Introduction

This book has identified a range of representational harms facing LGBTQ+ peoples within the hybrid media ecosystem of older and newer digital media logics – harms that denigrate, misrecognize, erase, or omit minority communities. I have conceptualized these harms as a form of information warfare that can perpetuate bias-motivated conduct across and through digital media platforms, and which can include algorithmic censorship, online vilification, such as slurs that minimize or conceal hate, and assault. This warfare is based on the manufacture of an imagined LGBTQ+ enemy, and the rationalization, normalization and monetization of stigmadriven marginaliziation based on that fiction. Through a range of case studies, the book has emphasized the atomistic nature of algorithmic intervention across jurisdictions, within a broader rise of violent domestic extremism that weaponizes diverse sexual and gender identity. Stigma against same-sex attraction, and its conflation with gender non-conformity, is often the basis for that weaponization. In doing so, the book has considered the consequences of representational harms on LGBTQ+ sites of legal, political and economic agency. The purpose of this chapter is to use the arguments laid out in the book as the jumping off point for consideration of current and future issues confronting the digiqueer in technocratic times.

The chapter considers the following four questions: (1) How will LGBTQ+ communities document, evaluate and disseminate their legal, political, and economic capital in response to representational harms? (2) How will big-tech companies respond to the ‘techlash’, which includes growing calls for regulation of digital platforms, and litigation that has found digital platforms responsible for representational harms such as defamatory content once made aware of it? (3) How will artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT perpetuate and ameliorate the structural biases against pre-digital LGBTQ+ expression through algorithmic discrimination, and responses to that discrimination noted throughout this book? (4) How will LGBTQ+ expression be impacted by information warfare in the grey zone – the space in between peace and war in which state and non-state actors engage in competition – as threats from digital technologies outside of physical war zones increase (Hayward 2020)? Before those questions are considered, the chapter summarizes the arguments and case studies drawn upon throughout.