Arabic Glitch: Technoculture, Data Bodies, and Archives 1503630994, 9781503630994

Citation preview

POLITICS / MIDDLE EAST

“Innovative and original, Arabic Glitch interrupts the theoretical silence around Arab technocultures. Channeling the academic, artistic, activist, and technologist, Laila Shereen Sakr embodies the contemporary hybridity of Arab cultural production, inaugurating a rightful place for it in the canon.” ADEL ISKANDAR, SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY

“Laila Shereen Sakr’s breathtaking work will transform how the social sciences and humanities understand cyberactivism, transnational solidarity, and collecacross the world have been waiting for.” NADINE NABER, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT CHICAGO

“Laila Shereen Sakr and her avatar, VJ Um Amel, embrace the glitch—clouds of unknowing, slippery loops, cracks and failures of systems—to better see the materiality of technology, power, and revolution. Aligning theory and practice, installation and performance, Sakr mobilizes media art and digital activist scenes across the Middle East, North Africa, and the Internet.” ALEXANDRA JUHASZ, BROOKLYN COLLEGE CUNY

“Arabic Glitch is an essential addition to the critical discourse on power and surveillance in the age of the Internet. Laila Shereen Sakr decodes the specificity of language and cultural identity on digital praxis, boldly articulating how digital data can enable a distinct form of ocular awareness.” DR. OMAR KHOLEIF, AUTHOR OF INTERNET_ ART: FROM THE BIRTH OF THE WEB TO THE RISE OF NFTS

Arabic Glitch explores an alternative origin story of twenty-first-century technological innovation in digital politics—one centered on the Middle East. Engaging revolutionary politics, Arab media, and digital practice, Laila Shereen Sakr formulates a media theory that advances the concept of the glitch as a disruptive media affordance and argues that there is no longer a divide between the virtual and the embodied. This book teaches us how a region under transformation became a vanguard for new thinking about digital systems: the records they keep, the lives they impact, and how to create change from within. Laila Shereen Sakr is Assistant Professor of Media Theory and Practice at the University

Sakr ARABIC GLITCH Technoculture, Data Bodies, and Archives

tive power. Arabic Glitch is the book interdisciplinary scholars and activists

ARABIC GLITCH

TECHNOCULTURE, DATA B O D I E S , a n d A RC H I V E S

of California, Santa Barbara. Stanford University Press www.sup.org Cover design: Daniel Benneworth-Gray Cover art: Boys on the Beach Glitched. Dye sublimation on metal. © 2014 by VJ Um Amel

Sakr_Arabic Glitch_Case Mech.indd 1

Stanford

Laila Shereen Sakr

5/2/23 1:34 PM

Arabic Glitch

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Technoculture, Data Bodies, and Archives

Laila Shereen Sakr

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2023 by Laila Shereen Sakr. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sakr, Laila Shereen, author. Title: Arabic glitch : technoculture, data bodies, and archives /   Laila Shereen Sakr. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2023. |   Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022049260 (print) | LCCN 2022049261 (ebook) |   ISBN 9781503630994 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503635883 (paperback) |   ISBN 9781503635890 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Online social networks—Political aspects—Arab countries. |   Social media—Political aspects—Arab countries. | Communication in   politics—Arab countries. | Political participation—Arab countries. |   Social movements—Arab countries. | Arab Spring, 2010– | Arab   countries—Politics and government—21st century. Classification: LCC JA85.2.A65 S34 2023 (print) | LCC JA85.2.A65 (ebook) |   DDC 302.302850917/4927—dc23/eng/20221101 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022049260 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022049261 Cover design: Daniel Benneworth-Gray Cover art: Boys on the Beach Glitched. Dye sublimation on metal. © 2014 by VJ Um Amel Typeset by Newgen in Adobe Jenson Pro 10.75/15

To Faiza and Ahmed Shereen

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Contents

Preface Introduction

A Posthuman Techno-Feminist Praxis

ix 1

One Glitch in the Age of Technoculture

13

T wo Arab Data Bodies

37

Three Digital Activism

57

Four Aggregation as Archive

76

Five Art Practice

102

Conclusion Fix Your Own Democracy

119

Acknowledgments 127 Notes 133 Bibliography 153 Index 169

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Preface

The post–September 11 moment in Arab American history witnessed an

a­ cceleration of backlash, profiling, and surveillance amid the emergence of a global War on Terror. As Nadine Naber argues, these narratives have been made to justify U.S. imperialist ambitions through military intervention in the region and domestic surveillance and targeting persons perceived to be Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim, reinforced by the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security.1 It was in this milieu that a nascent journal out of Minneapolis, Mizna: Prose, Poetry, and Art Exploring Arab America, published “On Becoming Arab” in a special edition in memory of Edward Said alongside Mohja Kahf, Iron Sheik, and Nathalie Handal. I had learned about the journal when I met its cofounder, playwright Kathy Haddad, at the Radius of Arab American Writers’ first conference in New York City in 2004.

x

Preface

“On Becoming Arab” food family laughter children language framework for your Knowledge i am an arab, alienated from american, sitting on the other side of that hyphen, alienated from language, my love sits in hand gestures and mama’s kitchen. i am american alienated from your conversations inundated and un-understood by him or her, as the hyphen stretches, so does she, around the globe and back. communication slips away into oceans vast and she arrests it, between parentheses Meanwhile, Exhaling it away,     into water, into metal    into water. i am arab-american passing way too well,

Preface xi

de-comprehension slips into the threads of your veil, while alienation ages again. She arrests it. between commas, this time, Inhaling all the     water, all the rock    all the water. i am arab and we are all palestinian trans-global trans-national post-national trans-post palestinian we are all arab exiled Moving across the internet, Shifting between languages in tangier, in new york, in amman, in dc displaced in diaspora untold unknown present day baghdad was bombed. i am american fractured and young but not

xii Preface

Anymore. it’s 2003 and I am 31. where are you from? my mama’s kitchen my papi’s garden, i am trans-national i am trans-global une citoyenne du monde, i am arab, in 1425 hijra. Transcend the binary Trans-cend the binary in the, form of love In the, form of love. Co-mmand your language! Command your language. that’s creation that is creation.2 I wrote this poem just after 9/11. The poem responds to the United States’ devastating war against Iraq, initiated under false premises, including that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction. I also wrote it in memory of world-renowned public intellectual Edward W. Said, who passed away in 2003 after a long battle with leukemia. Though we all knew what his illness would eventually mean, his loss was nonetheless a shock for communities of organizers and thinkers who, like Said, were committed to dismantling the legacy of colonialism theoretically, artistically, and through public engagement. Like many Arab Americans, I had found refuge in Said’s biographical publications. He went to the same secondary school in Alexandria, Egypt, that my uncle Aziz Wahby had attended. My mother, Faiza, went to its sister

Preface xiii

girls’ school across the street over a decade later. In his Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Said describes stories I have heard before about his (post) colonial experience as a student at Victoria College. He wrote, “the school’s first rule, emblazoned on the opening page of the handbook, read: ‘English is the language of the school; students caught speaking any other language will be punished.’ Yet, there were no native speakers of English among the students. Whereas the masters were all British, we were a motley crew of Arabs of various kinds, Armenians, Greeks, Italians, Jews, and Turks, each of whom had a native language that the school had explicitly outlawed. Yet all, or nearly all, of us spoke Arabic—many spoke Arabic and French—and so we were able to take refuge in a common language, in defiance of what we perceived as an unjust colonial structure.”3 Though Said described a moment in history when British colonial power was nearing its end after the Second World War, his generation had yet to fully articulate the undergirding power dynamics of their lived experience. I was born into this world where colonial English held power. My parents and I immigrated to the United States when I was a young child. Though this is the history that partly shaped my relationship to language, it was Said’s memoir, Out of Place,4 that impacted me the most. In his reflection on the Arab American experience, Said was able to circumvent the Orientalist filter that perceived different cultural objects as exotic and other. Situating Said within an Arab American social movement that coalesced in the late 1960s under the leadership of the Association of Arab American University Graduates (AAUG), Sarah Gualtieri demonstrates a transnational Arab American studies framework for understanding how Said’s Orientalism can be applied beyond city centers.5 In her research on the AAUG archive, she discovered a sustained flow of information and people across the Americas and the Middle East “from the records of delegations to Palestine and the correspondence in English and Arabic around the annual AAUG conventions, to the outreach to Black American organization.”6 In taking Said’s theories on a trip to the archives in the U.S. Midwest, Gualtieri illustrated the transgressive potential of Arab American archival methods. I was on the tenth floor of an office building three blocks from the White House at the corner of Fourteenth and I Streets in Northwest Washington, D.C., on that historic September morning in 2001. “I hope those responsible

xiv Preface

for this are not Arab,” one of us messaged the other on MSN. It was a Tuesday morning after my coffee-making ritual when I sat down at my Bill Gates Microsoft computer and an MSN message popped up from one of my closest friends in Beirut, Lebanon. She wrote something about a “WTC falling down.” “What is the WTC?” I replied. It was a quick exchange. Soon the building supervisor called everyone into an emergency meeting room where she explained that two planes had flown into the World Trade Center in New York, and a third plane had crashed into the Pentagon nearby. I do not remember what she said about the fourth plane, which was heading to Washington. We had to evacuate immediately, and seconds later I was rushing down those ten flights with hundreds of others. The details of that day remain incoherent. As if stuck on a loop, all I remember is walking down those ten flights of stairs wondering if I turned off the coffee machine. Seemingly mundane memories remain a glitch, a glitch of memories that continue to haunt, shape, inspire, and propel us.

Introduction A Posthuman Techno-Feminist Praxis

The glitch is a slipping, a digital banana peel. It is a loss of control. It inter-

rupts the system, revealing the wiring beneath the technology and rendering it vulnerable. It arrives without warning and carries unexpected lessons. I learned this in 2009 when I created a digital archive, R-Shief, to collect, analyze, and visualize social media content. R-Shief would become a repository of multiple social movements from Occupy Wall Street to the 2011 Arab uprisings. In its first years, R-Shief rapidly grew into a complex media system enabling me to collect and analyze data from social networking sites and to innovate machine-learning software. Using its immense data repository, I developed one of the earliest detection algorithms that recognized language from the series of characters in a tweet. The moment was replete with hyperfetishization and celebration of technology. The original 2009 R-Shief dashboard harvested Twitter by hashtag and visualized the tweets in real time on a shared server.1 As the Arab uprisings began in Tunisia in December 2010 and the wave traveled to Egypt a month later, R-Shief ’s Twitter-mining software was in full force. On the third day of the Egyptian uprising, January 27, 2011, the software broke the server. It took two days to temporarily migrate R-Shief to

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Arabic Glitch

a VPN server and from there to a direct server. By March 2011, R-Shief was on a cloud-computing instance that could now sustain its programming. The breakdown, in the midst of revolution, was a fortuitous glitch. It shed light on the critical role of data centers, hardware, and energy usage in processing data and keeping cyberspace alive. The journey had just begun. After a couple of months on the cloud-­ computing servers, another glitch slipped into existence. As a graduate student researcher at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg ­Innovation Lab, I had worked in a team of developers from IBM to modify their Natural Language Processing2 tools for Arabic. It was June 2011, and revolutionary upheaval had resulted in the ousting of Hosni Mubarak, the interim rule of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, and national presidential elections in Egypt. R-Shief displayed a visualization with a nearly 100 percent positive sentiment on a candidate named Mortada Mansour. That next month I presented this Arabic sentiment analysis at the American University in Cairo (AUC); the audience burst out in laughter. Mansour was a standing joke in Egypt.3 The Twitter analysis was unable to detect sarcasm. What it interpreted as positive words were undecipherable out of context. There was a glitch. The failure to produce correct sentiment analysis revealed the software’s inability to decipher coded language. It produced unclear measurements and erroneous political commentary. It was a moment of humility in a sea of celebration of the power of the algorithm. The glitch is a cloud of unknowing—there is no specific ontology, epistemology, or politics. The stories of Egyptian, Tunisian, Libyan, Palestinian, and other Arab techies, coders, and organizers reveal struggles that are not exceptional, but global and contemporary, residing in the dialectic of the glitch. Programmers, each in their context, shaped new modalities of cultural resistance, rebellion, and revolt. Arabic Glitch offers their stories as an alternative origin point of technological innovation in digital politics. Employing data analytics to analyze tweets, posts, and blogs reveals the promises, and the limits, of digital communication across borders and languages. Programming technology and its logics are not simple vehicles; they influence and shape social movements and realities. Those new realities make demands on our thinking and practice. The first demand: there is no divide between the virtual and the real. While the

A Posthuman Techno-Feminist Praxis

3

“virtual” was once a useful hermeneutics to theorize emergent technologies, it does not capture our lived realities. The virtual and the real are both physically and socially embodied. Data integrates into and shapes our contemporary livelihoods. Data bodies are the collective data records stored about any one body (medical records, social media profiles, school grades, citizenship records) that constitute the individual in the eyes of the record keeper (institutions, governments, states). Only data bodies with certain grades can be admitted into school programs, only data bodies with certain passports can travel, only data bodies with certain credit rankings can secure a loan to buy a house. These data bodies are inextricable from bodies on the ground; together they forge the promises, challenges, and limits of our lived realities. VJ Um Amel, one of the narrative voices in Arabic Glitch, is a response to this demand of avowing various forms of embodiment. In the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., I conceived the posthuman cyborg—an Arabic-speaking mother and a video jockey, a VJ. Um is mother in Arabic. Amel is hope. VJ Um Amel is the name I use in art practices that explore the implications of placing “mother” and “cyborg” in local and transnational expressions of “Arab.” Arab, cyborg, mother is a convergence of historical experiences, embodying movement and action as opposed to fixed identities or locations.4 Typically, a cyborg is free from biological, technological, or physical determinism. VJ Um Amel explores what it means when a machine learns and procreates.5 VJ Um Amel and I amassed an archive of social media. The traces that people leave online through posts, tweets, retweeting, and sharing expose various assemblages of people and ideas. They offer alternative geographies of movement and new spatialities of information patterns. The question is not to identify “who” the people are, but how they form networks of joint struggle around the production of knowledge. Tracing these flows of knowledge production and consumption and the glitches that punctuate them in real time reflects the constant flux of our lived present. What is this glitch and how do we understand it? Some have speculated that it is derived from the Yiddish glitsh, meaning “slippery place.” The word glitch did not exist in English until 1962, when the United States launched its first human spaceflight program, Project Mercury.6 In that context, a glitch was “a spike or change in voltage in an electrical current.”7 Thirty years

4

Arabic Glitch

later a black cat passing a hallway twice embodied the glitch in the now-cult film The Matrix.8 The cat signified an alteration in the programmed reality. When technology does not behave as it should, expressing strange sounds and breaking behavioral patterns, it provokes discomfort, even hostility. The machine is no longer simply an object. It appears suddenly mysterious, a fallible intelligent subject.9 Beyond the general users’ fear of technology, glitches lay bare deep-seated distrust, contempt even, for machines. It takes the same kind of reflective work to confront our reactions to technology as it does to deconstruct any systematic indoctrination. This takes us to our lived realities’ second demand: one must have procedural literacy10 to identify and understand how data bodies exist, how media systems work, and how glitches intervene. Procedural literacy is understanding how code works—how an algorithm processes sequences of definitions, computations, and executions. From the streets of the Egyptian revolution to the encampments of the Occupy movement, coders and techies transcended the digital divide and attained procedural literacy. They mobilized these tools to reimagine global networks of power. Globality was at the core of their practices and approaches. As Alaa Abd el-Fattah, an incarcerated Egyptian political activist, writer, and software developer, asserts, digital politics are necessarily transnational.11 For him the Egyptian revolution exceeded nationalist aspirations in its potential for a broader call for freedom and justice. From his visit to Gaza, Palestine,12 to his experience in South Africa,13 to his understanding of the Occupy movement, Alaa, like many coders and techies, understood revolution as collective, transnational, and global. Highlighting the interdependence and connectedness between struggles for freedom across the world, Alaa calls on us from his cell: “fix your own democracy.”14 What if we pose the Arab uprisings as ground zero for imagining this kind of global digital politics? Drawing on stories from Libya, Tunisia, Palestine, and Syria, as well as North America and Europe, Arabic Glitch offers a new map of an Arab techno-global uprising that shaped and informed waves of cyber activism. Through critical analysis of writing and reading Arabic on the Internet, and the material infrastructure that production and circulation entails, we can understand the complexities of live, digital platforms and move within and beyond the Arab revolutionary moment.15

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This category “Arab” has a long and dynamic history.16 Using it requires an attention to power, as well as a refusal of conflating geography, religion, subjectivity, and language. Shifting historical agendas have shaped the enterprise of studying, commenting on, or depicting the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa beginning with ancient Greece through the modern period.17 The Second World War brought about a dramatic expansion in area studies in the United States.18 For the U.S. during the Cold War, the category “Middle East” was in need of study for its own national interest— hence the emergence of Middle East studies as a field. The formation of the Middle East and North Africa can also be mapped through colonialism and economic extraction, coded as “development.”19 These codings would in turn influence the relationships between governments and states20 as well as buttressing institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Alongside these colonial trajectories, the category “Arab” has its own history of hegemony and excludes Kurds, Nubians, Armenians, Circassians, Iranians, Druze, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Turks, Yazidis, Azeris, Turkmen, Afghans, Imazighen, and more. Conscious of these colonial and extractive histories, I follow coders and techies as they explore the limits and potentials of other ways of being, and being Arab. For Arab Americans like myself, this rethinking became politically and socially more urgent than ever in a post-9/11 United States.21 It was the 2011 moment, a full decade later, that the rebels and their data bodies offered so many of us another way to imagine Arab, far from the state-centered trappings of the twentieth century. The uprisings signaled an opening to surpass state and social systems and revel in new solidarities and networks. Indeed, social media reveals the contestations between governments and hackers. At first glance, the battle appears to be between government and activists, but the fray is deeper and more complex, the actors multiple and constantly shifting. Understanding this broad and dynamic confluence of actors requires a transdisciplinary theory and practice that brings together the humanities, design, and science. Interactive data visualizations such as hashtag (#) analysis, topic modeling using network graphs, and image analysis reveal embodied digital media use. Every data point has an embodied analogue at some prior moment. Moreover, social media have historically and geo-specific genealogies that are inextricable from material bodies. The emerging

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Arabic Glitch

patterns demonstrate an Arab media scene that was experimental, innovative, and transnational. Arabic Glitch attempts to proximate one of the scene’s offerings: a model of communal authorship. Centering a “community-author” rather than a single subjectivity, whether expert, popular, or imaginative, reveals the relational infrastructure behind any idea or story. The strength of coauthored ideas relies on the infrastructure of collaborative practices. Community authorship can take multiple forms. It can be groups of people who do not know each other using a singular hashtag and creating a trend, a call to action, a discourse. It can be an intentional collective of individuals who write together under one name. It can be a network of anonymous academics working to “challenge the current norms of evaluating, commodifying, and institutionalizing intellectual labor.”22 In place of the copyright and authority of one agent, community authorship highlights sharing, learning, and exchange. The logics of measurement and data tempt us to believe that if only we could get the arithmetic or algorithm right, those in power would see scientific reason. There is power and risk in the mathematical models that algorithmically process quotidian life.23 The glitch is a key to challenging our realities and received wisdoms. As in the case of Mansour, measurement alone did not produce accurate findings. Glitches can allow us to challenge and reimagine the metrics that assess the performance and mandates of institutions, governments, and even collaborative ventures. The various expressions of resistance analyzed on these pages experiment with notions of collective power and imaginaries of solidarity. Indeed, the uprisings themselves may have been a glitch. The decentralized, networked, sometimes autonomous, sometimes collective nature of cultural production requires academic accounts that are themselves decentralized, collaborative, and networked. Challenging the fundamentals of the post and settler colonial, patriarchal, and hypercapitalist present, as Roopika Risam points out, requires decentering the global North and reengaging critical race theory. Reading and decoding the transnational scale of media circulation necessitates a wedding of technology and humanistic inquiry.24 Feminists firmly locate such creative and critical aesthetic engagements in the politics of the contemporary moment, an age marked by the proliferation of new media that have radically reconstituted

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7

the character of visual culture and its channels of transmission and circulation. Lauren Klein and Catherine D’Ignazio offer a procedural method that examines and challenges power, elevates emotion and embodiment, rethinks boundaries and hierarchies, embraces pluralism, attends to context, and renders occluded labor visible.25 Arabic Glitch applies this techno-feminist approach to social media and glitch theory. Glitch theory requires a capacious reading across media studies, visual arts, software studies, Middle East studies, and transnational feminist studies. An exciting body of creative and theoretical works on the glitch emerged in the early aughts and teens of the twenty-first century. Olga Goriunova and Alexei Shulgin’s 2008 study of the semiotics and public reception of glitch in software studies,26 the digital artist Rosa Menkman’s online interventions,27 and Peter Krapp’s media archaeology in computer mediation28 each explored formal and theoretical implications of glitch. At around the same time from the fields of design, architecture, and urban planning, Iman Moradi, Ant Scott, Joe Gilmore, and Christopher Murphy curated a selection of glitch art and interviews.29 Per Platou situated the collection of net art of the 1990s as a form of “resistance toward the slick neo-liberal dotcom-hype that dominated that era.”30 Many works on glitch and noise emerged from the analyses of culture-jamming projects of the late 1990s.31 More recently, Shane Denson invoked digital glitches to theorize the transactions between human and machine that have discorrelated the post-cinematic image.32 Curator and writer Legacy Russell positioned the glitch “as a gerund act” and “an activism that unfolds without end.”33 Similarly, Menkman’s manifesto on the glitch, with its typeface de/ascending diagonally, and its play on kerning and line space, rendered the design behind the layout bare. Alice Dailey posed the glitch as a semiotic sign for thinking about clones and biological reproduction; the reproduction of sovereignty, she argued, hinged on the production of corpses.34 Art critic and curator Laura Marks was the first to theorize, historicize, and curate “Arab glitch” as a category of knowledge production.35 Marks explained image breakdowns and glitches as regular occurrences in contexts where electricity and other media affordances are unreliable and media piracy flourishes.36 Surveying experimental Arab art, she argued that creative and intellectual work from the 1990s through 2014 were a “nahda, or cultural revival.”37 For Marks, the Arab intellectual is acutely aware of the fabrication

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Arabic Glitch

of political events yet unable to act because of unresponsive and corrupt governments.38 Drawing on digital media and the glitch, Marks argued that the Arab world “constitutes one of the world’s most impressive bodies of experimental cinema.”39 Inspired by these lessons on the glitch as a gerund act that reveals and enriches formal and theoretical structures, Arabic Glitch draws on the authority of my proper name as well as VJ Um Amel’s practices to mine and analyze blogs, social networking sites, Twitter feeds, YouTube, Parler, Facebook, and other new media platforms.40 Through digital archives, software, and installations, live cinema performances, published articles, and in Arabic Glitch, VJ Um Amel and I search for new ways to understand social media and popular uprising. In the multi-staging of social media on the R-Shief platform, in Beit Um Amel,41 or the Capital Glitch: Arab Cyborg Turns to D.C. exhibition,42 the glitch appears through the slippage of feelings, affects, cultures, and worlds. Remixing and restaging help us understand large bodies of social media as products of both surveillance or sousveillance (a watching from underneath or below). Racialization structures surveillance. Simone Browne puts surveillance into conversation with the archive of transatlantic slavery.43 Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities.44 In the twenty-first-century petabyte era, dominant interests continue to identify individual disruptive potentialities through careful tracking of data bodies. The algorithmic apparatus makes such micro-calculative rationality and logic possible. At the same time, encounters on social media platforms can be sites of rebellions where people want to cohere with their data bodies. This rebellion can stem from a desire to be seen and heard, and for there to be a specific GPS data leaked trail. When interdisciplinary media artist Hasan Elahi was subjected to months of FBI intensive investigation in the aftermath of 9/11, he created “Tracking Transience,”45 a web-based art project of self-tracking that constantly and publicly presents his exact location, activities, and other personal data. In this self-surveillance project, ongoing since 2002, he asserted that providing authorities with information would contain its

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demand. Through sousveillance, Elahi critiqued state surveillance while providing an ongoing alibi. There are long histories of sousveillance and data leaking as a way to amplify political voices. Rooted in an Arabic literary tradition, Tarek El-Ariss formulates a theory of an Arab digital consciousness through the practice of fadh—public shaming and scandalizing. He theorizes the leaking subject in the digital age through procedural acts of incivility—hacking (tahkir, iktiraq), leaking (tasrib), revealing (ifsha), proliferation (tafashshi), and exposure and scene-making (fadh). These glitchy acts, socially scripted as uncivil, punishable, and shameful, are the writing and political practices of the present.46 El-Ariss demonstrates how activists mobilized these tropes of civility to scandalize the government during the Arab uprisings. The subject enacting the fadh is taking a risk of being caught as they shed light onto a dark corner. However, for the leaky subject, there is no way out of the social moral code. Like Marks’s reading of the Arab intellectual, in El-Ariss’ account, using codes signals a condition of impossibility under state power. The relationship between data bodies, politics, and desire is part of a larger performative matrix. They can articulate themselves along a spectrum of political positions and possibilities, much like technology itself. Arabic Glitch resides in the double valence of technology as a site of oppression and struggle. To avow this double edge, to understand how iterative design and procedural process are at work in the reproduction of culture—this is the technological imagination.47 On the one hand, technology is reiterating the past and, on the other hand, it makes innovating a new assemblage possible. In these friction points we experience change and new knowledge. Arabic Glitch offers Arab digital politics as both case study and a global origin and location of oppression, struggle, and resistance. The glitch dialectic does not escape the surveillance of state, institutional, and corporate hegemony in a knowable way. Its outcome is unforeseeable and messy. And yet, it undermines the fetishizing efficiency, accuracy, and predictability of producers, consumers, and drivers of capital. The glitch is a point of entry for activists, hackers, and artists to resist the free and open-source functionalities that programmers have designed into the system. It brings into view a vast technological apparatus of the state

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Arabic Glitch

intended to surveil and discipline the population. It is the breaking down and breaking open of a paradigm, an infrastructure, or a system. It is people, in various forms of embodiment, who drive the glitch. People from different backgrounds and political actors, not only survive, but also become more empowered to create change. What happens online has direct impact on our lives. Procedural literacy equips us to avow those possibilities. Thus Arabic Glitch attends to structures of power and surveillance while also centering conditions of possibility. The Story

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; but, and also, how the interrelation between infrastructure and content varies from site to site. 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. 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 first 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

A Posthuman Techno-Feminist Praxis

11

body allows us to better sense what is at stake in the glitch. My data body allowed me to work with Manal. The very question of where my body is positioned in relation to her in Egypt remains elusive and in a cloud of unknowing. The glitch prompts us to ask whether we are cyborgs or citizens, or both. Chapter Two provides a methodology for creating a cyborgian subject in a transnational world. The data body is not just one thing, but an operational choice. VJ Um Amel mobilizes these theories to create a futuristic game, set a hundred years from now in 2211, in a world where humans and nonhumans are constituted solely from data. 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. 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. By the summer of 2011, the U.S. State Department under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had learned about R-Shief ’s analytics and the language detection algorithms and invited me to give a talk. A month later, I used the same R-Shief analytics to predict the fall of Muammar Qaddafi in Libya in August 2011. Conversation and exchanges continued over the subsequent months with Rose Gottemoeller, the assistant secretary of state of the Office of Biological Weapons in the Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance. Her interest in my research was using crowdsourced data for treaty verification. This experience shocked my understanding of the politics of knowledge production. Chapter Four 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 Qaddafi in 2011,

12

Arabic Glitch

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. Moving to media art scenes and digital performances in Cairo, Tehran, and Beirut, 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. 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. Offering glitches, mosaics, and mixed realities, VJ Um Amel revealed a secret world of code in an abstract and algorithmic aesthetic. The singularity of each image stands for an infinite number of visual memories, some recorded, most not. The use of the mosaic mode of “assemblage” is intended to capture this notion of the infinite, reiterative algorithmic form of any single visual expression. It attends to the text within the archive and approaches the archive as a text. 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.

One Glitch in the Age of Technoculture

Naming the phenomena that took place across the region as the “Arab

Spring” is more indicative of the perspective of the writer than is necessarily the full picture. It indicates that the speaker or writer is approaching the subject from the historical lens of Western democracy and economic liberalization. Otherwise naming these events the “Facebook” or “Twitter Revolution” overstates the technocultural moment and, again, is only part of the story. At the root of these uprisings, locally within each context, is a human struggle for dignity. A street vendor who suffered humiliation and neglect from local authorities, Tarek el-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire on December 17, 2010, in front of the municipality building in Ben Arous, Tunisia. Bouazizi’s suicide in 2011 was the catalyst for the Arab revolutions, as Bouazizi’s death only expanded the protests to encompass not only economic reform but also injustice by the government as a whole. Bouazizi’s act was a cry for basic human dignity. A year after the uprisings, in conversation with my friend and colleague Maytha Alhassen, she had asked me what topics were emerging from R-Shief ’s social media data analytics. The results I shared with her at the

14

Arabic Glitch

time were that the three most popular words used to describe the uprisings were karama, thawra, and haqooq (dignity, revolution, and rights). Alhassen published these results in an article crediting VJ Um Amel.1 This aesthetic research agenda, performing as VJ Um Amel, is my answer that the ambiguity of that process is a practice of embodied locality. As such, the book is informed by a scholarly practice of research, a practice of theorizing, an art practice. Arabic Glitch is inextricably tied to a specific set of digital archives originating from an Arabic-speaking community. Part of this intellectual project is to decenter the United States and the West as the source of digital knowledge production or necessarily the heart of literary canons. It is not the center. It does not always have to be the center. In the case of Arabic Glitch, the Arab world is its intellectual fulcrum. The first time writers, scholars, and pundits used “Arab Spring” to reference a progressive political uprising in the Arab world was not in 2011. It was just a couple of years after the U.S.-led war on Iraq, when events such as the elections in Palestine and Iraq, the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, and the Kefaya (“enough”) demonstrations in Egypt hallmarked the emergence of relative political liberalization in the region. In 2005, “The Arab Spring” was used to refer to the desired outcome of U.S. president George W. Bush’s foreign policy of democracy promotion and state-building efforts in his Global War on Terror.2 In a report on a news conference by President Bush in March 2005 titled “The Arab Spring of 2005,”3 a pundit explicitly referenced the revolutions of 1848 in Europe—Völkerfrühling in German, “springtime of the peoples,” and printemps des peuples in French, “spring of nations”—when popular uprisings against monarchies cascaded across France, Germany, Poland, Italy, Denmark, and the Austrian Empire. In 1956, the “Polish Spring of October” referred to the period of liberalization and attempted reform; in 1968, the “Prague Spring” referenced a period of attempted liberalization through partial decentralization of the largely state-controlled economy of Czechoslovakia from the Soviet Union. He wrote, “1848 did presage the coming of the liberal idea throughout Europe. (By 1871, it had been restored to France, for example.) It marked a turning point from which there was no going back.” The article went on to say, “The Arab Spring of 2005 will be noted by history as a similar turning point for the Arab world.”4 The correlation these journalists drew from the political phenomena occurring

Glitch in the Age of Technoculture

15

from 1848 to 2011 was based on two premises: (1) each revolution was marked by the popular protest against socioeconomic conditions and government corruption; and (2) the domino effect of uprisings transnationally revealed shadows of macroeconomic and geopolitical networks of power, capital, and media at play. The idea of a trans-local sensibility allows us to expand what we are thinking into a network. Networks often go beyond the boundaries of the nation-state and other technocultural configurations. Taking inspiration from Donna Haraway’s “new citizen” of technoculture, the cyborg embodies that trans-local sensibility through negotiation with its environment and assembling parts and pieces.5 In the introduction to their edited volume, Technoculture, Constance Penley and Andrew Ross depict a coming of age in the 1990s on the tail of the student uprising against the Chinese government in Tiananmen Square, anti-apartheid activism in South Africa, and the first Palestinian uprising (intifada), who instrumentally used fax machines, radio, and CNN broadcast in developing networks across regions and locally from within.6 Arabic Glitch takes place within the edges of that historical path. Another U.S. journalist, Scott Anderson, traced the 2011 revolutions through five historical junctures: Part 1 (1972–2003), “Origins”; Part 2 (2003–11), “The Iraq War”; Part 3 (2011–13), “Arab Spring”; Part 4, “ISIS Rising”; and Part 5, “Exodus,” in his New York Times Magazine article, “Fractured Lands: How the Arab World Came Apart.”7 By January 2011, several seemingly unrelated protests in Tunisia, Jordan, Kuwait, Egypt, and Algeria prompted political scientist Marc Lynch to write, “Are we seeing the beginnings of the Obama administration equivalent of the 2005 ‘Arab Spring,’ when the protests in Beirut captured popular attention and driven in part by newly powerful satellite television images inspired popular mobilization across the region that some hoped might finally break through the stagnation of Arab autocracy? Will social media play the role of al-Jazeera this time? Will the outcome be any different?”8 Competing and overlapping global and local powers together present a more complete and lucid picture. This chapter uncovers a glitch dialectic in its relationship to digital politics and culture where institutions of power try to keep up with the technological adeptness of countercultures, but cannot capture all these possibilities technoculture affords.

