Memes and popular geopolitics : Reddit's resonance machines for the "new" Cold War

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MEMES AND POPULAR GEOPOLITICS

Reddit’s Resonance Machines for the “New” Cold War

ABSTRACT

Memes constitute one of the most impactful ways of transmitting ideas across our hypermediatized world. This thesis works to understand how a momentous geopolitical event was “meme-ified” across Reddit - what cultural imaginaries inform these depictions, and what their political

motivations are. In the process, I analyze the platform’s inner politics, demographics, language practices, interests and tastes, identifying

hegemonies and counterhegemonies competing for resonance, or “seeking truth” in the “constant carnival.”

E. Blokbergen

MSc Social Science – UvA (GSSS) Student n.: 10259740 Thesis Supervisor:

Prof. Dr. M. De Goede Second Reader: G. Lovink Amsterdam, 17-06-2019

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1 To Gero, Anemone, Jusuck, and the rest of my family and friends for always being supportive and encouraging me to go on, and gave me a lot of faith. I have learned a lot and will keep striving to improve, and rise to the honor. To Oma, with love, and with the hope she will find this amusing, good for a laugh in between all the rest. Many thanks to Prof. De Goede for her support; and to Geert Lovink, for kindly agreeing to read the results.

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Introduction: The Summit and the Shitstorm

One of the most discussed topics of the past years has been Trump’s alleged ties with Russian government agencies and business elites, and how these might have helped him in getting elected. The majority of US and international liberal media has busied itself intensely with tracing Trump and his cabinet’s dealings with questionable figures in Moscow, dealings which go back to the late ‘80s and early ‘90s’ opening up of the ex-USSR to foreign capital.1_{These, they argue, suggest that Trump has indebted himself with Russian oligarchs to}

the point where they have coopted him, and that Russian government-sponsored agencies have actively worked to bring him to power. The Helsinki Summit in July, 2018 provided damning confirmation, to the vast majority of US and Western observers, that Trump was indeed “Putin’s puppet.”

The summit was announced in the news on June 28th_{, 2018: after a series of (also highly controversial) meetings}

in Europe and the UK, Trump was scheduled to convene with Putin in Finland on July 18th.2_{The choice of Helsinki}

had, for many, historical resonance, as the meeting grounds for US and USSR leaders in the late stages of the Cold War; the Helsinki Accords of 1975 are deemed by many historians to have spelled the beginning of the end of Soviet authoritarianism (Cold War Research Network, 2019).3

However, Trump’s conduct “shocked” those who had expected a strong confrontation with Putin about the allegations of campaign interference (Goodwyn, 2018). Instead, the two met for two hours alone, with only the interpreter present, and at the later press conference, Trump “sided with Putin,” who had been “very strong and powerful in his denial” about the allegations, thus “throwing the American intelligence community under the bus.” The two leaders spoke to the press about their shared hopes in normalizing relations between the two countries, in order to work together on many other global challenges.4

Reactions were overwhelmingly outraged: Trump was attacked from nearly all US politicians on the news and on Twitter,5_{and, according to the Huffington Post, “treason” became the top searched word after the summit.}6

The memes were, of course, quick to follow, as tens of thousands of social media users rushed to provide their take on the event.7

I was in St. Petersburg at the time, and had been privy to the highly positive, constructive mood of the FIFA World Cup (my feelings about this particular industry notwithstanding): foreigners were impressed by the friendliness and hospitality of the hosts, and their experiences were being transmitted back to “Western” media, finally shining a positive light on the country. The summit was able to wipe it all from the board, and the “new Cold War” rhetoric returned with a vengeance.

1_{See for instance the “collusion timeline” compiled by the Center for American Progress Action Fund’s “Moscow Project” at}

https://themoscowproject.org/collusion-timeline (accessed 25-05-2019)

2

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-summit/trump-and-putin-to-hold-first-summit-talks-as-twitchy-west-looks-on-idUSKBN1K601D; interestingly, the title in the URL about the “twitchy west” was absent on the page itself. (accessed 24-05-2019)

3

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/06/finland-helsinki-russia-trump-united-states-summit/564074/?utm_source=twb (accessed 19-05-2019)

4_{A transcript of the summit is available here:}

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/16/i-hold-both-countries-responsible-here-is-the-full-transcript-of-tr.html; video footage provided by CBS news: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvsrxNC5Keg (both accessed 25-05-2019)

5_{Witness the gathering to shame Trump’s performance: “damaging, disgraceful … so sad” (Nancy Pelosi, 03:12) on}

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJx0HWSU4kw (accessed 17-06-2019). (Posted on 4chan)

6_{https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/8zg8l4/treason_is_top_searched_word_after_trumpputin/?depth=2}

(accessed 25-05-2019)

7_{Testifying to the attention, the summit made its own chapter in Know Your Meme.com (within the wider “Russiagate”}

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4 Although I avoided following the story at the time,8_{the tempo and pervasiveness of the “Twitter shitstorm”}

(Lovink, 2016, p. 137) – “#treason “ – struck me as suspect. It seemed the entire media apparatus – from news to social – was in a whirling frenzy over a non-issue; just as the “Russian collusion” ordeal was, considering the US’ historical record of election meddling (Žižek, 2018, p. 41). Having lived in the US for several years as well, I could say with confidence that Trump was a 100% American product - in Kotkin’s phrasing, “as American as apple pie.” (Kotkin, 2019).9_{The fact that two known businessmen-in-power would be partnering up to serve their}

respective cliques’ interests seemed obvious; why was everyone on social media so shocked?

While the questions arising from the ordeal might have pointed to more pressing issues, such as why Trump is so popular, how we use social media to inform ourselves (Boyd, 2017), the historical background of US-Russian relations, or what the two leaders actually discussed (Dobrokhotov, 2018), public attention was directed at mocking the two leaders, portraying them in romantic/sexual interactions, with Trump as the submissive “fan-girl” and Putin as his tough and inscrutable master.10_{Red flags, hammers and sickles, angry bears, and other}

Soviet pop paraphernalia milled in the background.

Given the broad use of social media across countries, many may see memes about an event before knowing what actually happened – if they even bother to find out (Särmä, 2015, pp. 112–113). They thus have the potential to shape worldviews. I decided to make this the focus of my research: to understand how different digital cultures responded to the summit, and what kinds of memes they produced to express their opinions about it. I will show how one social media platform generally known for its more critical user base – Reddit – worked along with the platform’s administrators to amplify the media frenzy surrounding the event, forming a “resonance machine” (Connolly, 2005) which drew different groups with varying interests and sensitivities into a near-unanimous condemnation of Trump’s conduct as “treason,” and depictions of Trump as “Putin’s bitch.” By looking at the image memes which sprouted in the wake of the summit, I will attempt to trace their underlying sociocultural and geopolitical imaginaries (Saunders & Strukov, 2018); at the same time, I will work to draw out dissenting voices which were largely submerged by the deafening satirization of the event.

