But given how formations like Black Twitter now foster connections and offer opportunities for intense moments of identification, we might say that, at this point in time, the most concrete location we can find for this collective being of blackness is the digital, on social media platforms in the form of viral content - perhaps most importantly, memes. Historically, our collective being has always been scattered, stretched across continents and bodies of water. It is the necessity to “come correct,” for you are never simply yourself. It is the media treating the Dallas shooter as a representative for all black Americans, forcing the Black Lives Matter organization to either claim or condemn him (ultimately condemn) and the rest of us to temper our public disdain for law enforcement. It is your parents telling you to behave in public, not just for the sake of the family’s image but implicitly because you represent the whole race. Most - if not all - black Americans are familiar with the feeling. This collective being goes beyond “collective consciousness.” It relates to and potentially exceeds the inability of a black subject to act on their own. In Black Marxism, Cedric Robinson wrote of the “ontological totality” or collective being of blackness - the preservation of which, he argued, is the primary charge of the Black Radical tradition. The diaspora is “a precursor to the post-industrial drive toward fluxes and deterritorialization,” as British Afrofuturists claim, meaning that blackness was always ahead of its time, always already a networked culture and always already dematerialized, thanks to the Middle Passage. We have much experience with mass surveillance, a condition that the white avant-garde would have us believe is a recent development in state control. We, as black people, are no strangers to the alienation of a mediated selfhood. What makes for this condition? Some, like Kodwo Eshun and John Akomfrah, say that the African diaspora prefigures digital networks in its effects on bodies and subjectivities. Not only is blackness broadly attracted to the internet, technology, and the future at large - exemplified by the rich traditions of Afrofuturist literature, house music, hip-hop videos, and more - but the internet is a prime condition for black culture to thrive.
Twitter is more evenly distributed but still mostly minority-driven. Alongside the rise of the meme in internet culture, we have witnessed black-user-produced content drift toward center stage. According to a 2015 Pew survey, nearly half of black internet users use Instagram, as opposed to less than a quarter of white users. This phrase is not in common use.“There is no other meaning than the meaning of circulation” - Jean-Luc Nancyīlack people love social media, and social media love black people.
#Succ oh nigga you gay meme series#
The phrase is also a reference to the phrase "jump the shark", which has the same meaning, only applied to a television series instead of a film series. Fans of the Indiana Jones series found the absurdity of this event in the film to be the best example of the lower quality of this installment in the series, and thus coined the phrase, " nuke the fridge". Later in the movie, the audience is expected to fear for his safety in a normal fistfight. He then emerges from the fridge with no apparent injury. The term comes from the film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, in which, near the start of the movie, Harrison Ford's character survives a nuclear detonation by climbing into a kitchen fridge, which is then blown hundreds of feet through the sky whilst the town disintegrates. Nuke the fridge is a colloquialism used to refer to the moment in a film series that is so incredible that it lessens the excitement of subsequent scenes that rely on more understated action or suspense, and it becomes apparent that a certain installment is not as good as a previous installments, due to ridiculous or low quality storylines, events or characters.