The cybernetic death machine: Surveillance, queer identities, and the co-optation of state-sponsored violence in the Nigerian digital space

This article investigates the intersection of digital technologies, state power, and queer identities in Nigeria. It focuses on the mediatization of state-sponsored violence through the affordances of social media. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics and Donna Haraway’s STS-feminist cyborg theory, the article critiques how the mediatization of queer identities in the Nigerian digital space transforms into what I term “Cybernetic Death Machine” (CDM). This concept theorizes a mechanism of extermination in which the state’s juridical practices, user-generated content, and media affordances converge to perpetuate systemic violence against LGBTIQA+ individuals. Using vignettes, case studies of anti-LGBTIQA+ social media posts by high-ranking Nigerian police officers, and data from semi-structured interviews as reported in research publications produced by non-profit organizations, this article highlights how digital platforms amplify homophobic rhetoric that facilitates digital vigilantism and state surveillance. It demonstrates how digital media practices amplify normative and extrajudicial discriminatory behaviors and practices to exercise the state’s necropower.