Hito Steyerl

The Spam of theEarth:WithdrawalfromRepresentation

Dense clusters of radio waves leave our planetevery second. Our letters and snapshots,intimate and official communications, TVbroadcasts and text messages drift away fromearth in rings, a tectonic architecture of thedesires and fears of our times.1 In a few hundredthousand years, extraterrestrial forms ofintelligence may incredulously sift through ourwireless communications. But imagine theperplexity of those creatures when they actuallylook at the material. Because a huge percentageof the pictures inadvertently sent off into deepspace is actually spam. Any archaeologist,forensic, or historian – in this world or another –will look at it as our legacy and our likeness, atrue portrait of our times and ourselves. Imaginea human reconstruction somehow made fromthis digital rubble. Chances are, it would look likeimage spam.          Image spam is one of the many dark mattersof the digital world; spam tries to avoid detectionby filters by presenting its message as an imagefile. An inordinate amount of these images floatsaround the globe, desperately vying for humanattention.2 They advertise pharmaceuticals,replica items, body enhancements, pennystocks, and degrees. According to the picturesdispersed via image spam, humanity consists ofscantily dressed degree-holders with jolly smilesenhanced by orthodontic braces.

Medical spam images retrieved from corporation SymantecIntelligence's blog, found herehttp://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/image-spam

          Image spam is our message to the future.Instead of a modernist space capsule showing awoman and man on the outside – a family of“man” – our contemporary dispatch to theuniverse is image spam showing enhancedadvertisement mannequins.3 And this is how theuniverse will see us; it is perhaps even how it

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Example of spam advertising schooling, found here http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/image-spam

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sees us now.          In terms of sheer quantity, image spamoutnumbers the human population by far. It’sformed a silent majority, indeed. But of what?Who are the people portrayed in this type ofaccelerated advertisement? And what could theirimages tell potential extraterrestrial recipientsabout contemporary humanity?          From the perspective of image spam,people are improvable, or, as Hegel put it,perfectible. They are imagined to be potentially“flawless,” which in this context means horny,super skinny, armed with recession-proof collegedegrees, and always on time for their servicejobs, courtesy of their replica watches. This isthe contemporary family of men and women: abunch of people on knockoff antidepressants,fitted with enhanced body parts. They are thedream team of hyper-capitalism.          But is this how we really look? Well, no.Image spam might tell us a lot about “ideal”humans, but not by showing actual humans:quite the contrary. The models in image spam arephotochopped replicas, too improved to be true.A reserve army of digitally enhanced creatureswho resemble the minor demons and angels ofmystic speculation, luring, pushing andblackmailing people into the profane rapture ofconsumption.

Ed Ruscha, SPAM, Detail, 1961. From the series Product Still Lifes,1961/1999.

          Image spam is addressed to people who donot look like those in the ads: they neither areskinny nor have recession-proof degrees. Theyare those whose organic substance is far fromperfect from a neoliberal point of view. Peoplewho might open their inboxes every day waitingfor a miracle, or just a tiny sign, a rainbow at theother end of permanent crisis and hardship.Image spam is addressed to the vast majority of

humankind, but it does not show them. It doesnot represent those who are consideredexpendable and superfluous – just like spamitself; it speaks to them.          The image of humanity articulated in imagespam thus has actually nothing to do with it. Onthe contrary, it is an accurate portrayal of whathumanity is actually not. It is a negative image.

Mimicry and EnchantmentWhy is this? There is an obvious reason, which istoo well known to elaborate on here: imagestrigger mimetic desires and make people want tobecome like the products represented in them. Inthis view, hegemony infiltrates everyday cultureand spreads its values by way of mundanerepresentation.4 Image spam is thus interpretedas a tool for the production of bodies, andultimately ends up creating a culture stretchedbetween bulimia, steroid overdose, and personalbankruptcy. This perspective – one of moretraditional Cultural Studies – views image spamas an instrument of coercive persuasion as wellas of insidious seduction, and leads to theoblivious pleasures of surrendering to both.5

