My analog mix tape is on cassette. Your digital fantasy is...

"My analog mix tape is on cassette. Your digital fantasy is …." : Some Reflections on Barbados, Digital Rights and the “Thingification” in the Arts, Culture and Heritage

 By, Dr. Tara Inniss, Department of History, Philosophy and Psychology 

I will be dropping some samples from my mix tape in a series which will explore some concepts of digital rights and ethics in the space of arts, culture and heritage in Barbados and the Diaspora. In an era of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and “big data” we need more local oversight of culture and heritage, not less especially in the management of our digital repositories. Our so-called “digital transformation” must ensure that they are managed in a way that prioritizes access for Barbadians to their history and culture. There can be no discussion of decolonization and the “public good” that does not honour the birthright of Barbadians to determine their own value as creators, owners and consumers of their history and culture.

Track 1 “IP, ownership, the blueprint is by me,” “Squabble Up” (Kendrick Lamar, 2024) 

Sample: “When I Hear Music” (Debbie Deb, 1983) 

My favourite line in US rap icon’s Kendrick Lamar’s "Squabble up" which can mean "pay what you owe" in a bet or "fight up" or "dance" is "IP, ownership, the blueprint is by me.” Don’t let the now grey hair fool you, I am a 1990s hip-hop head—I was there through the 1980s/90s constant back and forth regarding the genre’s use of sampling and edits to make a new musical artform. In the early 1990s, copyright law was brought into the mix and hip-hop artists who sampled the creative works of others had to pay. But that was ok because rap was becoming popular and lucrative —the creativity of a new form needed to acknowledge and compensate the creativity of an old one. The hip-hop industry – born of Caribbean (-- Bajan, contested but we will go with it) people in the grooves of the ghetto is now worth $15 billion in the US economy alone. But that hasn’t meant that hip-hop artists and their craft have been valued in this extension of “thingification.” Hip-hop artists and a whole host of creators/ producers in the sector continue to struggle with economic marginalization and unfair predatory contracts. 

Lamar’s version of hip-hop culture was recently celebrated in the US (and across the world) in the last Superbowl halftime show for its ability to be popular but also subversive, challenging the moral legitimacy of its recently elected leader. “Squabble Up” and Track 2. “Not Like Us” (2024) were fitting tributes to the ways in which attempts were being made to oppress Black culture through appropriation or cultural colonisation, and a more recent sweep of assaults on Diversity, Equality and Inclusion or DEI measures that have helped to make minorities and their cultures more visible in public life. Some may think this is a phenomenon that is limited to Trump’s America, but it is part of a much larger neoliberal agenda that deregulates markets and focuses on profit-making across the world. And in an era of “big data” and “artificial intelligence” this neoliberal turn can have some devastating impacts on our concepts of individual rights and freedoms in the digital age. Enter Barbados. 

 ♪But wait, Oh no… Let’s slow it down.♪

Track 3: “When I reminisce over you…” Reminisce (Pete Rock & CL Smooth, 1992) 

Samples: “Today” (Tom Scott, The California Dreams 1967), “When She Made Me Promise” (The Beginning of the End, 1971), “Say it Loud; I’m Black and I’m Proud” (James Brown) 

My favourite object or what you might call a possession is not my laptop or my phone. I think of those things as now just tools or appendages. Hands down my favourite possession doesn’t belong to me at all. It is what I would like to call an heirloom – but I am not sure my children will see it that way. It’s not particularly valuable but if I lost it, I would be desperately upset. When I travel, I hide it like I would jewelry not because someone would steal it but because I am afraid it will end up thrown in the garden. Dismissed as junk. It’s not junk at all. It is both a lifeline and timeline to a now intangible past filled with memories of watching my grandmother cook. 

    It’s a rock. 

    It's my grandmother’s rock. 

    It's my grandmother’s rock that she used to prepare food with – smash garlic, blister cardamom pods, and mince green dhania and seasoning. 

    It is a rock that my Trinidadian grandmother used almost daily. 

    It is black and smooth with a slight crack but was long ago fused back together. 

    It is perfectly molded to her hand. 

    It is perfectly molded to my hand in hers. 

     I use it to smash garlic, blister cardamom pods and mince green dhania and seasoning when I cook. 

 

Now, if this rock was submitted to photogrammetry or digitized into a 3D model it would hardly carry that story even if it was recorded and appended to the digital file. It wouldn’t evoke the savoury and spicy smells of my youth and I don’t think I would be able to hold my grandmother’s hand while I cooked. Someone somewhere might be able to make it appear in some kind of spectral laser rendering in the future. But I doubt it. No one would care about a rock. It’s not a V@n G0gh after all. Hopefully my children will care because maybe they would want to hold my hand in theirs as they cook too. We can be together. 