This thesis thus aims to study one particular online space – Reddit – where (geo)political meaning is negotiated, through discussion, but also particularly through satire: where users deliberate on what is “funny” and

“unfunny” about global politics, what is or isn’t a security threat, what is true or false, how, and for whom. These discussions, as I will show, are problematically embedded in technologies and social practices which, together, have strayed far from the earlier promises of “participatory culture,” but instead work actively to distract and coopt users, while marginalizing critics of their “sanctioned carnival” (Massanari, 2015; Srnicek, 2017).

8_{Both out of cynicism, and a slightly uneasy feeling that the situation might have escalated while I was in the country –}

indicative of my own “Cold War paranoia,” of course.

9_{I would refer to this article as a neat, even-handed summary of the Mueller investigation ordeal; the conclusions Kotkin}

draws are somewhat similar to my own interpretation. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2019-05-21/american-hustle (accessed 27-05-2019).

10_{These imaginings were even pushed by a New York Times editorial animation series (which was met with another, much}

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Chapter 1: The ‘Othering’ of Russia from elite discourse to social media

In the following sections I explain how the memes commenting on the summit can be fruitfully analyzed as artifacts of popular geopolitics, which work within social media platforms to form resonance machines for competing securitizing and de-securitizing moves (Buzan, Waever, & de Wilde, 1998; Connolly, 2005; Saunders & Strukov, 2018; Wiggins & Bowers, 2015).11

The reaction to the summit will be given due contextualization drawing from critical geopolitics and

securitization theory; following will be an overview of the broad, interdisciplinary field of popular geopolitics, which strives to move past “high politics,” to study the everyday functioning of geopolitical assemblages. The role of humor in (geo)political messaging will be explored, pivoting the popular geopolitics approach to what are truly “popular” cultural artifacts, the study of which aligns with several scholars’ calls to pay attention to audience interpretations of geopolitical narratives and the securitizing discourses they underpin (Balzacq, Léonard, & Ruzicka, 2016; Dittmer & Gray, 2010; Grayson, 2018). Connolly’s concept of ‘resonance machines’ (Connolly, 2005) will be explored in depth and brought to bear on wider discussions on participatory social media – specifically, how memes, and the platform cultures they are embedded in, can work to attract different user groups into amplifying discursive hegemonies through irony and ambivalent humor (Phillips & Milner, 2017).

Critical Geopolitics and the ‘Othering’ of Russia

In its relatively young tradition (dating to the late 1980s), and following the ‘discursive turn’ embarked on in many other disciplines at the time (Saunders & Strukov, 2017a, p. 307), critical geopolitics has engaged with scrutinizing “the ‘sight, sites, and cite(s)’ through which the geopolitical becomes instantiated (Ó Tuathail 1996, 43 and 71; quoted in Grayson, 2018, p.44). In Ó Tuathail’s formulation,

[t]he practice of geopolitics involves the conduct of statecraft through state actions and the construction of particular meanings around events. This operates through the use of metaphors, analogies, and storylines, with leaders performing these storylines before domestic and international audiences. (Ó Tuathail, 2008, p. 690)

These constructions and performances rely significantly on "analogical reasoning" and "downscaled primary metaphors" – the mainstays of geopolitical "scripting" (Ó Tuathail, 2008, pp. 692; 699).

Deconstructing these storylines, Dalby has argued (1990), “allows their demystification and contributes to counter-hegemonic projects of critical inquiry” which are well served, he continues, by focusing “on the processes of ‘Othering’ in the creation of discourse.” (Dalby, 1990, p. 180)12

11_{An artefact, in its most basic formulation, is a human-made object which reflects specific ideas, beliefs and values}

(Huntington, 2013) - it is “immanent to a general social grammar.” (Kiersey & Neumann, 2015, p. 75) Artefacts are praised, circulated, and imitated when they are deemed to be “useful” or aesthetically pleasing; this appreciation can spread to become a sociocultural consensus, and more of the same type of artefacts will be made to fit in with the consensus. As Wiggins and Bower explain, they “possess both cultural and social attributes as they are produced, reproduced, and transformed to reconstitute the social system.” (Wiggins & Bowers, 2015, p. 1891)

12_{Drawing on Foucault, Dalby offers that "discourses are about how reality is specified and how social practices are}

structured in the terms of these realities." (Dalby, 1990, p. 7) In Salter’s summary, “discourse is defined more broadly as any archive of statements, the institutions and configurations of power/knowledge and truth that condition how they are sayable.” (Salter, 2013, p. 18) The notion of the ‘Other’ and ‘Othering’ is based on Edward Said’s classic study Orientalism

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6 Critical scholars widely share an understanding of the Cold War as the playing out of competing political

narratives, which in time came to “disallow” counterarguments, criticisms, and alternative strategies in their respective camps (Dalby, 1990, p. 169). These narratives relied on imaginings of the “Other” as an insidious enemy, ready to exploit any weakness, military or internal, in the other camp to destroy them and achieve global hegemony of their “perfidious” ideology.1314_{The McCarthyism of the Fifties saw a momentous expansion of these}

imaginings in US society, and the anti-communist hysteria it fostered would prove to have a long legacy (Cold War Research Network, 2019; Kuzmarov & Marciano, 2018).

As some scholars have noted, the rationale for “Russophobia” has had far more to do, historically, with US domestic politics than Russia’s conduct on the international stage (Tsygankov, 2018a). In Dalby’s understanding,

[t]he ‘Soviet Threat’ has waxed and waned in US political life since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. […] Obviously external developments are not irrelevant, but internal ideological matters […] and the bureaucratic infighting amongst the armed services […] are important factors in understanding the varying salience of concerns about the Soviet threat in US politics. (Dalby, 1990, pp. 43–44)15

In his seminal analysis of policy documents, press releases and speeches, focusing especially on the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), Dalby has shown how the notion of the Soviet menace was revived in US public discourse between the mid-70s and early 80s, bringing an end to nearly a decade of peaceful coexistence and détente between the blocs. Relying on “expert opinions,” helpfully offered by the field of American Sovietology (p.65), the CPD was able to divert public attention and spending from social welfare and the looming ecological crisis, towards the ramping up of military expenditures aimed at containing the “evil empire.” State-sponsored academia and “organic intellectuals” abidingly confirmed the threat, and necessary countermeasures, as “common sense,” building an effective anti-Soviet hegemony (in Gramscian terms) which Kuzmarov and Marciano see as the foundation of the widespread acceptance, today, of Russophobic language in US public discourse. (Dalby, 1990; Kuzmarov & Marciano, 2018).

