The installation conflates the inactions of social media platforms and their CEOs with the activities of the violent insurrectionists, thus linking the Capitol breach and social media platforms. In this way, listening to the image is revelatory through the after-affect produced: the compatibility of the seemingly incompatible.
Listening here means engaging a unique modality of “perception, encounter and engagement” (Campt 2017 p.4) to “challenge the equation of vision to knowledge” (p.6). So, rather than looking at it, I listen for connections and symmetries between things that sound incongruous. Thinking with Campt, I listen for “practices that are pervasive and ever-present yet occluded by their seeming absence or erasure in repetition, routine, or internalization’ (p.4). Habitual registers here mean the customary ways of privileging visual primacy, in which ‘seeing is believing’. I ask, what are the historically formless threats the image gives figurative shape to? In other words, what can the image tell us about the entanglements of Big Tech with forms of violence like white supremacy and white nationalism? Connecting with the image through these questions requires looking beyond what is visible in habitual registers (Campt 2017). I use the image as a jumping off point to think with the quote provided at the start. The installation was conceptualized by the non-profit advocacy organization SumOfUs and mounted outside of the Capitol Building in March 2021, ahead of Pichai, Zuckerberg, and Dorsey’s testimonies before two committees of the House of Representatives on the role of social media in promoting violence, extremism, and misinformation. The effigies, like analogue deepfakes, materialize strangely familiar figures-CEOs as violent insurrectionists and violent insurrectionists as CEOs. In the image above, the cutout figures of Sundar Pichai, Jack Dorsey, and Mark Zuckerberg collide with the iconography of prominent insurrectionists who breached the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
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