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Inaugurating a very black moment, Vine began much like any other social network, and not until its demise was it realized what would be missed. Founded in 2012 by a trio of entrepreneurs—a word often, as also here, applied to men with some coding knowledge and access to obscene amounts of money—Vine initiated the bite-size video format, a home for looping uploads each six seconds, max. To the extent that Facebook altered our relation to friendship and Twitter to sustained thought, Vine changed online video, hitting the viral sweet spot. Twitter, incidentally, acquired the platform shortly before it launched in 2013 and shut it down three years later when Vine proved unable to turn itself into a money tree. In those three years, millions of users making millions of videos looped millions of times took Vine’s limitations in their teeth and named themselves artisans of a new form. Vine became a “unique incubator,” as The Fader’s Jordan Darville put it, its influences felt across the web. “Watching the community and the tool push on each other was exciting and unreal, and almost immediately it became clear that Vine’s culture was going to shift towards creativity and experimentation,” Dom Hofmann, one of its founders, told The Verge.
Apps often come and go in a poof of VC lack of interest, but Vine felt different. Vine was mourned. More visibly than anywhere else, Vine rewarded the often comedic storytelling of its popular black users. As “both its own ecosystem of cultural production and an engine that powers cross-platform social media trends,” wrote Hannah Giorgis in the Guardian, Vine both came into its own through black comedy and also needed black comedy to make itself bigger than a mobile app, which for a time was the only way into Vineworld.
And the demise of the app wasn’t inevitable. In 2015, over a dozen of Vine’s most popular creators met with executives from Vine and Twitter to propose what would have been a mutually beneficial solution to the app’s financial concerns. “If Vine would pay all 18 of them $1.2 million each, roll out several product changes and open up a more direct line of communication,” Taylor Lorenz reported, “everyone in the room would agree to produce 12 pieces of monthly original content for the app, or three vines per week.” If Vine declined to pay these creators for further works put on the app, the group would walk off the app entirely. One of their requests in the way of product changes included effective guards against harassment. “Several viners said the community had taken a negative turn and their comments had turned into buckets of abuse,” wrote Lorenz. Most of the Viners who came to the table were not black, but the meeting’s outcome would say much about this tech company’s felt responsibility to compensate a group of people bringing life to its platform(s). The success of these Viners’ rescue attempt had implications for the many more mid- to upper-tier Viners—many of them black—who introduced so much of America, so much of the world, to their homegrown brand of tomfoolery.
The meeting’s outcome is obvious: Vine is gone. “This was a rare case when creative internet labor was organized enough and held enough leverage to negotiate collectively,” writes author Malcolm Harris, “but the important lesson from the story is that platforms would rather disappear entirely than start collective bargaining with talent.”
Vines went extinct, yet the ghost of internet cool still haunts us. Someone might still prompt their friend, “Watch this vine,” even if the video is 10 seconds or two minutes long. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram remain rife with compilations of creative content made for Vine for free by artists, comedians, and other storytellers. New slogans sprang into common speech, here forever. In one, looped millions of times, an adorable child breaks into dance after being urged for the third time to “do it for the vine.” It inspired a slew of remakes long before Damn, Daniel hit the scene. In what must be the most influential Vine of all time, Peaches Monroee, a k a Kayla Newman, admires her brows in the front-facing camera, declaring them “on fleek.”
Though “on fleek” was everywhere—Hefty ads, tweets from Denny’s and Taco Bell, fast fashion crop tops—Newman did not get the Ellen treatment or a lifetime supply of anything. “I gave the world a word,” Newman told The Fader in 2015. “I can’t explain the feeling. At the moment I haven’t gotten any endorsements or received any payment. I feel that I should be compensated. But I also feel that good things happen to those who wait.” Years after Louis C.K. donned a blaccent and called Leslie Jones’ nails “on fleek” on the season finale of Saturday Night Live, Newman started a GoFundMe to raise money for a forthcoming line of hair and beauty products—only to be called entitled for the desire to profit from her own creation. In a 2017 interview with Teen Vogue, Newman admitted she would have been more proactive about retaining the term if she had known what the internet was going to do. On Fleek Extensions by Peaches Monroee launched that year. Newman told The Fader, “Now it’s time for the world to get on fleek by me. Hahaha!”
Vine was a white-hot sterling feature of a larger truth. The internet depends on black people. Undeniable that so much content aggregated by millennial-targeted media orgs traces back to Black Tumblr, Black Twitter, and culture blogs. That research teams led by white faculty composed of white graduate students and maybe a token person of some color spend loads of time and grant money studying black internet communities. That so much language, fancifully attributed to internetspeak, emerged from the diaspora online and off. That black language at large works as a sort of metastasized meme, replicated by entities who crave access to an elusive cool. That the sum of reaction images employed to express emotions in lieu of text confesses a preference for black individuals. That femme black people, otherwise superfluous to their white and nonblack counterparts, become so necessary when it’s time to bring attitude. That Nene Leakes and Oprah Winfrey and Ms. Foxy and Prince help the likes of Meghan McCain and scores of white gay men find their inner diva.
