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Anti-Capitalist Online: From the Deliberative Public Sphere to Irony

Lucie Chateau 12288136 Completed on Thursday, 27 June 2019

MA and Digital University of Amsterdam Supervised by Dr. Davide Beraldo

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Contents 1. Introduction ...... 5 2. Online Politics ...... 7 2.1. The Networked Public Sphere...... 8 2.1.1. Filter bubble and Ideological Segregation ...... 9 2.1.2. Politics, the Meme War and the Overton Window ...... 10 2.2. Platform Ecologies ...... 11 2.2.1. Platform Affordances and Subcultures ...... 12 2.2.2. , Forums and Deliberation ...... 13 2.2.3. ’s Radicalisation ...... 16 2.2.4. ’s Subaltern Counterpublics ...... 18 2.3. Concluding Remarks ...... 21 3. Methodology ...... 21 3.1. Digital Methods and Ethnography ...... 22 3.2. Models of Online Communication ...... 23 3.3. Platforms ...... 24 3.3.1. Reddit ...... 25 3.3.2. Tumblr & Instagram ...... 28 3.4. Limitations...... 32 4. Findings ...... 33 4.1. Reddit ...... 35 4.1.1. Aesthetics and Affordances ...... 36 4.1.2. Referrals and Intra-ideological Questioning ...... 39 4.1.3. Memes and Practices ...... 42 4.2. Instagram ...... 45 4.2.1. Top vs. Recent ...... 45 4.2.2. Clusters and Tagging ...... 48 4.2.3. Post-Left Meme Pages ...... 49 4.2.4. Memes and Practices ...... 52 4.3. Tumblr ...... 54 4.3.1. ...... 56 4.3.2. Leftblr and Freeblr ...... 58 4.3.3. Libertarians and Communists ...... 60 4.3.4. Meme Grammars ...... 62 4.3.5. Laborwave ...... 63 4.4. The Political Compass ...... 64 5. Conclusion: A Critique on Three Axes ...... 67

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5.1. Irony, Climate Change and Capitalist Realism...... 67 5.2. “Study the Theory” ...... 70 5.3. Rejection of the Mainstream ...... 72 5.4 Final Remarks ...... 74 Works Cited ...... 77 Appendix ...... 88

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TABLE OF FIGURES

FIGURE 1. FREELON'S MODEL OF DELIBERATION ONLINE COMMUNICATION (2010: 7) ...... 24 FIGURE 2. SEARCH RESULTS FOR "ANTI-CAPITALISM"...... 26 FIGURE 3. REDDIT SEARCH RESULTS FOR "ANTI-CAPITALISM"...... 35 FIGURE 4. TIMELINE OF OCCURRENCE OF THE TERM "ANTI-CAPITALISM" ON REDDIT...... 36 FIGURES 5 & 6. THE AESTHETICS AND AFFORDANCES OF R/LATESTAGECAPITALISM...... 38 FIGURE 7. THE HOMEPAGE OF /R/CHAPOTRAPHOUSE INCORPORATES AESTHETICS FROM ITS INSIDE JOKES...... 39 FIGURE 8. INTRA-IDEOLOGICAL RECIPROCITY IN THE /R/LATESTAGECAPITALISM REFERRALS...... 40 FIGURE 9./ R/LATESTAGECAPITALISM’S ANTAGONISTIC REFERRALS TO /R/THE_DONALD TAKING THE FORM OF “”. .... 41 FIGURE 10. INTER-IDEOLOGICAL /R/CHAPOTRAPHOUSE REFERRALS...... 42 FIGURE 11. DEROGATORY /R/CHAPO REFERRALS TO /R/NEOLIBERAL...... 42 FIGURE 12. POPULAR IMAGES ABOUT HYPOCRISY ON /R/LATESTAGECAPITALISM...... 43 FIGURE 13. /R/LSC MEMES ABOUT HEALTHCARE AND GLOBAL WARMING...... 43 FIGURE 14. ANTI-IMPERIALIST /R/CHAPOTRAPHOUSE MEMES...... 44 FIGURE 15. /R/CHAPOTRAPHOUSE “READ THE THEORY” MEMES...... 45 FIGURE 16. "#ANTICAPITALISM" SEARCH ON INSTAGRAM...... 46 FIGURE 17. THE FORMAT OF A "TOP" POST...... 47 FIGURE 18. NETWORK BUILDING IN MEME PAGES FOUND IN “RECENT” THROUGH AFFORDANCES...... 48 FIGURE 19 . CLUSTERS PRESENT IN #ANTICAPITALISM CO-TAGS ON INSTAGRAM ...... 49 FIGURE 20. THE CORE ISSUES BEING STRATEGICALLY TAGGED ON INSTAGRAM...... 49 FIGURE 21. MONOLOGUES AND PERSONAL REVELATIONS ...... 51 FIGURE 22. DIALOGUE AND PEDAGOGY ON INSTAGRAM ...... 52 FIGURE 23. SOCIAL ECOLOGY AND ANARCHO-PRIMITIVIST MEMES ...... 53 FIGURE 24. A POPULAR MEME PAGE'S MEMES REFERRING TO THE COMMUNIST MEME PAGE NETWORK...... 54 FIGURE 25. SEARCHING FOR "ANTI-CAPITALISM" ON TUMBLR, OF WHICH THE FIRST RESULT OFFERS A SOLARPUNK ...... 55 FIGURE 26. SOLARPUNK'S PRESENCE IN #ANTICAPITALISM CO-TAG GRAPH ...... 56 FIGURE 27. A RETURN TO NATURE AND FUTURISTIC ARCHITECTURE FROM "#SOLARPUNK" ON TUMBLR...... 57 FIGURE 28. FREEBLR NETWORK IN "LEFTBLR" CO-TAG GRAPH...... 58 FIGURE 29. "FREEBLR" CO-TAG GRAPH ...... 59 FIGURE 30. CONTRADICTORY MEMES FOUND IN THE SAME HASHTAG...... 61 FIGURE 31. AN EXAMPLE OF FREEBLR MEMES...... 62 FIGURE 32. FULLY AUTOMATED LUXURY GAY SPACE , INFLUENCED BY ...... 63 FIGURE 33. LABORWAVE ON TUMBLR ...... 64 FIGURE 34. USE OF THE POLITIGRAM MEME FOR POLITICAL IDENTIFICATION AND FOR DISCOURSE ON INSTAGRAM...... 65 FIGURE 35. A /R/CHAPOTRAPHOUSE POLITICAL COMPASS ...... 68 FIGURE 36. AN INSTAGRAM POST-LEFT POLITICAL COMPASS ...... 66 FIGURE 37. A SOLARPUNK POLITICAL COMPASS ...... 68 FIGURE 38. A "FREEBLR" POLITICAL COMPASS ...... 66 FIGURE 39. GEN Z META-MEMES...... 68 FIGURE 40. THE GEN Z ARC OF ONLINE POLITICISATION FROM JOSHUA CITARELLA'S "IRONY POLITICS AND GEN Z"...... 70 FIGURE 41. THE POST-LEFT ARC OF POLITICISATION (EDITS OWN) ...... 71 FIGURE 42. BRANDS USING DEEP FRIED/ABSURD MEME ELEMENTS IN " CLAPBACKS" ...... 73 FIGURE 43. IDIOSYNCRATIC AND ERRATIC MEME STYLES MAKE THEM HARDER TO CO-OPT...... 74 FIGURE 44. THE IRONY POLITICS ECOSYSTEM ...... 75

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1. Introduction

In a democratic according to Jurgen Habermas’s public sphere model (1962), forming citizens’ rational political decision-making capabilities requires a communicative space for the democratic flow of information and ideas. Spaces like these need to be able to host public debate and deliberation as processes of open discussion aimed at achieving rationally motivated consensus amongst citizens (Dahlgren, 2005). Nowadays, amongst the youth and voters that are coming of age during what has been called the crisis of representative (Torney, 2014), the promise of horizontal communication that online social networking sites offers has become the defining democratic standard of civic interaction. As we come to rely on these platforms to host political discussion as a level playing field, we must turn to the debates that animated scholarship on public spaces and civil discourse, including on the structural dimensions of these spaces, their inclusivity and freedom of access (Dahlberg, 2001; Fuchs, 2014), but we also to how these spaces take us beyond the deliberative public sphere.

As we continue to incorporate these in our everyday lives, reflecting on the role of platforms in facilitating or hindering public debate is an imperative. The view that social media empowers citizens to engage in democratic debate (Shirky, 2011) by providing them with a neutral space, turning them from passive to active members of society, neglects to acknowledge that technological design can engender political consequences (Latour, 1994; Street, 1992; Winner, 1980). Instead, with the emergence of scandals like Cambridge Analytica, that exposed Facebook’s use of private data for political advertising and represented a turning point in the public understanding of data privacy, we come face to face with the realisation that the democratic norms of our society are being fundamentally changed. Increasingly, our digital environments create normative models of expression through their affordances, and the role these affordances play in structuring online debate warrants critical attention (Stanfill, 2014; Halpern & Gibbs, 2013).

Online, the democratic promise of horizontal communication and forums for debate have assisted the transition away from established parties and representative democracy towards single issue politics and advocacy we see in the youth (Dahlgren, 2005). As citizens have sought to identify politically outside of a , politics have become an instrumental activity to signify belonging, giving rise to “infinite” rather than “bounded” politics. These new, more fluid forms of political subgrouping vary in organisational structure and ideological cohesion, but the structure of the web has proven to be instrumental to their mobilisation and formation (Bennett, 2003; Cammaerts & van Audenhove, 2003). My research takes as its starting point anti-capitalist subcultures online, and how the politics they enact can reflect on the state of the digital public sphere today. To do this, I use Freelon’s model of online communication, providing “insight into how differently configured forums make certain democratic communication patterns more or less likely” (Freelon, 2010), to address the materiality of social networking sites based on vernacular affordances (McVeigh-Schultz & Baym, 2015).

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My starting point of anti-capitalist subcultures is interested in the state of online politics following the recent development of the alt-right online during the 2016 US Presidential (Nagle, 2017; Wendling, 2018). Amongst the controversial and disruptive processes through which this political began to gather attention and demonstrate its support for their favoured political candidate, , the ability of memes to politicise was widely introduced into the mainstream. As innocuous symbols took on deeply politically charged connotations, the world became familiar with political groups that had been brewing online for several years. This eruption on the stage of the antagonistic, ironic, politics of the right was a major development in digital public spheres scholarship. Previously held notions of political behaviour online included that conservative spaces were “the middle rung of a vertical, top-down transmission channel for talking points developed by corporate and political elites” while the other side of the aisle was depicted as “a haven of horizontal collaboration” (Freelon, 2010). While much has been written about disproving the former, I turn now to the latter. In this thesis, I want to interact with the state of our politics online post-2016, especially regarding forms of irony embodied in aesthetic objects, and how the anti-capitalist subcultures, broadly on the leftist spectrum of political , have come to represent their politics in the wake of widespread doubt and apathy sowed by the alt-right.

Two of the defining threads of online political subcultures post-2016 include post-truth politics and meme culture. Post-truth politics refers to the phenomenon of rationalising beliefs through one’s emotions rather than fact (Harsin, 2018), and have been controversially seen as a child of social media sites’ amplification of context collapse and algorithmic segregation (Viner, 2016). Post-truth can also be qualified as a disposition towards encountering media or statements without trust. In this way, it is closely related to what recent meme culture has shifted into as a product of the 2016 . Meme culture’s aesthetic disposition, its tendency to embrace images as comic due to their style,1 mirrors recent post-truth attitudes online whereby it radically accepts irony as a mode of politics. This development represents the “potential to embrace modes of radical absurdity and profoundly stunted empathy that push at the limits of what are usually understood as the edge of both mutual comprehensibility and social acceptability” (Holm: 7), a dangerous process that has enabled the expanding of the “Overton window” (Citarella, 2018).2 While the expanding of the Overton window to the right has already been covered, in this text I turn to the left, and how anti- capitalist memes help us understand the legacy of these post-truth and ironic attitudes.

In this era of radical paradigm expansion on both sides, I wish to contribute to debates on digital public spheres, affordances and the politicisation of memes and aesthetic styles. I believe it is crucial to understand these factors so that we may understand the role of the web in the development of critique. Therefore, I ask: how is a critique of capitalism presented online, and what can anti- capitalist subcultures tell us about the state of the digital public sphere? I focus on three platforms

1 As developed in Bourdieu’ major work, Distinction, the aesthetic disposition refers to a tendency to encounter objects in the world in terms of their mode of representation and/style, rather than in terms of what Bourdieu describes as naïve or ethical responses. Writing about “online deadpan and the comic disposition”, Nicholas Holm comments on how the technologically contingent character of these new online communities who “are now predisposed to interpreting any and all material experienced online as if it were comic” (2017: 4). 2 The Overton window refers to the range of ideas and discourses tolerated within . I turn more extensively to this process in 2.1.2, Reactionary Politics, the Meme War and the Overton Window

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(Reddit, Instagram and Tumblr) and compare anti-capitalist subcultures’ critique of capitalism in these spaces, based on the following research levels: at an illustrative level, I lay out what online subcultures position themselves as anti-capitalist. Then, at a descriptive level, looking at what themes emerge in the critique of capitalism by these subcultures will be done through the lens of the memes they produce. Finally, my analysis focuses on how platform affordances influence the communication and politics of platform subcultures.

2. Online Politics

Over the last few decades, theories of online political communication have had to keep up with the constant shifting and transformation of the digital public sphere due to evolving affordances of social media platforms, going through waves of optimism and pessimism. Representing both the potential to enhance participation and democratise discourse, the web has played a part in many utopian fantasies and events of the early 2010s allowed some to draw on reality to cement their theories (Loader, 2014). However, recent developments in worldwide politics have led to social networking sites being scrutinised for their role in affective manipulation, seen in the Cambridge Analytica revelations (Cadwalladr, 2018), weaponised propaganda (Martineau, 2018), and the polarisation of users through algorithmically engendered echo chambers (Pariser, 2011). More than ever, in the midst of debates about an authoritarian web, social networking sites are being perceived as a threat to democracy and a necessity to regulate.

What has emerged in symbiosis with fears about algorithmic control and big data is the festering of online communities engaged in culture wars with each other. Essentially sensationalist term to define ideological clashes between progressive and traditional views (Koleva et al, 2012), the culture war binary places the two views that have come to conflict into an ideological dichotomy, therefore pertaining to anxieties in a digital context about ideological segregation. Cultural wars have been claimed to happen various times throughout history, but the significance of online politics influencing offline actions has become crucial to the contemporary political landscapes, especially when these start weaponizing commonly circulated images. Therefore, the history of the meme has its equally important role to play in the history of the .

A concept drawn from evolutionary biology (Dawkins, 1976) whose definition has shifted in accordance with the online medium’s fast adoption and manipulation of the term, an is a multimodal text predicated on the idea of mimicry and remixing a single message or theme, often with humour as a goal (Milner, 2016). In the story of the internet, memes are not to be underestimated. They are complex assemblages of ideas and ideologies that have potential to incense, enrage, and pit against each other young and influenceable internet users. Memes have been heavily scrutinised from the alt-right perspective and in their role in the 2016 culture war, but scholarship on memes from the other side of the aisle occupies the mainstream less. Therefore, I outline in this section how critical positions on the political potential of the web contribute to our understanding of when, during the 2016 US Presidential elections, the cultural objects that these subcultures had weaponised against each other made the headlines (Haddow, 2016).

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2.1. The Networked Public Sphere

The emergence of the world wide web in the late 20th Century was euphorically framed by a distinctively libertarian spirit dubbed the “Californian ” (Barbook & Cameron, 1994). This deeply held conviction that the web would be a utopian place, free of hierarchies and control, has permeated and shaped behaviour on and critical approaches towards the internet as a public sphere. As such, early scholarship on networked public spheres argued that the radically alternative space of the web signified that a deliberative space could be realised through, or with the help of, the world wide web, by finally connecting individuals in a space outside of political ideology and control (Rheingold, 1993). This later defined position of ‘networked ’ (Rainie & Wellman, 2012) gave rise to the ‘networked citizen’ notion, embraced by scholars emphasising the potential of online, such as Jenkins’ formulation of participatory culture (Jenkins, 2009). Jenkins defines the participatory nature of the digital public sphere as offering opportunities for civic and artistic engagement, with an emphasis on support and , thus encompassing civil engagement and extending the networked individualism model to the citizen. Stronger democracy could thus be achieved through the participatory and deliberative potential of the web.

As words of a “twitter ” quickly took over the mainstream, the events at the turn of the decade were drawn on by scholars to argue that traditional models of political action were being replaced by modes of participation influenced by networked practices. Bennett and Segerberg’s theory of connective action uses the Occupy movement (2012) to define a connective model where the radical democratic potential of network structures represented large scale personal access to spread a mass message, ultimately depicting a shift in critical thought away from the digital public sphere and towards an autonomous connective citizen model.

Concordantly, what this meant for early meme scholarship was that, for researchers, memes represented the perfect vessel of participatory networked culture. Ryan Milner and Limor Shifman are two pre-eminent meme scholars whose respective publications3 are foundational in terms of defining key forms and terms (Milner, 2016; Shifman, 2014). Milner’s work places the emphasis on how processes of memetic reproduction create the world we live in through participatory conversation. He defines memes as “multimodal texts that facilitate participation by reappropriation, by balancing a fixed premise with novel expression” (2016: 14). Shifman, similarly, embodies how early writing on this meme is often characterised by an admiration and enthusiasm for the productive potential of meme culture; “In an era marked by ‘network individualism’ people use memes to simultaneously express both their uniqueness and their connectivity” (2014: 30).

It is significant to remember that this is the age of image macros and cat pictures, dogespeak and motivational animals, before political icons became memes- and vice versa. Though this position led others to argue that, “as more people can act creatively, more people use memes as a medium for connecting” (Burroughs, 2013: 259), the practices that Shifman and Milner speak of as being uniquely participatory are influenced by a thread in scholarship to emphasise the “connective” power of the net. As it privileges virality and remixing as the defining factors of memes, it carries out

3 The World Made Meme (Milner, 2016) and Memes in Digital Culture (Shifman, 2014).

8 a reading at the expense of collective identity formation and irony that will later come to dominate the practice of meme making. However, in 2013, influenced by trolling culture, Milner identifies this element of discourse already within meme grammar: “the blur between irony and earnestness makes room for discourse otherwise impermissible”, representing for Milner a “hacked social dynamic” (2013: 34).

