adahas | අදහස්

Originally published on the LSE Human Rights Blog 

Across India, one of the world’s ‘fastest growing economies’, humans from certain Dalit castes work as ‘manual scavengers’ that rummage through and clean other ‘high’ caste people’s dry toilets and carry their human waste. The men often clean the sewers and septic tanks while the women transport the human waste for disposal by carrying piles of excreta in cane baskets. It is estimated that over 600 such sewer workers die every year by inhaling poisonous gases. The figure is more than ten times the number of Indian soldiers who get killed each year.

In stark contrast, the internet is often held as a ‘modern’ hierarchy-less virtual space of limitless possibilities where ‘pre-modern’ categories such as caste, race and gender do not exist. I want to trouble this assumption and explore how the production, maintenance and ‘optimization’ of new media technologies that make some populations thrive and live a fantasy of a ‘post-human’ internet is often constructed through the invisibilization of the bodies and the labour, including the labour of death of (re)colonized others in ‘far away lands’.

The social imaginary that drove colonialism was based on the logic that knowledge emerged in West, and was extended to ‘the rest’ through the generosity of its violent imperial reach. It was believed that the colonized black and brown slaves needed the ‘civilizing project’ of colonialism and as such, colonialism was an inevitable righteous and pious endeavour. Almost all dominant institutions, including the scientific industrial complex, were mobilized to justify this truth claim. Meanwhile, colonial extraction continued to provide the resources that stimulated the Industrial Revolution. Some goods, including various technologies that were produced using the resources extracted off the colonies, were sold back to the colonized subjects, creating vicious cycles of dependency that exist to this day.

Many technology companies that emerge in the West often offshore the labour required for the production and maintenance of their technologies to ‘sweatshops’ in the global South. This is legitimized by invoking a neoliberal logic of ‘optimization’ as the ‘porno-tropics’ provide these companies with ample cheap (often female) labour with ‘nimble fingers and passive personalities’. This gendered, racialized and often orientalized labour is supplemented with the weak politico-legal infrastructures that exist in these countries which are struggling to lift their citizens out of poverty and a myriad of other social issues, some of which themselves are legacies of colonialism. Above all, as Lisa Nakamura says, in her work, Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronic Manufacture, what many corporations find most attractive about this labour, is it’s disposability, in that ‘they could be laid off at any time’ while ‘their employers could close plants and reopen them in’ the ‘cheapest place possible’.

Shedding light on the labour of indigenous Navajo Women who produced circuits at a Fairchild factory at the Navajo reserve, Nakamura says, ‘some must labour invisibly for others of us to feel, if not actually be, free and empowered through technology use’. She argues that ‘when we look at the history of digital devices, it is quite clear that the burden of digital media’s device production is borne disproportionately by the women of colour who make them’. She suggests that seeing into the histories of these technologies, ‘both machinic and human, is absolutely necessary for us to understand how digital labour is configured today’. However, the labour of these ‘women of colour is almost never associated with electronic manufacture or the digital revolution’.

‘Fairchild was regarded as a pioneer because of its willingness to take risks and to venture onto foreign shores in search of cheap labour … It was such histories of offshoring that helped to launch the PC revolution, which begot the commercial Internet, which begot everything else’.

Furthermore, ‘in Fairchild’s promotional materials and in journalistic accounts’, Navajo workers were always orientalized to be ‘possessing innate racial and cultural traits that could be enhanced or rehabilitated to produce chips accurately, quickly, and painlessly’. Like manual scavenging, chip manufacturing, too ‘is a notoriously dirty business, and workers at Fairchild and other semiconductor manufacturers were falling victim to pollution-related disease’. ‘Ultimately, the Navajo nation failed to benefit economically as much as it had expected from the plant and was left to deal with the detritus and its long-term consequences’.

