Necropolitics and Virtual Death-Worlds

Sky burial - necropolitics - virtual death-worlds

Photo by Casey Allen on Unsplash

Sky burial

In Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, and some parts of China and India, the bodies of the recently deceased are often left on a mountain, exposed to the elements.

There’s a practical and a spiritual reason for this tradition. Practically, the ground in these mountainous regions is too hard to dig a grave and timber for cremation is in short supply; spiritually, Buddhists consider it a generous way to return the now ‘empty’ body to earth.

But it’s not earth that takes the bodies.

Scavengers, most notably vultures, are common participants in sky burials. Those big birds are the only obligate scavengers among terrestrial vertebrates — they evolved to specialize in death. Dark. I like it.

For example, many vultures have bald heads so that pieces of rotting meat don’t get stuck in head feathers while they’re rooting around in a body with their strong, curved beaks. They also have incredibly acidic stomach acid that lets them digest anthrax and cholera without a burp. Our feathered friends root around in dead meat with their clawed feet too. To keep those clean, they regularly pee on their legs — the uric acid removes bacteria. Both the bald head and the leg peeing also help them thermoregulate. Take note, efficiency gurus.

Sadly, these avian deities of death are among the most threatened birds across the globe thanks to pesticides, heavy metals, and pharmaceutical waste…

Despite their gloomy reputation, vultures are remarkably social and socially flexible animals. There are solitary species, species that live in groups and engage in communal roosting, and pretty much everything in between. When vultures descend on a freshly deceased body, they often engage in dominance displays to decide who gets the first bite.

Ah, the politics of death.

Necropolitics

In 2003, Cameroonian historian Joseph-Achille Mbembe articulated the idea of necropolitics (expanded into a book in 2019). Building on Michel Foucault’s biopower - the many ways states control the life and health of their citizens - necropolitics is all about “the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.”

Mbembe frames necropolitics in terms of racism and colonialism. He begins by considering slavery and writes,

An unequal relationship is established along with the inequality of the power over life. This power over the life of another takes the form of commerce: a person’s humanity is dissolved to the point where it becomes possible to say that the slave’s life is possessed by the master

He moves on to the South African apartheid regime and the occupation of Palestine to suggest that similar mechanisms are at play in those contexts.

Four years after Mbembe’s coinage of the term, American gender studies professor Jabri K. Puar added a queer dimension to the necropolitics idea, later extended again to include a transgender dimension by cultural theorist C. Riley Snorton and environmental studies scholar Jin Haritaworn.

Regardless of along which intersections you want to slice it, at its root necropolitics says that the (groups of) people who can wield political power use that power to decide which ‘Other’ (groups) should die. Take away their healthcare, march them into poverty, or deny their (right to) existence outright.

*looks at world* Necropolitics is not a thing of the past.

What about our virtual world and its (crumbling) empires?

Virtual death-worlds

The application of necropolitics, Mbembe argues, leads to the creation of death-worlds, or,

… new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead¹.

You could argue that ‘social’ media has also given us a new form of social existence. Are there virtual death-worlds too? Virtual necropolitics?

Australian technology researcher Kelly Lewis makes the case for ‘yes’. She writes that,

… platform necropolitics manifest through asymmetrical content moderation processes, platform policies, and alternative enforcement systems.

The ladies and (mostly, let’s be fair) lords that rule the social media platforms on which we build parasocial relationships and followings can block and (shadow) ban people and groups at will. Let’s call it the Musk effect, even though Elon is only one of many platform lords who do so. Meta silences pro-Palestine voices on both Facebook and Instagram. YouTube deleted evidence of chemical weapon use in Syria. Pre-Musk Twitter blocked accounts associated with farmers protesting against the Indian government.

Lewis clarifies what is at stake,

… the battle to control the narrative dimensions of conflict, war, and contestation in platform spaces has become as central and intensified as the physical acts that typically govern it. Platforms enable people a space to tell their stories to global audiences and build alliances which can pressure international actors to respond with political and material support…

Who (not) to platform can, in extreme cases, be a matter of life and death, virtually and physically. Of course, content moderation is challenging and social media, like society, cannot be a free-for-all.

While it is tempting to shuffle all responsibility to the platform or plantation owners, the culpability extends further. Edmund Burke’s famous (and misattributed²) quote tells us that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. Most of us won’t build a social media platform or develop its content moderation strategy, and yet - to an extent - we can choose which platform to use and who we (don’t) give our attention to, provided they are not banned in the first place.

To return to the quote from Lewis, (virtual) necropolitics is about narrative control and its ensuing enforcement. If that sounds familiar, I would not be surprised. Populist politics can often be tied to necropolitical risks. But populism doesn’t work unless a population buys into the narrative. Mbembe, in his original necropolitics paper, already hinted at this when he writes,

Because the two narratives are incompatible and the two populations are inextricably intertwined, any demarcation of the territory on the basis of pure identity is quasi-impossible. Violence and sovereignty, in this case, claim a divine foundation: peoplehood itself is forged by the worship of one deity, and national identity is imagined as an identity against the Other…

On social media platforms, it doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to tie this to cancel culture (from both sides of the political divide), which is, by definition, about erasure.

The crowd can be wise, but it is often bloodthirsty when fired up by us versus them rhetoric, whipped into a frenzy by narratives that need not be based on facts.

I prefer vultures.

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1. I have to link to my zombie post. Them’s the rules.

2. He never said it. He did say, "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."