2.1.1. Filter bubble and Ideological Segregation

As the weight of the web’s presence in our lives continued to grow, critics warned that instead of offering a space for deliberative democracy between connected citizens, the net would instead likely be shaped by the existing entrenched social and economic power relations of contemporary (Hill and Hughes, 1998). In this era of public sphere literature influenced by the rise and plurification of social networking sites, more critics of platforms, ownership, and the “digital divide” emerged (Dahlgren, 2005; Dahlberg; 2001; Fuchs, 2014). From then on, context-dependent and affordance-based criticism surrounding the private spheres of social media becoming political spaces animated debate.

One of the main dangers to deliberative communication online to emerge from the evolution of social media platform is ideological segregation. Recommendation and personalisation algorithms have created “filter bubbles”, critics argued, ideologically cohesive spaces that undermine the democratic aspect of digital public sphere theory. Pariser’s theory of the filter bubble proposes that personalization through algorithms will expose users to content that echo with their own ideologies through analysing their previous online activity and interests, resulting in a lack of exposure to ideologically diverse content (2011). This filtering shapes “echo chambers” (Sunstein 2008) and has steered scholarship on digital public spheres into more critical positions, arguing that the internet and social media have created a more convenient environment for socialization with like-minded groups and the avoidance of counter attitudinal material. This type of behaviour is prominent on Facebook and Twitter, and studies into online environment have focused on these platforms (Twitter: Barbera et al, 2015, O’Callaghan et al, 2013, boyd, 2010; Facebook: Bakshy et al 2010), finding that ideologies on both sides of the spectrum were being algorithmically reinforced through the insular nature of their communication habits, creating a collective rather than connective community (Kerbel, 2009).

As users struggle to negotiate their autonomy, how our sociality and relation to these sites shifted in relation social media platforms’ expansion into our daily lives has also been the subject of debate. Recommendation and personalisation algorithms have a heavily affective dimension, as they are geared towards the creation and maintenance of participation and engagement (Bucher, 2018). On his work on algorithms, Gillespie refers to these as “the cycles of anticipation” (2014: 168). The affective co-dependence that is being cultivated by algorithms, nudging and gamification must therefore be factored into a debate on our ability as citizens to use these spaces for deliberation. More simply, Marcus Gilroy-Wade describes how: “Emotion is everything in timeline media. It’s what keeps us scrolling, and what keeps us coming back “every ten minutes” (2018: 45).

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This type of reward-seeking behaviour that makes us constantly crave satisfying content is expediated by other affective objects found on timeline media; memes. Our desire to consume memes does not make them particularly politically biased, but it does make them weaponizable. While some saw in this the potential that memes could “display emergent practises for identification that emphasize affective dimensions where alternative desires and forms of mobility may be imagined and enacted” (Szablewicz, 2014: 260), we must remember that this “capacity to communicate something meaningful with virtually zero narrative” (Gilroy-Wade, 2018: 40) can be a hindrance of democratic opinion formation. As we transition from a phase of connective means to increasingly segregated communities, memes have been cast as both the vessels of participatory networks and the perfect mobilisers of attention. In short, they are very powerful weapons, and during 2016, their role in the online culture war would soon prove them as much.

2.1.2. Reactionary Politics, the Meme War and the Overton Window

These defining characteristics of social networking have unfortunately proven to be a fecund space for communities to become radicalised in their beliefs. In the run-up to the US presidential elections of 2016, a clash between these communities took a subvert form, hidden amongst layers of irony and supposedly innocent memes (Nagle, 2017; Wendling, 2018; Citarella, 2018). In her book Memes in Digital Culture, Shifman warned us that:

heavy reliance on pop culture images in political memes may, at some points, lead to a process of depoliticization in which the political and critical aspects of Internet memes are diminished in favour of pure playful amusement (2013: 138).

Instead, we saw the opposite come true as “2016 politicized all aspects of pop culture” (Citarella, 2018). The processes of pure and playful amusement remained, but were in themselves weaponised, a process encapsulated by the concept of the Overton Window. Crucially, the Overton Window is always in flux, and can be expanded to accommodate radical points of view, if they are able to enter and find a permanent place in societal discourse. As Milner warned in 2013, play with images, expectations, and irony continued to thrive in meme culture. Holm comments on how the environment of the digital platform thereby gave rise to “online deadpan and the comic disposition”, an aesthetic mode of approaching and interacting with content that has:

the potential to embrace modes of radical absurdity and profoundly stunted empathy that push at the limits of what are usually understood as the edge of both mutual comprehensibility and social acceptability (Holm, 2017).

This way, extremist political positions have been able to infiltrate and thrive in the mainstream of online discourse through the trojan horse of memetic imagery. Though radical online subcultures are certainly not new, their breach into the mainstream through the vessel of memes was the first time the world beyond the deep vernacular web platforms was introduced to how this particular community portrayed and disseminated its ideas.

In the ecosystems of the “subcultural depths of the internet”, mostly found on the platforms Reddit and (OILAB, 2019), vernacular functions both as a collective identification and a protection

10 from outsider scrutiny. The deep vernacular web’s intimate and collective dynamics have warranted misinformation have been known to gestate and give rise to misinterpretation when misunderstood by other platforms, creating fake news such as the infamous “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory (Tuters et al, 2018). The shifting sands of irony and trolling culture that define the grammars of the platforms have made it resistant to interpretation and thus built up barriers around the communities that have formed on these platforms, giving rise to alternative label of the ambivalent web (Milner & Philips, 2017). Meme humour is its defining grammar, which can be notoriously difficult to interpret. This principle, foreshadowed by Milner’s “hacked social dynamic” (2013) is referred to as Poe’s Law; that “without a clear indication of the authors intent, it is difficult or impossible to tell the difference between an expression of sincere extremism and a parody of extremism” (Phillips, 5). Therefore, when right-wing memes in support of Donald Trump were popularised, the alt-right label was attached to this subculture, but was a contested one.4

Angela Nagle contends that the roots of this culture emerged both to act as parody and counter- force to “humourless, self-righteous, right-on social media” and “the sentimentality and absurd priorities of Western liberal performative politics and the online mass hysteria that often characterised it” (2018, 7). Indeed, both before and outside of the presidential elections, the antagonistic aspect of this culture war came when these increasingly political subcultures saw themselves as opposing a movement of political correctness and social justice coming from the left. The platform targeted using a “parody of extremism” was that one so often associated with these performative politics, Tumblr and its “social justice warriors” (Philips, 2018).

Amongst the chaos of the “culture war”, real and long-lasting impacts were made on our society’s ability to use the digital public sphere as a deliberative as rhetoric became undermined by irony. Studies into the web’s fostering of ideologically extreme communities then have taken over from optimistic treatments of the web as a powerful mobiliser of politically active individuals. While the alt-right has known fame through the coverage of this issue, it is time to turn towards the left. Now, I turn to the role platforms have played in creating platform cultures that have pitted themselves against each other, and how crucial understanding how affordances can create a culture fecund to political ideology building is.

2.2. Platform Ecologies

Scholarship on digital subcultures has up to now revolved around the notion of publics, the mobilisation of a crowd and formation of a “we” (Poel et al, 2018). The proliferation of “publics” literature shows a clear interest in group-making processes online, rooted in public sphere studies and the impact of the digital world on discourse and identity-building processes (Bruns & Burgess, 2011; Papacharissi, 2016; Dahlgren, 2012). boyd’s influential 2011 definition of networked publics embodies a connective or networked individualism vision of user behaviour of social networking sites, “[T]hey allow people to gather for social, cultural and civic purposes, and they help people

4 For Alice Marwick and Beca Lewis, the alt-right label had become inaccurate, because, by the 2016 , it had been embraced by, or at least was being used to describe, a range of “conspiracy theorists, techno- libertarians, white nationalists, Men’s Rights advocates, trolls, anti-feminists, anti-immigration activists, and bored young people” (Marwick & Lewis, 2016).

11 connect with a world beyond their close friends and family” (39).5 In the following, I highlight how publics theories can contribute to our understanding of platforms and affordances.

In the last few years, the Habermasian counterpublics has returned to supersede the notion of the networked publics as increasing amounts of attention are paid to social networking sites as the breeding ground for reactionary movement formation. The notion of counterpublics, group formations that arise and position themselves against a dominant voice and culture (Warner, 2002), is not natively digital, but counterpublics creation can be interpreted as being facilitated by networked publics. Networked publics not only lower the threshold for entering spaces wherein countercultural opinions and viewpoints thrive by connecting users that share these ideas, they also make available spaces that are invisible offline, unable to find a place in society due to stigma or shame (Reninger, 2015). Coming to inhabit a space for expression online however is caught between processes of subjectification that have to negotiate the private and public spheres of platform ownership. The subcultures that emerge from platform-specific counterpublics are not representative of, but still born from platform subcultures.

I take a similar approach to Reninger who, in his work on Tumblr, (2015) wishes to contextualise counterpublics communication within platform-specific affordances through Madianou and Miller’s theory of polymedia (2013) to emphasise the of the creative work of counterpublics. Polymedia scholarships holds a structuralist approach to mediation that is inherently valuable to my analysis in terms of platform affordances and communication. Though Madianou and Miller use this theory to show how individuals navigate the polymedia environment for their own (pre-existing) social relationship, I look at how users develop social relationship through affordances of media. I argue this process is crucial to how they will continue to behave on the platform, and essentially come to constitute a platform subculture in their relations to other users within the same space. Thus, before looking at the concept of subcultures, I first introduce the concept of affordances.

2.2.1. Platform Affordances and Subcultures

Platform affordances create communicative norms by rendering actions possible. From the field of ecological psychology, affordance is a concept that helps us understand how an environment shapes our relation to it. James Gibson’s theory about how “affordances do not cause behaviour but constrain and control it” (1982: 411) has guided a social constructivist approach to the materiality of media artefacts in the 21st century. Within a mediation and remediation context, affordances technologically construct a relationship to an integrated environment that is not abstract but social (Hutchby, 2001; Madianou & Miller, 2013). In the context of social media, Bucher and Helmond have distinguished between high- and low-level affordances 6 but write that most frequently, scholars combine the both in terms of considering high-level affordances of social media through specific features that therefore create an environment of “social affordances” (2018). Therefore, social

5 The concept of networked publics refers as much to this space as the interaction with it, and “the imagined collective that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, , and practice” (boyd, 39). 6 Bucher and Helmond explain: “High-level affordances are the kinds of dynamics and conditions enabled by technical devices, platforms and media…low-level affordances are typically located in the materiality of the medium, in specific features, buttons, screens and platforms” (2018, 12).

12 affordances refer to “the possibilities that technological changes afford for social relations and social structure” (Wellman, 2001: 228).

Recently, Baym and McVeigh-Schultz have tried to negotiate the technological determinism and structuralist tension within the field of affordance theory with their practice of sense-making and vernacular affordances (2015). Sense-making allows an understanding of a user’s evolving relationality to a social media affordance and how practices of meaning making can evolve when perspectives shift on a media’s materiality, for example when an affordance goes from “hidden” to “perceptible” (McVeigh-Schultz & Baym, 2015: 2). Their study situates affordance theory within a polymedia environment and demonstrates how users rationalise the way they communicate in the media ecosystem through different levels of abstraction; “including infrastructure, device, operating system, app marketplace, platform, interface, interface-feature” (2015, 5). My approach, which seeks to address the complexity of counterpublic formation through the afforded social construction of platform subcultures, therefore interacts with McVeigh-Schultz and Baym’s findings at platform- level, and responds to their suggestion for opening up the field of affordance theory to wider and more abstract reflections, including; “what are the political stakes involved in the design decisions that privilege certain levels of affordance over others, and what kinds of critical interventions can the concept of vernacular affordance make possible?” (2015: 11).

Turning to platforms, the body of work behind the term “platform politics” has come to refer to the assemblage of design, , and norms that encourage certain kinds of cultures and behaviours to coalesce on platforms while implicitly discouraging others (Gillespie, 2010; Van Dijck, 2013; Bucher, 2012). In this way, it directly comes to fill the gap in scholarship that McVeigh-Scultz and Baym question, but I want to extend this work further by emphasising the vernacular and cultural aspect of these platform subcultures. My understanding of a platform subculture is based not on group formation processes but observing the codes and norms of group user behaviour as enabled by social networking sites. Therefore, Bourdieu’s sociological classification of cultures in the context of platform-specific interaction picks up from a polymedia understanding of the user’s relationship to their environment. Bourdieu’s definition refers to the communicative practices of a group enacted through common aesthetics and language conventions and the norms that shape the way people talk to, conceive of, and treat one another (Bourdieu, 1984). Platform cultures have also been called “vernacular”, and Gibbs et al point out that, though certain affordances are common to a variety of platforms; “every platform has a vernacular specific to it that has developed over time, through design, appropriation, and use” (2015: 257). Therefore, scholarship on memes not as genre but as a “cultural dialect, used not just to frame certain propositional content but to communicate things about its user” (Douglas, 2015), informs my understanding of behaviour on these platforms.

2.2.2. Reddit, Forums and Deliberation

Many scholars have studied the issue of democratic conversation on Reddit, and the role of /r/The_Donald/ in issuing “meme warfare” during the 2016 US Presidential elections often serves to give reputation to the site as a whole (Massanari, 2015; Marantz, 2018; Nithyanand, R. et al. 2017). The history of the platform and the evolution of its features are closely interlinked with the public perception of Reddit as a bastion of free speech. Therefore, its platform culture has been influenced by both an insider sense of belonging to unregulated public sphere and outsider criticism of its free-

13 for-all approach to public discourse. Its contentious role as potential facilitator for hate speech has provoked scrutiny along with its past history of content moderation (Marantz, 2018). Here, I turn to how the open-source design and architecture of the site reifies a strong sense of community belonging.

Reddit is a forum-based link aggregator organised by interest-bound subforums called subreddits. Massanari describes reddit as a “community of communities” (2017: 331). Users, referred to as Redditors, can subscribe to any number of subreddits so that content from the subreddit of their choice appears in their individualised “feed”, but are free to participate in all forums through the site’s general feed (“all”). Content can take the form of text, images, links or videos, but most often outlinks are posted to other sites, such as image-hoster Imgur or news sources. On many popular forums, moderators are used to regulate the flow of content and monitor discourse on the forums. The moderator role is a voluntary position for any user with an interest in curating a particular subreddit. They are often dedicated to the issue at hand and in keeping a steady flow of quality content on their subreddit but represent an authoritarian position that often results in controversy.7

In 2018, a major redesign came which altered Reddit’s interface for the first time in a decade. Before this change, “classic” Reddit’s interface, as a link-aggregator, required users to click through links bringing them to the external content-hoster. Though the change was intended to graduate the site from a representative of the “anarchist web” to a more transparent, open to all version of the site (Pardes, 2018), this design made the site difficult to navigate, and content on it “schizophrenic” (Pardes, 2018). In terms of vernacular affordances, this interaction with the site made users aware of the mediation of their environment, as functionalities went from hidden to perceptible. Though its redesign could be said to increase the transparent immediacy of the site, where interaction with content is blended seamlessly into the interface rather than bringing the users out of it, this change also represented a turning point in user’s interaction with the platform’s interface. The social interaction with the content became something that grew and evolved alongside the site, and it also fostered a sense of belonging; writing for Wired, Arielle Pardes comments: “If you can figure it out, you get to be part of the club” (2018). Ultimately, this reified Reddit’s platform culture as something that was earned and cultivated rather than open to all.

The redesign also introduced new ranking algorithms into Reddit’s dynamic. Ranking algorithms are at work when determining the visibility of content and present different options for the user to choose when viewing their feed; Best, Hot, New, Top and Controversial. Best was introduced to “make the Reddit home feed more personal by surfacing posts from communities you’ve shown interest in recently and by filtering posts you’ve already seen so there is always fresh content” (cryptolemur Ranking). Reddit’s move to make the community feel like a home is crucial to understanding the dynamics of the platform and the way its users feel when browsing. As with all sorting algorithms designed to increase time spent on a platform, Massanari points out, “the sense that content on the site is completely tailored to your interests and regularly refreshed makes it both an intoxicating space and incredibly addicting” (2015: 9).

7 The subreddit /r/Subreddit drama is dedicated to monitoring controversy on subreddits, and issues with moderators represents a majority of the “drama” that is recorded there.

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Politically, Reddit’s most interesting feature is how it democratizes the creation and moderation of these subreddits. The platform’s open source structure presents an obvious opportunity to create interest-based forums for subjects big to small, but also an echo chamber. The individualisation of one’s feed, “based on individual interests, no matter how niche” (Pariser, 2011), has been described by Massanari as conducive to creating “an experience wherein one’s views are merely confirmed rather than challenged, likely the opposite of the democratic, deliberative nature of the “potential” of the internet” (2015: 9). Secondly, unlike twitter, Reddit enables users to participate in long conversations and complex discussions using replies to posts and through the construction of comment threads. As a site of political deliberation enabled by the affordances of the platform, then, Reddit has drawn critical attention (Freelon, 2017).

Reddit’s forum structure materially constitutes its platform culture in a way that sets it apart from other prominent social sites. The pseudonomity of the platform has been considered as potentially enhancing the online disinhibition effect felt by users. Online disinhibition effect refers to a perceived enhanced freedom users feel when communicating online rather than in-person, and is linked to asynchronous communication as well as anonymity and individual factors (Suler, 2004). Asynchronous communication has sparked positive and negative takes, with Coleman and Gøtze arguing that “the best deliberative results are often achieved when messages are stored or archived and responded to after readers have had time to contemplate them” (2001: 17), and Wright and Street associating increased deliberation with technical affordances of forums like prior review moderation and threaded messages (2007). Fishkin et al on the other hand contend that “affective bonding and mutual understanding” are relatively low in asynchronous forums (2005: 8). However, studies on Reddit in particular must also encompass other features of its design, such as upvoting and recontextualization.

