Anti-capitalist Subcultures Online: From the Deliberative Public Sphere to Irony Politics

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Anti-Capitalist Subcultures Online:

From the Deliberative Public Sphere to

Irony Politics

Lucie Chateau

12288136

Completed on Thursday, 27 June 2019

MA New Media and Digital Culture

University of Amsterdam

Supervised by Dr. Davide Beraldo

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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 “SHITPOSTING”. .... 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 BLOG. ... 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 COMMUNISM, INFLUENCED BY VAPORWAVE. ... 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 "TWITTER CLAPBACKS" ... 73

FIGURE 43.IDIOSYNCRATIC AND ERRATIC MEME STYLES MAKE THEM HARDER TO CO-OPT... 74

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1. Introduction

In a democratic society 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 democracy (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 technologies in our everyday lives, reflecting on the role of social media 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 parliamentary system, 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

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6 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 elections (Nagle, 2017; Wendling, 2018). Amongst the controversial and disruptive processes through which this political subculture began to gather attention and demonstrate its support for their favoured political candidate, Donald Trump, 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 ideologies, 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 culture war. 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 civil society. I turn more}

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7 (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 cultures start weaponizing commonly circulated images. Therefore, the history of the meme has its equally important role to play in the history of the internet.

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 internet meme 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 Ideology” (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 individualism’ (Rainie & Wellman, 2012) gave rise to the ‘networked citizen’ notion, embraced by scholars emphasising the potential of participatory culture 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 sharing, 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 revolution” 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

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9 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

societies (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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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 4chan (OILAB, 2019), vernacular functions both as a collective identification and a protection

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11 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 election, 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).

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12 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 value 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, technology, 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).

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13 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, policies, 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

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free-14 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}

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15 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. Voting 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:}

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16 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}

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17 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 Atlantic; “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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18 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 identity politics. 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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19 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 fiction, 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 blogs, 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 anonymous 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)}

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20 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

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21 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 collection 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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23 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.}

Anti-capitalist Subcultures Online: From the Deliberative Public Sphere to Irony Politics