          But what if image spam were actually muchmore than a tool of ideological and affectiveindoctrination? What if actual people – theimperfect and nonhorny ones – were notexcluded from spam advertisements because oftheir assumed deficiencies but had actuallychosen to desert this kind of portrayal? What ifimage spam thus became a record of awidespread refusal, a withdrawal of people fromrepresentation?          What do I mean by this? For a certain timealready I have noted that many people havestarted actively avoiding photographic ormoving-image representations, surreptitiouslytaking their distance from the lenses of cameras.Whether it’s camera-free zones in gatedcommunities or elitist techno clubs, someone’sdeclining interviews, Greek anarchists smashingcameras, or looters destroying LCD TVs, peoplehave started to actively, and passively, refuseconstantly being monitored, recorded, identified,photographed, scanned, and taped. Within a fullyimmersive media landscape, pictorialrepresentation – which was seen as aprerogative and a political privilege for a longtime6 – feels more like a threat.          There are many reasons for this. Thenumbing presence of trash talk and game showshas led to a situation in which TV has become amedium inextricably linked to the parading andridiculing of lower classes. Protagonists areviolently made over and subjected to countlessinvasive ordeals, confessions, inquiries, andassessments. Morning TV is the contemporaryequivalent to a torture chamber – including the

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Cover of Voyager's golden record with playing instructions and sound diagrams, launched in 1977.

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guilty pleasures of torturers, spectators, and, inmany cases, also the tortured themselves.          Additionally, in mainstream media peopleare often caught in the act of vanishing, whetherit be in life-threatening situations, extremeemergency and peril, warfare and disaster, or inthe constant stream of live broadcasts fromzones of conflict around the world. If peoplearen’t trapped within natural or man-madedisasters, they seem to physically vanish, asanorexic beauty standards imply. People areemaciated or made to shrink or downsize. Dietingis obviously the metonymic equivalent to aneconomic recession, which has become apermanent reality and caused substantialmaterial losses. This recession is coupled withan intellectual regression, which has become adogma within all but a very few mainstreammedia outlets. As intelligence doesn’t simplymelt away via starvation, derision and rancorlargely manage to keep it away from the groundsof mainstream representation.7

          Thus the zone of corporate representation islargely one of exception, which seems dangerousto enter: you may be derided, tested, stressed, oreven starved or killed. Rather than representingpeople it exemplifies the vanishing of the people:it’s gradual disappearance. And why wouldn’t thepeople be vanishing, given the countless acts ofaggression and invasion performed against themin mainstream media, but also in reality?8 Whocould actually withstand such an onslaughtwithout the desire to escape this visual territoryof threat and constant exposure?          Additionally, social media and cell-phonecameras have created a zone of mutual mass-surveillance, which adds to the ubiquitous urbannetworks of control, such as CCTV, cell -phoneGPS tracking and face-recognition software. Ontop of institutional surveillance, people are nowalso routinely surveilling each other by takingcountless pictures and publishing them inalmost real time. The social control associatedwith these practices of horizontal representationhas become quite influential. Employers googlereputations of job candidates; social media andblogs become halls of shame and malevolentgossip. The top-down cultural hegemonyexercised by advertisement and corporate mediais supplemented by a down-down regime of(mutual) self-control and visual self-disciplining,which is even harder to dislocate than earlierregimes of representation. This goes along withsubstantial shifts in modes of self-production.Hegemony is increasingly internalized, alongwith the pressure to conform and perform, as isthe pressure to represent and be represented.          Warhol’s prediction that everybody would beworld-famous for fifteen minutes had becometrue long ago. Now many people want the

contrary: to be invisible, if only for fifteenminutes. Even fifteen seconds would be great.We entered an era of mass-paparazzi, of thepeak-o-sphere and exhibitionist voyeurism. Theflare of photographic flashlights turns peopleinto victims, celebrities, or both. As we registerat cash tills, ATMs, and other checkpoints – asour cell phones reveal our slightest movementsand our snapshots are tagged with GPScoordinates – we end up not exactly amused todeath but represented to pieces.9

