figure who needs to be ‘stopped and searched’ and where social policies and re-education have to be designed to impede his tendencies and slide towards terrorism and religious fanaticism through policies such as Prevent, or be indefinitely incarcerated in spaces beyond legal jurisdiction and governed through the excesses of state power conferring him social death through renewed means of (il)legal force, detention and oppression to deprive him of civil and human rights. Her right to wear a head scarf or modest clothing on the beach have to be regulated. Their sacred spaces of worship are the breeding grounds for terrorism. His social death and his production as the death-bound subject coalesce with and through images of devastation and, as such, his social death is conjoined through the screen and through marathons of televisual carnage which have ensued since 9/11 and the ‘war on terror’. The shadow archive foreshadows him, imbricating him constantly as the death-bound subject. Muslims today are trapped in what Agamben calls the ‘zone of indistinction’ with the racialisation of this ‘bare life’ in constituting the ‘West’ as the province of sovereign power (Thobani, 2012: 5).
Hortense Spillers (2003) terms the enactment of Black suffering for a shocked and titillated audience as ‘pornotroping’. Here, the production of the human as ‘flesh’ (Spillers, 2003) or ‘bare life’ (Agamben, 1998) is bound with the physicality of torture where the target is lacking in body and human existence. Instances of pornotroping feature prominently in literary and visual conjurings of slavery, the Holocaust, colonialism and images from Abu Ghraib prison, as well as from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (Weheliye, 2008: 71). In a similar vein, Pugliese (2007: 256), in examining the practices of torture perpetrated at Abu Ghraib, argues that the images of torture must be seen through their ‘ritualised and codified repetition, as reproducing historical regimes of visuality predicated on White supremacist violence-as-spectacle’.
Throughout history, spectres of death have taken myriad forms of theatricality and materiality. Raiford (2009: 114) consigns visual longevity to the archive of lynching photographs where these structure our present modes of seeing and the inevitability of White supremacy. The centring of the Black victim in these violent spectacles was designed to induce a warning where Blacks were meant to identify with the abject at the centre of the frame and the White with their centrifugal power (Raiford, 2009: 115). Death spectacles become a gallery to announce the White supremacists’ mastery over the ‘flesh’ (Marriott, 2000: 4–6) and, as such, the death-bound subject emerged through these enactments that are akin to Roman spectacles of death where ritual acts solidified the subjectivities of victim and the aggressor (Liew, 2010) through the spectacle of violence.
In drawing on JanMohamed’s notion of the ‘death-bound’ subject and its relevance to the ‘Muslim Body’, I want to expand on this entity as not only socially dead but where this social death is also produced through its narration on screen where it is constantly imbricated as the death-inducing ‘monster-terrorist’ through apocalyptic and devastating images of the Western world in carnage. Death is part of its performed persona, both online and offline. It is never severed from its screen death but re-articulated through disaster and terrorist events which keep it in this sustained mode within this architecture of violence. This enactment of the Muslim body as both the invader and the target which needs to be contained making it amenable to the simulated environment akin to video games means that it is a body constantly impregnated through Western political ideologies and the West’s imagination of his Eastern god. The Muslim body as a death-bound subject is then relatable through the screen and the visual imagery of hunting, capture, captivity, torture and death, inducing the Muslim body as ‘an immense accumulation of spectacles’ (Debord, 1983). Equally, it is situated through a digital game logic where its chase, capture and death imbue it with a fatalism as a purgatory ritual to redeem the West and its civilisation from this monster of monotheism.