In more recent history, Ó Tuathail traces the return of this type of imaginary to the wake of Russia’s war with Georgia in 2008, which had prompted terse warnings in the media about “the ‘reawakened bear,’ the ‘return of the cold war,’ and the ‘new age of authoritarianism’ (Freeland, 2008)” (quoted in Ó Tuathail, 2008, p. 672). The spectacle of Russia’s land invasion of South Ossetia

made that metanarrative irresistible to many, and marked a new low in relations for the post–Soviet period. Geopolitical division and sphere-of-influence thinking were back, as was self-righteous moral outrage. (Ó Tuathail, 2008, p. 672)

In 2012, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney had been able to “assert that Russia is America’s ‘number one geopolitical foe’” (quoted in Saunders, 2017, p.9); by and large, this type of designation continues unabated in US political discourse: Russia is an enemy to be feared, or at least mistrusted – though the real reasons for the tensions are rarely discussed.16_{Key to this language, and its acceptance, is the more or less}

13_{The comparison of Russia to Nazi Germany also has a long pedigree in Cold War Sovietology, and was a key element in the}

Committee on Present Danger’s “specification of the USSR as evil and crucially expansionist. The whole specification of the USSR as evil on the axiological dimension of Otherness” excluded the possibility of any form of ‘appeasement’ in US foreign policy – the only result of that would have been “retreat and the USSR gaining global domination.” (Dalby, 1990, pp. 100–101)

14_{Cf. e.g. McKenna, K. 2001.}_{All the Views Fit to Print: Changing Images of the U.S. in Pravda Political Cartoons, 1917-1991}_{. New}

York: Peter Lang.

15_{According to Sharp (2000), the period of 1979-1985 witnessed a “renewed sense of vulnerability” within the US political}

establishment in the face of Third World revolutions (particularly Iran and Nicaragua), which they blamed on Soviet influence. (Sharp, 2000, p. 122)

16_{Cf. again, on this note, Ó Tuathail (2008): “After floating the idea of a common alliance against international terrorism,}

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7 conscious equation of the Russian Federation (RF) with its Soviet predecessor (Kuzmarov & Marciano, 2018, p. 164) – greatly assisted by Putin’s past occupation as KGB agent in the GDR. Morozov (2011) has also observed a marked “Cold War nostalgia” and “intellectual recycling” of Cold War concepts and mentalities of a wide group of US political actors, due to their having been professionally reared in the late years of the Cold War (Morozov, 2011, p. 40; also in Saunders & Strukov, 2018, p. 10) – making the discussions about the continuity between the RF and the USSR all the more ironic.

Despite repeated calls for critical scrutiny from, among others, scholars in the field of Soviet and post-Soviet studies (Hemment, 2017; Yurchak, 2017), and despite our “postmodern geopolitical condition [of] [g]lobalization, informationalization and the end of the Cold War,” we continue to make sense of events in terms of an earlier “modern geopolitical imagination.” (Gearöid Ó Tuathail, 2000, p. 167) The portrayal of the Russian Federation as an evil, expansionist empire of corrupt oligarchs, with Putin as its thuggish tsar, bent on revenge against the West for the demise of the Soviet Union (Kuzmarov & Marciano, 2018; Sussman, 2017; Tsygankov, 2018a) extends to virtually all major liberal US news publications, those of several other countries of the “Anglosphere,“ (Vucetic, 2008) and beyond.17

Defining Trump’s dealings with the Russian government and elites as “treason” also works to make them an issue of national security for the US.18_{Security threats, as Buzan, Waever and De Wilde (1998) originally}

suggested, are constructed by specific actors by way of performative “speech acts” (p. 26), the success of which depends on the existence of specific “conditions of possibility” (Huysmans, 2011, p. 378) for the public to accept or reject a “securitizing move” (Buzan et al., 1998). As I aim to show throughout this thesis, the portrayals, in “Western” popular culture, of the Soviet Union, the RF, and of Putin’s leadership style have all served to promote these conditions. As noted by Balzacq et al. (2016),

[…] when securitization is invoked, a specific grammar of security is activated. It is notably characterized by the closure of political options, the oligopoly of decision-making, restrictions to public deliberation and the creation of ‘deontic powers’ – that is, powers such as rights, duties, obligations, derogations and permissions – that follow from the collective acceptance by a community that a phenomenon is a threat.” (Balzacq et al., 2016, p. 181)

Several of the features listed here are present in the current case study: the “grammar of security” and “restrictions to public deliberation” are amply visible in current discussions on the “Russian threat” to “global” democracy (Cold War Research Network, 2019).19_{This thesis sets out to explore the degree of “collective}

acceptance,” examining how much currency these depictions of the enemy have on social media, and particularly in memes.

The next section will therefore explore the work of popular geopolitics in disentangling the relationship between “elite scriptings” of the world and popular culture. (Dittmer & Gray, 2010)

focusing on common European security, NATO launched an expansionist program that violated pledges made at the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. In his February 2007 speech in Munich, Putin declared that “it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernization of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust.” Russia has a right to ask, he continued: “against whom is this expansion intended?” (Putin, 2007).” (Ó Tuathail, 2008, p. 682) Cf. also (Mearsheimer, 2014; Tsygankov, 2018b) on how NATO expansion and the “Color Revolutions” have provided the rationale for Russian

“countermoves” in Georgia, then Ukraine (and, I might speculatively add, “cyberwarfare.”)

17_{By way of example, this BBC/CNN collaboration “Putin’s Power” (2018):}_{https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ-Kwr0VFUE}

(accessed 15-06-2019).

18_{The accusations of “treason” ironically mirror the discourse of the Russian government against its more liberal-minded}

critics (Yurchak, 2017, pp. 3–4) – deflecting, in the same way, from real confrontation with more pressing domestic grievances and more urgent political questions (Dalby, 1990; Kuzmarov & Marciano, 2018).

19_{And, as yet uncertain, and anyway beyond the scope of this thesis, “deontic powers” might be increased cyber}

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Popular Geopolitics and the new Cold War: from elite scripting to mass media

Critical observers of the rampant Russophobia in US liberal media thus ascribe it to a particular discursive hegemony which had already taken shape in the earliest years of the Soviet Union’s existence, and which had been a fixture in US political meaning-making, albeit to varying extents, throughout the Cold War (Sharp, 2000).20_{Its widespread acceptance and replication in “traditional” and online media speaks to the enduring}

effectiveness of these portrayals, which were consistently reinforced through consonant representations of Russia and the USSR in “Western” mainstream news media and popular culture. The latter sphere has been the primary domain of study for the growing field of popular geopolitics.

Originally an offshoot of critical geopolitics,

[p]opular geopolitics came into being as a response to how developments in information technologies and increases in global interaction density changed the way global social worlds were being produced. Popular geopolitics were also as a [sic] politically driven project, for it asked exactly whose global worlds should be singled out for scholarly attention. (Neumann, 2018, p. xii) (emphasis in original)

Proponents of the field aimed to “mov[e] away from stagnant macro-political analyses focused on systemic relations between states to find new referents and highlight new dynamics of power[:]” “site[s] of micro-politics where political subjectivities, geopolitical and security imaginations, identities, and imagined communities are (re)produced at the level of the everyday.” (Caso & Hamilton, 2015, p. 2)

Saunders and Strukov see these as “feedback loops” moving back and forth between and across “elite” and “mass” cultures, which “lead to circulation of positive or negative values, disabling a more nuanced world-view.” (Saunders & Strukov, 2017b, p. 305) Though not dealt with extensively as of yet, popular geopolitics scholars have understood that digital, “participatory” media (Jenkins, 2009) present a vast, exciting new field for research; as this thesis argues, the memes in particular are evidence (artifacts) of these feedback loops between pop culture and geopolitical discourse. (Särmä, 2015)

As also indicated by Saunders and Strukov (2018, p.5), the idea of feedback loops is indebted to Connelly’s (2005) concept of the “resonance machine” (Connolly, 2005):