As with production, there has also been an exponential growth in the offshoring of the labour of maintenance of different technologies to countries in the global South and the same politics and violences embedded in these technologies’ materiality as in the case of the circuits produced by the Navajo women, are also (dis)embodied in their ‘virtuality’. Jacob Breslaw in Moderating the ‘Worst of Humanity’: Sexuality, Witnessing, and the Digital Life of Coloniality points out how ‘an estimated 100,000 people are employed worldwide to engage in the labour of digital content moderation’. This ‘army’ of invisibilized labourers ‘scavenge’ through 500 hours of Youtube video footage, 450,000 tweets, and 2.5 million Facebook posts produced on the internet every minute and ‘scrub’ social media of violent, ‘offensive’, ‘obscene’ and even traumatic content. This is what Adrian Chen calls social media’s ‘Grandma Problem’ — ensuring that your grandmother who has recently joined Facebook never has to see any of the ‘obscene’ and ‘vulgar’ images or videos that are being circulated on the platform. These could range from child pornography to violent beheading videos of the Islamic State. However, these content moderators often based in the global South, engage in the affective labour of viewing this content so that your grandmother does not have to. Their labour is invisibilized in order to ensure that the average social media user is able to live the fantasy of utilizing the affordances of a ‘safe’, ‘respectable’ and ‘post-human’ internet where you click a report button and content is taken down. Daniel Wry exposes that suicide rates, among those engaging in this affective labour of content moderation is extremely high, so much so that among the staff ‘almost everyone knows about a case where someone committed suicide because of the work’.

This offshoring of ‘digital waste’ produced by the former colonizers for the witnessing of the (re)colonized is also justified within an exploitative logic of optimization as ‘content moderators in the Philippines often make in a day what some US-based moderators will make in an hour’. The choices of India and the Philippines are also not accidental and have very much to do with both countries’ violent colonial histories. Its colonial past has been invoked in the selection of the Philippines ‘as the country was a former American colony and has maintained close cultural ties to the United States, which content moderation companies say helps Filipinos determine what Americans find offensive’. Meanwhile, the dominance of the English language-based programming languages has led to the concentration of programming jobs in former British colonies such as India.

‘The dominance of English, combined with the overwhelming U.S. predominance in portal sites and the dominance of northern telecommunications companies, all combined with the concentration of capital within the North, makes these enlightened bridging solutions attempts to solidify, rather than reduce, electronic disparities.’ – Wendy Chun

Many technology companies such as Facebook, make their moderators sign strict nondisclosure agreements, barring them from talking even to other employees of the same outsourcing firm about their work. While Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg makes speeches at the United Nations about ‘harnessing the power of the internet’ as an enabler of human rights promoting his platform as a champion of the freedom of expression, his company, has threatened to punish its (offshored) labourers with a penalty of €10,000 if they violate the terms of these agreements and speak about their work.

Coloniality was and still continues to be, central to the construction of technology as both a driver of ‘optimization’ and also a site that needs to be perpetually optimized in the name of ideals of ‘growth’ and ‘progress’. The politics and violences embedded in these technologies show us that such a paradigm of ‘progress’ which makes some populations thrive and live ‘comfortable’ and ‘efficient’ lives; rests over the invisibilization of the bodies, labour and even the deaths of others. Those like the Dalit sewage workers, the Navajo women at the Fairchild factory and the Filipino Facebook content moderators, on whose invisiblized labour, this process of ‘optimization’ is built on, are disqualified from our imaginaries and narratives of technological progress and optimization. ‘Looking closer to the metal’ reveals that there are human beings ‘in far away lands’ who engage in labour with real-life consequences including threats to life and health. The labour of their deaths too, is figured aside and invisibilized so the rest of us can continue to live our ‘optimized’ lives. Achille Mbeme coined the term necropolitics to discuss the politics of death that decide which populations should die so the others, could live, or in this case, which populations should die, so that others could live their most ‘optimal’ lives. In order to resist this neoliberal capitalist fantasy of optimization we need to transform our (re)colonial dependences to radical interdependences. It is imperative that such transformations are built on the lived realities of those people on whose labour, these fantasies have been built on. As Chun phrased, digital media after all, is ‘more than screen-deep’.

Senel Wanniarachchi

“Your victory

Was so complete

Some among you

Thought to keep

A record of

Our little lives

The clothes we wore

Our spoons, our knives”

 —Lenard Cohen, Nevermind

I am at the entrance to the British Museum and the path separates into two. I take the path which appears to be less crowded and a guard interrupts me saying this entrance is for ‘members only’. I apologize, take the other and stand in a queue for several minutes. I pass through barricades that separate the members from ‘the other’ which leads me to a checkpoint. It’s my turn to have my bag checked and suddenly I’m conscious of my brownness. Soon, I find myself facing the British Museum. The building’s personality is intimidating and reeks of power. As I walk in, I am reminded that the history of this building and this city is intrinsically entrenched to my own and that of my ancestors and I am reminded of my place in the world and its hierarchies. As I walk in, I see a sign that reads ‘The British Museum —  collecting the world’.

