When Death Goes Viral

While livestreaming has been used as a means of building activist networks for social justice, in other instances streamed videos have become the impetus for action. On July 6, 2016, Diamond Reynolds began streaming on Facebook as Officer Jeronimo Yanez aimed his gun at her. He had just shot and killed her boyfriend Philando Castile during a routine traffic stop. Shortly thereafter, an archived version of the stream went viral across social media, sparking outcry and protests across the United States. The affective implications of this video, “merged with the momentum of the still fresh videos of the killing of Alton Sterling who had been shot roughly forty-four hours earlier in Baton Rouge, Louisiana” became the impetus for political action (Kumanyika 2017, 169). Within an hour of her stream, Reynold’s video received thousands of views and shares, and within days this number reached millions. These online viewers are what Sam Gregory (2015) refers to as distant witnesses, who are “copresent” through the livestreamed video, both synchronously as it is broadcast and asynchronously as it is played back and shared over social media. Distant witnesses have the capacity to impact events. In the case of Reynold’s stream, they instigated protests across the United States.

The video bears the stylistic qualities of being produced in the moment. The camera framing is close, too close, with visibly shaky movements that contrast with the steady tone of Reynolds’s voice. Only fragments of the unfolding events are evident (which I am intentionally not recounting here), but the emotional intensity and distress of the situation is clear. There is an incongruity with the final part of the video, which occurs once the phone is placed on the ground and the camera is still recording after Reynolds leaves the car, presenting a clear blue sky crossed with overhead electrical wires. At one point, the phone is forgotten, yet continues to stream. The camera streams for several more minutes, showing the unchanging frame of the blue sky, until someone picks up the phone and turns off the camera.

When this video went viral, I noticed how some of my white friends on social media shared it, highlighting the need to watch it in order to view these racist injustices. At times, people commented on how the video made them uncomfortable, but they made sure to watch it all the way through. There is an underlying presumption that witnessing such atrocities is necessary for white and non-Black viewers to acknowledge racism and how racist violence exists. Such statements give me pause regarding how these videos circulate online. Christina Sharpe describes how the repetition of imagery presenting “quotidian and extraordinary cruel and unusual violences enacted on Black people does not lead to a cessation of violence, nor does it, across or within communities, lead primarily to sympathy or something like empathy. Such repetitions often work to solidify and make continuous the colonial project of violence” (Sharpe 2016, 116).

Videos such as these evoke Susan Sontag’s short book, Regarding the Pain of Others, in which she considers photographic imagery and suffering. She wrote this book in 2003, at a time when blogging and Internet self-publishing were becoming more popular, though just prior to the advent of major social media platforms that facilitated the mass uploading and sharing of user-generated content. At that stage, videos and photographs in the media were no longer confined solely to the authority of journalists—a process that was further advanced through the dissemination of digital cameras in smartphones, perhaps the most ubiquitous piece of digital hardware in the current moment. Sontag discusses the impact of war photography, pointing out the multiplicity of responses that such images may evoke: “Photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses. A call for peace. A cry for revenge. Or simply the bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic information, that terrible things happen” (Sontag 2003, 13). While such images may play a significant role in raising awareness and lead to social responses, lens-based depictions of suffering do not result in clear uptake that stops the represented violence.

Sontag notes how photography and photojournalism did not bring the end of warfare during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as some had hoped, despite the increased authority that lens-based media carries. This authority connects to the camera’s capacity to merge objectivity with a subjective point of view, functioning as a “record of the real—incontrovertible, as no verbal account, however impartial, could be—since a machine was doing the recording. And they bore witness to the real—since a person had been there to take them” (Sontag 2003, 26). Today’s livestreaming compounds these qualities of authenticity, where “pictures of hellish events seem even more authentic when they don’t have the look that comes from being ‘properly’ lighted and composed, because the photographer [or streamer] either is an amateur or—just as serviceable—has adopted one of several familiar anti-art styles” (Sontag 2003, 26–27), through the shortening of time between event and its presentation. As such, these images are considered less manipulative than staged presentations of suffering, as through fictional films, where considerations of style are used explicitly to influence audience reactions. The role of lens-based media is poignant and its aesthetic impact exceeds the frame of the image. However, it cannot be forgotten that Reynolds’s video presents a murder, and her act of livestreaming most likely prevented another one.