Upvoting is an affordance that gives Reddit a meritocratic structure, in that users must earn the right to visibility (or, gain karma). Posts, as well as comments, present the option to be voted on by any other Redditor, and the score of the post, determines its placement in a subreddit’s feed. however is often a point of contention in Reddit platform culture, as rival subreddits can often use voting as a way of attacking another subreddit’s integrity and dynamics in a tactic known on the platform as “brigading”.8 Voting on Reddit when used as “a force for social control” has been argued to “mask the work it does to rationalize the hegemony of pre-established narratives” (LaViolette, 2017: 9).

LaViolette tackles the problem with free speech-based platforms masquerading as democratic. He argues that posts on Reddit take others’ speech out of context and supplement them with their own opinion, facilitating context collapse and secondary recontextualization of other’s speech, ultimately creating echo-chambers not only through algorithms, but vernacular means. On Reddit, “mechanisms for the presentation (and suppression) of discourse that are in fact unique to the online environment” intersect with “practices that are common in everyday speech and in no way unique to online communication—the use of metapragmatic stereotypes in representing samples of “others’” speech” (LaViolette, 2017: 19). Indeed, the civility of discourse has been a focal point in

8 “What is “brigading” and how do you do it?” Reddit, Retrieved from: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/36xhxc/what_is_brigading_and_how_do_you_do_it/

15 studies on Reddit’s politics. LaViolette’s conclusions correlate with findings by Nithyanand et al about online political discourse in the Trump era (2017). Their longitudinal study found a positive correlation between the expansion of political subreddits and the rise of offensiveness in public political discourse, and that discussion on political subreddits are on average 35% more likely to be offensive or showing traits of extreme speech than their non-political counterparts (2017, 14).9

In line with this argument, Massanari has argued that Reddit’s environment creates “toxic technocultures” (2017). She argues that the unique cocktail of affordances and platform culture “implicitly reifies the desires of certain groups (often young, white, cis-gendered, heterosexual males) while ignoring and marginalizing others” (2017: 330). Her point is backed by the actual demographics of the users of the site, which, according to Barthel et al. (2016), are made up of 69% of men, and 56% between 18 and 29 years old. Above, I’ve outlined how the platform’s technical affordances such as moderators, echo chambers, voting and asynchronous forums, further enhance the feeling of entrenchment within a particular belief system and give rise to vernacular and cultural norms. These mechanisms have influenced over time the strong affective bond Redditor’s feel towards the platforms, where the platform culture has now become predicated on “an Othering of those perceived as outside the culture” (Massanari, 2017: 333). In this context, platform culture has a strong bearing on the networks that mobilise on Reddit, and how they will use their networked power.

2.2.3. Instagram’s Radicalisation

While the platform has not yet garnered a specific reputation for political leaning, the mobilisation of networked power on Instagram is an emerging field of study. Instagram is a photo-sharing application widely used for the taking, editing and sharing of visual content. Pictures can be uploaded or taken with the application, then edited through the use of pre-set filters and captioned with text and hashtags. Instagram allows for sharing across platforms, making it a popular visual content hoster on other social networks. It also offers many of the key affordances of similar platforms including Tumblr and Twitter, such as a home feed, liking and commenting, and asymmetric follower relationships (For a comparison of all affordances across networks, see Appendix 1). Instagram is distinct in that it is widely rolled out as a mobile application. Though a web extension exists, most users are more familiar with Instagram as a mobile application, which for Gibbs et al accounts for its seamless integration into everyday life and its important influence on its users, “enabling Instagram to be embedded within everyday practices” (2017: 258). Used by 500 million users daily, the platform is now “arguably the fastest-growing media format ever” (Wagner, 2018). Now with 1 billion users, 32% of which are aged between 18-24, it is the second highest engaged with social media site after Facebook, and represents a hugely important userbase (Statista, 2019). What follows is an overview of which affordances have been conducive to interesting political behaviour on the platform, and how these have been covered in the media.

The sense of platform community as seen on Reddit is radically absent from Instagram. There are few socially-oriented affordances on the platform that promote horizontal communication. Instead,

9 They also found that republican subreddits experienced a “reduction in complexity of discourse” during the 2016 Presidential elections. (14)

16 the platform embodies the spirit of networked individualism; users have “pages” and interact with each other as accounts, but their feed is wholly personalised. Due to the visual-content based nature of the platform, Instagram studies have revolved around practices of self-presentation (Kleemans et al, 2018; Yann & Reich, 2018). The platform permits a relationship of relatability and enables social interaction between author and follower, albeit within an asymmetrical relationship that has given rise to the “influencer” marketing phenomenon (Glucksman, 2017). Thereby, the effect of prolonged exposure to curated visual content has provoked scrutiny in its interaction with societal gender norms (Chandra, Szymanski, 2018, Kleemans et al, 2018). Related subcultural movements that have arisen and incited attention are the body positive movement (Cwynar-Horta, 2016), as well as the issue of “authenticity” in movements such as influencers and micro-celebrity (Abidin, 2016).

The engagement factor of the platform is used for spreading the social network’s most powerful currency; memes. Unsurprisingly, Instagram’s visual nature has become a fecund place for the development and propagation of memes of all kinds. As a convergence point for a variety on internet cultures, Instagram has seen the evolution of meme styles that emerge from a wide variety of sources and other social media influences. For example, the niche meme account phenomenon (Lorenz, 2017) serves as real-life online diaries whose aesthetics are heavily drawn from a variety of meme legacies such as starter packs and vapourwave. Meme account dynamics thrive off influencer dynamics, but are also hatching newly emerging practice that try to connect a public in a platform that has no communal space, only individual user accounts. Often run by young, digitally native users, the platform’s affordances are manipulated in a way that internet-savvy users are wont to do. Instagram’s privacy settings furthermore allow ecologies of users to build and connect with each other, completely invisible to the outside world. Therefore, tagging users and hashtags have proven crucial to connecting users. Indeed, meme account networks are incredibly powerful on Instagram, and have been seen to mobilise against harmful content (Lorenz, 2019) in a move reminiscent of brigading on Reddit.

Combined with networked influencer dynamics, the affective structure of memes has been conducive to the emergence of deep subcultural networks. As was proven true in 2016, “memes pages and humor is a really effective way to introduce people to extremist content” (Lorenz, 2019). Messages in memes are often too implicit or coded to be detected by the platform’s content moderation policies (Cox & Koebler, 2019). Indeed, the nature of the platform as a hub of extreme memes is beginning to be unearthed and even covered in the mainstream media (Newton, 2018). Taylor Lorenz writes for ; “The platform is likely where the next great battle against misinformation will be fought, and yet it has largely escaped scrutiny” (2019). It is not only the affordances of the platform architecture and its visual nature that have catalysed the emergence of a radical network on Instagram. In this case, the algorithmic echo chamber of Instagram’s recommendation algorithm connects networks of users sharing ideologies and reinforces these connections; “Following just a handful of these accounts can quickly send users spiraling down a path toward even more extremist views and conspiracies, guided by Instagram’s own recommendation algorithm” (Lorenz, 2019). Instagram’s recommendation algorithm has come under fire for its ties to promoting extremist viewpoints. Through hashtagging and the “velocity of the recommendation algorithm”, Lorenz points out how “how Instagram can serve as an entry point into the internet’s darkest corners” (2019).

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In fact, Wired reported last year that Instagram had become the most targeted social media for Russia troll farm Internet Research Agency, and that these accounts were producing and propagating memes on a massive scale (Martineau, 2018). “Powered by networks of related and opposing profiles”, the IRA wielded the platform’s defining features against itself, and was undoubtedly successful, as a dozen of these accounts attained “influencer” level (acquired more than 100 000 followers) and around 50 more than 50 000 (micro influencer), representing all together more than 10 million interactions (Martineau, 2018). These meme accounts treated issues such as black culture, feminism, LGBTQ+ issues, Christianity, veterans, and gun rights. The existence of these profiles, whose purpose was to sow discord and create divisions in society, elevate memetic warfare through what can only be referred to as a weaponization of the platform.

On the left, I follow artist Joshua Citarella’s investigation into the “post-left” community on the platform. This first foray into the field of leftist content on Instagram leads him to unearth the process by which “a mass leaderless online movement organized around open source digital images” on Instagram is creating a “cultural agitation and contribut[ing] to a major shift in public discourse at a volatile time in history” (2018: 8). By tracking the “post-left” community on the platform, Citarella encovers a tightly wound network of young users advocating extreme left views “a haven for both ideologues and trolls” (2018: 7). His contributions and reflection on irony politics are essential to my project, and I will refer to them throughout this work.

Instagram’s skyrocketing success and popularity amongst young teenagers has drawn critical attention to the processes of networking building it allows. Its influencer-culture has revealed to extremist figures and associations a new model of communication and enhanced their ability to reach out and create networks through powerfully influential measures. These figures have used the power memes have accrued through a decade of gaining velocity on other social networks such as Facebook and Twitter and found a home on Instagram on which to exert this highly affective visual influence. This platform’s culture, though vastly divided and heterogenous, represents the potential next step in new media political communication.

2.2.4. Tumblr’s Subaltern Counterpublics

As a platform, Tumblr has provoked interest in how its micro-communities and counterpublics have popularised . Coined by Nancy Fraser in 1990, subaltern counterpublics refers to groups formed located on the fringes of society created by ostracised communities as alternative public spheres. In other words, Fraser defines this concept as “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and need” (1990, 67). While counterpublics position themselves against a dominant voice, subaltern counterpublics come together due to their marginalised identities. Digital subaltern counterpublics scholarship has historically focused on feminism (Travers, 2003), and as space of counterpublic intellectualism, Tumblr has incited academic attention in its formulation and performance of feminism (Thelandersson, 2014; Larsson, 2016; Felts, 2017), but also queer aesthetics (Cho, 2015; Fink & Miller, 2014), and queer social justice (Bell, 2013).

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Tumblr’s reputation thus became known for being a liberal online culture “successful in pushing fringe ideas into the mainstream” (McLean, 2014). Thereby, the formation of counterpublics on Tumblr can be understood to have lived up to Fraser’s bifold structure of the counterpublic as a place of safety and as an opportunity “to introduce new or alternative discursive positions into public spaces where they are able to be publicly opposed or challenged” (McLean, 2014). However, the former, Tumblr as a “safe space” has warranted much attention in the mainstream, and cause controversy around the issue of identity politics. Therefore, how the particular affordances and platform politics of Tumblr have given rise to this culture is outlined here.

Tumblr’s early platform reputation was mainly as a place for the emergence and participation in wide-scale digitally-enabled “fandoms” (Morimoto & Stein, 2018; Hillma et al, 2014). As a micro- blogging platform, it allowed for the sharing of , fan art, and general discussion all on a single platform (Neill, 2018). Its variety of posting functionalities includes photos, text, quotes, videos, audio, as well as chats and outlinks. Users follow any number of , and their content then appears in their dashboard. Therefore, relationships on the platforms hinge on content-based interaction through reblogging, which posts the content from their dashboard onto their own blog, and liking. Blogging on Tumblr then could be perceived as an act of curation, where users constantly “make” themselves.

Genre conventions born on Tumblr emanate from affordances such as reblogging that standardise content. Users are therefore more likely to reproduce grammar and stylistic preferences from other users on the platform, creating a heavily coded subcultural grammar. For example, Felts notes there are conventions on how to hold discussions on posts (Felts, 2017), and similar mechanism can be seen in asks, Tumblr’s messaging systems, and tagging, an affordance common to other platform that Tumblr’s platform culture norms dictates the use of. Tagging on Tumblr is also particular to the platform’s logic. This affordance can be used both as a curatorial tool for own blog purposes, and as a tertiary comment space.10 What I call the tertiary comment section is a feature that has developed as a vernacular affordance as users were socialised into cultural norms such as not commenting on a post when reblogging, which decreases the value of a post for future reblogging by one’s followers, but rather keeping their thoughts and comments into the tags, which are also visible on one’s dashboard. Therefore, vernacular affordances are a huge part of Tumblr’s platform culture.

The reblogging functionality is perhaps the most discerning and influential affordance of Tumblr. Researchers have argued that reblogging has facilitated unique dynamics of reappropriation and re- sharing, to the extent that over 93% of the Tumblr posts are reblogs rather than the original posts (Xu et al., 2014). Therefore, reblogging increases the exposure of a post and creates a certain grammar of repetition and virality unique to the platform. Posts are often encountered multiple times, reiterating logics and codes that could be seen as cementing a platform identity. Reblogging enhances shared experiences to the extent that Gonzalez-Polledo and Tarr contend that pain experiences no longer belong to one person on Tumblr; instead, “by virtue of traveling around the site through reblogging”, personal pain experiences are transformed into “symptomatic

10 Tumblr users primarily use tagging for “information organization–oriented tagging” (Lin & Chen, 2012) attesting to the curatorial behaviour on the site, but also for communal, codified blog maintenance

19 communication” that “no longer aims to represent or show reality” bound to individual bodies (2016, 7). Thereby, Seko and Lewis have argued that “such a relatively “asocial” affordance of Tumblr has made it particularly conducive to performing non-normative subjectivities” (2018: 182). While the architecture of Tumblr as a platform prevent the formation of sub-groups and interest based-networks (Felts, 2017), its reblogging functionality functions to spread viral content that functions as a mechanism for enhancing identification processes between users (Neill, 2018: 11).

Another form in which vernacular affordances have manifested and created a collective platform identity is through interaction with the user interface, in a way that echoes Reddit’s community cementing their belonging on the platform following the 2018 redesign. Interface design changes on Tumblr have suffered substantial backlash from users for being sometimes sub-optimal. Born out of these dynamics, Neill theorises a relationship of autonomy users feel in their relation to the platform. Combined with Tumblr’s open-source platform which allows for editing and customising of one’s blog, “their knowledge that the platform is less than a pristine, flawless technological actant, gives account holders a sense of control over their experiences” (2018, 12). Thereby, she argues that users’ experiences on Tumblr are unique in comparison to other social platforms, and the sense of identification and social cohesion makes Tumblr its users’ preferred platform. The affordances and general platform subculture on Tumblr create an attractive online “private” public sphere for marginalised identities.

This strong sense of kinship has cultivated a learning and teaching culture for Tumblr users, where educational and informational content is spread through reblogging and the sense of social cohesion is manipulated to keep users accountable when in the wrong. Political awareness became one of the pillars identity formation on Tumblr was built on. Allisson McCracken argues that the platform’s architecture created a “diverse liberal public sphere for commiseration, shared pleasures, education and mentoring, political activism, identity development, and other kinds of socialization” (2017, 151). As opposed to the toxic technocultures of Reddit and the networked individualism of Instagram, Tumblr’s strong platform identity, and affordances, can present a fecund space for the reception and curation of “othered” identities.

Identity politics emerged from a movement focusing on the intersectionality of oppression, wanting to draw attention to the subjugations many felt in society and moving beyond the cis, white male as a locus of critical attention. It denotes an emancipatory mode of political course of action based on the shared experience of marginalisation based on identity such as race, gender or class. (Patterson, 2006). Recently, Angela Nagle’s investigation into the online culture war between the alt-right on 4chan and Tumblr’s counterpublics culture and identity politics has erroneously dichotomised the two platforms into the extreme right and the extreme left. Nevertheless, the “culture war” attached to Tumblr the label as safe haven for social justice warriors, a pejorative term for an individual advocating for progressive social rights with an emphasis on intersectional feminism and identity politics.

Indeed, Tumblr is mainly represented on Reddit through the satirical subforum /r/TumblrInAction, a subreddit with a mass following dedicated to identifying throughout the internet, not just on Tumblr, evidence of points of views misrepresenting or over-emphasising political correctness to an extreme degree. In this grammar, “TumblrInAction” refers to identity politics becoming a satire of

20 itself. Tumblr’s progressive politics then are widely known, and firmly positioned against all forms of oppression. Class struggle and oppression by capitalism, though not a form of identity politics, are popular issues on the platform. A search on Google for “Buzzfeed Tumblr Anti-capitalism” brings up two different listicle articles where Buzzfeed has catalogued “19 Tumblr posts that will definitely destroy capitalism” (Lobanova, 2016) and “23 Times that Tumblr reminded you we live in a capitalist hell” (Akbar, 2015), giving Tumblr a distinctively leftist reputation.

2.3. Concluding Remarks

I’ve traced how the cultures of these platforms, Reddit, Instagram, and Tumblr, can be correlated to their technological specificity. In a vicious cycle, reputations have developed that furthermore consolidate the sentiment of platform cohesion. In short, affordances have given rise to a way to be and interact in these spaces that has quickly become codified and normative. Individual subcultures vary, but platform context matters. Next, I look at how to operationalise these ideas about platform affordances and cultures in order to listen to what anti-capitalist publics can tell us about the state of irony, politics and meme-ing online in 2019.

3. Methodology

To answer what forms anti-capitalism has taken online and what can their subcultures tell us about the state of the digital public sphere, I take three subsequent approaches.

RQ1. What online subcultures position themselves as anti-capitalist? RQ2. What themes emerge in the critique of capitalism by these subcultures’ memes? RQ3. How do platform affordances influence platform subcultures?

My study’s aim is to go from the general to the unique on each platform, and to correlate political ideals, forms and the ways they are formulated by communities on Reddit, Instagram and Tumblr with the site’s platform subculture, principally through an understanding of vernacular affordances. Therefore, I first narrow down anti-capitalism from a broad label available to be claimed by any user on the platform to users that have established platform-characteristic ways of relating to an anti- capitalist ideal (RQ1). Then, I extract specific behaviours, especially in relation to meme-ing and the aesthetics of anti-capitalism, from these groups of users (RQ2). While finding unique content and behaviours is out of reach in a polymedia context where users navigate between not only different sites but different communicative and representative modes respective to these different media environments (McVeigh-Schultz & Baym, 2015), I want to address more how each anti-capitalist subculture on Reddit, Instagram and Tumblr can be seen to be a product of the platform architecture itself. (RQ3) To do this, I draw on existing approaches to studying communities formed on platforms through their content and apply a reading of aesthetic, vernacular, and discursive traits such as found in meme scholarship (Literat & Sarah Van den Berg, 2017; Ask & Abidin, 2018).

