SA
Olivia, I’m so honoured to be sharing this space with you this evening. How are you feeling and how is NYC treating you?
O
Hiiii! Doing okay! Haven’t been outside much this time (since March) so I’ve been getting to know my neighborhood.
SA
Where in New York are you? I was living in Brooklyn for three years and overstayed my visa, I actually just returned back to Australia a month ago and I am missing it immensely.
O
Oh no! 🙁 I hope you can return soon (and that it’ll be safer to do so haha). I live in Southeast Queens, a few minutes outside of Jamaica. I was raised there, but I was living in New Hampshire for months at time for high school.
SA
When did you become interested in digital technologies as an art form?
O
Thinking back, it’s kind of what I always used it for? I learned to code before I hit puberty, so my perspective on the internet has always been really clear. You know the wizard behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz? It was as if I always knew he was there, so there wasn’t any ~magic~ or uncertainty about what the technology I was using was. Looking back, I think the moments where I was doing all my important teenage identity formation were mostly online, but I always had a small sense of agency the whole time.
When I first started out coding, I liked graphics programming the best because you could see the results very obviously! I’m still not that interested in like, database stuff. I used to send my friends in highschool really weird web pages that I made, and then someone told me that was “art”. To me, it was just pranks and jokes at first.
SA
I love this Wizard of Oz metaphor. Coding is such an impressive and important skill – it sounds like you really did have a formulated understanding on what was behind the veil. Can you speak a bit about your practice as a cyber doula?
O
Yeah! That title came to be during BUFU’s WYFY summer school in 2019. I was teaching a class there on my 18th birthday that was trying to remap cyberfeminist principles to the lived experiences of queer and trans people of color. I was thinking a lot about the experiences I had growing up online and how they changed the way I understand myself and the world around me. Virtual life, while it can be a gateway to self-determination and freer expressions, is a metaphor that scares me a lot, sometimes.
People talk about this concept of “magic circles” where a group of people decide on rules from behaving in a space and kind of like… create a second reality for themselves. Sometimes that looks like a Dungeons and Dragons game, or a funeral, or a classroom. Oftentimes in society, we make these magic circles so that we can cope with what’s outside the circle—the biggest one is human society itself, right? We crafted this second reality to cope with “wilderness.” And that’s caused a lot of issues in the world, you know—people are disconnected from the earth and it’s difficult for us to understand on a soul-level the effects our actions have on the rest of our reality. I think the second reality cyberspace creates can be really dangerous and harmful, not because of anything inherently wrong with electronics, but because the rules that govern behaviour in this space are non consensual. So, I was spiraling about that all summer. And when I taught this class I couldn’t help but think, I wish we could have an intervention. Because again, there’s nothing inherently terrible about electricity and transistors and diodes and stuff are really super cool. But we have all of this metaphor organizing how we understand them– this is a “laptop,” this is a “desktop,” this is a “browser,” this is a “computer file”… a lot of which come straight from 80s Western office culture, that it’s really hard to see what’s actually going on. All the abstraction obfuscates power. Which the general public was okay with for a bit, because the magic circle helps you not be afraid of what’s outside. But now it’s 2020 and we’re scared of authoritarianism and we have a right to say “gosh, what if my phone’s listening to my conversations,” but questioning those things is super scary. So the dream of a cyber doula really came out of wanting to hold someone else’s hand through that scary awakening phase, when they realize they don’t know how to navigate their own neighborhood without Google maps, or if they become distressed by advertisements on Instagram promoting a lifestyle they left behind years ago.
Wow that was a word vomit hahahaha
SA
I was just having a conversation with my friend this weekend about how, as you said, inherently these technologies aren’t bad, but how do you think we are supposed to move through social media, for example, as a portal that mediatizes, securitizes and surveils us while also offering new tools that help us understand ourselves and our spirits better? For example, the connection I have with my own spirit has been nurtured through resources I’ve found through healers on Instagram. But I also know that the app itself is recording my every move on it, so I become hesitant to engage too deeply with social media as a tool for healing. Is this something you think about? Do you have ideas on moving through this?
O
I’ve thought about this a lot! I feel like my biggest issue with social media is there aren’t enough enthusiastic “Yes!” moments of consent. Everytime Mark Zuckerberg asks me if I’m okay with something I kind of like… shrug my shoulders and go yeah okay if you really need to. It’s a really extractive relationship that depends on your ignorance to continue, so it’s hard to not feel a little icky when you start to lose some of that ignorance. I never finished The Matrix after they revealed everyone was plugged into machines, I totally turned it off because I was like “I can’t watch this during quarantine I’ll lose my head.” So it’s hard.
