Unedited truth

As a sophomore lighting Design concentration within the Stage Design and technology program I was consistently challenged to produce theatrical designs of quality. Likewise, I was consistently challenged (as I sat in a room of nine students) to keep my composure about being singularly brown. More than the socio-economic disconnect in life experiences.More than the lack of cultural connection which lead to a deficiency in intimate relationships and passionate friendships being conceived.More than the passive ignorance or willful choice to acknowledge these obvious dividers, what bothered me was that it never got better. Stagnant. It was what it was and everyone else was perfectly content being oblivious that there were reasons I chose never to speak to anyone in class unless being spoken to first. I didn’t know how to speak to them. I didn’t know how to speak with them. Among them. As one of them, because I never felt safe.

I had tried to spark conversation on my end at times, but the topics seemed to bounce off an invisible wall of, “Well that’s nice” motifs.In my heart, I truly don’t believe it was an active choice to be dismissive of these efforts by my classmates because they’re good people, however this is what I do know- everything in my life is black. From soft Dominican Curls to rhythms of speech, through hip-hop dancing feet and engrained in every bite of Puerto Rican food that I learned to make watching Abuela my Afro-Latino-ness knows no subversion.

The more I initially attempted to put myself out there the more I ran into the molasses like stillness that was the various eye glazing, “oh cool...”   “Well that’s nice” which truly meant, “well I can’t relate but I’m not going to tell you I have no idea why what you’re talking about matters at all because I grew up in another universe than you and haven’t cared to go outside my comfortable cultural bubble of privilege to become a well rounded adult and I expect you to have to explain and educate me on every nuance of whatever it is you’re so excited about right now while I make no effort to contribute to this now unfortunate one sided exchange and even when you take the time to explain I’ll just go back to speaking to anyone else about what we already can comfortably interact about since- ya know- its a lot of effort otherwise to have to get to know you as a person outside of our class structure and what I see of you on social media which I have already used to form my probably ill informed preconceived notions about you and that’s enough for me”.

I felt bad. I felt isolated for being born as myself. I felt like I made my classmates uncomfortable because they couldn’t speak on topics that make me everything that I am.Music, Food, First world problems, Fashion, pop culture, film, life anecdotes, how we grew up. Nothing. People bond over their collective struggles and passions. Between my classmates and I there were no common denominators to our truths other than our mutual craft- it wasn’t enough.I didn’t know what to say anymore, so I shut up.

My silence was not limited to my voice but extended to the insecurities I had fought all freshman year to overcome when initially shell shocked by this same mechanism of ignorance campus wide. I was again hyper aware of my black fashion, my black music bumpin out my black headphones, my black sense of humor, even the flavor of my stride as I walked was under my careful surveillance as to not stand out and make the white people uncomfortable. When colored people make white people uncomfortable bad things happen to colored people. No one tells you this formula, your inherit it as learned instinct growing up colored in America. Whether it’s another black kid getting shot or it’s someone in the workplace using their power dynamic against you because they feel threatened by your capabilities and you happen to be conveniently not white so they can use the power of subtle racial stigmas against you when the opportunity presents itself this formula is fact. It’s articulation in my college experience is my truth in this story.

9am walk in, exchange mundane socially ritualistic greetings. Listen to and voice some collegiate bullshit banter about whatever it is that’s making us “so tired” and “so overwhelmed” that morning because what is Emerson if not a money and soul sucking vacuum of privilege and what is a Design Tech student without the urge to complain for complaining’s sake - shut up. Listen for 15 min to these same classmates exchange excitedly with the other white kids who just walked in about everything and anything they’ve all been doing on their personal time with vibrant comfort and companionship. Sit quiet in class- Grab my bag and literally dip out the room as fast as possible the second we were dismissed. Irish goodfreakinbye. French mofreaking Exit. Repeat every other day for maximum effects of systemic/infrastructural oppression caused by a lack of diversity at your collegiate institution that no one seems to wants to effectively deal with.

