Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

DOI

10.20415/hyp/028.r01

Publication Title

Hyperrhiz

Issue

28

Pages

68-72

Abstract

[Introduction] If the long hot summer of 2020 marked a season of racial reckoning, it was also—now visible in retrospect—a moment for processing with the relation between digital technologies and power. 8:46 after all names not only an event, a murder, but the title of a short digital film. A film, moreover, that has found decisively counterposed audiences in its ongoing afterlives. A forensics of police violence, on the one hand, 8:46 also avails, in the shadier corners of the dark web, the pleasures of a snuff film. In this way, 8:46 is emblematic of a broader, and, perhaps, terminal indecision over the racial politics of digitality. To be sure, the proliferation of smartphone cameras and social media ecosystems has enabled, respectively, evidence of antiblack police violence and an amplifier for mass mobilization. At the same time, however, those same digital technologies have instantiated a massive militarization of urban and online topoi in the form of facial recognition and other surveillance technologies—disciplinary armatures whose imprecision at individuating black faces is only one of their features. And meanwhile, if social media has facilitated the growth and strategizing of groups like BLM, it has incubated with equal fervor an ascendant white nationalist movement. So, in a time of ongoing antiracist reckoning: whither the digital?

Rights

© 2026 The Author.

Published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License.

ORCID

0009-0008-8990-6912 (Alexander)

Original Publication Citation

Alexander, T. (2025). Toward a decolonial digitality: On Seb Franklin's The digitally disposed. Hyperrhiz(28), 68-72. https://doi.org/10.20415/hyp/028.r01

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