Paranoid Communities: Nishant Shah on Humane Digital Futures

by Nishant Shah & Digital Earth

“Paranoia is a trope that is most significantly used against marginalised voices in society, debunking their histories and epistemologies because they challenge the status quo”

We interviewed Professor Nishant Shah following his lab with our fellows in December 2020, hosted by ArtEZ. Through the lens of paranoia, utilising suspiciousness as a tool, he discusses the importance of rejecting the idea that everything will be fine. To build humane digital futures, we must comprehend the shortcomings and possibilities of the digital present-day by creating paranoid communities.

Your lab focused on paranoia. Can you expand on the notion of paranoia and its importance in questioning the status-quo of the dominant digital conditions?

One of the ambitions of the lab was to recognise the contemporary digital condition as one we live in. As artists, designers, researchers, how do we recognise the mechanics of negotiating with the dominant discourses of technology that we seek to critique? Our entry point into this was through the idea of paranoia. Paranoia has often been demonized as a pathological position, but increasingly, we recognise that paranoia is becoming a default aesthetic for our engagement with the digital conditions. The rise of post-truth media, the emergence of non-human informational actors, the complex systems of obfuscation of ownership, and the insidious nature of black-mirror technologies have engendered trust in systems that we had hitherto taken for granted. If, once upon a time, paranoia was the realm of fringe conspiracy theory groups on the Internet, it is easy to see that this has been naturalized, and we are all willingly and voluntarily embracing states of paranoia when it comes to thinking of the nexus of power, technology, and future. The lab was an attempt to reframe this paranoia as productive, as a space of critique, and most important as a way of breaking through the isolation that often comes when researching these rabbit holes of meaning and belonging. In the 2 day lab, we worked together to identify moments of paranoia in our work and recognise that the paranoia is a demand of the world we live in and not merely coming from inside the human subject. In this externalisation of paranoia, we could then find new ways of connecting and building communities of care within the digital transformation practices that the participants of Digital Earth embody.

Digital Earth’s leading question is how to imagine humane digital earths to come. Seeing your lab through this lens, how is paranoia crucial in the quest for building humane digital futures?

As the histories of mental health organisation and recognition show us, paranoia has often been used as a way of dismissing, gaslighting, discriminating, confining, and silencing those who show and perform distrust in dominant and populist spaces. Paranoia is often seen as a gateway symptom which allows for isolation or separation of the individual by force. Paranoia is a trope that is most significantly used against marginalised voices in society, debunking their histories and epistemologies because they challenge the status quo. Paranoid subjects are continually told that they are alone in how they think. In order to build humane digital futures, we have to admit that we are going to begin with building communities. And within communities, we need to start a collective conversation about what we are afraid of or anxious about, without succumbing to the danger of being dismissed. Paranoia as an entry point into this, allowed us to identify the irresolvable paradoxes of our times, and not taking upon us the burden of resolving them alone. It becomes a space for us to articulate anxieties without being pathologized for that critique, and in the process, starting a new sense of collective building humane and caring digital futures.

From seeing the fellows interact with a research topic you have dealt with for so long, what remarks, questions, or other considerations stayed with you following the lab?

What emerged in these conversations was a clear recognition that we are surrounded by digital objects that seem ordinary and quotidian but are actually triggers for a variety of transactions and actions that are often opaque and outside our control and comprehension. The inventory of paranoid objects that the fellows built was indicative of how much more attention we need to pay to the processes of digitization that we are a part of.

Take something as simple as the ‘Send’ button on our emails and messaging services. While it looks like a fairly functional button, a closer scrutiny recognises the finitude and finality of that action. Once you send something – a tricky email, a negotiation contract, a tough message, a private picture – you realise that there is no capacity to ‘unsend’ things. We have not just sent the information to the recipient, who might forget and forgive the indiscretions of that moment, we have also committed that information to unrelenting and unforgetting storage in the form of digital archives.

While digital communication pretends that there is a seamless, direct, cybernetic interaction between the sender and the receiver, we know that there is an enormous amount of mediation, translation, intervention, and storage so that the communication which we might have thought of as subject to human memory is being committed to digital storage. Perhaps, the ‘send’ button should be called the ‘store’ button, reminding us that this information is going to be stored, preserved, and used beyond our capacity to recall, remember, or validate it, in contexts that are beyond our knowledge.

However, if an artist were to design this ‘store’ button, they might be labelled paranoid, and any attempts at encryption, obfuscation, and avoiding these practices would eventually trigger a response that might not just be socially ostracising but also legally detrimental. 

Similarly, we discussed the notification sounds and banners that make our devices buzz incessantly with the joy of connectivity. While much has been said about notification and its attention grabbing tactics, continually throwing us into fits of information overload, the cohort also pointed out something new. Notifications are not just alerts to get your attention, they are also a performance of how our devices never seem to fail. Take a system error message – like the blue screen of death or the sad mac. Or the notifications that tell you that you are outside of a coverage area, or that your internet connection is dead, or that systems are failing and your device is crashing.

Notifications of failure exercise a ‘radical transparency’ that hide errors and glitches of the digital networks and devices by performing them and admitting to them. In these instances, when the systems fail, the notification pretends that this is still according to plan and triggers a series of automated responses which override privacy settings, suspend user control, and perform auto-updates and changes to our devices without our knowledge. The failure notifications suggest that the machine is always in control but it is the user who is failing, and hence it nudges user behaviour and demands more control of user action to make the systems perform better.

Reference List:

E. Sedgewick, Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading  - https://www.bu.edu/honoringeve/files/2009/09/paranoid-reading-and-reparative-reading.pdf

L. Jen-peng & N. Ding, Reticent poetics, queer poetics - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1462394042000326897

K. Keeling, Queer OS - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/297913433_Queer_OS

WHK Chun, Freedom and Control - https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/control-and-freedom