After two and a half months of this cycle we were to produce and present our “Cue to Music” projects. Pick a song and in the Lighting Design Lab design, program and execute a full light show to the song on the mannequin Fred and you have the option to bring someone in instead of Fred which hasn’t been done at all till this point because why do more work. Cool, bet- sounds fun. Except Fred is white. As a lighting designer how am I supposed to be the best I can be if I have never studied how to design on darker skin tones at the professional level. It is literally a handicap on my $65,000 a year training to not have to design on dark skin as a requirement. Our acting program has less than 30 people of color in it and casts less than half of that on any show I MIGHT be working on if at all so the odds of getting to design on a colored person in anything other than a student show is radically low.

Every class became a mission I had to mentally prepare myself for. By the time we got around to this project it was the end of the semester and reached the limit of what my mind and emotions we telling me was healthy about this situation. I had to speak.  I asked the only other Brown lighting designer in the major, then a freshman I had befriended (at first over the fact that we were not white then because we actually share values and interests) to be my mannequin.

The black body is a political body and I intended to use it as such. The song I chose was “How Great” by Chance the Rapper. Being a disciple of hip-hop culture I wanted to use it as a form of resistance from the negativity that had corrupted my self worth. I wanted something to celebrate so I turned to my faith in God and in my culture. I wanted to celebrate life and being alive via the glorification of my beliefs and applying my craft on a body that looked like my body. I felt a need to reclaim my identity from this space that had put me in a position where for so long I felt the need to suppress it. I had to speak.

Presentation day came and again I repeated my ritual of likable small talk before class and sat through some presentations as I got more and more anxious about mine. I had presented two very political projects earlier in the semester one design where I used my own poetry with Biggie Smalls lyrics from “Suicidal Thoughts” to tell a narrative of a black male character who grew up fatherless then had a wayward life that led to suicide and lit Fred to that. Another where I used Kendrick Lamar’s sampled interview with Tu-Pac at the end of “Mortal Man” to speak about the race issues in contemporary America via my design. But this time it was personal in a different way. It was about me.

I’m up - I went to the light board. As I loaded up my show cue file I started trembling. Luckily it was dark as I set my cue sheet and my friend took his place where Fred once stood so no one could tell...but I could tell.  

How great is our God, sing with me How great is our God, and all will see How great, how great is our God

Exalted- my body mechanically started keeping time with the music- eyes glued to my cue sheet- head tilting to see the cues popping off as the washed faded across my friends beautiful dark skin and Chance preached his truth and for those few minutes its was our truth- My Truth-the Truth. The room warped with the light of my afro-soul and the skill of my craft. The music of my people echoed against the walls and my classmates were presented with what at face value seemed like just another Elmer project. I was presented with my own voice and it embraced me like a friend long absent. My hand trembled like a would be lover confessing his infatuation after months of build up and self doubt. I was naked in a room of acquittances who didn’t know me “like that” -ears hot and adrenaline pumping.

This was my act of revolution. I felt unapologetic for the first time in this space. No longer sorry for being myself and no longer worried about someone else feeling uncomfortable about not understanding.

There is more context to these relationships and occurrences than I have the time to explain in this article. But if you take anything away from this let it be the following: This was one class in my second year of school...imagine living at this school...imagine the first year...imagine the other classes...imagine the stories I could tell-ask others of the stories they could tell.I do not feel resentment or ill will toward the students or professor of my class for being products of a system that puts them in a position where they are made complicit in the societal crimes of a greater structure outside of their immediate control. I respect, greatly admire and generally get along just fine on a surface level with the majority of my non POC classmates if not all and with each of my passionate professors. I do however hold anyone who should know better than to actively not be aware of their position of power and privilege within this system fully accountable for choosing to remain ignorant to their part in this. I hold anyone accountable who is not ignorant to their position and chooses to not participate in actively making an effort to make it better or does the bare minimum.   

I’m currently a junior. When I was accepted into my dream school I cried for hours. As I reflect on that night I view it as a precursor to the amount of tears I would shed especially in my first two years here caused by  infrastructural racial and psychological aggressions as well as ignorance on a day by day person to person basis. Wake up.