The way I’ve thought about balancing this has mostly revolved around my own personal boundaries, but also there’s a bit of playfulness. Recently I’ve been testing this thing where I “put my FBI agent to work” essentially, by forcefully trying to get my social media algorithm to show me certain things. There’s a part of social media that really works, mostly because of social engineering, to either boost or destroy self esteem. I’ve been wondering recently, when you have historically underloved populations of people, how can we harness the dopamine hit of the “like” to redistribute some care to others, digitally? Is that even a real thing? I’m not sure.
It’s also been really good for me to be super specific about what my social media accounts are for as well. Like, I don’t share certain information, or I try not to? I’m not as formulaic about it as it sounds when I describe it, it’s mostly a form of compartmentalization that I’ve noticed I do naturally. Living digitally with so many different accounts, it’s really easy to fragment yourself into chunks that way. Which can be super disturbing, but also really powerful in a technology of the fugitive kinda way. Sneaking around, lol.
SA
Yes totally. I’ve been thinking a lot about this compartmentalization as well. As Studio Ānanda took off, I was starting to feel a little encroached upon with my personal account – I guess I wasn’t used to having that many eyes on my work. I also make visual art and have a separate account for that & I was feeling entirely disconnected, paranoid almost, about how my multiple personalities may present themselves. Becoming specific + establishing those boundaries is what allowed me to regain sanity and a sense of control over my various online identities.
I actually first encountered your work through your collaborative project “I Pretend I Do Not See It,” which you worked on with a brilliant mutual friend, Rin. This discussion that you were having about systems of guilt and paranoia that are coerced through online surveillance capitalism really drew me in. How can we use online spaces to navigate both the guilt and paranoia that comes with being a public persona?
O
I feel this question really deeply! Both Rin and Liz are geniuses and I love working with them. I feel like when it comes to the public arena of online, you notice this like…almost puritanical rituals of moral maintenance, and cycles of shame. Especially for marginalized identities, I think capitalism survives on us feeling shame and exchanging capital to relieve that shame — which gets beefed up when surveillance capitalism gets involved, because there’s people paid to use machines to figure out where your tenderest parts are. Like what’s really gonna get you to click.
It doesn’t want us to live in balance, because living in extremes is where the profit comes in. So what’s better is if you can engineer a self-punishing system. I think about Instagram in this context, because it’s so image-focused, it definitely operates in this shame/fantasy/attention economy.
I’m really wary of conversations that get too deep into fear, concerning social media. Ultimately I’m really interested in building power and resiliency in my communities, and I feel like so much of critical tech education focuses on really alarmist, urgent language? I just can’t vibe with it. Institutions of fear and paranoia are white supremacist institutions.
I totally didn’t answer the question OMG lol
SA
Everything you just said really shook me up!!! I think I really needed to hear that — institutions of fear and paranoia are white supremacist institutions. Because it’s true, the way we commit to squashing ourselves, contorting ourselves to become smaller online is all based on a colonist way of thinking that basically reaffirms the status quo in that, people on the margins who use digital technologies to feel through and express themselves end up in cycles of shame for ‘taking up too much online space’. Wow, thank you for reiterating that…
O
It’s such a big deal! And so much energy gets put into convincing people that’s not happening, in a really weird neoliberal “up-by-your-bootstraps” way. Like, “if you did this or that, you wouldn’t feel this way online” when in reality, fascism depends on you feeling this way online. Victim blaming in the extreme lol
SA
Wow Olivia – you are really helping me understand these spaces in completely different, nuanced ways & I thank you so much for all that you offer to us!!
Before we wrap up, what are a couple of things that are helping you stay grounded over the past few months – maybe things you’re reading, listening to, eating, dancing to?
O
I’ve been taking a lot of time these last few months to write in a way I never really have before. Early on in quarantine, I was scared to journal because I was like, “No way, I don’t wanna bear witness to my own thoughts right now, that’s probably just as triggering as what’s going on outside…” But then my body slowly got used to the shock of isolation and I started needing that outlet. I’ve also been reading a lot of fanfiction lol I used to joke (but I lowkey believe it) that my art practice is inspired by how much fanfiction I read and reading tarot cards for my friends. I just like the idea of not being afraid to write new dialogues, make up new stories. Cyberspace really needs new metaphors, you know? So I’ve been trying to embrace this teenage girl technopraxis because I think she really understands something.
Aaand, for books I’ve been reading…. Jamaica Kincaid. Also, opening my Fred Moten pdf, reading a paragraph and then closing it every couple of weeks.