Cybre
is
…?
In
,
during their
{annuäl, annual}
Word‐of‐the‐Year
vote,
the
American Dialect Society
announced
cyber
as one of
the
words of the year.
The
ADS
glossed
cyber
as
pertaining to computers and electronic communication .
The other word for that year—it was a tie—was,
perhaps {presciëntly, presciently},
morph,
to change form.
|
As someone who was born in
,
I have witnessed the evolution of this term firsthand,
alongside my own personal development.
As such,
it seems only fitting that I should be the one to write this now.
|
For most of my life,
the word
cyber
has seemed largely an anachronism, evoked for a sense of
90s‐era nostalgia,
recalling a time when
the Internet
and computers were considered
an exciting new world of untold {possibilitys, possibilities}
rather than an
everpresent,
integrated
(and often troubling)
part
of {oür, our} day‐to‐day lives.
In stark contrast are the ways the word has persisted in the common vernacular,
through phrases such as
cyberwarfare,
Cyber Monday,
and
cyberpunk—signalling
militarism,
capitalism,
and
dystopia,
respectively;
instead of the {naïve, naive} optimism of the 90s,
the
cyber
of the present‐day connotates
all of the fraughtness and danger that {oür, our} interconnected technological networks have the potential to contain.
When
Donald Trump
made his
viral remarks
about
the cyber
in the first presidential debate,
and as concerns about
Russian
hacking and botnets took hold,
some {presciënt, prescient} commentators on
Twitter
remarked that
might well end up {beïng, being}
the year of the cyber
.
And indeed,
over the course of the past year we certainly
have
seen an increase in discussion and rhetoric pertaining to:
-
Cyberwarfare
-
Social media
({
especîally, especially}:
Facebook,
Twitter)'s
{influënce, influence} on public opinion
-
The
complacency
of technological institutions with
hostile
(white‐supremacist)
political thought
-
The
violation
of digital privacy,
both by state governments,
and by corporations
-
The continued,
unending,
lack
of diversity,
in the tech sector
-
Harrassment,
toxicity,
and
oppression
online
Certainly,
these topics carry with them
a threat of risk and danger to the people of the world.
However,
when analysing the
{reäctîons, reactions}
that these {sitûätîons, situations} have invoked (fighting
cyber
with
cyber;
the {continuïng, continuing} lack of accountability of large corporations for the content they distribute
or
their encroachments into their users' lives;
the {continuïng, continuing} rise of online hate and harrassment campaigns—with no end in sight),
one begins to wonder
whether they are indeed the threat to the social order that they have been made out to be,
or if they are,
in fact,
symptomatic of
and
integral to
the present shape of power in modern {sociëty, society}.
We are told
cyberwarfare
puts {oür, our} lives in danger,
but that
the only
solution
is
more
cyberwarfare.
We are told
social media has an
undue {influënce, influence}
in {oür, our} lives,
but
this
only
produces
more
social
media
coverage.
We are told
white‐supremacy is a threat,
but
it is
allowed
to
run
rampant
across {oür, our} digital networks.
We are told
privacy matters,
but
states
and
corporations
take
further
and
further
action
to encroach upon it.
We are told
diversity
is
a
priority,
but
we have
yet
to
see
it
meaningfully
materialize
in
any
form.
We are told
that
harrassment
is
unacceptable,
but
sites
and
algorithms
remain
designed
to help it grow.
The words do not line up with the facts.
Far from a threat to {sociëty, society},
these unsavory aspects of
cyberspace
seem to be part‐and‐parcel with its normal operation and expected functioning.
And—at the same time—other {storys, stories} are not {beïng, being} told.
The
indie
artists and musicians struggling
(and,
often,
succeeding)
to find {audiënces, audiences}
amidst the massive centralization,
appropriation,
and commodification of {virtûälly, virtually} every artform.
The
networks of
trans folx providing each other with care and support
sorely lacking in {sociëty, society} at‐large.
The
{communitys, communities} of {frends, friends},
activists,
and lovers,
working together,
in their spare time,
for little‐to‐no pay,
to design and implement systems which will help to liberate them from capitalism's hold.
Some of these are not {storys, stories} so much as sensations.
The
warmth of a screen
on a long,
darkened road.
The
buzz of your partner
after an anxious night alone.
We must consider the consequences of conceiving of the digital landscape as one of pure capitalistic exploitation and military expansion,
in which the lives and needs of its inhabitants are supernumerary and inconsequential
(except as subscribers,
customers,
or subjects)
to the machinations of power at play.
If this is indeed the shape that
cyber
space takes on today,
might we not need a new kind of fraughtness,
one which
challenges this social order
and
{reässerts, reasserts} the value of life and community
in {oür, our} day‐to‐day interactions online?
To put the question another way:
Is
this
(capitalism,
militarism,
exploitation,
oppression)
all that
computers and electrionic communication
can be?
Or
are there other landscapes imaginable?
