Laila Shereen Sakr – Arabic Glitch, Technoculture, Data Bodies, and Archives

laila-shereen-sakr-arabic-glitch

Stanford University Press, ISBN 978-1503635883, English, 184 pages, 2023, USA

The Arab uprisings of 2011 were a pivotal moment for the West to understand how enabling technologies can unite and help to be in a situation where the materiality of technology challenges the balance of power and surveillance. Her theoretical approach is to apply the metaphor of the glitch to indicate a general temporal malfunction in a general system, in this case propaganda, brought about by clever activists. She is a protagonist of many activities in the area, and in the first chapter she recalls the initiatives and dynamics of the uprising. She then focuses on her concept of “the tracking of data bodies”,and on the basic behaviours of algorithms in social media, and concludes by discussing artworks and her practise as VJ Um Amel. The text is rich in terms and facts and offers the opportunity to learn about lesser- known approaches such as Tarek El-Ariss’s theory of an Arab digital consciousness based on ‘hacking’, ‘leaking“, “revealing”, ”proliferation’ and “exposure/scene making”. Sakr has in fact promoted Arabic localisation in the open source movement and launched the R-Shief media system in the late 2000s, which archived seventy billion social media posts in seventy-two languages. The glitch practise she proposes thus becomes a methodology of awareness and liberation that draws on history and art practise and must be social. as the code should.