Soon, I am lost in the midst of glorious looted treasures – the mummies of Egypt, Samurai armour from ancient Japan and a Moai statue from the Easter Islands. Even the biggest cynic cannot deny that the museum is a grotesquely impressive custodian of memory, preserving people’s fears, broken dreams and fantasies; like a tragic yet magical cemetery. French art theorist André Malraux once noted, that ‘a museum has always been an artificial concept, a wrenching of objects not into context but out of it’. However, there is very much a context to the British Museum — it’s an institutional legacy of colonialism, white supremacy, slavery and genocide.

I collect a headphone, the piece of technology that would guide me across the museum. Odd euphemisms are used to refer to how the artefacts were ‘acquired’ —‘governed South Asia’, not ‘colonized’, protectorate not colony, ‘suppressing unrest’, not mass killing. Soon, I am drawn to the Museum’s long South Asian Gallery where I see Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction dancing on a circle of fire, Saraswati the goddess of knowledge and a shadow puppet of Mahatma Gandhi. I feel a strange sense of solidarity with these inanimate artefacts. At the end of the gallery, I find the infamous Tara,  standing tall atop a plinth gazing at me. Tara is a Buddhist and Hindu mother goddess of mercy and generous compassion. Her bronze statue plated in gold was stolen from Sri Lanka’s Kandyan Kingdom when the British colonized the island in 1815. Tara’s upper body is completely naked with a sarong draped around her hip concealing her body waist down. Her right hand is in the gesture known as varadamudra – of granting a wish.

At the museum, almost everyone passing by stops to take a look at Tara. A young white couple stands adjacent to me. The young man whispers something in his female companion’s ear. They both giggle. I’m inclined to assume it was a joke laden with some sexual innuendo. Many aren’t aware of Tara’s genealogy or her divinity. Many wouldn’t care. She fulfills an exoticized oriental fantasy. The audio explains that Tara was ‘given’ to Robert Brownrigg, the third Governor of Ceylon (as the British referred to Sri Lanka) who ‘donated’ it to the museum ‘perhaps finding her voluptuous form rather out of place in his English country home’. However, Tara was considered to be too obscene and perverse to be exhibited to the public. Her exposed bronze breasts too big, her waist too narrow and her hips too curvaceous for the respectability of the white gaze. As such, she was locked up in a discreet storeroom, aptly named ‘the Secretum’ for nearly thirty years. The Museum was mandated to create the Secretum, colloquially known as ‘the porn room’, through the 1857 Obscene Publications Act which gave the state power to destroy material it deemed offensive and obscene.

Here was a Sri Lankan mother Goddess worshipped by her devotees, stolen and taken by force to a foreign land where she is treated as some pornographic knick-knack only to be locked up in a storeroom along with phallic antiquities and European erotica that display orgies, bestiality and whatever else was deemed too indignant for the holy white gaze. Only adult white male specialists of ‘mature years and sound morals’ who constituted the very apex of the social hierarchy had access to enter the ‘Secretum’ for their pathologizing intellectual gaze. These scholars probably used Tara to enrich their knowledge system of ‘scientific’ racism that drove colonialism — the libidinous, ‘out of control’ non-humans were vice-indulgent and so were their vain gods. For the natives in the ‘Orient’, she represented mercy and compassion. The brown devotees who wanted to escape the illusion and suffering of the endless cycle of birth, death and rebirth of samsara would stare into her bronze eyes and meditate. This would have perplexed the white missionary slave masters for whom she represented a sinful profanity. How could a naked woman be a God? A God so religiously venerated that even the most powerful of men would kneel before her image, join their palms and pray? They were convinced that these queer emasculated leaders weren’t capable of governing their lands and people and as such, colonialism was not only justified but also inevitable.

For their white gaze, Tara wasn’t any woman, she was pornographic. How could one meditate while watching porn? For the Asians, the sensual and the spiritual were always interconnected and interdependent, perpetually producing and reproducing each other. In Vajrayana or tantric Buddhism, sexual yoga is treated as a form of meditation. However, the British, who failed to comprehend this hypersexualized dichotomy, concurred that the effeminate natives needed the white masters to civilize, not just them, but their Gods. As the missionaries ‘civilized’ the brown Buddhists, they inadvertently ‘civilized’ their Buddhism, and a new kind of rehabilitated Buddhism emerged– a Protestant Buddhism.

