Aina Abiodun: ‘The cost of their enrichment is my continued oppression’
Our Stories
Aina Abiodun
The cost of their enrichment is my continued oppression
I was once such a passionate advocate of the web that I made it my business to preach the gospel to my then skeptical friends, that technology would deliver a democratized, equitable and creatively limitless future to us all. After all, it was for everyone. And it was free. And there were no rules.
As a creative and storyteller who came of (professional) age at the exact moment when social media began to be widely adopted, I saw the possibilities of the burgeoning social platforms as expansive and liberating. I experimented with every format and community I could find, hosted YouTube channels, worked tirelessly on Vines, built a Twitter audience and thousands-large communities on Facebook. I even founded a company (StoryCode), whose mission to engage technology makers with a broad range of creative and diverse folks was so optimistic that it feels laughably naive today.
I was an ambassador for a technology enabled utopia for marginalised folks.
We all know how that turned out.
For me the harms began first at the moment when trolls became a thing; and the taste for hunting people whose identities were being lived out loud and online in ways they couldn’t in real life, bourgeoned. Many of us were Black women, queer people, artists and those whose newfound liberation online allowed us to find each other, connect on shared values, and try out brilliantly innovative ways of expressing our points of view. It bears mentioning that it is still the case, as recent protests by creators on tiktok, youtube and other platforms have highlighted, that marginalised folks remain the most innovative, imitated and entertaining of creators on the web.
I did my best then to protect myself from the trolls, but the new, monetization-seeking algorithmic approaches which these platforms adopted made it increasingly harder for me to connect with my community unless I paid for their attention. At the same time these platforms offered no protection from those who made it their cause to aggressively insult and threaten, and ultimately chase creators and contributors into hiding.
Then in a strange twist of tech capitalist fate, I wound up as a tech entrepreneur whose need for these very platforms to advertise and grow my business was unavoidable. I've been forced, fundamentally against my own principles, to participate (and fund) the continuation of these oppressive practices, all the way into advertising using content that is optimized by design to 'work well' on those platforms.
As the CEO of a fitness brand, I was practically forced to advertise images that conform to beauty and size standards in order to reach those people who would be interested in my product. As the norms of platforms such as instagram do not align with my personal norms nor those of the communities I belong to, this designed, hyper-aggressive algorithmic fence is an act of digital neo-colonisation which is just as traumatising as its analog predecessor. Why should we continue to be subject, in 2021 to the harm that comes from normalizing whiteness and white-ideal bodies to the point of erasing or denigrating Black and brown femme bodies of different shapes and sizes?
My professional understanding of the hard-coding of anti-black, anti-queer and anti-femme violence and misogyny into these algorithms means I've had to expend particular effort in curating my personal digital landscape. I no longer create honest and personal content because I don’t have the stomach to fend off the trolls. I keep my feeds narrowed to a handful of people whose realities reflect mine, and who affirm my identity and my right to experience a trauma-free digital life. But despite these enormous efforts, I have observed that the ad-serving function of these platforms continue to assault me with content that is explicitly against what my online behavior indicates -- such as persistently showing me fashion brands with imagery of emaciated white women, and serving literal ads of black objects after I have search Black Lives Matter, and suggesting feeds and accounts that do not reflect my documented interests.
Today it seems I am trapped personally, emotionally, and professionally; bound in all ways to these systems of oppression by the direct and designed acts of aggression and violence towards me and others like me. We know these systems greatly benefit a select few financial interests, but the cost of their enrichment is my continued oppression, as has been the case for centuries.
It is unacceptable that policy-makers have paid little attention to these seeming ‘technicalities’ or intricacies of technological oppression -- this is clearly complicity. In the West, the dismantling of the legacy of colonialism and race-based oppression must include a rigorous investigation into the ways in which white power is perpetuated online and reinforces the never-ending, metaphomorphosis of a vile and immoral anti-Black, anti-femme agenda.
Aina Abiodun
Tech Founder & CEO