How we talk about Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s life matters. How we talk about his death also matters.
I keep seeing folks online talking about how ICE “unalived” him.
I understand this term serves, in part, as a workaround to avoid getting content flagged, falling out of the algorithm, or getting shadow banned.
I also worry deeply about the extent to which participating in the terms of acceptability within social media participates in a kind of worldbuilding Meta and other technofascist entities envision. A world governed by the very kind of logics which are directly responsible for the killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.
Let me explain further.
We critique widely and rightfully the passive voice of legacy journalists; how everyday children are “bombed” in Palestine but by who? Of course, this practice seeks to absolve Israel of its crimes, but it also seeks to normalize the death of Palestinians and in particular children. It creates the sense that death, violent death in particular, is a natural occurrence for Palestinian children. It seeks to create a world in which Palestinian death is more normalized and—ultimately—acceptable than Palestinian life.
In not so dissimilar a way, “unalive” is passive a description. Even if we say that it was ICE who “unalived” someone and we name the actor, “unalive” is so imprecise, so vague, that it makes death appear a spontaneous occurrence between two parties.
The state has already distanced ICE from their victims through language: criminal, illegal, alien, invasion, terrorist, narco terrorist. Such framing makes the act of killing easier (dissociative naming practices are as old as war and organized group violence of any kind). They are doubly distanced by the mechanical means of violence at their disposal.
By participating in social media’s language preferences (at this point social media and the state cannot be separated so easily) and using the passive “unalive” we further distance and disassociate ICE from their victims and their violence even as we condemn them and seek their abolition. The question is, is our language assisting us in these aims?
ICE didn’t unalive Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, they profiled him, tracked him and they shot him. They handcuffed him and watched him bleed out in the street. They tortured him. The filtered him into a state run machine of categorization, surveillance, targeting, tracking, death, concentration, disappearance, and deportation. This matters. I fear if we continue to describe these killings as unaliving we will not simply obscure the actors, who they act on behalf of, but their practices and the meanings and evolution of these practices.
If we seek to circumvent the suppression of social media platforms, but in so doing participate in their worldview, we have not circumvented suppression but ultimately, I fear, participated in it in the long term.
We have to say what happened. We have to describe it precisely. We have to do so as a means of illuminating not only the regime’s tactics, but its imagination, its organizing principles, its relationship to violence as a system of meaning and a preview into the kind of world it desires.
If saying it accurately gets it suppressed then we need to be creative about spreading that message, both on social but also beyond it. We need to change our strategy, our tactics, our outlets, but our language should always be in service to the world we want to build and never in service of the world technofascists “allow” us to accept.
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