‘I WILL DO EVERYthing That Am Asked’: Scambaiting, Digital Show-Space, and the Racial Violence of Social Media

‘Trophy’ photographs of African men and women who pose holding signs, either naked or in outrageously bizarre outfits and positions, are prized memetic images produced by ‘scambaiters’. The unusual activities staged in these photographs and videos, such as men wearing bras, hitting each other in the face with fish, and pouring milk on each other’s heads, invite viewers to enjoy and speculate about their origins. Scambaiter trophy images originate in sites devoted to users who wish to deter would-be scammers and they circulate widely on image-boards where they are often reposted without their original context. This visual staging of the savage African digitally extends previous visual cultures of the primitive, showing how durable these have proven, despite our current ‘post-racial’ moment. Scambaiter trophy images extend colonialism’s show-space, rendering it even more powerful and far reaching, and allowing it to migrate freely into multiple contexts. This article argues for a new digital media archaeology that would investigate or acknowledge the conditions of racial coercion and enforced primitivism that gave rise to these digital imaging practice pictures. The author examines how sharing affordances on image boards and social media sites encourage users to unknowingly circulate abject images of race and gender.