Free game: Knowledge, surveillance and the Black cryptography of scam rap

This article examines Teejayx6, a ‘scam rapper’ from Detroit whose songs describe the use of dark web resources to support various scams, such as identity theft and credit card fraud. The article engages with Teejayx6’s ‘Swipe Story’ and ‘Swipe Story 3’ music videos, which address the viewer as tutorials on scamming processes. ‘Swipe Story’ simulates a heist at a Walmart store in the suburbs of Detroit. Shot on location, the video reproduces Teejayx6’s reflection as it appears on in-store surveillance monitors. This expository approach stands in contrast to the video’s references to dark web access points, such as the Tor browser. It is argued that Teejay6’s music videos enact a concept of ‘free game’, an open-source approach to presenting encrypted and illicit forms of knowledge. Free game leverages the ‘light’ of surveillance imaging to elaborate prohibited knowledge through the criminalized image and mobility of Blackness. The article situates these videos within Detroit through Teejayx6’s invocation of ‘Project Green Light’, a facial recognition programme in which flashing green lights signal the active monitoring of city spaces. Thinking alongside Simone Browne’s concept of ‘black luminosity’, it is argued that Teejayx6 plays with the luminous mechanics of race in ways that question anti-Black assumptions, Black capitalist discourses and technologies of racial surveillance.