[…] a moving complex […] in which heretofore unconnected or loosely associated elements fold, bend, blend, emulsify, and dissolve into each other, forging a qualitative assemblage resistant to classical models of explanation. (Connolly, 2005)

Connolly had used this term in 2005 to diagnose the “Evangelical-Capitalist resonance machine” of the US-Iraq War: a far-right, fire-and-brimstone Christian constituency rooting, in the US, for “cowboy capitalism” and a veritable crusade against the Middle East (i.e. the continued forfeiting of the future in favor of hyper-consumerism, and global resource predation to that end). In Connolly’s analysis, this constituency had been able to achieve hegemony by “tap[ping] latent intensities” (875) in US society – attracting different social groups into sharing their “fundamental disposition toward being in the world.” This they did by drumming up the already widespread belief in the inevitability of the End Times and the Final Judgment (as demonstrated by the extreme popularity of a series of novels envisioning this scenario of “Christo-terrorism,” p. 874), Thus,

an aura of suspicion, resentment and revenge [wa]s slipped into the daily perceptions of the faithful, encouraging them to make the worst interpretations of outsiders and to accept any scandalous story

20_{Though, as several scholars have argued, Western European prejudices towards their eastern neighbor date much}

further back in time (cf. e.g. Beller & Leerssen, 2007; Berman, 1982; Kaempf, 2010); from the perspective of the USSR, cf. Kuzmarov & Marciano, 2017, chapter 2 (pp. 41-58): “ ‘The Time You Sent Troops to Quell the Revolution’: The True Origins of the Cold War.”

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9 against them contrived by right-wing talk shows, the Republican advertising machine, Internet blogs,

and preachers on the Right. (Connolly, 2005, p. 875).

At the same time, this “disposition” effectively muted concerns about the impacts of corporate industry and unfettered consumption.

I argue that Connolly’s concept of “resonance machines” can be successfully applied to mass- and social media discourses emanating not only from the Trump movement, but also, and perhaps more significantly, from the liberal media’s “counterattack” on the former. While the Trumpian machine is built on the frustrations of the American working class and the interests of the wealthy class causing the frustrations, the liberal framing of Russia works to “tap latent intensities” in the US, but also further out in global (Anglocentric) digital society: in the broadest brushstrokes, Trump’s critics on the “left,” less-partisan elements who find Trump distasteful, people raised on Cold War cultural imagery, and younger populations reared on internet culture who simply find Putin’s behavior “funny,” if troubling and, perhaps, morbidly fascinating.

This thesis thus takes up Connolly’s invitation to “come to terms with the affinities of identity that energize the assemblage” (Connolly, 2005, p. 871), by examining how different “intensities” on one major platform were drawn into a hegemonic, Russophobic resonance machine – through heated discussions but also, and perhaps most insidiously, through satirical images and memes, which work “below the level of explicit attention and encourage the intense coding of those experiences as they do so.” (Connolly, 2005, p. 880)

Humor, Satire, and Vulgarity in Popular Geopolitics

The memes about Trump and Putin were overwhelmingly “vulgar,” which begged the question, to me, of what their purpose really was – why they were meant to shock and disgust. In conclusion to his article treating the popular, all-mocking animation South Park , Thorogood (2016) contends that “bodily, vulgar humour and affect [constitute] a site where geopolitics is negotiated and experienced ambiguously.” (Thorogood, 2016, p. 230)

South Park is the quintessential example of how the Bakhtinian “carnival” and the “body grotesque” are deployed to make deeply serious political critiques;21_{analyzing these affective strategies, he argues, can}

“reaffirm feminist concerns with the body as a geopolitical site of analysis.” (ibid.) In the first place, understanding what about geopolitical satire drives people to laughter, and what type of imaginaries are awakened by a particular joke or stereotype about another nation, provides one way of mapping different “emotional geographies” which inform audience subjectivities (Caso, 2018, pp. 96; 100). Secondly, and interconnectedly, the way the bodies of the two presidents – Putin and Trump – have been represented in the memes provide ample material to dissect what, I aim to show, are masculinist strategies (Hooper, 2001) of visual political communication and threat construction.22

As several scholars have argued, humor and satire form a quintessential vehicle for popular geopolitics, “translating” current events and elite discourses in irreverent tones which serve to “process,” as it were, information emanating from the “top.” Representations of “the ‘low norm’ of human behaviour, the everyday

21_{The Bakthinian carnival is “[…] a situation where frivolity and chaos associated with carnival celebrations invert the}

normal functioning of order. They engender a collective, devoid of the usual hierarchical trappings of society. This was by no means a fleeting performance but a genuine change in the organisation of social life. Carnival ‘is not a spectacle seen by the people, they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people.’ Furthermore, identities are inverted and new forms of social interaction, gesture, speech and comportment are available in the temporary suspension of hierarchical norms as new ideas, alliances, and relationships are endlessly tested and rejected in the cacophony of novel social interaction.” (Thorogood, 2016, pp. 221–222) In this momentary suspension of hierarchies, the body grotesque takes center stage as “an (albeit brief) explosion of equality. Everybody eats and shits at the carnival.” (222)

22_{Hooper (2001) suggests that the term}_masculinism_{is better suited than “patriarchy” or “androcentrism” to describe the}

way special privilege is given to “masculine” qualities – understood as constructed rather than biological features. (Hooper, 2001, p. 41).

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10 grubbiness or sordidness of social and political life” (Hall, 2014, p. 227) constitute key connections between the “elite” and the “popular,” serving to digest, in ways, political questions, but also everyday realities of political activity (cf. also Brassett & Sutton, 2017).

However, as I will show in the next section, humor also simultaneously serves to enforce hegemonies and their cultural boundaries, by collectively determining what is funny or “unfunny” within specific groups and

communities, to the exclusion of others with different opinions (Billig, 2005; Dodds, 2007; Dodds & Kirby, 2013; Thorogood, 2016).

In Billig’s analysis, laughter is "both universal and particular […] [,] social and anti-social […] mysterious and resistant to analysis, but it is also understandable and analyzable." (Billig, 2005, p. 178) All humans (and apparently only humans) laugh, but for reasons which vary across groups and individuals; it creates a sense of inclusion, and, simultaneously, exclusion (those laughing, and those being laughed at); and although impossible to generalize (there is no universally funny joke), instances of laughter can be studied empirically, and

connected to the social differences they police, for "humour has its politics, morality and aesthetics." (Billig, 2005, p. 187) Phillips and Milner (2017) similarly speak of the “constitutive characteristics of humor”,

“function[ing] as a communicative tool to help build and sustain social worlds, across degrees of mediation.” (Phillips & Milner, 2017, p. 95) This type of humor

hinges most conspicuously on its fetishism: the process by which the full emotional, political, or cultural context of a given event or utterance is obscured, allowing participants to focus only on the amusing details. […] [F]etishized laughter is fundamentally myopic […]." (Phillips & Milner, 2017, p. 98)23