JanMohamed’s treatise with relevance to the Christchurch massacre incorporates livestreaming and new media technologies as a locus of material reproduction of the death-bound subject and his inner confrontations which make him an aporetic subject between Eros and Thanatos. These tendencies are destructive to others and the self, reinforced through the external forces of a socio-political material word (Taylor, 2009: 318). In invoking Lacan’s mirror-stage, JanMohamed posits how specular relations shape the processes of racial subordination, between psychoanalytic and materialist accounts of subject formation. Because death is at once an extension of a political system seeking to reproduce racial hierarchies and a means to inscribe that hierarchy in the psyches of the subordinate population, the death-bound subject is necessarily situated at the crossroads of material and psycho-affective politics. (Murray, 2006: 300). For such a subject, the psychopolitical dimensions of the subject’s formation include the socio-political world and its materiality which invariably subsumes new media technologies and their technologies of vision, extending their reach into the alterity of the death-bound subject, illuminating how these are lent to the processes of the subject’s formation over time (and, in this instance, in ‘real time’). The livestreaming of a massacre in centring him as the target of death and the invocation of jouissance through live broadcast in public platforms means his inner fears and horrific dreams sync with the savagery of the massacre played out in real time, binding the subject to his internalised fears of actual death. As JanMohamed (2005: 162)posits, ‘racialized subjection is a complex process of binding and unbinding, psycho-political in nature and this process of subjectification produces a subject deeply divided against himself’.
New architectures of violence
Drawing on Spillers’ notion of pornotroping, I want to employ it to illuminate the new spectres of death enabled through the screen and convergence of technologies where the temporality of livestreaming can banalise horror, enacting terror as a joint enterprise, co-produced through live audience interaction in the sharing economy. The convergence of technologies and the affordance of streaming live fuse reality with the unscripted as entertainment where this co-production of terror targets the flesh. The convergent screen elongating this form of pornotroping has been evident with the use of the Internet for propaganda by terrorist organisations such as Islamic State of Iraq and Syria in which ‘shocking beheading and killing images and videos are meant to create awareness about the group and its activities’ (Al-Rawi, 2018: 745).
The New Zealand massacre video-recorded with a GoPro helmet, promoted through a social media trail on Twitter and Facebook, was broadcast live on Facebook on the day of the massacre. A 74-page anti-Muslim manifesto had been posted prior to it on Twitter and the extremist forum 8chan decrying ‘white genocide’. This forum had courted controversy in the past, including a 2015 campaign to boycott the latest Star Wars film because it had Black and female leads. The occurrence of child pornography on the site prompted Google to delist it, and today channels that appear to advertise child-abuse material remain live on the site (Brewster, 2019).
The alleged perpetrator’s message on 8chan read, ‘I will carry out and attack against the invaders, and will even livestream the attack via Facebook’ (Spangler, 2019). With users on the site following the attack in real time, cheering or expressing horror, they were immersed in a transaction economy of trading links to the alleged shooter’s hate-filled postings and to copies of his videos on various sites, while encouraging each other to download the clips before they were taken offline. The rampage was livestreamed on Facebook for 17 min with news organisations airing some of the footage as they reported on the destruction that took place (Lapowsky, 2019). Over the two days before the shooting about 60 of the same links had been posted across different platforms, nearly half of which were to YouTube videos that were still active after the massacre (Timberg et al., 2019). Soon after the massacre, short clips of the footage had been edited to include footage of YouTube personalities superimposed as if they were livestreaming a video game (Roose, 2019).
On Reddit, one of America’s most popular websites, the videos had been reposted for users to narrate and comment on in real time on forums named ‘gore’ and ‘watchpeopledie’, which Reddit subsequently banned. A moderator on the ‘watchpeopledie’ forum had defended keeping the video online because it offered ‘unfiltered reality’ and the 7-year-old forum had more than 300,000 subscribers at the time of the massacre. Reddit subsequently announced in a statement that it was ‘actively monitoring the situation in Christchurch and that any content containing links to the video stream would be removed in accordance with their policy’ (Timberg et al., 2019). Nevertheless, erasure of the video online proved challenging as users posted links to the videos, re-uploading the videos as they were deleted and signposting new links to alternative ‘mirror’ sites, ensuring it as an artefact for sharing despite condemnation and criticisms in sharing these posts on different platforms.
