The cup runneth over: The body, the public and its regulation in digital activism

<jats:p> The mainstream discourse focuses on predictive algorithms of probability as a measure of responsibility and culpability for digitally mediated activism. Bodies that threaten to disrupt the seamlessness of events are seen as problematic. The expected response is to contain this overflow into physical spaces and to restrict their excesses to the online platforms. This essay argues that this separation of zones of affective excess signals a shift in how we understand the body, publicness and punishment in the face of ubiquitous digitality. It confronts this ‘cleansing’ acts of algorithmic regulation with a case study of the #KissOfLove campaign from India to show how the expected tropes that deal with concerns of safety of the body, the separation and weaving together of the digital and physical spaces, and the affordances provided by regulation and policy often unquestioningly mark bodies and spaces as overflowing and hence in need of curation, containment and cleansing. Building upon the narratives of technologised nation building in India, it complicates the terrain of the overflow, showing that a ‘technoaffective’ framework might lead to unpacking the ways in which selected bodies are rendered culpable and are forced to bear the marks of punishment in an emerging technosocial landscape. </jats:p>