This “fundamental myopia,” they continue, can then be defended against critics by pointing to the “play frame” in which the joke occurs (Bateson, 1972; quoted p. 98) – what Billig terms the “tease-spray” (Billig, 2005, p. 197): by insisting on the humorous, playful intent of the offending joke, criticisms can be effectively neutralized, and critics are in turn excluded for lacking a “sense of humor.” Particularly in popular geopolitics in “the West,” this fetishistic humor serves to establish hierarchies of groups, or even nations, and unite those “at the top” of the hierarchical order in laughing at those “below”, giving rise to what Särmä terms “hegemonic laughter.” (Särmä, 2015, p. 115)

Building on their expertise as folklorists, Phillips and Milner (2017) trace a much longer history of “carnivalesque” expression, from dirty jokes and anecdotes to the once highly popular – and now all but forgotten – “Xeroxlore” of (US) corporate employees.24_{(Phillips & Milner, 2017) They suggest that folkloric}

expression contains both elements of conservativism and dynamism, respectively in its intent to mock and provoke, and its ever-evolving formats and shifting targets, in step with changing technological affordances and social concerns (p. 44). All of this “old soil”, from which, as they claim (p.21), the “new dirt” of memes, as well as online “trolling”, have grown out of, was always “bawdy and rough-hewn” (Greenhill and Matrix, 2010; quoted p. 34) – pushing the boundaries of the socially and morally acceptable and palatable, but also, frequently, aimed at subjugating certain social groups through mockery and stereotyping. As Phillips argues (p. 37), little of this has changed, especially in certain social media environments where “androcentrism” is very much alive and well (Massanari, 2015).

Political satire often shows the obverse effect ofdepoliticizing events, burying important information under waves of ambiguous humor in a “constant carnival” (Billig, 2005). Holbert et al. (2011) quote a study by Young, based on a widely-used Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), which suggested that respondents were “less

23_{In Žižek’s “simple Freudian” reading, the “political fetish” is “a fascinating image whose function is to obfuscate the true}

antagonism.” (Žižek, 2018, p. 82)

24_{The practice of – physically – cutting and pasting images and texts to form scannable and printable vignettes, which were}

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11 likely to scrutinize the claims presented” in humorous messages (Young, 2008, p. 134; quoted in Holbert et al., 2011, p. 190). In Žižek’s analysis,

when obscenity penetrates the political scene, ideological mystification is at its strongest: the true political, economic and ideological stakes are more invisible than ever. […] Unfortunately, people are ready to swallow many things if they are presented to them with laughter.” (Žižek, 2018, p. 85)

As this thesis tries to argue, the memes can be seen as drives by different groups to include people into laughing along (Särmä, 2015), thus accepting the different messages they push. The punchlines, however, are often troublingly fetishistic, and “digital tools kick ambivalent humor into hyperdrive" (Phillips & Milner, 2017, p. 116), effectively drowning out the possibility for a more concerted public debate (Kurowska & Reshetnikov, 2018). In the case of Reddit, this played out in the phenomenon of a “masculinist hegemony” (Hooper, 2001) engaged in “hegemonic laughter” (Särmä, 2015) that absorbed other users into the “collective acceptance” (Balzacq et al., 2016) of the liberal-democratic establishment’s sterile securitizing moves (Žižek, 2018) .

Visual securitization

Long before memes were the phenomenon they are today, images have been the subject of studies concerned with their role and impact in everyday politics – how they serve to reinforce beliefs or arouse support for or against issues, exacerbate diplomatic tensions (Saunders, 2018), and even lead to violence (Hansen, 2011). Hansen credits images’ ability to “speak security” to the visceral, immediate reactions they can engender (“immediacy”), the rapidity with which they move across communication channels (“circulability”), and the unpredictability of their reading(s) (“ambiguity.”) (Duncombe & Bleiker, 2015, p. 42; Hansen, 2011, p. 53). As also stated by Mirzoeff, “in the contemporary realm of international relations, images have been weaponized in an unending war of ideas, and while they may not cause actual physical damage they are nonetheless capable of producing tangible, often destructive outcomes (Mirzoeff 2015).” (Saunders, 2017, p. 1)

In Vuori (2015)’s summary,

visual means can present security arguments, embody threat images, and increase or decrease the plausibility of such claims. Similarly important is how images portray, amplify, and form cultural resonance and symbolic capital within processes of securitization […]. (Vuori, 2013, p. 199)

Visual and audiovisual media are thus particularly powerful elements in the feedback loops which form the “conditions of possibility” for securitization (Hansen, 2011).

The principal questions then to be asked by those studying issues of visual representation are “’[w]ho or what represents what to whom with what, and where and why?’”( W.J.T. Mitchell, 1994: 420; quoted in Rose, 2016, p. 20). The debate, today, stands between those who argue that new digital tools for image creation and reproduction have emancipatory potential, and those more skeptical of “technological determinism” (Morozov, 2011; Stocchetti, 2015).

In Stocchetti’s analysis, images are inherently ambivalent, supportive of emancipation as well as oppression” (Stocchetti, 2015, p. 5); over-optimism for the former fails to take into account the power relations which ultimately determine 1. the form and scope of technology on which the images travel and 2. the inescapable hierarchies of social values (i.e. ideology) which determine the “effectiveness” - the spread and political impact - of any image. In observing the contemporary mediascape, Stocchetti’s view leans more to the latter, stating that “digital visuality may facilitate the diversification of delivery platforms, but not the pluralism of ideological functions.” (Stocchetti, 2015, pp. 8–9) This proves, sadly, to be the case with most of the images explored in this thesis.

Wiggins and Bower (2015) observe how image memes in particular have proven to persist more in time compared to videos or GIFs. Images are smaller in size and almost immediate in impact, requiring little to no

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12 data usage or time spent appraising them, and can be viewed anywhere, at any time. With the use of clever captions, an unambiguous reading of the image is enforced (pace Hansen).

Memes thus present themselves as uniquely optimal vehicles for the transmission of explicit ideas, and for the reinforcement of social and cultural capital (Vuori, 2013), and have become staples of our information diet well beyond my own generation, thanks to the growing use of social media. As noted by Särmä (2015),

even though online happenings and encounters are so often described as separate from those that happen IRL (in real life), they actually, in very tangible ways, constitute our everyday understandings of world politics and our engagements with various issues that we associate with the realm of world politics. In other words, how, in the everyday, we make sense of Iran or North Korea, Kim Jong-Il and Kim Jong-Un, [or Putin’s Russia], nuclear weapons and proliferation, is intimately tied to the viewing of, laughing at, and making and/or sharing of the various memes and parodies. (Särmä, 2015, p. 113)

The next section will provide an overview of current debates on social media and the memes they spread.

Memes and social media, then and now

In surveying the literature dating around 2013-2014, one sees a highly optimistic rhetoric about networked communication’s potential to influence political affairs, (Lovink, 2019; Shifman, 2014) by propelling forward “positive” messages of change and solidarity from the bottom up (Miltner, 2018). The recent Arab spring, and the social media factor which was, we now know, overly hyped (Morozov, 2011) betrayed a hope that ubiquitous connectivity could create new, constructive energies that would transcend boundaries and national

specificities into a greater, global, democratic citizenry. As we have witnessed in recent years, new energies

have been created – but social media have also, and often more prominently, given an effective platform for more negative (e.g. racist, chauvinist, or simply dispersive) discourse emanating both from the “top”

(Karatzogianni, Miazhevich, & Denisova, 2017; Kurowska & Reshetnikov, 2018) and from the “bottom” (Lovink, 2019; Nagle, 2017; Phillips, 2018; Phillips & Milner, 2017).