To consider this video in terms of a relational aesthetic encounter also raises ethical questions around sharing such content online. These scenes are experienced as shared sensory phenomena. Drawing from Rancière (2014), politics revolves around what can be seen and what can be said, with aesthetics enabling such processes of making sensible. The presentation of information, for Simondon, involves operations of taking on form, which is analogous to Rancière’s relationship of the aesthetic and the political: information forms as it informs. In other words, Reynolds’s stream and subsequent shared video makes visible police racist violence and murder, but also is an instance of how those targeted by this violence produce videos that extend the scope of witnessing these experiences. These videos are transformative not just because of the content, but who produces them and whose voices can be heard.

There is a paradox to this visibility, however, that Rancière does not consider, and has implications for marginalized and minoritized groups and individuals. In her book, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Simone Browne traces a genealogy of surveilling Black bodies to the transatlantic slave trade, where the visibility of Black individuals is used as a means of instigating racist oppression: “Surveillance is nothing new to black folks. It is the fact of antiblackness” (Browne 2015, 10). To make visible means to make trackable and controllable, which predates the technological infrastructures and algorithmic mediation of social media. In addition, these broadcasts perpetuate a “terrible spectacle” of violence, which Sadiya Hartman relates to slavery in the United States, where the origin of enslaved subjects was tied to violence as a means of demonstrating the “brutal power and authority of another” (Hartman 1997, 3). The “terrible spectacle” of violence against the enslaved persists in videos and images of violence against Black individuals online, continuing to define subjectivity through brutal violence and death. When discussing such depictions of violence against the enslaved, Hartman asks if we are witnesses to the truth of such trauma, or “are we voyeurs fascinated with and repelled by exhibitions of terror and suffering?” (Hartman 1997, 3). The legacy of slavery remains as the “afterlife of slavery”:

If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment (Hartman 2007, 6).

Here, I want to return to the title of Sontag’s book, regarding the pain of others. Sontag connects war photography to a longer iconography of suffering, arguing that “it seems that the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked” (Sontag 2003, 41). Witnessing an image of suffering created with a camera implies that whoever is viewing this image is at a different time and place than when the images were documented, though with livestreaming the gap in time has become much narrower, to less than a minute. Sontag considers who has the right to witness such pain, noting that: “Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who can alleviate it [. . .] or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be” (Sontag 2003, 42). When viewing Diamond Reynolds’s video, I am witnessing the trauma of an other as it unfolds. The other in this instance is not just because it is violence occurring to someone different from I, but also as a white person living in a European country, I am not subjected to the systemic racism that influences police brutality in the United States. Viewing the archived stream, I am not just witnessing someone else’s trauma, but become a spectator to the racist violence Black people experience from Reynolds’s perspective. I engage in shared emotional distress by watching this video (Sutherland 2017), but I cannot limit the ethical implications of this video to my emotional state. Instead I ask: Do I have a right to view this trauma? Can I alleviate it? Can I learn from it? Or am I a voyeur? In addition to being emotionally impacted by this video, am I partaking in the necessary actions to instigate change? What would it mean for me to share and circulate this video on social media? What are the consequences of sharing this video and its capacity to re-traumatize? And to be discussed further below, who profits from me sharing this viral video? Here is what Hartman refers to as the “uncertain line between witness and spectator” and the “precariousness of empathy” in responding to such depictions of violence, especially when depictions of such trauma define Black subjectivity (Hartman 1997, 4).

The Commodification of Trauma

The gestures of sharing videos of racist violence on social media by white individuals may assuage guilt, though even the most well-meaning allies risk perpetuating violence against Black bodies and the spectacle of anti-Black violence in order to satisfy white affect. In addition, Sofiya Noble (2018) argues that the structure of social media platforms as private corporate enterprises means that profit is being made through the sharing of collective trauma. Social media sites are part of what Jean Burgess refers to as the platform paradigm, which means “not only that platforms like YouTube and Facebook have a lot of power within the information sector and creative content industries but also that their logic—their ways of operating and their systems of value—are more deeply reshaping our society and culture” (Burgess 2021, 22). When livestreams are presented on social media platforms, they function as part of this datafied ecosystem and exist beyond the intentions and influence of the creators, enabling the “extraction and collection of digital traces of cultural practices and social interactions so that they can be sorted, aggregated, analyzed, and deployed for strategic purposes” (Burgess 2021, 22–23). The technical objects of livestreaming, therefore, not only include the hardware involved in the creation and viewing of broadcasts, but the platforms that store and circulate them. The role of social media platforms in the framing and datafication of these streams, including the risk of perpetuating trauma through the viral circulation of media, warrants further attention.