16

Arabic Glitch

Both the hopes and defeats of 2011 traveled from local experiences to global narratives. Fitzcarraldo Editions published a collection of Alaa’s writings, from essays to tweets to reflections that he scrawled in pencil and smuggled out of prison.9 The incarcerated activist’s writings, widely distributed across Europe and other places, keep the spirit of the 2011 revolution alive. His book begins immediately after the eighteen days in Tahrir Square and weaves personal reflections in his poetic style. “The burning of churches, the battles at police stations, the massacre of the soldiers in Rafah, the arrest of the Supreme Guide, all these events predate Rabaa, but their m ­ eaning—and 10 their consequences—changed after Rabaa.” Rather than raising dissent and breaking away from liberal currents, the revolutionary left acquiesced in the police massacre of nearly a thousand demonstrators at Rab’a who stood in allegiance with the Muslim Brotherhood as an organization and political Islam as an idea. The events at Rab’a marked a turning point in Egyptian history. Most of Alaa’s thirties were spent in prison. He spent his first detainment in May 2006 protesting the earlier detention of political activists rallying for a free judiciary. In October 2013, the Egyptian interim military council locked him up again for his effort in struggling to preserve bodies retrieved from the Maspero Massacre of protesters by the army. Then again, Alaa served five years of imprisonment, this time for participating in a five-minute protest pause in front of the Shura Council for refusing the trial of civilians in front of the military courts in November 2013.11 It did not stop there, however. Ten years on, military authority is back in power in Cairo and Alaa is back in prison, alongside an estimated sixty thousand other political detainees. In the first trial session after over two years in prison, Abd el-Fattah learned for the first time in October 2021 that his crime was resharing a tweet about a prisoner who died as a result of ill-treatment in detention in the maximum-­ security wing of Tora Prison Complex in summer 2019. On his third day of detention, November 1, 2011, from cell 19, Prison of Appeal, Bab al-Khalq, Alaa wrote a letter later published in Al Shorouk and the Guardian. His letter, like a glitch, made visible the crisis of legitimacy engulfing the Egyptian Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), which had dragged its feet on democratic reform and waged a campaign of repression against activists, journalists, and demonstrators. He wrote:

Glitch in the Age of Technoculture 17

I did not expect that the very same experience would be repeated after five years. After a revolution in which we have ousted the tyrant, I go back to jail. The memories of being incarcerated have returned, all the details, from the skills of being able to sleep on the floor with eight colleagues in a small cell (2 x 4 meters) to the songs and discussions of the inmates. But I am completely unable to remember how I secured my glasses while asleep. They were trampled upon three times in one day. I realize suddenly that they were the very same pair I had when I was jailed in 2006 and that I am imprisoned, now, pending investigation under similarly flimsy accusations and reasons for that incarceration. The only difference is that we have exchanged state security prosecution with military prosecution: a change fitting to the military moment we are living in. The previous time, I was joined in detention by 50 colleagues from the Kefaya movement, but on this occasion, I am alone, together with eight wrongly accused. As soon as they realized that I was from the “Youth of the Revolution,” they started cursing at the revolution and how it failed in “sorting out” the Interior Ministry. I spent the first two days listening to stories of torture by the police force, which is not only adamantly resisting reform, but also seeking revenge for being defeated by the downtrodden, the guilty, and the innocent. From their stories, I discover the truth of the great achievements of the restoration of security. Two of my colleagues are in jail for the first time, simple youth without a grain of violence. And what is it they are accused of? Forming a gang. Now I understand what the Interior Ministry means when it reports that it has caught armed gangs. I congratulate the country for the restoration of security then. In the following few hours, sunlight will enter our always dim cell. We read the creative Arabic engravings of a former colleague, four walls from floor to ceiling covered in Quran, prayers, supplications, thoughts and what appear to be the will of a tyrant to repent. The next day we discover in the corner the date of the inmate’s execution and we are overwhelmed by tears. The guilty plan on repenting, but the innocent do not know what to do to avoid a similar fate. On the radio, I hear the speech of his Excellency the General inaugurating the tallest flag pole in the world, one which will certainly enter the record books. And I wonder: Was the inclusion of the name of the martyr Mina Danial as one of the instigators in my case also a record in

18

Arabic Glitch

audacity? On the basis of it not being sufficient for them to be first to kill the victim and to walk in the funeral but also to spit on the corpse and accuse it of a crime? Or perhaps this cell can win the record of the number of cockroaches? My thoughts are interrupted by Abu Mailk: “I swear to God Almighty, if the wronged are not absolved, this revolution will not succeed.”12

Maspero

Across from the Maspero church sat the state Egyptian Radio & Television Union headquarters. On the evening of October 9, 2011, SCAF attacked activists in front of the church who were protesting the demolition of another church in Aswan, Upper Egypt. It was not the first time activists protested in front of those buildings. During the Maspero Massacre, soldiers crushed protesters with their tanks and fired live ammunition, while state television incited stories against them. Twenty-seven protesters died during the clashes, as well as an unknown number of soldiers. The events of that day seared into Egypt’s collective memory—not in the least, the images of devastation and desolation that were photographed and videotaped. Maspero became a name associated with media misreporting after Egyptian state television falsely claimed that Coptic demonstrators initiated an attack on the army. Meanwhile streaming across the Internet, activists and journalists’ grim video footage showed military vehicles running over protesters, in some cases mounting onto pavements outside the state media building. These online testimonies contradicted the official accounts to such an extent that, like a digital banana peel, they interrupted state programming and its sanctioned flow of information. As bloggers like Sandmonkey13 and Sarah Carr14 published firsthand accounts of the Maspero Massacre, so did video collectives such as Mosireen Collective and Kazeboon upload a series of footage screened on mobile devices. Mosireen was a volunteer media activist collective that produced and made accessible roughly two hundred videos documenting Egypt’s battles and protests from 2011 to 2014. Mosireen itself is an archive of a glitched history, leaked moments on the ground, mostly captured through mobile phones and uploaded somewhere public despite the mediated political environment. A bit more radical, the

Glitch in the Age of Technoculture 19

Kazeboon campaign was anonymous. Operating more like a data body, Kazeboon lived online within a Facebook page, a Twitter account, and a YouTube channel where people uploaded videos and announced screenings. In Arabic, Kazeboon means “Liars.” It was a campaign to make military violations visible by screening citizen-produced videos uploaded on YouTube in streets and public places in Egypt. The collective’s model was that anybody interested could organize a screening in the name of Kazeboon by hanging a screen and projecting a Kazeboon video in public. Media activists, angry crowds, armed military, and subaltern protesters lit up the streets of Cairo into a dissonant reconfiguration of a dynamic process of technological rendering of memory, space, and bodies. Much like the sociopolitical context in Egypt and the story of the Egyptian uprising itself, Maspero is a story of mediated failure. Forefronting the case of the Maspero neighborhood and its youth alliances frames the revolution through the network of denizens’ everyday politics in a crushing struggle with the regime to examine the informal disruptions, mediated failures, and glitches to traditional ways of doing politics. In the case of Maspero, the neighborhood’s inhabitants developed an affective attachment around the material, the encroachment, and the social networks and moved beyond that. To them, Maspero is their country and their home—a designation partly shaped but greatly amplified through a specific social media presence in the way data, bodies, and livelihoods transgress the online and on-the-ground spaces. Precisely because of Maspero’s youth allegiance to Tahrir Square’s occupation, Egyptians were shell-shocked by the events of October 9. They were shocked that the military fired on protesters after claiming to be a protector of the revolution. They were shocked by the exposure of underlying sectarian politics that led to violent clashing. Maspero crystallized the rejection of the Egyptian army that many revolutionaries felt. It also crystallized for many other Egyptians that the only solution was to support the military and condemn any challenges to it. This reaction was mainly out of fear that October 9 could be a harbinger of a much worse crisis. A couple of days after the October 9 massacre, the Egyptian military prosecutor summoned Alaa Abd el-Fattah and another activist, Bahaa Saber, to the court without giving them a reason. The summons came soon after Alaa published an article in al-Shorouk newspaper in which he wrote

20 Arabic Glitch

a poetic and loving epistolary account of the death of his friend and activist Mina Danial, who had been among the Maspero Massacre fatalities. Mina was a well-known activist who blogged from Tahrir Square, where he camped out during the eighteen days of the uprising. His smiling face was a familiar image on social media; he was beloved by many. Most inhabitants within local urban geographies exist in different and differentiated temporalities and spatialities. It is rare when members within some communities have enough extensive attunement with each other, as in the case of these activists. Alaa’s article circulated widely on Facebook and elsewhere. It is possible that Abd el-Fattah and Saber were summoned on accusations of inciting violence at Maspero, but equally possible that this article aggravated the military. Even after claiming to stop military tribunals on civilians, the military council’s actions show the increasingly authoritarian way the military was mounting pressure on mainstream media and activists to end public criticism of SCAF. On Twitter, Arab data bodies posted tweets using the hashtags #NoMilTrials, #NoSCAF, #FuckSCAF—all related to Egyptian citizens being tried for military crimes and the brutality of the SCAF. On Twitter’s platform, we were bombarded with infographics providing statistics on the revolutions, links to similar movements in Egypt, related hashtags supporting the same cause, links to news articles providing essential reports and updates, and paintings done by revolutionaries to illustrate their pain and frustration with the political corruption. At this historical juncture in 2011, the distinction between on-the-ground and online events was more defined. The name Maspero also became linked to latent sectarianism against Copts. Regardless, in contemporary settled life founded on land ownership, contemporary communities cohere through a convergence of self and heterogeneity. If not infrastructure, then what is necessary for circulation and virality in contemporary life? By focusing on the turn of the century, beginning with the 1990s, a period heavily impacted by neoliberal policies, this chapter provides a specific historical analysis of the glitch. We can then engage further into the relationship between the pitfalls of globalization, technology with its affect, and its aesthetics in twenty-­ first-century communities.

Glitch in the Age of Technoculture 21

Glitch and Urban Infrastructure

The various expressions of glitches articulated and theorized in the chapter are slippery loops emerging from a lack of infrastructure, particularly in poor urban neighborhoods. The social and political glitches reveal new communities, new forms of collective power, and new imaginaries of solidarity across different urban subalterns. In Cairo, an urban subaltern emerged from spatialized forms of everyday interaction between popular forces and agents of the government. These interactions were formative in developing the urban, virtual, and other subjectivities that entered into the making of “the people” who “demand the fall of the regime.” Not a new subject of discourse in Middle East studies, the Arab street, or street politics, has often been considered an indispensable asset for reproducing economic and cultural life. Asef Bayat describes the ongoing conflict over the public space between the state and the subaltern as “street politics,” consequently politicizing ordinary citizens through their struggles over urban space.15 Salwa Ismail’s work on the role of the urban subaltern in the revolution was productive in unpacking and tracing the everyday Egyptian revolution.16 Ismail’s argument highlights the neighborhoods as spatial political laboratories where the urban subaltern, through rigorous negotiations and everyday encounters with the state, accumulates knowledge about modes of governance and how to resist them. The Maspero Triangle is a primarily Coptic Christian neighborhood in Cairo located between al-Galaa Street, July 26 Street, and the Nile River. This land triangle is demarcated by the Egyptian Radio & Television Union headquarters, the Foreign Affairs Ministry, the Italian consulate, and residential areas and hotels. Some parts date back to the 1400s Mamluk era, while the rest were built in the 1800s. An earthquake in 1992 affected the majority of the historical areas. Many houses needed maintenance and repairs, but the government refused to grant repair licenses to the owners and tenants.17 In her work on Cairo’s urban anthropology, Omnia Khalil contextualizes Maspero within the establishment of Egypt’s Informal Settlement Development Fund after buildings collapsed in a nearby neighborhood, killing more than one hundred people in 2008.18 Initially organized to coordinate a response to the ongoing interactions with Egypt’s Ministry

22 Arabic Glitch

Figure 1.1. “Strike!” is a stencil from January 2012, which became so popular

that it started appearing on walls in neighborhoods where the Maspero Youth Association did not have an active organizational presence. Image courtesy of Maspero Facebook page.

of Housing, Maspero denizens established the Maspero Youth Association informally in the 1990s. They designed a plan to upgrade and save the old buildings, which the Ministry of Housing dismissed a couple of years after the fatal building collapse in 2010. The series of these friction points sparked the government’s gentrification project euphemistically called Cairo 2050. Leaked documents revealed plans to transform the Maspero Triangle into a tourist, recreational, and development center. While Egyptian media portrayed the transformation as a participatory one with neighborhood inhabitants, the process of forced eviction through gentrification unfolded over the years. Nearly a decade after the tragic building collapse, the Egyptian Ministry of Housing officially demolished the Maspero Triangle in 2018. The Maspero Youth Association played a crucial role in mentorship, if nothing else, to its future generations who also negotiated their data bodies in urban space. What surfaced in 2011 with a much broader media impact was

Glitch in the Age of Technoculture 23

As-Safha Ar-Rasmiyah Iltihad Shabab Maspero (Union of Maspero Youth, or Maspero Youth Union), a loose organization of young, Coptic activists who helped organize and put themselves forward as media spokespersons. Rami Kamel, Ibram Louis, and Antoine Adel are its most visible founders and leaders. The emergence of this group marked a significant challenge to the authority of the Coptic Church, which had actively campaigned against Coptic participation in the protests at Tahrir Square. By 2011, social media had created an opportunity for political organizations to define themselves and for visibility to broader communities. The Facebook page for the Maspero Youth Union alone had around twenty-five thousand members in 2011.19 As I mentioned earlier, the data body is a set of categories in the form of data organized only in relation to other sets of data—not to history, context, or material bodies or space. Does the Coptic identity of Maspero become more pronounced through communities of data bodies? Housed in Facebook’s databases, the Maspero youth had more freedom to discuss Coptic identity in a global world of data bodies than on the real Arab street. Arab data bodies operating on social media with other likeminded data bodies enabled the Maspero Youth Union to make a broader political impact. So when the Egyptian army fired on Maspero protesters in the massacre of October 9, their stories’ viral impact was surprising and incongruent with Maspero subaltern’s history on the ground. The Maspero Massacre had gained attention through glitched channels and created a momentum for Egyptian activists to resist the failure to repeal the Emergency Law and continued military trail of civilians. Located just off Tahrir Square and leading to the interior ministry, Mohammed Mahmoud Street was a thoroughfare for ongoing battles between protesters and security forces. Clashes escalated again in November 2011, when for about six days Egypt’s riot police and Security Forces suppressed protests in Tahrir Square and Mohammed Mahmoud Street using tear gas. Riot Smoke (Figure 1.2) is a composited image that represents the immense and unwieldy social media activity taken during the six days of battle on Mohammed Mahmoud Street. It is one in a series of mosaics made up of profile thumbnails from the top thousand Twitter users contributing posts and Flickr photos to imitate popular memes using the hashtag #Abassaiya. In a comprehensive survey documenting the Egyptian graffiti movement

24 Arabic Glitch

Figure 1.2. VJ Um Amel, Riot Smoke (2013). A mosaic made up of Facebook

profile images of users who posted about #Abassaiya during the Mohammed Mahmoud Street riots of 2011.

since January 2011, Walls of Freedom: Street Art of the Egyptian Revolution curates the works of a hundred photographers and a hundred artists including works of internationally recognized artists Alaa Awad, Bahia Shehab, and Ammar Abo Bakr.20 The legacy of these battles were graffitied onto the walls lining Mohammed Mahmoud Street with mural after mural. Cairo Glitch (Figure 1.3) and Cairo Graffiti (Figure 1.4) are glitched images that VJ Um Amel created from photographs of the murals on Mohammed Mahmoud while visiting Cairo in 2014. The glitch aesthetic slows down the high-circulation images and brings out latent events. Glitch may do violence to the surface of the image, but it makes it possible to see more, by questioning the source, revealing the material support of the digital ether, and suggesting how images are recomposed in circulation. Understanding the role of the urban subaltern in political mobilization and protest lay in the microprocesses of everyday life in urban s­ ettlements— the forms of governance they live in and their sentiment toward it. The

Figure 1.3. VJ Um Amel, Cairo Glitch (2015). Dye sublimation prints of glitched

photographs from graffiti murals taken on Mohammed Mahmoud Street in 2014.

Figure 1.4. VJ Um Amel, Cairo Graffiti (2015). Dye sublimation prints of glitched

photographs from graffiti murals taken on Mohammed Mahmoud Street in 2014.

26 Arabic Glitch

political engineering of affect in everyday urban life and what may seem aesthetic—glitch, graffiti, remix—was politically instrumentalized. Glitch and Resistance

Glitches provide a critical lens for understanding the operational logic of systems: through its cracks and failures, the system becomes visible. The neoliberal global systems that Arabic Glitch exposes are especially visible in city centers such as Tunis, Amman, Beirut, Cairo, Dubai, Ramallah, and Istanbul. The gradual implementation during the 1990s of significant housing economic structural adjustment reform from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), along with reductions in Egyptian public welfare and socialist programs, afforded fertile ground for urban neighborhoods to transform into political laboratories of sorts. Whether through organized negotiations or everyday encounters with state officials or policies in downtown Cairo’s urban subaltern, they learned to work around inadequate technical infrastructures to meet their needs, experimenting and innovating with whatever materials were at hand to stay connected to contemporary media production. Cairo’s subaltern devised alternatives such as using outdated or obsolete hardware and software platforms, building social connections while waiting for slow Internet connections, and often using pirated digital stock. Trying to stay up to speed was all the more challenging with hardware and software companies building obsolescence into their products, forcing users to keep upgrading. Beyond the example of the Egyptian Ministry of Housing’s denial of permits for the demolition of the Maspero neighborhoods, one of the most extreme examples of government corruption and criminal neglect in the broader Arab world is Lebanon’s long-standing debate over access to electricity and garbage disposal. Scholars such as Ziad Abu-Rish and Eric Verdeil have traced the Ottoman origins of Electricité du Liban to public demonstrations in the early 1950s against uneven distribution and inaccessible costs21 and again through the structural adjustment of the 1990s.22 Work like theirs exposes the operations of neoliberalism on urban infrastructure in Lebanon and highlights the withdrawal of the state and the entry of private actors—who only aggravate inequalities. Nothing was new or surprising about people burning tires in the streets in 2012 to protest the poor service of Electricité du Liban. Electricity was

Glitch in the Age of Technoculture 27

not the only infrastructural resource mismanaged and corrupt; water, sewage, and telecommunications were all known to be unreliable, at best, in Lebanon. Dire enough for sectarian populations in Lebanon, the extreme unreliability of electricity provision targets Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon’s overcrowded camps.23 By the summer of 2015, the Lebanese government’s failure to resolve a garbage disposal crisis and address chronic electricity and water shortages sparked the #YouStink campaign in Beirut. During a heat wave and amid piles of stinking garbage everywhere, YouStink organizers were joined by semiformal groups of activists outside of sectarian identity politics: feminist, queer, socialists, and environmentalists. Glitches help to signal incompetence or corruption by governments that fail to deliver essential services. Dysfunctional electrical, water, waste, and energy infrastructure in Lebanon, though reprehensible in the short term, constitutes a glitch to the extent that it draws attention to divisive patterns of uneven distribution across old sectarian divides. Unfortunately, this has yet to be accomplished. After a twenty-year civil war, the Lebanese reconstructed their government in the 1990s, fully recognizing and giving rights to its eighteen religious sects. However, the sectarian system in Lebanon was never about fostering a system of mutual coexistence. Certainly those tensions existed, but the various governments (Ottoman, French, and Lebanese) were central to producing them. It was a structure of power from the mutasarrifiyya of 186124 to the sectarian divisions and structures of exclusion and oppression of the French Mandate described by Thompson25 and Weiss,26 to the contemporary history of what Mikdashi has called “sextarianism,”27 a theory of political sectarianism as a technology of securitization that centers sectarian demographics, women’s sexuality, racism, classism, and violence. Abu-Rish also forcefully argues that state inefficiency is crucial to the propping of a state.28 So here the dysfunctional is functional. Glitch in Representation

Though the glitch is a relatively new topic in theories of technology, it has a long history if we consider pre-digital glitches occasioned by the camera or the invention of the punch card. Likewise, glitch art and aesthetics have a pre-digital history that expands the meaning and value of focusing on the

28 Arabic Glitch

glitch.29 For example, avant-garde artists, whether inspired or disgusted by technology and its societal influence, have long enlisted machine functionalities (speed, uniformity, repetition) as part of a machine’s aesthetics. The two go hand in hand, no matter what stage of technology we consider.30 Glitch art shares both the fascination with the engine and its reminder of revolutionary change. Cubism’s technique of layering bits and pieces simply deconstructs any linear perspective. One could examine painting’s responses to photography at the turn of the twentieth century as a constituted set of glitches relative to what were, then, dominant conventions of visual representation. Understanding mechanical reproduction during industrialization helps understand how glitch is contextualized within the neoliberal moment at the end of the twentieth century. Advancements in optical technology during the age of mechanical reproduction, as Walter Benjamin31 and Paul Virilio32 demonstrated, gave way to the mechanical speed, acceleration, and precision of the modern world with Greenwich, England, as the center. Human beings entered a race and exercised a pace of inevitable mess and gravitas to participate in this modern world. Failure was programmed into the technical product from the moment of its production or implementation. “Every technology produces, provokes, and programs a specific accident. For example: when they invented the railroad, what did they invent? An object that allowed you to go fast, which allowed you to progress—a vision à la Jules Verne, positivism, evolutionism. But at the same time they invented the railway catastrophe,” Virilio articulates in conversation with Sylvère Lotringer.33 Thus the accident becomes critical to understanding Virilio’s spectacle approach to technology. As mechanically reproducible technology evolved and increased, so did the opportunity for automated error. The influence of speed and energy on the modern imagination, as Virilio envisioned, produced an image that lacks the coherency of the composition. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin famously states that when art loses the magical aura of creation by being reproduced, it negotiates a political dimension. His conclusion provides us with a Marxist analysis by intertwining the role of printed art reaching “the masses” and the Fascist “attempt to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure . . . [and by] giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.”34 For

Glitch in the Age of Technoculture 29

Benjamin, the aura of work emanates from its authenticity and the singularity of its birth. When art’s relevance becomes tied to a cult, a mass audience, then the audience, more than the artist, bestows authenticity on the work. Here I draw on Mark LeVine’s use of Benjamin’s “aura” to describe contemporary Arab music during the 2011 revolutions.35 In his discussion of Tunisian rapper El General (born Hamada bin Amr) and Egyptian heavy metal singer Ramy Essam and their roles in the Arab revolutionary period, Levine draws on the important debates in cultural theory between Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, surrounding the question of how the mechanical reproduction of art and its commodification would impact art’s “aura” and thus its ability to act as an agent or amplifier of social change. He argues that El General and Ramy Essam and other rap, rock, metal, and traditional artists who were featured in the Arab uprisings disseminated their music for free on the Internet or sold directly by the artists to fans. They unbound the artists from dependency on government permission or corporate sponsorship and returned live performance to the center of musical experience—bringing aura back to the experience of art. LeVine argues that “the return of the ‘aura’ to music and other forms of critical cultural production (art, poetry, graffiti, theatre, etc.) has renewed their authenticity, making them powerful weapons in the long-term war—of position, maneuver, and sometimes both—­ between subaltern forces and state power for hegemony.”36 In his 1913 manifesto, The Art of Noises, Luigi Russolo wrote and designed several noise machines to replace traditional European orchestras with sounds of European modernity.37 Alongside movements like Cubism and offshoots from the Russian avant-garde, futurism symbolized, fetishized, and poeticized the speed, energy, and dynamics of industrial machines and the scattered compression of modern life these factors engendered. In the moving image field, a host of early filmmakers engaged in experimental techniques like scratching the film, intentionally overexposing it to create non– commercially viable effects. One example, Len Lye’s A Colour Box from 1935, is a kinetic film that consists of scratched and scratched and hand-painted celluloid.38 Early uses of photomontage (including the numerous devices of cinematic histories, such as stereoscopes) represent another set of essential glitch precursors. These experiments were often concerned with decompressing visual content. A wave of “stop trick” splicing of film emerged at the very

30 Arabic Glitch

beginning of film history. Most notably, in 1896, French filmmaker Georges Méliès inadvertently discovered a special effect known as “stop substitution,” which altered one or more selected aspects of the mise-en-scène.39 Visual distortion has since become an intentionally applied vernacular effect, displayed in the work of Gerhard Richter and in a newer genre of video art that deliberately works with a gritty, low-fidelity aesthetic. This anti-compression aesthetic rose alongside the growth of high-resolution visual media and film in modern culture at large. The move from avant-garde experimentation to the mid-twentieth-­ century variety of cultural productions occurred in the context of significant militarization that ended in a technological Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. This period saw a sharp increase in technologies that served the American capitalist dream of innovation and the U.S. military forces that fought to uphold this American dream in the face of the “threat of communism.” One of the most profound changes to emerge from this historical friction point was the Internet. The plan to develop a communication network that could withstand nuclear fallout began after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957. The basic idea was to divide and conquer: to break messages into packets to route over secure networks. In 1969, the United States created the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), connecting computers at four universities—Stanford University; the University of California, Santa Barbara; University of California, Los Angeles; and the University of Utah. By 1974, this protocol of arbitrary packet switching was standardized as the Transmission Control Program, or TCP. The document describing TCP used the term Internet for the first time, as shorthand for “Internetworking.” By the early 1990s, Internet Protocol, or IP, was developed to deliver packets of information over a network to the right destination like a postal service. Understanding how IP works is analogous to knowing how the postal service, FedEx, or Amazon is successful at delivering messages and packages across the globe in a short amount of time. Glitch and Media

Discussions between media theorist Marshall McLuhan and architect Buckminster Fuller have taken the study of networks out of the field of cybernetics

Glitch in the Age of Technoculture

31

and placed it into the logics of space, architecture, and design. Fuller and his co-conspirator McLuhan offered a competing narrative according to which people might continue to enjoy rising living standards if they could only wean themselves from Social Darwinism40 and understand our interdependencies better. In fact, I argue that Fuller’s theorization and modeling of the principle of tensegrity can help us understand how a revolution can be leaderless. Tensegrity is a structural principle deriving from mid-twentieth-century innovations in design and engineering, often credited to Fuller. However, it is part of a long-standing debate with Kenneth Snelson, his student, as well as a sculptor and photographer. Tensegrity is the principle that isolated components compress inside a net so that the compressed members do not touch each other and the members under tension delineate the system spatially. The visualization of tensegrity was as stunning as its principles. (See Figure 1.5.) The resemblance between Fuller’s tensegrity and VJ Um Amel’s

Figure 1.5. a. Buckminster Fuller with a model of his theory of tensegrity.

Source: Flickr.com PoetArchitecture album, “R. Buckminster Fuller holds up a Tensegrity sphere. 18th April, 1979”: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ poetarchitecture/26806590126/in/album-72157665615758814/. Courtesy The Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller.

32

Arabic Glitch

Figure 1.5. b. Data analytics and visualization made by VJ Um Amel of half

a million tweets on #Syria collected July 2001 among sixty thousand users (nodes). The green represents Arabic-language tweets. The blue is English, and the red is French.

network visualization of Twitter is compelling. While this Twitter network visualization is composed of data from tweets with the hashtag #Syria, the multidimensional structure of this data is the same for Twitter data analytics drawn from Maspero or any other network. The properties of tensegrity can be applied to networks and to how data scientists study the multiple dimensions in a data set—username, user profile, posts, time stamps, geo-tags, ratings, followers, forwards, replies, languages, attachments, attachment sizes,

Glitch in the Age of Technoculture 33

and the list can go on. On the one hand, with adequate tension separate units can produce a strong network; on the other hand, to use a Marxist term, the necessary alienation of the individuals of the network deserves further discussion. Here I am borrowing from mid-twentieth-century design and engineering innovations built on structural principles that delineate what a system looks like. I argue that in order to understand how this tension functions in multidimensional geographies such as platforms on the Internet, an understanding of the basic structural design of the Internet is necessary. Only from that vantage point can one see how the flow of information occurs. Within such a theoretical framework, the release of videos taken at the massacre at Maspero in Cairo on October 9, 2011, for example, can be understood as glitch resistance. From the printing press to TikTok and Twitter, technologies of communication contribute significantly to the transformation of knowledge. What distinguishes the interaction between technology and knowledge production since the development of the personal computer in the 1980s is the volume, velocity, and variety of collective knowledge and habits that our institutional infrastructures have not been able to keep up with. We negotiate the ever-­ growing gap between individual lifestyles and the institutions in which they must survive. The 1990s reaction to the personal computer resulted in a mash-up of media hacking, information warfare, terror art, and guerrilla semiotics. In his 2006 book, Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins argues that the new digital environment of personal computing expanded the scope of film, TV, and new media to include consumer activities.41 This became even more true with the advent of mobile phones and, later, smartphones. Culture jamming emerged as a form of political communication in response to economic isolation. These activists argued that corporate-driven hypersaturated images had abused culture, politics, and social values in modern society. Culture jamming presents various exciting strategies that glitch branded images and icons of consumer culture to make consumers aware of the corruption, injustice, and diverse cultural experiences that warrant their attention. Many culture jammers simply aimed at exposing questionable political assumptions behind the commercial culture. They redesigned logos, body images, and product images to challenge hyperconsumerism and normativity.

34 Arabic Glitch

These 1990s glitches attempted to expose a product or company by foregrounding what the company was seeking to hide in its design—whether that be environmental damage, poor labor conditions, or the illusory nature of marketing. The logic of the 1990s glitch politics and aesthetics was to convert easily identifiable images into explicit challenges regarding the ecological and human costs of consumption or private corporate uses of the “public” airwaves. The central unit of cultural transmission emerging in 1990s print glitching is the meme. Memes are compressed images that stimulate sensorial associations that people can use to communicate.42 Culture jamming and meme-driven interruptions pivoted the transformation of politics and media even before the turn of the twenty-first century. As imagined in this book, the glitch quickly expands and moves easily from literal to metaphorical and back again. Arabic Glitch discovers messiness and error through an exploration of what I refer to as technical semiotics, the logic, and language of algorithms placed in a networked social landscape that, at times, renders the technological infrastructure more visible. Despite its technological roots, the glitch can reference and thus illuminate other areas of experience and understanding. When understood as audible noise, for instance, it becomes political when translated into voice—that enters, is heard, and interrupts the ordered political world of policy. Noise is produced by anyone who acts from outside the dominant order, and it is directed at no one in particular. In one sense, noise parallels what Talal Asad means by “local knowledges” (rooted, circumscribed, limited) that oppose and thus reveal the contours of “official” knowledge (unlimited, cosmopolitan, uprooted, universal).43 Asad’s understanding of noise as a political act outside the political order is similar to Tarek El-Ariss’s formulation of Arab digital consciousness rooted in local societal orders, and shameful behavior. Thus, one could argue that the videos and live testimonies of the Maspero Massacre uploaded across social media platforms were heard as noise, especially among those upholding official knowledge from the state or authorities. Since the word first entered the English lexicon in the 1960s, we have identified the glitch in liminal spaces: between signals in transistor radios, the scratch of the record, the audiotape’s crackling sound, and the record’s skip. We have seen it twitch along the bottom of VHS playback and freeze the DVD image pixels. With the rise of web 2.0 in the aughts, online videos

Glitch in the Age of Technoculture 35

became host to a new kind of glitch: the digital stutter of buffering in Adobe Flash and other streaming media software. Then, when a computer was unable to download a file fast enough to exceed the playback rate, the viewer watched her image freeze and then skip forward as it tried to rematch its audio and video tracks. The glitch aesthetic emerged from altering digital compression to reveal the materiality of the support underlying the digital image. The low-quality video was captured on mobile phones and compressed beyond image distortion to share beyond the screen of that particular device. This type of materiality constitutes an everyday problem in countries with poor infrastructure, including most Arab countries. Glitches also make evident the power relations that undergird authoritarian regimes within more extensive geopolitical arrangements. Low resolution diminishes individuality; compression forces data to conform to filters, and a glitch interrupts the intended message with a more urgent one. The glitch makes the aesthetics of compression and loss of resolution more evident in a matrix-based medium. In a glitch, the medium becomes a temporal presence during all of these common glitches, a missed beat, or somehow sideways outside the code’s hermetic order. Dropped frames interrupt and skew visual expectations and the viewer’s fantasy of mastery. Simulated glitches make their ambivalent relationships visible to patriarchal, heterocentric video culture as they interrupt the gaze without alienating the spectator. When we extend the meaning of machine to reference a system or structure, we likewise extend the use of glitch to mean a set of procedural actions that leads to a projected pathway astray. To recall John Glenn’s initial use of the word to describe an electrical current: glitch is not an object. It is a directive, a command, a script, an algorithm, or a procedural set of actions. It exposes that the apparatus or machine is engineered for a purpose by interrupting the smooth and concealed functioning of its technological infrastructure. Unaware that these #Maspero videos had gone viral, SCAF members stated in a televised press conference held three days after the massacre that the military had no responsibility. Generals Mohamed El-Assar and Adel Emara insisted that army personnel were unarmed and were the ones under attack by protesters, despite the video evidence to the contrary. Egyptian state television initially blamed the bloodshed on protesters, who it said had

36 Arabic Glitch

attacked security forces as data bodies flooded the Internet with reports and turned the blame squarely at the security forces, who they say employed brutal tactics to suppress the protest. My point in referencing this episode is to highlight an example of a glitch whose meaning far exceeds some notion of technological malfunction or disarray. The activists who were taking the videos and capturing the massacre, without the Internet, were not expected to circulate their media. Capturing and then making public videos of the Egyptian army running over its citizens to disseminate virally is an act of resistance afforded by social media. The release of videos taken at Maspero’s massacre in Cairo on October 9, 2011, for example, can be understood as a glitch. Analyzing the media infrastructure empowering Arab digital activism broadens our understanding of the networks operating in (and behind) contemporary debates on the social media tools of counterrevolutionary bots and fake news and upends the literature that portrays the “Arab Spring” as a Facebook revolution. A node situated within the site of digital humanities, Arabic Glitch asks how we might think of the digital humanities as a bridge/site for bringing together different ways of knowing. While it may be tempting to dismiss media such as Twitter as the product of corporate structure, we must also recognize how techies like Manal Bahey el-Din Hassan and Alaa Abd el-Fattah developed software that destabilized the corporate model and was able to disseminate revolutionary content. We gain two insights from recognizing this interaction. Any communication network can both reify and challenge dominant economies of knowledge production; but, and also, the interrelation between infrastructure and content varies from site to site. This variation has different political effects in the Middle East than in the U.S., allowing for an understanding of locality that ostensibly speaks globally without being tied to the global market economy.

two Arab Data Bodies

On March 20, 2004, Alaa Abd el-Fattah and Manal Bahey el-Din Hassan first

went live with their blog, Manal and Alaa’s Bit Bucket, in Cairo. They explored and experimented with web publishing platforms to facilitate a growing community web presence. Theirs is a story of the coming of age at the turn of the century. Alaa and Manal first met as young teenagers in the 1990s in a summer camp organized by Annosoor Assaghera, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) concerned with children’s rights. According to the NGO’s website, its objectives “centered around the values of freedom of expression, justice, and equality, and to equip children with skills to engage in the exchange of ideas.”1 In the mid-1990s, like much of the region, Egypt was in the middle of a dramatic and growing youth bulge, with more than half the total population under the age of thirty. Over seventy percent of the Egyptian population was between nine and nineteen. Alaa was fourteen and Manal was thirteen when they first met that summer. They stayed together through adolescence and continued through the same computer science bachelor’s program at Ain Shams University through 2005. Developing Arabic-language versions of free and open-source software

38 Arabic Glitch

(FOSS) and platforms, Manal and Alaa first became known for developing Omraneya. This website aggregated Egyptian blogs in the early aughts. Alaa had organized an online group of programmers working on the Arabization Drupal software,2 while leading training workshops in Egypt on how to install the free and open-source operating system Linux. As it were, I reached out to that very same Drupal Arabization forum when I started building R-Shief ’s prototype in 2007. Manal is the one who replied to my query about how to employ the Drupal Arabic aggregator code she and Alaa had developed. That is how our friendship began. Both software developers, Manal and Alaa were committed to a broader vision for sharing FOSS to bring Arabic-speaking publics online. The free-software movement began in opposition to the loss of access to software source code, as enforced through copyright. Source code is the human-readable form of the instructions that control computerized devices. “These machines run us. Code runs these machines,”3 wrote Lawrence Lessig. The early FOSS movement proved to be a precursor to multifaceted resistance against the broad privatization of culture and restrictions on expression. Today Manal continues to train software developers in Egypt as she raises their son Khaled on her own while Alaa serves another jail sentence in Egypt’s prison. In one of their earliest blog posts, “The rise and rise of the Manalaa civilization,” the reader can identify with the teens’ musical tastes, favorite foods, and subjects of interest and situate them within global youth culture.4 Alaa makes a familiar critique of Egyptian popular music: “only Microbus drivers listened to decent Egyptian music at that time so apart from Mounir, I didn’t like anything Egyptian. there was Portishead, Radiohead (creep was big at that time), Cranberries (zombie eih eih), Prodigy (I got the poison, I got the remedy). was Metallica’s black album released at that time too?” At that moment, blog readers locally within Egypt and in the Diaspora witnessed the global precarity in which they found themselves as Egyptian youth in a global media and consumer culture. “The rise and rise of the Manalaa civilization” is Manal and Alaa’s response to a tagging game designed for online collaborators to learn about each other. A series of questions each player responds to by listing information is a narrative structure for gaming and interaction design. Rather than acting or verbalizing, the game’s rules ask players to record a list. Whether

Arab Data Bodies 39

comma- or space-separated, each record constitutes the basic unit housed in a database—the data. Fellow open-source developer and blogger Mohamed Sameer started the tagging game by listing data about his life: “ten years ago, five years ago, one year ago, tomorrow.”5 The game asks for lists of five favorite snacks, music, places, people, clothes, toys, etc. According to Manal, we learn that they have been married for two years and love to travel—only where there is broadband connectivity. They love Egyptian food and American music. They both listed the digital camera as their favorite toy. Manal loved math and was good in school; Alaa rebelled. By the end, the blog post creates an intimacy between the reader and the players in the tagging game. A precursor to social media profiles, these data records are interpreted as indicators of Manal and Alaa’s character. Together, a set of objects and their features constitutes the data (or dataset)—data that is to the digital artist as clay is to the sculptor or paint is to a painter. Most data representations include some aspects of the data bodies and exclude others. Understanding this formation is necessary when performing an analysis of social and cultural formations using data. Before analyzing a phenomenon, person, or activity, they must be represented as a finite set of individual data objects with a finite number of features. Data representation is modular; that is, it consists of separate elements: objects and their features. Secondly, the features are encoded in such a way that programmers calculate them. Such calculability means that the features can take several forms—integers, floating-­point numbers, categories represented as integers or text labels, spatial coordinates, time units—but not just any form. Digitized data is not just any random collection of items in some medium such as paper. In a computational environment, data is something a computer can read, transform, and analyze, which imposes encoding constraints on representation. What is chosen as objects, what features are selected, and how are these features encoded? These three decisions are equally crucial for representing phenomena as data and making them computable, manageable, knowable, and shareable through data science techniques. Stored data records of social media, and institutional records, can serve as indicators of character. These records, saved and institutionalized over time, re-create characters or personas into what I have previously called data bodies in installations and lectures.6 The data body is the information

40 Arabic Glitch

that makes up institutional records of an individual’s societal rankings. In the U.S., it is your Social Security number. It is your grade point average (GPA) from college. It is your FICO7 credit score as determined by three U.S. ­companies—Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax. It is your driver’s license record maintained by the state. It is your Facebook feed. The data body has so much clout that you cannot buy a house unless your data body is normalized in economic systems. Furthermore, how can the physical body transgress the data body? The value and content of documented information vary across space and time. For example, paternal and maternal lineages and religion are often recorded on an Egyptian birth certificate. The subject of citizenship and personhood vis-à-vis the Arab state and its borders is one that scholars, writers, cultural producers, and activists have engaged in rigorously. The modern state produces, quantifies, and regulates its denizens with instantiated and totalizing identifiers: name, address, gender, sex, religion, age, caste, race, refugee status, and, finally, citizenship. As Middle East studies scholars have argued, the nationalizing of citizenship necessarily fosters an affective narrative of subjectivity.8 The very act of citizenship becomes an assemblage composed of multiple friction points, often articulated through contradiction—a key to understanding my concept of the data body. In Lebanon, Kafa9 ran a digital campaign on personal status, domestic violence, and sexual harassment; the Jinsiyati10 campaign demanded the law to allow women to pass their Lebanese national identity to their spouses or children. In Saudi Arabia, women took to social media with the hashtag #Women2Drive in a campaign to end the ban on female drivers in the country, which, one can argue, was successful. King Salman lifted the ban in his royal decree issued in 2017, and Saudi women officially got behind the wheel in June 2018.11 As software developed to incorporate Arabic throughout the aughts, Arab netizens (including the Arabic-­speaking Diaspora) began to create their data bodies through creative usernames, memes, profiles, and avatars. These indicators or markings grew in value, as did the instant, global reach of these Arab data bodies. Several Egyptian bloggers and artists, including myself, created monikers—such as Sandmonkey, Gaza Mom, or Zeinobia—that translated into the emergent web culture made up of netizens and mutable data bodies.