The language of conquest was taxonomically allegorized by gender and sexuality. The manly and bold Europe penetrates the effeminate ‘orient’ with exotic landscapes and strange non-humans who worshipped licentious naked Gods. Attempting to meditate looking into Tara’s bronze eyes, I was reminded of what Sri Lanka would have once been, before the island and its inhabitants were marked by colonialism. For the white colonial masters, the island was full of sin and vice. Like Tara, the brown Asians audaciously exposed their bodies in the tropical sun with only a ‘small bit of cord round the loins from which hung a piece of cloth … covering their natural nakedness’. Polyandry was customary as men had ‘but one wife; but a woman often had two husbands’. ‘The sin of sodomy’ was ‘so prevalent’ and with the absence of binarized performances of gender, the colonial masters often found themselves looking at the brown natives under tropical palm trees in confusion wondering ‘men or women?… these males are so perfectly beautiful that one’s gaze can be fooled’.

The audio in my ear whispers that Tara was perhaps buried in soil for protection from invaders causing the scars across her face and body. The image of Tara’s body traumatized by scars reminds me how Sri Lanka continues to be marked by colonialism. In order to please our colonial masters, we learnt to regulate ourselves and each other and to be ashamed of our brown bodies and conceal them in shame. The same temples that were home to female deities like Tara, now deny women access as they ‘sinfully’ menstruate ‘dirty’ blood. We memorized the masters’ language and started sharing their obsession with hierarchies such as heteronormativity, patriarchy and capitalism. We now perform their binarized gender roles for them better than the masters themselves. Our militarized nationalisms treated the minorities within our own communities the way our slave masters treated us. We appropriated their monogamous marital family as the primary site of surveillance of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’. Our state institutionalized colonialism in all its arms, from the military to politics and education to tame its populations and massify them into these moulds, using biopower to regulate every raised eyebrow, every condescending giggle and every embarrassed look. Our legal infrastructure is a residue of colonialism, not one based on Buddhist or Hindu jurisprudence. Our Obscene Publications Act is much like the one which mandated the creation of the Secretum. Our penal code criminalizes homosexuality and the Vagrants Ordinance criminalizes sex work. These laws were mobilized to punish deviance and most of us abided through ‘self-governance’ in fear of the carceral state. The post-colonial monolithic Sri Lankan state metamorphosed itself in order to please the masters’ understandings of chastity, virility, domesticity, and respectability and we ‘emulate and simulate’ these ‘moral codes’ as if they are our own culture. A new post-colonial brownness was recreated to be in a perpetual struggle to achieve whiteness both physically & ontologically.

The audio tells me that the precious gems that decorated Tara’s hair are now missing. Colonization robbed us not only of our gems but our soil, our air, our sexuality, our language, our culture and our gods. We complied in order to please our colonial masters and to show to them that we are respectable and are capable of governing ourselves. Today, the same master looks back at us and says we are too illiberal, unenlightened and conservative, our masculinity too toxic, our femininity too servile and our culture and religion too backward, for practising these very things we appropriated from them. ‘The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’. When will we admit that this purity is a performance? That we are erotic? That we were the original ‘free the nipple’? That some amongst us are queer? That some of our ancestors were sex workers?

Museums construct certain ‘narratives’ of history, and the British Museum’s narrativization is one of a history as written by the victors, of the ‘executioner having the last word’. Representations of colonialism as adventurous expeditions to ‘collect the world’ erase the struggle of the natives and reproduce orientalist fantasies. We need to reclaim these stories, our brownness and our erotic which is our power.

However, unmoved and unaffected, Tara stands tall as a silent yet deeply political act of resistance and a reminder of a pre-colonial past where a naked woman was a goddess who brought the most powerful of kings, priests and generals in ‘the Orient’ to their knees. There have been several requests from Sri Lanka calling for the return of Tara and other artefacts. Looking into her eyes, I am unsure if Tara should to be brought back to Sri Lanka. Colonialism has erased something so intrinsic about the island that I am no longer sure if she is even welcome. The audio in my ear concludes voyeuristically, ‘before you move on, admire her from every side’. I look at Tara’s left hand, the varadamudra, and say a prayer for my beautiful country.

Senel Wanniarachchi

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(Opening remarks made at the Adhil Bakeer Markar Foundation’s Inaugural Youth Dialogue on the Role of Youth in Shaping Multicultural Societies )

A very good morning everyone. On behalf of the Adhil Bakeer Markar Foundation, it’s an absolute privilege to be able to welcome you all to the Foundation’s inaugural event: this Youth Dialogue with His Excellency Prof. Ahmet Davutoğlu, the Former Prime Minister of Turkey, who will speak to us about something extremely important to us and something that our dear friend Adhil cared so much about– the Role of Youth in Shaping Multicultural Societies.

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