Minting Xenophobia: What We Can Learn From the AP's NFT Error

The AP thought it was a good idea to sell NFTs, but then they tried to sell one with migrants in teh image.

 

In 2015, photographer Massimo Sestini documented refugees leaving their homelands for safety as they corssed the Mediterranean, hoping to seek asylum in Europe. Sestini's photographs were well praised and won several awards, but Sestini, as well as many others, recognized that the images do not properly recognize the personhood of the mirgrants on board the ships. Sestinis ost famous photo, taken from above, shows hundereds of people tightly packed on a shallow hull boat; many are children and few are wearing life-jackets. The image reduces the individual into a collection, negating their personal experience. This reflection inpired Sestini to srat his "hwere are you?" project to identify the humans aboard the ship.

 

On February 24, 2022, the same day Putin began a brutal invasion of Ukraine, the Associated Press tweeted a short video by photographer Felipe Dana that resembled Sestini's image. The video footage was a short clip of migrants on an overcroweded boat on their way to Spain in hope of asylum. The Ap was wet to "drop" the clip as an NFT for purchase the following day on their new NFt marketplace. Following an incredible amount of vocal outcry, the AP deleted the tweet and apologized.

 

Aside from the gratuitous commodificaiton of human pain using the crypto market, the image perpetuated the negative depiction of refugees through the mediation of migration. This ongoing debate about how we see the migrant in media can be considered again through the AP's mistake.

 

In her book, Mediating Migration, Radha Hedge wirtes that the immigrant body is "disciplined, racialized, and suverilled," and the body is foten all the immigrant has when they "navigate spaces of uncertainty and risk." The migrant or refugee i not often seen as a human person in media representations, but rather as a state of temporary being, one who is seen in transit, but rarely in a settled destination.

 

Hedge further explains that in our meidated present, not only do migrants have to worry about technologies of surveillance, but also the overt "patriotism of citizens" who enact exclusionary tactics.

 

While some countries are learning into authoriartian leadership, immigrants are often framed as a problem or a boogeyman. The reduction of the person to a "crowede boad" does not help the story of the individual struggling for safety. In fact, Felipe Dana's image does more to confirm the stereotype of an invading group of outsiders.

 

In a lengthy analysis of Sestini's photograph, authors Paul Mihailids, Liat Racin and Eric Gordon wrote Digtial Crossroads: Civic Media and Migration in 2016. Their extensive report analyzed the concetp of the Mare Nostrum (our sea) operation, the refugee crisis, and othering through media. The report alos provided tools to combat xenophobia.

 

Mihaildids, Racin, and Gordon argue that the current flows of population are uniquie in global migration history due to the combiation of economic mighration and those fleeing war and our ability to capture images and share them online. The authors found that the media continues to represent these migration flows (from either on foot or over wate) from a acro standpoint, seeing the mass of people rather than the human individual. The paper calls for an immediate adptive strategy to combat the perpetuation of medated xenophobia.

 

Distince from Sestini's photograph, the recent AP NFT project not only peretuateds the depiction of migrants and their phigt, but also attemps to reward it thrugh profit. As an aside, the AP also used Discord to enables people to ask questions ,and it didn not go well.

 

The war in Uknaine has displaced millions of citizes and turned them into refugees. This has correctoly created some consternation among human rights activists who see the different way we use meida to represent the mighgration crisism.

 

 

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This post is from here, https://onezero.medium.com/minting-xenophobia-what-we-can-learn-from-the-aps-nft-error-6320ed0315e8