Arab Data Bodies 41

The Arab data body is a discrete and critical subject of analysis that provides new information on how a generation of people under thirty maintains itself as a state-oppositional presence on a global platform and finds the resources to do so. Born into a corrupt system under Hosni Mubarak’s regime, this new generation of activists in Egypt fashioned themselves as part vigilante, part technological experts. They sought to expose the irreality of Mubarak’s “leadership” and to craft hybrid and mutable identities. In doing so, they crafted mutable identities for themselves—Blogger-­Activist, Techie-Activist, Artist-Techie, Blogger-Journalist-Artist, Artist-Activist, Artist-Techie-Scholar, et cetera. Their technological sophistication and political sensibilities were reinforced by a 1990s culture-jamming, guerrilla ­aesthetic—a refusal to be one single thing. In many ways, these activists, who are also theorists, have guided much of my research through genuine friendship and collaborations, mainly in Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, Syria, Gaza, and the West Bank. From Diwans to Blogs

Much academic scholarship in the Arab world has situated its discussions on digital media within the existing discipline of news journalism as a state apparatus.12 One can date the beginning of print media in this region to around the end of the Ottoman Empire. However, long before modern journalism, Arab societies had elaborate conventions for public communication. According to Samar al-Roomi, for example, “Kuwait’s heavy reliance on tribal Dywaniahs (in which men meet regularly to talk about public and private concerns) plays a more significant role in determining Kuwait’s communication process and news’ validity than do Web pages/blogs.”13 In addition to formal spaces, throughout the Middle East, neighborhood coffeehouses and other informal social spaces have also served as loci to communicate reliable public information. For example, in her 2007 article in Public Culture, Lisa Wedeen argues that Qāt chews in Yemen qualify as public spheres.14 To examine popular social modes of communication that are culturally specific to the Middle East, Jon Anderson provides a trans-local approach to his 2003 book on New Media in the Muslim World by making a distinction

42 Arabic Glitch

between professional journalists and bloggers. Anderson describes the phenomenon by explaining that “bloggers tend to have less tolerance of conventional wisdom and less trust of governments. Some bloggers are also less concerned than professional journalists about commitments to accuracy and objectivity.”15 Similar to Anderson, Naomi Sakr makes the point that “pronouncements about new media influence have too often been limited to observations about causality that are broadly positivist in character but without being grounded in empirical research,” in her introductory chapter to Arab Media and Political Renewal: Community, Legitimacy and Public Life.16 As bloggers became citizen journalists—playing an active journalistic role, sending instant messages and images on mobile phones, or blogging their views on the Internet—their power grew. At the 2010 Arab Media Forum Dubai, Ali Al Karni, director and Al Jazirah Newspaper Chair for International Journalism at King Saud University, was famously quoted as saying, “the new tribe has emerged as the ‘Fifth Estate,’ achieving a coup d’etat against the traditional Fourth Estate.”17 The most recent Arab revolutionary events brought to international attention that revolution also happens on social media. How did Egyptian innovations and practices of social media challenge U.S.-based trends and systems? What can this challenge tell us about the flows of global capital? Furthermore, did these innovations and methods offer a reprise from the global political economy? The infrastructure was neither neoliberal nor capitalist. Thanks to grassroots technological innovators, it was a technical infrastructure that enabled Arabic speakers to assemble and protest. By 2004, techies in the region had already begun to change the nature of the interrelation between the world of technology and the humanities and nonhegemonic institution building. How did a generation of people under thirty maintain themselves as a state-oppositional presence on a global platform and find the resources to do so? Educated engineers and designers, concerned with social and political justice, took to the streets risking their physical bodies and to the Internet with their data bodies—such as Twitter users @sandmonkey, @alaa, @zeinobia—demonstrating how data bodies and real bodies can operate as one. To the extent that the reputation of digital activism in the region is credited to the Facebook-ifying and Twitterizing of contemporary media,

Arab Data Bodies 43

Tunisia and Egypt differ in significant ways. In many ways, they were ahead of Facebook and its followers. In 2004, Harvard seniors were updating their online program “Facemash,” which allowed users to objectify fellow students by comparing photos of their faces and selecting whom they deemed as “hotter,” to the first iteration of Facebook, an English-based social networking site. Facebook originated from a platform for adjudicating females by their looks, which reified its white patriarchal context. At the same time, two critical movements in Egypt were emerging: the open-source software and localization movement to Arabic, and the Kefaya political party, which used both websites and online journalism for campaigning. In one of the earliest gatherings, in December 2004, more than fifty people assembled outside the attorney general’s office, making demands far beyond the established boundaries of free expression for the time. Their banners called for the cancellation of the state of emergency law and read “The Egyptian Movement for Change.”18 In that same year, developers still needed to devise applications to enable Arabic characters on a keyboard. Several open-source projects developed software for Arabic on Drupal, Yamli, Google, and other platforms in the years that followed, thereby enabling Arabic-­language content to grow dramatically. Recovering this narrative and what it implies, Egyptian techies were producing in advance of Mark Zuckerberg and his entourage. By 2004, techies on the ground in Egypt had already begun to change the nature of the interrelation between the world of technology19 and the humanities or social movements and nonhegemonic institution building. The story of the techies belongs within budding literature in Middle East studies on science and technology studies. It offers something new among On Barak’s work on time and technology;20 Timothy Mitchell’s Rule of Experts;21 Yoav Di-Capua’s contribution on aviation, calls, and technology in early-twentieth-century Egypt in the Journal of Social History;22 Aaron Jakes on public utilities and roads in Egypt’s Occupation;23 and Charles Hirschkind on cassette sermons in The Ethical Soundscape.24 Among the literature of postcolonial digital humanities, the Arab activists’ use of social media became a model for other social movements immediately thereafter. The techies on the ground in Egypt possessed a technological sophistication and political sensibilities reinforced by a 1990s culture-jamming, glitch aesthetic—a refusal to be one thing.

44 Arabic Glitch

Arab Media Goes Digital

There was a time right before the Arab blogosphere developed when programmers could not get the Arabic glyph encoded for web interfaces. Just as the birth of Arabic typesetting occurred separately from that of Western languages, in the fifteenth century in European books and seventeenth century in the Arab world,25 the same holds true for the digital glyph. In the early aughts, we could not get those interfaces to read from right to left. These two fundamental limitations presented quite a challenge from both technological and visual design perspectives and took some time to resolve. Building the Internet to function using only English characters is glitchy and draws attention to the fact that the Internet, for all its hype, was not a worldwide phenomenon but only a Western one. It launched in English. The code was the mathematical language C++, and the interfaces were read in English. The first glitch was that this Internet was not a worldwide net— not accessible to languages that use letters other than the Roman alphabet, let alone are written and read from right to left. In short, the inability to produce digital text in Arabic seriously compromised any claim of global democracy through access and literacy. The burgeoning academic field of Internet studies (that is, the Association of Internet Researchers) is so young that its ethical standards and traditions are still in formation. Scholarship on Internet studies often is published without providing public access to the data or tools used in the analysis. Despite the fact that the Arab uprisings are widely discussed in scholarship, the period is often framed from a Western perspective as the “Arab Spring” by scholars outside the region. Rarely do scholars engage Egyptian and Tunisian technologists as authors of their own emancipation. We should study the activists who have used Silicon Valley tools to design their data bodies specific to local culture and history as the theorists framing scholarship. There were many localization glitches concerning scripts for the various human languages. In one effort, funded by Canada’s International Development Research Centre, Manal Hassan, along with typographer Khaled Hosny and Ahmad Gharbeia, a programmer who became known for Arabizing Wikipedia, collaborated on a project to publish a training

Arab Data Bodies 45

manual, Effecting Change Through Localisation. The introduction explained, “It is important to realise that even if we are able to use technology in our second or third language, the constant exposure to this language doesn’t only allow us to use the technology, but it also slowly degrades our ability to use our own language. It is my belief that languages that are not used in all the important spheres of our lives will have a hard time surviving the onslaught of globalisation. Software localisation can therefore not only help with access to information and useful technology, but also with language revival and cultural preservation.”26 Developing an encoding language for Arabic and graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to read from right to left was crucial to overcoming web accessibility problems inherent to constructions of power and who has control of what online. One problem was that the Arabic glyph appeared much smaller than the Roman glyph. In producing a bilingual site, it was challenging to design the Arabic legibly without the English looking dramatically large—it was a well-known and common glitch. Allegorically ironic, it was much like the power the English language had in the early years of the Internet. Later, open-source projects like Wikipedia and Drupal worked to change that. Drupal’s network of Arabic-language developers continued to find design solutions to enable Arabic to function online. In 2000, researchers from the University of Antwerp, Dries Buytaert and Hans Snijder, tried to make a small internal website or a message board to share news and work status with friends. Dries decided to put that website online and named it drop.org. Initially they intended to call the site “Dorp” (the Dutch word for “village”), but they mistyped it. This initial glitch inspired Dries to release the software as Drupal, which means “drop” in Dutch. Drop.org turned into an experimentation platform for discussions and the flow of ideas. Making Drupal open source was supposed to reduce the work burden on Dries, but instead a community of developers emerged and created Drupal itself. Drupal’s first claim to fame came when it was used in 2003 to build “DeanSpace” for one of the candidates in the 2004 U.S. presidential race.27 Drupal development in Arabic (right-to-left programming and UTF-8 encoding for Arabic script)28 grew tremendously, with more than fifty software developers contributing to Drupal’s open-source platform. One of the

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Arabic Team administrators for Drupal29 is Alaa Abd el-Fattah of Manal and Alaa’s Bit Bucket blog. He posted the following biography on his profile in 2004: From his work with children using Facebook to ridicule their teachers in the Arab digital expression camps, to his work with pro-democracy activists using blogs to mobilize thousands of Egyptians against the government in the Kefaya movement, Alaa just loves helping people use ICTs to stick it to the man. By day he works as a Free/Open-Source Software developer, by night he dons his mask and cape and patrols the streets of Cairo, jumping from campaign to campaign, building websites, providing support and training, looking out for activists in need. He likes to pretend that his work on the Egyptian Blogs Aggregator helped bring in a new era of citizen journalism and usher in a new generation of digital activists, while the rest of the world acts as if his blog is relevant.30

Alaa was modest in using “pretend” to describe his influence on the “new era of citizen journalism.” His mastery and ridiculing of neoliberal discourses celebrating and sanitizing digital activists; his implicit critique of the incorporation of youth rebellion (students criticizing their teachers); and his recognition of the relevance of the blogosphere and cautioning against digital activism disconnected from on-the-ground engagement (his reference to “mask and cape patrols”) did usher in a new generation of digital activists. However, the rise of the largest forum on the World Wide Web, a community for Egyptian women called Fatakat, went unnoticed compared to the media attention on Arab bloggers who were reporting intensified violence by the state and growing social unrest. Alaa’s contributions made a great impact. Between 2004 and 2011, Alaa’s blog posts oscillated like a pendulum between matters related to RSS aggregators and the Egyptian constitution. He was first jailed in 2006 along with other bloggers while calling for an independent judiciary in Egypt. That is the same year Jack Dorsey launched Twitter; Mark Zuckerberg had launched Facebook two years prior. By 2004, Alaa and Manal had been traveling around Egypt conducting Linux installfests, hosting other Egyptian websites. They built their own blog, Manalaa. net, and the prototype of the blog aggregator Omraneya. At the same time,

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citizen journalists started blogging on a crucial website called Torture in Egypt.31 One of the key instigators of the Arab uprising of 2011 was when the Alexandria police beat Khaled Said to death in June 2010. Khaled’s battered face circulated across the Internet on memes, banners, and posters. The message was out, and once again the virtual and real worlds collided. In just a few years, scholars, journalists, and pundits published many articles and books on the Arab uprisings, and a virtual body politic32 posted petabytes of Twitter and Facebook microblogs in multiple languages. Though scholars have neologized social media as coauthored by the public in critically productive ways, much research on “the Arab public” has focused on political histories,33 public opinion through traditional polling,34 or ethnographic investigations.35 In this regard, much research on the Arab uprisings of 2011 at once overdetermined and neglected the mechanisms for verification and authority within the digital domain. Digital knowledge production is not like pop culture or traditional public texts (that is, newspapers or legal documents). Instead it offers a redefinition of “the public” as groups of people systematically engage in the Internet, making open-source transactions with mobile devices. That is worthy of rigorous study. Through a formulation of digital transmission, Marwan Kraidy creatively inserted the human body as the essential medium of political expression during the Arab uprisings of 2010–12.36 As mentioned earlier, Tarek El-Ariss reconsiders the same Arab uprisings from a theoretical framework of what he calls a leaky subject. He argues that “the leaking subject is both erased and inscribed through mise en anime in an open text attributed to Scheherazade-like figure, a fictional character posited as author, to be celebrated or shunned, exiled or imprisoned.”37 In an exciting two-year research project, “Producing the Public,” convened from 2013 to 2015 in Tunis and Cairo, I collaborated with Egyptian media figures Lina Attalah, Ahmad Gharbeia, and Alaa Abd el-Fattah (who was imprisoned during the second year of the grant), as well as with scholars in Cairo: AUC historian Pascale Ghazaleh, prominent feminist and scholar Hoda Elsadda, and feminist, activist, and historian Sherene Seikaly (the grant’s principal investigator). Once again we were grappling between the noise of what Talal Asad refers to as local knowledge and the official knowledge from the state and other authorities. In this workshop, we sought to

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bridge the gap between the scholarly social theorist and the one who leans more toward activism. From the beginning to the end of the two-year grant cycle, many participants in the working group leaked and transformed. Lina Attalah was in the throes of moving from being managing editor of the Egypt Independent to cofounding Mada Masr, an independent online Egyptian newspaper. While Alaa Abd el-Fattah served in solitary confinement in Tora Prison, Ahmad Gharbeia also had to abstain from the working group to alleviate the workload at the Arab Digital Expression Foundation due to the untimely death of the organization’s director, Ali Shaath. In December 2014, the four of us were able to meet in Cairo at the AUC’s Tahrir Square campus. With trained feminists in the working group, we spent a couple of days in that room in conversation. We published the results of the research in a roundtable discussion on the free and open ezine, Jadaliyya, “Who Are the People? A Conversation on the Assemblages and the Archives of the People.”38 We ourselves had experienced the assemblages, glitches, and leaks of the revolution through its counterrevolution. We learned that each of us had found our unique ways of rewriting a history of digital activism. And, as Lina mentions in the roundtable, what we experienced as revolutionary hope, in the longer term, proved to be daily management of crises where amalgams of hope and despair emerge.39 Much of the scholarship on the Arab uprisings that does engage social media frames the discussion about the uniqueness of the media and technology from Silicon Valley that enabled social movements in other parts of the world. Is Western technical infrastructure necessary for revolution? From a place of non-infrastructure came experimentation, came glitch resistance. For example, in Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, Zeynep Tufekci delivers an empirical analysis of how a Castellian40 networked public sphere impacted social movements, in Istanbul’s Gezi Park and Cairo’s Tahrir Square specifically. She writes that “the 2011 uprisings of the Middle East and North Africa had taken the scholarly community—and the activists themselves—by surprise.”41 The influence of social media on the 2011 uprisings has taken center stage in the discussion, with too much focus on Facebook, Twitter, and Google and not enough on the underlying political struggles or engagement with theorists from the region. With faulty infrastructure and text editors that do not work in Arabic, Arab coders and

Arab Data Bodies 49

techies built powerful communities who performed as a network through glitch resistance and reimagining networks of power. Since Timothy Mitchell published the Rule of Experts,42 many scholars have turned to actor-network theory studies with new fervor. As they have done so, they have mobilized the idea of networks and actor-network theory to posit a different vision of the relations between human, nonhuman, nature, and technology. In delving into the digital meanings of uprising, techies reveal how technophilia erases the complex relationship that techies on the ground had with technology and various political movements. Policy makers’ go-to think tanks like the RAND Corporation and political organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy and the Mohammed bin Rashid School of Government, supported by policy makers and the interests of current global hegemonic structures, produce much of the cited empirical research on social media content of the region. Indeed, before and even after the uprisings of 2011, there was a clear divide between the qualitative, humanistic research that Middle East media scholars produced and traditional communications scholars’ quantitative approach. For example, in the articles of volume 5, Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication,43 the authors do not employ methods needed to examine large datasets of digital media content, specifically; nonetheless, they address critical sociopolitical concerns of Middle East media. Postcolonial digital humanities, as Roopika Risam articulated, “requires praxis at the intersection of digital technologies and humanistic inquiry: designing new workflows and building new archives, tools, databases, and other digital objects that actively resist reinscriptions of colonial and neo-colonialism.”44 Multidimensional Data Visualization and Immersion

In disengaging from the Gaza Strip in 2005, Israel did not end the occupation but technologized it. The telecommunications sector was turned over to the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo II accord and subcontracted to the Palestine Telecommunications Company (Paltel), furthering a neoliberal economic agenda that privately controlled digital space. “Yet the shift to less military manpower, less direct contact with civilians, and subsequently less negative publicity has gone hand in hand with a tighter seal around Gaza

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that became a testing-ground for the latest military technologies,” argued media scholar Helga Tawil-Souri, whose intervention in Palestinian digital media infrastructure brought to light the tension between its digital flows and territorial borders. In a 2007 coproduction by Govcom.org, the Dutch organization Hivos, and the Information Society in Palestine Project, “Palestine Web Space,” a set of ten data visualizations on Palestinian web domains from 2004 to 2005, mapped and recorded Palestinian data centers, cables, towers, and “web space” as new territories.45 The visualizations were categorized in two groups—one telling the story of the emergence of the Palestinian web domain (.ps) and the second demonstrating interconnectedness among the various political spheres. There were visualizations mapping the migration of significant Palestinian websites and universities to the new .ps domain. They created early cultural analytics to map how popular Palestinian videos were shared online and to compare how the videos were used for political campaigning. The mapping of the Palestinian telecommunications infrastructure during the wake of the Oslo Accords and data analytics on Palestinian web space (domains ending in .ps) were groundbreaking and inspiring. When I starting building web crawlers to archive and analyze what the Internet was saying about the Arab world in 2008, I began with Gaza because of the Israeli attack on the Palestinian territory in 2008; Lebanon because of the 2006 Israel War on Lebanon; Iraq because of the 2003 U.S.-led occupation of that country. I then repeatedly built new versions of R-Shief, launching version 1.0 in 2011, 2.0 in 2013, 3.0 in 2015, 4.0 in 2017, and finally 5.0 in 2020. Each version ultimately broke or overextended its server, which propelled the next iteration. Applying an iterative design process, this monograph approaches political resistance using a creative research methodology.46 This is to say, this cognitive and transdisciplinary approach conceives and realizes new things through an iterative process of molding together. I caution against overlooking quantitative biases, noting that “it may be useful to note that several quantitative methods of media analysis have failed in interesting ways that offer valuable insight through practice-based research. In fact, the gross inaccuracies themselves have led to new findings of using old methods of analysis on streams of social media content.”47 As data visualization and social media seem to age in light of emerging technologies

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such as virtual and augmented reality projects (volumetric video and interactive 3-D environments), how might area studies evolve with a new way of analyzing contemporary art, technology, and political agency that is intertwined and outside of the classical debates in the humanities and social sciences. An imaginary extension of the representation of R-Shief ’s historical, eleven-year-old archive of social media from two-dimensional data visualizations is an immersive experience using the historical archive of social media during the uprisings from 2011 through 2013. This futuristic adaptation into a game of historical data and public spaces, rich in cinematic nonfiction storytelling and visuality, allows participants to experience the feelings and ideas generated in that historical moment. Instead of selecting filter options on a website to visually make sense of data, in an immersive world, users will walk through what were graffiti-adorned streets and join protesters chanting hashtags in front of the Maspero building adjacent to Tahrir Square. Or they might choose to jump to the famous Battle of the Camel on February 2, 2011, when the tide began to change in favor of the revolutionaries. From 2009 to 2020, R-Shief ’s media system and its many outputs revealed the various friction points between activism and state securitized agencies. The project addresses the twenty-first-century Arab condition undergoing revolution around the concept of the data body. In the process, this work interrogates new modes of knowledge production in the age of mixed realities, artificial intelligence, and big data. The idea for the mixed-reality documentary builds upon the initial prototype, “Arab Future Trippings VR Prototype.”48 In this rendered prototype, an avatar interacts with a set of tweets on the Women’s March of January 21, 2017. As the cyborg approaches tree stumps, the trees grow, and the data appears. The world is made up of sixty thousand users (trees) who tweeted about half a million posts (frogs, mushrooms, and deer) on #WomensMarch over twenty-four hours in 2017 (time indicated by scenes). In a second video, “Moving My Data Body and Live Tweeting,”49 we documented another world of live tweeting mixed with historical, social media. The first shots connect the 3-D VJ Um Amel avatar (bone by bone) to the Kinect motion sensor input system, and live tweeting appears in our VR world. I built an earlier prototype of an immersive environment made up of social media posts in 2012. This early project I built using Unity resulted in an

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Figure 2.1. Early prototype of a 3-D model made by VJ Um Amel that simulated

the user’s movements using a Kinect system. The 3-D model also interacts with Twitter directly in its VR world.

abstract world-building game and video: “Tweet World: 3D interactive visualization of 500,000 tweets on #Syria.”50 Aesthetically, Tweet World is an attempt to transform a 2-D data visualization into a 3-D immersive, embodied environment.51 This game prototype uses a representation of 500,000 Twitter posts on #Syria collected in August 2011, and machine-learning analytics that determine how many tweets were in Arabic (green), English (blue), and French (red). The challenge was in connecting this 3-D data visualization directly to the live stream of tweets. The green waterfalls are Arabic tweets, the blue waterfalls are English tweets, and the red ones are French tweets. The more elevated the terrain, the more retweeting occurred. Your mission is to find the original tweet in each language. The winners get access to the data. The actual source data appear in comma-delineated (csv) tables that are easily downloadable. Users are able to download four distinct files for each of the hashtags found. They appear in a database structure of rows and columns for the player to use in an imaginative way. Development for Arab Data Bodies the game began in 2021 with funding from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). The story takes place in 2111. It is an Arab futuristic world where the history of the

Arab Data Bodies 53

twenty-first century is one where data and artificial intelligence have created data bodies. In a hundred years from now, the story imagines human and nonhuman subjectivities are created solely from data—that data births individuality. The game uses real data from early-twenty-first-century uprising social movements—activating the 2011 Arab uprising as ground zero. The story takes place in 2111. It is a futuristic world where the history of the twenty-first century is one where data and artificial intelligence have created data bodies. In this world set a hundred years from now, humans and nonhumans are constituted solely from data. It is a third-person, point-and-click, narrative

Figure 2.2. Concept art made by VJ Um Amel for cyborgs in Arab Data Bodies,

the game.

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Figure 2.3. Concept art made by VJ Um Amel for future politicians in Arab Data

Bodies, the game.

game. You play as a cyborg historian who has discovered through the remnants of the defunct United States Library of Congress that there were democratic uprisings in the early twenty-first century. This history has gone missing over the last century, but there remains a hidden archive of social media content from that period documenting the revolutions beginning in Tunisia and Egypt. To protect the archive, it was divided among six families who served as guardians over generations. As the cyborg historian, you use special glitch powers to travel to each guardian and convince them to give you the data they have saved and protected. The player’s goal is to retrieve the

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archival bits and take it to the tower in new Cairo, where you decipher the archive through data visualization and a paragraph about the lost history. Disparate and discrete pieces of knowledge produced and promulgated in scholarship around the world could and should be nuanced, revised, corrected, or enhanced by existing in concert with each other. That is, one form of knowledge should interact with another, and the two be portrayed as mutually engaged. Facilitating this interaction is R-Shief ’s signal accomplishment. My vision was to organize (in my role as a scholar) and visualize (in my role as an artist) the disparate array of digital information coming from many transnational Arab communities into one platform—that is, to produce an archive at the intersection of technology, politics, and art. Positioning research on media as reporting vehicles (rather than a combination of art, media, and technology as agents of knowledge/meaning) has focused the investigations on truth-seeking missions—assuming there is a truth out there to be mediated and broadcast. The interdisciplinary roots of digital arts and new media require critics to consider the role of art practice and technology and representation. As writers and scholars deploy digital knowledge production, it can be a vehicle and be transformative. Integra­ ting digital arts into the field of Middle East studies would allow both interdisciplinary fields to enrich their terrain of knowledge production. Implicit in the conceptual design of R-Shief is the premise that the medium itself becomes inseparable from the object—hence the digital form contributes to the manifestation of meaning in a significantly transformative manner. Since the otherness of the Arabic script and language has traditionally rendered its content (scholarship, popular culture, etc.) inaccessible, it has remained outside the interaction of discrete bits of information that form knowledge production. The conceptual design of R-Shief, through its digital ­composition—its unique form—allows the integration of this body of output into a conversation through which the various discrete parts enter into the universalized discourse. The debate over the validity of the printed text and the expert’s authority is certainly not new. Arabic Glitch similarly considers that knowledge is not there for us to find but is constructed and produced. Public intellectuals such as Edward Said embodied no correct way to view social reality and

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historical narratives. He was fond of quoting a passage from the medieval philosopher Hugo de St. Victor: “The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land.”52 Different conventions may have different codes, but these are ultimately not exclusive to each other—they are present simultaneously in our minds and continually inform each other. How did data bodies and real bodies actualize themselves to the degree that a hashtag is connected to a body? To the degree that data can imprison a body? As trans-local specificity of information became hypergranular, institutions of power knew when you were moving and where you were going. People provided this hypergranular data through various platform systems and connectivity. It happened without injecting people with nanobots. When Ricardo Dominguez recounted to me a data body story about Tallahassee, Florida, he was referencing the Critical Art Ensemble’s theory of electronic civil disobedience.53 That is, data bodies and real bodies would amplify in the streets such that there was a civil disobedience that Gandhi called satyagraha (devotion to truth). Though authorities can find you and hurt you, you have taken to the streets for embodied contestation. How does one embody the electronic impulse? Can data and bodies amplify each other?54 The conversation about real bodies and data bodies came to the foreground again when activists and artists started looking at the Global Positioning System (GPS) in the early aughts.55 It was in 2005 that Egyptian feminists built HarassMap, the crowdsourced map of sexual harassment incidents that has grown into a robust advocacy platform.56

three Digital Activism

The word activist is meaningless. I don’t believe that there are activists and non-activists. There are only acts of activism and degrees of commitment, and in that sense, yeah, I was raised to be an activist. I think before May 25, my political involvement was just an excuse to spend time with my mum. The anti-war protests of 2003 and 2004 were actually a great way to see my mum and dad share something. Somehow the time spent together there was more private than in the big family meetings. Now we make several phone calls every day just ranting about the movement or some political happening. She visits me more often to help with posters, pamphlets, petitions, and that kind of stuff.1 —Alaa Abd el-Fattah, 2006

While others celebrated Facebook, Twitter, and the blogosphere for the up-

risings that swept the Arab world beginning 2011, activists in the region were building upon a history of resistance and revolution. Alaa was thinking of his community and how the work of social change had morphed from the tales he heard from his parents of the 1970s and 1980s. Under Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian government first imprisoned Alaa’s father, Ahmed Seif El-Islam, for leading student movements at Cairo University in the late 1970s. Seif earned a law degree while serving in prison. He became a human rights lawyer who defended several controversial cases, including the 2001 Queen Boat nightclub case in which fifty-two men were accused of “obscene” behavior

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and the Mahala workers’ strike on April 6, 2008. Alaa spent his youth visiting his father in jail and growing up at home with his mother, scholar and activist Laila Soueif, and two sisters, Mona and Sanaa Seif—each of whom is an activist in her own right. Mona Seif is known as the voice behind the campaign against military trials for civilians and is an activist on social media. The youngest sister, Sanaa, is an activist and film and digital media maker who was recently imprisoned from 2020 to 2021.2 Thus it went that a young man raised in a household of activists would grow up to become an organizing leader in the open-source software community. Alaa’s reputation grew with the hype of the Egyptian blogosphere, yet his skill as an activist enabled him to build communities of programmers both online and off. In reading a threaded discussion on the predecessor to Reddit and social news aggregator Slashdot,3 we learn that Alaa had organized and led workshops on how to install the Linux4 operating system in 2004. The Linux installfest attracted a group of programmers in Egypt who regularly attended events and cohered online within wikis and forum discussions. Together Alaa and Manal built the first website for the Egyptian Linux User Group (eglug.org). As stated on their website, a shared “philosophy of free software, the open-source model, and love of the GNU/Linux system” brought together this informal group of volunteers from different backgrounds and ages. By browsing the website’s sidebar, you understand that the users were empowered to participate in voting, ranking, and polling functions. Clicking a little further, you find that the website has a ratified charter with articles and bylaws carefully written in Arabic and English. The charter’s eight articles state the organization’s title, why eglug.org exists, membership, basic principles, moderators, administrators, voting and decision making, amendments, and an appendix on versioning. With that process, the programmer who built this website organized not only the data but also the human bodies producing the data—transforming the programmer into a political organizer as well. In a translation from their About page in Arabic, they state: “The purpose of these rules is not to restrict anyone but to help us create a community of friendship and goodwill and to ensure members rights all rules decided upon through a democratic process and are periodically reexamined and changed if need be.”5

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A house of alternative expression and amplifier of muted voices, the Manalaa data body expressed this new wave of digital activism. Through software localization projects aimed to democratize Internet technologies in Arabic grew a global network of Arab data bodies. These Arab data bodies practiced building a culture of open exchange of ideas by embracing feminist practices and strategies of cooperation and horizontal networking. Though these web platforms established democratic processes for voting and decision making, Alaa himself found the term civil society as a neoliberal indicator of the influence of late-postcolonial global exchange. Of course, his generation of Egyptian youth who grew up in Mubarak’s 1990s understood that predicament more acutely. In a blog uploaded to eglug.org on New Year’s Eve 2004, Alaa wrote an analytical reflection on accessible computing in Egypt: “I have a Dream: Affordable, Accessible Computing.”6 Interestingly, this call Alaa made in 2004 echoes those of the “Right to Repair” movement, which gained traction during an equally austere time during the pandemic in the early 2020s.7 In the post, Alaa comprehensively explained how computers’ affordability enabled information and communication technologies (ICTs) to transform Egyptian life-—specifically through data storage, retrieval and processing, sharing data and resources, communication, digital multimedia, and building cyber communities. He then provides a blueprint for democratizing technology through free and open-source software (FOSS) development. Alaa’s online theorizing gave fodder to nonprofit organizations to expand their influence, such as the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada’s most prominent international NGO, with deep roots in Egypt since its 1971 inception. At the top of the blog post, Alaa mentioned that this elaborate document is his attempt to articulate thoughts “hashed out while attempting to join the WSIS Arab NGO Caucus and through discussions with the /dev/cabal folks and Adel El Zaim from IDRC.” Perhaps IDRC was the intended audience for Alaa’s treatise. Regardless, it was yet another marker of the neoliberal impact of international development that the young Egyptian found himself in. Market liberalization of the 1990s had brought about profound change as private and international demand for Egyptian art and culture displaced the state as a dominant force in production.