WalkoutThis is why many people by now walk away fromvisual representation. Their instincts (and theirintelligence) tell them that photographic ormoving images are dangerous devices of capture:of time, affect, productive forces, andsubjectivity. They can jail you or shame youforever; they can trap you in hardwaremonopolies and conversion conundrums, and,moreover, once these images are online they willnever be deleted again. Ever been photographednaked? Congratulations – you’re immortal. Thisimage will survive you and your offspring, provemore resilient than even the sturdiest ofmummies, and is already traveling into deepspace, waiting to greet the aliens.          The old magic fear of cameras is thusreincarnated in the world of digital natives. Butin this environment, cameras do not take awayyour soul (digital natives replaced this withiPhones) but drain away your life. They activelymake you disappear, shrink, and render younaked, in desperate need of orthodontic surgery.In fact, it is a misunderstanding that cameras aretools of representation; they are at present toolsof disappearance.10 The more people arerepresented the less is left of them in reality.          To return to the example of image spam Iused before; it is a negative image of itsconstituency, but how? It is not – as a traditionalCultural Studies approach would argue –because ideology tries to impose a forcedmimicry on people, thus making them invest intheir own oppression and correction in trying toreach unattainable standards of efficiency,attractiveness, and fitness. No. Lets boldlyassume that image spam is a negative image ofits constituency because people are also activelywalking away from this kind of representation,leaving behind only enhanced crash-testdummies. Thus image spam becomes aninvoluntary record of a subtle strike, a walkout ofthe people from photographic and moving-imagerepresentation. It is a document of an almostimperceptible exodus from a field of powerrelations that are too extreme to be survivedwithout major reduction and downsizing. Ratherthan a document of domination, image spam is

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Rendition of iSee Manhattan, a web-based application charting the locations of CCTV surveillance cameras in urban environments. Users areable to locate routes that avoid being filmed by unregulated security monitors.

the people’s monument of resistance to beingrepresented like this. They are leaving the givenframe of representation.

Political and Cultural RepresentationThis shatters many dogmas about the relationbetween political and pictorial representation.For a long time my generation has been trainedto think that representation was the primary siteof contestation for both politics and aesthetics.The site of culture became a popular field ofinvestigation into the “soft” politics inherent ineveryday environments. It was hoped thatchanges in the field of culture would hark back tothe field of politics. A more nuanced realm ofrepresentation was seen to lead to more politicaland economical equality.          But gradually it became clear that bothwere less linked than originally anticipated, andthat the partition of goods and rights and thepartition of the senses were not necessarilyrunning parallel to each other. Ariella Azoulay’sconcept of photography as a form of civilcontract provides a rich background to thinkthrough these ideas. If photography was a civilcontract between the people who participated init, then the current withdrawal fromrepresentation is the breaking of a social

contract, having promised participation butdelivered gossip, surveillance, evidence, serialnarcissism, as well as occasional uprisings.11

          While visual representation shifted intooverdrive and was popularized through digitaltechnologies, political representation of thepeople slipped into a deep crisis and wasovershadowed by economic interest. While everypossible minority was acknowledged as apotential consumer and visually represented (toa certain extent), people’s participation in thepolitical and economic realms became moreuneven. The social contract of contemporaryvisual representation thus somewhat resemblesthe ponzi schemes of the early twenty-firstcentury, or, more precisely, participation in agame show with unpredictable consequences.          And if there ever was a link between thetwo, it has become very unstable in an era inwhich relations between signs and theirreferents have been further destabilized bysystemic speculation and deregulation.          Both terms do not only apply tofinancialization and privatization; they also referto loosened standards of public information.Professional standards of truth production injournalism have been overwhelmed by massmedia production, by the cloning of rumor and its

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amplification on Wikipedia discussion boards.Speculation is not only a financial operation butalso a process that takes place in between a signand its referent, a sudden miraculousenhancement, or spin, that snaps apart anyremaining indexical relation.          Visual representation matters, indeed, butnot exactly in unison with other forms ofrepresentation. There is a serious imbalancebetween both. On the one hand, there is a hugenumber of images without referents; on theother, many people without representation. Tophrase it more dramatically: A growing number ofunmoored and floating images corresponds to agrowing number of disenfranchized, invisible, oreven disappeared and missing people.12