The teasing of the live event through social media sites, the invoking of celebrity figures on YouTube, the posting of links across social media as pre-announcements to the real act, the livestreaming on Facebook and equally the numerous re-postings of the links to alternative mirror sites, meant that terror had found a new infrastructure to stage and relay content through an interactive audience, complicit in its engagement to consume, repost and watch terror in real time while interacting through their commentary and preserving terror by retaining these on selective sites. In this pornotrope, the temporality of liveness is fused with the reality of horror as a mode of entertainment for the masses. The rise of ethno-nationalism and the increasing use of dedicated alt-right sites as echo chambers to stream radical views to target a civilian population renews the Internet as a site to enact new modes of violence from the discursive to livestreaming. Acts of terrorism which emerge through the sentiments of ethno-nationalism may be rationalised by the ‘thought that by killing these targets, their communities would perceive that the terrorists were committed to solving problems in everyday local life that the State was unable to deal with’ (De La Calle and Sánchez-Cuenca, 2007:11).
Pornotroping and livestreaming
Spillers’ ‘pornotroping’ can take different forms today in the age of convergence where technologies enable the broadcast of events in real time through the vantage point of the person filming the event. The livestreaming of the Christchurch massacre in a 17-min video which showed the attacker entering the Al Noor Mosque and shooting multiple people portends new ethical challenges with technologies. Livestreaming of horror is an invitation to watch, consume and elongate new spectres of death through audience interaction and online participation. This spectre of violence is now bound with the banality of convergent technologies which allow us to broadcast ourselves on public platforms conjoining the banality of the everyday with the ‘production of the horrific’ which capitalises on an audience socialised into reality television and a new media economy where the banal and the spectacular (Ibrahim, 2016) can be co-produced with a wider audience through interactive modes on public platforms. As such, mediatised spectacles which emerge through digital platforms are then ‘not just a collection of images, they signify a social relation among people that is mediated by images’ (Debord, 1983: 2). Here, new pornotropes can be played out, including ‘the vanquished enemy as corpse-trophy’, the fascist aesthetics of torture (Pugliese, 2007: 255) or the terrorists’ rituals of beheadings.
The New Zealand massacre marked the third time that Facebook has been used to broadcast footage of a murder. In 2015, a gunman uploaded a smartphone video that showed him shooting two television journalists from a station in Virginia, with the killer’s first-person video spreading via Facebook and Twitter. In 2017, a gunman posted a video of his fatal shooting of a bystander in Cleveland, then went on Facebook Live to talk about the killing (Lapowsky, 2019; Timberg et al., 2019). In a post on 8chan, the shooting was referred to as a ‘real life effort post’ (Roose, 2019). According to Jonathan Albright, ‘shock videos with graphic first-person footage is where reality television meets violent gaming culture meets attention-amplification algorithms’(cf. Timberg et al., 2019). Albright points out that ‘the architecture of the internet is designed to elicit engagement-first, and as such is not equipped to thwart the spread of harmful material and ideas particularly in terms of ultra-violent terrorism footage.’ (cf. Timberg et al., 2019).
The production of horror and its co-relationship with a digital economy with its ease of upload and invitation to gaze immerses the production of terror into the banalisation of evil where evil can be staged and co-produced through platforms where the ‘logic’ of sharing content outpaces our ethical capacities to act, installing the human as part of the assemblage that relays content for the sharing economy. The temporality of liveness in the broadcast age predating the digital era was one which impressed an urgency and immediacy to a crisis situation or moments of national communion. During this era, presidential addresses, war-time announcements, assassinations or coverage of strife or devastation were the stuff of live coverage. Live broadcast in the age of television cut into national time, eking out attention from the audience as citizens to bear witness to live national events. In the age of convergence, livestreaming claims temporality of the now to engage in personal communication, messaging and reaching out to known and unknown audiences where temporal frames are co-opted for participation and co-creation through audience interaction. Livestreaming calibrates the temporality of the now as being available to the masses and not one consigned to moments of national crisis or communion. As such, it performs to new and varied modalities of prosumerism, including pornotroping which consigns horror as an explicit category for co-production in real time with audience interactivity and through the virulence of the sharing economy.