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Together Manal and Alaa created Manalaa.net as a place to record their thoughts and feelings, to share media and ideas with friends, and most importantly, “to offer free hosting space and free aid in developing a website for any cause we find worthy or interesting or for any speech that is censored or prosecuted in Egypt.” They hosted websites for March 2003 protests against the international invasion of Iraq; for Egypt’s Center for Socialist Studies; and for Bayoumi Andil’s website in Arabic. They imagined and then built the famous Omraneya aggregator, which collected and archived Egyptian blogs. The Manalaa data body often reminded us how, at the same time that data bodies were blogging in the heart of our cities, the youth of our slums locally assembled computers. Meanwhile, the government announced the forming of colossal partnerships, promising to provide a laptop for every child in the context of some grand 2010 scheme. The platform also reminded its readers that bandwidth was already being shared daily by hundreds and supporting the livelihood of dozens in the rural regions outside of urban Cairo and in its less privileged quarters like the Maspero Triangle district. Meanwhile, it took years to consider connectivity for all. They wrote about this evolution. Most importantly, they were thinking about how Internet tools should serve these changes. Feminist Practices

One of the largest forums on the Internet throughout the aughts was a community for Egyptian women called Fatakat. Originally established as a forum among three sisters, mainly sharing recipes, in the summer of 1997, it quickly grew into the most prominent hub of Internet communication for Middle Eastern and North African women, emerging alongside forums for gamers and techies before the advent of social networking sites.8 As early adopters of the Internet in Arabic, Egyptian women developed platforms like SuperMama to cater to Middle Eastern mothers and families, as well as feminist technologies such as HarassMap, an advocacy, prevention, and response tool that uses crowdsourced data to map incidents of sexual harassment in Egypt. As the technologies spread in the early aughts, the Egyptian Linux development community articulated in various forums that there was

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something unique about Egyptian engagement with technology. In 2004, Alaa explained, “ok, no problems here, Egyptians are very good at utilizing any new communication technology or medium, no need to worry here.”9 Alaa’s sarcastic tone suggests he was making fun of the lack of infrastructure because it provides fertile ground for experimentation and collaboration in its void. He was also speaking to the several Arabic digital initiatives that launched around the same time. One of the earliest open-source projects was an Egyptian Internet Technology (IT) company that provided its services using Drupal open-source software. Though the company did not survive the economic crisis of 2008, Open Craft was a pioneering open-source company that brought together like-minded people, including Manal Hassan and Zeinab Samir, who cofounded the popular blog SuperMama. These techies held a shared vision of technologies used for self-organization and community building. This generation of programmers and designers was very active during the very early boom of social networking technologies, participating in bulletin board communities, mailing lists, Usenet groups, web forums, and wikis like the ones Manal and Alaa used in the Linux installfests. One of the leading programmers known for his efforts in making wikis available in Arabic is Ahmad Gharbeia. He trained media and technology practitioners on open culture and knowledge. In a 2020 article, Gharbeia wrote, “Wikis are thus cognitive tools of the cyber age with a variety of software applications which, while varying in the details of their design and method of function, have basic components that allow for collaborative content creation. Beyond providing collaborative methods of content editing to their users, the majority of wikis are also experiments in self-organisation, wherein editors are set to participate in putting forward the rules governing their cooperative community, from the boundaries of that community, its degree of openness and rules of engagement, down to the rules of editing previously authored content and the nature of content to be authored, accumulated and preserved.”10 Gharbeia was not the only programmer who demonstrated a commitment to knowledge production through both theory and practice. He argued that participants in wikis and blogs were all conceptually and practically committed. In reflection, Gharbeia described how revolutionary discussions of religious and ethnic diversity (such as sectarian strife between Muslims and

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Christians in Egypt, and the rights of religious minorities such as the Baha’is) as well as sexual and political orientations, were very present in the collective conversations that took place in the blogosphere at its peak.11 While wikis and content management systems like Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla directly impacted the birth of the blogosphere, these new web technologies also impacted traditional presses in Egypt. Independent journalists from Al Masry al-Youm and other online platforms leaked stories about state human rights violations using open-source web-publishing tools.12 Several writers contributed to the website reporting on “Torture in Egypt” and other independent news outlets. Journalist Lina Attalah managed the editorial desk of the daily newspaper Al Masry al-Youm, a print press covering Egypt’s revolutionary period until it closed its doors in 2013. Atallah went on to found Mada Masr, a Cairo-based media outlet that seeks to secure “a house for a dislocated practice of journalism that did not survive in mainstream organizations and their associated political and economic conditions.”13 Graced with a uniquely poetic pen and dedication to her communities, Atallah envisioned a broad Arab media network that reached into the arts, scholarship, and beyond national boundaries. After the 2011 revolutions, she was involved in several attempts to rethink media practice outside of state and corporate control. This resulted in her focusing on local media groups that were also outward-looking. One of the defining characteristics of these international media collectives is that they were searching for bottom-up and horizontal pan-Arab organization methods, rather than the top-down, authoritarian model of pan-Arab media networking. As the editors of Mada Masr describe on their About page, “In order to launch, we had to wear several additional hats, besides journalism. Some of us became fundraisers. Others summoned their business development knowledge to try building a sustainable model. The artistic ones took care of creating our physical space and our virtual look on the web. The semi-geeks studied what technology could promise to journalism before building and developing our website. And we all took on menial tasks, doing what needs to be done to keep the organization going.14” Time recognized Lina Atallah as a New Generation Leader, calling her the “Muckraker of the Arab World,” in 2018 and again in Time’s 100 Most Influential People of 2020.15 As Cairo-based journalist Jared Malsin explained, “under Attalah’s leadership, Mada Masr

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has earned a reputation for being fearless, running blockbuster corruption investigations, revelations of regime purges and coverage of the war against ISIS in the Sinai Peninsula, which the authorities have attempted to shield from public view.”16 The depth of Atallah’s impact on contemporary culture and politics in Egypt and its Middle Eastern context went broadly from journalism to technology, activism, the arts, and scholarship as she immersed herself and collaborated in these arenas. It was smack dab in the middle of many intersections that I first met Lina—appropriately, at a gathering of feminist programmers and designers who were, perhaps in a cloud of unknowing at first, all involved in a synchronous effort to Arabize the Internet. Co-organized by Lina Attallah and Manal Hassan, among others, the Arab Techies Women’s Workshop took place in Jounieh, Lebanon, in 2010 with around thirty participants. I was one of them. It was a dynamic event where growing relationships were strengthened, new ones were forged, and common relations were unearthed. The first gathering of the Arab Techies had taken place in Cairo at the end of 2008, and subsequent events included an “Arabization” Code Sprint in Cairo in 2009—in other regions, these two- or three-day workshops are called hackathons. These multiday events were designed with intervention in mind. The participants tackled subjects on citizen media, open-source software, digital activism, mobile telephony, aggregators, and social networks. At its conclusion, evaluation forms revealed significant criticism of the lack of women techies at the meeting. The same criticism emerged at the following Arab Techies event, which was focused on solving Arabic-language support issues and NLP problems as well as how to improve search normalization and text indexing. Only two of the sixteen software developers were women.17 Thus merged the idea of organizing an Arab Techies gathering for women only. As part of the Arab Techies initiative, the chief aim of the women’s gathering was to introduce/send women techies into communities desiring social change and needing technical support. Out of this eclectic set grew a cyberfeminist praxis. We had been in communication for a couple of years over my R-Shief project when Manal Hassan invited me to Jounieh to participate with thirty other Arab women from Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, Oman, and Yemen—many of whom were leading progressive organizations

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working with the social and collaborative potential of emerging technologies. What brought us together was a shared commitment to making the accessible, open, transformative, and transforming educational institutions of our dreams. Each of us was working on expanding critical literacies about the social and political implications of these systems. We shared an understanding that digital and other technologies can both subvert and reinscribe oppressive relations of power and work to make these complex relations of power transparent. I met Nagla Rizk, professor of economics and founding director of the Access to Knowledge for Development Center (A2K4D) at AUC. Her academic research on presenting the voice of developing countries in global conversations provides a critical foundation for her advocacy work on promoting access to knowledge, freedom of information, and open-source technologies. Rizk was sitting across from Nadine Moawad from Take Back the Tech Arabia, a local Lebanese organization under the umbrella organization, Take Back the Tech, whose objective was to bring feminist perspectives into technology usage, understanding, and programming. I remember our first moments of encounter so vividly because I was surprised to learn how intimately connected we were beyond the proper scope of the workshop. Walking to dinner in downtown Beirut on our first day, Nadine slipped me a note from someone who, it turned out, was a mutual friend, who I also had not realized was in Beirut. As I was telling this story to Nagla Rizk and Ranwa Yehia over dinner, we also learned that we had even more friends in common. We did not know how intertwined our future endeavors would ultimately grow. Ranwa Yehia was a practicing journalist when she decided to quit her job and explore the Arab bloggers community. Yehia’s research and development led her and her partner, the late Ali Shaath, to cofound the Arab Digital Expression Foundation (ADEF) in 2005. The ADEF website describes the foundation as committed to an “open culture that freedom of expression and right to knowledge thrives and becomes a force that drives us to explore and discover our endless potential.”18 Dedicated to teaching procedural literacy to Arab youth, they aimed to create an Arab digital expression summer camp. The foundation was officially established when Yehia and Shaath began hosting the camps in 2007. Through an ongoing collaborative process, Yehia and Shaath built an organization that continues to support communities of

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techies, artists, writers, and educators working beyond the digital divide both online and offline. The impact of summer youth camps was not new to the Arab world. In 1983, as a young Palestinian living in Egypt, Shaath inspired the “CompuCamps project,” which developed quickly over subsequent years. His dedication prompted his father, along with friends, to fund and organize forty-four summer camps on computer programming, for Arab children aged eight to eighteen. From 1984 to 1994, close to ten thousand Arab youth attended these summer camps in Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon, and even England and Zimbabwe. ADEF built upon this legacy to create what became a visionary project. These camps created a new generation of Arab youth who were drawn into technology as well as political activism— trying to come up with algorithms for social change. Shaath was one of the bedrocks of this emerging community of digital activists and artists. At the ADEF camps, young people from across the Arab world gathered in a residential camp and embarked on an experiential educational journey where technology and art became fertile avenues for self-expression and identity exploration. Among the first cohort of trainers and concept developers were Maysara Abdelhaq, another Palestinian, known as Ahmad Gharbeia for his early contribution to Arabic Wikipedia. Fellow techies from the Drupal forum Alaa, Manal, and Alia Mosallam also contributed to developing the camp curricula in the early years. The gendered code sprint of the Arab Techies in Lebanon in 2010 was a nodal juncture where feminist educators, activists, and technologists collaborated together as Lina, Alaa, and Manal articulated when forging this new Arab Techies network. The mission, as explained on its website, was “to build a collective to support and engage with community-based projects and initiatives such as providing server connectivity, free software, shared data, and resources, and lots of training.”19 I participated in the Arab Techies 2011 code sprint organized with the Arab Digital Expression Foundation and Access to Knowledge for Development at AUC. It was the last Arab Techies event to be organized. Shortly after that Alaa was incarcerated. At the Arab Techies women’s gathering in Lebanon, there was so much information circulating over the five-day workshop that we decided to use Twitter to document the conference. The common identifier we used was the hashtag #ATWomen. A few weeks after the meeting, we tried to capture our

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Twitter feeds to synthesize and analyze the data through visualizations or other techniques. However, since we had not stored the tweets soon enough, we could not retrieve past tweets because Twitter only saved the previous seven days. Frustrated by the loss of our Arab Techies women’s conference documentation, I started researching various ways to capture data from Twitter. I discovered that I could analyze the Twitter data, once captured, through multiple scholarly methods—from artistic visualizations to data for practical research. I had only begun to think about using Twitter as a research tool, specifically for scholarship in the region. R-Shief developed methods for capturing and parsing digital feeds such as Twitter, blogs, RSS feeds, and their applications to behavioral and social sciences from this departure point. The purpose had been to provide researchers with communication of abstract data (large and unwieldy hashtags) through interactive visual interfaces for creative and scholarly works. And so began R-Shief ’s “Information Mappings” of Twitter with these four hashtags: #gaza, #flotilla, #abdulemam, and #KhaledSaid—trending Twitter posts related to censorship or more extensive systems of oppression. For example, the hashtag #abdulemam signified Ali Abdulemam, a blogger and the founding editor of BahrainOnline.org. On September 5, 2010, Bahraini authorities arrested Ali for “publishing false news” on the famous portal. Just as R-Shief recognized the relationship between open-source technology as a form of democratization, it is important to understand that the impulse to aggregate Twitter by hashtag emerged from a uniquely collaborative shared experience of Arab women programmers and activists. Building this tool certainly was not easy. The relationships among this group of women proved to withstand the heavy labor and the extreme trials we faced in the years that followed. On the heels of the 2011 revolution, Alaa organized a series of events he called Tweet Nadwa,20 an event where hundreds of Twitter subscribers huddled together in a room with laptops and phones at hand. A large screen had been erected, displaying the Twitter page created for the Tweet Nadwa, streaming all the messages and photos related to the meeting. The form of discussion interestingly took elements from Twitter directly. Alaa limited speakers to 140 seconds—and asked attendees to wave their hands in silence, rather than clap, in order for the conversations to flow uninterrupted. The nadwa brought activists from a vast stretch of the political and religious

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spectrum and was carried out in good humor and allowed diverse voices a stage to air their views. The second half of the Tweet Nadwa consisted of an open round of discussion, encouraging members from the floor to speak to each other. Alaa stressed that members should speak to each other authentically. A gathering of Egyptian activists and bloggers convened in Dokki, Cairo, to participate in the first Tweet Nadwa, where one person asked the poignant question that set off a series of reactions, “What would an Islamist state look like?” Some argued that the military council, which de facto ruled Egypt then, was the main problem creating factions. Others attacked Islamists for using religion and the fear of eternal punishment to gather voters. Alaa’s response was to ask his colleagues in the room to look forward and envision the perfect state, and then to work backward and discern what steps are needed to build this state. Users flooded Twitter with posts expressing the pleasure that such a meeting could occur and that such a wide range of views could be expressed amicably and with humor. Alaa organized Tweet Nadwas across Egypt and encouraged others to adopt the event format. He published a manual so the younger generation could use the model and organize their local nadwas. This same model was carried on by the Kazeboon media collective, who adopted the same methodology for their videos to be screened in public spaces across Egypt. Free and Open-Source Software Movement

The use of creative commons licensing and praxis of free and open-source software (FOSS) production using social networking programs such as Drupal, MediaWiki, Ning, and WordPress emphasized a commitment to a new model of media production. It embraced free and open access and grew from contributions from a forum of developers worldwide. Through the early developments of open-source technology, I first encountered, and ultimately participated among, the network of Arab techies and activists in the region. I chose to build the prototype of R-Shief in Drupal because of its extensive network of programmers who had already developed Arabic localization modules. Since 2006, developers were still building applications to enable Arabic characters on a keyboard. Several open-source projects to develop software for Arabic on Drupal, Yamli, Kalimaat, GNOME, and other

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platforms enabled Arabic-language content to grow dramatically in the following years. There are activist platforms such as Katib and as I mentioned earlier, Take Back the Tech (to end violence against women), based out of Lebanon. In addition, a great deal of work had gone into Arabic-language analyses, from e-Space’s Arabic Morphological Analyser to Taha Zerrouki’s Arabic verb conjugator project, Qutrub.21 Qutrub is housed in a collaborative wiki, Arabeyes. When I joined the Drupal Arabization forum and the Arab Techies, I was an open-source designer building Arabic and English websites for academic and activist communities in Washington, D.C. We were all working to develop platform infrastructures without knowing where all this might lead. I began collaborating with them and other open-source developers of Arabic software localization and built R-Shief ’s prototype in Drupal because of its free Arabic localization modules. R-Shief provided real-time analysis of opinions about late-breaking issues in the Arab world. By using aggregate data from Twitter and the web from 2009 through August 2011, R-Shief visualized how Libyans perceive the presence of NATO forces, how Bahrainis perceive the presence of the Saudi military, and how pro-regime supporters in Syria are using social media platforms. The data visualizations crystallized my efforts to include

Figure 3.1. Screenshot of R-Shief’s first Twitter Data Analytics Dashboard in

2010.

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the input of a “community-author” in knowledge production. The interactive displays amplified expert, popular, and imaginative voices in the Arab world. Configuring ideas and activating virtual landscapes—aggregating, visualizing, reviewing, and building community—were part of a larger new way to document and mobilize multilingual communities. R-Shief developed a program of joint research initiatives and workshops to provide activists, scholars, journalists, professionals, and artists with tools and methodologies for comprehending the Arab world through the context of procedural literacy—the interplay between human and technically mediated processes. Twelve rotating board members consistently provided R-Shief engagement and opportunities for collaboration and growth. While there are many critical solutions to “open” knowledge, such as UShahidi. com, the need remains to make meaning of systematic changes affecting all fields and the technological devices enabling them. From its conception, R-Shief was developed on the belief that procedural literacy provides the key to twenty-first-century democratic practices. Within a broader framework, I specifically designed this digital archive: to bridge the knowledge gaps between technologists, scholars, artists, and media makers; to build an interdisciplinary community that uses hybrid models for data-centric research, publication, art, and cultural production; to promote procedural literacy across transnational networked communities; to rethink the roles of art, culture, and social media in large-scale social movements; and to archive, digitize, and make available multiple data feeds, including PDF documentation, online articles, video, and Twitter and Facebook analytics to the community of users. The use of creative commons licensing and praxis of free and open-source software like MediaWiki, Ning, and WordPress emphasizes R-Shief ’s commitment to a collaborative, participatory model of archiving. However, I used Drupal because of its proven Arabic-language programming abilities. Drupal’s Arabic-language developers built modules to fix the problems caused by the Internet’s inability to transcribe right-to-left non-roman script languages. These problems are ongoing. For example, Drupal developer @ Amr recently released Mozilla’s Yamli extension and spent some time packaging a Drupal module to integrate the Arabic comma as a separator for Drupal tags.22

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The technological project of Arabic software localization (adapting computer software to different languages and regional differences) requires critical humanistic thinking.23 At an even deeper level, the shift in programming from using C++ (a highly mathematical computer language) to using Java (a computer language that contains lots of English-based vocabulary) has meant a shift into what is culturally and hegemonically English-based. As software languages grew and developed, they shifted from C++ toward more English-language, semantic software languages like Java and Python that supported English-language content. What was needed and what did happen is a process called software localization: translating an application to local languages (for example, making sure string wrapping supports various grammar rules), cultures (dialects), and legal requirements (ownership and censorship laws vary widely). That is the translation of software in ways that empower the user. Translated software can ensure that technology is usable by more people and that more languages participate in the emerging field of information technology. A fundamental reason why localization is vital to Internet democratization is that there are various encoding protocols that computers need, to be able to decode different varieties of human language. For example, English is encoded in ASCII, whereas the Unicode Standard encodes “other” non-English languages and UTF-8 encodes Arabic.24 Software localization has played a critical role in fostering Internet democracy. But not without a price. The way in which glitch exposes the design of a system works in multiple dimensions. In the serial reproducibility of something, glitches will worsen the longer they can reproduce. The presumption of seriality itself is the origin of its eventual failure. Although seriality may not be at stake here, security function and malfunction are. The techies on the ground who understood this were agents in designing new Internet protocols and software, which eventually were sold for security purposes. In typical system functioning, inevitably, a mutation produces something unknown, chaotic, which reveals the entire system’s vulnerabilities. According to the 2011 Reporters Without Borders’ “Enemies of the Internet” report, “One in three of the world’s Internet users do not have access to an unrestricted Internet.”25 Internet filtering practices range widely, from concerns over national security, cultural sensitivities, and social values

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protection to rent-seeking and monopolies.26 This is according to reports from various NGOs (Arab Social Media Report; Freedom House; Human Rights Watch; Reporters Without Borders; Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research; Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor ; Freedom on the Net). They devoted years to studying forms of control in the media spaces (both the so-called traditional media and Internet resources) of Arab countries, as well as to describe the techniques, methods, and prevalence of Internet censorship. Many countries implemented various filtering policies. Tunisian digital activists took a creative route in response to President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali’s web filtering censorship of Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr (not Twitter). Typically, scholars and writers have instanced Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation as sparking what they continue to call the “Arab Spring.” However, in a play on the “404 pages not found” message for blocked websites, Tunisian activists dreamed of him as a fictional frontman for the sprawling surveillance state of the late ruler Ben Ali. Ammar 404 became a tag for referencing the Tunisian Big Brother.27 “Ammar 404” not only censored the Internet, but also glitched it by changing the content of emails in transit. In this world, Tunisians could never be sure if emails arrived as sent, or at all. Tunisia’s surveillance apparatus put it at the forefront of a technological arms race in which regimes gained increasing power to monitor and manipulate netizens’ electronic activities. In November 2011, Bloomberg reported that an Italian company had been hired to monitor online activities in Syria while the death toll of protesters in the country mounted.28 After the report was published, the company ceased its monitoring. Iran purchased European gear to track citizens’ locations after a crackdown surrounding the contested 2009 elections. Egypt, Yemen, and Syria purchased the same interception gear. The Ben Ali regime deployed the surveillance gear to demonstrate its power: changing emails into nonsense rather than luring dissidents into ambushes created a pervasive unease. Tunisian netizens even attributed spam to the work of Ammar 404. These tactics left citizens in a persistent state of uncertainty about the security and integrity of their communications. A post-revolution hunt for Ammar 404 showed that while he is, of course, nobody in particular, many shoulder responsibility for his deeds.

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Under President Ben Ali, Tunisia became the first country in the Arab world to connect to the Internet in 1991. Tunisian netizens (a popular term during the emergence of web 2.0) had access by 1996. That same year, the Tunisian government established L’Agence Tunisienne d’Internet (Tunisian Internet Agency, or ATI), whose primary mandate was Internet censorship. Swept up by the global technology bubble, countries across the Arab world quickly came online. Concurrently, there emerged and developed technological hubs in Cairo, Beirut, Amman, and Abu Dhabi, where entrepreneurs began developing online services and, most importantly, web forums. Discussions about global Internet freedom started focusing primarily on what are widely considered the two most restrictive countries: China and Iran. But while China’s “Great Firewall” was the most sophisticated system of censorship of its day and Iran’s persecution of bloggers unprecedented, the Arab world—the twenty-two Arabic-speaking states and territories stretching from Morocco to Saudi Arabia—actually exerted the heaviest censorship. For example, even today in Saudi Arabia, traditional media websites must obtain a three-year license from the information and culture ministry, a requirement since 2001. By January 2011, the Egyptian Internet had become a platform for mobilization and dissent. Website censorship was still limited when the blogosphere experienced spectacular growth. One could argue that this was due to the neoliberal IT development program initiated by the Mubarak regime in the 1990s. Egypt claimed one of Africa’s highest penetration rates. Telecom Egypt owned the Internet service provider controlling more than half of the market. Digital activists, mainly young and educated, took to social media to denounce human rights abuses and police brutality. One of these digital activists’ early triumphs was the arrest and indictment of the police officers implicated in the torture videos posted by Wael Abbas in 2009.29 Egyptian activists glitched the state of emergency regulations by using social networking sites, specifically Facebook, to mobilize. On April 6, 2008, a strike broke out in Mahalla, north of Cairo, the location of the country’s largest textile factory. On the same day, Egyptian police arrested Facebook users for commenting, liking, and posting about the upcoming labor strike. Activists declared April 6 the “Day of Anger,” and the many messages about this, circulating via SMS, mobilized young people. April 6 became a symbolic

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date—a critical annual meeting date for dissenters. The regime felt obliged to retaliate and stop the movement by invoking the need to maintain order. In 2008, President Mubarak had more than five hundred Egyptian bloggers arrested for “endangering state security,” mainly under the State of Emergency Law. The crackdown on bloggers continues well beyond his regime, and conditions for prisoners have only been worsening over time. Blogger Kareem Amer was arrested in November 2009. Authorities sentenced him to three years in prison for a comment he posted on an Internet forum, purportedly insulting the president and inciting hatred. Beginning in early 2007, the Egyptian government reinforced Internet surveillance in the American-led fight against terrorism through a department in Egypt’s Ministry of Interior. Facebook was placed under surveillance rather than blocked altogether so that activists could be observed or arrested. Authorities monitored emails and telephone calls without any court order under the Telecommunications Law, which required Internet service providers (ISPs) to supply them with surveillance services and equipment without question. Another blogger, Ahmed Abdel Fattah Mustafa, was tried as a citizen before a military court in March 2010. He was court-martialed and charged with “publishing false news” about the army and attempting to undermine people’s confidence in the armed forces. He was released a week later after he posted apologies on his blog. In 2009, blogger Wael Abbas was sentenced to six months in prison and fined five hundred Egyptian pounds on a charge of damaging an Internet cable, a conviction that a Cairo appeals court later overturned. The following year, he was convicted on charges of “providing telecommunications service to the public without permission from authorities” and again sentenced to six months in prison and a five-hundred-pound fine. Abbas’s lawyer said the new conviction would be challenged: “This sentence was issued through a twisted legal path and revealed an invisible hand manipulating the case. The case was closed, and we already proved to the courts that the charges brought against my client were fabricated.” A year earlier, Egyptian authorities sentenced blogger Tamer Mabrouk on defamation charges brought by the Trust Chemical Company. These defamation charges are large clouds of unknowing. The first pre-programmed irony is that it was the very development of Arabic online tools and software that enabled states to carry on their

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surveillance and censorship. At the same time, it enabled netizens to take to the forums and blogs with their reports on corruption, torture, and violence. Within an environment of censorship and surveillance, the techies on the ground developed tools that glitched the very policy they were operating. The Dream

The feminist underpinnings of Egyptian digital activism, online censorship, and the re-occurring appearance of Western surveillance technology being utilized by regimes in the Middle East and North Africa provide the context for the pedagogical impulse driving the trainers in the ADEFs camps, at the Tweet Nadwas, or in a classroom at the American University in Cairo. Before. I used the prose poem as a script to guide VJ Um Amel’s video “Egyptian Body Politic: Adaptation of Tahrir.”30 While Alaa might have found the word activist to be meaningless, he certainly found a dream world inspiring his actions, his political involvement, and his sacrifices for more social, communal, groups of people—al shabaab (Arabic for the people). Dream first; remember to dream first. The square was dominated with a condition that can only be described with sacred, Sufi adjectives even by those who are less committed than us. The genius of the spontaneous collective act forced destiny to respond positively. How did we manage to invent a decision-making mechanism from scratch? How did we defend ourselves on the day of the camels’ attack? Who first started to hit metal fences to elicit the fear of our enemies? We discovered sacredness in being together. Narrative: Was the square really a utopia, one that cannot even be found in dreams, where all the divisions of sex, religion and wealth have faded away? Or was it our dream for the square to become like that, so the dream became reality because we believed in it? The square was a huge spectacle. The revolutionary act from Bouazizi to the embassy is ripe with symbolism. But performance and symbolism are only part of the revolution. A spectacle needs an audience. In our era, audiences rely on cameras and satellite televisions. Away from cameras, the realm of performance is more limited and the possibility of symbolism is scarcer.

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Away from cameras, the struggle was not performed. Away from cameras, our people have gone through a war with Mubarak’s policemen, a war where hundreds, if not thousands, of martyrs fell. The revolution won sometimes by returning violence. Its victory was completed with the burning of the security’s strongholds. The end remains opaque, but we know the destiny of our martyrs. Yet most of our martyrs are poor. The worst in poverty is not need, but the sentiment that the will is absent, for my destiny is not in my hand. The revolution has inspired the poor and elucidated them to the fact that their destiny is in their hands. Even in its least symbolic manifestations, the revolution is a conflict of ideas. The idea is always disturbing for the authority, as it was the case with the protest at the embassy. Any authority. Even in democracies, we find the poor robbed of their will. They are not martyrs then. They are only thugs. What about the police? True, those who killed musicians and engineers are criminals, but in their popular neighborhoods, they are heroes. In the state security, there are butcher houses, but in police stations, they are symbols of the state kudos of course. The state kudos is imposed on those who didn’t see reaped fruits out of obeying the rules and those who didn’t see a chance for the state’s destiny to be determined through obeying those rules (although they haven’t seen any good in there) or through accepting this destiny (although they haven’t taken part in its articulation). How can we be allowed to weave a narrative for this revolution that could threaten this kudos? The security apparatus has killed our martyrs twice; once with the gunshots of former Interior Minister Habib al-Adly and the second when the current minister Mansour al-Eissawy thought that martyrdom was too much for them. One time, cameras were absent, while the second, it was all live. Leave the experts behind and listen to the poets for we are in a revolution. Let go of the mind and hold on to the dream for we are in a revolution. Beware of caution and embrace the unknown for we are in a revolution. Celebrate the martyrs, for amidst ideas, symbols, stories, spectacles and dreams, nothing is real but their blood and nothing is guaranteed but their eternity.31

four Aggregation as Archive

It was a button-operated, silver Nokia flip phone. Steve Jobs had just intro-

duced the first Apple smartphone; I had yet to invest in one. My Nokia was a few years old and beaten up because it frequently “babysat” our three-yearold daughter, Amel, by keeping her distracted while my doctoral research occupied me. The guard asked me for my mobile phone before I went through the second set of security protocols. She put the phone in a cubby that I could grab on my way out. I then put my handbag on the conveyor apparatus within the cozy hallway leading to the office of the United States secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton. The meeting would last only a third of an hour or so. I met with Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller during that visit. She wanted to know how I had used my repository of multilingual tweets to produce “predictive analytics” of the fall of Qaddafi in Libya in August 2011. I explained that the term predictive analytics is misleading, as my process of analysis was formed by looking backward into R-Shief ’s repository of multilingual tweets. A few months later, Assistant Secretary of State Gottemoeller mentioned my research in an address on arms control and the information age at Stanford University. She explained how I had created a massive database

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of Arabic-language tweets following the Arab uprisings. She went into detail describing how I archived the data into real-time visualizations of patterns. “A short while later, similar word spikes reappeared, allowing her to identify Tripoli’s impending fall. She was accurate within a few hours.”1 I was first invited to give a lecture on R-Shief semantic analytic software at the U.S. State Department in July 2011 by the Office of Biological Weapons in the Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance. Rose Gottemoeller’s interest in my research had to do with the early days of the organization Pugwash, a continuing series of international peace conferences of scientists. Its mission derived from a manifesto2 issued in 1955 by Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein—signed also by Max Born, Percy Bridgman, Leopold Infeld, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, Hermann Muller, Linus Pauling, Cecil Powell, Joseph Rotblat, and Hideki Yukawa. The Russell-­ Einstein Manifesto warned that nuclear weapons pose a threat to the survival of the human species and called for major efforts to address and contain nuclear danger—and for an end to war. The only scientist to resign from the Manhattan Project on moral grounds, Rotblat, emphasized the social responsibility of the scientific community. He shared the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize with the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. In the 1950s, Rotblat proposed something called societal verification, a means for concerned citizens to report on violations of arms control agreements. The obvious drawback of a state willingly allowing its citizens to report on violations of international law brought up a lot of questions. Inspired by this vision for an international network for diplomacy to reduce the threat of weapons, Rose Gottemoeller was attracted to the power of cyber communities networking together. She wondered if leveraging mobile technologies and, by extension, social media could aid in the arms control mission. That is why she initially reached out to me. She wanted to know to what extent social media could be used as a public means of alerting violations of international treaties and law. One could already keep track of government radiation sensors with an iPhone, but this could give citizens the ability to themselves detect and track radiation, for example from hidden loose nuclear material from an accident at a nuclear power plant. She also understood that this kind of activity can be viewed as criminal and that the use of Twitter and Facebook has already raised concerns in many national police

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and intelligence services. Her office spent time researching projects such as George Clooney’s Satellite Sentinel, which has been using spacecraft imagery to monitor human rights abuses in Sudan and South Sudan since December 2010.3 Shortly after I met with her, she mentioned her interest in my research in an interview with NPR, not in any predictive abilities but in its timely response time. In response to the interview, the Cincinnati Fire Department contacted Gottemoeller about their web platform Raven911.4 Similar to R-Shief, Raven911 was an open-source development project supporting first responders in the city. While they never found a way to incorporate social media in their process of treaty verification, the discussions at Stanford University helped develop a concept of Public Technical Means (PTM). Sidney Drell and Christopher Stubbs define PTM as methods that involve data, interactions, and analysis in the public domain—in contrast to National Technical Means, such as satellites, radars, and the intelligence community, or Shared Technical Means like associated datasets and agreements.5 The distinguishing feature of Public Technical Means is the generation and analysis of open-access data, by the public, for treaty verification. Even Drell and Stubbs attributed the Arab world as ground zero for digital activism against a state: “The interactions between a technologically empowered public and their governments are undergoing rapid change, as evidenced by recent events in the Arab world.”6 However, R-Shief ’s contributions went into the JASON report, a study in response to a request from the Department of State and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency that provides evidence of open and crowd-sourced data being potentially useful and elective for treaty verification.7 I first heard from the State Department in June 2011, as I was about to board a plane to attend the Arab Techies workshop in Cairo. Initially I was conflicted by this invitation from the state itself about my deciphering software. I naturally brought it up in discussion among the techies. During the summer, Cairenes often wait to gather until around 10 p.m. to avoid insufferable heat. It was clear this downtown restaurant known as the Greek Club was a local favorite—crowds of people eating, talking, smoking cigarettes, and laughing on the rooftop. Around the table were Alaa, Manal, Ranwa, Ali, Lina, and I. We discussed the premise of societal verification for arms control using Twitter and Facebook, specifically. The discussion led us into

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a Gramscian critique of civil society. To illustrate the dynamics, Alaa used Gramsci’s famous quotation, “one might say that State = political society + civil society, in other words, hegemony protected by the armor of coercion.”8 Despite Alaa’s anarchist vision of the role or non-role of the state, none of us actually lived outside the container, at least not then. We were engaged in teaching, training, learning, and significant community building. I understood this invitation to lecture, discuss, and learn from one another to be positive. Upon my return to California, I posted on Facebook: I have just returned from a two-week trip to Cairo, Egypt, where I was invited by the Access to Knowledge for Development Center at the American University of Cairo to participate in their second annual conference on “Democratizing Knowledge.” The trip was super productive, and I met with several initiatives in Egypt to build a new Egypt—free from corruption and democratic from the ground up. On Sunday, 26 June 2011, I was invited to participate on a panel on “Al-Sha’ab Yureed (The People Demand): Transmitting the Revolution.” And so I sent them this VJ Remix of my talk at the #A2K4D conference.9

Alaa’s critique of civil society came up again more than a year later. In a fascinating email thread on the Arab Techies listserv in September 2012, Sami Ben Gharbia, Slim Amamou, and Alaa Abd el-Fattah expressed grievances to the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab when they approached activists on the listserv for data requesting “open and collaborative research.” Alaa wrote: “It seems like there is a new field in academia that uses the ‘newness’ of the Internet as an excuse to get rid of the guidelines, ethics, and traditions developed in the humanities, so results are published without using the tools, algorithms or data, bringing into question how peer review is possible. The problem would be mitigated if local academia were consulted. Why seek stewards among practitioners and not engage with local universities and researchers? Sure our brown universities are as messed up as our brown lives here in the brown south but I assure you the difficulties in working with them are nothing compared to the difficulty of doing accurate research without their understanding of the context.” The problem for Alaa was about the authority of text and knowledge production. In Cairo alone, there are Ain Shams University, Cairo University,

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Helwan University, and the American University in Cairo, along with at least fifteen other universities in Cairo serving an international community. He saw the request from the University of Toronto as sidelining the many, many qualified scholars in his local radius. Ben Gharbia, Amamou, and Abd el-Fattah suggested that academia needs to shift from building tools that further reinforce hegemonic divides between cultures and peoples to building tools that extend the work and agency of local digital activists themselves. At the time, we were hopeful that we could support activists’ technical needs across the Arab world. We had no way of imagining the devastation that would engulf the region after the uprisings. We also never imagined that Alaa would end up serving multiple times in Tora Prison, or that we would mourn the deaths of Aaron Swartz, Bassel Safadi, Ali Shaath, and many more. We were occupied celebrating our glitch resistance while dominant interests continued to identify individual disruptive potentialities. It is the algorithmic apparatus that makes possible such micro-calculative rationality and logic. As I mentioned in the introduction, states have always tracked their populations for potential threats, underscoring the state-foundational belief that the people are a problem. To illustrate further, in Algorithms of Oppression Safiya Noble argues that racist and sexist Google search results— such as pornographic images returned when you type in the phrase “black girls”—grow out of a corporate logic of either willful neglect or a profit imperative that makes money from racism and sexism.10 In a different vein, Simone Browne explains “surveillance is nothing new to black folks,” from slave ships and slave patrols to airport security checkpoints and stop-and-frisk policing practices. She points out that surveillance in black life challenges a techno-­ deterministic approach. Brown points out that surveillance has not been inaugurated by new technologies; rather, racism and anti-blackness have undergirded and sustained the intersecting surveillance of our present order.11 Glitch extends the intersectional frame to bring a spotlight to the vast technological apparatus of governing institutions, subaltern bodies, and Arab data bodies in mechanisms to discipline the population. This apparatus’s danger is that it is invisible—it is infrastructure with all of its political injustices and skewed realities. This chapter engages in the logic of digital archiving, specifically the computational method of aggregation I used in analyzing Twitter conversations around two historical moments, in Libya

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2011 and Gaza in 2014. These two examples enable me to conduct a close analysis of Twitter in order to unpack the issues of aggregation in relation to archiving the glitch. The set of research practices that emerge at the intersection of cultural and technical analytics in new media studies is born out of the moment now. The present moment is defined as we face new scales of machinated information, with affective and political influences on our cultural practices that are systematic, transnational, and mobile. Like the nonlinear form of a NoSQL database beyond the x- and y-axis table configuration, data-driven narratives are made legible metonymically rather than metaphorically. R-Shief ’s Twitter mining project computationally performs an aggregating function that seeks to harness the liminal space between groups of people trying to deal with archival material and digital repositories in the Middle East. From 2009 to 2013, R-Shief aggregated tweets using Twitter’s public API version one12 for its primary source. By aggregating tweets over years, R-Shief created a digital archive that provided real-time information visualization representing the global pulse of Twitter. I built it to pull automatically from Twitter’s API up to the maximum allotted tweets every two minutes and save them onto our cloud-computing server. Then I started creating more IP addresses to surmount Twitter’s limit of tweets per computer, which the company authenticated by the machine’s IP address. To amass an archive is a leap of faith, not in terms of preserving data, but in the belief that there will be someone to use it, that the accumulation of these histories will continue to matter, and that they will have listeners. The archive represents something even more palpable for the artist—an opportunity to provide a countercollection, standing against its monumental history. Created as much by state organizations and institutions as by individuals and groups, the archive, as distinct from a library or collection, constitutes a repository or ordered system of documents and records, both verbal and visual, that is the foundation from which history is written. Libya

In the months prior to the overthrow, it became apparent that we could determine the influence of various of Qaddafi’s children based on their visibility

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on social media (including newspapers and radio) and that their visibility changed whimsically on nearly a daily basis. More curiously, after the overthrow it became clear that many interlocutors in Libya had either switched sides or had put up false fronts in the earlier days. What was true and what was false? It is still impossible to know. What we do have is a blog I posted on Friday, August 19, 2011, of the procedural steps in data analytics alongside a blow-by-blow account of determining that the rebels would attack Qaddafi in the capital within eighteen to thirty-six hours. After months of gains and losses by rebel forces across Libya and, with the help of NATO, Benghazi’s first liberation, those forces required only eighteen hours to gain control of Tripoli’s city center. On the one hand, this seems like a rapid turn of events. On the other hand, the rebels experienced significant setbacks and committed several errors of judgment. The delays included temporary losses of territory that they thought they had liberated, errors in the deployment of Libyan forces, and security control. The announcement came with the news of the arrest and detainment of Saif al-Islam Qaddafi, the Libyan dictator’s son and putative heir. A short time later, he appeared on television to prove that, even if the rebels had succeeded at capturing him, he had quickly escaped. I received a text message from a friend in Cairo who alerted me to fighting in Zawiya, Libya. They asked me to check my Twitter real-time analytics system for insight. The rebels had taken Zawiya, a principal city near the Mediterranean coast in Libya, only thirty miles west of Tripoli. When I examined R-Shief ’s Twitter aggregator, I found similar patterns emerging in the analytics related to the hashtags #Zawiya and #Tripoli. By using R-Shief ’s real-time analytics within hours of events in Libya, I could see that it had taken roughly twenty-four hours for the rebels to take over Zawiya, from when the fighting began to when they captured the main square. Just as I had seen the words now and began appear in the word clouds generated from frequency counts from Thursday night tweets on Zawiya, I began to see those words appear in tweets on Tripoli. Despite the desire to find a tool that could use Twitter to “predict” Qaddafi’s fall, it was not a prophecy. It was big data and analytics, yes. It was a text message from a friend, a social network of techies on the ground that activated a sequence of events. It is critical to identify the distinction

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and relationship between “big data analytics” and what happens intimately within communities. This is a clear example of the complicated interplay between what happens in the virtual world and in the embodied one that is so inextricably linked, that thinking of them as alienated from one another is simply not useful. Friday, 8/19/2011

7:55 p.m. Los Angeles time/4:55 a.m. Zawiya time: Throughout the summer of 2011, NATO continued to bomb key targets aimed at halting Qaddafi’s military and his loyalists’ abilities while the rebels made minimal/scant progress. Then something appeared to change radically, allowing the rebels to make great strides, including taking the city of Tripoli, neighborhood by neighborhood. The announcement of the rebels taking control of Tripoli came reasonably quickly, especially when one considers how many months it took for both the rebels and NATO to get to the point of recognizing the rebels’ form of political government, the Transitional National Council (TNC).13 Placed on a broader time spectrum, Qaddafi held power for more than four decades in Libya, but the actions that led to his marginalization took less than one year. It is as if Libyans’ fears diminished as they banded together and experienced rebel accomplishments—­ demonstrating an incredible political possibility. Saturday, 8/20/2011

2:00 p.m. Los Angeles time/11:00 p.m. Zawiya time: The Natural Language Processing (NLP) analysis of posts using the hashtag #Libya illustrated the value of another tactical insight gleaned from social media: how the repetition of certain everyday words on a social media platform suddenly reflects the rising momentum of a rebel advance. The first step to analyzing what was happening in real-time involved exporting all the #Libya tweets aggregated from March 30 through August 20, 2011. In Figure 4.1, graphed tweets revealed patterns and disruptions to the baseline analysis. The rate of tweet activity grew to levels earlier witnessed during mass mobilization in the spring. Even more noticeably, the number of channels, or hashtags, increased exponentially in August, in particular.