Crisis of RepresentationThis creates a situation that is very differentfrom how we used to look at images: as more orless accurate representations of something orsomeone in public. In an age of unrepresentablepeople and an overpopulation of images, thisrelation is irrevocably altered.          Image spam is an interesting symptom ofthe current situation because it is arepresentation that remains, for the most part,invisible.          Image spam circulates endlessly withoutever being seen by a human eye. It is made bymachines, sent by bots, and caught by spamfilters, which are slowly becoming as potent asanti-immigration walls, barriers, and fences. Theplastic people shown in it thus remain, to a largeextent, unseen. They are treated like digitalscum, and thus paradoxically end up on a similarlevel to that of the low-res people they appeal to.This is how it is different from any other kind ofrepresentational dummies, which inhabit theworld of visibility and high-end representation.Creatures of image spam get treated as lumpendata, avatars of the conmen who are indeedbehind their creation. If Jean Genet were stillalive, he would have sung praise to the gorgeoushoodlums, tricksters, prostitutes, and fakedentists of image spam.          They are still not a representation of thepeople, because, in any case, the people are nota representation. They are an event, which mighthappen one day, or maybe later, in that suddenblink of an eye that is not covered by anything.          By now, however, people might have learnedthis, and accepted that any people can only berepresented visually in negative form. Thisnegative cannot be developed under anycircumstance, since a magical process willensure that all you are ever going to see in thepositive is a bunch of populist substitutes andimpostors, enhanced crash-test dummies tryingto claim legitimacy. The image of the people as a

nation, or culture, is precisely that: acompressed stereotype for ideological gain.Image Spam is the true avatar of the people. Anegative image with absolutely no pretense tooriginality? An image of what the people are notas their only possible representation?          And as people are increasingly makers ofimages – and not their objects or subjects – theyare perhaps also increasingly aware that thepeople might happen by jointly making an imageand not by being represented in one. Any imageis a shared ground for action and passion, a zoneof traffic between things and intensities. As theirproduction has become mass production, imagesare now increasingly res publicae, or publicthings. Or even pubic things, as the languages ofspam fabulously romance. 13          This doesn’t mean that who or what is beingshown in images doesn’t matter. This relation isfar from being one-dimensional. Image spam’sgeneric cast is not the people, and the better forit. Rather, the subjects of image spam stand infor the people as negative substitutes andabsorb the flak of the limelight on their behalf.On the one hand, they embody all the vices andvirtues (or, more precisely, vices-as-virtues) ofthe present economic paradigm. On the other,they remain more often than not invisible,because hardly anybody actually looks at them.          Who knows what the people in image spamare up to, if nobody is actually looking? Theirpublic appearance may be just a silly face theyput on to make sure we continue to not payattention. They might carry important messagesfor the aliens in the meantime, about those whowe stopped caring for, those excluded fromshambolic “social contracts,” or any form ofparticipation other than morning TV; that is, thespam of the earth, the stars of CCTV and aerialinfrared surveillance. Or they might temporarilyshare in the realm of the disappeared andinvisible, made up of those who, more often thannot, inhabit a shameful silence and whoserelatives have to lower their eyes to their killersevery day.          The image-spam people are double agents.They inhabit both the realms of over- andinvisibility. This may be the reason why they arecontinuously smiling but not saying anything.They know that their frozen poses and vanishingfeatures are actually providing cover for thepeople to go off the record in the meantime. Toperhaps take a break and slowly regroup. “Go offscreen” they seem to whisper. “We’ll substitutefor you. Let them tag and scan us in themeantime. You go off the radar and do what youhave to.” Whatever this is, they will not give usaway, ever. And for this, they deserve our loveand admiration.          !