If, as Susan Sontag states, “photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed” (Sontag 2003, 81), then images and videos, including the archive of Reynold’s stream, that are posted on social media take this to a new extreme as digital objects. Yuk Hui defines digital objects as “basically data, sharable and controllable; they can be made visible or invisible through the configuration of the system” (Hui 2016, 1). That is, digital objects are not just comprised of content and form, such as video, sound, graphics, or text, but also their existence within digital infrastructures. Noble (2018) challenges the presumed benefits of sharing these traumatic videos and images online, arguing that such benefits tend to serve white audience members and corporate social media stakeholders. While Reynolds’s livestream brought awareness to the disproportionate impact of police brutality on Black individuals in the United States to white audiences without direct experience of this violence, the circulation of the video did not serve as evidence against Castile’s killers (Alexander and Alexander 2021). Tonia Sutherland argues that through social media “death and trauma are continuously re-inscribed, visually and, perhaps, eternally,” reinforcing the systems of racism and white supremacy that cause such deaths (Sutherland 2017, 34). Like a gif that repeats the same action over and over, the viral circulation of these images repeat trauma as an infinite loop—violence against Black bodies becomes social media spectacle without recourse for justice.

Whether livestreams are used to build activist networks and support protest on the ground or become the impetus for such actions, the techno-aesthetics of livestreams shot and shared on social media networks are entangled in milieux that are material and social, political and ethical. These streams extend the realm of political possibility through the aesthetic object of moving image, as encounters with these objects enable ways of redefining engagement. At the same time, there is risk of reinforcing white, supremacist, capitalist oppression. Ruha Benjamin observes how white supremacy is encoded in digital technologies through the “new Jim Code,” or “the employment of new technologies that reflect and reproduce existing inequities but that are promoted and perceived as more objective or progressive than the discriminatory systems of a previous era” (Benjamin 2019, 3). Instead of technology bypassing human biases, ideologies and values, including white supremacy, are encoded into technologies, with the ability to entrench and perpetuate them at speeds and capacities that exceed previous forms of social relations. While livestreaming is a vital aspect of social movements today, the form is implicated in commercial and institutional structures that risk perpetuating the injustices that people and groups may be trying to counter, as the techno-aesthetics of these streams are influenced by these structures.

Performative Allyship

Even in instances where outrage leads to action, what is becoming more often the case is the appearance of action. The neologism performative allyship, or “the practice of announcing or demonstrating allyship for an audience” (Jackson, Bailey, and Welles 2020, 168), has come to describe online activism lacking offline counterparts. Mia Mckenzie (2015) argues that performative allyship, or what she refers to as “ally theatre,” provides a glimpse into the shortcomings of white allyship more generally speaking, where the need to be seen performing allyship publicly takes precedence over real solidarity. While the phrase has been in circulation for some time, the response to racist police brutality and murder during the Covid-19 pandemic has brought criticisms of such online gestures into sharp focus. The issue that performative allyship raises is not that digital technologies and their entangled performances are inadequate platforms and tools for activism. Instead, performative allyship exemplifies when social justice becomes personal performances of impression management online. Here, aesthetics is reduced to the stylistic impressions of an individual when performing the role of allyship rather than the multifaceted encounter that livestreaming provokes. That is, acts of allyship are reduced to being seen as an ally. An example of this includes the sharing of Reynolds’s archived stream coupled with statements by white viewers of the need to witness this video that are directed toward other white viewers. Performative allyship satisfies the need to be seen as supporting social movements—allyship with an audience.