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Figure 4.1. This is the graph that enabled me to quickly slide through words

already processed.

Saturday, 8/20/2011

4:20 p.m. Los Angeles time/1:20 a.m. (next day, Sunday) Tripoli time: A few hours later the same day, the rebels advanced to Tripoli and began the fight for Libya’s capital city, and I conducted a second analysis. I compared Tripoli’s tweets with those on Zawiya within the #Libya corpus of data; I first filtered tweets with various combinations of “Zawiya” and “Tripoli” from the same population sample.

Figure 4.1 was initially dynamic and showed that it took roughly twenty-­ four hours for the rebels to take over Zawiya from when the fighting began, when they captured the main square. Just as I saw the words now and began appear in the word clouds generated from frequency counts from Thursday night tweets on Zawiya, I had begun to see those words appear in Tripoli’s tweets. It took forty minutes to process gigabytes of tweets data, visualize, and analyze them. I then sent a text message to R-Shief ’s mobile subscribers: “Analyzing R-Shief ’s tweets—prediction is Tripoli will fall in the next 18–36 hours.”

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Figure 4.2. Word cloud of most frequent words tweeted on #Qaddafi from

August 18 to August 22, 2011.

Sunday, 8/21/2011

5:00 p.m. Los Angeles time/2:00 a.m. (next day, Sunday) Tripoli time: Indeed, eighteen hours later, Al Jazeera journalists and social media feeds announced that Mohammed Qaddafi (the eldest son) had surrendered. NATO-supported militia from the Khaled bin al-Waleed Brigade had captured Seif Islam Qaddafi (although a few days later, he was checking into a hotel), and the head of intelligence, Abdullah al-Senussi, had been assassinated. The Libyan regime had fallen.

In the case of #Libya tweets, most people who were tweeting about #Libya probably were not tweeting from Libya. The least ambiguous indication of that assumption, even before NATO interfered, is that tweets in Arabic were coming in at around 2,500 a day while tweets in English were coming in at 20,000 a day—a remarkable difference, especially when you compare them with tweets on #Egypt or #Syria in the graph below in Figure 4.3. This brings into question how we define geography and asks us to consider: how do we include immigrants in the Diaspora into the global Arabic-speaking world. These graphs have not fluctuated much (see Figure 4.1). There has been a slight increase in Arabic tweets, but nothing indicative of a local population. It certainly seems that the infrastructural conditions for those on the ground tweeting on #Libya were different from those tweeting on #Syria or #Egypt,

Figures 4.3. Comparison of the number of tweets in Arabic (green) to tweets

in English (brown) on #Libya with tweets on #Syria when rebels advanced in Zawiya in August 2011.

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where phones and tweets are an integral part of organizing the rebellion. In many YouTube videos and images, Libyan rebels are seen carrying AK-47s rather than the cell phones carried by Egyptian regime opponents.14 One possible interpretation drawn from this comparison is that the people tweeting on #Libya were communicating a “voyeuristic” logic and perhaps “encoding sarcasm” and “linking media.” They were, thus, most likely not Libyans on the ground in Libya. This matters because it challenges, once again, how we define the geography of social media. It requires an understanding of the historical context of migrations to understand what other parameters need to be included in these data calculations. Algorithmic Logic

The study of algorithms explores how to develop methods and techniques that solve problems in an efficient manner. To demystify the algorithm, I offer a theory for understanding it through humanistic inquiry that probes the logic of cultural objects, narratives, or processes for critical making. The history of the algorithm predates computation. Given that the term algorithm has an etymology traceable to the ninth-century Islamic scholar alKhwārizmī, how can we understand the explosion of discourse about algorithms in the last decade? Algorithms are more than computation: What does it mean to study algorithms as myth, narrative, ideology, discourse, or power? In what ways can these approaches prompt reformulations of concepts and questions within computer science, data science, and big data initiatives?15 Algorithms are specifically computational: What kinds of applications and activities are now possible given certain developments in computational infrastructure and theories of computation, such as big data, deep neural networks, distributed computing, or “microwork” developed in computer science since the 1970s? What are the social and theoretical implications of these developments?16 Algorithmic bias: Training data encodes biases; data collection creates feedback loops (find an area with crime, send police there, arrest more people, more crime stats); subpopulations have different observed trends; minority populations necessarily represent smaller portions of data.17

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When trying to solve a problem, a computer scientist needs to devise a systematic and procedural solution that the computer can then follow to solve the problem. This systematic solution is called an algorithm. Consider the problem of finding the telephone number of an individual. Assume we start with a phone set (in mathematical terms, a set does not have order) of pairs of names and their corresponding phone numbers: . Given a query, for example, a search for a phone number correlating to a particular name, we would like to write an algorithm to retrieve from the phone set of pairs the corresponding number. Since the data is not sorted, the best we can do is to check all pairs in the list and see if the first component of any pair matches the query name. For example, we might query for anyone with the first name “Amel.” Here is a simple algorithm: ■■

■■

■■

■■

Compare Amel with the name in the first pair. If it matches “Amel,” we are done, and we return the corresponding phone number. Otherwise, we check the next pair in the set. Repeat this until either a name matches “Amel” or we reach the end of the list and announce that Amel does not have a phone number (at least in our phone set).

This is how an algorithm works. From a computer science point of view, it is not a great algorithm since it has to check every pair in the list. We call it a linear algorithm, since it takes a linear amount of time proportional to the dataset to come up with an answer. Imagine if the list had all 7 billion people on the earth, and each check took about 10 nanoseconds (10-9). This process could take, in the worst case, about 1 second. That is a straightforward “algorithm,” and this is an eternity in terms of computers. Imagine that this operation was being done in the cloud (by a search engine). You would need to add communication time. Furthermore, assume you had to store this data on disk (the data was not only phone numbers but also pictures and videos of Amel). Disks are slow. This simple algorithm would easily take multiple seconds, which is not acceptable for online interactions. (Would you get upset if a search engine took several seconds to answer a query?)

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The study of algorithms explores how to develop methods and techniques that efficiently solve problems. For example, in the phone search problem, a computer scientist might start by deciding to sort the phone list by name before executing any queries. Sorting is an algorithm that takes a list and orders the listed items in numerical or alphanumerical order. Once sorted, we can devise a simple search algorithm: ■■

■■

■■

Given a name, Amel, compare the name with the name in the middle of the list, say midname. If Amel is less than midname (in alphabet order), we know that the phone number for Amel cannot be in the second half of the list, so we can discard all those pairs and we know Amel (if in the list) is in the first half. Or vice versa. Now repeat this process for half of the list until you either find name or not.

This is a more efficient algorithm than our previous linear algorithm. The method used here is called divide and conquer. It is a paradigm for many other algorithms. It only needs to check a logarithmic number of values. For example, to search for a phone number in a list of 7 billion entries, we only need to check 33 names! This makes a computer scientist happy. Divide and conquer is an example of an algorithm where the time it takes to solve the problem is much less than the time it takes to linearly touch every data item. We call this type of algorithm logarithmic (nothing to do with algorithm!). Of course, we had to first sort the list of names, which is an expensive operation in itself, but worth it if we are going to answer lots of queries. Divide and conquer is one example of several different paradigms to help solve problems. These include greedy methods, dynamic programming, etc. Most of these algorithms aim to have complexity that is logarithmic, linear, quadratic, or cubic in the size of the dataset. Even though we would love for all algorithms to be logarithmic, realistically, many problems need to touch each data item more than once, hence the need for more than linear algorithms. All these algorithms are called polynomial time algorithms. Unfortunately, there are many interesting problems that we would like to solve, where computer scientists have not been able to design polynomial

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algorithms. This is not due to lack of trying: many very clever people have been banging their heads at some of these problems for decades (at least explicitly since the 1950s) to develop polynomial time algorithms, or prove that no such algorithm exists. An example of such a problem is the traveling salesman problem. In this problem, we have a set of cities connected by roads. The road between any two cities has a given length in miles. A traveling salesman would like to visit all cities while minimizing the travel time, that is, the sum of the miles traveled. It turns out that to date, the best algorithm we can design is to enumerate all possible paths, that is, test all permutations of the nodes and pick the one with the least travel time. This is quite time-­consuming, even given only 20 cities. We must generate more than 2.4 * 10^18 (24 followed by 17 zeros). Even on the fastest computers, this would take too much time to solve. In general, there are many problems like this, where the best algorithms we know involve enumerating all possibilities. This type of algorithm is called exponential (or non-polynomial). (One can actually do better than generating all paths by using dynamic programming. The algorithm is faster than the brute-force method, but still exponential.) In general, these problems can easily take months to solve even on the fastest computers for relatively small problem sizes. In general, we do not know for a big set of problems whether there is a polynomial solution or not. This is a famous problem in computer science and is referred to as the “P=NP?” problem. Many computer scientists have been working on this problem for decades, and nobody has been able to ascertain if the answer is Yes or No. Since many popular problems are NP, and we need to solve them at any rate, computer scientists have developed many approximation algorithms. These algorithms are not guaranteed to give the exact correct solution (for example, they might not give the minimum cost solution to the traveling salesman problem), but often they give guarantees on how close. They have also devised randomized algorithms that use randomization as part of their logic (flip a coin) and provide solutions with probabilistic guarantees. The Archiving Algorithm

Aggregation is a process of combining things. In mathematics, it is an operation that takes multiple values and returns a single value. That is, it puts

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things together so that we can refer to them collectively. As a specific type of software program, it recognizes no ownership between the hierarchy of objects and the sub-objects. When an aggregate is destroyed, the sub-objects are not destroyed. As an example, think about references in a bibliography. You refer to them individually in your footnotes. However, the bibliography is a thing in and of itself. It is also important to realize that each member of the aggregation still retains its properties during part of the whole. In other words, each reference in the bibliography remains intact. The process of combining them has not altered them in any way. In computer programming, object aggregation is different from object composition, which is a different way of composing objects together. For example, using the method draw() could combine sub-objects.18 While aggregation’s primary purpose is to refer to a group of items as a whole, a secondary one is to simplify access to the individual items. For example, an array is an aggregating mechanism that creates a group of ordered entries, where each entry can be referred to by its index: this is powerful logic. It means that the group can be referred to by its name, say X. Its members can be referred to by their index, X1, X2, etc. Many computer languages support this way of combining entities. I first learned about aggregation in 2003 while building a website for an antiwar activist collective I co-organized, the DC Guerrilla Poetry Insurgency.19 In the conversation on an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) about free and open-source technology, the young and brilliant Aaron Swartz explained what an aggregating function was and how to apply it. At the age of fourteen, Aaron helped create Really Simple Syndication (RSS)—one of the first Internet aggregating protocols. Later, in 2005, he founded blog aggregator Reddit, which tapped “the wisdom of the crowds” by letting users submit and rank news and other online content.20 When I was visiting the IRC for opensource web developers during the actions in protest of the 2003 war on Iraq, Aaron was often present, providing advice on how we can organize news collaboratively. Those of us on that channel dreamed of creating an active and connected public sphere online. We believed that bringing news together is a way of bringing people together. You can see traces of this vision in Reddit’s way of threading discussions for more than a decade. Aaron participated in an impressive data dump of materials from JSTOR, a scholarly database, on

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the principle that scholarly material should be free to users. Scholars and activists do get along, but that was not the case for Aaron Swartz. Aaron had legal access to JSTOR through his Harvard affiliation; however, he was indicted because he had used a Massachusetts Institute of Technology guest account to download the articles. He faced prosecution, more than a million dollars in fines, and thirty-five years in jail. In early 2013, a month before his trial in federal court was scheduled, Aaron took his own life. We owe a great deal to Aaron Swartz. His contributions to online community aggregation paved the way for many other online resources that have since challenged existing knowledge production. Soon after Aaron launched Reddit, Drupal developers released their first aggregator module.21 The Aggregator module in Drupal can fetch not only text but also images and other varieties of content. After fetching the feed data, display those data in Drupal regions. Aggregator makes feed items available from a Drupal site using RSS, Atom, and RDF. In another way, you can also say that an aggregator is an RSS feed reader. Meanwhile, in Egypt, Alaa Abd el-Fattah and Manal Hassan added the new module to their Drupal-­powered Manal and Alaa’s Bit Bucket website and began to aggregate Egyptian blogs.22 The aggregator played a significant role in building a community of bloggers (among them activists and citizen journalists), helped expose Egyptian bloggers to a broader audience, and made bloggers more accessible to mainstream media. After a couple of years, Manal and Alaa moved the aggregator to its own website, which they named Omraneya. In Arabic it means to give life, to build—as when you infuse arid land with people, plants, and activity. A poetic expression to launch a new imaginary, a unique combination of ideas to fill the long-standing void of a voice from the people, Omraneya collected more than four hundred blogs from across the region between 2007 and 2013. It was a house of alternative expression, and a broadcast of voices otherwise silenced. Blogspot, the most popular blogging platform at the turn of the century, enabled Arabic script in its posts. It hosted many of the blogs in Omraneya whose taxonomy included many intersecting ideas: Lebanon, Human rights, (journals) ‫خواطر ومقاالت‬, Palestine, Music, Labour Party, Terrorism, London, politics, egyptian, baha’is, (Mubarak) ‫مبــارك‬, Media,

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religion, (human rights) ‫حقوق اإلنسان‬, (politics) ‫سياسة‬, activism, Egypt, kareem, Iraq, art, bloggers, labor, ‫ خواطر‬Islam, Mubarak, Iran, left, technology. While media pundits and scholars celebrated Facebook, Twitter, and the logosphere, Alaa was thinking of the community and how activism was changing and differing from that of previous generations. “Now, after two years of running the aggregator it is finally going to get a place of its own, we have grand plans for new community-oriented features, a better design, and more community ownership. Give us a few days to get everything running,” wrote Alaa in a blog post on the new Omraneya site days before the new year. A few weeks later in 2007, he uploaded these instructions on how to use the grammar and punctuation of aggregation: we just added a few neat features, you can now rate blog posts, if you like a post click on the up arrow and if you hate it click on the one pointing down, when enough people vote we’ll start showing the highest rated polls. (note you have to be registered and logged in to use this feature). speaking of registered users, if you register, you’ll get your own bookmarks page where you could add the posts you find interesting and refer back to them later. now categories (especially tags) are a great way to navigate blogs, check the tag cloud above or see even more categories here. but neat as they may be unfortunately most Egyptian bloggers don’t categorize their posts. Even when they do their worldview might not match with yours. but don’t despair you can now tag posts too, just click on the title of any blogpost to show it in a page of it’s own and you’ll find a field where you can add tags separated by commas.23

This marked a historical moment not only in Arabic software development but in the even broader field of software development. And he did so seemingly having glitched traditional English writing conventions with his disregard for much punctuation, and capitalization altogether. The set of research practices that emerge at the intersection of cultural and technical analytics is born out of the contemporary sociohistorical moment as we face new scales of information that demand machinated computation and political influences on our cultural practices—systematic, transnational, and mobile.24 In techie language, this is similar to the nonlinear narrative form of a NoSQL

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database, where programmers map data-driven narratives relationally and within larger systems and orders. Archiving Twitter

A conversation I had with Elizabeth Losh, author of Virtualpolitik, about archiving Twitter reminded me of the existing limitations of expression of the economics of social media.25 Indeed, there are no definitive economic models to study the value of our associations, our temporality, or how to quantify things in the present. Bound by the logics of imperialism and late capitalism, emerging trends on large-scale social media datasets cry out for humanistic examination. R-Shief ’s mining and compilation of data helped to fill that gap by working among networked communities as commentators and resources. A basic literacy about the logic of software is crucial to help non-experts reimagine their relationship to technology and gain a deeper understanding of the implications of using or choosing not to use digital technology. Some analysis of the population sample is required to gain a deeper understanding of tweeting and how it contributes to spreading information. Since we cannot know how much of a sample the public API is out of the complete corpus from Twitter, the analyst detects a limitation in the data, much like a box or a series of boxes missing from a historical archive. Despite this limitation, most researchers analyze tweets using only Twitter’s API because of the costly nature of the full pipe, though Twitter does not make the cost explicit. They have varied over time. In 2011, to receive all tweets posted, what is known as a “full hose,” cost around $30,000 a month. Twitter also imposes another restriction: it has set a download limit of 1,500 tweets for each pull, and users can only access up to the previous seven days of tweets. This is a critical point. To do any in-depth analysis of tweets, one needs a history and quantity to sample. As for the tweet itself, it was initially composed of 140 alphanumeric characters, produced by an individual using either a text-enabled phone or a computer. Tweets can be organized by hashtag (a sort of “channel”) by adding a “#” in front of a group of characters (usually, a word). This is done for metadata, such as geo-tagging, to be embedded in the stream of tweets identifying tweeters’ chosen identifiers when they make their postings. Accurate

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geo-location is rare as very few users allow for geo-tagging, which requires user permission. However, there is a popular assumption that when people are tweeting, they are tweeting what is happening in the moment around them in real time and space. But that does not consider memories, voyeuristic engagement from another location, or pure imagination and fantasy. From within the fields of design research and performance art, R-Shief ’s tools and methods are centered on a practice of “radical presentness.” The basic operational logic of software is “send and receive.” Aggregation is a continuous series of send and receive functions. In one line of code (represented in a time-based scheduler, a “cron job”), the request to data-mine Twitter, Facebook, blog, forum, and website content is executed every two minutes. Rather than approaching human behavior, and therefore art, as mimetic, R-Shief understands the human behavior it archives as in a state of “becoming.” From this perspective, art does not imitate life, but rather, it takes on a double identity, where the nature of human experience and the telling of it is something that never quite begins, nor quite ends, but is in a constant state of becoming. In this case, R-Shief is designed to embody this in its code and machine intelligence. Gaza

How do we understand the relationship between spatiality and embodied experiences and different kinds of digital performance? How do we think about the aesthetics of information visualization? How do we create things that are not only beautiful as a representation of data, but also things that are meaningful for people, that move people, and that cause people to feel connected to these data streams? The biggest underlying difference to consider when studying the violent attacks on Palestinians in Gaza in 2014 is that they have been under siege in this manner since 2006, with cuts to water and power supplies and direct military attacks from the state of Israel. By 2014, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian children under the age of ten in Gaza had lived through three wars in their short lifetimes. The accumulation over the years of young bodies under siege has become obscene. I argue that the exhibition of young, dead Palestinian bodies on

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Figure 4.4. Boys on the Beach, from VJ Um Amel’s #Gaza Visual Narrative by a

Cyborg: Images Tweeted by Hashtag (2014).

display on social media felt obscene. The excess of violence, the excess of the images, this voyeuristic act upon ungrievable life.26 In an archival impulse, I created #Gaza Audio-Visual Narrative by a Cyborg: Images Tweeted by Hashtag as an interactive, audiovisual narrative using five sets of posts from Twitter on #Gaza, #GazaUnderAttack, #ProtectiveEdge, #PalestineResists, and #48KMarch. It includes an interactive mosaic of the surveillance image that went viral of the boys killed on a beach, computerized sound files of the tweets, and an organized gallery of the images most tweeted. The mosaic comprises more than a thousand images posted on Twitter within an hour on July 26, 2014.27 Merely comparing the imagery of the public sphere of Tahrir during the revolution and subsequent protests when the square was adorned with posters of gruesome images of those of the martyred, to the pornographic, violent images of broken young Palestinian bodies, brings insight. How does the physical Tahrir experience—on a human scale with twenty-foothigh images—compare with the phone or computer’s smaller scale? Rather than attempting the impossible task of understanding the totality of what Arabic speakers are producing online, this archival process collects modest

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percentages of data and from within defines scopes of analysis. In other words, discontinuity is a bifurcation, a switch from one virtual pattern to another. Critical research and artistic practices are all tied up together—they inform each other. I suggest an interdisciplinary approach to questioning and learning that incorporates an art research methodology. Research is the praxis of systematic critical reflection that focuses on compelling questions. And these questions can be investigated only when we unsettle the very tools we use to examine them. The design process I used to make this piece combines a method of cultural analytics with a world-building approach to narrative, displayed through a web interface. Rather than using formal elements like color or hue to determine the procedural form of the image as media scholars advise,28 my process involves pulling culturally significant content and prioritizing images that are most popular in my representation of social media on Gaza by hashtag. This is determined by analyzing trends on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and other websites. By clicking on the #Gaza Audio-Visual Narrative by a Cyborg interface, the user can enter this world of images and audio tweets.29 The immersive experience is meant to make you feel the bodies bloodied and maimed, bombed and broken, in photographs on social media in the hundreds of thousands. On the home page is an interactive mosaic with a mix of images parsed from sets of tweets by five hashtags: #GazaUnderAttack, #Gaza, #48KMarch, #PalestineResists, and #ProtectiveEdge. Each hashtag represents a distinctive group of data bodies using affective language to express their political perspective. You can engage and find a way into the archive whether you see the Israeli attacks as “protective,” or as “attacking” Palestinians, or if you frame your tweets for people in solidarity with the Palestinian right to return to their homes, as signified by the number 48, as in 1948, the year of the Nakba. Subjectivity is implicit in any archive, as two people on different sides of an issue will give you different data. As you hover over the mosaic, the images attached to each tweet enlarge. When you click on the hashtags on the top menu, you get a traditional gallery display of the images tweeted with that hashtag only. This function allows users to compare mobilizations of information patterns. When comparing various sets of hashtags, semantic differences emerge among different online communities. During events, there are often several

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hashtags circulating representing the names of the persons, places, or events, such as #Egypt or #Gaza. Then there are the more creative hashtags representing a political position or movement in a particular struggle; in this instance, #GazaUnderAttack represented the voice of most tweets on Gaza, even more than the #Gaza tags. More than half of the people tweeting on the subject saw the people in Gaza as victims. The fewest tweets came from the hashtag #PalestineResists, used by activists, and #ProtectiveEdge, the Israeli army’s title for the war on Gaza that summer. However, the virtual cannot become actual without differentiating itself in the process. In a way, the virtual will always miss the mark of actuality through this differential; it must toggle undecidedly between presence and pattern, “materiality, on the one hand, information on the other,” as N. Katherine Hayles asserts.30 She argues that the characteristic of virtuality is to exist in such a way that it is differentiated and is forced to differentiate itself; in order to be actualized it must create its lines of differentiation. Through this theoretical prism, we can better understand the first ambition of Arabic Glitch: to demonstrate that by 2021, the concept of the virtual is no longer a useful category of hermeneutics, which is its main conceptual purpose. By focusing on Gaza and the broader Middle East, we are able to ask whether conceiving of the physical and the virtual as distinct becomes empirically and/or phenomenologically misguided since our lives are so integrated with the various experiences. There are data files, programs that call and process the files, hardware functionalities that interpret or compile the programs, and so on. It takes all of these to produce the electronic text. Omit any one of them and the text literally cannot be generated. For this reason, it would be more accurate to call an electronic text a process rather than an object. Even these other entities—files, programs, hardware functionalities that are “literally” necessary for the electronic text production—seem to be working in the service of a familiar literary textual persistence. Are the tweets here seen as a process, or as the authorized result of a process? Finally, how do we understand transitory text that can be mobilized through such innovations as dynamic typography, where words function as verbal signifiers whose visual image’s kinetic qualities also convey meaning? Are these dual-­ aspect “word-images” functioning, for the critic or reader, in time? Whose

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real time? The author’s time? The reader’s time? Are they processes, or have they just acquired (new) qualities? Text is process. Departing from Hayles, my conception of the glitch insists upon returning to #Gaza to think about fixity, presence, and movement. To allow code to comment on the writing machine, we need to elaborate a more emphatic statement of this argument, one that is less fixated on a layered, flickering structure that imitates persistent text, or on a text—­ persistent in this sense—that can “acquire” paratextual dynamics. Instead we need to recognize textuality that is itself dynamic because it contains, conceals, and runs on code—because it exists only as a durational, transliteral process. If virtuality is negotiated between materiality and information patterns that are generated in the virtual world, then virtuality itself is composed of the words in the ideas expressed on social media, not the people themselves. Looking at social media content through a virtual lens requires a focus on a different kind of analytics—on information patterns and flows. The information thus loses its body in order that we might better know how to keep disembodiment from being written once again into dominant concepts of subjectivity. Electronic textuality involves multiple senses utilizing signifying components that allow us to see images as elements of the narrative. The confluence of accumulating injustice and political possibility catalyzed uprisings from Tunis to Cairo, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain. Regimes fell, and new ones emerged. Technology and social media have taken many positions in the stories about the protests that spread across the Arab world: it was the revolution itself, the vehicle for revolution, and/or the vehicle for counterrevolution and containment. It was not long before the counterrevolution forces would take hold, bringing in a civil war, followed by military recalcitrance and the imprisonment of activists and bloggers. In 2013, Alaa Abd el-Fattah wrote from prison: The charge—it appears—is that I participated in inviting people to protest yesterday, in front of the Shura Council building, against p­ lacing— for the second time—an article in the constitution legitimizing the court-martial of civilians. The strange thing is that both the Prosecutor and the Ministry of the Interior knew that I was present for eight

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hours at First Police Station New Cairo in solidarity with the people arrested yesterday on the same charges. But neither the Prosecutor nor the MOI ordered my arrest at the time or demanded that I be questioned. This probably means that they intend to put on a show where I play the criminal-in-hiding.31

The end of the aughts arrived hopeful for netizens in urban spaces transformed by the previous decades of market liberalization. They had endured an ongoing War on Terror, and U.S. president Barack Obama had just won a historic election campaigning on the idea of hope. Years from now, you’ll look back and you’ll say that this was the moment, this was the place where America remembered what it means to hope. For many months, we’ve been teased, even derided for talking about hope. But we always knew that hope is not blind optimism. It’s not ignoring the enormity of the tasks ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. It’s not sitting on the sidelines or shirking from a fight. Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it and to work for it and to fight for it.32—Barack Obama, Iowa Caucus Address, 2008

It was a contagious moment that was compelling to many people ­worldwide—including the inhabitants of Cairo, Egypt. Once in office, the new U.S. president delivered another well-known address at Cairo University on June 4, 2009. He aimed to ease the tensions between the United States and the Middle East accumulated during the eight years of the George W. Bush administration. Obama had taken office in the shadows of the previous decade’s dramatic events—the 9/11 attacks and the wars on Iraq. The deterioration that happened in Iraq after the war, with the occupation, the Abu Ghraib prison torture photographs, and other torture scandals, led to severe degeneration of the U.S. reputation in the region. Obama was trying to provide the public a counternarrative in the name of empowering others, yet through a neoliberal policy, he sought to protect U.S. interests in the Middle East—namely, access to cheap oil and maintaining Israel’s power over Palestinian land and neighboring Arab states.

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The crowded city of 17 million33 came to a strange halt in the spring of 2009 as the Egyptian government closed major thoroughfares in Cairo in preparation for Obama’s visit. Residents of areas neighboring the Cairo University campus were amazed by the complete transformation. New gardens suddenly appeared in front of the university’s dome, along with freshly painted old bridges and lampposts around the area. The officials managed to lay new asphalt on all roads the Obama motorcade would travel through. Unbeknownst to all, shortly thereafter, these same streets would hold the millions of Egyptians pouring out and into those public spaces. The relationship between the Arab uprising and U.S. intervention in the Middle East post-9/11 changed public approval of U.S.-Egyptian relations. The U.S. has had a strong influence on the country since the 1970s, yet the Egyptian people visibly disapproved of the U.S. wars on Afghanistan and Iraq and the broader U.S. War on Terror. By 2008, a shift in U.S. administrations from the Bush-Cheney era of massive destruction to the Middle East and demonizing and orientalizing all that is Arab to anything else brought hope. Obama’s campaign for hope provided the counternarrative. A cloud of unknowing in the legal system that destabilized the power structures? Was it the revolution or the counterrevolution that was a glitch in the larger historical progression? Or was it both? How do we make sense of these stark moments of possibilities, so quickly reversed? The glitch is one way to begin posing and answering new questions about the uprisings and social revolution, more generally, and in relation to technology.

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Visitors watched their image gradually form on the wall using letters from

the Arabic alphabet as they entered the back of Cairo’s Viennoise Hotel. Bodies entering the gallery space triggered a ceiling-mounted projector to cast Arabic glyphs onto the walls. Letters changed as people moved, and eventually, a group of visitors could form words or even sentences from all the glyph play. Just as Ahmed Basiony had envisioned, visitors controlled the image formations in the room through their moving embodied locality. Basiony’s artistic process was algorithmic, using open-source programming that integrated the external hardware circuitry platform Arduino board. Language lies at the heart of this configuration process. Like my impulse to archive the Internet in Arabic, Basiony highlighted the Arabic alphabet’s incompatibility with ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) programming code through his experimentation with open-source software in his Cairo Documenta installation, “ASCII Doesn’t Speak Arabic.” The interactive installation was exhibited at the 2010 Cairo Documenta. It was his last show. Ahmed Basiony was killed on January 28, 2011, while actively protesting and filming the clashes around Tahrir Square. He had been confirmed to play at Barcelona’s digital music festival SONIC in July 2011.

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The Egyptian Ministry of Culture had announced he would represent Egypt at the next Venice Biennale. However, his ASCII installation and performance, “Thirty Days Running in Place,” along with footage of street protests he filmed from January 25 to 27, 2011, were Basiony’s final works. Mainstream media named him the “martyred artist.” His tragic death affirmed Basiony’s artistic body of work and, by extension, the credibility of new media art practice in Egypt. The grassroots activism of Arab protesters of 2011, as viewed in the U.S., disrupted the firm grip of stereotypes and upended Hollywood narratives about Arabs as uncivilized.1 Media or digital art conversely has endured its history, which is arguably defined by predominantly American and European lenses. And representations of contemporary Arab art outside of the Arab world commonly fetishized the “Arabesque.” Basiony’s death, nevertheless, instigated potent validation of new media art practice in Egyptian art history. In 2011, the pavilion at the Venice Biennale was posthumously dedicated to and composed of fragments of repurposed and unfinished material from Basiony’s video and performance compositions. Perhaps it is precisely because Ahmed Basiony and other Arab artists using digital media and algorithmic processes, were outside of the frame of reference, that they have been able to experiment in and produce breathtaking glitch, experimental art. Art critic Laura Marks, for example, has curated several compelling collections of Arab experimental artists of the moving image under the frame “Arab Glitch,” in addition to her published volumes that curate many more Arab artists. In 2014, she curated four Arab Glitch films at the University of Rochester. Gheith al-Amine’s T.S.T.L. is a stop-­motion video that dissociates humor and wit, unveiling its obsolescence, through the use of a canvas, one black acrylic tube, one white acrylic tube, a human voice, a melodica, a pocket trumpet, lots of gibberish, and a self-referential phrase.2 Rania Stephan went to Cairo street stalls to find pirated VHS tapes of the late Egyptian actress Souad Hosni’s films, then edited together scenes from the secondhand footage and remixed the soundtracks into an elegiac feature-length film. Its three acts, bookended by a prologue and epilogue, trace Hosni’s emergence, maturity, and untimely death, possibly by suicide. Throughout, Stephan blurs the line between Hosni’s complex private life and her public personification of an idealized modern Arab woman.3

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Marks also screened Ahmed El Shaer’s Home,4 Raed Yassin’s The New Film,5 and Ahmed Nagy’s The Holy Zero,6 alongside The Three Disappearances of Souad Hosni at the University of Rochester’s Arab Glitch film series. It is also imperative to expand the frame to include often-forgotten corners of the Arab world where compelling examples of such work exist. These include North African techno artists in the Maghreb region, Arab diasporic activist artists, Iraqi, Palestinian, Yemeni, etc. This chapter provides an account of dissent in the Arab world of 2011 as a dynamic (digital) subtext of critical dissonant practices, embodied in a glitch, as forms and strategies of material transformation. Digital platforms and infrastructures, artistic collectives, contemporary media art, and (trans-)cultural networks have shaped new ways of being, as well as epistemologies of connectivity. This chapter examines the aesthetic of technical errata of layered historicized forms and data of algorithmic art. A YouTube series from Jordan, The Box–‫الصندوق‬, consisted of short films that address the relationship between technology, the body, and resistance within and beyond culture and society.7 Kuwaiti musician Tamara Qaddoumi released her EP Soft Glitch in 2021 featuring four songs whose names suggest subject matter about dislocation, mobility, and operating across various planes. In an interview with Bazaar magazine, Qaddoumi reflects on working during the pandemic. She describes her experience producing the music videos for Soft Glitch with choreographer Jana Younes as returning to her theater roots. She said, “I studied physical theater in drama school, and drama in university, and felt like I lost touch with that physicality, the sense of movement psychology. When people listen to my music, I want to ignite every sense. So I thought it was a great moment to relearn how to communicate and speak with my body. The video really is about the ways in which seeing can be touching—which I think resonates particularly this year, with so much imposed distance and lack of intimacy.”8 In 2021, she also gave a talk in Kuwait titled “Jasady” (My Body). Cairo Documenta 2010

The Ministry of Culture hosted the 12th Cairo Biennale in 2010–11 despite a scandal involving a Van Gogh stolen from the Cairo Museum earlier in 2010.