Especially for this reason, critical commentators have reemphasized the significance of working to understand memes and what they represent, beyond “trivial yuks” (Zittrain, 2014) or “meaningless media snacks” (Jenkins, 2009).

The term “meme” was originally coined by Richard Dawkins to describe “units of cultural transmission” (1976, quoted in Philips and Milner 2017: 30) which spread, like genes, across minds – hence the adaptation of the word mimema (imitation) to rhyme with “genes.” Another major input into meme research came from Blackmore (2000), who suggested a wider application of the concept – and perhaps a more eerie one: that our bodies and minds are merely conduits for memes, which have no aim except to continue replicating, regardless of the effects on their hosts. Often memes coalesce to mutually reinforce each other: these are termed “memeplexes,” (Blackmore, 1999) and examples of these would be religion, capitalism, even – I would venture – the Cold War.25

This latter memeplex might be seen to include Putin and Russia’s image in the West, the belief in the necessity of US global supremacy, Eurocentrism, the morbid (Orientalizing) attraction to topics of Soviet espionage and “international intrigue” (Sharp, 2000), from which the accusations of “treason” levied against Trump have emerged.

However, these conceptualizations of memes are not the first to come to mind, due to the “reappropriation” of the word in the digital context. The idea of our brains as mostly unwitting hosts to memes which have one sole aim – to occupy minds and grow further – was enthusiastically taken up in early internet cultures, and the term has been used to describe digital artifacts – videos, GIFs, and images, usually of a humorous nature – which spread like viruses across the internet, often for reasons we can’t quite explain. This type of understanding has

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13 gained the widest currency, even though (or perhaps, because) it obscures the rather more unsettling original connotation within an effective “play frame” (Phillips & Milner, 2017).

In Zittrain’s concise formulation, “an internet meme is a picture or drawing (usually from an unwitting source) that’s taken on a shared, iconic quality, coupled with a resonating message […]." (Zittrain, 2014, p. 388)

Resonance is derived from memes’ “intertextuality” (Shifman, 2014, p. 4). Intertextuality presumes a shared mindset, reflected in particular “language formations,” which ensures that individuals who are “in the know” will decode and interpret objects and texts along the same, or at least similar, lines, to the exclusion of other interpretations (Salter, 2013, p. 18). “Getting” a meme – understanding its message and appreciating its humor or relatability – then, requires the viewer to appraise a “multimodal” (visual, textual, and sometimes audio) combination (“remixing”) of variously “reappropriated” popular culture material (i.e. taken and transposed out of their original context) (Phillips & Milner, 2017, pp. 30–31). This material is often “iconic,” though recognizability of the original is not a strict requirement, but is rather “contingent upon the reader”(Weldes & Rowley, 2015, p. 19) and their particular information diets.26_{The more a message is “resonant” with the viewer’s personal}

experience and/or cultural tastes, the more likely they will be to pass the meme on to others, anticipating a similar resonance among them. “Through these logics, participants create, circulate, and transform shared texts, adding unique and ever-evolving contributions to vast cultural tapestries.” (Phillips & Milner, 2017, pp. 30– 31) It is in these “vast cultural tapestries,” then, that discursive hegemonies are created and reinforced.

Memes are thus understandable as “hypermediatized”27_{ideas, informed by news and pop culture, mixed with}

personal experiences and outlooks, and accelerated by technology, which aim to replicate by seeking resonance and acceptance in a wider audience, who will confirm it as “truth” by liking and sharing it.28

Goriunova (2013), following Deleuze, contends that the “new media idiocy” which seems to be at the heart of memetic production is in fact testimony to a search for this truth , which necessarily takes the path of exploring the false and idiotic (usually through the humorous); with “new media” (which is of course no longer new at all), this endeavor is taken up individually, but within a larger collective effort on social media platforms,

increasingly divided into competitive groups of interest. As observed by Särmä (2015),

there are codes/conventions of commenting, linking and giving praise for the best and cleverest images and what seems like a bit of competition for who is first – i.e. fastest – and who is canniest in designing and releasing the images. The competitive nature of parody practices on the internet contributes to these surges of parody images relating to a specific event […]. (Särmä, 2015, p. 113)

Here, “the ease with which it can switch from breakthroughs to meaninglessness is characteristic of network human–technical architecture at large and the software mediation of culture in particular.” (Goriunova, 2013, p. 233) As testament to the time Goriunova’s article was written, the memes observed were overall positive in tone, expressing messages which may have been idiotic, but were fundamentally harmless. It is however possible to see how the same processes can take on negative features, as the competitive “carnival” becomes increasingly dark and aggressive (Lovink & Tuters, 2018). With the acceleration of competition for resonance, it often seems as though meme-making communities – at least in certain quarters – are in a race to the bottom, to make the “edgiest”, “dankest”29_{(and darkest) memes to shock, surprise, and be spread further by an}

increasingly numb and cynical audience.

26_{Lovink and Tuters (2018a) provide, in this sense, a much more drier, pragmatic description of memes as “local language}

games embedded within communities of practice and bracketed by the affordances of platforms.” (Lovink & Tuters, 2018)

27_{Bolter and Grusin quote William J. Mitchell (1994)’s description of “hypermediacy” as a visual style which "privileges}

fragmentation, indeterminacy, and heterogeneity and … emphasizes process or performance rather than the finished art object" (Bolter & Grusin, 2001, p. 31).

28_{Cf. (Fuller, 2018) for a wider discussion of the notions of truth (or consensus) in science and philosophy.} 29_{Cf. glossary entry “dank”.}

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14

Figure 1 - a reflection on how internet culture has changed in its aesthetic approach to cats (and fonts). Source:

https://me.me/i/internet-remember-when-cats-used-to-rule-internet-also-internet-3e5e7d2e4be34c308f6df7383cbbe2d9 (accessed 27-05-2019)

This research aims to demonstrate the powerful role memes have played in promoting or excluding specific interpretations of a geopolitical event, and how these functions are embedded in the hegemonic discourses and practices of one particularly influential social media platform: Reddit.

I characterize Reddit as a “digest” of news and entertainment, curated by users, but also by administrators: analyzing discussions here thus aims to continue on the path set out by Sharp (2000), who examined the

trajectories of US (geo)political identity formation through the Reader’s Digest, before, during, and after the Cold War (Dittmer, 2018; Sharp, 2000). This thesis, however, also aims to meet the invitation from popular geopolitics scholars to look beyond “elite scriptings of the world” (Dittmer & Gray, 2010, p. 1665), to see how geopolitical imaginaries are negotiated in what are truly popular culture artifacts: memes.

