Real life does not end where digital life begins. Moreover, digital life does more than mirror life away from the computer keyboard. According to curator and author Legacy Russell, digital life encodes the body with liberation and accustoms it to resist the power structures and prejudices that mass surveillance reflects.
Legacy Russell’s second book, ‘BLACK MEME: A History of the Images that Make Us’, was published in May 2024. She is a writer and the Executive Director & Chief Curator at The Kitchen. Russell’s writings include essays, reviews, fiction, poetry, and the highly acclaimed cyberfeminist manifesto called ‘Glitch Feminism’, with which she debuted as an author in 2020.
In BLACK MEME, Russell describes Blackness as “always existing in transfer and transmission”, and thus “the originating cultural engine”.[1] This serves to explain that “Blackness in itself is memetic and, by extension, that the technology of memes as a core component of a dawning digital culture has been driven by, shaped by, authored by, Blackness”.[2]
To shed light on Russell’s notion of digital culture – and the emancipation embedded in its code – this article revisits her first book ‘Glitch Feminism’ to encourage and guide the reading of ‘BLACK MEME’, wherein she explores Black imagery and how the perception of these images structure our thoughts and actions.
Glitch Feminism
Published almost four years ago, ‘Glitch Feminism’ is celebrated as one of the best art books of the year. In it, Russell discusses the gender binary. The gender binary distinguishes between the masculine and the feminine with respect to inaccurate ideas of biology and sex. At best, this distinction is reductive. At worst, it is violent.
Russell writes that the “construct of gender binary is, and has always been, precarious. Aggressively contingent, it is an immaterial invention that in its toxic virality has infected our social and cultural narratives”.[3] In other words, the gender binary is performed …
When we stop performing gender in accordance with those inaccurate ideas, the binary glitches. This glitch, Russell argues, is resistance and protests systemic violence.
“All technology reflects the society that produces it, including its power structures and prejudices”.[4] Therefore, digital culture mirrors the norms IRL (in real life). Russell, however, replaces IRL with another abbreviation, i.e. AFK (away from keyboard), to express that real life does not end where digital life begins. Rather, digital life is just as real as life away from keyboard, including those power structures and prejudices.
Digital life may not only expose power structures and prejudices. Digital life also offers multiple opportunities to escape them. This line of reasoning enables theorising that “we are empowered via the liberatory task of seizing the digital imaginary as an opportunity, a site to build on and the material to build with”.[5]
This is where the glitch comes back into the picture. Digital life offers multiple opportunities to explore gender identity and resist the binary because it is an extension of bodily presence, onto which the binary, away from keyboard, is more easily projected.
Online communities are not less real, neither are they illegitimate. In fact, they are opportunities to practice glitching without compromising one’s safety. Furthermore, digital life exposes the intertwinement of the capitalist economy and the gender binary:
“For example, every forty-eight hours online we as a global community generate as much information as was generated in written history from the beginning of civilization until 2003.1 This data we generate triggers monumental questions about mass surveillance and how the information tied to our digital selves can be used to track our every movements. Our Internet search histories, social media habits, and modes of online communication—what sociologist David Lyon calls “factual fragments”— expose our innermost thoughts, anxieties, plans, desires, and goals.2 Gender binary is a part of this engine: a body read online as male/female, masculine/feminine fulfills a target demographic for advertising and marketing”.[6]
Put differently, the glitch also puts a spoke in the wheel of capitalism, and glitch feminists “embody the virus as a vehicle of resistance, we are putting a wrench into the machinic gears of gender, striking against its economy, immersing ourselves inside of brokenness, inside of the break. We want to infect, to corrupt ordinary data”.[7]
The glitch is thus a “socio-cultural malware”[8] written online. By the keyboard, the malware remains undetected. But, away from keyboard, the glitch resists and mobilises. This is how glitch feminism turns cyberfeminist as well as anticapitalist. The glitched body “renders itself useless as a subject of capital’s regime of mining and profiting from data”.[9]
Shutdown
Russell’s manifesto is in no way a renegotiation of gender equality and data regulation. She wants more than that. She wants the glitch to push “the machine to its breaking point by refusing to function for it, refusing to uphold its fiction”.[10]
Real life may not end where digital life begins, but the machine will never end the violent gender binary. To Russell, the machine represents the political status quo. This is why ‘Glitch Feminism’ wants the glitch to go viral and corrupt the data computed by the machine to, eventually, fuck the machine up.[11] Therefore, Russell’s finishing words are:
“Let the whole goddamn thing short-circuit”.[12]
Fucking up the machine by refusing to function for it is an open-ended project. ‘BLACK MEME’ continues this project because, early on, she notes that “the work of blackness in expanding feminism—and, by extension, cyberfeminism—remains an essential precursor for glitch politics, creating new space and re-defining the face of a movement, amplifying the visibility of historically othered bodies”.[13]
Russell makes a compelling case. Digital culture reflects white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy. Yet, digital life is more than a mirror reflecting those power structures. Liberation is embedded in its code because, before stepping away from the keyboard, we can extend our bodily presence online and practice glitching. Before stepping away from keyboard, we can practice resisting racist, classist, and patriarchal prejudices. If so, we write a socio-cultural malware. This malware resists power structures and, in reality, mobilises against them until the whole goddamn thing shuts down …
[1] Page 28 in ’BLACK MEME: A History of the Images that Make Us’, Verso (2024)
[2] Page 24 in ’BLACK MEME: A History of the Images that Make Us’, Verso (2024)
[3] Page 9 in ’Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto’, Verso (2020)
[4] Page 17 in ’Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto’, Verso (2020)
[5] Page 21 in ’Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto’, Verso (2020)
[6] Page 41 in ’Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto’, Verso (2020)
[7] Page 63 in ’Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto’, Verso (2020)
[8] Page 63 in ’Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto’, Verso (2020)
[9] Page 73 in ‘Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto’, Verso (2020)
[10] Page 87 in ‘Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto’, Verso (2020)
[11] Page 86 in ’Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto’, Verso (2020)
[12] Page 88 in ’Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto’, Verso (2020)
[13] Page 28 in ’Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto’, Verso (2020)