Crises seem to be coming so thick and fast recently that the temptation to go off the grid – especially offline – grows more and more by the day, but turning off the onslaught of news hardly feels like an option. Endless reports of humanitarian and humanist cruelties dominate headlines, stances on recent events dominate conversations, but what I have found most chilling is both the speed at which video footage of these cruelties circulate across the TikTok algorithms of millions, and the speed at which they are swiftly removed from the platform.
Last Thursday’s announcement of TikTok’s changing hands, becoming, according to a BBC report, a ‘joint venture […] [that] will operate as an independent entity governed by a seven-member, majority-US board of directors’, has raised questions as to the already-contentious system of ‘censorship’ that the app’s algorithm employs. Perhaps most topically, summarised by Dani Di Placido’s Forbes article ‘The Big Backlash Against TikTok, Explained’, is that a commonly noticed feature of the app’s terms and conditions after the board changes is an ability to ‘[request] access to […] citizenship and immigration status’. Albeit justification from the WayBack machine, which provides an archive of ‘TikTokers already [having] permitted the app to collect this user-generated personal data’, worries about algorithmic suppression becomes a focal point in the wake of events, such as the killing of Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good by Minneapolis ICE agents, and the recent defections of prominent UK politicians such as Suella Braverman (after thirty years in the Conservative party) , Robert Jenrick and Andrew Rosindell, the latter two being members of the Tory shadow cabinet, to Reform UK- a party notorious for its often demagogic promotion of its anti-immigration ethos.
Anti-immigration (or more specifically, anti-immigrant) rhetoric, in light of these events, has become even more vitriolic in reaction to protests, anti-ICE demonstrations, and a general backlash of horror to these crackdowns. What this has made me think, though, is of the idea of ‘bare life’; how it applies to the too-common justification of cruelty being lashed upon immigrants, ‘illegals’, people outside of a certain nationhood. The idea belongs to Italian philosopher and political theorist Giorgio Agamben, and though was conceived in 1998, is a concept that seems as if it will be evergreen, almost thirty years on: a worrying indictment of the state of modern states, as it were. Similarly to how death and the breaking down of the body is seen in the majority of the contemporary world as not only a justifiable but expected punishment for transgressions of the law, albeit if done privately, so too does the body of the immigrant, the refugee, receive the same treatment. We are seeing it play out on our news channels, our search engines, and- briefly, it seems, like a candle quickly extinguished- through our social media algorithms. Being in a state of ‘bare life’ is to be reduced simply to one’s biological existence; not belonging to any state, nation or sovereignty, and hence being stripped of the protections and regulations. As Agamben discusses, populations have only in the last few centuries become a body seen to be in need of regulating, controlling, by a governmental or state body: and so, this gradual development of state intervention in declaring and separating populations into ‘citizens/subjects’ has culminated in the demonisation of the immigrant/refugee figure, because they exist outside of identifiable nationhood or sovereignty- they have no classification. And so, like many judicial systems, it seems to have become permissible to deal with this anomaly by whatever means possible.
Where I am going with this is to make the suggestion to think critically about these ideas of nationhood as self-classification. After all, we don’t choose where we are born, or who to. But to think about how bodily harm, cruelty, alienation is enacted upon people, supported by people, so prevalently in recent times, is to remind yourself (as is applicable to many readers) of the privilege that the certainty of nationhood brings- and to consciously reconsider those biases that exist within many of us, too, to enact more empathy to those currently in a state of ‘bare life’.
Image: Ahmed Akacha via Pexels