In his 2006 master’s thesis, Joshua Lumpkin Green introduces the term “digital blackface” to describe how technology enables nonblack individuals to slip into black personhood. Taking the game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas as a case, Green argues that the medium “allows the player the avenue to safely experience the thrill of racialized violence and eroticized sex” though its black protagonist. Digital blackface extends the historical and ongoing minstrel practice that gives it its name, but new technology also “presents whole new type of animal, more dangerous and more pervasive” than anything before. Adding to Green’s work, art historian Kate Brown applies the concept of digital blackface to the prevalence of reaction gifs on Tumblr of black women and queer black men that often take on a “minstrelsy quality.” Animated gifs now function as forms of communication, Brown explains, and how we use them to express ourselves expresses something about how we see ourselves and want others to see us, our identity. “The images that inundate our online world have the potential to create virtual tourists.”
In between these regular appropriations, swarms of card-carrying Nazis impersonate black identity behind fictitious profiles. Hailing from crude message boards, relics of an online beforetime, hordes of white people blacken up their social media profiles in order to infiltrate online discussions about justice. As they try on black vernacular language for size, their posts and tweets can read like corporate coolspeak, but motivated by chaos as much as greed. Their goal is to muss up whatever the topic is at hand. They are men, usually, but not always. Autonomy expressed by both people of color and white women has them fit to be tied and ready to harass. Years before Jack and Zuck and tech journalism, before the federal government decided to investigate the alt-right trolls better called white supremacists, critics and thinkers like Anita Sarkeesian and Shafiqah Hudson and I’Nasah Crockett and Sydette Harry saw the terror behind the scenes, the frothing hatred of men so desperate to stymie equality that they’ll willingly don masks (again).
In June 2014, Hudson uncovered an organized campaign called Operation: Lollipop. Started on 4chan, Operation: Lollipop gathered together men’s rights and pickup artist enthusiasts and otherwise unaffiliated racists and misogynists. The campaign, which had been going on for at least a year, urged fanatics to “infiltrate feminists movements with twitter accounts and conduct a black propaganda campaign to secure classified objectives.” By mimicking the social justice discourse that was by then thriving, Operation: Lollipop wanted to pit activists against each others. The idea was to drip the poison slowly, impersonate black and East Asian women and introduce enough disagreement to invite arguments, but not sound so off-base that activists would consider it futile to engage. The idea was also to attract the attention of weaker allies, male feminists and white liberals, who needed but the slightest nudge to doubt the cause. (It is no fluke that they dressed up as women of color.) One account accumulated more than 9,000 followers before the jig was up.
Operation: Lollipop was revealed after #EndFathersDay and #WhitesCantBeRaped trended worldwide on Twitter the Friday before the holiday. By the weekend, Fox News host Tucker Carlson had worked up a lather over #EndFathersDay, and Fox & Friends invited the author Susan Patton onto the show to browbeat the alleged feminists responsible. “They’re not just interested in ending Father’s Day. They’re interested in ending men,” said Patton. However, the “they” in this case would be the men behind Operation: Lollipop, whom Fox never identified. Instead, it was up to Hudson to create #YourSlipIsShowing, which began tracking conspicuous activity from accounts run by people who weren’t who they claimed to be. As Hudson and other contributors to the archive such as Crockett and Harry found, fake accounts have tells visible to those who pay attention. Observers can spot the ones who’ve amassed fluency in black vernacular and radical politics through cable television. Observers, however, must first be willing to give blackness and feminism the benefit of the doubt. Yet, there are as many fake allies as there are fake accounts. People believe the hoaxes they want to be true.
YourSlipIsShowing is ongoing because the campaigns are ongoing. With fascism at home in the White House, certain groups only grew emboldened online and off. The freedom afforded these men, the fluid, choose-for-yourself bodylessness special to the internet, was once so crucial to the many people for whom existing in the outside world incurs risk. Once havens of a sort, online platforms have become liabilities to the well-being of anyone not already fiercely protected by the administration.
The scale between meme culture and virtual tourism and misinformation campaigns is slipperier than users warrant. The mere mention of “digital blackface” prompts responses as interesting as the concept itself. There are the Good White People who stumble over each other to prove their goodness, who would declare the use of any GIF verboten if a black person wished it so, but only if they could broadcast such on social media. This black person never asked for that, but Good White People don’t care so much for reading and listening either, they want to fast-forward to whatever prescribed action alleviates their guilt. “The impulse towards action can work to block hearing,” writes the feminist scholar Sara Ahmed. “In moving on from the present towards the future, it can also move away from the object of critique, or place the white subject ‘outside’ that critique in the present of the hearing.” It feels bad to wade in the repercussions of our behavior, it feels good to apologize and disavow and consider oneself exempt moving forward. But being online, being white, being online as a white person, means never being exempt. Antiracist as a noun does not exist. There’s only people doing the work, or not. The person genuinely invested in the work doesn’t run from discomfort, they accept it as the price of personhood taken for granted.
In terms of images, discomfort means knowing that circulation of any kind is never neutral. Even those willing to be convinced that blackness is both reviled and relied upon for what happens on the internet—an ambivalence to the tune of Eric Lott’s classic study Love and Theft—tend to feel uneasy about the suggestion that the out-and-out racism of anonymous users bears any relation to their own, very casual, user behavior. But we all drink from the well poisoned by the anti-blackness that wants everyone to forget when blackness goes viral.
The story tech tells is empty and incomplete. While that industry entertains itself with a fantasy of how the internet came to be, the truth throbs in the living tissue of our interfaces. Whether black people will be acknowledged and allowed to thrive more than spiritually from their innovations remains to be seen. Silicon Valley can ignore every sign of life on this planet, but will never escape the blackness of the web.
Excerpted from White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue…And Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation by Lauren Michele Jackson (Beacon Press, 2019). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.
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