Leaky academia: digital intimacy and open secrets in times of COVID-19

Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark; Zeerak Talat, University of Sheffield, UK; and Daniela Agostinho, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Image credit: Manu Luksch and Scott Killdal, Contagious Whisper, 2020.

Within the context of academia, much like in other sectors of society, the ongoing pandemic has exposed inequalities that we here describe as 'open secrets'. The disclosure of such open secrets, or 'hidden truths' that were never hidden to begin with, is being facilitated through the digitally networked spaces that bring us together more than ever. Engaging with the 'viral condition' foregrounded by this virtual symposium, this essay thinks through how the virality of digital media is currently intersecting with the unfolding viral pandemic. As we find ourselves connecting in new ways, we suggest that it is time to consider the challenges posed by digital networks, the troubled intimacies they generate, and their potential to forge alliances and solidarities amidst stark and growing inequality.  

COVID-19 turned the familiar humdrum of the academic year upside down, abruptly putting a stop to everyday routines and demanding new practices. The effects of COVID-19 have been brutal across society: unemployment rates have skyrocketed, economies have gone to shambles, and hundreds of thousands have died and will continue to die and fall ill from this disease.
 
Many writers before us have pointed out how the unfolding pandemic has magnified existing inequalities, laying bare realities that were there all along. Such inequalities have also become highly visible in digitally-enabled academia, as higher education institutions have rushed to respond to the spread of the virus.
 
Across privileged Scandinavia, from where we write, professors retreated to spacious summerhouses away from urban centres, quietly enjoying their sudden liberation from academic reproductive labour, tedious meetings and departmental obligations. Some even enjoyed a surge in productivity or used their time to catch up on their reading lists. Others seized the chance to add a COVID-19 grant to their already extensive grant collection. Beyond Scandinavia, journal submissions from male authors went up (Flaherty 2020). Executive branches of academia saw new opportunities in the sudden shift to online teaching, framing the analogue-to-digital conversion as a positive disruptive force (Kandri 2020). Tech companies strongly encouraged this embrace and gained new strongholds in the educational sector, fueling disaster capitalism on campus (Turiano 2020). From this perspective, COVID-19 was not only experienced as a social tragedy, but also as an opportunity for retreat, advancement and profit.
 
Meanwhile, with their work rhythms, social lives and study habits upended, students struggle to keep afloat in small and shared accommodations. A massive pre-existing mental health crisis among the student population suddenly hits the headlines (Pedersen 2020). Without a systemic response in place, some universities reacted with quickly improvised tips on how to keep a routine and promises of a mindfulness app (Munk 2020), offering technological fixes in lieux of politically-informed responses. Feminist, anti-racist and critical disability communities quickly came together to perform the unpaid and academically unrecognised labour of gathering best practices for online teaching (Davidson 2020; Hamraie 2020; Wernimont 2020). Yet, as student and teacher frustration with online instruction accumulates over time, the already devalued labour performed by critical digital pedagogy is even more frowned upon than before the pandemic. Moreover, the socio-political critiques that underlie this body of scholarship are evacuated by utilitarian uptakes, disregarding the critique of sexism, racism and ableism in academia in favour of uncritical implementation of digital technologies. Meanwhile, the divide between tenured faculty and short-term employees is widening (Zahneiss 2020). Researchers on temporary contracts witness their working hours and job prospects disappear like grains of sand in a precarious hourglass, while universities avoid committing to contract extensions or even use the opportunity to fire temporary employees (Collini 2020). Fieldwork stalls. And journal submissions by women drop (Wiegand et al. 2020; Andersen et al. 2020).
 
Within the context of academia, much like in other sectors of society, the ongoing pandemic has exposed inequalities that we here describe as 'open secrets'. The disclosure of such open secrets, or 'hidden truths' that were never hidden to begin with, is being facilitated through the digitally networked spaces that bring us together more than ever. Engaging with the 'viral condition' foregrounded by this virtual symposium, this essay thinks through how the virality of digital media is currently intersecting with the unfolding viral pandemic. As we find ourselves connecting in new ways, we suggest that it is time to consider the challenges posed by digital networks, the troubled intimacies they generate, and their potential to forge alliances and solidarities amidst stark and growing inequality.
 
Leaky conditions – ‘hidden’ truths
As we practice containment – stuck in rooms, apartments, buildings, cities and countries – we also experience new modes of intimacy. Through the porous digital networks that bind us, we leak into each others’ homes and lives. We screenshot and close-examine colleagues’ bookshelves and domestic backgrounds. We observe meeting participants who, forgetting they are on screen, fill dishwashers, pick noses or go to the restroom. We leak into rooms and backyards of students while our children, partners, parents and pets photobomb our lectures. We even leak into our own field of vision, our tired faces – normally out of sight – staring back at us on screen.
 