Sara Ahmed’s work pertaining to diversity in educational institutions provides a useful way of rethinking J. L. Austin’s performative in conjunction with performative allyship. Austin defines a performative utterance as when a person “is doing something rather than merely saying something” (emphasis in original, Austin 1979, 235). His treatment of words as the means of performing actions treats language as a constitutive gesture as opposed to just being relegated to a realm of description or reflection. In On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012), Ahmed considered institutional approaches to diversity through Austin’s definition of the performative. In particular, Ahmed describes how an institutional policy pertaining to diversity and statements about diversity, such as “we are diverse,” come to take the place of action to make the necessary changes to implement diversity. Such statements may be considered as paying lip service to diversity, much like performative allyship, where the creating and sharing of digital objects on social media take the place of the actual deliverables of social justice. However, while Austin does not consider statements of lip service as pertaining to the performative, as they do not do what is stated, Ahmed argues that these statements change the conventions of speaking about diversity, though not always in ways to accommodate appropriate actions. In a similar manner, acts of performative allyship change ways of speaking about social justice online, altering the conventions of social media. However, there is simultaneously a reinforcing of the norms of white supremacy as personal reputation takes precedence over the necessary alterations of habits required for change to occur.

The Aesthetics and Ethics of Allyship

Like the educational institution, the individual on social media is concerned about the presentation of self, which is a performance of impression management. Emphasis comes to be placed on being seen as performing, which correlates with a general rise in performance culture. Performance culture involves “increasing self-consciousness about how to perform in [audit] systems, by generating the right kinds of procedures, methods, and materials, where rightness is determined as the fulfillment of the requirements of a system” (Ahmed 2012, 84–85). What originated in the financial sector, Ahmed observes, has transitioned to public institutions with an increased reliance on audit systems, including universities, but is now centered on individuals through emphasis on self-improvement. It also means to be seen as performing, where to “do well” means “generating the right kinds of appearance” (emphasis in original, Ahmed 2012, 85). Ahmed warns that this sort of performance culture can in fact conceal inequalities, such as when emphasis is placed on being perceived as anti-racist in instances of performative allyship. At the same time, Ahmed acknowledges the significance of going through the actions affiliated with performance culture: “If equality can be a way of ‘going through the motions,’ these motions give the institution a direction; the motions themselves direct attention” (Ahmed 2012, 111). Trouble arises when this shift in attention is perceived as an end in itself.

What role does aesthetics play in this? As noted previously, performative allyship is a type of impression management, where the user develops allyship as a brand and greater attention is paid to the virtual impression of allyship rather than engaging in actions that lead to accountable change. Here, the design of social media platforms influences how content is presented and shared, impacting the style of such content, which includes being shown as part of a never-ending feed of content. Topics in the social media feed switch as quickly as a person scrolls through them, facilitating hyper attention. Emphasis is placed on capturing attention, which is an aspect of the aesthetic encounter that focuses on visual and aural stimuli and sensations. Someone posting the need to watch a video is one way to capture attention in this context. Once re-shared, a livestream becomes recontextualized, not just as a means of extending the audience of virtual witnesses to murder and a perpetuation of the spectacle of death as defining Black subjectivity, but also enabling the person sharing to identify as an ally. This change in context within the technological milieu shifts the aesthetic encounter from the video itself to the impression management of the person sharing it.

Not all acts of social justice online are to be treated as equal. This leads to the question: Is a more authentic or ethical means of sharing content online possible, and if so, what would it look like? Considering the current design of technological infrastructures that make livestreaming possible and the values encoded into these technologies, which facilitate allyship as brand management, a radical shift in how they are used is needed. As aesthetic encounters, livestreams cannot be simply reduced to fixed interpretations, even though these are presented on social media and are archived as digital objects. With each experience of engagement, new possibilities for relation occur. That is, aesthetic encounters entail relational complexities and possibilities for future becomings that cannot be simply reduced to calculation, like the number of views or comments, entangled with the ethical and political relations of transindividuation vital for social justice. Livestreaming’s aesthetics of duration, as discussed previously, could provide one means of working against the grain of current social media platforms. Here duration is not just in terms of the style of streams, but also to consider social justice itself a kind of durational performance of which livestreams function as one part of a broader milieu of people, technical objects, geographies, and social systems. Emphasis is not just on the stream itself, but the relational implications and interactions that include the virtual realm along with what happens offline.

Patternmaking: Techno-Aesthetics of Mundane Intimacy