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3.1. Digital Methods and Ethnography

Users can be found to group themselves into forums, such as on Reddit, or through loose networks articulated around hashtags or aesthetics, on Instagram and Tumblr. Different operational definitions are at play here, and each method for analysis must therefore render itself pliable to the interface of the platform and use site navigation to amplify ethnographic practices. Hybridising two methods of conducting online research is therefore necessary for this project. While big data and the advent of digital methods symbolises new and untapped potential for mass-scale quantitative analysis, thought and critique must espouse the new ways of seeing data and contribute to them. As a practice, digital methods seek to “follow the medium” and grow alongside it, which is especially true of adapting methodological practices to specific platform interfaces (Rogers, 2013).

The purpose of digital methods is to make online practices politically and socially meaningful. Through the lens of an ethnographic framework I use in this study platform-native tools, tools developed for digital methods and analysis, visualisation softwares to do this. My approach takes into account platform cultures as much as it wants to witness organic processes of ideological critique online. Therefore, it must re-purpose the afforded social practices of platforms, to understand “how social media are used in non-standard ways, identifying practices that might easily be missed through automated analyses” (Highfield & Leaver, 2015). Forays into this topic from an artistic point of view conducted by Joshua Citarella have applied a similarly mutable and shifting methodology that embraces the fluidity of the ideas and subcultures at play. He writes that the post- left community on Instagram:

can’t be visualized from the outside. It must be explored qualitatively from within. Search results yield mainstream meme accounts, paid posts and merch stores ready to monetize their followings. [they] are generally not trusted; they’re normies (2018: 7).

Digital ethnographic study is a principle for conducting research about users, behaviours and dynamics in computer-mediated interaction. Digital ethnography is driven by the same narrative desire as traditional ethnography: “telling social stories” but wishes to espouse the same goals in regard to online communication and phenomena (Murthy, 2008). The emergence of the field and its symbiotic transformation with its object of study, the constantly evolving terrains of social media and online spaces, have meant that researchers have needed to be critical about their engagement with their method of study. Dicks et al. warns that the internet should never be read as a ‘neutral’ space but rather a fieldwork setting and must be approached with a critical eye, taking into consideration that “a researcher’s data selection and analyses are always biased by agendas, personal histories, and social norms” (2005: 128). Furthermore, ethical considerations such as capture of usernames and content without consent are also animating debates in the field of digital ethnography.

For my purposes, the principles of digital ethnography, informed by a theoretical position on online publics, guide my meme and cataloguing. To do this, I draw on existing approaches to studying communities formed on platforms through their content and apply a reading of aesthetic, vernacular, and discursive traits such as found in meme scholarship (Literat & Van den Berg, 2017;

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Ask & Abidin, 2018). Therefore, looking for memes representative of certain themes was informed by ethnographic study goals. As pre-eminent meme scholar Ryan Milner notes, “transformation [of memes] requires an understanding of representational conventions associated with specific groups or individuals” (2016: 90). Though meme selection can be standardised according to criteria like visual patterns for further study, (Ross & Rivers, 2017) in these quantitative methods the logic of play that defines memes and their aesthetic is lost (Massanari, 2017). Meme studies have primordially focused on memes as cultural knowledge or value (Burgess, 2008; Milner, 2012; Miltner, 2014), but I apply Literat and Van den Berg’s principles of “the vernacular criticism of memes – meaning their discussion and evaluation within the digital communities that produce and circulate them” to my analysis (2017: 2).

Certain image sorting tools were used to analyse and capture certain aesthetic trends within memes, but it is vital to remember that memes do not represent a hegemonic nor objective data-set. Observation and recording are the key tenets of using technology for social research that have influenced this methodology. A non-intrusive approach was taken where I, the researcher, observed but did not partake in the manifested online subcultures. This approach was chosen over participant observation so as not to establish hierarchies in my interactions with the objects of study.11 Nevertheless, data selection was shaped by the researcher’s knowledge of meme cultures and past research experience across social media platforms. In this case, cultural expertise and intuitive navigation through user spaces and pages influenced by prior knowledge of fandom cultures shaped data collection.

3.2. Models of Online Communication

Supplementary to analysing visual content, ethnographic principles were applied to studying discussion on Reddit forums and Instagram pages through observation. To analyse tone and discourse, Freelon’s model of deliberative online communication was applied. In an effort to provide a framework for the contextualisation of deliberative spaces online, Deen Freelon elaborates three modes of online deliberation; liberal individualist, communitarian and deliberative, according to the following concepts; rationality, equality, reciprocal listening, political topicality, and cross-cutting debate (2010). These attitudes represent an elaboration of Habermassian theory and Lincoln Dahlberg’s work (2001) and help us distinguish modes of communication that reflect on democratic- oriented ideologies. I want to extend this contemporary reflection on the digital public sphere by focusing on affordances.

The three communicative modes can be identified through their “indicative metrics” as seen in Figure 1, and thus contribute to understanding group dynamics of anti-capitalist subcultures, specifically within the context of the identity and vernacular affordances. Freelon writes:

In a communitarian setting, participants should communicate primarily with ideological similars (that is, ingroup members), whereas deliberative spaces would be expected to contain

11 Though this process sought to reduce human bias, objectivity was still vulnerable to algorithmic influence. See 3.4 limitations.

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far more crosscutting responses; liberal spaces would be characterized by significantly lower amounts of both types of responses (2010: 10).

Figure 1. Freelon's model of deliberation online communication (2010: 7)

What will be particularly relevant to my analysis is to observe how affordance use in different Reddit forums will be strategically manipulated in order to ensure one or the other mode of communication such as intra-ideological reciprocity (ensuring ideological homophily in a communitarian perspective) or inter-ideological questioning (embodying a deliberative mindset). Another feature of online communication that would speak to a forum’s state of mind is evidence of . Flaming here is recognised as harassment of political opponents, “releasing the tension associated with suppressing their unpopular opinions in offline life, or simply antagonizing others for its own sake” (Freelon, 2010: 9) and has historically been a part of Reddit’s structure (Massanari, 2015).

The same guidelines are applicable to posts constituting part of a network as seen on Instagram and can be applied to interactions seen in comment sections, where evidence of liberal individualist modes such as influencer behaviour is endemic to the structure of the platform. This includes such behaviour as monologuing and personal revelation, “a content-based criterion that embodies the liberal individualist proclivity to focus on oneself” (Freelon, 9).

3.3. Platforms

To operationalise my research object and answer RQ1, “What online subcultures position themselves as anti-capitalist?”, my first step is to identify the forms anti-capitalism takes on my chosen platforms of Reddit, Tumblr and Instagram, with the aims of finding unique grammars per site.

It is important here to note that “Anti-capitalism” was chosen as a query for its neutrality. “Anti- capitalism” is a vector lacking an identifiable , as opposed to “communism”, “” or “”. My aim is not to find communities grouping themselves around an identifiable or pre-established political ideology, but, through the principles of issue-bound publics (Marres, 2007), to find any group that positions itself against capitalism online. These anti-capitalist

24 subcultures thus might take the shape of communist or Marxist forums, but also more implicitly political forums that circulate satirical or critical memes, and my goal is to take these digital objects seriously and to interpret anti-capitalism from their point of view. Therefore, groups or communities that articulate their critique of capitalism from outside the point of view of a political system are of interest to me, especially those prolific in their production of humorous content and memes.

Identifying these communities was done through digitally native methods offered by the platforms themselves, reflecting the path any regular user of the platforms would take when trying to find on the site content or communities that embody what they look for in terms of anti-capitalism. In order to find relevant content not supplied by each platform’s searching functionalities, social network analysis tools were also used. These are tools for digital methods that access a platform through its API. Application Programme Interfaces (APIs) allow third party developers to access platforms through their back-end interface. Researchers use APIs to access data banks held by platforms, and therefore grants the opportunity for further insight into platform subcultures from the back-end. In the following, these principles are applied to the specificity of each platform.

3.3.1. Reddit

a. Search

Reddit’s search function is supported by the CloudSearch12 engine and allows for the searching of the entire site, offering results including subreddits, particular threads, and users. Results are automatically organised and sorted by “most relevant”, showing a combination of both communities and posts with the time setting “of all time”.13 Sorting can be changed to “top”, “new” or “comments”, and the time frame from any time period ranging from the last hour to “of all time”. “Relevance” depends on a black-box algorithm, meaning that its parameters are not public, but its aim is to “make it easier to find the content you're looking for on reddit”.14 From this, we can extrapolate that it functions similarly to the default ranking algorithm on Reddit, “Best”. “Best” was introduced in April 2018 to “make the Reddit home feed more personal by surfacing posts from communities you’ve shown interest in recently and by filtering posts you’ve already seen so there is always fresh content”.15 Query expansion is thus used to improve query relevance, though perhaps not aiding in the overall goal of results being “context-appropriate”.16 Therefore, the query was wrapped in double-quotes in order to avoid a high occurrence of this.

12 “The new search domain is an attempt to improve performance and reliability while maintaining backwards compatibility” /u/bsimpson, “Reddit Search Performance Improvements” Reddit Changelog. Retrieved from: https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/694o34/reddit_search_performance_improvements/ 13 Meaning as long as these communities have existed. 14 /u/tdohz “Reddit Change: New Search Results Page” Reddit Changelog Retrieved from: https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/3bsm11/reddit_change_new_search_results_page/ 15 /u/cryptolemur. ‘Best Is the New Hotness’. Reddit, Jan. 2018, Retrieved from: https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/7spgg0/best_is_the_new_hotness/. Accessed 20 April 2019.

16 “Reddit Change: New Result Page”

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Figure 2. Search results for "anti-capitalism".

For these purposes, the “relevance” sorting was chosen as it is the site’s natural default and demonstrates a user’s organic interaction with content. The result list of the top 15 “most relevant” subreddits was captured through screenshot, then figures such as a significant subscriber count (above 100 000) were looked at to determine the influence of a subreddit and their description was read to assess their commitment to anti-capitalism, in order to avoid satirical content. Brief surveying of each subreddit’s content was done by sorting through “top” and “hot” on each forum and features such as proportion of image posts and meme content were taken as indicators of a dynamic meme circulation ecosystem.

My criteria of selecting non-political forums excluded two of the top subreddits, r/ and r/socialism. Though with important subscriber counts (both around 100 to 200 000), I exclude them along with general subreddits such as /r/worldnews in order to find specific grammars of anti- capitalism that do not subscribe to a particular ideology. A significant subreddit that does not subscribe to a political system but describes itself as anti-capitalist in its description is /r/LateStageCapitalism, “rooted in broad-based anti-capitalist thought, with an underlying Marxist tendency that is steeped in intersectionalist Critical Theory”.17 This forum has over 425 000 subscribers, highest amongst the relevant results list, making it, numerically, the most popular form of anti-capitalism on Reddit. A browse of the subreddit reveals a mostly visual grammar, with memes and tweets being the most shared image formats. Therefore, it was selected for its potential communitarian aspect and meme production and circulation dynamics.

The second selected subreddit was /r/ChapoTrapHouse, a fanbase forum for a popular left-wing . Though with a smaller membership than /r/LateStageCapitalism, around 123 000, it is a particularly thriving centre for meme production. This attests to the fact that fandom dynamics tend to be more generative of fan-content and inside jokes which manifest themselves as memes

17 “/r/LateStageCapitalism”, Subreddit. Retrieved from: https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/ Accessed 20 April 2019

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(Lothian, 2013). The material on /r/ChapoTrapHouse is more controversial and abrasive then /r/LateStageCapitalism, so it was chosen alongside the latter for its potential flaming or deliberative behaviour.

b. Google BigQuery: Mapping Concepts across Reddit

In order to supplement Reddit’s own search domain, another method was used to identify communities which could have been overlooked by using Reddit’s algorithm. To further analyse Reddit networks and dynamics, Google BigQuery was used. BigQuery is a large-scale online data storage facility that works in conjunction with Google Storage to allow for the analysis of large datasets. Google BigQuery queries through a specialised SQL (Structured Query Language) coding language. Reddit research is conducted on Google BigQuery by querying a dataset captured by Jason Baumgartner from Pushshift.io18 which covers almost the entirety of Reddit (Hagen, 2018). A recorded version of Reddit can thus be queried in a variety of ways in order to extract relevant data for analysis.

This query method allows for the building of an objective timeline that tracks the level of interest in the query. This provides a visualisation of trends on the platform that complements a manual analysis conducted at a specific point in time, which any objective set of factors could influence and therefore skew. The time range of January 2017 to January 2019 was chosen to get a depiction of the evolution of the term and see the prevalence of certain subreddits. In order to do this, Google BigQuery was used to query the Reddit dataset for the term “anti-capitalism”, month by month for the time range (see Appendix 2). 25 queries were made, and the top 20 results for each month were downloaded as CSV files. The data was then compiled into one table for the time range.

The data was then visualised through RawGraphs.19 RawGraphs is an open source web application for data visualisation. It offers a variety of options for the visualisation of data by taking a chart- based approach. In this way, data dimensions can be mapped along different variables, including a “Time Series” options which offers a chronological axis. The “stream-graph” was chosen for the clarity of the data visualisation, which allowed me to confirm trough the importance of /r/LateStageCapitalism and /r/ChapoTrapHouse that they are the dominant forms of anti-capitalist subcultures on Reddit.

c. Subreddit_Stats

Once relevant subreddits were identified in step 1 and confirmed in step 2, these were queried for on /r/Subreddit_Stats to get a feel for the popular discourse and tone of the subreddit.

18 Pushshift.io (2018) Reddit Statistics. Retrieved from: https://pushshift.io/ 19 Mauri, M., Elli, T., Caviglia, G., Uboldi, G., & Azzi, M. (2017). RAWGraphs: A Visualisation Platform to Create Open Outputs. In Proceedings of the 12th Biannual Conference on Italian SIGCHI Chapter (p. 28:1–28:5). New York, NY, USA: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3125571.3125585

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Subreddit_Stats is an open source tool that provides basic statistics on a specified subreddit by accessing Reddit’s API through PRAW, the Python Reddit API Wrapper (BBOE).20 Any Redditor is free to make a query request concerning any subreddit by posting on /r/Subreddit_Stats. Then, an automated query process will fetch the information through the Python Reddit API Wrapper. Statistics for the top 1000 submissions of the given subreddit are returned and organised according to top submitters, top submissions, top commenters and top comments. This allows for an overview of popular, or upvoted, content, and also permits the tracing of most active users through Reddit’s affordances. Digital ethnographic principles were applied for analysing the results of this process., and this influenced an evaluation of communicative practices on the subreddit according to Freelon’s three models.

d. Google BigQuery: Referrals

To map relationships between subreddits and identify networks, Google BigQuery was once again used. Taking /r/LateStageCapitalism and /r/ChapoTrapHouse as starting points based on my initial findings, these subreddit were analysed in terms of their referrals. Referrals are mentions of another subreddit by Redditors in the title or comments of posts in a particular subreddit. This is a popular occurrence on Reddit and can indicate what other subreddits are present in the conversational space of a particular forum, shedding light on what dynamics are at play, such as one of pranking and troll culture, or one of debating and pedagogy. Therefore, referrals to educational or informative subforums could be interpreted as the latter. Within my findings, I look for evidence of intra- or inter- ideological questioning, as outlined by Freelon, but also flaming, to find the former.

The SQL script for subreddit referrals matches and extract words that start with “r/” (See Appendix 3 & 4). Another script allows to do the reverse, to see which other subreddits, anywhere on Reddit, are mentioning a chosen subreddit. Two queries were made for each forum, one for other subreddits mentioned, and one for the subreddits mention. Self-referrals to the forum were excluded, also in the form of shorthand. (lsc for LateStageCapitalism, chapo, ctp for chapotraphouse). Automated tools native to Reddit that serve different functions, such as shortening a long post (autotldr) were also present amongst the findings but taken out of the results, to give a resulting set of 15 referrals on each side of the network. The two sets of data were compiled into one sheet, and then the RAWGraphs alluvial diagram was used to map the bifold dynamic.

3.3.2. Tumblr & Instagram

The analysis of Tumblr and Instagram differed from Reddit, as their architecture as microblogging and photo-sharing application respectively afford contrasting features for analysis to Reddit. On both platforms, hashtags can be used by any user to organise posts, and can be considered as an architecture to platform discourse (Ertzscheid, 2013), thus providing the most obvious entry-way into data scraping on each platform. To analyse subcultures, hashtags were taken as a starting point with the hope of finding unique hashtag use that could show a community’s self-assigned hashtag.

20 “BBOE’s PRAWtools”, Github. Retrieved from: https://github.com/praw-dev/prawtools Accessed 20 May 2019

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Therefore, co-hashtag use was studied to find hashtags that were tagged alongside the queried hashtag (#anticapitalism can often be found with #socialism, #communism etc). This means that co- occuring hashtags can create clusters when visualised in network visualisation software Gephi. If significant clusters were found, certain communities can be extrapolated from hashtag use.

Tools developed by the Digital Methods Initiative were used scrape Tumblr and Instagram and retrieve metadata about posts using the hashtag “#anticapitalism”, so that the dataset represented the same intentionality of use as on Reddit. However, once unique co-hashtags that could embody community identification were observed, these were once again queried through the scrapers to compare the resulting dataset with the first graph. For example, it was noticed that Tumblr’s leftist community uses the hashtag “#leftblr” in their posts, so another query was made using this hashtag to observe clustering and communities in this network.

Though the affordance is the same, tagging dynamics on the platform will differ according to platform subculture, and will thus result in contrasting data. Hashtags on Instagram serve a similar function as those employed on Twitter, indicating the main themes or subjects, events, locations, or emotions featured in post. However, the usage of hashtags can also span much beyond a utilitarian use, and can also represent idiosyncratic grammar, making ascribing intentionality to a hashtag network difficult (Highfield, Leaver, 2015).