These new digital intimacies (Wiehn 2020) are not reserved for close friends and colleagues. We also leak into wider communities and data aggregates through video conferencing platforms, contact tracing apps and new higher-ed platforms. Professors conducting online classes about China in one end of the world leak into Chinese censorship apparatuses through Zoom (@letahong 2020). Researchers developing contact tracing apps in the health sector find themselves entangled in regimes of surveillance and policing (Amnesty 2020). And the rushed adoption of digital technologies in the classroom sediments infrastructures that create new value flows between big tech and higher education (Walsh 2020). Academia’s apparently contained spaces, previously upheld by physical walls and normative epistemological boundaries between the public and private spheres, now turn into intimate membranes that leak through digital networks.
 
Digital intimacies have given rise to a string of viral stories about digital transgressions: people unwittingly broadcasting their toilet visits and intimate affairs to department meetings and online classes (Vincent 2020; Smith 2020; Feldman 2020). And in turn, the racialised and sexualised abuse that occurs offline now leak into once safe spaces. Rather than merely exposing flawed privacy settings or digital illiteracy, these stories, in which the boundaries between public and private dissolve, tend to confirm the inherently porous nature of digital technologies. The leakiness of digital technologies is not accidental or anecdotal; it is built into the digital networks that bind us. Rather than premised on sealed infrastructures that shield and protect, digital technologies are meant to leak at all times (Agostinho and Thylstrup 2019; Chun 2016). Crucially, this leaky nature not only exposes domestic intimacies to the wider world; it also enables and upholds the economic model of surveillance capitalism, as it allows for massive and continuous data flows across platforms.
 
Exhausted by lockdowns and fatigued by digital screens, many of us long to return to more contained spaces: meeting rooms, classrooms, hallways and canteens that will allow us to maintain the (imagined) boundaries between public and private and navigate safe and unsafe spaces physically. But this longing for contained spaces also reveals a conservative nostalgia for spaces where privilege can thrive without being confronted by precarity and vulnerability. A space where the pre-existing inequalities are less dramatically seen and felt. Where academia’s dirty secrets can be thrown back into the closet.
 
Here we draw on queer theorist Eve Sedgwick and her landmark book Epistemology of the Closet (1990), where she challenges the binary ‘secrecy/disclosure’ that forms the backbone of modern society. Following Michel Foucault, Sedgwick examines sexuality (its secrecy and disclosure) as the structure of modern ways of knowing. She suggests that modern power is premised on the knowledge and withholding of secrets, or as she puts it, modern power is organized around the figure of the closet. The closet here functions as a contained space: what it contains (what is closeted) and what it spills or leaks (the act of outing) structures the modern organisation of knowledge, what is supposed to be known and what is supposed to remain unknown. As Claire Hemmings puts it, the 'closet is the open secret through which difference and inequality are both obscured and played out in front of our eyes in plain sight' (Hemmings 2020).
 
The closet of society’s open secrets has been further challenged by the intersection of the pandemic with digital connectivity. Within academia, the shared (if unequally felt) condition of COVID-19 and the unprecedented intimacy of digital media laid bare the 'hidden' truths of academic inequality, both locally and globally. We use scare quotes around 'hidden' to emphasise how these inequalities were never actually hidden. Instead they were hiding in plain sight, but only the privileged could afford to look away: the unequal distribution of reproductive labour, falling along gendered and racialised lines; the previous exclusion of disabled and chronically ill colleagues from academic events, as well as colleagues from the global south, who suddenly are allowed to participate in events swiftly moved online; the ticking clock of temporary contracts and the disposability of casualised staff, with disproportionate impact on BAME and female academics; the mental health crisis affecting students and staff, and the underfunded and ill-conceived university support services.
 
As Hemmings points out, 'Sedgwick’s closet epistemology allows us to see these contradictions or shows of deadly ignorance not as undoing how we know and experience coronavirus, but as central to its logics' (Hemmings 2020). The revelations that leak through our e-mails and screens are not really revelations. They are confirmations of what many of us already knew.
 
Drawing on Sedgwick’s epistemology of the closet, media theorist Wendy Chun proposes the term ‘epistemology of outing’ to describe the disclosure of information in digitally-networked societies: the outing of secrets that were never secrets to begin with. This epistemology, Chun suggests, structures 'communication more broadly… Most pointedly, the epistemology of outing depends on the illusion of privacy, which it must transgress'. (Chun 2016: 151).
 
This epistemology of outing in digital networks offers fertile ground for new dangers within the current 'viral condition', as misinformation, hate speech and zoom bombings spread virally on digital platforms, subjecting the already vulnerable to new threats and harms. This virality, however, as media historians have shown, has always been endemic to computational media ecologies (Parikka 2007).[1] And we can draw lessons from previous intersections of media virality with viral pandemics to make sense of these new vulnerabilities, as well as possibilities for cultivating life.
 
In their study of HIV/AIDS and the history of computing, media historians Dylan Mulvin and Cait McKinney explain how HIV was used as a metaphor to describe the dangers of networked connection. Throughout the 1990’s, institutions likened the sharing of data through open networking environments to the spread of AIDS, noting concerns about the harmful consequences of expanding one’s social network of contacts. Mulvin and McKinney document how computer users living with HIV responded to and rerouted the virus metaphor, and forged models for interdependence, shared vulnerability and organising using digital technologies. The dangers of the network society, they remind us, 'are part of being connected to others in interdependent relationships that can also be grounds for solidarity and survival'.
 
