Digital/commercial (in)visibility

Abstract

This article explores one aspect of digital politics, the politics of videos and more specifically of DAESH recruitment videos. It proposes a practice theoretical approach to the politics of DAESH recruitment videos focused on the re-production of regimes of (in)visibility. The article develops an argument demonstrating specifically how digital and commercial logics characterize the aesthetic, circulatory, and infrastructuring practices re-producing the regime of (in)visibility. It shows that digital/commercial logics are at the heart of the combinatorial marketing of multiple, contradictory images of the DAESH polity in the videos; that they are core to the participatory, entrepreneurial, individualized and affective processes of contagion determining whom the videos reach and involve; and that they shape the sorting, linking, flagging and censoring of the videos that define their accessibility on the internet. The theoretical and political cost of overlooking these digital and commercial characteristics of DAESH visibility practices are high. It perpetuates misconceptions of how the videos work and what their politics are and it reinforces the digital Orientalism/Occidentalism in which these misconceptions are anchored.

Join our team, change the world: edibility, producibility and food futures in cultured meat company recruitment videos

“…Furthermore, they are important as symbolic representations of the significance of recruitment to the current start-up sector, and values, skills, and attitudes sought by the company. Subsequently, this paper contributes by highlighting the significance of recruitment videos as sites for social science analysis, as an empirical setting that has until now been under-researched (with the exception of a set of papers on recruitment videos used by terrorist groups (Salem, Reid, and Chen 2008;Carriere and Blackman 2016;Leander 2017;Macnair and Frank 2017)). Meats 2017), and subsequently raised a further 17m USD during their 2017 Series A investment round.…”

The departed militant: A portrait of joy, violence and political evil

“…Likewise, the ISIS magazine Inspire copies and pastes ‘counter-interrogation’ strategies from publicly available CIA manuals (Austin, 2017: 120). Computer games like Call of Duty are regularly invoked as allusive examples within texts (Crone, 2014; Shaw and Warf, 2009), while forms of capitalist commerce are generally promoted in propaganda more commonly than violent acts (Leander, 2016). More than all this, Tsarnaev’s closest companion remained his brother, Dzhokhar, who never stopped drinking, smoking weed and being, well, a teenager.…”

“…Contemporary information flows are now organized horizontally, in such a way that ‘instead of the [classical] relation between a class [of knowledge] and its members, the organizing principle is simply the inter-connectedness of all the elements’ irrespective of whether they form obviously ‘meaningful links’ (Dreyfus, 2009: 11). The general result is that connections are developed more through processes of contagion, non-linear networking and related phenomena than through coherence between the connections formed (Coyne, 2008; Leander, 2016). More than this, non-linear informational transformations often operate via ‘aesthetic assemblages’ (Crone, 2014) that produce an ‘augmented reality’ working to ‘change our own goals and aims, our own ways of relating to one another, our social relations, and the very way we think, act, feel’ (Bryant, 2011: 17).…”

The security captor, captured. Digital cameras, visual politics and material semiotics

“…The notable exception to this de-privileging of cameras and production agency is in Kennedy's (2009) work on soldier photography, where we see how digital cameras transform the warzone as soldiers capture routine and exceptional moments, including moments of violence, as mundane part of everyday practices, and share these moments with people who are not in the battlefield. While an increasing amount of works consider the digital mediation of images (Crone 2014;Leander 2017;Malmvig 2020), the tendency to bracket or overlook camera agency has proved surprisingly stubborn even as international relations researchers have themselves begun using cameras to do research, producing and altering images (Weber 2011;Saugmann Andersen 2012; Der Derian, Udris, and Udris 2010; Möller 2013; Särmä 2018; Lisle and Johnson 2018).…”