Self-Isolation Diary: A Day in the Life Of Allana Davison

With people around the country winding down their eighth week of self-isolation, FASHION is reaching out to some of our favourite Canadians to get a peek into how they’re living their lives in lockdown (remember: #StayHomeSaveLives). Each week, keep an eye out for new self-isolation diaries from actors, designers, influencers and artists who are riding this uncertain time out with us.

Allana Davison, beauty blogger

When the lockdown first hit, I was surprised at how much it seemed to affect me mentally. I’d never experienced much in terms of anxiety or panic attacks, but started to feel overwhelmed by the sudden complete shift in our everyday lives. Seeing what was happening in other parts of the world was scary and sad, and the speed at which it all came was a lot to take in! I found myself really needing to step away from social media for the first week or two. Seeing everyone posting about their blooming productivity that they somehow dug up from the depths of their souls and in their homes; the workout routines, the cleaning, the LEARNING—it all made me feel guilty for not being on the same level! I work from home normally, so why was this affecting me SO much?

I decided to shut off my phone, I took a week off from posting videos, and did completely mind-numbing activities to calm down and take my mind off of everything. I dug up my old Gameboy, downloaded Stardew Valley, and binged Netflix like I’ve never binged before! I listened to what my mind and body needed in those moments and think that shutting off for that little while helped me gain a better perspective of myself in this whole situation.

Once the initial shock more or less subsided, I found myself stepping back into a “normal routine.” Working from home already made it so that my day-to-day didn’t have to change all that much. My doc said that doing regular activity and elevating the heart rate is crucial for managing stress during this time. So after a few weeks, I finally gave in to the idea of at-home workouts. I’m such a group fitness gal, so getting the motivation to get my butt off of the couch was really hard at first. I started slow with some low impact pilates/barre-esque workouts, and have worked up to doing full-on sweaty HIIT classes in my living room! A few of my favourite workouts are by Jess Sims on the Peloton app (her full body strength classes are killer) and Mad Fit on Youtube. My beloved Ride Cycle Club has also been doing amazing Instagram Lives from the studio, and if you have a stationary bike at home, it feels so great to pretend like we’re all in the studio again.

I’ve actually really come to enjoy my workout hour in the morning, and even though it may seem hard and very cliché at first, getting my booty moving has helped keep my morale HIGH and the sluggish feelings LOW during this crazy time!

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Missing u, outside world ⚡️

A post shared by Allana Davison (@allanaramaa) on Apr 20, 2020 at 4:17pm PDT

I love binge watching shows on Netflix regardless of what is going on, and there have been SO MANY good releases! Thank you, Netflix, for keeping us entertained, and I am embarrassed to admit how many hours have been clocked on the TV. The Witcher was unreal if you’re a fantasy lover and may be still upset about the tragic movie that they made from Eragon (also hellOOOO Henry Cavill); I loved Locke and Key for another quick fantasy fix; Tiger King (who hasn’t watched this?!?!); How to Fix A Drug Scandal absolutely blew my mind; and I am horrified to admit how much I loved Too Hot to Handle (I finished it in one sitting).

Once you’ve completed the Netflix catalogue, do what I did and download Stardew Valley. A beautiful game that brings all of the sweet memories of Hay Day, Farmville, and Animal Crossing into one sweet bundle! If you have an iPad, download it on to there – it’s the best for functions in my humble opinion. If any of you were Pokémon pals and want to dive back in to your yesteryears, during quarantine I learned that Amazon sells used Gameboys and I picked up a pile of my old games – such great lockdown entertainment!

Besides the Netflix binges and video game marathons, lockdown has proven to be the best time to keep up with loved ones. I’ve spent countless guilt-free hours on FaceTime with my close friends and family. Our normal travel schedules are pretty hectic and we don’t often have a lot of downtime to just chill and connect with the people in our lives. What used to be weekly or biweekly conversations with my family and girlfriends back home have become a daily occurrence and I love that part of this! Being creative and coming up with ways to have fun together via video chat has given our girls nights an interesting twist. FYI: you can, in fact, successfully play Kings Cup via FaceTime and ‘unce unce’ in a living room club shortly thereafter… who would have thought!