As we live through the effects of the pandemic in such disparate ways, we rightfully mourn how the virus has limited the possibilities for physical touch, intimacy and connection that build and sustain communities. We sorely feel how the fraught, leaky intimacies enabled by digital networks fall short from the intimacy of physical co-presence. But the intimacy of digital leakiness, we suggest, might also offer new models for care, solidarity and alliances across borders. How might we reconceive the leakiness of digital networks in ways that open up to radically unbounded subjectivities and intimacy as interdependence?
 
Leaky networks as care and solidarity
At the height of the AIDS pandemic, Eve Sedgwick also used 'the viral' as a way of valuing alternative epistemologies and lives. These viral epistemologies encompassed modes of knowledge, communication and mutual aid that spread beyond the violent networks aimed at containing the lives of the most vulnerable. In the words of Clare Hemmings, these alternative epistemologies 'provide circuits of intimacy that are not rooted in hermetically sealed "households" but in chosen family, shared histories and modes of touching others that have always been innovative'. How might we cultivate what Hemmings terms 'a loving viral epistemology' in the face of the coronavirus pandemic and the digital networks that connect us?
 
As André Brock Jr. (2020, 211) notes, 'Technology use for Blacks often occurs from the margins of society, where survival, joy, and resistance intertwine uncomfortably in the everyday'. This observation resonates with the current moment, in which the same digital space that spreads misinformation and hate speech also offers room to organise, congregate, mourn, find joy and enter new political alliances of solidarity and radical care. Digital networks make such ambivalent engagements possible, allowing space for repetitions and refrains of solidarity and resistance (Keeling 2019; Campt 2020) leaking across analogue and digital spaces in the form of protests, stans, whisper channels, retweeted hashtags and repeated slogans. While such repetitive dynamics could be interpreted simply as being 'stuck' in the neoliberal circuit of crises-habit that exploits viral amplification for profit, we wish instead to read them as examples of how digitally mediated communities can make room for radical care (Hobart and Kneese 2020).
 
In response to digital platforms’ complicity with surveillance capitalism and white supremacy, many offer models of withdrawal, blackout and exit from social media as radical political options as leaky content moderation technology does not offer a reprieve (Thylstrup and Waseem n.d.). In these perspectives, the toxic space of social media is pitted against an idealised revolutionary space untouched by technology and complicity. Yet, as Sarah Sharma notes in 'Exit and the Extensions of Man', 'pulling out' is a deceptively simple solution to real-life entanglements, and the very privilege to imagine exit as a viable political strategy remains a fundamentally male prerogative (Sharma 2017).  Sharma argues that exit – or what she calls sExit – is a privilege that occurs at the expense of cultivating and sustaining conditions of collective self-determination. She further notes that exiting stands in direct contradistinction to care. Care is an opposing political force to exit. Care stays back with the trouble, holding the fort, while the Exiters exit. Care sustains, nourishes, enables and keeps alive (Agostinho 2020).
 
Along similar lines, Wendy Chun reminds us that the operations by which we leak into each other’s purview through technological repetitions make 'clear the necessity of responsibility – of constant decisions – to something like safety (or saving), which is always precarious'. Rather than figuring these leaky repetitions as depriving people and communities of agency and self-determination, Chun reminds us that they can also foreground 'the importance of human agency, a human act to constantly save' not only information but also ourselves, each other and the planet.
 
These leaky networks, we suggest, can function as a call to imagine intimacy otherwise. Refraining Hemmings, leaky networks can 'provide circuits of intimacy that are not rooted in hermetically sealed "households"'. Leaking draws attention to the open secret that we are not bounded, self-sufficient human beings, but porous and interconnected. Leaking disproves our illusions of privacy and sovereignty, and lays bare the fact that we are entangled with and mutually responsible for the life and wellbeing of others. As George Yancy forcefully puts it, 'My life is entangled with your life, your pain, your suffering, your joy, your growth, your diminution, your death, your virus-related vulnerability' (Yancy 2020). By this we mean that the leaks that bind us can work as a powerful reminder that simply returning to contained spaces will not do. The secrets are out. Rather than pushing the open secrets back into the closet, we can cultivate the leak as a 'loving viral epistemology', as a driver for a global sense of shared and implicative responsibility that foregrounds our bodies as transcorporeal beings, always already implicated in one another.

[1] https://www.campaignasia.com/article/misinformation-and-hate-infect-social-media-users-alongside-coronavirus/457871

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Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, Zeerak Waseem and Daniela Agostinho

Nanna Bonde Thylstrup is Associate Professor at the Department of Management, Society and Communication, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. 
 
Zeerak Waseem is Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science, Sheffield University, UK.
 
Daniela Agostinho is Assistant Professor at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.