Lin and Chen’s (2012) analysis of tagging behaviour is useful when approaching tagging on Tumblr as well as Instagram. They define three levels of tag use; information organization–oriented, social- oriented and strategic tagging. (2012: 543) Users tagging for organizational purposes do this for personal information retrieval, while social-oriented tagging also applies the logic of using tags to categorise content as a resource, but is also externally motivated, meaning that it can be used by other users and visitors to the Tumblr blog. Finally, strategic tagging is a more dynamic and flexible form of tagging wherein users make use of popular or established tags to gain visibility for their content, and on Instagram, create networks. This influences the platform architecture as popularity and recommendation algorithms will increase the visibility of certain tags by suggesting them to users. A fourth approach to tagging on Tumblr however can also be witnessed when harvesting co- tag data. A high number of unique occurrences of tags and their format shows that many users on the platform use tags as a tertiary comment section. These tags exhibit highly idiosyncratic, monologue traits and are native to the platform. Therefore, during the network analysis, nodes with count frequency <2 were removed to account for this phenomenon.

a. DMI Tools

The University of Amsterdam’s Digital Methods Initiative develops tools and methodologies to aid in Internet research and analysis. These are open source tools that aim for “repurposing online devices and platforms” that are rendered available on the DMI website and include a variety of methods and objects of study (DMI: About, 2018). The tools used here are the Instagram Scraper and the Tumblr tool.

API-enabled research allows for the collecting of “digital footprints” on non-public web platforms, as opposed to web crawling. It does this by accessing the Application Programme Interface, in a way

29 that is instantaneous and non-intrusive, making “the collection, organization, cleaning, preservation and analysis of data can be automated, thus making API highly efficient research tools” (Lomborg, S., & Bechmann, 2014: 256). Nevertheless, API research does not offer full transparency of data or unlimited access to servers of social media companies, and thus must be used cautiously.

Instagram scraper uses Instagram’s API through Instaloader, 21 an open source tool for retrieving and downloading posts and metadata from Instagram including post information, author, date, hashtags. Instascraper 22 allows the user to access this information for a query of a hashtag or geolocation. Access to Instagram’s developer API was severely restricted by Facebook, Instagram’s owner, in April 2018, and replaced with the “Instagram API Platform”, which severely constrains researcher’s abilities to use the platform for digital methods. 23 Therefore, Instaloader interfaces not with the Instagram developer API, but the web interface of Instagram (what a user would encounter when opening the platform’s web application), interacting with it as an anonymous user. This fetches posts in a mostly chronological order, but with some popular content re-inserted into results. For Instagram, the 1000 most recent posts were scraped in order to obtain both a broad enough overview of the subculture on the platform, but also limiting the quantity of data points as to make a readable and analysable graph through Gephi.

The Tumblr scraper retrieves co-hashtags and post data for a query of a hashtag.24 It retrieves posts through Tumblr’s API, which is open to developers and encourages anyone with an interest in using the interface creatively to use it, which correlates with the platform culture. It is a flexible and user- friendly API that is well documented by Tumblr. The Tumblr tool uses the “Get Posts with Tag” script to retrieve metadata about posts with a certain hashtag. The first queried hashtag was “#anticapitalism”, and the search was fixed at 100 iterations, meaning that only up to 100 pages can be fetched. 20 posts are documented per page, giving up to scrapeable 2000 results.

Both these tools also produce a GDF format file containing co-tags. The data was then visualised in Gephi to identify dominant hashtags and their interactions with each other, with the hope of finding discrete clusters or recurrent phenomena.

b. Gephi Network Analysis

Gephi is an open source graph and network visualisation software that produces 3D rendered dynamic networks. Network visualisation enhances the interpretive capabilities of researchers vis a vis their data, and functionalities such as modularity class can be used to highlight communities within data sets (Bastian et al, 2009). Gephi visualises data through force-vector algorithm, creating

21 “Instaloader”, Github. Retrieved from: https://instaloader.github.io/ 22 Borra, Erik (07 Jul 2015) “Instagram Scraper” Digital Methods Initiative. Retrieved from: https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/ToolInstagramScraper 23 This aimed to tackle “privacy” issues and unofficial third-party apps built on the platform’s API in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Restriction was set in place for existing APIs to control the amount of calls made per hour from 5000 to 200, and it was issued that no new apps would be accepted, and existing ones reviewed. Constine, John, (Apr 2 2018) “Instagram suddenly chokes off developers as Facebook chases privacy”, TechCrunch Retrieved from: https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/02/instagram-api-limit/ 24 Rieder, Bernard, “TumblrTool” Github. Retrieved from: https://github.com/bernorieder/TumblrTool

30 interactive medium graphs. In both cases, the data was visualised using the ForceAtlas 2 force-vector algorithm, with a scaling of 40.0, gravity of 0.5 and Prevent Overlap. Node size was set to proportional to Degree. This allows clustering to form and significant occurrence of co-hashtag use to be noted on. Modularity complements cluster capture by highlighting subdivisions within a network, called communities (Grandjean, 2015). Modularity does this by comparing the density of edges within a group to the rest of the graph, and, once run, allows node colour to be organised according to modularity class (Newman, 2006). The overall network could then be visualised in terms of community and captured through screenshot. Zooming into significant communities, labels were added in order to analyse what issues were being co-tagged with anti-capitalism, and clusters were classified.

For Instagram’s results, the strong attraction between nodes creates a densely connected core of the graph. This significant contribution to “popular” hashtags” in order to gain visibility reveals significant strategic tagging at work on the platform. Tagging strategies and network building tactics utilised by users reduced the amount of distinct clustering. Certain clusters did reveal certain issue- bound communities, such as a zero-waste cluster, but the most interesting methodology to adopt in this case is to investigate which communities were using strategic tagging to strike up a following, which could only be done through manually delving into the platform dynamics (See 3.3.2.c. Manual click-through).

Research has shown that the suffix “-blr” is a popular portmanteaun showing community identification on Tumblr, as seen in the case of shoplifting community “liftblr” (Encinas, 2018). Therefore, traces of this portmanteau were looked for within the Gephi visualisation to determine if these were recurrent. “Freeblr” and “Leftblr” were significant nodes and browsing the hashtags on the platform allowed the research to confirm that these are used as communitarian signifiers for identification and network building on the platform around issues of left-wing politics. Therefore, the preceding steps of querying and visualising were repeated based on these results for the Tumblr dataset.

c. Manual click-through: Instagram

Co-tag analysis showed that significant communities are mobilising themselves on Instagram through the use of strategic tagging using co-hashtags. Upon manual analysis, one can also see following lists and user shout-outs being employed. Citarella’s investigation into the post-left community on Instagram demonstrates two ways of employing a manual methodology to find these communities:

a shout-out from a more popular account can be a powerful endorsement. Otherwise, sifting through the comment threads is usually the best way to uncover the core accounts and OC tastemakers within the community (2018: 7).

Methods for finding communities are then in-built into the networks users themselves form, creating digitally native methods for ethnographic research into community construction. Screenshots of popular and relevant accounts were taken through this method. During this step, features such as proportion of meme content, meme style, ideologies represented, and relationship

31 to other users in the same network were used to assess the belonging of a particular account to the “post-left” subcultures. Self-referential memes about the community itself also offered a window into the behaviours of these users. Then, traits of discursive deliberation according to Freelon’s three models were observed, especially liberal-individualist traits such as monologue and personal revelation, traits facilitated by the platform and its affordances. To determine the level of group identification, communitarian traits were also looked out for.

d. Imagespector: Tumblr

Tumblr’s affordances do not allow for the same dynamics of network-building as seen on Instagram. Therefore, manual click-through cannot guarantee the unearthing of any community or significant networks. However, visual content is the platform’s most compelling feature, and bears the most weight in this analysis of meme cultures. Therefore, patterns within communities were identified visually by looking at the products of these platform subcultures. Images from posts tagged with the relevant hashtags were downloaded from the Tumblr tool’s HTML output through the web extension “DownloadThemAll”. Then, the resulting photos were studied through Imagesorter, an image sorting tool.25 Imagesorter allows for the browsing of a high number of images and categorises them by a chosen parameter. Sorting by colour renders patterns visible, such as a high density of text images (tweets etc), a particular trend (green images in the solarpunk tag) or a particular meme aesthetic (neon-coloured in the laborwave trend, red and black anarchist memes). This allowed relevant meme grammars to be captured by screenshot.

3.4. Limitations

This project is limited by my operationalisation of the term anti-capitalism. While an in-depth study of the history and ecology of internet leftism is something to be critically approached as soon as possible, I chose to focus on iterations that would serve my research object and illustrates unique and significant grammars enabled and enhanced by vernacular affordances. Then, ethnographic and therefore qualitative means provide a more subjective and personal approach to studying this set of findings. Obvious limitations come with the subjective study of data, such as a researcher’s own prejudices and preferences, along with, in the case of politically-interested projects such as these, political affiliation and leanings. Furthermore, conducting these forms of research on applications like Instagram interacted with my personalised recommendation algorithm and thus could potentially have influenced my work by cementing echo chambers.

When operationalising my research object through hashtags, the limitations associated are the same as many objects online regarding intent. Highfield and Leaver’s methodology for analysing Instagram hashtags reiterates: “presuming that using a tag is an indication that the user intended this tweet, or photo, to be grouped together meaningfully with other tweets or photos using that tag – cannot be taken as a given.” (2015: 7) Intentionality is marred by satire, irony and idiosyncratic behaviours characteristic of online, so must be treated with the same ambiguity as statements, and not as fact. However, while this is especially true of Tumblr’s platform culture, important strategic tagging

25 “Imagesorter” Tucows Download. Retrieved from: http://www.tucows.com/preview/510399/ImageSorter

32 behaviours on Instagram show us that it goes against community building practices to use hashtags in this duplicitous way, and therefore practices diverge surrounding this object depending on platform culture. As always, this is why a reflection on platform subcultures must accompany a data- driven analysis.

This approach uses large-scale scraping through APIS of entire platforms or forums (Reddit) or a large quantity of posts (1000-2000 on Tumblr) and visualises the resulting structured databases through different open source data and graph visualisation softwares. The study of large-scale datasets is popular and enabled by the “big data” trend, but its limitations are noted by researchers. It is crucial to remain critical about large amounts of data; in “Critical Questions for Big Data”, Internet and data scholars danah boyd and Alice Marwick warn us of the dangers of apophenia: “seeing patterns where none actually exist” (boyd & Crawford, 2012). API research especially is a treacherous terrain when using black box algorithms that we can only speculate on, such as is the case with the Instaloader’s use of Instagram’s web API.

Furthermore, a crucial issue to be acknowledged made critical by big data is that of ethics and anonymity in the age of public platforms (Moreno et al, 2013). Existence in the public eye is encoded into the structure of social networks, but, as divisions between the public and the private seem to crumble before our eyes, an understanding of the consequences and significance of this fact are not always fully realised by users. Doing research can entail privacy violations as content can contain identifiable data, but this is also inherently public information- a dilemma social media researchers have needed to grapple with (boyd & Crawford, 2012). I take these principles into consideration and provide anonymity to the few accounts that I include in my analysis. Furthermore, in terms of participant observation, I follow the tenet that “In this case, the information is not private, and it does not require any interaction with the subject to access it” (Moreno et al, 2013).

4. Findings

Anti-capitalist subcultures on social media take various forms and embody different communicative ideals based on their platforms. Their deliberative norms are co-constructed by platform affordances and structure what kind of communities are able to flourish and prosper. Individual subcultures often accentuate the known demographics of each platform, such as the occurrence of the “” on Reddit, a community known for its harsh and abrasive male-dominated culture, which correlates with previous findings about “toxic technocultures” of the platform (Massanari, 2017). Instagram’s vibrant and proficient meme making communities are radically young and politicised, making for the most abundant area of research, while Tumblr privileges aesthetics and presents the most overlapping political cultures. However, before delving into these mechanics, it is worthwhile untangling the complex web of political ideologies weaved by these subcultures to show that while encounters between subcultures that are animated by an anti-capitalist sentiment should be intra- ideological, the afforded overlapping of different, sometimes insular, ideologies actually constructs contrasting and often clashing subcultures.

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Libertarianism is, seemingly, an ideology that has never ceased to have influence on internet users since the “Californian ideology” of the early days of the net (Barbrook & Cameron, 1994). At the core of a libertarian ideology are the twin principles of liberty and the pursuit of freedom, often correlating with a critique of , believed to be a hindrance to personal autonomy and freedom of choice. However, is a many-branched philosophy, whose definition has diverged as it developed transatlantically. Initially conceived in Europe as a form of , libertarianism as is associated with John Stuart Mill and privileges the right of the individual to pursue freedom and moral autonomy and the obligation of to protect these individual rights. During the American Revolution, the newly fledged nation espoused these beliefs and legislated these values into their constitution, where they remain tremendously influential to the country’s politics today. However, though European liberalism still championed individual rights, through the centuries of adversity created by war and poverty, it changed its position on government intervention and free markets and gradually new liberalism started to advocate the adoption welfare state and . Therefore, through an organic process of divergence, this ideology has come to be often divided into libertarian right and left, a spectrum whose notion is often played with online (See more 4.4. The Political Compass).

Across all three platforms, anarchist ideologies are strongly represented, some embracing capitalism such as Anarcho-Capitalism (AnCap for shot, found on Reddit), 26 or rejecting it, such as Anarcho- Communism (AnCom for short, and most prevalent on Instagram). Perceiving them as oppressive systems, anarchism rejects all hierarchies, including political ideologies and economics, but also artificial divisions or binaries within society, such as borders, states, racism or gender. This sets in place the other axis of the political compass, authoritarian versus libertarian. Anarcho-Capitalism therefore seems a paradoxical ideology, perceiving governments as the oppressive hierarchy but nevertheless embracing capitalism and the market as a regulatory system. Though I do not dwell on this pocket of ideology, it helps us nevertheless understand a libertarian-right position that plays a significant role in the ecology of these subcultures. Due to their commitment to property rights, Ancaps value capitalism as “a highly ethical system of voluntary transactions between mutually consenting parties” (Citarella, 2018: 4). Therefore, it is in their interest to promote voluntarism, or the willing self-organisation of peoples through a free market. On the libertarian left though, Anarcho-Communists believe in the abolition of authority from a fundamentally anti-capitalist position, viewing it as a system of oppression and that only through the removal of both structures can “full communism” be attained.

As I now turn to these platforms, I will focus on what is significant about each platform subculture, though this does not mean that these subcultures exist in a vacuum and are unique to that site. As always, internet cultures and movements exist as hybrids, mere components of a larger web culture, and though platform cultures are conducive to certain ways of articulating and presenting knowledge, no one of them is a discrete space. When I study meme cultures on these platforms, they represent not something unique, only to be found within that space, but something significant that articulates how the affordances of the platform create these ways of knowing. As such,

26 https://www.reddit.com/r/AnarchoCapitalism has tenfold more subscribers than the equivalent Anarcho- Communist subreddit

34 deliberative communication traits are afforded by the materiality of Reddit, but liberal individualist communication is likely to found on Instagram, as per the platforms’ networked individualism culture. Tumblr will potentially embody traits of a more visual subculture and more minoritarian counterpublics. It would however, be most interesting to find evidence of behaviour that goes against literature surrounding the platform subculture. This would indicate a subversion of a platform’s affordances and re-appropriation for alternative use through engagement with vernacular affordances.

4.1. Reddit

Reddit’s platform culture is conducive to two major forms of communication; communitarian and deliberative. Forum-based structures are interest-based and can form based on a pre-existing identification led groups, but Reddit’s environment is testament to “the power of technology to reinforce existing community ties as well as establish new ones”. (Freelon, 6) Here then, communitarian structures of ideological homophily and their communicative processes are also tied to the deliberative and inter-ideological spirit of Reddit. First, I track the biggest occurrences of anti- capitalist forums on Reddit. Then, I outline how both forms of communication can be observed in anti-capitalist interest groups, and how grammars of anti-capitalism contrast when rallying around a particular logic (e.g that of Late Stage Capitalism) or fan following (that of podcast ChapoTrapHouse). Finally, I look at how their meme cultures are thus born out of those dynamics, and present different approaches to meme-ing against capitalism.

A search on Reddit for “anti-capitalism” returns a variety of subreddits with both political and apolitical outlooks. Prominent political-identifying subreddits that appear in the results are /r/Anarchism (128 000 subscribers) or /r/Socialism (189 000 subscribers). Interest communities that are not explicitly anti-capitalist in their stances and outlooks are also returned by this search, such as r/Anarcho-Capitalism. Amongst the relevant anti-capitalist results, /r/ShitLiberalsSay is a satirical subreddit aiming to mock “the worst liberals on Reddit, from around the Internet and from real life”. However, it is a rather small community that is not as important as two others, namely /r/LateStageCapitalism (425 000 subscribers) and /r/ChapoTrapHouse (123 000 subscribers).

Figure 3. Reddit search results for "anti-capitalism".

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In Figure 4, a timeline of two years of the use of the term “anti-capitalism” on Reddit brings historical context to the lifecycle of certain ideologies on Reddit, as well as bringing up discrepancies with Reddit’s own search tool method. /r/ChapoTrapHouse accounts for a significant use of the term “anti-capitalism”, despite its smaller userbase than /r/LateStageCapitalism, and has been expanding since its inception around April 2017. /r/LateStageCapitalism, initially the primary vector of anti- capitalism on Reddit, is dwindling but still a relevant grammar on the site. We see also here a debating subreddit, /r/capitalismVsocialism also absent from Reddit’s returned results. Self- described as “A place to debate or discuss capitalism and socialism”,27 this forum and others like it (debating subreddits) shows that inter-ideological questioning is represented on the platform as a whole as a discrete space. We also see a limited presence of certain results from Reddit’s list, such as /r/PropagandaPosters. Nevertheless, this still confirms the dominance of /r/LateStageCapitalism and /r/ChapoTrapHouse, which I now turn to.

Figure 4. Timeline of occurrence of the term "anti-capitalism" on Reddit.

4.1.1. Aesthetics and Affordances

Out of the subreddits presented with a firmly anti-capitalist stance, /r/LateStageCapitalism is the most popular and describes itself as rooted “in broad-based anti-capitalist thought, with an underlying Marxist tendency that is steeped in intersectionalist Critical Theory”. The subreddit itself is aesthetically and discursively involved in representing anti-capitalism, as seen in Figure 5. Framed by a background that references Guy Debord’s classic postmodernist text, “The Society of the Spectacle”(1967), all posts on /r/LateStageCapitalism (hereafter referred to as LSC) are materially framed by the context of the forum. The community rules are ever present on the right-hand side of

27 “/r/CapitalismVSocialism” Subreddit, Retrieved from: https://www.reddit.com/r/capitalismVsocialism Accessed 20 April 2019

36 the forum, number one of which dictates: “no capitalist apologia/anti-socialism”. Upon posting, an auto-moderator 28 will provide the following introductory guide and pre-cursor to any discussion by “sticky-ing”29 this comment below the post;

LSC is run by and for communists and anarchists. We welcome socialist/anti-capitalist news, memes, links, and discussion. This subreddit is not the place to debate socialism. We allow good-faith questions and education but are not a 10130 sub; please take 101-style questions elsewhere.