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Mohsen Shaalan, deputy culture minister and director of the official Cairo Biennale, had been arrested and then fired as a scapegoat in the months leading up to the biennial. The show went on without a director. Inspired by Documenta’s legacy reaching back to 1955, twenty-five young Egyptian artists organized an uncurated exhibition in Cairo’s Viennoise Hotel, across town from the Cairo Biennale. They proposed an alternative model for display free from the conditional frameworks imposed by art institutions and their curators. It would be another nine years before Cairo officially hosts its thirteenth international biennale. Conceived under the theme of “independence,” the DIY exhibition across town, Cairo Documenta 2010, had little support for exhibition space. Rich for analysis, we are reminded of the common interest in occupying sovereign, public space in the arts, activism, and the digital world. Documenta 2010 provided no simple answers to the questions it raised. The participating artists, Mohamed Allam, Mahmoud Hallwy, and Ahmed Basiony, had also grown more experimental in their art practice, producing elaborate digital media installations. Basiony participated in several workshops in the “Egypt Lab” through the Medrar Contemporary Art Foundation in Egypt. By 2010, Basiony was among the very few Egyptians working in digital interactive media despite minimal formal academic training and a lack of the vast amount of necessary software and hardware knowledge. His story speaks to the resourcefulness and strength of the Egyptian informal networks and subalterns. Cairo Documenta reflected the increasing decentralization of Cairo’s independent art scene—from Townhouse Gallery, Contemporary Image Collective, Espace Karim Francis, and Mashrabeya transforming part of Cairo’s downtown into an arts hub—to newcomers who contributed to the exhibition, including Artellewa, Zawya, Darb 1718, and Medrar for Contemporary Art. Medrar, an artistic initiative cofounded by Mohamed Allam and Mohamed Abdelkarim, grew into a sustainable institution that also initiated Cairo’s first Video Festival, which has been running annually since 2005. At a site for digital media art production, the Medrar artists produced largescale audiovisual performances and media archival representations, often employing glitch aesthetics by altering digital compression to reveal the materiality of the support underlying the digital image.

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Allam himself was one of the leading video artists leading up to the 2011 uprisings. In one of his best-known projects, My Nineties, Allam collected more than four thousand VHS tapes from around Cairo’s urban corners. Out of this archive of physical tapes, he created a glitch art project addressing Egypt’s mediascape during the 1990s. In her ethnographic study of cultural and art production in 1990s Cairo, Jessica Winegar makes the case that artists belonging to the young generation manifested an artistic subjectivity tied to neoliberal sensibilities.9 This approach enabled us to see how, in Egypt, the state and globalizing art markets have summoned the work and the subjective consciousness of artists, critics, curators, and collectors who had persuaded largely secular ideologies of taste, authenticity, personhood, expression, and national belonging. The figures in Egypt’s art world are not passive subjects in being “hailed” this way but are, in fact, alert and discerning agents who debate their pasts and their prospects critically. Similar to Joy Garnett’s Bee Kingdom10 and R-Shief, Allam generated several creative productions from the archive, including an exhibition of video installations screened raw and glitched using analog techniques from the 1990s, as well as a live audiovisual performance. It also includes a documentary by Emad Maher featuring newspaper and magazine articles and scholarly texts discussing the role of television in that decade. Most of the artwork at Cairo Documenta 2010 adopted an activist approach, directly commenting on socioeconomic conditions, cultural values, and political events. In “Without a Cover Project,” Ibrahim Saad projected two short documentaries from Iraq and Egypt in a restroom. In the first, he showed a U.S. soldier covering the head of Saddam Hussein’s statue at Firdous Square with an American flag during the 2003 U.S. invasion. In the second, Egyptian football fans covered the face of novelist Naguib Mahfouz’s statue in Cairo with the Egyptian flag after the national team lost to Algeria. News headlines about poverty, illiteracy and economic crisis in Egypt under President Hosni Mubarak’s regime appeared at the screens’ bottom. According to the artist’s diacritics, Mahmoud Hallwy’s piece, “To Be a Hero,” comprised three poster-size self-portraits in which Hallwy dressed as an Egyptian army officer against an incongruous, computer-generated backdrop that projected images of geysers, a white picket fence, a willow tree, and pink flamingos.

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In a challenge to traditional art practices, artist Marwan Fayed presented “Possibilities of Post Curation” on the opening night of Cairo Documenta 2010. Mohamed Allam’s sound installation piece, “You will enjoy a pop song if you listen to it more than five times in more than one place,” was displayed in the same room. Allam has long critiqued the traditionalist framing devices associated with “high” art such that the layout worked perfectly. Ahmed El Shaer’s software app, “Reissue,” also critiqued the English language’s domination through video game play. As an interactive game, “Reissue” audience members were asked to destroy “the word concept in English,” which appears at the right side of a computer screen, by aiming a missile at it. The tension created by the three works in one space reflected the diversity of views among the participating artists concerning the mediation of artwork and the legacies that shaped an “authentically” postcolonial “Egyptian” art. Cairo Documenta 2010 provided a convergence of emerging digital art practices in the region. Perhaps its most significant achievement was in offering an art exhibition experience outside the world of art jurisdiction and in curating experimentation itself. With its strident tone, the exhibition statement is arguably a manifesto proceeding through a series of negotiations, that is, this is not an institution, a permanent space, or a curatorial initiative. The claim of artists’ autonomy from authority was performed and embodied rather than rendered through a detailed argument or critical narrative. Inspired by emergent artist and activist communities like the DIY artists of Cairo Documenta 2010, in Kassel, Germany, the documenta 13 curator, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, decided to include events outside the city of Kassel in advance of the 2012 exhibition, as well as a concurrent event at a different location. Christov-Bakargie, the second female curator in over fifty years of documenta, thematized documenta 13 through four cities and their states of being: “onstage” in Kassel, “under siege” in Kabul, “hope and revolt” in Cairo and Alexandria, and “retreat” in Banff, Alberta. The seminar’s original theme had been “in a state of hope”: one of four conditions informing documenta 13’s curatorial approach. In a colorful review in Bidoun magazine, Claire Davies explains that due to the growing momentum of counterrevolution in Egypt, the organizers decided to substitute “sleeping and dreaming” as the seminar’s theme a week prior. Hope was now the domain of the

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Muslim Brotherhood—which, having been outlawed for almost six decades, was now pushing forward a self-styled nahda, or renaissance platform.11 While Cairo was inundated with a burgeoning new media art scene in 2010, in Europe, Egyptian artist Bahia Shehab participated in an exhibition commemorating one hundred years of Islamic art in Europe. The curator made it a condition that she use Arabic script in the piece. And the artist had only one word to say: “no.” She titled her exhibition using the common expression of negation, “No, and a Thousand Times, No.” She then searched for a thousand “no’s” produced across time and space of different regimes of Muslim rule. Organized chronologically, she published her finds in a book with the name, patron, medium, and date. The book sat on a small shelf next to the installation, which stood three by seven meters in Munich, Germany, from September 2010 through January 2011.12 Like many Egyptians who had dreamed or dared to dissent, Shehab experienced a hopeful vision of dignity for all people in Egypt during those eighteen days between January 25 and February 12, 2011. Divisions of power among the military, Islamists, and revolutionaries quickly glitched that hopeful vision. After several military assaults on civilians and the Maspero incident in October 2011, the mood definitely had changed. Shehab took the stencils of the “no’s” she had collected, and like ammunition, she started to graffiti them all over Cairo, like ammunition. She added messages after each “no.” She wrote: “No to military rule,” “No to a new pharaoh,” “No to violence,” “No to blinding heroes,” “No to barrier walls,” and “No to the stripping of people.” Each statement is made in response to a real-life incident, such as the reference to stripping people, based on the “blue bra” incident of December 17, 2011, when video emerged of security forces at a protest in Tahrir Square beating and dragging a young woman until her clothes no longer covered her. The blue bra reflects the larger grouping of Egyptians, enraged by this public act of violence. For Shehab, this female protester does not stand alone—she is placed next to other demands, other people, and other societal problems that were highlighted through a litany of Nos stenciled on walls throughout Cairo. Ahmed Basiony reminded us that ASCII does not speak Arabic; Ahmed El Shaer and Bahia Shehab remixed Islamic art spanning fourteen hundred years into multiple instantiations of contemporary resistance graffiti. All the

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Figure 5.1. Bahia Shehab, A Thousand Times No, stencils, 2011, Cairo, Egypt.

Courtesy of the artist.

while, Arab techies like Manal Hassan and Ahmad Gharbeia relentlessly built new open-source software enabling Arabic script to operate on interfaces, online forms, and with social media nomenclature like the hashtag. And we were not the only ones concerned with the abduction of language through the transformation into the twenty-first-century information age. In addition to the video game Reissue, Ahmed El Shaer produced the video Recycle (the Code)13 as a commentary on how algorithmic code, as a language, continues to recycle political and social ideas. In New York on a fellowship at Eyebeam to explore code as a medium of self-expression, artist and computer scientist Ramsey Nasser built Qalb/ 14,‫ قلب‬a functional programming language allowing a programmer to write programs completely in Arabic. He built the software to find out where do things bring break? For example, ‫ قلب‬is hosted on GitHub, where hyphens replace the projects’s name in Arabic glyphs. Every text editor failed at editing text coherently in different ways, requiring Nasser to patch together a process with several text editors, open-source technologies, and help from Arab solidarity. Developed during his residency at the New York City art institute Eyebeam, Nasser’s project

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is engineering performance art. It is not speculative. It highlights the cultural biases endemic to computer science and challenging the assumptions we make about programming. Why is it so hard to program in non-English languages? Language lies at the heart of this configuration process. As VJ Um Amel, I created dictionaries to analyze the arsenal of online data she has against certain questions. Yet limitations became the wealth of impressions and humor embedded in colloquial language, in abundance in social media in non-English languages. My goal thus became to embody this language in future research tools, methods, and dictionaries. Glitch Art Practice

We have to continue to experiment in order to build and imagine. The Internet is not a fantasy space. It is a future space. From Second Life to metaverse, it has been an actual space where real people have transactions and interactions with one another. The way I answer that ambiguity between data and real bodies is through a sense of embodied locality that is the cyborg art practice. As in my glitched memory of walking down flights of stairs on loop, asking what is the WTC, I communicate through an embodied performance of body with language. The VJ Um Amel project also introduces the question of materialities, creation, and motherhood. Whether these creations are nonbiological or organic children of the cyborg, they are co-created through various configurations of community authorship. VJ Um Amel is a longue durée performance that continues since that infamous day on September 11th when I was running down those ten flights of stairs in Washington, D.C. Its magnitude in duration enables the VJ Um Amel project to substantively speak to the longer arc of U.S. foreign policy in Southwest Asia and North Africa. My earlier work investigated the process of building communities among transnational artists and activists through design: DC Guerrilla Poetry Insurgency (2003), Word of Mouth (1999). Over time, my practice evolved into live cinema performance, digital art, network analysis, questioning the problem space between technology and political change in the contemporary world from the perspective

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of an Arabic-­speaking cyborg. Embodied with USB ports as fingertips, VJ Um Amel tells us that we are all cyborgs reconciling the organic with the technical. The global pandemic of Covid-19 heightened our reckoning with radical biological vulnerability. While we have yet to wrap our heads around it, one thing is clear: the kind of viral capacity we imagined the Internet to ­provide—if it ever were global—is now even more multilocal than ever. In February 2020, just before the world shut down in a global pandemic, three exhibitions curated by Shiva Balaghi opened across three galleries at the American University in Cairo’s Tahrir Cultural Center that focused on the concept of glitch and its evidentiary aesthetics in artistic transformations—group exhibition Glitch: Art & Technology,15 Bahia Shehab’s solo exhibition, Corner of a Dream”16 and my first solo exhibition in Cairo, Beit Um Amel. Insisting that we are all cyborgs, in Beit Um Amel (“House of Um Amel”) I created in the gallery space her home with pixelated self-portraits of a cyborg, glitched interactive media, digital archives of social media activity in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, and “R-Shief Portal” (2020)—a virtual archive that visitors can both experience and manipulate on wallmounted iPads.17 Shehab’s exhibition was a digital video installation that weaves together the themes of exile, nomadism, and belonging against the background of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s writings while staging the documentaries in an immersive room lined with white sheets. Balaghi opened her curatorial outline with a nod to German artist Hito Steyerl, emphasizing the organic, vulnerable arrangement of our networked lives: “In today’s increasingly fluid media space, images and sounds morph across different bodies and carriers, acquiring more and more glitches and bruises along the way.”18 The curator said the idea of the exhibition’s theme and its title, Glitch, came to her when she first saw my glitch print on metal, Birds, in which the pixel-sorted image shows birds flying over a refugee boat in Libya.19 Among the installations in the group exhibition, Haytham Nawar’s vector-based graphic installation Aish Baladi—Arabic for Egyptian local bread—uses a very analog reference, a political and cultural icon of the Bread Uprisings in Egypt.20 The group exhibition also featured the prominent futurist aesthetic of Basim Magdy, Petra Cortright, and Shady El Noshokaty.

Figure 5.2. VJ Um Amel, Beach/‫الشاطئ‬. An exploration of memory, diaspora, and

migration through glitch aesthetics. Shown in Beit Um Amel.

Figure 5.3. VJ Um Amel, Tapestry/2015( ”‫)نسيج‬. Dye sublimation on metal. The

glitched image of destroyed homes induces a simultaneous intimacy and abstraction. Shown in Beit Um Amel.

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The walls in Magdy’s exhibition corner were painted in colors of blue, purple, and pink, creating a flashy out-of-space experience. Petra Cortright’s digital painting IRA javaplateset_ LANdesk marche floriste (2018), a reframed still-life, references intermedial practices of found footage that are appropriated and altered to create more multidimensional objects on a physical medium. Ahmed Basiony’s teacher and mentor El Noshokaty extended glitch into organic matter in his exhibition, Colony–Rainbow Map, a multimedia installation that narrates the operations of a living ecology through a large ­microcosmic glass cabinet.The artworks in the exhibition covered a wide range of artistic practices and media, thereby configuring a complex understanding of what “glitch” reveals in the here and now of a perennial geopolitical hotspot—the Middle East. In January 2021, Iranian independent art institution Platform 101 hosted Glitch Art: Pixel Language, the first video group exhibition in Tehran focused on glitch art curated by Mohammad Ali Famori and Sadegh Majlesi.21 Glitch Art: Pixel Language featured twenty-seven artists from Iran, Singapore, Azerbaijan, Italy, Brazil, and the United States, whose works examine the value of pixels and their identity as the smallest components of the digital image, forcing the viewers to look at the pixel language from a different perspective. Their mission, according to their website, “revolves around the economy of art by developing an equal opportunity between the artist and the audience. towards making art accessible to everyone, this institution supports young artists by featuring their work among private art centers and cultural institutions around the globe.”22 Over ten years since the 2010 DIY art exhibition Cairo Documenta inspired a generation of digital artists, the Tehran-based art collective Platform 101 brings back the collaborative, grassroots Middle Eastern art scene. While they are building local communities of Iranian artists, Platform 101 has a global vision. Occupy Data

Beyond the scope of art galleries and festivals in Cairo, Tehran, and Kassel, many international glitch artists have emerged on Facebook groups, GitHub forums, and other net art collectives. Artists have used the glitch as a technique to explore the inextricability of politics and aesthetics. International

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coders, activists, and makers, in turn, extended arts-based methodology into hacktivism, science, and social science research. In 2011, R-Shief released all of its #occupy data and analytics for a threeday hackathon. Out of Stanford University, @Liberationtech tweeted, “Extraordinary & Unprecedented: #OccupyData Hackathon to Bring Together Academics & Activists.” Another influential tweet by Ethan Zuckerman was retweeted forty-four times on December 7: “You’re invited to the #OccupyData hackathon, analyzing #OWS data at @civicMIT.” While the outcomes from this experimental event are proving to be more than a series of smart, useful, and beautiful data visualizations created in forty-eight hours, perhaps more importantly what has emerged is a systematic documentation of our process (by way of videos, notepads shared online, recorded conversations, and many back channels). Our process also included synchronizing among four venues—Utrecht, Netherlands; Zaragoza, Spain; Cambridge, England; and Los Angeles, California. We hope the trails we leave behind will serve future research and development in the area of social networks, resistance, data visualization, social media analytics, and the Occupy movement. We organized this event seeking how we might apply the mechanics of the Occupy movement to the data of Twitter itself. #OccupyData is meant to serve as an intervention by offering experts and activists a means to work together and think critically about the movement—how its messages, goals, the role of new media, and specifically, Twitter, might play in this system. Officially, thirty-nine people registered for the event internationally to receive open access to R-Shief ’s collection and swarm computing analytics. Joining us on back channels like Ustream and an IRC channel were experts such as Gilad Lotan from SocialFlow, who, along with others, gave online advice and lectures. The pedagogical implications of this experiment are many—bringing activists, whose learning is self-directed and modus operandi is often speed over rigor, together with academics, whose reflexive methods often require time and are embedded in privileged, hierarchical systems of learning, are ambitious, to say the least. In trying to tailor this event for both activist and academic audiences, some design processes failed to work cohesively. For

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example, the request for academic participants to “register” is both understood and gives credibility to the event within that community. However, asking hackers and activists to register intrudes into the veil of anonymity that many Western activists create (for example, Banksy and Anonymous). Within a few hours of day one of the hackathon, someone created a BitTorrent of the data that enabled users to bypass the registration process. It is made available on the Google public document that has become the centralized repository about the hackathon. We knew that eventually, it would happen, but still wanted to see how the hacking of the registration system would unfold. The conversation about how accessible we made the database was discussed among the steering committee, with rigor, months before as we planned the event. Requesting each person to register to use the data served two purposes. One, we asked users to agree to an attribution, and noncommercial licensing on the registration form. Two, we wanted to know what would happen with the data and have a centralized location to showcase the outcomes of the event. There was another reason why we had asked people to register—which is that we are in pursuit of workable models for organizing ourselves in a post–Arab Revolution, post–Occupy Wall Street, post-Twitter world. On some levels, the information age is one of hypertransparency and inevitable surveillance. One tactic that we were trying to emulate was Hasan Elahi’s process of sousveillance—the inverse surveillance or “watchful vigilance from underneath.” Sousveillance seems to be working in the Middle East, where activists and bloggers are known not only by name but also by face, a face that sometimes carries symbolic meaning. One of the sparks of the Egyptian revolutions was the spreading of the face of the Alexandrian who was brutally killed in 2010, Khaled Said. #OccupyData Hackathon

For those in Los Angeles on Friday morning December 9, 2011, the hackathon began very early (nine hours behind UTC in Western Europe) in order to synchronize with fellow hackers in the Netherlands who had organized a team of students and faculty from Utrecht University’s New Media Master’s

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program (NMDC). In a blog post about the event, Assistant Professor Mirko Schӓfer wrote, “NMDC students are interested in data analysis and visualization. Popular platforms such as Twitter generate large amounts of data that can be scraped from the Internet.”23 Indeed, these students (Ryanne Turenhout, Thomas Boeschoten, and Ruben Hazelaar from UU) were motivated and had blown through the dataset before I actually woke up.24 Meanwhile, the participants in Boston were arriving at the MIT Media Lab after a night when authorities had evicted #OccupyBoston protesters. The fast-paced “Twitter energy” was palpable as hackers tweeted each other in an effort to synchronize. The team in Utrecht sent me a Dropbox link to a bunch of files they had processed for network analysis using Gephi, an open-source software built in France. But after doing so, they realized they had much more than they could analyze and wanted to share the files with others in the hackathon. And at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Sasha Costanza-Chock and Pablo Rey had uploaded a series of images reflecting the results of their whiteboard brainstorming session.25At this point, both groups had realized the broad scope of the project and decided to focus on one corpus of data. The Utrecht team focused their work on the OccupyAmsterdam tags, while the MIT team focused on the OccupyBoston tags—each making use of their local experience and knowledge. After watching the truly inspiring work presented in Spain via Ustream, Alex Leavitt and I, located in the Blue Lab of the University of Southern California’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy, in Los Angeles, joined the couple of participants in Cambridge and Utrecht in Google Hangout. We streamed the conversation for others to watch and join in. While the other teams were thinking through the various available datasets, in Los Angeles fellow USC PhD students Alex Leavitt, micha cárdenas, and I engaged in long conversations around the design process of analysis— the value of qualitative versus quantitative study. We discussed the role of ethics in new models of communication and social interactions. We asked: In a post-DIY world, where are our value economies? We also engaged the questions micha had posted on Twitter the night before. She asked, “#OccupyData: can we use the data to visualize the scope of violence? The global number of arrests? of police? of types of arrests?” And, “can we dynamically shift qualities like size, attitude towards police, economic status to various

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Figure 5.4. Concept art for #rustltd in-progress #OccupyData Hackathon

game.

qualities like color & shape?” Ultimately, “how can you visualize a mass movement of locally autonomous collectivities? Or even a single occupation?” On day two, we started seeing visuals and more documentation emerge. The morning began with several people using pad.riseup to make choices about what scripts and software to use in various visualizations. We were able to both collaborate on decisions as well as preserve documentation of that process.26 In Utrecht, Ryanne Turenhout posted a visualization of fourteen hashtag networks, #OccupyData, in a corpus of millions of tweets. Pablo Rey posted versions of his Pepper Spray Cop Mosaic on Meta Meme.27 Critiquing through a deliberate performance as a cyborg, through this practice devoted to data, VJ Um Amel has performed capturing, analyzing, and visualizing algorithmic culture as a mediation of civic life today. This approach to understanding the algorithmic culture of social media and a trends analysis of Internet data as cultural objects draws from the histories of critical cartography, indigenous mapping, and feminist critique. The VJ Um Amel project operationalizes these critiques of power and feminist ethics.

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Actual material bodies are writing the information patterns that netizens circumscribe and read on social media. And with social media, for the first time, we are seeing media being circumscribed by its millions and millions of users rather than one state-run apparatus like a newspaper or television network. These authors represent the plethora of human diversity. It is this largeness in daily political movements and operations that are defining the social media production of knowledge. It is revolutionary. VJ Um Amel explores what it means when a machine learns and procreates. As such, the VJ Um Amel project underscore how 1) the creation and inhabitation of VJ Um Amel “embodies” the first demand (blurring real and virtual) and 2) how it, as embodiment and art practice, relates to interest in the glitch. The cyborg not only uses glitch to explose logics and illogics of power, but then takes flight in the creative potential of the digital slippage that is glitch. At a time when “Arab” undergoes another shift, an emergent twenty-­ first-century community of researchers and thinkers are publishing and producing copious amounts of work on the region in digital form. I want to bypass the notion of the critic as an authority who controls narrative and instead work to create a new role in the transnational Arab community that resonates with web culture: to function as critic, curator, and artist all at the same time. This cyber-conscious, digital art practice allows me to shift roles between VJ Um Amel and acting in R-Shief ’s web-based technoscape, occupying both subjectivities simultaneously. VJ Um Amel’s work thus acts as an active site of production of meaning, particularly relevant to the process of theorizing the history of what has happened. Her work also takes the conversation about new media away from the anxieties of celebrating its tools, which has become almost an aesthetic process of understanding this novel world. Configuring ideas and activating various landscapes—archiving, commenting, rating, tagging—is a new way to mobilize a multilingual practice. This is the focus of the cyborg’s practice.

Conclusion Fix Your Own Democracy

Arabic Glitch is a story that has been remixed, layered, and VJ’ed through

nested periodization of concepts and time in which glitch art and resistance emerge and the data body actualizes. One could go back to the Second World War or the 1970s with the rise of democracy’s global dependence on fossil fuels to trace the history of global technoculture. Another layer of the story consists of conceptual dialogues on cyborgs and cyberfeminism that emerged in the 1980s. Within Internet history, the 1990s played a significant role in introducing digital activism, hacktivism, DIY, and the open-source movement. The Internet was very susceptible to glitches at that moment. Hacker projects were about overthrowing the corporate system because they could. Following that moment, glitch aesthetic emerged with its own sensibility and critique of global capitalism. This brings us to the 2011 uprisings, a moment when glitch resistance—in its multiple forms of embodiment, with procedural literacy, and operationalizing community-authorship—had revolutionary consequences. All of this is framed within my personal history as poet, as artist, as VJ, and as an immigrant traveling down the stairway in 2001 in Washington, D.C. There is no romanticism or causality between the glitch and a better world. In many

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ways, the work presented in this book is an embrace of Alaa’s powerful invitation to “fix your own democracy.”1 The Stakes Are High

On January 6, 2021, I was in my garage office preparing to teach on Zoom because classes had been fully remote at the University of California, Santa Barbara, since March 2020. As the January 6 insurrection unfolded, countless words, images, and videos inundated our senses through our multiple media infrastructures—some coming from mainstream sources, some from the “alt-right.” Alt-right is short for alternative right and refers to a growing movement in the United States in the 2010s characterized by a rejection of mainstream politics and by the use of online media to express opposition to racial, religious, or gender equality. I canceled my regular course schedule and asked the students to turn their gaze to the Capitol building in D.C. We watched, annotated, and made sense of the insurrection through Slack, a communication platform that works like Internet Relay Chat (IRC) with features such as persistent chat rooms organized by topic, private groups, and direct messaging. Within days of witnessing the Capitol riot, I read on Twitter about a young hacktivist who had downloaded and made publicly available copious amounts of social media from the alt-right social media platform Parler. I immediately messaged the students on Slack about this hacker, who goes by the handle @donk_enby, who eventually snagged 56 terabytes’ worth of data: photos, videos, and text posts, many of which included some GPS metadata that positively put Parler users in and around the Capitol on January 6, including in secured areas. At least some of this data—56,000 gigabytes of it. How did she do it? There was a lot of speculation that it was because Parler had used WordPress, an open-source platform. It was widely known, and “hundreds” had exploited it before #donk_enby started posting, but she had the best equipment to grab everything. The bottom line is Parler’s user data leaked because CEO John Matze and the site’s architects left major flaws in Parler’s Application Protocol Interface (API), the link between Parler’s front end and its user data.

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First, Parler’s designers did not restrict access to the API by requiring authentication. Users did not need specific credentials to access the data on the back end. That left an enormous back door open. Most websites aware of basic security protocol do not allow access to the API without some form of user authentication to ensure the request is not malicious. Two common authentication solutions are API keys and “tokens,” both of which require some valid credentials that also allow the website to know who is accessing the data. Second, rate limiting caps how much data a user can access regardless of credentials. Web users may have seen “Too Many Requests” error messages out in the wild, which is a sign that there have been too many knocks or attempts to pass through the door. Parler did not have this, either, which meant that once the unsecured back end was accessed, @donk_enby was also able to archive Parler’s data within forty-eight hours. In addition, Parler allowed posts its users believed were deleted to be both available and easily discovered once someone was in the back end. In the aftermath of the deadly riots, some Parler users, aware of the reams of evidence available on the web, encouraged others to delete their posts from January 6. All of Parler’s posts were given sequential numbers that increased by one. Even when those posts were deleted by the user, they remained on the back end. @donk_enby needed to write only a very basic script that found and archived each post, one by one. Finally, since Parler did not bother removing geo-tagged data from photos and videos and posts before they were uploaded, that information was also sitting there waiting to be archived. Over those early winter months, the class continued to question and grapple with logics of automation and scale underpinning networked, computational platforms. We explored vocabularies and methods of critical analysis that we can reshape and reuse in thinking and writing about data-­driven, algorithmically produced stories. One day, DJ Duncan, a young scholar with whom I work, sent me a link to one of @donk-enby’s Parler dumps on GitHub, a repository for open-source software. And so it began. By the time spring had rolled around, several things had converged at the same time, and I was compelled and could not say no to the work that would lie ahead.

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What Does the VJ Um Amel Practice of the Glitch Tell Us about January 6?

On November 4, 2021, the Qualcomm Institute (QI) at the University of California, San Diego, premiered a large-scale, solo art exhibition of cultural analytics of social media collected on January 6 from the alt-right, conservative social media platform Parler and the broader network of Twitter, Capital Glitch: Arab Cyborg Turns to D.C.2 Reflecting 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. Gallery participants could populate Capital Glitch’s thirty-foot mosaic by choosing among topics analyzed in the images, using their phones as game controllers. Viewers could choose among a dozen images of Arab cyborgs as their avatar to navigate an archive of images and memes sourced from Parler rendered into “day” and “night” mosaics of the U.S. Capitol building. The “day” version of the Capitol mosaic derives from a set of Parler social media and the “night” version from a set of Twitter data posted on January 6, 2021. Three dye-sublimation-on-metal prints from the Arab revolutions of 2011 hang in the liminal space between the wall of mosaics and the gallery experience. While Birds, Cairo Graffiti, and Tapestry are artistically a prehistory of the January 6 moment, they are also thematically related to this new body of work. Outside the gallery, viewers saw consequences of U.S. foreign policy. Similar forces play out in the domestic sphere within the gallery’s interior. Using mixed-reality smart glasses to experience the augmented reality “Insurrection Video Procession,” participants could gesture inside holograms to interact with an archive of videos that populate a map around the U.S. Capitol building and words that connect the dots among users within online conversations. This augmented-reality data visualization of over five hundred videos posted onto Parler on January 6, 2021, from the stage where Donald Trump gave his “Stop the Steal” speech to the U.S. Capitol building, where the attempted coup took place. These videos were re-created in a table-sized miniature recreation of that location. Wearing a headset, viewers could return to the scene and choose among the videos that were uploaded in synchronicity with others on the same network within proximity to watch.

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Instead of selecting filter options on a website to visually make sense of data, in this 3-D augmented reality, users can still filter through video selections, but through an embodied experience of the context in which these media were captured and shared. .

Figure C.1. Glitch 3-D image of the U.S. Capitol in a video installation in Capital

Glitch at the Qualcomm Institute’s Gallery QI. In the gallery, participants interacted with an augmented-reality data visualization of 9 million videos posted to Parler platform on January 6, 2021.

Figure C.2. Interactive mosaic installation on a thirty-foot wall at Gallery QI

during the opening night of Capital Glitch, November 4, 2021.

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Offering glitches, mosaics, and mixed realities, VJ Um Amel (and I) revealed a secret world of code in an abstract and algorithmic aesthetic. The singularity of each image stands for an infinite number of visual memories, some recorded, most not. The use of the mosaic mode of “assemblage” is intended to capture this notion of the infinite, reiterative algorithmic form of any single visual expression. It attends to the text within the archive and approaches the archive as a text. These disenchanted yet synchronized voices warn us of the dangers of the radical right and its data embodiment. Their assemblage revealed democracy and authoritarianism as a spectrum, not unlike the potentialities of data embodiment itself, located on a range of political imaginaries and possibilities. The exhibition took up the term glitch as a semiotic sign to critique the visceral idea that difference is always already built into the machine. In its glitchiness, the image of the Capitol building fails to substantiate the sovereignty of state power. When I turned the VJ Um Amel practice to the January 6 moment, the theory of Arabic glitch expanded to provide a new analytical framework to grasp the alt-right movement in the U.S. as a deep world-building project born out of Fox News that millions of people live in. When we put it back in Washington, D.C., during a domestic insurrection and attempted coup, a pedagogical twist occurs. The subtitle of Capital Glitch: Arab Cyborg Turns to D.C. gestures toward centering oneself within the Arab world looking out at the rest, not looking at a finite place called the Arab world as an object of study. Thus the Arabic glitch is a location, a method, and a perspective on our lived realities. The assemblages laid out in this book reveal the imperatives of avowing multiple forms of embodiment, of attaining procedural literacy, and of committing to community-authorship. Yet these are all tools; they are not movements in and of themselves. Indeed, January 6 reminds us that radical change and revolution can happen from the right as much as, if not more than, the left. Digital politics and revolution do not only belong to the progressive actors, nor are cause for liberatory celebration. Techies and coders come in all stripes. And the lessons of Arabic glitch are as urgent for us today as they were ten years ago. In 2017 the Saudi Arabian robot Sophia became the first nonhuman in the world to receive citizenship from a state. The insights from Arabic Glitch

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will only resonate more twenty and thirty years into the future in a world with robotic workers and new, technosocial, economic, and political systems at play. As we peer into the horizon, one thing is clear: our lived reality as humanity on this planet is undergoing a profound transformation. I hope that the lessons of Arabic glitch serve as lighthouses and guideposts as we navigate the future, unknown terrain.

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Acknowledgments

As the work described in this book is deeply community based and sus-

tained by infrastructure of family, friends, colleagues, and granting institutions. The number of people to thank is expansive. To the activists, revolutionaries, and all those who have mobilized their communities on the ground and online toward a world with human rights, justice, and dignity, I am indebted to your fortitude and commitment to each other and a vision of future possibility. Various grants and fellowships beginning with the Regents Graduate Student Fellowship at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Jack Shaheen Media Scholarship, Annenberg Fellowship at the University of Southern California, MacArthur Foundation HASTAC Scholar Award, the Arab Digital Expression Foundation Award, the Future Leadership Award by Egyptian American Association, the Arab Council on Social Sciences Research Grant, Open Society Foundation Human Rights Initiative Grant, UC Regents’ Junior Faculty Fellowship, Carsey-Wolf Center Faculty Research Support Award, Interdisciplinary Humanities Center Faculty Fellowship, the American Council of Learned Societies Digital Extension Grant, as well as research, travel, and conference grants from the University of California, Santa Barbara, made this work materialize.

