“A Comfortable Form of Control”
Memories are only invisible to those who haven’t suffered them
Mimi Onuoha, “Natural” from Uncertain Archives
Mushon Zer-Aviv, “Obfuscation,” from Uncertain ArchiveTonia Sutherland, “Remains,” from Uncertain Archives
Cifor, M., Garcia, P., Cowan, T.L., Rault, J., Sutherland, T., Chan, A., Rode, J., Hoffmann, A.L., Salehi, N., Nakamura, L. (2019). Feminist Data Manifest-No.
Doctorow, Cory. “How Tech Changed Global Labor Struggles for Better and Worse: Seize the Means of Computation!.” Medium, 2 Dec. 2022.
Tim Sherrat, “Unremembering the Unforgotten,” DDH 2019
For me, reading these authors exposed one of the most significant issues of deeply embedded colonial ideology: putting the label of invisibility on events, aggressions, injustices and memories that are only truly invisible to those who haven’t suffered them.
Some projects of digital humanists aim to “bring to the surface” forgotten aspects of history. The Wet’suwet’en Supporter Toolkit includes the Ally Bill of Responsibilities, and several of its principles could be applied to sniff-test data projects that aim to uncover the invisible. Don’t start from a place of guilt. Understand your own needs and agendas take a back seat. Embrace the ignorance of your oppressive acts. Perhaps most importantly, understand the larger oppressive power structures that serve to hold certain groups and people down.
Where is data science situated on the spectrum of allyship? Often the projects that aim to expose “hidden” datasets or illuminate the invisible do not address the problem that created the invisibility in the first place, and that is the willful ignorance to not see it. In other words, people are not invisible by accident. How can we apply principles of allyship to correcting this, that does not come from a place of guilt, or with our own altruistic agendas at their heart?
“Where are the places we are allowed to be?”
“It is a comfortable form of control, the easy certainty that purports to know where some people belong and others do not.” (Onuoha 353). Reading this, I include one of the places where people belong is in a perhaps well-intentioned but completely constructed category of “the invisible”. Onuoha is right when she states that “what is unique are the ways in which data-driven stories concerning Black people begin, too often, from an assumption of disenfranchisement.” So those “missing” Black women from the winners of the beauty pageant, or the lack of data on Black faces in an algorithm are highlighted and when they are, “the more they normalize the idea that routine suffering of Black people is natural and expected.” (Onuoha 355). This is one of those places where the “forgotten” are “allowed to be”: in aggregated examples of digital harm written up in articles with the purpose of that very reiteration, or on “digital platforms, where death and trauma are continuously reinscribed and reexperienced, visually and, perhaps, eternally.” (Sutherland 436)
“Remembering the forgotten is not only a matter of recall or rediscovery but also a battle over the boundaries of what matters.” (Sherrat) As our digital world intersects with the slow and long-overdue processes of dismantling entrenched colonial ideologies, it seems that those who (still) occupy spaces of power have decided that “the invisible” matters, that it is a priority. Those who gatekeep these pervasive power structures have once again made their mistakes about them, and “invisible data” has provided a raison d’etre, not for true allyship, but the performance of it. The pendulum seems to have swung from outright racist actions of colonial history to digital reform and correction, and “reproducing the logic that declares that only data give credible testimony to this pain” (Onuoha). But guess what? It’s not just the about the data! Data expresses systemic discrimination while also perpetuating it. So, even if we “fix” the missing datasets, this is only part of the much bigger problem.
True agency in invisibility is closely tied to the right to be forgotten, a right that Sutherland powerfully addresses in her chapter:
“Trayvon Martin, for example, does not enjoy the right to be forgotten; nor do Henrietta Lacks or Tupac Shakur. The enslaved Black people resurrected through the digitization of slavery-era archives do not enjoy the right to be forgotten.” (Sutherland 441)
“For those in positions of power, there are political, social, and economic gains to be made by reinscribing images of Black death: these visual records serve as a means of power and control, a powerful reminder that one must be ever vigilant and ever in fear for one’s life” (Sutherland 436)
Access and Invisibility
We have had numerous discussions about how many things can only exist in relation(ship) to something else, a point that Sherrat makes when discussing access as “itself defined through restriction…” It could be that being settlers, and as such, outsiders to daily racial struggles, our ideas of access have been constructed from the opposing invisibility. In reality, those who have lived through their memories have the access, but it is the embedded structural powers that creates the boundaries to it. The truly vital information, that should be informed and released by those who have lived it, is available, but only sometimes made visible, and then only partially, or incompletely.
I don’t think that the type of invisibility I’m talking about is the same as that which made Sherrat’s grandfather, and others like him who went to work and never came back, invisible from the historical record. Working on projects to bring their lives to life in the present is obviously worthwhile in the sense of what ordinary lives can tell us about history. But there is a big difference between this and correcting the mistakes of much bigger histories, such as the lands of Britain being built on the backs of slaves who are erased from the narrative. (Onuoha 355)
P.S…Regarding the tools of obfuscation in the Doctorow piece: my favourite is the unfitbit. Genius!