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Have you seen my recent video? A lil #WFH makeup look & some tips for feeling fab on those ever-so-beloved zOom meetings 🤟🏻🥰

A post shared by Allana Davison (@allanaramaa) on May 5, 2020 at 3:42pm PDT

As for working from home on social media and keeping up with regular content, it was pretty tough to navigate what felt appropriate at first. I didn’t want to post anything that would make people feel worse than they might already be feeling in these tough times. How are others feeling in this situation? What would I want to see in terms of entertainment on Instagram and Youtube? I ultimately had to press on as normal – this is my job! – but needed to continue in a way that would be sensitive to the world around us, and hopefully bring a smile or giggle to someone’s day. I’ve been trying my best to continue with my regular content, while lightening the mood and being candid with how I’ve been dealing with it all at the same time. I find comfort in knowing that I am not alone when going through a hard time, and I really want to convey that to my community online.

Overall, I am trying not to dwell on the sense of loss in our world, and instead focusing on the things I’m still so lucky and grateful to have in my life. I’m trying to do the best that I can to keep the spirits high, bring some laughter and entertainment to my followers, and I look forward to the future when this will all be over and we can hug and kiss our loved ones again! Just remind yourself that this isn’t forever, this too shall pass, *insert Pinterest quote here*, etc etc … ☺ And finally, I so look forward to the bright sweet day where we can all walk down the glorious grey aisle of an airplane and whisk away to warmer lands filled with sun soaking and margaritas … until then! XO

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Self-Isolation Diary: A Day in the Life Of Allana Davison published first on https://borboletabags.tumblr.com/

LARB presents an excerpt from Geert Lovink’s latest book, Sad by Design: On Platform Nihilism, which was released this month by Pluto Press.

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“Solitary tears are not wasted.” — René Char

“I dreamt about autocorrect last night.” — Darcie Wilder

“The personal is impersonal.”  — Mark Fisher

Try and dream, if you can, of a mourning app. The mobile has come dangerously close to our psychic bone, to the point where the two can no longer be separated. If only my phone could gently weep. McLuhan’s “extensions of man” has imploded right into the exhausted self. Social media and the psyche have fused, turning daily life into a “social reality” that — much like artificial and virtual reality — is overtaking our perception of the world and its inhabitants. Social reality is a corporate hybrid between handheld media and the psychic structure of the user. It’s a distributed form of social ranking that can no longer be reduced to the interests of state and corporate platforms. As online subjects, we too are implicit, far too deeply involved. Likes and followers define your social status. But what happens when nothing can motivate you anymore, when all the self-optimization techniques fail and you begin to carefully avoid these forms of emotional analytics? Compared to others your ranking is low — and this makes you sad.

Omnipresent social media places a claim on our elapsed time, our fractured lives. We’re all sad in our very own way. As there are no lulls or quiet moments anymore, the result is fatigue, depletion, and loss of energy. We’re becoming obsessed with waiting. How long have you been forgotten by your love ones? Time, meticulously measured on every app, tells us right to our face. Chronos hurts. Should I post something to attract attention and show I’m still here? Nobody likes me anymore. As the random messages keep relentlessly piling in, there’s no way to halt them, to take a moment and think it all through.

Delacroix once declared that every day which is not noted is like a day that does not exist. Diary writing used to fulfil that task. Elements of early blog culture tried to update the diary form for the online realm, but that moment has now passed. Unlike the blog entries of the Web 2.0 era, social media have surpassed the summary stage of the diary in a desperate attempt to keep up with real-time regime. Instagram Stories, for example, bring back the nostalgia of an unfolding chain of events — and then disappear at the end of the day, like a revenge act, a satire of ancient sentiments gone by. Storage will make the pain permanent. Better forget about it and move on.