The temporal framing of horror through livestreaming and broadcasting infuses a more insidious element to the Internet and its repository of horror and terror images. Here, beheadings by terrorist organisations and images of devastation renew the spectre of death by committing these as immaterial artefacts online, as shadow archives and an attendant transaction economy of exchange and sharing, making these amenable to new modes of consumption where sharing, reposting and uploading allude to engagement to widen the consumption of pornotroping while lending to the co-production of horror. Liveness remakes the spectacle as a lived experience through its immediacy and temporality making us part of the act where events happen in real time and not as an after-event of consumption. Real-time events require the immediacy of our moral response and in committing these to terror spectacles consumed in real time we become part of the production of horror and its invocation to evil, consigning the real to the reel, and the flesh to the screen as a digital offering.
The massacre unfolding through the vantage point of the perpetrator then turns into a simulated gaming environment where the idea of attacking the ‘invaders’ with the ‘logic’ of the game mode on, turns these victims under attack as targets to be destroyed. With livestreaming, the horror event is not limited to the victim or the bystanders but potentially a global audience consuming horror through the movement and actions of the perpetrator and his ideological invocation and invitation. In the process, we move in the body of the perpetrator and his gaze, assuming his intent and targets as our own. The horrific resides as part of a simulated ecology where reality is re-mediated through a gaming mode where victims become the shooter’s target, where the real and the simulated occupy blurred boundaries as genres, remaking convergence as a technical architecture for new modalities of evil. The ubiquitous digital camera becomes ‘that ultimate third party’ where torture would not be confined to the act itself but preserved into the future in a way the victim would not be able to control (Danner, 2004). Danner’s terming of the camera as a ‘third party’ calls to attention the voyeurism of the camera, triangulating the relationship between the tortured and the perpetrator. The spectacle draws the spectators into this voyeuristic economy, making them complicit in the act of torture and in the process making the camera an adjunct weapon in the arsenal of torture implements such as the gun (Pugliese, 2007: 252).
The cinematic violence of killing in video games remakes the screen as a site of fervent violence and intertextuality commingling contemporary politics; its propensity for the production of racialised bare lives through the aesthetic of the screen and the temporality of instant gratification. Gaming and terror have an inextricable tryst with violence as a form of play where a number of games directly deal with terror-related issues, especially in connection with the war on terror, such as Splinter Cell which revolves around the 9/11 events, or Counter-Strike which allows teams from opposing sides to take the role of terrorists as well as counter-terrorists. Equally, digital gaming has been used by Al Qaeda and Lebanese Hezbollah to present their own modalities of violence ‘to present their grievances and display their fighting prowess in ways that advance the organizations’ strategic goals’ (Al-Rawi, 2018: 741–742). Digital games such as Kuma War and Medal of Honour as a reflection of popular culture reveal the kind of men that have to be targeted (turban-wearing Arabs with beards) or where the fights take place, e.g. in front of a mosque (Schiffer, 2011). A study which examined players of antiterrorist games found that video game stereotypes can prime negative and aggressive perceptions, attitudes towards the stereotyped group (Saleem and Anderson, 2013). As such, reality and the screen conjoin in the foreplay of pornotroping.
The repository of horror imagery online inevitably draws on other shadow archives including the Hollywood film industry with its long history of racist representations – where Arabs are the marauders, necessary for their eliciting the pornography of violence (Pugliese, 2007: 254; Semmerling, 2006; Shaheen, 2009). The cultural production and consumption of torture images as fetishistic objects of personal pleasure and entertainment then draw on a range of intertextual aesthetic modalities including the colonial, Orientalist, White supremacist and penal regimes (Pinar, 2001: 158; Pugliese, 2007: 251).
The violence of the ‘sharing’ economy
The sharing economy reproduces violence in its inability to contain violence. According to Facebook, ‘fewer than 200 people had watched the 17-minute video of the Christchurch shootings while it was live, and the first user report of the video came 12 minutes after it ended’ (BBC News, 2019). In the first 24 h, Facebook reportedly removed about 1.5 million videos of the attack globally. More than 1.2 million of those videos were blocked at upload and were therefore prevented from being seen (Firstpost.Com, 2019). As the digital platforms struggled to take down the clips, new copies cropped up, replaced these and were replayed endlessly on YouTube, Twitter and Reddit (Roose, 2019). Restrictions on livestreaming were also being explored by Facebook after the attack (Regan and Gunter, 2019). Content-sharing portals like YouTube and Facebook have come under intense scrutiny and censure in recent years for broadcasting and spreading hateful online conspiracies, terrorist recruiting videos and a wide range of inappropriate content reaching children, including suicide instructions spliced into kids’ videos (Firstpost.Com, 2019).
