Reflections on ‘data healing’

Lately, time and space are physical portals within digital portals within physical portals... For example, I was sitting in my bedroom with a complete stranger—we met online and now, our first meeting, we’re attending a virtual event together #Just2021things. Moving somewhere I know no one (during a pandemic) for a job, I’ve had to rely on the Internet unlike ever before to meet new people. We order food and pop onto the Data Healing event hosted by guerrilla theorist and curator Neema Githere. While we’re waiting for the event to start, I see my friend's name on the attendee list; it almost feels like meeting eyes from across the classroom—I’m giddy! We haven’t held each other for months, but I see their instagram posts which is something, right? It makes me feel something.

Neema’s #DivestFromInstagram session was extremely timely with the Facebook blackout happening just days before. Imagining a world where my Instagram didn’t come back stirred strong emotions for me. I’ve used my current account (yes, I had multiple angsty phases with different accounts) since I was a sophomore in high school. Often, this account feels like the only thread connecting present me to past versions of myself. Coming of age on Instagram, my generation is the first to conceptualize time and self through infinite scrolling instead of finite flipping through a photobook. My mom hoards physically, but my digital hoarding on Instagram knows no bounds. My parents and my grandparents' photos are in a fire safe box in my basement. My Instagram isn’t even in the Cloud—or at least my Cloud, on my computer, on my land. The thought of losing my Instagram, felt like losing myself, making it viscerally clear: I don’t own my own memories.

I knew I had to convene with others about what that meant while the news went onto the next thing. Neema used this guerilla theory session to define data trauma, a word coined by @cyberdoula aka Olivia McKayla Ross, and the implications of this specification. Data trauma is how the digital amplifies the systems exploiting us in the physical world. Growing up with the internet, but old enough to remember life pre-smart phone, I still differentiate between the digital and the real (something I doubt my hypothetical children will do). It was incredibly affirming to be in a virtual (yet very real) space that could name and hold this nebulous grief. It allowed me to admit: over the last nine years, my attention has been insidiously stolen from me. My coming of age was marked by brain changing activity that I did not consent to.

I remember my first digital griefs. I watched the time that I spent with my friends slowly change. Normally, we’d ask, “what do you want to do?,” and brainstorm an exhaustive list of activities that would keep us up all night long, but that void, that promise of time that was ours to fill, slowly became time that was always filled, by increasingly addictive means.

Now, presence is a commodity. We flesh bags, in the physical world, expect to compete with the digital world. We are all used to sharing our friends, partners, even parents, with their phone portals. We have every bit of information and media at our fingertips and little tools to resist the sexiness of being known so profoundly, so intimately by our little algorithms. When I recently met someone, I swear her facial expression read, “I’m not convinced coming out tonight will be better than this hit of dopamine waiting for me on Instagram.” It’s brutal competition, but let me say, I wasn’t convinced either! My Instagram feels safe, like home!—familiar faces, ads curated to my specific taste, that one influencer I’ve been following since I was like 12 (yes, I feel like I know her).

The algorithm knows me better than this stranger sitting across from me at a bar! I greet my algorithm first thing every morning. But is this intimacy? It’s moments of uncertainty, awkwardness, the unfamiliar, really any gnawing uncomfortable feeling that makes my finger scroll. Can I be my authentic self with my timeline? With my algorithm?

When I do feel present, when another person cares and takes the time to meet me where I’m at, when I listen and reciprocate that, it’s magic, it’s a drug unmatched to my explore page, which shows how deprived of intimacy we truly are. If intimacy is showing up however you feel at a given moment, no algorithm can hold that space for you because “one key aspect of data trauma is [being] treated as a set of habits, as a user and not as a person who can evolve and change,” @cyberdoubla explained. On Instagram, you are not encouraged to show up as you are because predictive analysis is profitable. Your stagnancy is profitable. Our collective societal stagnancy is profitable.

For example, I recently redownloaded Tik Tok, and I immediately remembered why you should never restart your Tik Tok account—there’s so much absolute shit to sift through. I was prepared for hours of unpaid digital labor to re-teach the algorithm who I was. Yet, low and behold, it only took a few hours before I was getting unsolicited advice from therapists on Tik Tok about very niche experiences I’d had (how this is ethical, I do not know). At first, I felt seen, the algorithm cut to the chase, we were in the thick of it—family trauma, attachment patterns—no one’s ever known me like this so quickly, so effortlessly! I was self-diagnosing left and right. Realization after realization.

But then, after a few days, I started to dread going on Tik Tok. I couldn’t scroll without psychoanalyzing myself; it became an emotionally damaging experience. Even something that should be fun and abundant and liberating like consuming the content of queer creators became exhausting. The algorithm decided what was coded as “queerness” and it felt like if I wasn’t with it that week, I wasn’t queer enough. As if an algorithm could define queerness! Something so expansive, subjective, and spiritual as my own sexuality.

This is where scrolling crosses the line into alarming—the veil lifts, there’s a whole operation on the other side of my little algorithm, simultaneously extracting things from me while confining me. This algorithm doesn’t know me. It can’t know my wholeness. In the same way I can’t know myself. It’s in the discomfort, in the unknowns, not in the depths of my data files, that a mirror is held up.

"If there is data trauma, then there must be data healing. We deserve our pathways to bliss,” Neema said in an interview with BitchMedia. While the digital monopolizes our time, there’s little language and space to reflect and organize around data healing. Black technologists and artists like Neema Githere and Olivia McKayla Ross are leading the carework of finding alternatives for relating to technology and voicing the pain of my generation.

Neema is ardently against abstinence approaches to Instagram because “abstaining from social media is presently not the most accessible solution for marginalized people who rely on these platforms for community and resources.” I only found out about this event because of Instagram! In this case, Instagram fostered a present community; intimate space was held to connect with others through reflecting on our relationships with technology. Are institutions capable of holding space for this? This is a question about how we want to live and how we want to feel on a daily basis. The Internet has and will continue to refindine home.

Neema’s alternatives are bigger than just mediating relationships with existing platforms. What could an internet or social media with non-Western/White values look like? Guided by principles of the reindigenization movement, outside the confines of Western technoculture, people are imagining a much more expansive, reciprocally nourishing, distributed Internet. Neema and McKayla embody the radical potential for the web to be converted from a tool of oppression into a tool of reconnection.

In a colonized, industrialized world, there’s nowhere to return to. For gen-Z, a generation expected to relocate to or call in from thousands of miles for the best schools and the highest paying jobs during a pandemic, sense of home is especially murky and loneliness rampant. We all search for home on the Internet. Locality is transient, but the Internet is forever. It’s imperative for the mental health and wellness of my generation to have social media networks that feel good, that sustain real relationships and produce culture that feeds us.

So, I’m left to ask myself, is the intimacy you have with your algorithm more sacred than the intimacy you have with yourself? With your communities? Can my spirit, my loving, growing self fit on this timeline? We’ve yet to see social media platforms that allow us to show up as our full divine selves, but we are being empowered to imagine them.

For more resources on data trauma and healing check out Neema’s aren.na.