Frequently asked links are also included in this pre-amble, including a “socialism crash course” and a “glossary of socialist terms”. Here Reddit’s affordances put into place a framework to ensure intra- ideological reciprocity across the forum, that is, participants will be conversing with ideological similar.

28 These are widely used throughout and managed by moderators for a variety of purposes, e.g to ensure civility of discourse. 29 This ensures that the comment will show up first amongst the comments underneath a post. 30 By this they mean a debating-specific or introductory/FAQ style space.

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Figures 5 & 6. The aesthetics and affordances of r/LateStageCapitalism.

/r/ChapoTrapHouse31 is a subreddit devoted to a popular American political podcast (Chapo Trap House), with over 123 000 subscribers. The Chapo Trap House podcast is described as having a “cult” following, which accounts for its large presence on Reddit, with inside jokes and references that “are so many and so interwoven, each with its own shade of meaning, that they form a shorthand of tensile nuance” (Rhode, 2016). Indeed, the subreddit’s description states abruptly: “ChapoTrapHouse is a podcast”. In other words, one must already be in the know to participate, and it is unlikely that Redditors will happen on the forum and understand the group culture and references already at work. For example, one of its auto-moderators is a sarcastic bot that is

31 “r/ChapoTrapHouse”, Subreddit. Retrieved from: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChapoTrapHouse/ Accessed May 5 2019

38 activated when a user’s comment contains “/s”. This will trigger an automated reaction from a bot designed to comment the following:

WATCH OUT EVERYONE THIS USER IS USING A /s, WHICH MEANS THEY MAY BE BEING SARCASTIC ON /r/CTH, PLEASE TREAT THIS DUMBFUCK'S SARCASM WITH AN APPROPRIATE RESPONSE 32

Therefore, a strong communitarian spirit, one that “uphold the cultivation of social cohesion” (Freelon, 9) is evident already within the fandom, where sarcasm itself is an inside joke treated with irony. Its community rules are simple, and emphasise civility and respect of other subreddits, as well as prohibit brigading through promoting the use of the “non-participation” subdomains when linking to threads from outside of the subreddit, meaning that flaming is a frowned-upon behaviour in this space. While there is no use of FAQs or community rules and description to ensure intra-ideological questioning, social cohesion and group hegemony is nevertheless enhanced by the affordances of Reddit such as meritocratic upvoting, which ensures that views that resonate with other Redditors are the most visible, and flairs 33 which frequently refer to an inside joke of the podcast.

Figure 7. The homepage of /r/ChapoTrapHouse incorporates aesthetics from its inside jokes.

4.1.2. Referrals and Intra-ideological Questioning

Figure 8 charts which subreddits are referred to by posts and comments on /r/LSC, (right) and which subreddits mention and refer to /r/LSC (left). Referrals to other subreddits here are an affordance used by Redditors to engage in debate and help to contextualise a subreddit’s interactions with the wider Reddit community. This shows that, beyond engaging in intra-ideological reciprocity in their

32 /u/blyqyuu, “r/ChapoTrapHouse”, Subreddit. Retrieved from: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChapoTrapHouse/comments/blqyuu/_/ 33 Flairs are labels that Redditors can attach to their usernames on subreddits. Some flairs on the forum include “All chaps are by definition assless” and “Cucked by alpha male lobsters apexing the dominance hierarchy”.

39 own forum, /r/LSC is interested in orienting users to other ideologically similar subreddits, such as /r/socialism and /r/communism101. It also shows a didactic approach to intra-ideological questioning by referring to /r/debatecommunism, a less popular subreddit with about roughly half the members of /r/capitalismVsocialism. /r/debatecommunism describes itself as “An active community for challenging, debating, and discussing communism and socialism with originality and flair”.34 /r/LSC therefore shows communitarian traits, by extending deliberation to other ideologically similar spaces, but its referrals lack an inter-ideological character, shying away from a deliberative outlook.

Figure 8. Intra-ideological reciprocity in the /r/LateStageCapitalism referrals.

Though referrals to ideologically contrasting subreddits are present, these types of referrals could be misleading or ironic in nature, as /r/The_Donald is referred to by users LSC as a “hate subreddit” and calls for bans make up the majority of the referrals. Contrariwise, referrals to LSC from forums such as /r/cringeanarchy or /r/libertarian as also often ironic in nature, as seen in Figure 9, with an intention to delegitimise or mock the opinions of users on LSC. Thus, evidence of flaming is caught up within these referrals.35 Flaming, evidence of hostile inter-ideological behaviour, refers to the harassment of supporters of another political ideology and flaming from LSC users towards

34 “/r/DebateCommunism” Subreddit. Retrieved from: https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateCommunism/ Accessed 20 April 2019 35 Freelon adds that “posters engage in flaming to derive personal satisfaction by harassing political opponents, releasing the tension associated with suppressing their unpopular opinions in offline life, or simply antagonizing others for its own sake”. (Freelon, 2010 p.9)

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/r/The_Donald takes the form of “shitposting”36 or downvoting content.

Figure 9./ r/LateStageCapitalism’s antagonistic referrals to /r/The_Donald taking the form of “shitposting”.

The referrals to and from /r/ChapoTrapHouse show a very different approach than /r/LateSageCapitalism. Limited evidence of intra-ideological questioning is seen, and more inter- ideological exchanges are seen. This could be due to the podcast’s abrasive and contrarian nature, where its fans have internalised a more deliberative approach to their politics and defending their opinions, though flaming or antagonistic behaviour is discouraged. We see in Figure 10 that this forum exists in a very different Reddit ecosystem than /r/LSC, which could be attributed to its fandom vernacular. Instead of taking a didactic approach, referrals on /r/Chapo are about mocking and antagonising the mentioned subreddit, though without flaming techniques as seen on /r/LSC. By criticising users on popular subreddits like /r/politics or /r/neoliberal, /r/ChapoTrapHouse explicitly positions itself against the mainstream through its ideological homophily.

36 Shitposting is the process of deliberating producing “bad”, “messy” or purposefully “cringe” content. In meme cultures, it is highly praised as it engages with irony and play. It is a joke in itself to be rejecting the norms of “good” content production, and one that introduces new ideas into the mainstream through the subterfuge of humour. However, in this case, shitposting is used as aggression on /r/The_Donald. The kind of shitposting these Redditors are conducting on their rival subreddit is no doubt meant to destabilise or confuse the politics of this subreddit, seaming discord.

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Figure 10. Inter-ideological /r/ChapoTrapHouse referrals.

Figure 11. Derogatory /r/Chapo referrals to /r/neoliberal.

4.1.3. Memes and Practices

In terms on content, an ethnographic analysis of /r/LateStageCapitalism’s top posts reveals the dominant traits of the subreddit. A definite anglo/US- dominates the forum, and the same

42 issues echo widely. Issues brought up on the forum are broad anti-capitalist ideas, mostly attacking class and wealth inequality, the need for universal healthcare and global warming as a product of corporate greed. Popular posts are very often screenshotted tweets, meaning that the forum is an echo chamber for twitter. Images captured and shared on the forum often try to articulate the hypocrisy or contradictions of late stage capitalism.

Figure 12. Popular images about hypocrisy on /r/LateStageCapitalism.

The same issues reoccur in the memes of /r/LSC. LateStageCapitalism’s memes have a broad and wide-ranging appeal, in that their formats and issues are simple enough to be understood by anyone despite of their private political beliefs. The problems they tackle are criticised, but not necessarily deconstructed by this grammar. They enact a straight forward comedic format, less influenced by subcultural aesthetics such as vapourwave (See 4.3.5 Laborwave) or absurdism. The aim of /r/LSC’s memes is not to subvert through irony (beyond defining meme dynamics) but point out what they see as valid criticisms of capitalism.

Figure 13. /r/LSC memes about healthcare and global warming.

The politics on /r/ChapoTrapHouse are both more ideologically cohesive due to the devotion of the forum to a particular podcast, which offers them a political ideal to subscribe to, and somewhat

43 divided. A strongly anti-establishmentarian and libertarian left attitude towards both sides of the aisle in terms of American politics dominates. However, not all Chapo fans subscribe to the same political ideals despite having a common value system, and frequent debates unfurl in the comment sections of posts on /r/Chapo, showing intra-ideological questioning.

The forum has a similar twitter echo chamber role as /r/LateStageCapitalism, but more coded language and memes are used, and a few targets are repeatedly criticised, showing more consistency and fandom-driven communitarian identification. A content analysis of /r/ChapoTrapHouse reveals an intense US centrism due to the US politics focus of the podcast, but also a willingness to engage with international issues through the lens of anti-imperialism. The Israel- Palestine conflict is a frequently reoccurring issue on the forum, with a fervent support of Palestine. Anti-military sentiment is prevalent, related to anti-police sentiment, 37 and cause for contention with more right-wing communities on Reddit, as seen Figure 14. To understand and participate in their memes, one must be on their side of the issue.

Figure 14. Anti-imperialist /r/ChapoTrapHouse memes: On the left, mocking /r/The_Donald.

A playful relationship to posting is enacted on /r/Chapo. Community identification can be seen in community language used, such as “we” or “us”, but memes remain their strongest signifier of cohesive belonging. Memes on /r/Chapo deal both with the issues outlines above, but also the self- awareness of the space, including the educating of others in their network. Emphasis is placed on the reading of Marxist theory and the educating of oneself (Figure 15). This offers an insight into issues of “authenticity”, namely being concerned with not qualifying as educated enough Marxists, that members of this fandom are plagued with. This also shows that a didactic approach to politics is present on the forum but not only reserved for those already within a related ideological sphere, which leads us to questioning the insularity of forums such as these, as well as articulated in their characteristically ironic vernacular. Ultimately, this re-direction of users towards external sources of knowledge (theory, literature) shows a desire for autonomy, and a criticism of social networks as a digital public sphere, which I will later come to.

37 ACAB, “all cops are bastards” is shorthand for this sentiment.

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Figure 15. /r/ChapoTrapHouse “read the theory” memes.

4.2. Instagram

Instagram political content is most emergent and most fragmented, thereby exhibiting the most individual meme grammars. In this, we see the liberal individualism intrinsic to the architecture of the platform. While distinctively embodying a communicative libertarianism, the Instagram users behind the post-left accounts consciously dodge a libertarian outlook and subvert and re- appropriate affordances by establishing “brotherhoods” and communities to prevent themselves from establishing hierarchies. Nevertheless, traces of Instagram’s platform culture bleed through, giving birth to a tension between ideology and the way it is communicated online. In this section, I outline the platform-surface level of searching for anti-capitalism, then dig further into my findings through co-occurring hashtags, eventually making use of a manual methodology to get familiar with the dynamics of these meme pages. In this insular and fragmented community, the meme culture is then especially diverse and compelling to turn to.

4.2.1. Top vs. Recent

Searching a term on Instagram offers a few possibilities to the user, of which the most popular is to sort by hashtag to find relevant posts. Considering the two options offered in terms of opting for a dashboard model to display this content, “top” or “recent”, gives us already significant insight into hashtag usage and platform culture. As seen in Figure 16, the “top” sorting algorithm gives an image of popular and like-worthy anti-capitalist sentiment on the platform; street protests and catchphrases concerning immigration issues and inequality. There is less meme content in this result page, and more text, either in the form of tweets or slogans. Here, the dominant, mainstream grammar seems to revolve around a few core issues (labour, immigration) and fits into Instagram’s platform grammar and aesthetics, while the “recent” view undermines this. The “recent” feed offers more niche memes and underground pages with fewer likes and more narrow issues being represented, attesting to the fragmented nature of the hashtag. This provides insight into how many people are strategically using the hashtag “#anticapitalism” for exposure, and which issues are more susceptible of making it to the “top” algorithm page rather than staying on the “recent”. Furthermore, since “top” is the default sorting option, a filter bubble can be seen being created by this affordance.

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Figure 16. "#anticapitalism" search on Instagram. On the right, the “recent” posts vs. on the left, the “top” sorting algorithm.

Strategic tagging is the practice of building on a popular hashtag to get traction for one’s post, as browsing a frequently used hashtag will procure more exposure for one’s content. Within this strategy, other dynamics are at play that are also designed to engineer more traffic. In Figure 17 can be seen an example of a “top” sorted post showing 3 discernible characteristics; a short, catchy caption, a break engineered to hide content under a “read more” option Instagram automatically allocates to long captions, then, a secondary, perhaps bolder caption and finally a list of hashtags ranging a wide variety of political issues. This format is designed to be not only likeable but easy to consume, with only a small as its visible caption, demanding no further thought, and hiding its hashtags beneath a read more so as not to make its strategic use of hashtags too prominent. This is a vernacular use of platform affordances; as users have come to grow alongside the platform, they have come to understand its affordances and use them for their purposes.

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Figure 17. The format of a "top" post.

In Figure 18, the two images show a similar dynamic in a more specialised meme page from the “recent” feed. The short caption includes a credit to the original poster (OP) of the meme, where in a system that works through hashtags and shout-outs, credit must always be paid where it is due. Then, the disguised break is referentially made with a hammer and sickle icon and hides a list of the page’s “brotherhood” or “network”. Here, dozens of accounts are tagged in the post in order to gain visibility and expand their following. Joining the list is straightforward, as the poster adds “DM if you would like to be added”. Then, hashtags are used ranging from specific ideologies like #ancom (anarcho-communism) to broad terms #capitalism, #politics or campaign slogans such as #bernie2020. The format here is undoubtedly still Instagram’s grammar, but with subcultural twists and re-appropriated for network-building purposes.

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Figure 18. Network building in meme pages found in “recent” through affordances.

4.2.2. Clusters and Tagging

Therefore, a co-tag analysis will add further depth to this phenomenon of strategic tagging. A co-tag analysis graphs the co-occurrence of hashtags used with the queried hashtag, in my case, “#anticapitalism”. This shows in Figure 19 bifold results in the Instagram dataset. First, it shows a highly connected core (Figure 20) of tags co-occuring with #anticapitalism, used in strategic tagging as seen above. Some of these tags are socialism, anarchism, communism and Marxism. Secondly, it also shows clustering, of which relevant ones are labelled, but I focus here on the dynamics of the community at the heart of the former.

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Figure 19 . Clusters present in #anticapitalism co-tags on Instagram

Figure 20. The core issues being strategically tagged on Instagram.

4.2.3. Post-Left Meme Pages

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The strongly connected core of the graph and the importance of other hashtags such as antifascism and anarchism shows that there is no significant hashtag uniting the anti-capitalist community on Instagram, but a few issues that fragmented ideologies make use of. Within this ecosystem, the many pages exhibiting similar traits and posting grammar prove the heterogeneity of the subculture. Coined as the “post-left” communities by Joshua Citarella (2018), these pages incorporate communitarian identification dynamics with personal idiosyncrasies to create surprisingly deliberative communities on an otherwise asocial platform. The dynamics in these communities are vibrant and differ radically from Reddit, emphasising subversive humour and a mastery of the subject through political inside jokes.

Networked individualism defines how a user’s behaviour on social media sites reaffirms not only their agency, but their place in a society: “as social actors leverage networked affordances through interaction, we simultaneously reassert the importance of individualism…while also staking our place amongst the network of ties that exist amidst today’s digital-analog dialectic” (Elwell, 2014). Use of Instagram’s affordances in this way is “invited by the architecture of the platform and partially enabled through the expressive and connective tendencies of the...networked self” (Papacharissi, 2012: 1). The networked individualism model therefore correlates with traits Freelon sees as exhibiting liberal individualist behaviour: “personal expression and the pursuit of self- interest” which can be broken down into the following features; “monologue, personal revelation, personal showcase and flaming” (2010: 7). It is significant to note that, though few participate in this subculture through the use of their real names, preferring communitarian-inspired usernames that further elevate their ,38 a high level of individualism perpetuates the networked individualist structuring of their online communication.

Monologuing and personal showcase are characteristic features of Instagram that are enhanced and enabled by the platform’s affordances. In Figure 21, a user’s defence of his actions is enacted through monologue, emphasising his rights and dominion over the page; “This is my page and it will be run as I see fit”. On the right, another user’s page is set up much like a private Instagram, not only stating their intent and personal nature of the page in their description, but also categorising themselves as a “politician”. In the pinned stories, question and answer sessions they have organised for themselves as well as a “face reveal” reflect behaviours re-appropriated from influencer culture.

38 Nissembaum and Shifman use cultural capital as “the command of cultural knowledge as a means to achieve a privileged position within a social field” to help us understand the concept of memes on 4chan’s /b/ board. (2015, 484)

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Figure 21. Monologues and personal revelations

However, these traits of liberal individualist expression co-exist with a radical pedagogy that disavows Wilhelm’s findings that online forum users’ contributions generally lacked “the listening, responsiveness, and dialogue that would promote communicative actions” (1999: 98). Inter- ideological questioning is both a source of growth and debate but also frustration in this network. As seen in Figure 21, trolls or “right-wingers who haven’t taken the time to learn the basics” are not always welcome, evidencing a lack of openness to inter-ideological questioning. However, due to the fragmented ideologies and individualistic nature of the pages in this network, evidence of the contrasting modes of communication can also easily be found. Figure 22 shows a user’s willingness to educate another user and to move towards conflict resolution through light-hearted and sympathetic messaging. Ignorant comments are can often be found dealt with in this way, with an urge to take it into “dms” (direct messaging), where conversation is easier than through comments.

