Reflection

Reading Sasha Costanza-Chock's Design Justice and the chapter "Skills Will Not Set You Free" from Your Computer Is on Fire alongside the work I've been doing for this project has produced a productive friction I want to try to name.

This project is an attempt to contextualize a body of album art from hardcore punk and powerviolence records that reappropriate documentary atrocity photography: images of executions, mass casualties, wartime prisoners, and state violence, used as sleeve art without attribution, without consent, and largely without comment. My position going in was sympathetic to these bands without being uncritical of the practice. Both texts have helped me articulate why those positions can coexist, and where each one runs out.

The most generative passage for me in Costanza-Chock comes from the chapter on affordances, where the critique of Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday Things names what is missing from his account: race, gender, disability, capitalism — acknowledged at most in passing and never followed as threads. This feels directly relevant to the visual culture I'm examining. The bands in this collection — Infest, Crossed Out, Disrupt, Conflict — are operating with a coherent political consciousness. They are explicitly anti-capitalist, anti-state, anti-imperialist. But the design decisions embedded in their album art frequently reproduce a form of extraction they would, I think, recognize and reject if named: taking photographs of people in the worst moments of their lives, stripping those images of their specificity, and using them as aesthetic provocation in a context entirely removed from the communities depicted.

Costanza-Chock's distinction between intentional and unintentional reproduction of the matrix of domination is useful here, though I want to handle it carefully. These bands are not "unintentionally reproducing white supremacist heteropatriarchy" in the way that a corporate UX team might be. The politics are present; the problem is a different one. It is more about proximity. Despise You are from Inglewood and West LA. The imagery they draw on — gang life, poverty, drug use, street violence — is in many cases drawn from their own communities, and in at least one documented instance (And On and On…) from a credited photographer, Joseph Rodriguez, whose decades-long documentary practice is rooted in exactly those communities. That is a different ethical situation than Crossed Out using photographs of executions in post-revolutionary Iran, or Infest using photographs of Vietnamese prisoners, or Infest again using images that may document the Cambodian genocide. The question of whose oppression is being aestheticized, and by whom, matters. Costanza-Chock's formulation — that design justice requires asking who benefits and who bears the burden — applies directly.

The "Skills Will Not Set You Free" chapter adds a dimension to this question that I hadn't fully considered. Swati Banerjee's account of the Seelampur women's ICT training program describes participants who subvert the program's celebratory discourse through collective laughter and play with Photoshop, producing images that contrast the sterile training environment with the chaotic, material reality of their actual lives. The author describes these as "moments of play and refusal," and argues that while they "may seem spontaneous and fleeting, they represent another dimension of 'fire' through the immediate material lives of people and their fraught practices of technology-enabled labor." These women are not producing outcomes the program intended. They are, in a modest but real way, using the tools against the grain of the institution providing them.

This is not an exact parallel to anything in my project, but the resonance is productive. The hardcore and powerviolence scene I'm examining was also built on a practice of using available materials — cheap recording equipment, photocopied zines, found images, shared pressing plants — against the grain of the cultural industries those materials were otherwise embedded in. The shocking imagery on these records was not decorative; it was intended as a kind of counter-information, a refusal of the sanitized public sphere. The Seelampur women's Photoshop play and a 1991 seven-inch with an execution photograph on the cover are not the same thing, but they share a structural position: both are acts of subversion within systems that were not designed with their participants in mind, using tools that were designed for other purposes.

The harder question, which my annotations kept circling back to, is whether the shock imagery was ever doing the political work it was meant to do, and whether that question is answerable. My instinct is that in the pre-internet era — the early 1990s, when most of these releases were produced — the use of documentary atrocity photography on album sleeves distributed through underground networks did function as counter-information. These were images that did not circulate widely in mainstream media. Seeing a photograph of an Iranian execution or a Vietnam War prisoner on a $3 seven-inch at a record table did something. But Banerjee's chapter also cautions against romanticism here: the Seelampur women's moments of refusal are real, but the program still "produced precarious and low-paid workers at the fringes of the information economy." The subversion does not undo the structural condition. Similarly, however effectively the shock imagery communicated anti-state politics to a hardcore audience in 1991, it did not restore names or histories to the people depicted. The photograph's human subjects remain disafforded — made unavailable as full persons — by the design decision to use their image without context.

This is also where the IT industry's meritocracy claims, which both texts address, become relevant. Banerjee notes that the IT industry's insistence on hiring by "merit" — while recruiting primarily from elite colleges and certain urban areas — systematically excludes the very workers skills training programs are supposedly preparing. Costanza-Chock makes the corresponding point that VSD treats values as "disembodied abstractions, to be codified in libraries from which designers might draw," rather than grounding them in "the lived experience of communities and individuals who exist at the intersection of systems of structural oppression." Both critiques identify the same evasion: a politics that claims universalism while producing exclusion. The album art I'm examining performs a version of this evasion too — a universalizing anti-state politics that treats the suffering of specific, named, particular people as interchangeable raw material for a broadly applicable message.

One tension I have not resolved is the one Costanza-Chock surfaces around platform dependency. Her account of using Facebook and Google Docs to organize the #QTPower action is genuinely useful as an example of working within and against corporate affordances — but it also reads, with nearly a decade of hindsight, as a document of how thoroughly organizing infrastructure became captured by extractive platforms. My own background is in spaces where anonymity at a protest was assumed rather than tracked, and where the preservation of that anonymity was understood as a political position, not a preference. The design justice framework's insistence on accountability and visibility is in productive tension with that tradition, and I don't think the tension resolves easily.

The project I'm building tries to intervene modestly in the space between these arguments. Costanza-Chock writes that design justice "values stem from the lived experience of communities and individuals who exist at the intersection of systems of structural oppression and resistance." The slideshow is an attempt to return some of that specificity to images that have been stripped of it — to acknowledge that Stanley Forman took the photograph of Ted Landsmark being attacked with a flag on April 5, 1976, that Kaveh Golestan may have documented the Iranian executions at risk to his own life, that the Documentation Center of Cambodia exists and holds records. Some of these attributions remain unconfirmed; the metadata marks those gaps honestly. That honesty is itself, I think, a small design justice practice: not filling uncertainty with false authority, but making the limits of what is known visible and traceable.