In the online context, sadness appears as a short moment of indecisiveness, a flash that opens up the possibility of a reflection. The frequently used “sad” label is a vehicle, a strange attractor to enter the liquid mess called social media. Sadness is a container. Each and every situation can potentially be qualified as sad. Through this mild form of suffering we enter the blues of being in the world. When something’s sad, things around it become gray. You trust the machine because you feel you’re in control of it. You want to go from zero to hero. But then your propped-up ego implodes and the failure of self-esteem becomes apparent again.

The price of self-control in an age of instant gratification is high. We long to revolt against the restless zombie inside us, but we don’t know how. Our psychic armor is thin and eroded from within, open to behavioral modifications. Sadness arises at the point when we’re exhausted by the online world. After yet another app session in which we failed to make a date, purchased a ticket, and did a quick round of videos, the post-dopamine mood hits us hard. The sheer busyness and self-importance of the world makes you feel joyless. After a dive into the network, we’re drained and feel socially awkward. The swiping finger is tired, and we have to stop.

Sadness has neighboring feelings we can check out. There is the sense of worthlessness, blankness, joylessness, the fear of accelerating boredom, the feeling of nothingness, plain self-hatred while trying to get off drug dependency, those lapses of self-esteem, the laying low in the mornings, those moments of being overtaken by a sense of dread and alienation, up to your neck in crippling anxiety, there is the self-violence, panic attacks, and deep despondency before we cycle all the way back to reoccurring despair. We can go into the deep emotional territory of the Russian toska. Or we can think of online sadness as part of that moment of cosmic loneliness Camus imagined after God created the earth. I wish that every chat were never ending. But what do you do when your inability to respond takes over? You’re heartbroken and delete the session. After yet another stretch of compulsory engagement with those cruel Likes, silly comments, empty text messages, detached emails, and vacuous selfies, you feel empty and indifferent. You hover for a moment, vaguely unsatisfied. You want to stay calm, yet start to lose your edge, disgusted by your own Facebook Memories. But what’s this message that just came in? Strange. Did he respond?

Evidence that sadness today is designed is overwhelming. Take the social reality of WhatsApp. The gray and blue tick marks alongside each message in the app may seem a trivial detail, but let’s not ignore the mass anxiety it’s causing. Forget being ignored. Forget pretending you didn’t read a friend’s text. Some thought that this feature already existed, but in fact two gray tick marks signify only that a message was sent and received — not read. Even if you know what the double tick syndrome is about, it still incites jealousy, anxiety, and suspicion. It may be possible that ignorance is bliss, that by intentionally not knowing whether the person has seen or received the message, your relationship will improve. The bare-all nature of social media causes rifts between lovers who would rather not have this information. But in the information age, this does not bode well with the social pressure to be “on social,” as the Italians call it.

We should be careful to distinguish sadness from anomalies such as suicide, depression, and burnout. Everything and everyone can be called sad, but not everyone is depressed. Much like boredom, sadness is not a medical condition (though never say never because everything can be turned into one). No matter how brief and mild, sadness is the default mental state of the online billions. Its original intensity gets dissipated. It seeps out, becoming a general atmosphere, a chronic background condition. Occasionally — for a brief moment — we feel the loss. A seething rage emerges. After checking for the 10th time what someone said on Instagram, the pain of the social makes us feel miserable, and we put the phone away. Am I suffering from the phantom vibration syndrome? Wouldn’t it be nice if we were offline? Why’s life so tragic? He blocked me. At night, you read through the thread again. Do we need to quit again, to go cold turkey again? Others are supposed to move us, to arouse us, and yet we don’t feel anything anymore. The heart is frozen.