128 Acknowledgments

This work would not have been possible without the loving support of many friends and family members throughout the decades, of whom there are too many to mention. Over the last several years, Felice Blake, Julie Carlson, Nadege Clitandre, Sherene Seikaly, and Jennifer Tyburczy have been my bedrock as we “salonistad” and gathered weekly through a global pandemic on Zoom, in masks, outdoors and indoors with wine and cookies, and always together. To say thank you barely scratches the surface. Other luminaries with whom conversation and provocation have greatly influenced Arabic Glitch include Amy Alexander, Paul Amar, Miriyam Aouragh, Lina Attalah, Shiva Balaghi, Eric Beuville, Ninotchka Bennahum, Rosie Bsheer, Alenda Chang, Ricardo Dominguez, Amr El Abbadi, Hoda Elsadda, Rochelle Davis, Richard Falk, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Lisa Hajjar, Jennifer Holt, Adel Iskander, Miranda Joseph, Eileen Joy, Aranye Fradenburg Joy, Melody Jue, Alexandra Juhasz, Kimberly Katz, Steven Keller, Mark Levine, Laura Marks, Christina McPhee, Maya Mikdashi, Mireille Miller-Young, Marcy Newman, Brian Nordman, Milena Pafundi, Lisa Parks, Constance Penley, Susana Ruiz, Bhaskar Sarkar, Nadya Sbaiti, Greg Siegel, Cynthia Stohl, Leyya Mona Tawil, Helga Tawil-Souri, Winddance Twine, Vivian Valentin, Cristina Venegas, Sharif Waked, Joe Walther, William Wang, Ranwa Yehia, Naoki Yamamato, and Kim Yasuda. Thank you all for inspiring and motivating me to keep raising the bar. Another star in my universe, Liz Kepferle, who has come to my rescue in the final hours of this book with editorial diligence, I thank from the deepest places in my heart. I am abundantly grateful to my mentors at the University of California, Santa Cruz—Warren Sack, Sharon Daniel, and Soraya Murray—and to the entire Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) community who actively supported me through my transition into motherhood as I arrived to the program seven months pregnant with my first child. I am indebted to their help with child care and the many enriching conversations with faculty, staff, and students Margaret Morse, Luke Bullock, Angela N. Carroll, Miki Foster, G. Craig Hobbs, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Nada Miljkovic, Lindsay Kelley, Felice Rice, and Abram (Aphid) Stern. Over the years, I have had the privilege of working with an inspiring group of mentors and leaders in their fields. My warm thanks go to Anne Balsamo, who stimulated, guided, and encouraged me; Steve Anderson, to

Acknowledgments 129

whom I am utterly grateful for his encouragement to explore deeper into creative scholarship; to Laurie Brand for her genuine open-mindedness, collegiality, and valuable advice; Mike Patterson for his creative brilliance. And to Sherene Seikaly I am profoundly grateful for her belief in this project from its inception. Her faith in me and my project proved unwavering as she continues to play many roles in my life and the life of this book—guiding me from conception to development of the ideas written here to her powerful and artful editorial feedback at the eleventh hour. I simply cannot put into words the love and partnership she has generously provided me for more than two decades. I am forever grateful and forever transformed. My intellectual community at the University of Southern California, both in the Media Arts and Practice program (iMAP) and throughout the campus, inspired and influenced the ideas in this book so much. I am deeply grateful for the ongoing intellectual engagement of the brilliant scholars I met there: micha cardenas, Susana Ruiz, Rosemary Comella, Jeanne Jo, Clea T. Waite, Diego Siemerene, Nonny de la Peña, Samantha Gorman, Laura Cechanowicz, Adam Sulzdorf-Liszkiewicz, Veronica Paredes, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Amanda Tasse, Behnaz Farahi, Maytha Alhassen, Holly Willis, Andreas Kratky, Stacy Patterson, Elizabeth Ramsey, Sonia Seetharaman, and the late Jeff Watson and the late Gabriel Peters-Lazaro. Long live the unicorns. When I joined the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2015, I found an exceptional community of scholars who have provided a rich intellectual engagement that contributed to this book in innumerable ways. Thank you to John Majewski for going out of his way to help me and my family settled in Santa Barbara. I am deeply grateful for the exceptional generosity and support I found from my colleagues in the Department of Film and Media Studies: Alenda Chang, Peter Bloom, Michael Curtin, Mona Damluji, Anna Everett, Dick Hebdige, Jennifer Holt, Ross Melnick, Lisa Parks, Constance Penley, Patrice Petro, Bhaskar Sarkar, Greg Siegel, Cristina Venegas, Janet Walker, Charles Wolfe, and Naoki Yamamoto. Thank you to the amazing students in my graduate seminars, Casey Coffee, Chelsea Roesch, Kyna McClenaghan, Nathan Cox, Intae Hwang, HanWei Kung, Sihwa Park, Sara Morris, Sarah Lerner, Alex Lilburn, Paul Kim, Soha Saghazadeh, and Tinghao Zhou, for the invaluable debate over ideas

130 Acknowledgments

that have informed my work. A group of brilliant and engaged undergraduates taught me how to be a scholar of media. In particular, I am indebted to the skill and care of my undergraduate research assistants Rachel Grainger, Josh Bevan, and especially DJ Duncan, who read drafts of the manuscript and provided great feedback. To the collective of developers at R-Shief, it has been a great learning adventure and an honor to work together. These individuals have worked tirelessly and volunteered months and years of their time toward this opensource project. To Manal Bahey el-Din Hassan, who has dedicated her and her family’s lives to Arabic software localization and open-source movements, words are not enough. Inspired by her software development and dedication to training others, I sought her out as the first developer I worked with on this project while she and her husband, Alaa Abd al-Fattah, were living in South Africa. To Manal and her family, I remain in solidarity. I also want to thank Ranwa Yehia and the late Ali Shaath—friends, comrades, and cofounders of R-Shief ’s partner, the Arab Digital Expression Foundation. To Ali’s partner, Ranwa, I offer my awe and appreciation for her strength to continue to build what they started together in solidarity with the larger community of Arab technologists and activists. To the programmers and developers who helped me build R-Shief, Benjamin Doherty, Mahmoud Said, Dan Selden, and Josh Bevan, your innovative contributions have not only helped materialize what we built together but the very ideas in this book. I also wish to thank the people who served on R-Shief ’s board of advisers—Osama Abi Mershed, Miriyam Aouragh, Lina Attalah, Brenda Bickett, Shahid Buttar, Sasha Costanza-Chock, Robin Dougherty, Bassam Haddad, Steven Keller, Laurie King, Liz Losh, Lynn Maalouf, Marcy Newman, Sherene Seikaly, and Helga Tawil-Souri, and Jillian York. Kate Wahl has been an early and consistent champion of this book. Her kindness, professionalism, and keen eye provided me with the fortitude to see this project over the years. I am deeply grateful and inspired by her editorial acuity. I am also grateful for the generosity of my manuscript reviewers and their helpful feedback. As this book demonstrates, intellectual work is predicated on an embodied reality, and the care for one’s body is so important to accomplish a task like producing this body of work. I need to thank my coaches and friends in

Acknowledgments 131

the gym who have been instrumental to me as I wrote this book over the last six years. Thank you for being there through the daily grind over the years, Andrew Araza, Amy Armstrong, Jacqueline Bernal, Debra Jo Colegrave, Sammy Davis, Darcel Elliott, Erin Foster, Jeff Foster, David Kafer, Hannah Kafer Jenner, Rachel Johnson, Michele Herrera, Cris Lacerda, Aki Laine, Kristine Lehman, Adam Pearlman, Sierra Peltcher, Lori Redfern, Pam Scott, Seth Stanley, Kaitlyn Trabucco, and Nate Warmerdam. A particular shout out to coach, mentor, and friend Hannah Kafer Jenner for believing in me and teaching me to see with eyes of strength. To my family, I owe everything. Offering thanks to my mother and father is the least I can do to the most beautiful people who continue to nurture me well into my adulthood. To my sisters and brothers—Ahmed, Yasmine, Peri, and Rafik—thank you for teaching me about sharing and community and a life with love and lots of people. I love you all so much and am so proud to be a part of this growing family. To my three daughters—Amel, my hope; Aya, my poetry; and Dahlia, my flower—you are my life. You girls have taught me about the beauty of being vulnerably human. Thank you for bringing the daily discipline and infinite joy I needed to complete this book. Finally, to my best friend, my life partner, my husband through thick and thin, I could not have done this without you. Thank you, Fadi, for your endless patience with me as I disappeared before daybreak without a word until nightfall day after day. Thank you for doing whatever it takes to support us as I traveled, researched, and wrote. Thank you for raising our children with me and providing a home for all of us. You are my home.

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Notes

Preface 1.  Nadine Naber, “‘Look, Mohammed the Terrorist Is Coming!’ Cultural Racism, Nation-Based Racism, and Intersectionality of Oppressions after 9/11,” in Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11: From Visible Citizens to Visible Subjects, ed. Amaney Jamal and Nadine Naber (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008), 276–304. 2.  Laila Shereen, “On Becoming Arab,” Mizna: Prose, Poetry, and Art Exploring Arab America 6, no. 1 (Summer 2004): 60–62. 3.  Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 512. 4.  Edward W. Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (London: Knopf, 1999). 5.  Sarah Gualtieri, “Edward Said, the AAUG, and Arab American Archival Methods,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 38, no. 1 (2018): 21–29. 6.  Gualtieri. “Edward Said,” 22. Introduction 1.  VJ Um Amel, “Twitter Analytics by Hashtag,” Vimeo, February 20, 2011, https://vimeo.com/20178532. 2.  Natural Language Processing is a field of computer science and linguistics. It is a type of computational method of extracting meaning from unstructured

134 Notes to Introduction

data. Examples include word and sentence tokenization, text classification and sentiment analysis, spelling correction, information extraction, parsing, meaning extraction, and question answering. 3.  Lawyer Mortada Mansour ran for presidential election in 2011 but was disqualified by the High Elections Commission over legal questions surrounding the leadership of the Egypt National Party, which nominated him for the presidency. He entered the presidential race again in 2018. Mansour is chairman of the national soccer team, the Zamalek Club. “Mortada Mansour to Run for President,” Mada Masr, April 6, 2014, https://www.madamasr.com/ en/2014/04/06/news/u/mortada-mansour-to-run-for-president/. 4.  Nadine Naber, “The Radical Potential of Mothering during the Egyptian Revolution,” Feminist Studies 47, no. 1 (2021): 62–93. 5. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-­Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149–81. 6.  “Glitch” entry in American Heritage Dictionary, 4th ed. (2000), cites John Glenn. 7.  Gene Gurney, Americans into Orbit (New York: Random House, 1962), 151–65. 8.  The Matrix, directed by Lana and Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski (Warner Bros., 1999). 9.  Olga Goriunova and Alexei Shulgin, “Glitch,” in Software Studies: A Lexicon, ed. Matthew Fuller (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 116. 10.  See further, Michael Mateas, “Procedural Literacy: Educating the New Media Practitioner,” On the Horizon 13 (2005): 101–11. 11.  Alaa Abd el-Fattah, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated: Selected Works 2011–2021 (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2021). 12.  Abd el-Fattah, 118. 13.  Abd el-Fattah, 59. 14.  Abd el-Fattah, 312. 15.  Fadi A. Bardawil, Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020). 16.  Peter Webb, Imagining the Arabs: Arab Identity and the Rise of Islam (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). 17.  Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism, 2nd ed., The Contemporary Middle East 3 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Notes to Introduction 135

18.  Lockman, 124. 19.  Sherene Seikaly, Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016), 77–102. 20.  Robert Vitalis and Steven Heydemann, “War, Keynesianism, and Colonialism: Explaining State-Market Relations in the Postwar Middle East,” in Steven Heydemann, ed., War, Institutions, and Social Change in the Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 102. 21. Rabab Abdulhadi, Evelyn Alsultany, and Nadine Naber, eds., Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, and Belonging (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011). Conceived in the aftermath of 9/11, Arab and Arab-American Feminisms covers the larger political and cultural framework, tracing historic changes in Arab and Muslim organizing in the U.S., especially the impact of 9/11 and the Patriot Act. The editors point to the growing alliance between Arab and African Americans as advocates of anticolonialism and a new world order that challenged white supremacy. 22.  Uncertain Commons, Speculate This! (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). 23.  Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (New York: Crown, 2016). 24.  Roopika Risam, New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018), 12. 25.  Lauren F. Klein and Catherine D’Ignazio, Data Feminism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020). 26.  Goriunova and Shulgin, “Glitch.” 27.  Rosa Menkman, “Glitch Studies Manifesto,” online release 2010, republished in Geert Lovink and Rachel Somers Miles, eds., Video Vortex Reader II: Moving Images beyond YouTube (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011). 28.  Peter Krapp, Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture, Electronic Mediations, vol. 37 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 29. Iman Moradi et al., Glitch: Designing Imperfection (Brooklyn: Mark Batty, 2009). 30.  Per Platou, Foreword to Moradi et al., Glitch: Designing Imperfection, 6. 31.  Mark Nunes, Error: Glitch, Noise, and Jam in New Media Cultures (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011).

136 Notes to Introduction

32.  Shane Denson, Discorrelated Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020). 33.  Legacy Russell, “Digital Dualism and the Glitch Feminism Manifesto,” Cyborgology, December 10, 2012. 34.  Alice Dailey, How to Do Things with Dead People (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022). Dailey’s book provides an in-depth exploration of King Richard III’s body as a spectacle in Shakespeare’s play, in which she introduces crip theory and queer theory as other vocabularies that function similarly to each other. Crip theory, like disability studies generally, shares the tendency of the glitch to make the exception into something that reveals the norm. In a corporeal turn, Dailey explores the glitch concept in explicitly biological and corporeal terms. She imagines a future populated by the disabled and dead, yet nonetheless, sentient things. 35.  Laura Marks, “Arab Glitch,” in Uncommon Grounds: New Media and Visual Practice in the Middle East and North Africa, ed. Anthony Downey (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014), 256–71. 36.  Laura Marks, Hanan Al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 250–52. 37. Marks, Hanan Al-Cinema, 9. 38. Marks, Hanan Al-Cinema, 4. 39. Marks, Hanan al-Cinema, 1. 40.  Brian Getnick, Alexandra Juhasz, and Laila Shereen Sakr, “Ev-Ent-­ Anglement: Reflexively Extending Engagement By Way of Technology,” in Bodies of Information: Feminist Debates in Digital Humanities, ed. Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Wernimont (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 203–29. 41.  Beit Um Amel, solo exhibition by VJ Um Amel, Tahrir Cultural Center, American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt, February 12–March 11, 2020. 42.  Capital Glitch: Arab Cyborg Turns to D.C., by VJ Um Amel, Gallery QI, La Jolla, CA, November 4–December 3, 2021. 43.  Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 44.  Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: New York University Press, 2018). 45.  Hasan Elahi, website, http://trackingtransience.net. 46.  Tarek El-Ariss, Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals: Arab Culture in the Digital Age, Translation/Transnation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).

Notes to Introdution and Chapter One 137

47.  Anne Balsamo, Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Chapter One 1.  Maytha Alhassen, “Please Reconsider the Term ‘Arab Spring,’” HuffPost, February 10, 2011, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/please-reconsider-ar​ ab​ -sp_b​_1268971. 2.  Gilbert Achcar, “Arab Spring” Le Monde, March 2005; Rupert Cornwall, “Was Bush Right After All?” Independent, March 8, 2005; Charles Krauthammer, “The Arab Spring of 2005,” Seattle Times, March 21, 2005. 3. Krauthammer, “The Arab Spring of 2005,” https://www.seattletimes​ .com/opinion/the-arab-spring-of-2005/. 4. Krauthammer. 5. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-­Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), 149–81. First published in Socialist Review 80 (1985). 6.  Constance Penley and Andrew Ross, eds., Technoculture, vol. 3, Cultural Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 7.  Scott Anderson, “Fractured Lands: How the Arab World Came Apart,” New York Times Magazine, August 2016, with photography by Paolo Pellegrin. Anderson presents this fifty-year history through a lengthy, complex interweaving of five ethnographies. 8.  Marc Lynch, “Obama’s ‘Arab Spring’?” Foreign Policy, January 6, 2011. 9.  Alaa Abd el-Fattah, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated: Selected Works 2011–2021 (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2021). 10.  Abd el-Fattah, 156. 11.  “Egypt: President Approves Anti-Protest Law,” 2013, https://www.loc.​ gov/item/global-legal-monitor/2013-12-19/egypt-president-approves-anti-protest​ -law/. 12.  Alaa Abd el-Fattah, “After Egypt’s Revolution, I Never Expected to Be Back in Mubarak’s Jails,” Guardian, November 2, 2011, https://www.theguard​ ian.com/commentisfree/2011/nov/02/egypt-revolution-back-mubarak-jails. 13. Sandmonkey (blog), last accessed December 15, 2020, http://www.sand​ monkey.org. 14.  Sarah Carr, “A Firsthand Account: Marching from Shubra to Deaths at Maspero,” Egypt Independent, October 10, 2011, https://egyptindependent.com/ firsthand-account-marching-shubra-deaths-maspero/.

138 Notes to Chapter One

15.  Asef Bayat, “Politics in the City-Inside-Out,” City & Society 24, no. 2 (August 2012): 110–28. 16.  Salwa Ismail, “Urban Subalterns in the Arab Revolutions: Cairo and Damascus in Comparative Perspective,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 55, no. 4 (October 2013): 865–94. 17.  Omnia Khalil, “From Community Participation to Forced Eviction in the Maspero Triangle,” Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, June 14, 2018, https://timep.org/commentary/analysis/from-community-participa​t ion-toforced-eviction-in-the-maspero​-triangle/. 18.  Omnia Khalil, ‫ مقتل العش رات في انهيار صخري من جبل المقطم على‬:‫مصر‬ ‫( ”منطقة الدويقة‬September 7, 2008) ‫االحـد‬, last accessed August 8, 2020, https:// archive.aawsat.com/details.asp?issueno=10626&article=485914#.XzlsZx​ NKjUJ. 19.  ‫لصفحة الرسمية إلتحاد شباب ماسبيرو‬, Facebook, last accessed December 15, 2020, http://www.facebook.com/Coptic.Masbero. 20.  Don Karl and Basma Hamdy, Walls of Freedom: Street Art of the Egyptian Revolution (Berlin: From Here to Fame, 2014). 21.  Ziad Abu-Rish, “On Power Cuts, Protests, and Institutions: A Brief History of Electricity in Beirut (Part One),” Jadaliyya, April 22, 2014, https:// www.jadaliyya.com/Details/30564/On-Power-Cuts,-Protests,-and-Institutions​ -A-Brief-History-of-Electricity-in-Beirut-Part-One. 22.  Eric Verdeil, “Electricity Subsidies in Lebanon: Benefiting Some Regions More than Others,” Jadaliyya, October 4, 2018, https://www.jadaliyya​.com/ Details/38045/Electricity-Subsidies-Benefiting-some-Regions-More-than​ -Others. 23.  Rami Siklawi, “The Dynamics of Palestinian Political Endurance in Lebanon,” Middle East Journal 64, no. 4 (2010): 597–611. Exiled Palestinians started arriving in Lebanon as of 1948, upon the establishment of the state of Israel, and initially lived in informal camps across the country, of which twelve camps managed by UNRWA remain today. 24.  Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (Berkeley, CA: UC Press, 2000). 25.  Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). 26.  Max Weiss, In the Shadow of Sectarianism: Law, Shi’ism, and the Making of Modern Lebanon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

Notes to Chapter One 139

27.  Maya Mikdashi, Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State in Lebanon (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022). 28.  Abu-Rish, “On Power Cuts.” 29.  Large-scale, social, organizational tool in cultural and social structures, starting as early as 1890 with control of the population through the electromechanical, punched-card system. 30.  For example, Cubo-futurist artists such as Mayakovsky, Gontcharova, Kandinsky, Larionov, and Malevich. 31.  Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), 217–51. 32.  Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics, trans. Mark Polizzotti, Semiotext(e) | a History of the Present (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2006). 33.  Paul Virilio, and Sylvère Lotringer, Pure War (Cambridge, MA: Semiotext€, 2008), 46. 34.  Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art.” 35.  Mark LeVine, “Music and the Aura of Revolution,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 44, no. 4 (2012): 794–97. 36. LeVine. 37.  Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noise: (Futurist Manifesto, 1913), trans. Robert Filliou (New York: Something Else Press, 1967). 38.  Len Lye, “A Colour Box,” short film, 1935. 39.  Frank Kessler, “On Fairies and Technologies,” in Moving Images: From Edison to the Webcam, ed. John Fullerton and Astrid Söderbergh Widding (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 39. 40.  Marshall McLuhan et al., “Debate with W. H. Auden and Buckminster Fuller,” University of Toronto, 1971, YouTube video, 32:08, https://www.you​ tube.com/watch?v=100wLAP6URc&t=57s. 41.  Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2006). 42.  As Richard Dawkins discusses in The Selfish Gene, activists glitch familiar commercial memes such as Nike’s logo to engage people of different political persuasions in thinking about the implications of their consumption practices. In one example, Jonah Peretti’s email exchange with a custom Nike website that refused his request to put the word sweatshop circulated virally. Peretti’s meme glitching Nike’s powerful “Just Do It” branding was one of the more successful culture jams of the decade. For Kalle Lasn, one of Adbusters’s founders, the best culture jam is the two-level message meta-meme that both punctures a specific

140 Notes to Chapter One and Two

commercial image and glitches a political culture of corporate domination. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 43. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 123–56. Chapter Two 1.  Annosoor Assaghera website, last accessed September 8, 2020, https:// web.archive.org/web/2005050509203/http://www.geocities.com/annosoor/ index​.html. 2.  “Arabization Group on Drupal,” Drupal website, last accessed September 8, 2020, https://groups.drupal.org/arabization. 3.  Lawrence Lessig, introduction to Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman, ed. Joshua Gay (Boston: GNU Press, 2002), 7. Stallman describes the sharing of source code as common within the programming community prior to the 1980s. Colleagues could read, change, and reuse one another’s work. Open sharing of code was “as old as computers, just as sharing of recipes is as old as cooking.” Free Software, 13. 4. Manal Hassan and Alaa Abd El Fattah, “The Rise and Rise of the Manalaa Civilization,” Manal and Alaa’s bit bucket (blog), August 29, 2005, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20070210114940/http://www​ .manalaa​.net/alaa/the_rise_and_rise_of_the_manalaa_civilization#comment (site discontinued). 5.  Mohamed Sameer, Foolab.org (blog), accessed September 8, 2020, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20061214141812/http://www.foolab​ .org/node/695 (site discontinued). 6. VJ Um Amel, “Touch Data Body X,” interactive media installation, 2018, last accessed December 15, 2020, https://vjumamel.com/portfolio/ touch-data-body-x. 7.  FICO scores are created by the Fair Isaac Corporation and are used by more than 90 percent of top lenders when making lending decisions. 8.  See work of Suad Joseph, Lisa Wedeen, Mahmoud Mamdani, and Maya Mikdashi. 9.  Kafa Digital Campaign, last accessed December 15, 2020, https://www​ .kafa.org.lb/en/campaigns. 10.  “About the Campaign,” Jinsiyati Nationality Digital Campaign, last accessed December 15, 2020, https://nationalitycampaign.wordpress.com/.

Notes to Chapter Two 141

11.  Merrit Kennedy, “Saudi Arabia Says It Will End Ban and Allow Women to Drive,” NPR, September 26, 2017. https://www.npr.org/sections/thet​wo​ -way/2017/09/26/553784663/saudi-arabia-says-it-will-end-ban-and-allow-wom​ en-to​-drive. 12.  See Jon Anderson, Dale Eickelman, S. Abdallah Schleifer, and other writers in the Journal of Arab Media and Society (2007–present), which was founded in 1998 as the Journal of Transnational Broadcasting Studies. 13.  Samar Al-Roomi, “Women, Blogs, and Political Power in Kuwait,” in New Media in the New Middle East, ed. Philip Seib (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 148. 14. Lisa Wedeen, “The Politics of Deliberation: Qāt Chews as Public Spheres in Yemen,” Public Culture 19, no.1 (January 2007): 59–84. 15.  Dale F. Eickelman and Jon W. Anderson, eds., New Media in the Muslim World: The Emergent Public Sphere, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 141. 16.  Naomi Sakr, ed., Arab Media and Political Renewal: Community, Legitimacy, and Public Life (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 1–12. 17. Sharmila Dhal, “Citizen Journalism: Debate Rages On,” Gulf News, May  13,  2010. https://gulfnews.com/uae/citizen-journalism-debate-rages-on-1​ .62​6183. 18.  Kefaya (“Enough!”) is a coalition of loosely knit diverse political parties and perspectives. Similar to Ukraine’s Orange Revolution and Poland’s Solidarity movement, the Kefaya movement drew its support from urban ­intellectuals—from Nasserists, Islamists, Liberals, and Marxists to Secularists. The movement came of age in 2005. 19. The history of Egypt’s technological infrastructure emerged from a broader political and economic condition that grew over the decades. The Internet started in Egypt in 1993 with a cable connection to France of a 9.6 kbps bandwidth to the Egyptian Universities Network and the Cabinet Information & Decision Support Center (IDSC), with the National Telephone Organization (predecessor of Telecom Egypt) providing the infrastructure. 20. On Barak, On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). 21. Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 22.  Yoav Di-Capua, “Common Skies Divided Horizons: Aviation, Class and Modernity in Early Twentieth Century Egypt,” Journal of Social History 41, no. 4 (Summer 2008): 917–42, https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh.0.0024.

142 Notes to Chapter Two

23.  Aaron Jakes, Egypt’s Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020). 24.  Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 25.  Bahia Shehab and Haytham Nawar, A History of Arab Graphic Design (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2020). In a comparative media study of Arabic script over centuries, J. R. Osborn details the technological challenges of the Arabic script or naskh from digital fonts, print typesetting, calligraphy, and handwritten scripts. J. R. Osborn, Letters of Light: Arabic Script in Calligraphy, Print, and Digital Design (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). 26.  Friedel Wolff, Effecting Change Through Localisation: Localisation Guide for Free and Open Source Software, Translate.org.za, 2011, 1. 27.  “The History of Drupal: Drupal Market Share & Drupal Versions,” https://kinsta.com/drupal-market-share/. 28. Computers read fonts through various encoding/decoding software: ASCII is for English as UTF-8 is for Arabic. Translation in the digital medium happens semantically as well as programmatically. 29.  “Arabic,” Drupal Translations, accessed December 7, 2019, https://local​ ize.drupal.org/translate/languages/ar. 30.  Alaa Abd el-Fattah, “Alaa’s Drupal Profile,” accessed December 7, 2019, https://www.drupal.org/user/8991. 31.  Noha Atef, Torture in Egypt website, accessed January 17, 2012, https:// web.archive.org/web/20120117205632/http://tortureinegypt.net/. 32.  Laila Shereen Sakr, “A Virtual Body Politic on #Gaza: The Mobilization of Information Patterns,” Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network 8, no. 2 (March 2015). 33.  For example, Marc Lynch, The Arab Uprising: The Unfinished Revolutions of the Middle East (New York: PublicAffairs, 2012); Lynch, Voices of the New Arab Public: Iraq, Al-Jazeera, and Middle East Politics Today (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); and John Chalcraft, Popular Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 34. Arab Public Opinion Poll conducted by Zogby International and Brookings Institution, 2003–11. 35.  For example, Dale Eickelman and Jon Anderson, New Media in the Muslim World: The Emergent Public Sphere (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003); and Walter Armbrust, Martyrs and Tricksters: An Ethnography of the Egyptian Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).

Notes to Chapter Two 143

36.  Marwan Kraidy, The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative Insurgency in the Arab World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). 37.  Tarek El-Ariss, Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals: Arab Culture in the Digital Age, Translation/Transnation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 23. 38.  Sherene Seikaly, Laila Shereen Sakr, Hoda Elsadda, Pascale Ghazaleh, Lina Attalah, and Dina Mansour,“Who Are the People? A Conversation on the Assemblages and the Archives of the People,” Jadaliyya ezine, February 2015. 39.  Seikaly et al., “Who Are the People?”. 40.  In his groundbreaking book, The Rise of the Network Society (2000), Manuel Castells argued that the net, as he theorized it, is the cause for profound social transformation from vertical integrated hierarchies as the dominant form of social organization to more horizontal organization. 41.  Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), x. 42. Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 43.  Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 5, no. 1 (January 2012). 44.  Roopika Risam, New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018), 4. 45.  Miriyam Aouragh, “Mapping the Palestinian Web Space,” govcom.org, accessed December 15, 2020, http://www.govcom.org/pisp_maps1.html. 46.  Design thinking approaches problem solving using both artistic and scientific practices. Yet, at its core, design is the language of modeling. As Nigel Cross has argued, design thinking is “learnable,” as is the language of the sciences (numeracy) and the language of the humanities (literacy). Nigel Cross, Design Thinking (London: Bloomsbury, 2011); Nigel Cross, “Designerly Ways of Knowing,” Design Studies 3, no. 4 (1982): 221–27. 47.  Laila Shereen Sakr, “Studying Social Streams: Cultural Analytics in Arabic,” Jadaliyya ezine, October 31, 2012, https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/​ 27306. 48.  VJ Um Amel, “Arab Future Tripping (VR Prototype),” Vimeo, May 22, 2017, https://vimeo.com/218523422. 49.  VJ Um Amel, “Moving My Data Body and Live Tweeting,” Vimeo, June 7, 2017, https://vimeo.com/220739597. 50.  VJ Um Amel, “Tweet World: 3D interactive visualization of 500,000 tweets on #Syria,” Vimeo, February 20, 2011 https://vjumamel.com/portfolio/ tweet-world-3d-interactive-visualization-of-500000-tweets-on-syria/.

144 Notes to Chapter Two and Three

51.  VJ Um Amel, “Tweet World: 3D interactive visualization of 500,000 tweets on #Syria,” Vimeo, https://vimeo.com/30667863. 52.  Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978), 259. 53.  Ricardo Dominguez, “Electronic Civil Disobedience: Inventing the Future of Online Agitprop Theater,” PMLA 124, no. 5 (2009): 1806–12. Ricardo Dominguez engaged me in a conversation about the data body over messenger. He discussed a data body while describing artistic, political, and social interventions he calls micro gestures. In this context, a “micro gesture” describes an action that reveals something, such as a logical or philosophical weakness, in the surrounding system, thus destabilizing it. The micro gesture that made a significant impression on me challenged a local law that allowed men to be topless but not women. Dominguez and his female colleague, who was male at birth and whose driver’s license read male, sought to discover which held more social and institutional power: the “real” physical body or the body of data on a person’s record. 54.  The Dutch hacker community from the early 1990s, Hippies from Hell, argued that you could not teleport concepts from the real world to the virtual world. That is, you cannot take civil disobedience onto a digital platform because it is a totally different world. They created a digital divide. Hippies from Hell, website, last accessed July 1, 2022, http://web.archive.org/web/20100113014226/ http://www.hippiesfromhell.org/. 55.  Though the U.S. military gave the public access to GPS in 1983 with selective availability, it was not until 2000 that U.S. president Clinton disabled the scrambling technique enabling broader consumer use—a key moment in history allowing a suturing of real and data bodies. 56.  Harassmap, website, last accessed July 1, 2022, https://harassmap.org. Chapter Three 1.  Ahdaf Soueif, “A Conversation with Alaa Abd El Fattah,” Bidoun, Fall 2006. 2. Amnesty International, “Human Rights Activist Detained for Third Time,” June 2020, https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/MDE12​ 3013​2020​ENGLISH​.pdf. 3.  Slashdot is one of the earliest social media platforms. Developed in the 1990s on Linux open-source software, Slashdot grew into a hub for discussion and rants, usually about software. 4.  Linux is similar to other operating systems you may have used before, such as Windows, macOS, or iOS. However, Linux is open-source software. The code used to create Linux is free and available to the public to view, and edit.

Notes to Chapter Three 145

5.  Egyptian Linux Users Group (eglug.org), “About,” accessed November 1, 2020, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20050305173332/http:// www.eglug.org/about (site defunct). 6.  Alaa Abd el-Fattah, “I Have a Dream: Affordable, Accessible Computing,” Alaa’s blog (blog), eglug.org, December 31, 2004, accessed November 1, 2020, https://web.archive.org/web/20050205102930/http://www.eglug.org/ node/848 (site defunct). 7. Paola Rosa-Aquino, “Fix, or Toss? The ‘Right to Repair’ Movement Gains Ground,” New York Times, October 23, 2020, updated November 2, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/23/climate/right-to-repair.html. 8. Ahmad Al-Shagra, “Fatakat: Family Project Becomes #1 Hub for MENA Women,” The Next Web, September 3, 2010, https://thenextweb.com/ me/2010/09/03/fatakat-family-project-becomes-1-hub-for-mena-women/. 9. https://web.archive.org/web/20050205102930/http://www.eglug.org/ node/848. 10.  Ahmad Gharbeia, “Wikis as Catalysts for Activism: The Case of Arabic Wiki Gender,” Arab Reform Initiative, January 23, 2020, https://www.arab-re​ form​.net/publication/wikis-as-catalysts-for-activism-the-case-of-arabic-wiki -gender/. 11.  Pew Research Center, “Egypt Takes Center Stage on Blogs,” February 10, 2011, https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2011/02/10/egypt-takes-cen​ ter-stage​-blogs/. 12.  Torture in Egypt website, accessed January 17, 2012, https://web.archive​ .org/web/20120117205632/http://tortureinegypt.net/. 13.  Mada Masr website, “About Us,” accessed December 31, 2020, https:// www.madamasr.com/en/about-us/ 14.  Mada Masr website, “About Us.” 15.  Maria Ressa, “Lina Attalah,” Time, September 22, 2020, https://time​ .com/collection/100-most-influential-people-2020/5888226/lina-attalah/. 16.  Jared Malsin, “Muckraker of the Arab World,” Time, October 17, 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/20191129000820/https://time.com/collection​ -post/​4969​555/​lina-attalah-next-generation-leaders/. 17.  Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a field of study combining linguistics, computer science, information engineering, and artificial intelligence to understand the communication and interaction between computer languages and human (natural) languages. 18.  Arab Digital Expression Foundation, “Home Page,” accessed January 18, 2022, https://arabdigitalexpression.org/.

146 Notes to Chapter Three

19.  Arab Techies was a collective that started with the goal to bring together a varied group of techies who vigorously utilize their IT skills to support their communities on the route of development and social change, to share experiences and knowledge, learn from each other, and collaborate on solving common problems. 20. Nadwa is Arabic for “forum.” 21.  Qutrub software app, accessed December 15, 2020, Qutrub.arabeyes.org. 22.  Yamli website, accessed December 7, 2019, https://www.yamli.com/. 23.  Laila Shereen Sakr, “New Texts Out Now: VJ Um Amel, A Digital Humanities Approach: Text, the Internet, and the Egyptian Uprising,” Jadaliyya ezine, February 2014, https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/30222. 24. The Unicode Standard encodes characters in the range U+0000.. U+10FFFF, which amounts to a 21-bit code space. Depending on the encoding form you choose (UTF-8, UTF-16, or UTF-32), each character will then be represented either as a sequence of one to four 8-bit bytes, one or two 16-bit code units, or a single 32-bit code unit. 25.  Reporters Without Borders, Enemies of the Internet, Annual Report, 2011. 26. Ron J. Deibert, “The Geopolitics of Internet Control: Censorship, Sovereignty, and Cyberspace,” in Routledge Handbook of Internet Politics, ed. Andrew Chadwick and Philip N. Howard (London: Taylor & Francis, 2009), 323–36. 27.  What was Ammar 404 is the expression Tunisia netizens used to refer to the Internet and surveillance apparatuses under the rule of former dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. Ammar is a male first name, while 404 is derived from 404 Page Not Found. 28.  Ben Elgin and Vernon Silver, “Syria Crackdown Gets Italy Firm’s Aid with U.S.-Europe Spy Gear,” Bloomberg News, November 3, 2011, https:// www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-11-03/syria-crackdown-gets-italy-firm​ -s-aid-with-u-s-europe-spy​-gear. 29.  Committee to Protect Journalists, “Egyptian Blogger Abbas, Cleared Once, Is Convicted Anew,” March 11, 2010, https://cpj.org/2010/03/egyptian​ -blogger-abbas-cleared-once-is​-convicted-a/. 30.  VJ Um Amel, “Egyptian Body Politic: Adaptation of Tahrir,” Vimeo, November 24, 2011, https://vimeo.com/32640763. 31.  When I left Cairo in July 2011, Lina Atallah shared this prose poem representing a dream all digital activists shared.

Notes to Chapter Four 147

Chapter Four 1.  Rose Gottemoeller, “From the Manhattan Project to the Cloud: Arms Control in the Information Age,” Sidney Drell Lecture, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, October 27, 2011, https://2009-2017.state.gov/t/avc/rls/176331​ .htm. 2.  Jeffrey Boutwell, ed., Addressing the Nuclear Weapons Threat: The Russell-­ Einstein Manifesto Fifty Years On, Pugwash Occasional Papers 4, no. 1 (December 2005), https://pugwashconferences.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/200512​ _occasionalpaper_manifesto50​years​.pdf 3.  Mike Shuster, “A New Weapon Against Nukes: Social Media,” NPR, February 8, 2012, https://www.npr.org/2012/02/08/146589700/a-new-weapon​ -against-nukes-social​-media. 4. Raven911, accessed January 18, 2022, https://www.raven911.net/. 5.  Christopher W. Stubbs and Sidney D. Drell, “Public Domain Treaty Compliance Verification in the Digital Age,” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, December 9, 2013. 6.  Stubbs and Drell, 64. 7.  Brian Nordmann, Open and Crowd-Sourced Data for Treaty Verification, prepared by the MITRE Corporation, sponsored by the Office of Biological Weapons, October 31, 2014, https://irp.fas.org/agency/dod/jason/crowd.pdf. 8.  Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International, 1971), 263. 9.  VJ Um Amel, “A Tribute to Cairo: A VJ Remix,” R-Shief, 2011, https://v1​ .r-shief.org/r-shief-blog/tribute-cairo-vj-remix-36499. 10.  Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: New York University Press, 2018). 11.  Browne, Simone, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 12.  Twitter released its second public API v.2 in August 2020. 13.  NATO took control of all military operations for Libya under United Nations Security Council Resolutions 1970 and 1973 on March 31, 2011. 14.  VJ Um Amel, “Intervention, Libya, Jadaliyya: A Documentary Remix,” Vimeo, 2012, https://vimeo.com/20725703. 15.  Andrew Goffey, “Algorithm,” in Software Studies: A Lexicon, ed. Matthew Fuller (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); Tarleton Gillespie, “The Relevance of Algorithms,” in Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, ed. Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo Boczkowski, and Kirsten

148 Notes to Chapter Four

Foot (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 167–94; Martina Mahnke and Emma Uprichard, “Algorithming the Algorithm,” in Society of the Query Reader: Reflections on Web Search, ed. René König and Miriam Rasch (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2014); Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Ted Striphas, “Algorithmic Culture,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 18, nos. 4–5 (2015): 395–412; Malte Ziewitz, “Governing Algorithms: Myth, Mess, and Methods,” Science, Technology & Human Values 41, no. 1 (2016): 3–16. 16.  See work of Princeton University professor Robert Tarjan, website last accessed December 15, 2020, https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=lazJix​ IAAAAJ​&hl=en. 17.  Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Medford, MA: Polity, 2019); Charlton McIlwain, Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: New York University Press, 2018); Safiya Umoja Noble and Brendesh M. Tynes, eds., “The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Class, and Culture Online,” Digital Formations 105 (New York: Peter Lang, 2016). 18.  The draw method allows you to draw text, lines, patterns, pictures, and geometric shapes on windows, controls, and printer pages. 19. https://www.guerrillapoets.org/. 20. Theory of Reddit, last accessed August 8, 2020. https://www​.reddit​ .com/r/TheoryOfReddit/search?q=wisdom%20of%20the%20crowds&restric​ t_sr=1. 21.  Drupal released version 4.6 in April 2005, partially in response to PHP’s search module made available in version 4.3.3. See Drupal 4.6.0 aggregator module, last accessed August 8, 2020, https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/modules%​ 21aggregator.module/4.6.x. 22. http://www.manalaa.net/egblogs. 23.  Alaa Abd el-Fattah, “New Features,” Omraneya.net, last accessed August 8, 2020, https://web.archive.org/web/20100329103214/http://www.om​ raneya.net:80/node. 24.  Technology studied outside of the sciences must also face a fear among many academicians. As Franklin and Rodriguez introduce their argument, “‘Hypertext. Hypermedia. High Performance Computing.’ It’s enough to make

Notes to Chapter Four and Five 149

a humanities scholar hyperventilate. A debate has raged in the last decade (at least) about whether or not the Digital Age will see the death of The Book, The Library and perhaps, The Humanities more broadly.” Kevin D. Franklin and Karen Rodriguez, “The Next Big Thing in Humanities, Arts and Social Science Computing: Cultural Analytics,” HPC Wire, July 29, 2008. 25. Elizabeth Losh, Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-­Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). 26.  Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2008). 27.  VJ Um Amel, #Gaza Visual Narrative by a Cyborg: Images Tweeted by Hashtag, interactive mosaic, July 18, 2014, https://vjumamel.com/portfolio/ gaza-audio-visual-narrative-by-a-cyborg-images-by-hashtag/. 28.  Lev Manovich, Cultural Analytics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020). 29.  VJ Um Amel, #Gaza Visual Narrative by a Cyborg, software, August 6, 2014, https://vjumamel.com/gaza-viz/. 30.  N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 14. 31.  Alaa Abd el-Fattah, “Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s today’s statement in English (my version),” Google Drive, originally written in Arabic, 2013, accessed December 7, 2019, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ua3t5DHgRwPoUGUJWV​ vFMmPuAV9_5ICLKhRRK4aAWhc/edit?usp​=sharin. 32.  “Barack Obama’s Caucus Speech,” New York Times, January 3, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/03/us/politics/03obama-transcript.html. 33.  There is a failure of precise measurement and visibility. Officially, Cairo has around 12 million residents, but during the day there are about 20 million bodies in the capital city. Chapter Five 1.  A famous example of this is Jack Shaheen’s 2001 publication, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, a product of twenty years of scholarship. His analysis showed that of approximately one thousand films with Arab or Muslim characters made between 1896 and 2000, only twelve portrayed them positively. 2.  Gheith al-Amine, T.S.T.L., video (Lebanon, 2011, 5:00). 3.  Rania Stephan, The Three Disappearances of Souad Hosni, documentary film (Lebanon, 2011, 70:00).

