Down with the Click: Expanding Blackness in the Internet Era

Text: Neicia Marsh
Illustration: Jade Lönnqvist
April 10, 2021

Audio: Listen to this article read by Moriamo Ahmed. Recording was done at the reader’s home.

As a Black teenager growing up in the UK , the familiar dial-up sound was frequently heard in my home after school and every weekend. Regularly being asked to “please get off the internet as I need to use the house phone” (at the time these two acts could not happen simultaneously) was not uncommon. During the late ’90s/early 2000s, my love for the internet grew: it was a place where I learned basic coding skills (only to animate and change the background colour of my MySpace page), and a place where I met so many people, making friends with like-minded teenagers through numerous boyband fan forums before meeting at concerts and forming even stronger friendships. It was a place—and still is a space, to a degree—where you were able to create a version of yourself that you wanted to express on any given day. But you were also given room to try out a new version the very next day, a place where you could just be. 

The world of what is known as Web 2.0—the beginnings of the social web era—allowed me to perform, create, and shape the ways in which I wanted to be ‘seen’ online. MSN Messenger and associated forums allowed me to remove my Black body from unwanted encounters, but also place Blackness at the forefront of any online version of myself that I created, at my own discretion. During the later 2000s and until more recently, the internet grew in sophistication, new platforms like Tumblr and Instagram became a space in which Black people can create, modify, perform, transform, and shape different ways of existing. This allowed Black people to push back against societal confinements — the perplexing state of being simultaneously hypervisible and invisible In Real Life (IRL). 

As more Black people started to render their existence digitally, these online spaces, such as Tumblr, have allowed for Blackness, our bodies, and our multi-layered identities to emerge. Alongside Facebook, spaces such as Black Twitter — a community predominantly consisting of Black users on Twitter — began to have an important role in my online life. It gave me a sense of belonging, while alerting me to parallel discussions within other spheres.

The umbrella of Black Twitter is a digital powerhouse. It is a place for Black communities to share THE CULTURE, language, and interests of Black lives across many diasporas. Black Twitter is now an online space that merges politics and activism with memes and Black vernacular English. If Black Twitter did not forge this existence, activists Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi could not have created the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. Black feminist, writer, and, cultural critic Mikki Kendall, could not have created #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, the hashtag used as a critique towards mainstream white feminism. The hashtag #OscarsSoWhite would not have stimulated better representation within the American film industry, which for example, has resulted in the Oscars implementing new diversity and inclusion guidelines. And yt still wouldn’t know what “on fleek” even means.

Through the emergence of social networks, Black people have been able to build strong communities across the globe. For me, as a Black feminist, it’s remarkable to see the ways in which Blackness moves, adapts, and embodies technologies to fight systems of oppression and enact the future that we as Black people want to see. To me, Black Cyberfeminism is an activist and artistic framework that situates and practices Black feminist theories from academics, such as bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins, within online and digital contexts. It has been at the forefront of these underground online worlds I’ve been inhabiting, and has shown me the various ways in which Black artists have instrumentalized technologies to tackle oppression.  

While platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok have been replicating the types of surveillance online that Black bodies face AFK, our cyber selves have nonetheless thrived.

Thanks to the rise of Black Cyberfeminism, interdisciplinary artists like E. Jane have been able to emerge and present work inspired by Black liberation, and the ways in which Black femmes navigate networked media. Jane’s work both inspires and intrigues me, particularly how they built and traversed online and IRL worlds, empowered by an avatar they created called Mhysa, an alter-ego and “pop star 4 the underground cyber resistance”. Through Mhysa, E. Jane has been able to digitally create one embodiment of their multi-layered self.

This is the type of work I want to uplift—the work of Black queer artists, the type of artistic practice that pushes boundaries both online and IRL. This is work that questions, explores, dismantles, recreates, and conceptualises Blackness through the use of digital media. Jane’s work fights back against societal structures of oppression, and creates ways in which Black femmes can push back against these structures. It’s work that can transcend ‘real world’ boundaries and move freely within the digital cyber underground space. As the line between our digital and ‘real world’ lives fade, we have slowly started to shift from IRL towards Away From the Keyboard (AFK), the more fitting term frequently used by curator and writer Legacy Russell, who wrote Glitch Feminism: A manifesto. This term better reflects the lessening divide between our multilayered digital and AFK selves. 

As our digital and AFK entities merge, Black feminist researchers have started to identify how the structural oppressions that Black people face AFK also seeps into the online sphere. This has been explored further in a book, Algorithms of Oppression, by Associate Professor of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles Safiya Umoja, which highlights how algorithms reinforce racism. You can see this in action by googling ‘unprofessional hairstyles for work’, still today, the majority of results are examples of Black women experiencing discrimination towards Afro hair.

Comparatively, searching for 'professional hairstyles for work’ results in images of white women. Additionally, on social media accounts, Black people are regularly discussing their experiences of being systematically shadowbanned, meaning their content is being blocked and removed from feeds without their knowledge by social media platforms such as Instagram. According to researcher Simone Browne, who wrote Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, the ways in which technologies are being used to monitor Black people within the digital space is sadly becoming ever more common.

It is obvious that we, as Black people, need to adapt and learn new ways of protecting both our online and AFK selves. While platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok have been replicating the types of surveillance online that Black bodies face AFK, our cyber selves have nonetheless thrived. The magnitude of ways in which Black people have been able to exist within digital spaces is awe-inspiring. We have been able to amplify our voices. We have been able to educate people on the ways in which structural oppression impacts our daily lives, through creative and innovative uses of social media. We have been able to craft when and how we choose to be visible through creating the multifaceted versions of ourselves that we want to see both online and AFK.

Even today in the face of growing digital systems of oppression, surveillance, and control, Black people are blooming and smoothly maneuvering between their online and AFK existence. But to what degree can these existences continue to merge before something breaks? As we move deeper into the next generation of cyber technologies, it is becoming clear to me that collapse is inevitable, both online and AFK. This is supported by but not limited to prolonged activism, increasing diversity (and awareness of biases) within data science, and growing conversations around algorithms of oppression. And so, as we begin to see the cracks appear we, as Black people, must find joy in its collapse, because as this falls, we will rise.