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Figure 22. Dialogue and pedagogy on Instagram

Efforts to educate followers are not only restricted to inter-ideological deliberation in the comments, but intra-ideologically in posts. Figure 22 shows a user page posting excerpts from Marxist theory for the benefit of their followers, some, “mutual aid”, citing “we are stronger together”. These users can be seen to embody the responsibility of their page and take on a leader-figure, where the burden to teach and educate could easily lead to perfectionism. There is less autonomy and outright rejection of the digital public sphere than as seen in Reddit’s /r/ChapoTrapHouse community. What is surprising and compelling about this community is that they constantly strive to learn more and from each other, and perfect their knowledge of history and theory, a movement that can also be seen in the memes they produce.

4.2.4. Memes and Practices

A shared frame of reference beyond a common affinity for anti-capitalism is assumed by these users when making and disseminating their memes, especially in smaller and more specialised meme pages. There are therefore intellectual thresholds to certain memes, echoing /r/Chapo’s “read the theory” spirit. Certain memes hinge on extreme ideas and ideologies such as anti-civilisation or, at its radical opposite, , or a rather advanced understanding of critical theorists such as Deleuze and Guattari or Max Stirner. In this way, nichification is anti-collectivist, reflecting the lack of cohesive label or hashtag uniting the entire network. Of the ideologies at the zeitgeist of the post- left community, many respond to the current climate crisis, and emphasise radical based on the social ecology ideas of Murray Bookchin. Concepts like anarcho-primitivism are the anti-civilisation end of the spectrum, advocating a return to a world before agriculture and the breakdown of contemporary agrarian society into self-sufficient tribes. These ideologies look forward to the "industrial collapse” and seek to accelerate it, while others, believers in transhumanism for example, are certain the future will bring humanity to transcend its physical form

52 through technology and science. Ultimately, there are manifold combinations that these ideologies can take, and all of them are played with through the format of memes.

Figure 23. Social ecology and anarcho-primitivist memes

Though Citarella purports that:

It seems that the end trajectory for every type of online radical is ultimately “the black pill”. The network itself works to individuate and isolate everyone; each user is an island. All roads eventually lead to nihilism (2018: 38), in this case, fragmentation of ideologies has led to more individualistic behaviour, but I argue that memes serve as an overarching communitarian structure in which to articulate desires. We see this self-awareness in certain bigger pages’ memes referring to their own communities’ dynamics, their humour hinging on a shared experience more than frame of reference and demonstrate a desire to overcome the insularity of their community. It can be argued that meme-making practices unite these pages in their outlooks and dispositions.

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Figure 24. A popular meme page's memes referring to the communist meme page network. 4.3. Tumblr

Tumblr’s platform architecture is conducive to belonging and fandom identity. Reblogging and its influence on social cohesion has heavily influenced the subcultures that have developed on the site, and the micro-communities they have created have found on Tumblr a place to prosper and foster a sense of group identity. We continue to see this in terms of anti-capitalist grammars on the platform, which rally themselves under one or both of the signifiers “leftblr” or “freeblr”, portmanteaus that refer to the wider Tumblr community involved in using this hashtag.

However, this model of community is less communitarian than seen on Reddit. Reblogging allows for the re-iteration of a particular image or text, enabling the elaboration of community language or imagery, but not necessarily reciprocity or questioning as horizontal communication is notoriously difficult on the platform. Therefore, the type of fostering that is susceptible to being popular on the

54 platform is mainly visual, as images are easily reblogged without second thought, while text posts are less frequently debated on and spread. We see this in the manifestation not only of certain meme grammars, namely vapourwave, but also aesthetic styles related to political ideologies, such as solarpunk.

Figure 25. Searching for "anti-capitalism" on Tumblr, of which the first result offers a solarpunk blog.

When encountering Tumblr’s interface, searching occurs not by hashtag but by term. Results are then presented in different forms, including suggested related tags, blogs and posts, which can be viewed according to most popular or most recent, and then by post type. Suggested tags here are testament to the strategic tagging practices seen on Instagram; once a hashtag is sufficiently associated with another, Instagram’s recommendation algorithm will suggest it to another user who is searching a related term. Indeed, when conducting analysis of the co-tags of “anti-capitalism”, significant co-occurring hashtags are co-tags of communism, socialism or Marxism are seen on Instagram (Figure 19). However, Tumblr’s dynamics display significantly less clustering (See Appendix 5). This shows us that anti-capitalism is not defined according to a specific direction or ideology, but rather can be tagged on to many issues at will, showing that posting is the work of individual users and not communities.

This method of analysis leads us to the identification of two prominent nodes which represent the dominant vector of anti-capitalism on Tumblr that the hashtag “#anticapitalism” does not, namely “leftblr” and “freeblr”, which I will later turn to. While there is no strategic tagging is at work in the anticapitalism hashtag, we do see the emergence of topics like ecosocialism and wealth inequality as nodes from which other topics branch off, allowing us to find a genre of visual grammar that is closely related to ecosocialism39 and that presents a very cohesive aesthetic, solarpunk.

39 Based on community structure of the network.

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Figure 26. Solarpunk's presence in #anticapitalism co-tag graph

4.3.1. Solarpunk

Solarpunk is a genre of speculative fiction, a subset of science fiction that emphasise optimism towards the future and the potential to create community through technology, renewable energies and a communion with nature. It is a futuristic aesthetic that embodies radical systemic social change, where our relation to the earth would be renewed through a global infrastructural shift.40 It is a positive vision of the future based on our technology of today, including solar power and organic architecture and design, seemingly related to but distinct from the post-left’s faith transhumanism, which aims to get beyond the physical constraints of the body.

Tumblr’s definition of solarpunk seems to have steered towards self-sufficiency and overlapped with another movement referred to as “cottagecore”, “homesteading” or “farmcore.” There is a strong aesthetic appreciation for the movement, and less satire or subversion that is characteristic of Instagram’s post-left meme pages, or the meme culture in other communities on Tumblr. The solarpunk movement takes itself seriously and hopes to one day achieve its goals of powering society through renewable energies and living in symbiosis with nature.

40 For more information on this: Flynn, Adam (September 14, 2014) “Solarpunk: Notes toward a manifesto” Hieroglyph. Retrieved from: https://hieroglyph.asu.edu/2014/09/solarpunk-notes-toward-a-manifesto/

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Figure 27. A return to nature and futuristic architecture from "#solarpunk" on Tumblr.

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4.3.2. Leftblr and Freeblr

While not “#anticapitalism”, certain identifying hashtags do exist for those involved in leftist politics on Tumblr, including “lefbtlr” and “freeblr”. The “leftblr” signifier generously encompasses all left- leaning ideologies on Instagram, but with less clustering, meaning more fragmentation, and few commonalities (Appendix 5). In it, the communities of anarcho-communism and social justice are the most prevalent, showing the most overlap with Instagram’s results and correlating with Tumblr’s reputation for having a radically leftist and identity politics-motivated culture.

Figure 28. Freeblr network in "leftblr" co-tag graph.

However, I take “freeblr” as a jumping off point for further analysis, due to its connection to the core issues of communism, anarchism and socialism (Figure 28). Scrolling through the freeblr hashtag on Tumblr confirms that this is the platform’s most thriving anti-capitalist signifier, with a vibrant meme culture speaking to a variety of issues.

.

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“Freeblr” exists for two major political axes on Tumblr; the anarchists of the platform as well as the libertarians, two ideologies that, though with common ground, clash here. In Figure 29, the co-tag graph for the hashtag “freeblr” shows major clusters as well as relevant bridge nodes annotated with arrows. We see distinct clustering around related, but distanced issues. On the right, the center for stateless society journal is an avid poster making use of strategic tagging to publicise its publications. On the left and bottom however we see organic nodes clustering separately around the issues of anarchism and libertarianism, both using #freeblr as their rallying hashtag.

Agorism is a libertarian philosophy that advocates counter-establishment economics, proposed by libertarian philosopher Samuel Edward Konkin III during the latter half of the 20th century. It promotes voluntary exchanges between people through market anarchism, or without the authority of the state. In this way, its position seems to be similar to that of Anarcho-Capitalism, which is perceived as being “right-libertarian” while agorism has been portrayed as a left-wing ideology.41 In this network, it bridges libertarian positions (in purple) and the communist core (in orange). While communism does have a strong relation to the anarchist cluster (in blue) there is a less significant presence of the Anarchist-Communism philosophy than the “leftblr” graph. This shows less leftist extremism in the “freeblr” network, and more mitigated and sometimes contrasting viewpoints, with no strong core attained through strategic tagging.

Figure 29. "Freeblr" co-tag graph

41 For more information on this, Broze, Derrick, (September 13 2016) “Agorism is Not Anarcho-Capitalism, Center For Stateless Society. Retrieved from: https://c4ss.org/content/46153

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4.3.3. Libertarians and Communists

There is a tension between libertarian ideologues and anarchist or communist users using the same hashtag to indicate their politics, and we sometimes see clashing ideas. The imagery of the Gadsden flag, a yellow flag featuring a rattlesnake and the phrase “don’t tread on me” harks back to the American revolution but has over the last decade accrued significant meme presence. The flag was originally a symbol of the US pro-revolution, anti-British sentiment, but was adopted by the America Tea Party in 2009, coming to stand for the libertarian right (Mare). As much a meme as an earnest symbol of libertarianism, it is a popular ironically reappropriated imagery within the post-left Instagram network (Citarella, 2018). In Figure 30, variations on this meme, and other anti- communist meme contrast others found in the same tag attacking a libertarian logic. Found in the “freeblr” hashtag, this indicates the lack of cohesive ideology within Tumblr users of this signifier. Due to the lack of horizontal communication affordances on the platform, this shows, rather than inter-ideological reciprocity or questioning, inter-ideological antagonism is produced through meme warfare. This enacts therefore a more liberal individualist flaming than as seen on Reddit.

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Figure 30. Contradictory memes found in the same hashtag. Top 2 rows: anti-communist/libertarian memes Bottom 2 rows: Anti-libertarian/communist memes

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4.3.4. Meme Grammars

Freeblr memes can be antagonistic, as seen above, but lack a communitarian or subversive approach. They have broader appeal than /r/ChapoTrapHouse memes when they play with the tenets of capitalism (Figure 31), and the idiosyncratic memes of Instagram’s post-left users, but are more radical than /r/LateStageCapitalism. Their critiques can sometimes be more pointed and have more to do with social justice and wealth inequality, but also with imperialism as seen in /r/Chapo content. More calls for “class warfare” are issued in freeblr memes than in other logics, with perhaps a romanticising of ideals. However, a distinct humour and subcultural spirit occupies these memes. As always with memes, it is unclear whether their authors believe in the things they are putting on the page.

Figure 31. An example of Freeblr memes.

Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism is a prominent meme that blends the platform’s jokey queer culture and its love of hyper-aesthetics. It is not unique to Tumblr, but recurs frequently in its discourse, sometimes abbreviated to “falc”. FALC is originally a meme that takes its origin from the works of philosopher Aaron Bastani “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” referring to a post- scarcity society that could allow, through full automation, luxury to all its peoples (Noys, 2013). 42 It is unclear when the terms “gay” and “space” were tagged on by internet users, but the term started gathering energy around 2017, and has remained a subcultural joke since then amongst leftist movement online. Tumblr’s platform subculture has proven especially fecund for this meme to remain part of the lexicon, as FALC engages both in the concept of radical liberation and queer

42 It is essentially an accelerationist movement, that believes that capitalism can be overcome through a full investment into the terminal velocity of capital itself, and that its forward-moving force can lead us to overcome capitalism itself by producing a technologically automated society and getting rid of the need to work. (Noys, 2013)

62 identity, but is also a highly stylised meme that takes its influence from the vapourwave aesthetic favoured by users of the platform.

Figure 32. Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, influenced by vaporwave.

4.3.5. Laborwave

A popular genre on Tumblr is vapourwave in its leftist iteration, laborwave. Vaporwave is a music and art movement indebted to a variety of visual forms and contingent with the role of the internet in democratising art, resources and culture. Artist Gene McHugh thus coined the “term post- internet” to draw together theses online practices, referring to:

the Internet as a platform for a cultural economy where information is available to be mined and reused in ways that recontextualise (or decontextualize) its original meaning, creating a form of digital DIY (Trainer, 2016: 413).

Vaporwave aesthetics are easily recognisable: neon, floating in ambient landscapes and playing with recurring imagery such as Japanese characters, palm trees, statue heads or 1990s- era desktop PCs. Specifically, vaporwave imbues visuals and sonorities with affects, “concerned with representing the early 1990s and focused on a particular aesthetic married to a passé utopianism rooted in the detritus of global capitalism” (Trainer, 419). Therefore, vaporwave has a particular political significance infused with a postmodernist critique of late capitalism. It is a movement that is “inherently post-ironic in nature”, playing and recycling corporate culture and (Trainer, 420).

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In laborwave, the same principles are applied to communist imagery, citations or figures. The musical genre blends the audio trademarks of vaporwave sound with speeches from communist leaders of the last century. 43 The popularity and reproduction of this style on Tumblr thus speaks to an aesthetic-based communication mode were community images function as vernacular, rather than a vernacular or deliberative approach.

Figure 33. Laborwave on Tumblr

4.4. The Political Compass

Vernacular affordances help us understand the processes of sense-making that emerge from a user’s relationality to a platform’s affordances, and how modes of communication and meaning making can evolve when perspectives shift on a media’s materiality. Throughout different subcultures and different platforms, anti-capitalism takes on different meanings and negotiate a tension between performing a critique of capitalism online and the role of the platform as a digital public sphere. Efforts to distance themselves from the platform subcultures that have been encoded into users through technological materiality are palpable, but unstable. Instagram’s post-left community holds in tension the desire for anonymity and collectivist meme-making practices but retains liberal individualist traits in phenomena such as “face reveals” and question and answer sessions. Reddit forums are engaged in constant battle against one another, trolling their political opponents and trying to ensure intra-ideological reciprocity on their own pages, eventually promoting autonomy rather than deliberation. Tumblr users deal in aesthetics and ideas, preferring the stylised and conceptual over community identity, but clash. Memes help us understand all this.

43A communist artists’ cooperation website for the movement describes itself as “an inter-sectional art style reconciling nostalgia for a Soviet past with a nostalgia for the visual motifs of the 80s, 90s and early 2000s”: Laborwave Politburo of Agitation and Propaganda, “Laborwave”. Retrieved from: https://www.laborwave.org/

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In summation, an analysis of the three platform meme cultures can be done using a simple and popular meme: the political compass. The political compass is a graphic representation of two ideologic axes: libertarian and authoritarians vs. left and right, which indicates to the user the political position they most identify with after taking a simple test.44 It is treated both seriously and as a resource for infinite meme-ing in these communities. On Instagram, users refer to it to track their ideological progression and to show their followers in full transparency their political beliefs. However, it also presents the opportunity to mock political opponents and make clever jokes.

Figure 34. Use of the politigram meme for political identification and for meme-ing on Instagram.

Figures 35 to 38 show the different subcultures found on Reddit, Instagram and Tumblr through their use of the political compass. /r/Chapo’s is self-explanatory: political viewpoints are influenced by education or ideologies, and it is up to us to take responsibility for this. The Instagram’s post-left political compass demonstrates its young audience’s use of vernacular, and staunchly anti- reactionary right positions (the “redpilled”). The solarpunk community situates its movement within a broader context. Freeblr’s is a playful interpretation of the meme, with not much at stake but humour. In all of these instances, a libertarian (or authoritarian) left position is framed as the favourable ideology to hold, but each reflects the way these subcultures produce and interact with knowledge through memes.

44 The Political Compass, “Test”. Retrieved from: https://www.politicalcompass.org/test

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Figure 35. A /r/ChapoTrapHouse political compass Figure 36. An Instagram Post-left political compass

Figure 37. A solarpunk political compass Figure 38. A "freeblr" political compass

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5. Conclusion: A Critique on Three Axes

Anti-capitalist platform subcultures are existentially put into question by a very real paradox: how do they articulate a critique of something they are themselves part of, and that profits off of their immaterial labour generated by their time on the platform, producing content for an entity they criticise in their memes? They respond to this, mostly, with a deep sense of irony and meaninglessness. Aesthetics such as laborwave play on this, recycling symbols, imagery and affects that pre-date the generation making them, hoping to capture a nostalgia for a time when content had purpose and intent. Other meme aesthetics take on the revolutionary forms and ideas of communist thought and saturate them with humour, hoping to keep ideas alive within the mainstream through memethink. They show a both a complex and nuanced engagement with their technological environment and provide insight into the state of the digital public sphere in 2019.

Beyond deliberation and the public sphere, affect and play are the circulation mechanisms of ideas online in 2019. What entered the mainstream with the 2016 meme war is what some have called “memethink”,45 referring to the term “groupthink” coined by George Orwell in his pillar of literary dystopian fiction, “1984”. The original term invokes the communitarian aspect of a close group replacing all forms of independent or critical thought and eclipsing rational behaviour and attitudes towards those outside of the group, ultimately creating irrational decisions or conclusions. Updated for the 21st century, memethink is “an image-based form of groupthink” (Monahan & Secaf, 2018). To Monahan and Secaf, memethink is exponentially more dangerous than groupthink because it is reliant on images, whose affective potential often overpowers logical or critical thought. They argue that unlike text, people lack an education in critically engaging with images, giving them a more affective power. In effect, “images don’t really have counter-arguments” (Finster, 2018). The term “viral” that has been attached to popular phenomenon spreading online thus begins to take on a dark connotation. Memes have become something we think in rather than something we circulate with humour.

Memethink is infectious, irrational and dangerous because it “nudges our way of thinking” (Citarella, 2019). In this way, Citarella argues “they become a type of augmented reality, overlaying the world and social relationships” (Citarella, 2019). However, it is hard to determine the significance of thinking in a simulacrum of reality engineered by memes. They can become tremendously powerful tools to propel an ideology on either side of the aisle, but can anti-capitalist memes critique? I argue that they can, along three axes that I describe below. On a symbolic level, they offer alternatives and an alternative to the pervasiveness of capitalist realism. Normatively, they promote the reading theory and critical autonomy from social networks. Finally, on an aesthetic level, their inherent subversion lies in that they cannot be co-opted by privatisation and power relations enacted by mainstream actors.

5.1. Irony, Climate Change and Capitalist Realism

Without a doubt, what the meme war happenings of 2016 has shown us is that irony is political.