But do you see what is lost when you focus on the digital life of data? When you have reduced it to a commodity to be bought, sold, rendered, used, in a faceless trade. You lose the humanity in the life of an object? If that digital file opened in front of me or even if it was 3D printed, it would not feel the same. It would have lost its integrity and its authenticity. It cannot be reproduced into a perfect, stable facsimile of that feeling, sound, taste or smell. It cannot be stored in more than one place (lest it end up in the garden) and I wonder if it would be even retrievable here. It is immutable. But with its presence, what I can say and store about that object is verifiable. It ties back to reality. So the digital was just another version, but it was not the version. In this case, I would prefer to hold the version in my hand so I could hold my grandmother’s as we cook together. 

     I am but a memory holder – a custodian. 

 ♪If this world were mine…♪

Track 4. “Relax yourself girl, please settle down" “Electric Relaxation” (Tribe Called Quest, 1993) Samples: “Mystic Brew” (Ronnie Foster, 1972), “Dreams” (Ramsey Lewis, 1973), “Outside Love” (Brethren, 1970) 

While digital versions of ourselves were being dreamed up during the pandemic, I fell in love with a painting. Sheena – full respect! I am not sure why I was drawn to “How can I afford?” I really could not afford. But I bought it. I knew that a lot of people would not respond to its strength, but it symbolized a lot of what I was going through as a Mom in lockdown with political upheaval and racism creeping into every moment of our Black Lives which Matter. Violence and anger were unfolding on our screens, while most of us sat masked or inside our curtilage – watching. The painting spoke to me, so I bought it. I enjoyed my in-person studio visit. I enjoyed the hour escape to a space of creativity. But what I enjoyed most was supporting an artist that I responded to during a very difficult time for artists. It was a difficult time for me as a working mom in a pandemic running myself ragged with homeschooling, Zoom calls and teaching, gardening, provisioning, vaccinating, caring etc. I happily paid every month for that little piece of joy, creativity and individuality that she felt in those moments that her ideas manifested on canvas. Why? Because it was hers and no one was going to take it away whether I bought it or not. And I really hope that no one will. 

 

I am but a custodian of a creator’s property. 

 I own the canvas. She owns her creativity -- her mind -- end to end. 

That is not divisible property until she says it is. 

And the value of that right is a price you simply can’t afford.

Track 5: “The Black mic is like a red violin/ With more rhymes than is lines in your database… (MF Doom)/To a trauma, dropped our mommas off in Bahamas And Barbados, Tobago's, separated us from slave boats (Rza),” Books of War (The Lost Chapters) (MF Doom, Rza, Jeru The Damaja, Guru, Talib Kweli, DMX/ Omeagh Red Fan Edit?, 2011?/ 2015?) 

Samples: “The Night the Earth Cried” (Gravediggaz, 1997), “It Ain’t Nuttin” (The Herbaliser, MF Doom, 2002), “Kaun Komsott” (Ros Sereysothea), “Get Out My Life, Woman” (Lee Dorsey, 1965) 

As an historian in the 21st century I move between paper and digital records on every research project. I move between geographies of displacement. I move between an incomplete archive in one place and try to find crumbs of our past in another. My world is a physical place where time bends backwards. As historians we lived in the ether of data storage thousands of years before blockchain. We don’t mint, trade and burn. We record, interpret and share… and yes, we see dead people. Nuff of them. But they are more than bodies in the ground, they are bodies in our records. They are not just names clipped into metadata. They are people. People on a page. People who need humans to recognise their humanity. 

It has been a long time since we have been able to use some of our island’s libraries and archives. The closures and limited access to the island’s repositories have been a huge challenge for researchers and students both near and far. The last time I used the Archives for research I had been researching the unequal worlds of 17th/18th century women in Barbados—I followed one woman who was the “legitimate” wife of a St. Michael planter through several digital repositories—from the US to the UK. Her archive of relationships took me from Dorset to India. Her economic relationships took me from Barbados to Russia. I could see her and her children/ grandchildren. 

The other woman was named Free Jenny. She was the manumitted Black consort of the same 17th century St. Michael planter. I could not see her except for a mention in the planter’s digitized will. She had a smaller archive. She had children who were baptized. So, I went to look for her in the real archive in a place known for isolation and healing. I miraculously obtained a deed book that had been closed for conservation for several years. I may have been one of the first to use it since it was mended. For those of you who know what it is like to trawl through endless sources to find nothing of merit you will also know that magical feeling when you turn the page (yes, a physical page!) and a name becomes embodied and real before your eyes. When I opened a mended book, I opened it to find Free Jenny and her children lifted off that page – one time. I could start to understand her life in time and space. Hers was a little piece of the rock near a beach bequeathed to her by her former enslaver who was the father of her children. It was a small piece of rab land on the beach in the early 18th century and it was there on the page. It was just like the faded notations of our people in the margins of a page—but no less there. Our archive—her archive—will always be incomplete. That is the ongoing violence and frustration we all must bear as part of this legacy. Digitization won’t change that. 