{Pursuïng, Pursuing} this question is what
cybre theory
is all about.
It is a
queering of conventional
cyber
discourse
to shed light on the
personal,
the
intimate,
the
community,
the
many and varied bonds
which tie us together through technology outside of pure capitalistic norms.
It is also a call to action
against those systems and structures which seek to oppress,
control,
and ultimately erase these bonds from existence.
CYBREMONDAY
is a {casûäl, casual} webzine aimed at elucidating conversations and {ideäs, ideas},
questioning existing narratives,
and promoting discussion regarding life and culture in
(cyber/cybre)space.
This is its zeroth issue.
Seizing the Means of Knowledge‐Production
Over the past few years,
the landscape has shifted {dramaticly, dramatically} in terms of how we talk about the internet.
In one sense,
this is to say:
we talk about it at all.
Twitter, Facebook,
{&, et} al receive mainstream treatment in the daily news as questions arise regarding everything from
their use
by government officials to
their role
in the
US
Presidential
election;
bugs like
Heartbleed
and
Spectre
become issues of international concern;
hackers
and
botnets
and
those damn emails
have now dominated political discussions for over a year.
{Creäted, Created} by mass media for an (inter)national audience, these stories typically centre on big businesses, large governments, or—occasionally—one or two problematic individuals who have managed to make something difficult for the aformentioned.
Gone are the days of talking about internet {communitys, communities} and digital uprising—acknowledging the radical transformative potential of cybre movements like #ArabSpring
ceased quickly once #BlackLivesMatter
showed that it could happen in the States too.
Instead, internet spaces are construed as political in the worst way—a politics of pure, empty strucutres, devoid of life and material consequence, interacting like clockwork according to the forces of power at play.
How far do we have to stretch
the picture,
Before pixellating
the human texture?
While woefully inaccurate, speaking about the internet as though it were devoid of inhabitants serves the interests of those who seek to exploit it, ethical concerns—and even personal agency—fading into the distance on such a broad scale.
As an (to varying degrees) open publishing platform, there is nothing which can be done to directly inhibit the publishing of counternarratives or the recognition of individual or collective life, voice, and agency online.
However, these things can be easily dismissed so long as they can be classified as offtopic or irrelevant—and in an age where the relevance of knowledge is largely determined by corporate algorithms (à la Bing, Twitter, Facebook, Google), this is no small matter.
In an internet which overflows with information, we have given up the means of producing our own knowledge—and it is well past time to take those back.
Consequently, it is imperative that we not only concentrate our efforts on the publishing of cybre narratives, but that we also repeatedly and unrelentingly affirm these narratives as important, topical, and meaningful, at least as much as those being published on a grander scale.
As content which runs counter to the normative gaze of relevance, such stories will by definition be difficult to discover through conventional means—and, in many ways, this is desirable.
But it means that we must develop a practice of {activly, actively} promoting, sharing in, and involving ourselves, on the community level, with these conversations, and create other passages through which they might be seen or heard.
The goal here is not to push radical narratives into the mainstream discourse so much as it is to decentre the mainstream discourse as the be‐all and end‐all of what matters to us, our loved ones, and our communities.
The (inter)national politick will always be of concern to the people, but this does not imply that the people should be solely concerned with the (inter)national politick.
Cybre shops local.
And so it goes.
Cybre Pride
I was only 14 when Yahoo announced that GeoCities in the United States would be shut down—as my internet history at the time consisted almost entirely of RuneScape and Wikipedia, it's safe to say that the event hardly registered on my radar.
I didn't even really learn what GeoCities was until much later, through websites like One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age Photo Op and browsing the collection in the Internet Archive.
This discovery came roughly synonymously with my decision to switch to a Gender Studies major, and so naturally I found myself wandering the streets of WestHollywood, browsing the homepages of an LGBT community of years gone by.
Some of what I discovered there, I had expected to find:
The {homẅrought, homewrought}, old‐fashioned look and feel of the pages;
the inconsistent (often within the same page) rhetoric and terminology;
the frequent fetishization and {sexuälizatîon, sexualization} of queer—especially trans—bodies;
the {storys, stories} of struggle and queer oppression;
the vibrant—if somewhat under‐the‐surface—community, using the tools they had available to persist through it all.
Other things, perhaps betraying my naïveté, caught me completely by surprise; for example, the long, legalistic introductory pages which demanded that visitors be a legal adult before even beginning to look at information on being trans or gay.
In modern times, of course, the situation has—at least on the surface—changed.
Tech corporations across the board openly celebrate gay pride and LGBT communities.
Mainstream online press features explicit queer sections, and queer media is promoted to users through services like Spotify and Netflix.
From a cursory glance at these websites, it seems the fight for cybre queer representation has already been won.
Under the surface, though, things are much the same.
Queer—especially trans—users are frequently mistreated or banned from social media; queer content and resources continue to be restricted, especially from younger users.