45 Research trends agency Box1824 coined this term in their report on and “GenExit” Monahan, Sean and Sophie Secaf “GenExit” Retrieved from: http://box1824.com/Box1824.GenExit_Official.pdf

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Irony is characteristically the grammar of late capitalism memes. Within a genre that already predicates intertextuality and the sharing of a symbolic “joke”, the joke on late capitalism is often that it is itself self-defeating. Showing the paradoxes and inconsistencies of capital is a favourite move of forums like /r/LateStageCapitalism. However, there is more there than revelling in the shared irony of a product contradicting itself. The role of irony as a political weapon online was cemented by the meme war, but the forms that it embodies now in anti-capitalist subcultures can also represent a reactionary movement to the meme war, handling with more reflectivity and self- awareness the processes of irony that define . It also indicates a generational divergence in the treatment and experimentation with aesthetics in the digital public sphere by users that participated in 2016 meme formats and users that have come to age on social media in 2019. This is frequently referred to in the boomer/zoomer memes, where “Zoomers”, users from generation-Z, comment on their own descent into absurdism (Figure 40).

Figure 39. Gen Z meta-memes.

Indeed, I want to draw attention to the significance that the points of view of these users lies most often in demographics. Imperative to remember is that the userbase of the most radical communities such as the post-left on Instagram is also radically young, with most users between the ages of 12-17 (Citarella, 2018). This is Generation Z, born after the year 2000, and in terms of political views and opinion moulding, age matters. Research shows that, politically, ages 14-24 are the most formative years and that societal events at age 18 are about three times as likely to influence one’s political opinions as those at age 40 (Badger & Miller, 2019). What we see here in the young anti-capitalist subcultures of the internet is an extremism tied towards the future as dictated by the climate crisis. This is manifested both as a pessimism, but also sometimes gleams of optimism (for example, solarpunk). With climate change, Generation Z faces one of the most existentially threatening phenomena to be growing up and developing a political conscience in. In a poll by the Harvard Public Opinion Project, over 70 percent of the Generation Z respondents agree that climate change is a problem, 66 percent of whom think it is “a crisis and demands urgent action” Cox, 2014). However, they respond in a way that disrupts previous generations: not with cynicism, but alternatives, at least, for the imagination.

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Irony and cynicism are the prevailing moods of our age, and to find a way to combat them I turn to how memes fight back against this crisis of the imaginary. In the post-Marxist tradition, “Capitalist realism” was coined by philosopher Mark Fisher to refer both to the pervading belief that there is no alternative to capitalism, and the environment that promotes this conviction, rendering it futile to even formulate radical desires outside of the capitalist landscape. All hopes to subvert capitalist ideology are dictated by a pervasive sense of cynicism and political immobility. This is “precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture” (Fisher, 9), and it holds on our imaginative potential hostage. Instead, what we are left with is:

the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics. Yet this turn from belief to aesthetics, from engagement to spectatorship, is held to be one of the virtues of capitalist realism…. capitalist realism presents itself as a shield protecting us from the perils posed by belief itself (Fisher, 4-5).

In this grammar, we see the raison d’être of vapourwave: it honours the relics of late capitalism and undermines spectatorship. More so than ever though, post-left memes use cynicism to revel and play in the detritus of the ideology of late stage capitalism in a way that draws attention to how capitalist realism functions to blind us from acknowledging the realities we are repressing through our cynicism.

A crucial facet of capitalist realism is the ability of our cultural products to perform our anti- capitalism for us, promoting interpassivity and inviting us to take part in our subjugation rather than subordinating us to it. In this way, anti-capitalist memes could prove a dangerous demonstration of simply performing anti-capitalism for us. However, I move that they do not, and that they enact critique on three axes, the first being as a reaction to climate change. Indeed, Fisher does consider the question of what form an effective challenge to capitalist realism can take and where it can come from, and answers that a critique of capitalism comes from finding out that its pervasive “realism” is not the real: “if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable” (Fisher, 16). To pierce through the real of capitalist realism, an event or phenomena must be so immense that “its real implications for capitalism too traumatic to be assimilated into the system” (Fisher, 16). For Fisher, these are environmental catastrophes. In the discourse about climate change present in anti- capitalist meme subcultures, we see a willingness to pierce the realism of capital and to draw attention to the untenable nature of our current economic system due to its long-lasting and devastating consequences on our habitat. In the face of this existential threat, alternatives must be found. These subcultures no longer accept the often-quoted idiom, “It is now easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” (Jameson, 2003).

Climate change is both a dominant theme and a catalyst of other ideologies amongst the post-left community. A powerlessness in the face of radical environmental change has led to more radical options being considered and introduced in the mainstream. For sure, these alternatives, such as post-civilisation which advocates the eradication of civilisation and the return to a more primitive, hunter-gatherer society, are radical and being introduced through layers of cynic irony. Nevertheless, it is not a cynicism that is going along with the realism of capital anymore. It seeks to

69 dismantle the ideological environment that posits capitalism as the inevitable summation of all human civilisation. But it also advertises a world where cynicism doesn’t have to exist anymore. This is not only present in radical alternatives such as found on the post-left, but also optimistic views such as the solarpunk movement prevalent on Tumblr. In this, we see a flourishing of the imaginative potential of memes to creatively construct alternatives to a mainstream held captive by a sterility produced by cynicism and ideology.

5.2. “Study the Theory”

The second critical axis of these anti-capitalist memes is their remarkable reflexivity and critical character, especially in regard to promoting the reading of and engagement with theoretical texts. It is here that leftist memes diverge most radically from memes crafted by the alt-right during the meme war. I use here Joshua Citarella’s model of “irony politics” to illustrate what the critical potential of anti-capitalist memes represents.

Figure 40. The Gen Z arc of online politicisation from Joshua Citarella's "Irony Politics and Gen Z".

Citarella’s work has shed significant light on the post-left community and the users behind it (2018; 2019). His model of irony politics departs from disingenuous modes of consumption of the early 2000s representing the first breach of ironic aesthetics and social reality, and how this vector gained notoriety to eventually expose the politics behind the ironic means of the 2016 US presidential elections troll. His diagram in Figure 40 outlines how processes of shitposting, and therefore the widening of the Overton window, leave users susceptible to new narratives, or narratives outside the realm of capitalist realism. The adoption of these ideas is then aided by an ironic front that promotes a cynical distance to these ideologies. I depart from this analysis to note that what is

70 especially interesting about the current media paradigm of post-left memes however, is that they make a detour somewhere in the midst of layers of irony to study “the theory”, and then have this background feed back into their shitposting.

Figure 41. The post-left arc of politicisation (edits own)

The quantity of memes found during my research that instruct their reader to either “study the theory” or that necessitate a theoretical background in Marxist or other forms of leftist thought to comprehend them is significant and provides insight into how critique can exist in visual vernaculars. For the post-left users, shitposting is not a way to introduce new ideologies into their circles, but to reify their knowledge and play with expectations of themselves through asserting their grasp on the ideology. This shows also a reactionary movement against the meme war and asserts a wholly different approach to meme-ing: not vapid or disingenuous, but informed, whilst retaining ironic aesthetics.

“Study the theory” memes also want to distinguish between memes and humour and an actually- informed and theoretically sound political position. In this way, post-left memes are reacting to the meme war and re-appropriating the dynamics of irony whilst making it starkly known that they know what they are doing. The humour comes from the communitarian aspect of sharing comedic content intra-ideologically, rather than the transgressive and antagonistic aspect of the memes. But it is clear that memes are not politics, nor do they incite them. In this case, memes are used to provoke users to instruct themselves so that they can participate in the comedic dynamics of the community or network. They therefore advocate an education outside of the digital public sphere, acquired through autonomous study rather than deliberation. Indeed, Citarella notes “Shitposting is also a

71 way of re-asserting individual freedom within online collectivities” (2019). These subcultures negotiate that collective meme making practices eradicated participation in order to privilege collective meaning-making during the 2016 meme war, and advocate a return to individual meaning- making.

5.3. Rejection of the Mainstream

Finally, the third axis of critique that anti-capitalist memes operate on is one that mediates the tension between a mainstream, corporate use of the Internet and the subcultural, counterpublics use that online communities often see themselves as embodying. Anti-capitalist memes permit these communities to reify themselves and their isolationist behaviour by producing something that, theoretically, escapes the realm of precorporation. Corporate presence on platforms like Twitter are a treacherous field, and though some companies have incited controversy in their tweets, brand marketing on social media in this day seems to be down to being able to be culturally relevant and relatable, and unfortunately, often appropriating the dynamics of meme culture (Allebach, 2019).

Undoubtedly, co-opting and using memes, privatising and monetarising them for marketing purposes, goes against the participatory, subversive and ironic character of memes that gives them political power. Evidently, however, anti-capitalist memes work against the favour of marketing strategies. Though brands will go far in their attempts to sell their products with relatability and authentic meme culture knowledge, unafraid to create meta-memes and even participating in (thought to be too) 46 risky mental health discourses, drawing attention to their labor practices is evidently too far (Allebach, 2019).47 Laughing along with these memes simply reifies what partaking in brand twitter culture erases: the asymmetry of the communication power enacted in these relationships, and thus its exploitative nature (Losse, 2014). In this phenomenom, we can see that internet culture is still preoccupied with playing and the spectacle of humour on the internet, rather than in de-constructing systems of thought and hierarchies through what was once something they wielded unique to them.

This ability to dodge preocorporation is integral to the subversive character of late capitalism memes. Because they are not able to be incorporated into mainstream discourse, as they are counter-productive to a brand’s marketing agenda, these memes then retain a sense of being subcultural to the point of embodying resistance against a homogenising process of commodification. At least, for now. As Fisher notes, we can easily foresee a future where we are invited to participate in our critique, where anti-capitalism is performed for us,.

46 Lorenz talks about “risky” memes in terms of depression and mental illness memes being unco-optable back in 2017, before marketing campaigns like Burger King’s “Real Meals” in 2019 disproved her thesis. In: Lorenz, Taylor, (July 11 2017) “Why does Everyone on the Internet Want to die?”, Mic. Retrieved From: https://mic.com/articles/181752/why-does-everyone-on-the-internet-want-to-die-how-death-memes-took- over-the-web#.BTOmykleU 47Newman, Nathan. “How about not exploiting workers making your burgers. Why are you the only major fast food chain refusing to pay tomato workers a decent wage.” 6 Feb 2018 Tweet. Retrieved from: https://twitter.com/nathansnewman/status/960913507251302400

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Figure 42. Brands using deep fried/absurd meme elements in "Twitter clapbacks"

As even deeply subcultural meme genres such as surreal, absurd or deepfried are being manipulated and co-opted by “relatability” narratives, meme genres that are illegible to the wider public, and un- co-optable are in high demand for meme communities wishing to stay subcultural. This is why more abstract, sometimes incomprehensible memes have been adopted by the post-left on Instagram. Their strong belief that if anything lasts too long it can be co-opted (Citarella, 2019) also leads them to have a much more erratic aesthetic style (Figure 43). These meme pages do not reproduce easy formats with an infinite twist on content, but rather produce infinite formats with varied content. This ensures that their grammar is unique to them. Anyone that is digitally literate can put together the significance or humour behind the memes in Figure 42, but anti-capitalist memes need to go a step forward to safeguard their ideology in a digital environment where they are constantly prey to commodification.

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Figure 43. Idiosyncratic and erratic meme styles make them harder to co-opt: On the left, the recent feed for the ancom hashtag, on the right, one particular user’s feed.

This behaviour also plays with platform subculture at large, for example the schizophrenic nature of their memes reflects the attention sapping deficit of Instagram and the consumption of content on the platform. The post-left uses Instagram anarchically, refusing to obey the platform’s rules. They do not gather massive followings or use hashtags to identify their communities, but are still savvy enough to navigate the forms that it has given rise to. In short, they have grown up on the platform and know how to manipulate it. Again, this brings me back to the generation behind users propagating anti-capitalist memes and how they are engaging with social media in 2019. The age of curated and branded profiles and accounts on Instagram is over. Those belonged to , who are “individualist, entrepreneurial, and focused on a personal brand”, now “Gen-Zers are collectivist, nihilistic, and interested in identity play” (Citarella, 2019). They play with the internet and how we have learnt to use and politicise it.

5.4 Final Remarks

Turning to the technological environments that shape our politics is crucial work in this day and age. It’s important to consider that it’s not the affordances that are always written about- likes and follower counts- that are being used to significantly shape ideologies. Instead, what a platform culture has evolved into based on communitarian, deliberative or liberal individualist communication norms afforded by the technological interface of the platform has a substantial influence on how political subcultures develop there. Affordances can be used to reinforce communitarian principles such as intra-ideological reciprocity on Reddit, and therefore contribute to the elaboration of a

74 cohesive political identity. However, the same structure can differ in uses, for example between /r/LateStageCapitalism, which utilises functions like auto-moderators and FAQs to ensure this, whilst a group identity formed outside of the platform, /r/Chapo, makes less use of these but nevertheless reify a communitarian outlook in their memes and content. A lack of these community-building affordances gives rise to an aesthetic preoccupation on Tumblr, where visual styles are privileged over network-forming and deliberation, and meme warfare is still being used between the libertarians and anarchists of the platform. While the liberal individualism that is intrinsically coded into Instagram is attempted to be rejected by collectivist play, certain factors remain such as micro- celebrity. Therefore, we can add a further dimension to our diagram:

PLATFORM CONTEXT/ AFFORDANCES

reading theory

Figure 44. The irony politics ecosystem

Learning how to use the internet to and politicise it is critical for counterpublic movements online, but intricately wrapped up in processes of platform ownership and materiality. While some subcultures play with platform and user expectations, the extent to which this is a self-awareness can create a purposefully subversive process remains to be explored. Re-purposing is a process that still functions within the system. Ultimately, sorting hierarchies constructed by algorithms still shape the way these cultures will interact with each other and the platform at large, if at all. Citarella points out “the cultural nichification of the internet is producing communities so polarized that they have almost no concept of a shared reality or grand narrative”, meaning that that the technologically afforded Overton window for Gen Z online political spaces is “infinite” (2019). Eventually, we are left

75 to deal with the consequences of the materiality of our online spaces and reflect on their contribution to democratic discourse.

Nevertheless, we see online and on the left new developments and uses of the digital public sphere that move beyond using it solely as a space for deliberation. These allow us to turn to those communicative modes capable of articulating insights integral to our democracy; modes that a rationalist bias in society eclipses: “including the affective, the poetic, the humorous, the ironic, and so forth” (Dahlgren, 156). These question the social network as a space for education, pushing other users to return to books and theory to get their education, but also use the radical creative potential to create new imaginaries and alternatives, while remaining subversive in a way that empowers their community. Born out of generation that has grown up taking apart and playing with internet culture for their own social capital, Gen-Z offers insight into how young internet users are using the tools offered to them to radically reshape the digital public sphere and contest the commodification and power hierarchies native to the online environment.

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Appendix

Affordance Reddit Instagram Tumblr Username Yes Yes Yes User profile Yes Yes Yes User blog/stream No No Yes Customizability: Yes Yes Yes Subscription-based Personal Feed Algorithmically-based Yes Yes No General Feed Content Moderators Yes No No Enforced Community Yes Yes Yes Guidelines Posting Visual content Yes Yes Yes Posting text Yes No Yes Hashtags No Yes Yes Re-posting No No Yes Outlinks Yes No Yes Private Users No Yes Yes Liking/Favouriting No Yes Yes Commenting/Reply Yes Yes No Private Messaging No Yes Yes Cross-posting across Yes Yes Yes platforms Interest-based Yes No No communities Algorithmically-based Yes No No visibility 1. Upvoting Algorithmically-based Yes Yes Yes/No vibility 2. Feed Searching Yes Yes Yes Transparency No No No Anonymity No No Yes Appendix 1. Affordance comparison across networks.

SELECT count (*) count, subreddit, '2017-01' as date FROM [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2017_01]

WHERE LOWER(body) LIKE '%anti-capitalism%'

GROUP BY subreddit, date ORDER BY count DESC LIMIT 20

Appendix 2. SQL code for tracking “anti-capitalism” across subreddits through Google BigQuery.

SELECT subreddit_mention, COUNT(*)count FROM (SELECT lower(REGEXP_EXTRACT(body, r'r\/([\w\d]+)')) as subreddit_mention

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FROM [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2016_01], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2016_02], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2016_03], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2016_04], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2016_05], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2016_06], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2016_07], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2016_08], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2016_09], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2016_10], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2016_11], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2016_12], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2017_01], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2017_02], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2017_03], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2017_04], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2017_05], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2017_06], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2017_07], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2017_08], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2017_09], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2017_10], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2017_11], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2017_12], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2018_01], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2018_02], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2018_03], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2018_04], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2018_05], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2018_06], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2018_07], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2018_08], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2018_09], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2018_10], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2018_11], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2018_12], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2019_01] WHERE lower(subreddit)='latestagecapitalism')*

WHERE subreddit_mention IS NOT null

GROUP BY subreddit_mention ORDER BY count DESC ##possible LIMIT

Appendix 3. SQL code for querying referrals of a subreddit to other subreddits. *sub in desired subreddit

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SELECT subreddit, count(*)count FROM ( SELECT lower(subreddit) as subreddit, REGEXP_EXTRACT(lower(body), r'r\/([\w\d]+)') as subreddit_mention

FROM [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2016_01], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2016_02], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2016_03], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2016_04], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2016_05], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2016_06], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2016_07], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2016_08], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2016_09], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2016_10], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2016_11], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2016_12], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2017_01], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2017_02], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2017_03], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2017_04], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2017_05], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2017_06], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2017_07], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2017_08], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2017_09], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2017_10], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2017_11], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2017_12], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2018_01], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2018_02], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2018_03], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2018_04], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2018_05], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2018_06], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2018_07], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2018_08], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2018_09], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2018_10], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2018_11], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2018_12], [fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2019_01] )

WHERE subreddit_mention = 'latestagecapitalism'* AND subreddit_mention IS NOT null

GROUP BY subreddit ORDER BY count DESC ##possible LIMIT

Appendix 4. SQL code for querying referrals from other subreddit to a specific subreddits. *sub in desired subreddit

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Appendix 5. Leftblr Network Graph

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