The promise of finding digital bodies will not change the fact that like real ones, we don’t know where they are. AI might help us find them, but current research suggests that we will scarcely fill out their humanity and maybe not in a verifiable way and not even in a relatable imaginative way that takes human form. We need to take great care in the work we are doing to recover the real and digital lives of people caught up in the violent worlds of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery just as we must take great care in protecting the land on which their blood has spilled. That is a sacrifice that cannot easily be sold away in a faceless trade that potentially commodifies data beyond recognition. Our ancestors don’t want that to happen again—not to them. Not to us. And certainly not for others’ benefit. We can commercialize many aspects of our archive and diversify with various revenue streams, but we should always be mindful of where that data comes from and where it is going. That is what digital archivists do for people -- researchers -- because they need to know with certainty that the archive they are protecting has integrity. We will need ethical approaches to how we amass, interpret and manage the digital data concerning the slave trade and slavery under the responsibility of archivists who know where the real and digital records are at all times. We will need ethical and accessible approaches to how Barbadians access their history and the archive which are both in person and online. It is their birthright. We will also need to build not only the skills needed to assemble this data, but to interpret, analyse and synthesize for our people. We will need history and historians. 

There is an oft used West African saying, "When a griot dies it is as if a library has burned down." We have lost three of ours in three months and part of the archives last summer. They now stand as sentinels at the ancestral gate. There is a simple message: the digital helps us preserve, but it does not replace. Griots, historians, MCs can all pick up the "Black mic" and play the kora, the "red violin" so "everybody back to the lab, try again" (It Ain't Nothin', The Herbaliser feat MF Doom, 2002). We have always used technology to tell our stories. 

Archivists are bearers memory. They assemble. They document. They protect. 

Historians are but conjurers of memory. We record. We interpret. We share.

If we could be replaced, what we say -- what we write -- what we share would not be need to train @I.

And that is not divisible property until we say it is.

 ♪Turn this TV off. Turn this TV off♪

Track 6 “… Regulators Mount Up,” Regulate (Warren G, 1994) 

Samples: "I keep forgetting" (Michael McDonald, 1982), "Sign of the times" (Bob James, 1981), "Mothership Connection" (Parliament, 1975), "Wikka Wrap" (The Evasions, 1981), "Regulators" (Young Guns, 1988) 

Enter Barbados and a neoliberal digital agenda. I am at the point where I believe if the GPS coordinates of each leaf on a tree on this island could be digitized or scanned, we would do it for God knows what purpose. I was reminded that Aimé Cesaire had a name for this approach in “Discourse on the Colonizer” (1955). Thingification. He wrote: 

 “I spoke of contact. Between colonizer and colonized there is room only for forced labor, intimida¬tion, pressure, the police, taxation, theft, rape, compulsory crops, contempt, mis¬trust, arrogance, self-complacency, swinishness, brainless elites, degraded masses. No human contact, but relations of domination and submission which turn the colonizing man into a classroom monitor, an army sergeant, a prison guard, a slave driver, and the indigenous man into an instrument of production.  

 

My turn to state an equation: colonization = "thingification." 

 

I hear the storm. They talk to me about progress, about "achievements;" diseases cured, improved standards of living. I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out. They throw facts at my head, statistics, mileages of roads, canals, and railroad tracks.” 

In this digital world of “thingification” we are forced to now ask whither arts, culture and our archive? Where will they go? Will they be safe? Who will own them end to end… And to what end? We should know, no? What agreements have been signed in our names and for what purpose? Will the holders identified for us, not by us take great care with our memory? Have they already? Will my grandmother’s rock, the monkey jar, the dung basket be considered valuable and cherished? Will generations in the future be able to hold and trace their contours? Will the physical monuments that are built wrest our ancestors from their sleep to walk across the road and sit unfound but their value sold in the ether? Many questions. Many of us have them. We wait for answers. 

The world has Kendrick Lamar. He trademarked his name. Our people have Arrow “Hold on to Your Property” (2002). We have an anthem. Looking forward to that sample on a beat. 

Our ancestors merely lead us. They trust us with their legacy on the ground and 

in the archive. 

 They only seek liberation. Their freedom is ours. 

 That is not divisible property until they/ we say it is.