150 Notes to Chapter Five

4. Ahmed El Shaer, Home (Egypt, 2006, 6:00). See http://www.ahmed​ elshaer.com/?page_id=30. 5.  Raed Yassin, The New Film (Lebanon/Egypt, 2009, 9:00). See https:// raedyassin.info/the-new-film. 6.  Ahmed Nagy, The Holy Zero (Egypt, 2010, 30:00). See http://ahmedmah​ moudnagy.blogspot.com/p/ultimate-computing-holly-zero.html. 7.  The Box—‫الصندوق‬, YouTube channel, accessed January 18, 2022, https:// www.youtube.com/channel/UCCkjFHWwDBfemghfAV85vGA. 8. Yasmine El Charif, “We See You, Tamara,” Bazaar, January 1, 2021, https://bazaar.town/tamara-qaddoumi-see-you/. 9.  Jessica Winegar, Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). 10.  Joy Garnett, The Bee Kingdom, website last accessed December 15, 2020, https://thebeekingdom.art/. 11.  Clare Davies, Tom Francis, and Sohrab Mohebbi, “Documenta 13,” Bidoun, no. 28: interviews, Spring 2013, last accessed December 15, 2020. https:// www.bidoun.org/issues/28-interviews#documenta-13. 12.  As described by the artist in conversation with the author. See also Bahia Shehab, website, bahiashehab.com. 13.  Ahmed Al-Shaer, Recycle (the Code), 2010, last accessed September 20, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFMySOVGJME. 14.  Ramsey Nasser, 2013 .‫قلب‬, last accessed December 15, 2020, https://nas​ .sr/%D9%82%D9%84%D8%A8/. 15. Shiva Balaghi, curator, Glitch: Art and Technology, group exhibition, American University in Cairo, exhibition booklet, February 2020. 16. Bahia Shehab, “At the Corner of a Dream,” solo exhibition, Tahrir Cultural Center, American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt, February 12– March 11, 2020, created 2019. See https://www.bahiashehab.com/solo-shows/ project-one-ccf44. 17.  VJ Um Amel, Beit Um Amel, solo exhibition, Tahrir Cultural Center, American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt, February 12–March 11, 2020. 18.  Shiva Balaghi, curator, Glitch: Art and Technology, group exhibition at the American University in Cairo, February 2020. 19.  VJ Um Amel’s Birds (2015) is the cover art for Arabic Glitch. 20.  The Bread Uprising, which took place in Egypt in 1977, was a significant event that disrupted the narrative of Egyptian, and more broadly, Arab complacency. The uprising was sparked by rising food prices, which led to protests and demonstrations across the country. The Bread Uprising was a moment of politics

Notes to Chapter Five and Conclusion 151

and popular sovereignty, challenging traditional notions of what is considered political, rational, and legitimate. The role food played in the protesters’ and government’s strategies and demands demonstrates how basic needs can trigger social upheaval and political containment. The way in which protesters narrated and represented themselves and their demands challenges the construction of the “people” and provides insights into continuity and rupture between the 1977 and the 2011 uprisings. 21.  Platform 101, website, accessed January 18, 2022, https://platform-101​ .com/. 22.  Platform 101, website. 23.  Mirko Tobias Schӓfer, “OccupyData Hackathon,” New Media Studies, August 12, 2011, accessed March 29, 2012, https://web.archive.org/web/20130404​ 080418/http://www.newmediastudies.nl/magazine/occupydata​-hacka​thon. 24. Mirko Tobias Schäfer, “#OccupyData Hackathon: Analyzing Millions of Tweets,” mtschaefer.net, December 2011, https://web.archive.org/ web/20120712052914/http://www.mtschaefer.net/entry/opccupydata-hack​ athon-analysing-millions​-tweets/. 25. Occupy Research, accessed January 18, 2022 https://cementerio.mon​ tera34​.com/occupyresearch.net/. 26. Occupy Research, “Occupy LinkViz first steps,” December 10, 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/20130404080418/http://montera34.com/occu​ pyresearch/2011/12/10/occupy-linkviz​-first-steps/. 27.  Occupy Research, “Metameme: Pepper Spray Cop,” December 10, 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/20130404080418/http://montera34.com/occupy​ research/2011/12/10/mosaic-version-1/. Conclusion 1.  Alaa Abd el-Fattah, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated: Selected Works 2011– 2021 (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2021), 312. 2.  VJ Um Amel. Capital Glitch: Arab Cyborg Turns to D.C. (San Diego: Gallery QI, Qualcomm Institute, 2021). http;//vj.live.

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Abbas, Wael, 72, 73 Abd el-Fattah, Alaa, 4, 10 16, 19, 20, 36–39, 57–61, 65–67, 74–75, 78–80, 99–100; “After Egypt’s Revolution, I Never Expected to Be Back in Mubarak’s Jails,” 16–18; article about death of Mina Danial, 19–20; Drupal Arabic Team administrator, 45–46; Egyptian Linux User Group website, 58; father’s imprisonment, 57–58; “fix your own democracy,” 4, 12, 120; Greek Club gathering, 78–79; “I have a Dream: Affordable, Accessible Computing,” 59; imprisonments, 16, 47, 48, 65, 80; Omraneya (blog aggregator), 10, 38, 46, 92–93; “Producing

the Public” collaboration, 47; published collection of writings, 16; Tweet Nadwas, 66–67. See also Manal and Alaa’s Bit Bucket (blog) Abdel Fattah Mustafa, Ahmed, 73 Abdelhaq, Maysara, 65 Abdulemam, Ali, 66 Abo Bakr, Ammar, 24 Abu-Rish, Ziad, 26, 27 Adel, Antoine, 23 Adobe Flash, 35 Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), 30 Afghanistan, 101 Aggregation, 90–94; definition of, 90–91; Omraneya (blog aggregator), 10, 38, 46, 92–93; primary

170 Index

Aggregation (continued) purpose, 90–91; secondary purpose, 91; “wisdom of the crowds,” 91 Ain Shams University, 37, 79 Al-Amine, Gheith, T.S.T.L., 103 Al-Eissawy, Mansour, 75 Algorithm, 6, 8, 11–12, 34, 35, 80, 87–90; aggregation algorithms, 90–94; definition of, 87–88; divide and conquer paradigm, 89; etymology of the word, 87; exponential algorithms, 90; language detection algorithms, 11; linear algorithms, 88, 89; phone number problem, 88–89; P=NP? problem, 90; polynomial algorithms, 89–90; procedural literacy and, 4; randomized algorithms, 90; travel time problem, 90 Algorithmic aesthetic, 12, 103, 104, 109, 124 Algorithmic culture, 117 Alhassen, Maytha, 13–14 Al-Jazeera, 15, 85 Al Karni, Ali, 42 Al-Khwārizmī, 87 Allam, Mohamed, 105–7; My Nineties, 106; “You will enjoy a pop song . . .,” 107 Al Masry al-Youm (newspaper), 62 Al-Roomi, Samar, 41 Al Shorouk (newspaper), 16, 19–20 Alt-right, 120, 122–23 Amamou, Slim, 79, 80 Amer, Kareem, 73 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), 52–53

American University in Cairo, 2, 47, 48, 74, 80; Access to Knowledge for Development Center (A2K4D), 64, 65, 79; art exhibitions, 111–13; Tahrir Cultural Center, 111 Anderson, Jon, 41–42 Anderson, Scott, 15 Annosoor Assaghera (NGO), 37 Application Protocol Interface (API), 81, 94, 120–21 Arab, definition of, 5 Arab data bodies. See Data bodies Arab Data Bodies the game, 52–54, 53, 54 Arab Digital Expression Foundation (ADEF), 48, 64–65, 74 Arab glitch, 7–8. See also Glitch “Arab Glitch” film series, 103–4 “Arab Spring,” use of the term, 14. See also Arab uprisings (2011) Arab street. See Street politics Arab uprisings (2011), 1–12, 29, 44, 47–48, 53, 77, 101; Arab Bodies the game, 52–55; Arab music and, 29; in Bahrain, 66, 68, 99; glitch resistance and, 119; in Libya, 2, 4, 11, 68, 76, 81–87, 99, 147n13; significance for digital politics, 4; as “social media revolutions,” 13, 36, 48, 57, 93; in Syria, 4, 32, 32, 52, 68, 71, 85, 86, 99; traditional and Western perspectives, 14–15, 44–49; in Tunisia, 1, 2, 4, 11, 13, 15, 29, 44, 54; U.S. military interventions and, 101. See also Egyptian uprising Asad, Talal, 34, 47

Index 171

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), 70, 102–3, 108, 142n28 Association of Arab American ­University Graduates (AAUG), xiii Attalah, Lina, 47, 48, 62–63, 65, 78 Aura, artistic, 28–29 Authoritarianism, 12, 20, 35, 62, 124 Authority, 6, 8, 23, 47, 55, 75, 79–80, 107, 118 Awad, Alaa, 24   Bahrain, 66, 68, 99 Balaghi, Shiva, 111–13 Basiony, Ahmed, 105, 113; “ASCII Doesn’t Speak Arabic,” 102–3, 108; death of, 103; Egypt Lab workshops, 105; “Thirty Days Running in Place,” 103 Bayat, Asef, 21 Bee Kingdom (website), 106 Beit Um Amel (exhibition), 8, 111–13 Ben Ali, Zine al-Abidine, 71–72, 146n27 Ben Gharbeia, Sami, 79, 80 Benjamin, Walter, 28–29 Biases: algorithmic, 87; cultural, 110; quantitative, 50 Big data, 51, 82, 83, 87 Birds (glitch print on metal), 111, 122 Boeschoten, Thomas, 116 Bouazizi, Tarek el-Tayeb Mohamed, 13, 71, 74 Box, The (YouTube series), 104 Browne, Simone, 8, 80 Buffering, 35

Bush, George W., 14, 100–101 Buytaert, Dries, 45   C++, 44, 70 Cairo Documenta, 104–8, 113; curator, 107; exhibits, 102–3, 104–7 Cairo Glitch (glitched images), 24, 25 Cairo Graffiti (glitched images), 24, 25, 122 Cairo University, 57, 79, 100–101 Capital Glitch: Arab Cyborg Turns to D.C. (exhibition), 8, 122–24, 123 cárdenas, micha, 116 Carr, Sarah, 18 Censorship, 11, 60, 66, 70–74 China: “Great Firewall,” 72; Tiananmen Square uprising, 15 Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn, 107 Citizen journalists and media, 42, 46–47, 63, 92 Citizenship, 3, 11, 40, 124; “new citizen” of technoculture, 10, 15 Civil disobedience, 56, 144n54 Civil society, 59, 78–79 Clinton, Bill, 144n55 Clinton, Hillary Rodham, 11, 76 Code sprints, 11, 63, 65 Cold War, 5, 30 Colonialism, xii–xiii, 5 Colour Box, A (Lye), 29 Community authorship, 6, 68–69, 110, 119, 124 Compression, 35, 105; anti-compression aesthetic, 29–30; glitch aesthetic and, 35; memes and, 34; tensegrity and, 31 CompuCamps project, 65

172 Index

Copts and Coptic Church: Maspero Massacre and, 18, 20, 21; Maspero Youth Union, 23 Copyright, 6, 38 Cortright, Petra, 111, 113 Costanza-Chock, Sasha, 116 COVID-19 pandemic, 59, 104, 111 Creative commons, 67, 69 Critical Art Ensemble, 56 Critical race theory, 6 Culture jamming, 7, 33–34, 41, 43, 139–40n42   Dailey, Alice, 7, 136n34 Danial, Mina, 17–18, 20 Darwish, Mahmoud, 111 Data bodies, 9–11, 144n53; Arab Data Bodies the game, 52–54, 53, 54; citizenship and, 40; definition of, 3, 23, 39–41; global network of, 59; hashtags and, 56, 97; localization glitches and, 44–45; Manalaa data body, 59–60; Maspero Massacre and, 19–20; Maspero Youth Union, 23; monikers and, 40; “Moving My Data Body and Live Tweeting,” 51; real bodies and, 43, 56; R-Shief and, 51; social media and, 23; surveillance of, 8; value of, 39–40 Data representation, 39 Data visualizations, 5, 50–52, 55, 68, 114, 122–23 DC Guerrilla Poetry Insurgency, 91, 110 Denson, Shane, 7 Di-Capua, Yoav, 43 Digital humanities, 36, 43, 49 D’Ignazio, Catherine, 7

Dominguez, Ricardo, 56, 144n53 Dorsey, Jack, 46 Drell, Sidney, 78 Drupal (Arabization software), 38, 43, 45–46, 61, 62, 65, 67–69, 92   Egypt, 1–2, 4; citizenship, 40; graffiti movement, 23–26, 25; Informal Settlement Development Fund, 21–22; Kefaya (“enough”) demonstrations, 14, 15, 17, 43, 46, 141n18; Maspero Triangle, 21–22, 60; Ministry of Housing, 21–22, 26; Mohammed Mahmoud Street (Cairo), 23–24, 24, 25; Rab’a massacre, 16; Rafah massacre, 16; Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), 2, 16–17, 18, 20, 35; Tora Prison, 16, 48, 80; Viennoise Hotel (Cairo), 102, 105; “Without a Cover Project” (art installation), 106; youth, 37–38. See also Egyptian uprising; Mubarak, Hosni Egyptian Radio & Television Union, 18, 21 Egyptian uprising, 1–2, 4; Battle of the Camel, 51; digital activism and, 72–74; Maspero Massacre, 10, 16, 18–20, 23, 33–36, 108; Tahrir Square protests, 16, 19–20, 23, 48, 51, 74–75, 102, 108 Egypt Independent, 48 “Egypt Lab,” 105 Einstein, Albert, 77 Elahi, Hasan, 8–9, 115 El-Ariss, Tarek, 9, 34, 47 El-Assar, Mohamed, 35 El General (Hamada bin Amr), 29

Index 173

El Noshokaty, Shady, 111, 113 Elsadda, Hoda, 47 El Shaer, Ahmed, 108; Home, 104; Recycle (the Code), 109; “Reissue” (software app), 107, 109 El Zaim, Adel, 59 Emara, Adel, 35 Essam, Ramy, 29   Facebook: Egyptian “Day of Anger” and, 71; Maspero Youth Union page, 23; origins of, 43, 46; Riot Smoke mosaic, 24; surveillance and censoring of, 71, 73, 77–78 “Facebook revolution,” 13, 36, 48, 57, 93 Fadh (public shaming and scandalizing), 9 Famori, Mohammad Ali, 113 Fascism, 28 Fatakat (Web forum for Egyptian women), 46, 60 Fayed, Marwan, “Possibilities of Post Curation,” 107 Feminist practices and technologies, 59, 60–67; cyberfeminism, 63–65, 119; Egyptian digital activism, 74; feminist ethics, 117; gendered code sprint, 65; HarassMap, 56, 60; “Producing the Public,” 47–48; SuperMama blog, 60, 61; Take Back the Tech, 64; techno-­ feminism, 6–7; transnational feminist studies, 7 Free and open-source software (FOSS), 9, 10–11, 37–38, 59, 67–74, 91; Gephi, 116; GitHub, 109, 113–14, 121; glitch aesthetic and, 102; history of, 38; Linux, 38,

46, 58, 60–61, 144–45n4, 144n3; Parler and, 120; R-Shief and, 66 Fuller, Buckminster, 30–31, 31 Futurism, 11, 29, 51–54, 111, 113   Gandhi, Mohandas, 56 Garnett, Joy, 106 Gaza Strip, 12, 49–50, 81, 95–99 Gharbeia, Ahmad, 44–45, 47, 48, 61–62, 65, 109 Ghazaleh, Pascale, 47 Gilmore, Joe, 7 GitHub, 109, 113–14, 121 Glenn, John, 35 Glitch: author’s glitched memory of 9/11, xiii–xiv, 110; definition of, 2, 3–4; etymology of, 3; as gerund act, 7–8; in liminal spaces, 34–35; scholarship, 7; urban infrastructure and, 21–26. See also Glitch aesthetic; Glitch resistance Glitch: Art & Technology (group exhibition), 111, 113 Glitch aesthetic, 12, 14, 24, 27–30, 34, 43, 100–118, 119; aura and, 28–29; avant-garde artists, 28–30; compression and, 35; cubism, 28, 29; futurism, 29; industrialization and, 28–29; photography, 28; pre-digital history, 27–30; stop substitution, 30; stop trick, 29–30 Glitch Art: Pixel Language (video group exhibition), 113 Glitch resistance, 33, 48–49, 80, 119; Egyptian housing economic structure and, 26; Lebanese infrastructure and, 26–27 Glitch theory, 7

174 Index

Globalization, 4, 20, 45, 106 Global Positioning System (GPS), 8, 56, 120, 144n55 Google, 43, 48, 115; Hangout, 116; search algorithm, 8, 80 Goriunova, Olga, 7 Gottemoeller, Rose, 11, 76–78 Graffiti: artistic aura and, 29; Egyptian graffiti movement, 23–26, 25; A Thousand Times No exhibition, 108, 109; Walls of Freedom: Street Art of the Egyptian Revolution (Karl and Hamdy), 23–24 Gramsci, Antonio, 78–79 Graphical user interfaces (GUIs), 45 Gualtieri, Sarah, xiii Guardian (newspaper), 16   Haddad, Kathy, ix Hallwy, Mahmoud, 105; “To Be a Hero,” 106 HarassMap, 56, 60 Haraway, Donna, 10, 15 Hashtags: #Abassaiya, 23–24, 24; #abdulemam, 66; #ATWomen, 65; #Egypt, 85, 86; #flotilla, 66; #FuckSCAF, 20; #gaza, 66; #Gaza Audio-Visual Narrative by a Cyborg, 96–99; interactive data visualizations, 5, 96–97; #KhaledSaid, 66; #Libya, 83–87, 86; #Maspero, 35; #NoMilTrials, 20; #NoSCAF, 20; #OccupyData, 114, 116–17; purpose and use of, 94–95; #Qaddafi, 85; #Syria, 32, 32. 52, 85, 86; #Tripoli, 82; ­#Women2Drive, 40;

#WomensMarch, 51; #YouStink, 27; #Zawiya, 82 Hassan, Manal Bahey el-Din, 10, 11, 36–39, 44, 45–47, 58, 60, 63, 109; ADEF camps, 65; Arab Techies Women’s Workshop co-­organizer, 63; Greek Club gathering, 78; Omraneya (blog aggregator), 10, 38, 46, 92–93; Open Craft, 61. See also Manal and Alaa’s Bit Bucket (blog) Hayles, N. Katherine, 98, 99 Hazelaar, Ruben, 116 Helwan University, 80 Hirschkind, Charles, 43 Hosny, Khaled, 44–45 Hussein, Saddam, xii, 106   Immigration, xiii, 85, 119 Industrial revolution, 28–29 Infrastructure: glitch and Lebanese infrastructure, 26–27; glitch and urban infrastructure, 21–26 International Development Research Centre (IDRC), 59 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 5, 26 Internet, history of, 30 Internet Protocol (IP), 30 Internet Relay Chat (IRC), 91, 114, 120 Internet studies, 44 Iran, 71, 72, 93, 113 Iraq: elections, 14; invasion of and war on, xii, 14, 15, 50, 60, 91, 100, 101, 106; “Without a Cover Project” (art installation), 106

Index 175

Ismail, Salwa, 21 Israel. See Gaza Strip; Palestine and Palestinians Jadaliyya (ezine), 48 Jakes, Aaron, 43 January 6, 2021, Capitol riot, 120–23 JASON report, 78 Java, 70 Jenkins, Henry, 33 Joomla, 62 JSTOR, 91–92   Kamel, Rami, 23 Kassel, Germany. See Cairo Documenta Kazeboon media collective, 18–19, 67 Khalil, Omnia, 21 King Saud University, 42 Klein, Lauren, 7 Knowledge and knowledge production: Arab Data Bodies the game and, 55; Arab glitch as category of knowledge production, 7; authority and, 14, 79–80; digital knowledge production, 47–48; economies of knowledge production, 10, 36; flows of knowledge production, 3; local knowledge, 34, 47; official knowledge, 34, 47; open access to, 61, 64, 69; Said on, 55–56; technology and, 33; wikis and, 61 Kraidy, Marwan, 47 Krapp, Peter, 7 Kuwait, 15, 41, 104

Leavitt, Alex, 116 Lebanon: Arab Techies Women’s Workshop, 63, 64–65; Cedar Revolution, 14; Electricité du Liban, 26–27; exiled Palestinians in, 138n23; Israel War on, 50; Jinsiyati Nationality Digital Campaign, 40; sectarian system, 27; Take Back the Tech Arabia, 64, 68; #YouStink campaign, 26–27 Lessig, Lawrence, 38 LeVine, Mark, 29 Libya, 2, 4, 11, 68, 76, 81–87, 99, 111, 147n13 Liminal space, 34, 81, 122 Linux, 38, 46, 58, 60–61, 144–45n4, 144n3 Localization movement and projects, Arabic, 11, 43–47, 59, 67–70 Losh, Elizabeth, 94 Louis, Ibram, 23 Lye, Len, 29 Lynch, Marc, 15   Mabrouk, Tamer, 73 Mada Masr, 48, 62–63 Magdy, Basim, 111, 113 Maher, Emad, 106 Majlesi, Sadegh, 113 Malsin, Jared, 62–63 Manal and Alaa’s Bit Bucket (blog), 37–39, 45–46, 59–60, 92–93; “The rise and rise of the Manalaa civilization,” 38–39 Manhattan Project, 77 Mansour, Mortada, 2, 6, 134n3

176 Index

Marks, Laura, 7–8, 9, 103–4 Marxism, 28, 33 Maspero Massacre, 10, 16, 18–20, 23, 33–36, 108 Maspero Youth Association, 22–23; “Strike!” (stencil), 22 Maspero Youth Union (As-Safha Ar-Rasmiyah Iltihad Shabab Maspero), 22–23 Matze, John, 120 McLuhan, Marshall, 30–31 Media: communication technology and knowledge production, 33–36; culture jamming, 7, 33–34, 41, 43, 139–40n42; glitch and, 30–36; media theory, 30–31; pre-digital history, 34–35; tensegrity and, 31, 31–33 MediaWiki, 67, 69 Medrar (artistic initiative), 105 Méliès, Georges, 30 Memes, 23, 34, 139–40n42; meta-meme, 139–40n42 Menkman, Rosa, 7 Meta Meme, 117 Middle East, category of, 5 Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 49 Mikdashi, Maya, 27 Militarization, 30 Mitchell, Timothy, 43, 49 MIT Media Lab, 116 Mizna: Prose, Poetry, and Art Exploring Arab America (journal), ix–xii Moawad, Nadine, 64 Moradi, Iman, 7 Morocco, 72

Mosallam, Alia, 65 Mosireen Collective, 18–19 Mozilla, 69 Mubarak, Hosni, 2, 41, 59, 72–73, 75, 92–93, 106 Multidimensional data visualization and immersion, 49–56 Murphy, Christopher, 7 Muslim Brotherhood, 16, 107–8   Naber, Nadine, ix Nasser, Ramsey, 109–10 National Technical Means, 78 NATO, 68, 82, 83, 85, 147n13 Natural Language Processing (NLP), 63, 83, 133–34n2, 145n17 Nawar, Haytham, Aish Baladi, 111, 113 Neoliberalism: Abd et-Fattah on, 46, 59; artists and, 106; civil society and, 59; Egyptian IT development program and, 72; glitch resistance and, 26–27; Israel and, 49; mechanical reproduction and, 28; Obama administration and, 100 9/11, 3, 110; “On Becoming Arab” and, ix–xii; post-9/11era, ix, 5, 8, 100, 101; Sakr’s glitched memory of, xiii–xiv, 110 Ning, 67, 69 Noble, Safiya Umoja, 8, 80 Noise, 7, 34, 47 Noise machines, 29 Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), 71; Annosoor Assaghera, 37; International Development Research Centre, 59 Nuclear weapons, 77

Index 177

Obama, Barack, 15, 100–101 #OccupyData hackathon, 114–18 Occupy movement, 1, 4 Omraneya (blog aggregator), 10, 38, 46, 92–93 “On Becoming Arab” (Sakr), ix–xii Open Craft, 61 Open-source technology. See Free and open-source software (FOSS) Orientalism, xiii, 101 Oslo Accords, 49, 50 Ottoman Empire, 26, 41   Palestine and Palestinians: #Gaza Audio-Visual Narrative by a Cyborg, 96–99; Gaza Strip, 12, 49–50, 81, 95–99; in “On Becoming Arab,” xi; Oslo Accords, 49, 50 “Palestine Web Space” (data visualizations), 50 Palestinian uprising (intifada), 15 Parler, 120–22, 123 Penley, Constance, 15 Phones: citizen journalists’ use of, 42; smartphones, 33, 76–77; societal verification and, 77; surveillance of telephone calls, 73; telephone number problem, 88–89; used as game controllers, 122; for video capture, 18, 35 Platou, Per, 7 Postcolonialism, 43, 49, 59, 107 Predictive analytics, 76 Procedural literacy, 4, 10, 11, 64, 69, 119, 124

“Producing the Public” (research project), 47–48 Public Technical Means (PTM), 78 Python, 70 Qaddafi, Muammar, 11–12, 76, 81–83, 85, 85 Qaddafi, Saif al-Islam, 82, 85 Qaddoumi, Tamara: “Jasady,” 104; Soft Glitch, 104 Qalb, 109–10 Qutrub, 68   Radius of Arab American Writers conference (2004), ix Raven911 (first responder web platform), 78 Really Simple Syndication (RSS), 46, 66, 91, 92 Reddit, 58, 91–92 Rey, Pablo, 116, 117 Richter, Gerhard, 30 Risam, Roopika, 6, 49 Rizk, Nagla, 64 Ross, Andrew, 15 Rotblat, Joseph, 77 R-Shief: author’s State Department lecture on, 77, 78; collaborative and participatory model of, 55, 69; conceptual design of, 55; Egyptian uprising and, 1–2; first Twitter Data Analytics Dashboard, 68; knowledge interaction and, 55; Libyan uprising and, 76–77, 82–87; moved to cloud-computing servers, 1–2; #OccupyData hackathon data, 114, 116; origin and

178 Index

R-Shief (continued) history of, 1–2, 38, 50–51, 67–68; prototype, 38, 67, 68; “radical presentness” practice, 95; Twitter “Information Mappings,” 66; Twitter-mining and analysis, 1–2, 11, 13–14, 68, 80–82, 94–95 “R-Shief Portal” (virtual archive), 111 Russell, Bertrand, 77 Russell, Legacy, 7 Russell-Einstein Manifesto, 77 Russolo, Luigi, 29 Saad, Ibrahim, “Without a Cover Project,” 106 Saber, Bahaa, 19–20 Sadat, Anwar, 57 Safadi, Bassel, 80 Said, Edward W., xii–xiii, 55–56; death of, xii; education of, xii–xiii; “On Becoming Arab” written in memory of, ix–xii; Out of Place, xiii; Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, xiii Said, Khaled, 47, 66, 115 Sakr, Naomi, 42 Salman of Saudi Arabia, 40 Sameer, Mohamed, 39 Samir, Zeinab, 61 Sandmonkey (blogger), 18, 40 Saudi Arabia, 40, 72, 124 Scha¨fer, Mirko, 116 Scott, Ant, 7 Second Life, 110 Second World War, 5, 119 Seif, Mona, 58 Seif, Sanaa, 58 Seif El-Islam, Ahmed, 57–58

Seikaly, Sherene, 47 September 11, 2001. See 9/11 Seriality, 70 Sextarianism, 27 Sexual harassment, 40, 56, 60 Shaalan, Mohsen, 105 Shaath, Ali, 48, 64–65, 78, 80 Shared Technical Means, 78 Shehab, Bahia, 24; Corner of a Dream, 111; A Thousand Times No, 108–9, 109 Shulgin, Alexei, 7 Slashdot, 58, 144n3 Snelson, Kenneth, 31 Snijder, Hans, 45 Social Darwinism, 31 Societal verification, 77–78 Sousveillance, 8–9, 115 South Africa, 4, 15 Sputnik, 30 Stanford University, 30, 76, 78, 114 Stephan, Rania, The Three Disappearances of Souad Hosni, 103 Steyerl, Hito, 111 Street art, 21–24 Street politics, 19–26, 42, 46, 51, 56, 103 Stubbs, Christopher, 78 Subaltern: bodies, 80; protest, 19, 24–26; urban, 21–26 Surveillance, ix, 8–11, 71, 73–74, 80, 96, 115 Swartz, Aaron, 80, 91–92 Syria, 4, 32, 32, 52, 68, 71, 85, 86, 99   Take Back the Tech, 64, 68 Tawil-Souri, Helga, 50 Technical semiotics, 34 Tensegrity, 31, 31–33

Index 179

Thompson, Elizabeth, 27 “Tracking Transience” (web-based art project), 8–9 Trans-local sensibility, 10, 15, 41–42, 56 Transmission Control Program (TCP), 30 Transnational feminist studies, 7 Transnationality: transnational communities, 55, 69, 110, 118; transnational effects of uprisings, 15; transnational media circulation, 6; transnational political influences, 81, 93; transnational revolutions, 4 Trump, Donald, 122 Tufekci, Zeynep, 48 Tunisia: Internet surveillance, 71–72, 146n27; uprising, 1, 2, 4, 11, 13, 15, 29, 44, 54 Turenhout, Ryanne, 116, 117 Twitter: Arab data bodies and, 20, 42; Arab Techies code sprint and, 65–66; archiving, 94–95; January 6, 2021, Capitol riot, 120, 122; launch of, 46; #OccupyData hackathon, 114, 116; Riot Smoke, 23–24, 24; R-Shief ’s Information Mappings, 66; R-Shief ’s mining and analysis, 1–2, 11, 13–14, 68, 80–82, 94–95; #Syria data analytics and visualization, 31–32, 32; Tweet Nadwas, 66–67; Tweet World (game prototype), 52. See also Hashtags   Unicode Standard, 70, 146n24 University of Antwerp, 45

University of California, Los Angeles, 30 University of California, San Diego, 122 University of California, Santa Barbara, 30, 120 University of Rochester, 103, 104 University of Southern California: Annenberg Innovation Lab, 2; Institute for Multimedia Literacy, 116 University of Toronto, 79, 80 University of Utah, 30 Utrecht University, 115–16   Verdeil, Eric, 26, 27 Virilio, Paul, 28 Virtuality, 98–99 VJ Um Amel project, 3, 10–12, 14, 110–13, 117–18, 124; 3-D model, 51, 52; “Arab Future Trippings VR Prototype,” 51; Beach, 112; Beit Um Amel, 8, 111–13; Birds, 112, 122; Boys on the Beach, 96; Cairo Glitch, 24, 25; Cairo Graffiti, 24, 25, 122; Capital Glitch: Arab Cyborg Turns to D.C., 8, 122–24; concept art for cyborgs, 53; concept art for future politicians, 54; data analytics and visualization of tweets on #Syria, 32; “Egyptian Body Politic: Adaptation of Tahrir,” 74–75; meaning of name, 3; “Moving My Data Body and Live Tweeting,” 51; Riot Smoke, 23, 24; Tapestry, 112; Tweet World, 52   War on Terror, ix, 14, 100, 101 Wedeen, Lisa, 41

180 Index

Weiss, Max, 27 Wikipedia, 44, 45, 65 Wikis, 58, 61–62, 67, 68, 69 Winegar, Jessica, 106 WordPress, 62, 67, 69, 120 World Bank, 5, 26 World Trade Center (WTC), xiii– xiv, 110. See also 9/11

Yamli, 43, 67, 69 Yassin, Raed, The New Film, 104 Yemen, 41, 63, 71, 99, 104   Zuckerberg, Mark, 43, 46 Zuckerman, Ethan, 114

POLITICS / MIDDLE EAST

“Innovative and original, Arabic Glitch interrupts the theoretical silence around Arab technocultures. Channeling the academic, artistic, activist, and technologist, Laila Shereen Sakr embodies the contemporary hybridity of Arab cultural production, inaugurating a rightful place for it in the canon.” ADEL ISKANDAR, SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY

“Laila Shereen Sakr’s breathtaking work will transform how the social sciences and humanities understand cyberactivism, transnational solidarity, and collecacross the world have been waiting for.” NADINE NABER, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT CHICAGO

“Laila Shereen Sakr and her avatar, VJ Um Amel, embrace the glitch—clouds of unknowing, slippery loops, cracks and failures of systems—to better see the materiality of technology, power, and revolution. Aligning theory and practice, installation and performance, Sakr mobilizes media art and digital activist scenes across the Middle East, North Africa, and the Internet.” ALEXANDRA JUHASZ, BROOKLYN COLLEGE CUNY

“Arabic Glitch is an essential addition to the critical discourse on power and surveillance in the age of the Internet. Laila Shereen Sakr decodes the specificity of language and cultural identity on digital praxis, boldly articulating how digital data can enable a distinct form of ocular awareness.” DR. OMAR KHOLEIF, AUTHOR OF INTERNET_ ART: FROM THE BIRTH OF THE WEB TO THE RISE OF NFTS

Arabic Glitch explores an alternative origin story of twenty-first-century technological innovation in digital politics—one centered on the Middle East. Engaging revolutionary politics, Arab media, and digital practice, Laila Shereen Sakr formulates a media theory that advances the concept of the glitch as a disruptive media affordance and argues that there is no longer a divide between the virtual and the embodied. This book teaches us how a region under transformation became a vanguard for new thinking about digital systems: the records they keep, the lives they impact, and how to create change from within. Laila Shereen Sakr is Assistant Professor of Media Theory and Practice at the University

Sakr ARABIC GLITCH Technoculture, Data Bodies, and Archives

tive power. Arabic Glitch is the book interdisciplinary scholars and activists

ARABIC GLITCH

TECHNOCULTURE, DATA B O D I E S , a n d A RC H I V E S

of California, Santa Barbara. Stanford University Press www.sup.org Cover design: Daniel Benneworth-Gray Cover art: Boys on the Beach Glitched. Dye sublimation on metal. © 2014 by VJ Um Amel

Sakr_Arabic Glitch_Case Mech.indd 1

Stanford

Laila Shereen Sakr

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