The digital carceral: Media infrastructure, digital cultures and state surveillance in post-Arab Spring Morocco

Abstract

This paper analyzes Moroccan discourses around media infrastructures and their intersection with carceral culture, taking up Mamfakinch’s responses to state-sponsored spyware attacks and judicial harassment as symbolic of shifting imaginaries of the digital. This work is situated within a growing subset of the media and communication literature on media infrastructures, which works to connect the materiality of media systems with everyday media cultures, practices and power. Mamfakinch’s experience with spyware and subsequent evolution into a digital rights organization are indicative of attempts to transfer a lingering carceral culture into digital spaces and a shift in state and activist internet imaginaries. In a global era and as part of a hypersurveillant state, Mamfakinch demonstrates how the digital becomes an increasingly important site for the surveillance and policing of dissent while presenting new modes of publicness and activism that directly challenge those endeavors.