With the New Zealand massacre, long after the attacker and other suspects had been arrested, the footage was still being uploaded and re-uploaded to YouTube and other online services. A search of keywords related to the event, such as ‘New Zealand’, surfaced a long list of videos, many of which were lengthy and uncensored views of the massacre (Firstpost.Com, 2019). The instant spread of the videos and their movement back and forth on sites meant that the sharing economy enabled the spread of these videos more quickly than platforms could react to it. The rate of sharing, uploading and reposting outraced website moderators’ ability to delete the clips. Some of the videos were named after quotes from the shooter, such as, ‘Let’s get this party started’ (Timberg et al., 2019). Many hours after the shooting began, various versions of the video were readily searchable on YouTube using basic keywords, like the shooter’s name (Lapowsky, 2019).
Livestreaming and its ability to co-produce terror is conjoined to an architecture of non-erasure where terror spectacles can traverse the Internet to be replicated, to be disseminated to a wider audience, to be archived on forums and to be doubled in ‘mirror’ sites to defy eradication. Here, screen consumption and non-erasure of the wretched bodies become inextricably bound. The violence of this architecture depends on its ability to leak and its characteristic of non-containment where the algorithms facilitate a sharing economy premising the emphasis on sharing, overriding our moral sensibilities. This non-erasure, characterised through its immateriality, means it becomes ineradicable yet alters in form where it can be re-hashed and morphed and re-released into other digital platforms (Ibrahim, 2018). Visual images of gratuitous violence became entities emptied of their ethical dimension, eliciting voyeurism and objectification (Dauphinée, 2007: 147; Tait, 2008), highlighting the ‘hallucinogenic pleasure in violence’ (Baudrillard, 1995: 75).
In contrast to images produced by professionals are amateur productions and copies of copies made for digital dissemination which Hito Steyerl (2012: 32–44) calls the ‘poor image’ from an imperfect cinema. These poor images do not stand for the event they represent, per se, but become a life form of their own entering into a world of exchange whose value increases with rapid circulation. The poor image is then about its own real conditions of existence, standing for swarm circulation, digital dispersion and fractured and flexible temporalities, calling us to think of value through velocity, intensity and spread. The use value of the real event becomes a residue of the poor images as the ‘wretched of the screen’.
Steyerl (2012) argues that these images floating as part of dubious data pools capture the frenetic energy of their formation through relentless sharing of images, not just uploads or downloads but reformatting, re-editing and file-sharing, binding audiences with (and as) producers. These are extrapolated both into capitalist modes and equally function as alternative audio-visual economies or what Sekula terms ‘shadow archives’ to be both disruptive and affective while being imbued with advanced commodification techniques (Steyerl, 2012: 42). As unstable forms which are compressed, re-hashed, remixed and distributed onto multiple platforms and sites, they signify the speed and acceleration of exchange, containing a mix of trivia and substance, offering transgression and subsumption, overrun with both porn and paranoia. It drafts the human into active participation and, in so doing, captures the affective condition of the crowd reflecting their neuroses, paranoia and fear, as well as cravings for intensity, fun and distraction (Steyerl, 2012: 40). Here, the countless transfers and reformattings are significant points of human engagement and involvement inscribing the human as integral to the sharing architecture both in the production of the trivial and the horrific where they lose matter and gain speed. Within such a configuration, these popular imageries lend to the architecture of circulation, transacting quality for accessibility, inducing cult value through its exhibition and producing distraction rather than rumination. Classifying poor images as the ‘contemporary wretched of the screen’ Steyerl argues that these …testify to the violent dislocation, transferrals, and displacement of images—their acceleration and circulation within the vicious cycles of audiovisual capitalism. Poor images are dragged around the globe as commodities or their effigies, as gifts or as bounty. They spread pleasure or death threats, conspiracy theories or bootlegs, resistance or stultification. Poor images show the rare, the obvious, and the unbelievable. (2012: 32)
The technology of the photographic camera and its presence not only enabled the aestheticisation of torture at the lynchings of African-Americans, it also enabled these images to enter domestic circuits of exchange, consumption (Pugliese, 2007: 262) and pleasure seeking. Allan Sekula, in drawing attention to an ‘imaginary economy’ in which images are consumed and transacted, emphasises how this economy is inscribed by an infrastructure of culture, finance, production and consumption. In premising the emergence of photographs within the genealogy of the archive, Sekula (1986: 16) contends that ‘the camera is integrated into a larger ensemble: a bureaucratic clerical-statistical system of ‘intelligence’. For Sekula, the central artefact of this system and its mastery was not the camera but the filing cabinet ‘functioning as a sophisticated form of the archive’.
