mantis x prater digital

VR performance

length: 9:45min

Safe Spaces in the digital world

Unlike in physical space, marginalised and/or oppressed people can shape their digital world more freely through seemingly independent selection of content. They can come together to form groups and thus identities can be created, confirmed and consolidated. In this way, "Communities" develop that promise mutual support. Within the communities, these people can reach out and be reached, mobilise, protest, share content, create avatars and present themselves freely.

Thus, more diverse content can be created in social media - unlike in the mass media dominated by the heteronormative, white majority society.

This (apparent) control over one's own feed creates the illusion of a safer space. This creates a majority feeling that makes marginalised, oppressed people feel safe. In this way, the digital safer space becomes a space that could be compared to a mirrored glass house. Anyone can look in from the outside, but it is impossible to see who is looking in from the inside.

Thus, it is an illusion of security that is nevertheless necessary. Marginalised and oppressed people are more dependent on digital gatherings with like-minded people than the majority society, so the problem with algorithms hits them all the harder.
For example, when Instagram changed its algorithm in 2016, users no longer see a reverse chronological feed, but the most recent posts of the users and posts they follow or have interacted with through likes or messages. Instagram wants to keep users on its platform for as long as possible, which is why the Instagram algorithm now presents each user with a feed that is as personalised as possible.

Demonetisation of videos with certain titles on YouTube, shadowbanning and the blocking or deletion of posts or entire accounts on Instagram primarily affects (left-wing) political content from BIPoC, queers and femmes. This means that they are actively silenced.

Algorithms and codes are written by people, so they are not objective - as is often assumed. They are shaped by the reality of those who create them. These are mostly people with a white, cis heteronormative, Eurocentric worldview.
Caroline Criado Perez's science book "Invisible Women" exposes the data distortion in a world designed for (heterosexual, white cis) men. Joy Buolamwini, a PhD student at the MIT Media Lab and a Black computer scientist, coined the term "The Coded Gaze" to describe algorithmic bias. She describes "'The Coded Gaze' as the embedded views that are propagated by those who have the power to code systems "1 (Buolamwini 2016).

Similarly, there is a huge data gap in most of humanity's recorded history. When A.I.s are subsequently trained with these same one-sided, incomplete data sets, the result is riddled with as many -isms as the society that created them.

This results in, for example, racist, gendered, class-based and regional forms of discrimination that invade digital safer spaces from within.

Artificial intelligence and algorithms are not only perceived as neutral and objective, but deliberately presented as such.

These artificial intelligences transcend human understanding and thus they influence and control our lives more than we do them. However, they are riddled with flaws and gaps that only become visible in a few lightning moments.

They are similar to glitches that reveal that a film frame is made of pixels and its authenticity is only illusion - they are fleeting moments that flash centuries of fundamental problems of a white-western, racist capitalist patriarchy.

The brief moment of looking into the abyss - the Coded Gaze, data gaps, censorship, polarisation, individualism, social pressure, sensory overload,(...) market power of these private corporations financed by advertising and data sales create a gulf so deep that a human being seems unable to comprehend its extent.