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15

Chapter 2: Methodology

In the previous chapter I suggested that the memes which emerged in response to the summit constitute artifacts of popular geopolitics, which function as resonance machines to draw viewers into agreeing with a certain interpretation of events, by playing on recognizable, yet novel combinations of image and text. In the next sections I will describe how I explored the wider context of the summit’s discussion, and the types of memes that sprung from it (Särmä, 2015, p. 112). I will explain my decision to focus on Reddit, and report my observations on its functioning and social politics. Finally, I will outline my approach to understanding what kinds of content – visual and textual – were most shared and interacted with on the occasion of the summit. As noted by Lindgren (2017), given the shifting nature of the digital sphere, research into digital spaces “must embrace research methods as a creative act. […] [R]esearchers must ‘reveal the messy details of what they are actually doing, aiming toward mutual reflection, creativity, and learning that advances the state of the art’ (Sandvig & Hargittai 2015; quoted in (Lindgren, 2017, p. 234)).” I will therefore also discuss the difficulties in gathering data, and maintain attempt to clarify my choice for a combination of emergent methods to understand a multifaceted, ephemeral phenomenon.

Multimodal research in the digital fields of the web and social media

As explored in previous sections, memes depend on a complex intertextuality. The sets of cultural, social, political references they remix, reappropriated, and often transform, usually require some familiarity with the original products; furthermore, certain linguistic and aesthetic features are often incomprehensible to those who have not extensively engaged with the field. As Dittmer and Gray (2010) surmise,

[t]he semiotic and commercial success of a popular culture artifact is only understandable as a result of emergent causality, with various elements of the techno-cultural-economic assemblage resonating with each other in ways neither predictable nor necessarily understandable after the fact. (Dittmer & Gray, 2010, p. 1670)

Understanding “the cultural soup” (Lovink, 2019) from which memes emerge and into which they spread and morph therefore necessitates a “multimodal” approach, (Machin & van Leeuwen, 2016; Rose, 2016) which examines, in the first place, the images, but also their underlying imaginaries, the broader contexts, discourses or peculiarities they refer to, and the specific cultural and technological practices of the platforms they travel on (Dittmer & Gray, 2010, p. 1670; Särmä, 2015, p. 113).

I initially collected material starting from repeated “research searches” (Airoldi, 2018, p. 4; Rogers, 2017) (i.e. entering the fixed search terms ‘trump’ ‘putin’ ‘helsinki summit,’ and, in a separate instance, ‘memes’ into different search bars (social media or Google) and followed the results around the web. (Särmä, 2015, pp. 116– 117)

I read a vast number of news articles and editorials on the event, analyzing their language, from which I later observed the extent to which they resonated on social media. I explored the memes propagated on the occasion, and identified common tropes and themes. After about one month of “pre-fielding,” I chose to focus on Reddit, where I observed the platform’s overall rules of engagement and principal demographics. In a later stage, I worked to triangulate my observations with quantitative analyses of the memes and posts shared on the occasion, and their engagement metrics within and beyond the site, in order to identify the most popular posts pertaining to the case study, while situating them in the broader social media ecology of the period in question. This period spanned from the end of June to the beginning of August, 2018; however, given that my “fieldwork” took place from October 2018 onwards, there were also relevant items which dated later than the summit, and several of these will also be discussed.

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16 I also collected material encountered during my “normal” internet use. Sharing my research interests with friends, for instance, led to what Särmä has termed “reverse snowballing”(Särmä, 2015, pp. 116–117): many of them began (and continue) to send me material more or less pertaining to my topic. This also alerted me to “trending” discussions, memes and formats, and deepened my understanding of the language and tempos of social media. As I went, I bookmarked all material that might be relevant, screenshotted interesting comments, and noted my observations and ideas.

The amount of material on the topic is potentially infinite, and the story continues to evolve even after the anti-climactic ending of the Mueller probe. (Kotkin, 2019) For this reason, sticking to my original research time- and conceptual frame was extremely difficult. To complicate matters further, there are ever-increasing options for web research (as well as disappearing options, in the wake of a number of reported cases of misuse by

platforms such as Facebook – cf. Rieder, 2018). The practice of striving to understand and test these new tools became an excessively time-consuming process. Given my temporal and technical limitations, I opted for a few simple ways of “working with the medium” (Weltevrede, 2016) and with “found data:” data publicly available online, acquired “covertly” by “lurking” on the site – i.e. without declaring my presence as researcher (Lindgren, 2017, pp. 232–233). Although I had initially aimed to undertake a digital ethnography – or “netnography”

(Kozinets, 2015)30_{– time limitations, a good deal of confusion and distraction, and reluctance to interact with the}

field led me to settle for qualitative/interpretive, visual and textual discourse analysis. Below, I will present my “semi-ethnographic” analysis of the Reddit platform on which I lurked (and into which I have, by now, “gone native.”)

What is Reddit?

31

Self-titled as “The Frontpage of the Internet,” Reddit (counting approximately 330 million users at this time)32

showcases an almost infinite variety of groups (“subreddits”, or “subs”, denoted by the prefix “r/”)33_{where users}

(“redditors”) post content (“submissions”) according to each sub’s stated interests and themes. These have specific sets of rules to post, and moderators (“mods”) will “ban” redditors who break them (i.e., prevent them from posting or commenting on that sub). Other redditors up- or down-vote these submissions, and can comment on them.

The most popular content across the platform appears on r/popular and r/all, which display, respectively, the most “upvoted” submissions by users, and a “digest” of all submissions, selected by Reddit’s administrators. The most favored content on these “frontpages” is often explicitly non-political, coming from subs dedicated to posting heartwarming pictures of animals (e.g. r/aww), discussions in various pop culture fan communities, and

30_{Online ethnography involving participant observation and interviews with different social media groupings, e.g. by}

frequenting chatrooms (Kozinets, 2015).

31_{Massanari (2015) wrote an ethnography of Reddit, which I came to significantly late in my research: on the one hand, this}

allowed me to take an independent approach in exploring the site; on the other, I was able to fill in several gaps in my understanding of some of the site’s less obvious functions, and compare my notes with her observations. I identified many similarities in our interpretations, and these have been indicated; however, the overall discourse has certainly changed in the wake of Trump’s election, and the widely-perceived inauguration of the “post-truth era” and extreme political polarization. Testifying to her perspicacity, though, there were many anticipations in her conclusions about what Reddit might become.

32_{Cf. the visualization of different SNS’ growth over time by u/splityoassintwo (07-04-2018)}

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/8ahy05/internet_communities_popularity_on_google_trends/ (accessed 13-05-2019)

33_{The complete list of subreddits, as well as their more recent attention metrics, can be seen on}_{http://redditlist.com}

(accessed 09-05-2019). Cf. u/SirEpic’s visualization of the different subs’ growth over time:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/9c52iq/oc_the_growth_of_reddit_interactive_demo_in/ (u/SirEpic, 01-09-2018; accessed 13-05-2019).

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17 especially photos and videos of funny or absurd situations (for instance, r/youseeingthisshit).34_{There are also}

subs dedicated to specific hobbies or activities, learning and useful information, and some showing videos of injuries, or even death (though these are largely hidden from the front pages – partially by popular vote, partially by platform censorship).