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This text originated as a presentation at the “The HumanSnapshot” conference, organized by Tirdad Zolghadr and TomKeenan at the Luma Foundation in Arles, July 2–4,  2011. It isthe third part of a trilogy about spam, the first two of whichare published in October, no. 138 (fall 2011), guest-edited byDavid Joselit. Part one is titled “Spam and the Angel ofHistory,” and part two “Letter to an Unknown Woman:Romance Scams and Epistolary Affect.” The writer would liketo thank Ariella Azoulay, George Baker, Phil Collins, DavidJoselit, Imri Kahn, Rabih Mroué, and the many others whosparked or catalyzed various ideas within the series. Thankyou also to Brian, as ever.

Hito Steyerl is a filmmaker and writer. She teachesNew Media Art at University of Arts Berlin and hasrecently participated in Documenta 12, ShanghaiBiennial, and Rotterdam Film Festival.

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      1Douglas Phillips, “Can Desire GoOn Without a Body?” in TheSpam Book: On Viruses, Porn,and Other Anomolies from theDark Side of Digital Culture, eds.Jussi Parikka and Tony D.Sampson (Creskill, N.J.:Hampton Press, 2009), 199f.

      2The number of spam emails sentper day is at roughly 250 billion(as per 2010). The total amountof image-spam has variedconsiderably over the years, butin 2007, image spam accountedfor 35 percent of all spammessages and took up 70percent of bandwidth bulge.“Image spam could bring theinternet to a standstill,” LondonEvening Standard, October 1,2007, seehttp://http//www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-2338116 4-image-spam-could-bring-the -internet-to-a-standstill.do . Allthe pictures of image spamaccompanying this text havebeen borrowed from theinvaluable source “Image Spam”,by Mathew Nisbet, seehttp://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/image-spam. To avoidmisunderstandings, most imagespam shows text, not pictures.

      3This is similar to the goldenplaques on the Pioneer spacecapsules launched in 1972 and1973, which depicted a whitewoman and a white man, withthe woman’s genitals omitted.Because of the criticismdirected at the relative nudity ofthe human figures, subsequentplaques showed only the humansilhouettes. It will be at leastforty thousand years until thecapsule could potentially deliverthis message.

      4This is a sloppy, fast-forwardrehash of a classical Gramscianperspective, from early CulturalStudies.

      5Or it may more likely be analyzedas partially self-defeating andcontradictory.

      6I have discussed the failedpromise of culturalrepresentation in “TheInstitution of Critique,”in Institutional Critique: anAnthology of Artists’ Writings,eds. Alex Alberro and BlakeStimson (Cambridge, MA: MITPress, 2009). 486f.

      7This applies unevenly around theworld.

      8In the 1990s, people from formerYugoslavia would say that theformer anti-fascist slogan of theSecond World War had be turnedupside down: “Death to fascism,freedom to the people” had beentransformed by nationalists fromall sides into, “Death to thepeople, freedom to fascism.”

      9See Brian Massumi, Parables forthe Virtual (Durham, NC: DukeUniversity Press, 2002).

      10I remember my former teacherWim Wenders elaborating on thephotographing of things that willdisappear. It is more likely,though, that things willdisappear if (or even because)they are photographed.

      11I cannot expand on thisappropriately here. It might benecessary to think throughrecent facebook riots from theperspective of breakingintolerable social contracts, andnot from entering or sustainingthem.

      12The era of the digital revolutioncorresponds to that of enforcedmass disappearance and murderin former Yugoslavia, Rwanda,Chechnya, Algeria, Iraq, Turkey,and parts of Guatemala, to listjust a few. In the DemocraticRepublic of the Congo, whichsaw roughly 2.5 million warcasualties between 1998 and2008, it is agreed on byresearchers that demand for rawmaterials for the IT industries(such as coltane) played a directrole in the country’s conflict. Thenumber of migrants who diedwhile trying to reach Europesince 1990 is estimated to beeighteen thousand.

      13This derives from a pirated DVDcover of the movie In the Line ofFire (Wolfgang Peterson, 1993),which states, in no uncertainterms, that pubic performanceof the disc is strictly prohibited.

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