Like the filing cabinet which orders content, algorithms in the sharing economy are put in a place where sharing and the ability to pass on content become an integral aspect of digital sensibility. They fragment and accelerate the temporal while co-locating its place through human affectivity and patterns of behaviour, drawing on their sensuous and aesthetic labour to multiply assemblages where machinic subjectivity syncs with modes of the capitalist extractions through algorithms designed through the mimetics of the human. Hidden, invisible, yet designed to extract and order through the demands of commercial platforms and their bind with capital, the algorithm in the sharing economy and its co-location with ‘search’ on the World Wide Web remake the digital archive as one which is decentred yet satisfying niche and perverse pleasure where porn and piety can co-exist as content. Here, sharing and bearing news and images as a form of social capital for users and platforms invoke sharing as a virtue over the veracity or ethics of the content shared. As such, human subjectivity is increasingly dependent on a multitude of machinic systems while leveraging on collective human attributes like sharing.
No area of opinion, thought, images, affects or spectacle has eluded the invasive grip of computer-assisted operations such as databanks and telematics (Genosko, 1996: 95), and graphic images of violence swim within this architecture. For users keeping the ‘forbidden’ content undetected by content-sharing platforms, moderators and image recognition software becomes another element of this complicit economy of keeping taboos and unethical matter afloat undetected and archived in extreme sites. The fact that machines are capable of articulating statements and registering states of fact in as little as a nanosecond, and soon in a picosecond (Genosko, 1996: 95–96), enmesh violence into these assemblages. In doing so, the sharing economy and the selective invocation of the ethics in content distribution means platforms appropriate vast degrees of power in censuring material and equally in enabling millions of users to get access to materials of torture, collapsing these as part of the sharing economy and trading images in real time. Pornotroping in the digital age is the abstraction of flesh from the slayed and feeding the depraved and hungry, content-sharing assemblages as the wretched of the screen. Horror, terror and banal videos of cats and dogs swim together as content in the sharing economy where sharing as a reflex action and virtue outpace our ethical and moral responses consigning horror to screen aesthetics and its moral sensibilities.
Conclusion
The Christchurch massacre was an event made for sharing and filmed by the perpetrator with a GoPro camera attached to his head. The narration of the event through the body of the mass murderer in real time opened new moral and ethical challenges for the fatigued human form in the age of digital capitalism. The massacre promoted on social media sites and streamed on Facebook, again re-invoked the Muslim body as the death-bound subject, where its ability to live is characterised through its possibilities and imminence of death. Since 9/11 and the ‘war on terror’, the Muslim body is the site of televisual spectacles of carnage and disaster. As such, its social death is amplified through its manifest death on the screen and its aesthetics of demise. Its narration as the wretched of the Earth is then complemented through its elongation and recombination of form as the wretched of the screen, passed on endlessly and transacted as part of the sharing economy, inducing man and machine to form new subjectivities where horror settles into a new architecture of violence. Here, the body is traded long after its mortal death and terror is co-produced and multiplied through humans trading images in real time, coalescing with machines where the logic of sharing prevails as the prima virtus.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