Social media anxiety has found its literary expressions, even if these take decidedly different forms than the despair on display in Franz Kafka’s letters to Felice Bauer. The willingness to publicly perform your own mental health is now a viable strategy in our attention economy. Take L.A. writer Melissa Broder, whose So Sad Today “twitterature” benefited from her previous literary activities as a poet. Broder is the contemporary expert in matters of apathy, sorrow, and uselessness. During one afternoon she can feel compulsive about cheesecakes, show her true self as an online exhibitionist, be lonely out in public, babble and then cry, go on about her short attention span, hate everything, and desire “to fuck up life.” In between taking care of her sick husband and the obligatory meeting with Santa Monica socialites, there are always more “insatiable spiritual holes” to be filled. The more we intensify events, the sadder we are once they’re over. The moment we leave, the urge for the next experiential high arises. As phone and life can no longer be separated, neither can we distinguish between real and virtual, fact or fiction, data or poetry. Broder’s polyamorous lifestyle is an integral part of the precarious condition. Instead of empathy, the cold despair invites us to see the larger picture of a society in permanent anxiety. If anything, Broder embodies Slavoj Žižek’s courage of hopelessness: “Forget the light at the end of the tunnel — it’s actually the headlight of a train about to hit us.”

Once the excitement has worn off, we seek distance, searching for mental detachment. The wish for “anti-experience” arises, as Mark Greif has described it. The reduction of feeling is an essential part of what he calls “the anaesthetic ideology.” If experience is the “habit of creating isolated moments within raw occurrence in order to save and recount them,” the desire to anaesthetize experience is a kind of immune response against “the stimulations of another modern novelty, the total aesthetic environment.”

Most of the time your eyes are glued to a screen, as if it’s now or never. As Gloria Estefan summarized the FOMO condition: “The sad truth is that opportunity doesn’t knock twice.” Then, you stand up and walk away from the intrusions. The fear of missing out backfires, the social battery is empty and you put the phone aside. This is the moment sadness arises. It’s all been too much, the intake has been pulverized and you shut down for a moment, poisoning him with your unanswered messages. According to Greif, “the hallmark of the conversion to anti-experience is a lowered threshold for eventfulness.” A Facebook event is the one you’re interested in, but do not attend. We observe others around us, yet are no longer part of the conversation: “They are nature’s creatures, in the full grace of modernity. The sad truth is that you still want to live in their world. It just somehow seems this world has changed to exile you.” You leave the online arena; you need to rest. This is an inverse movement from the constant quest for experience. That is, until we turn our heads away, grab the phone, swipe, and text back. God only knows what I’d be without the app.

Anxieties that go untreated build up to a breaking point. Yet unlike burnout, sadness is a continuous state of mind. Sadness pops up the second events start to fade away — and now you’re down in the rabbit hole once more. The perpetual now can no longer be captured and leaves us isolated, a scattered set of online subjects. What happens when the soul is caught in the permanent present? Is this what Franco Berardi calls the “slow cancellation of the future”? By scrolling, swiping, and flipping, we hungry ghosts try to fill the existential emptiness, frantically searching for a determining sign — and failing. When the phone hurts and you cry together, that’s technological sadness. “I miss your voice. Call, don’t text.”

We overcome sadness not through happiness, but rather, as Andrew Culp insisted, through a hatred of this world. Sadness occurs in situations where the stagnant “becoming” has turned into a blatant lie. We suffer, and there’s no form of absurdism that can offer an escape. Public access to a 21st-century version of Dadaism has been blocked. The absence of surrealism hurts. What could our social fantasies look like? Are legal constructs such as creative commons and cooperatives all we can come up with? It seems we’re trapped in smoothness, skimming a surface littered with impressions and notifications. The collective imaginary is on hold. What’s worse, this banality itself is seamless, offering no indicators of its dangers and distortions. As a result, we’ve become subdued. Has the possibility of myth become technologically impossible? Instead of creatively externalizing our inner shipwrecks, we project our need for strangeness on humanized robots. The digital is neither new nor old, but — to use Culp’s phrase — it will become cataclysmic when smooth services fall apart into tragic ruins. Faced with the limited possibilities of the individual domain, we cannot positively identify with the tragic manifestation of the collective being called social media. We can neither return to mysticism nor to positivism. The naïve act of communication is lost — and this is why we cry.

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Geert Lovink is a media theorist and internet critic and the author of Zero Comments, Networks Without a Cause, Social Media Abyss, and Sad by Design: On Platform Nihilism. He founded the Institute of Network Cultures at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences and teaches at the European Graduate School. He stopped using Facebook in 2010.

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