Another interesting aspect of Reddit which will be treated in this thesis is the AMA format. r/IAmA (19m subscribers) is a thread where individuals offer to answer questions directly from redditors (titles usually opening as: “I am a […] . Ask me anything!) These events have involved celebrities, politicians, and scientists, but also “ordinary” people with interesting professions or life experiences,35_{creating a line of direct communication}

between “experts” and audiences. (Massanari, 2015, p. 9) One of the top Reddit posts of all time (216K upvotes), for instance, was an AMA with US President Barack Obama in 2012.36

Redditor share content which they believe might stoke interest on the platform – measured in upvotes. Each upvote gives the user (“Original Poster” or “OP”) “karma” points. A high karma score acts as a badge of merit: users with high karma will generally be seen as more credible when posting content or comments; low or negative karma works the opposite way, and also bars one from posting to certain subreddits. Redditors can use “silver,” “gold,” and “platinum” tokens, acquired by purchasing Reddit “coins,” to further reward posts they have particularly enjoyed. The awards grant receivers an escalating sum of reddit coins they can use to then reward others, and one or two weeks experiencing the “premium” account (otherwise costing 5.99 euros per month).37

While many redditors appear to scorn these micropayment schemes (which serve to fund Reddit and – allegedly – ensure its independence), everyone wishes for their post to be seen and rewarded; awards are always

gratefully (and formulaically) acknowledged: “thanks for the gold/silver kind stranger!” “Wow, did not expect

platinum!” etc. The number of awards inevitably influences how users first approach the post.

There is, in fact, a petty, competitive side to Reddit as well: this is seen also in the frequent episodes of “karma farming (/whoring)” – when users repost others’ content as their own “original content” (“OC”), or play on overused trends to gain “easy” points. These are usually called out by other redditors, but often the majority takes the bait, either because they are new to the site, or are not as assiduous frequenters. The latter, however, routinely (and often viciously) question other redditors’ sincerity, ultimately seeing interactions as a

competitive “game” for popularity and attention, while accusing others of this mentality (Massanari, 2015). A post’s lack of success can be determined by several other factors. Sometimes it was simply not seen by a wider public: although there are always a few dedicated redditors who ‘sort by new’ – i.e. choose to be shown the most recent posts on their homepage, rather than the most popular ones – if there isn’t a critical mass of upvotes, the post will simply be lost from view. As redditors scroll endlessly for the most interesting content, many less-than-impressive posts are ignored – neither upvoted nor downvoted. The same situation applies to comments. Timing and time zones are also a significant factor: many interactions are missed simply because different users are online at different times. This also works to maintain the widely-perceived US centrism of the platform: content posted on US times will inevitably attract the bulk of the attention.

34_{The clever play on words here (“Are You Seeing This Shit”) was noted, e.g, by u/fistmyberrybummle (26-07-2018):}

https://www.reddit.com/r/youseeingthisshit/top/?t=year (accessed 11-06-2019)

35_{Cf. Massanari, 2015 on how some of these AMA’s have gone awry to the point that they are part of Reddit history. One of}

these (the one with actor Woody Harrelson) was even mentioned in this thread – harkening back to a historical “shitshow”.

36_{https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/z1c9z/i_am_barack_obama_president_of_the_united_states/}_(accessed

09-06-2019)

37_{The privileged membership r/Lounge one can access with Reddit gold is described (rather unflatteringly) here:}

https://slate.com/technology/2018/08/reddits-lounge-for-elite-posters-is-very-boring-it-turns-out.html?via=recirc_recent (accessed 09-05-2019).

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18 Other times a post is truly disliked by a majority of redditors: this occurs most often when it is a ‘repost’ (an item which has been shared in the past, usually enough times that other redditors remember it); a perceived instance of “karma farming;” or propounding distasteful views. Although the number of downvotes are not reported, each post presents a percentage measure of upvotes to downvotes (the “upvote ratio”), providing another useful index of (dis)agreement on a submission. Reddit has the option to sort the homepage, a sub, or a post’s comments by ‘controversial’, whereby interactions which have received a near-equal measure of up- and downvotes, or a significant number of downvotes and comments, can be seen. Often redditors “report” on the appalling conditions “down there.”

As noted by Massanari (2015), although the official “Reddiquette” (etiquette) insists that downvoting should only be deployed on submissions that do not “contribute to the discussion” rather than for personal reasons, very few actually uphold this, and instances of “brigading” are frequent.38_{The “rules of the game” are thus both}

consciously and explicitly enforced – and, more often than not, subverted (Massanari, 2015). This has provided much insight into the nature and limits of “civil discussion,” US-centric social media’s “metacultural values,” and the “invisible hegemonic cultures” (Sharp, 2000, pp. xiii; xvi) that define what is “civil.” There are many subs dedicated to metacommentary and reflexivity (Massanari, 2015, p. 21), where redditors can call out disagreeable behavior or complain about the platform’s “hive-mind” effect (ibid., p. 10). On less-politicized issues, however, “typical” redditors strive towards objectivity and correctness in their postings and their interactions, with content and with each other.39

While Reddit appears to host a majority of left-leaning, liberal-progressive (and often quite elitist) users, there are notable exceptions, such as r/The_Donald, self-described as “[…] a never-ending rally dedicated to the 45th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump.”40_{Other similarly-oriented subs include r/Republican,}

r/libertarian, r/conservative, etc. These subs’ posts rarely exceed a few thousand upvotes, however – unlike r/politics and r/Political Humor which frequently hit upwards of ten thousand upvotes, up to over a hundred thousand, and are regularly on the front pages (r/popular and r/all). If one sticks to the personalized homepage, though, it is easy to remain in a filter bubble. Reddit, like most other social media, uses proprietary algorithms (“black boxes” – Weltevreden 2016) which re-order the content a user will see according to their subscriptions and past interactions,41_{but also according to even less transparent administrator (and advertisers’)}

preferences.42_{Furthermore, the comment sections are sorted so that parts of the threads are hidden: to see all}

interactions, one has to manually “open” hidden replies – something a casual scroller would not normally do. As most redditors also understand, there are definite platform politics at work, which privilege or marginalize certain types of content.

38_{“Brigading” refers to a more or less organized, concerted effort by redditors to downvote a post or comment they don’t}

like to reduce its visibility on the page. It can sometimes take unreasonable dimensions (for instance calling on fellow users to downvote all the past posts and comments of a target redditor), thanks both to the “Reddit hivemind” (Massanari, 2015) and the tendencies of certain redditors to take interactions to extremes.

39_{This was also the reasoning behind my decision to not treat 4chan in this paper, given this platform’s well-known}

penchant for utterly inscrutable ambivalence (Burton, 2016; Phillips & Milner, 2017).

40_{The sub is moderated in part by a member of the Trump campaign management, Brad Parscale.}

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/bi6o6t/feeling_cute_might_delete_later_idk/ (accessed 29-04-2019)

41_{(cf. the discussion on}

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/88disb/did_reddit_change_the_front_page_algorithm_again/ and official notice by administrators https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/7spgg0/best_is_the_new_hotness/ (both accessed last 11-06-2019).

42_{I had an effective adblocker throughout my research, whereby I did not notice any external ads. A few logins from}

Memes and popular geopolitics : Reddit's resonance machines for the "new" Cold War