Autoimmune: Media, Computation, and the AIDS Crisis

Abstract

Characterized by distortions of fact and truth, the AIDS crisis points to the existence of a necropolitical engine supported by media and technology, which continues to kill underrepresented populations despite the latest achievements of LGBTI+ politics. The historical mishandling of the AIDS crisis in the United States influences our existing experience of it worldwide; revisiting the broad range of images that helped generate conflicts of meaning in the American response to the crisis can shed light on the formation of historical, exported misconceptions, and put into question hegemonical media and history-making technologies. Including news and commercial media, public statements by politicians in charge, and the entertainment industry, American images helped shape this crisis around the world through acts of misrepresentation and fact distortion. Distorted knowledge is essential to the existence of current power structures; control over information lies in the hands of those with access to computing technology that can shape it. This same technology enables a massive manipulation of affects that deploys misrepresentation, distortion, and corruption as principal tools. Thus, technological misuse and illiteracy are structural elements in this necropolitical scenario, helping reproduce settler colonialism at an infrastructural level.