Clashing cyphers, contagious content: The digital geopolitics of grime

Abstract

This paper seeks to expand popular geopolitics in line with the digital worlds in which many of us now live. By interpreting geopolitics as a method of cultural (re)production, it becomes a creative tool that can be used to shape and elevate the affective appeal of content. Digital technologies are centrally implicated in the production of such content. By decoupling space and time from their physical anchors in the real world, digital technologies imbue them with a creative latency that can be deployed in both agentic and affective ways. Specifically, decoupling creates spatio‐temporal openings that offer new opportunities for content to be territorialised, and for artists and audiences to be engaged. Digital geopolitics thus considers the ways in which the decoupling of space and time can foreground new types of digitally mediated geopolitical praxis. Through an analysis of music videos exchanged between two grime artists involved in a “clash,” I show how digital technologies enable them to mediate between the different spatio‐temporal logics of the digital and real worlds. Doing so reifies the affective power of space, and the expansive role of popular geopolitics in the digital age.