Table of Contents for Arabic Glitch
Introduction: A Posthuman Techno-Feminist Praxis
The story of Arabic Glitch begins with the technoculture of the 1990s, tracing a theory of a glitch dialectic beyond and before its usual electrical and technical associations. Taking inspiration from Donna Haraway's "new citizen" of technoculture, VJ Um Amel embodies that trans-local sensibility through negotiation with its environment and assembling parts and pieces. Framed within this technoculture critique, the story explores glitch in its relation to infrastructure, resistance, and representation to understand how communication networks can both reify and challenge dominant economies of knowledge production. The chief contribution of the book is in decentering Silicon Valley and US computer know-how in narratives regarding the role of technology in digital politics. It thus proposes an alternative (anti-) origin story that foregrounds technological innovation in the Middle East. Arabic Glitch offers a new map of an Arab techno-global uprising that shaped waves of cyber activism.
One: Glitch in the Age of Technoculture
As a case study, Chapter One examines an event that initially started as demonstrations against the demolition of a church in a poor neighborhood in Cairo in October 2011 and ended in a massacre of Egyptian civilians by their military. Viral social media videos with footage of the army attacking its civilians glitched the official Egyptian state-run TV and radio broadcast of the Maspero Massacre. These activists demonstrated how communities with unreliable access and connectivity to the Internet could become communities of power performing as a network, creating and demanding new forms of access and gesture. Chapter One theorizes glitch in relation to urban infrastructure, resistance, representation, and media.
Two: Arab Data Bodies
Software programmers Alaa Abd el-Fattah and Manal Bahey el-Din Hassan supported a community of Arabs techies and users by developing Arabic-language versions of free and open-source software (FOSS) and platforms as early as 2003. In the early aughts they became known for developing a website that aggregated Egyptian blogs, Omraneya. They each developed their data bodies as the Arab media scene went digital. The data body allows us to better sense what's at stake in the glitch. The glitch prompts us to ask whether we are cyborgs, citizens, or both. Chapter Two provides a methodology for creating a cyborgian subject in a transnational world. The data body is not one thing but an operational choice. VJ Um Amel mobilizes these theories to create a futuristic game, set a hundred years from now in 2111, in a world where humans and nonhumans are constituted solely from data.
Three: Digital Activism
Chapter Three narrates the development of Arab organizations promoting technical literacy, including the summer computer camps organized in the 1980s in Palestine, the code sprints and tweet nadwas run by Arab techies as early as 2004, and the 404 Ammar digital campaign against censorship in Tunisia just before the uprising. The Arabic online tools and software that the community of activists innovated at times worked against them, enabling states to intensify surveillance and censorship. At the same time, activists relentlessly mobilized forums and blogs to circulate reports on corruption, torture, and other forms of state-perpetrated violence. These worlds and imaginaries are made possible by the collective labor and theorizing of networks of programmers working together in shifting contexts to build free and open-source software (FOSS) in Arabic. This history of software localization is contextualized within state Internet censorship and surveillance, and its significance to procedural literacy.
Four: Aggregation as Archive
Chapter Four explains the work of algorithmic logic in archiving Twitter. It provides two cases to illustrate where slippages of information occurred in data analytics—the texts from tweets from Libya during the attack on former president Muammar Qaddafi in 2011, and images circulated on Twitter during the 2014 Israeli assault on Palestinians in Gaza, which had been under siege since 2006. This chapter breaks down the process of social media flows of images and text through real-time analysis. It offers the procedural trajectory of the algorithms governing the flow of high-stakes information.
Five: Art Practice
Moving from media art scenes and digital performances in Cairo, Tehran, and Beirut to occupy data hackathons in the United States, Chapter Five explores the relationship between spatiality and embodied experiences. Artists have used the glitch as a technique to explore the inextricability of politics and aesthetics. International coders, activists, and makers, in turn, extended arts-based methodology into hacktivism, science, and social science research. Chapter Five demonstrates the intersections between artists and coders in their public engagements with the glitch.
Conclusion: Fix Your Own Democracy
The conclusion embraces Alaa's invitation to "fix your own democracy." Depicting the attempted coup of democratic elections in the United States, Arabic Glitch concludes with VJ Um Amel's installation of social media captured on the events leading up to and taking place during the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The three-act installation consisted of interactive mosaics, glitch metal prints, and a mixed-reality immersive experience. These disenchanted yet synchronized voices warn us of the dangers of the radical right and its data embodiment. Their assemblage lays bare democracy and authoritarianism as a spectrum, not unlike the potentialities of data embodiment itself, located on a range of political imaginaries and possibilities.