And there are newer problems as well.
The ever‐increasing focus on a white and/or privileged gay experience; the emphasis on {allys, allies} and showing support over providing material help or change; the appropriation of queer narratives and trauma for clickbait income.
In fact, despite appearances, when it comes to connecting people with resources or accurately reflecting the queer {experiënce, experience} online, things might be worse than ever.
The steady encroachment on personal and nonprofit websites by Google, Facebook, and Amazon—as well as the postweb internet of Alexa and Siri—have restricted both the amount of information available and the kind of community structures allowed to only that which those providers see fit to approve or design for.
As one particularly drastic example: The International Foundation for Gender Education website was once one of the best resources on the web for trans information—now it is little more than a poorly‐formatted blog.
IFGE has offered a Web site containing information for transgender people since 1998. The site was very heavily used by transgender people seeking information on the Internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with respondents to a 2002 survey identifying the site as the "best source on the internet," (p. 102) preferring the site to Google and Yahoo for trans-related information seeking.[6]
Placing gay cybre culture in the hands of {companys, companies} whose workforces are primarily straight, white, and male simply doesn't make sense.
Consequently, we must reclaim and reposition cybre pride as something which is created under our own authorship, within our own communities.
It is not enough to merely denounce corporations' gesutres towards LGBT acceptance as hypocritical—we must provide a counternarrative which demonstrates and {reäffirms, reaffirms} queer pride and community—in all its forms and complexity, outside the boundaries of what is normative or deemed acceptable in the public sphere.
This means {doïng, doing} more than just protest (although, by all means, continue to protest).
It means finding reason to celebrate and making queer culture {oür, our} own.
The Message is not the Message;
or, Virality is not the Cure
It is easy, when considering and discussing the fraught nature of modern cybrespace—perhaps, when faced with a Manifesto—to think that the message of cybre is its message; that the message is self‐justifying, so to speak, and the purpose of cybre discourse is to promote cybre discourse and not some higher aspiration or aim.
Given this, virality seems the obvious tack to take, spreading and sharing content among friends and peers and social networks, arguing points and jumping into mentions and doing all of the work that propagating a message entails.
This impression is deceiving, and it is wrong.
The message of cybre—the imagining of a new digital landscape which respects life, community, and {oür, our} many and varied relationships of support, in all their diverse complexity—is not something which can be spread via discourse or social media post, but through decades of work to develop the structures from which these forms might evolve.
Indeed, insofar as it diverts queer {energys, energies} away from making progress and into defending positions, and insofar as it centralizes discussion inside the normative structures whose dismantling is {oür, our} ultimate aim, discourse is {oür, our} opponent in this journey forward.
We need fewer well-intentioned essays addressed to bros with good intentions about why sexist language might seem good but is bad. In the tech feminism community, we’ve been writing these essays for most of a decade. The systematic use of abuser tactics to control conversations and shut down criticism continues. These conversations go on and on, and happen over and over, each one seemingly unencumbered by the lessons of the previous one — what’s happening isn’t a conversation at all, but rather, a power struggle.
Far from a quick path to success, virality has proven itself over the past few years to be a source of violence and harrassment in exchange for little or no material gain.
Almost by definition, in order to reach a viral state, a message must first be reduced and reformatted into something which is palatable to the mainstream.
In {doïng, doing} so, the fundamental urgency and {nuänce, nuance} of the original is invariably lost.
Viral moments are ephemeral, burning quickly and then vanishing as the next takes centrestage.
But the cybre project is persistent, ongoing, continual, reaching back to the very first days of networked connectivity and forward into futures unknown.
As separate spectacles, we are less threatening.
In some ways, the project of discourse is doomed from the start.
How to describe the feelings of hurt and precariousness which accompany everyday life for marginalized queers in the modern connected world?
How to explain that these are not just numbers for us (40% of trans respondents attempting suicide at some time in their lives, 30% experiencing homelessness, 47% being victims of sexual assault, 10% in the last year, 13% while in K–12, 58% reporting harrassment by police in the past year alone, 30% facing mistreatment in the workplace, 15% now facing unemployment, 29% living in poverty, and all of these numbers increasing dramatically when componded with other forms of marginalization—according to the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey), but {oür, our} lived {experiënces, experiences}, and those of {oür, our} {frends, friends}, {oür, our} lovers, {oür, our} {familys, families}, and {oür, our} {communitys, communities}?
How to argue and debate over the fundamental value of a life, its right to exist in a space, its right to the resources and support that it needs to survive and to flourish, despite whatever forces might seek to oppress and control?
There are no words, and there never will be.
And so {oür, our} goal must be something more than merely seeking understanding or spreading a message.
It must be to assert value, change the landscape, press ever forward into this cybre realm.
It must be to embrace the fraughtness at hand, turn it into something meaningful, undo the structures which constrain us and support each other into tomorrow and beyond.
This is the cybre mission.
Together onward.