Who tf is Joshua Citarella?
Since the launch of Doomscroll, some of the most frequent questions I hear are; “who tf is this guy?” and “seriously tho, where did he come from?” lol. In this week’s newsletter, I’ll do my best to answer some of these questions.
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The story goes like this: In 2018, I published a long form essay called Politigram & the Post-left. The text is a deep dive into young online memetic subcultures where teens explore niche radical politics like: eco-extremism, NRx, anarcho-primitivism, transhumanism, anarcho-capitalism, egoism, cyber-nihilism and much more.
I’m an artist and internet culture writer based in New York. For many years, my work was a “best kept secret” within the art world. I would give talks at galleries, museums and universities. I would publish online but I never put my work on sites with algorithmic recommendation (such as YouTube). Few avenues for discovery meant that this work spread mostly by personal recommendation and word of mouth. My projects developed a dedicated audience that focused on the topics of niche internet culture and radical online politics.
Among these readers and listeners were journalists, content creators, musicians, researchers, art curators and newsroom editors. As online politics became increasing bizarre and influential, I was one of the few independent voices publishing on these subjects outside of a think tank or academic setting. I would often give pull quotes to journalists. (For example, I’m the researcher quoted in Taylor Lorenz’s “OK Boomer” article in the New York Times.) My audience was small — but impactful. This video lecture gives an overview of my work and research at the time:
In addition to hosting Doomscroll, I’m also an artist. I’ve participated in art shows and museum projects for over a decade. I teach a media theory seminar at an MFA program (although the show has kept me so busy I’m unsure if I will be able to return in the fall).
For many years, I collaborated with the artist Brad Troemel. Throughout various projects we created numerous viral artworks. A 2017 profile in The New Yorker described Brad as “the troll of internet art”. (It’s not totally incorrect.) Through my participation in the New York art world I knew people in the local scene.
In hindsight, the media theory that post-internet artists would discuss in the early 20teens, laid the foundation for the radical online politics that would soon flourish on social media. In 2020, I started to self-publish alongside other independent art-adjacent projects like ‘Lil Internet and Caroline Busta of NEW MODELS. As my work began to circulate online, it attracted the attention of mainstream and alternative media voices.
My practice became an extensive research project into the underbelly of online political subcultures. Frustrated by the lack of quality writing and research in this field, I felt an obligation to continue.
To me, the project seemed rather straightforward; I would draw upon the media theory and aesthetic knowledge of the art world to explain the political chaos that was happening on social media. Our communication networks run on memes, so we should talk about them in a serious way.
Down the Rabbit Hole
Politigram & the Post-left follows a group of young social media users, across various platforms, as they drift in their political beliefs. Members of this group generally began on the progressive left but over time radicalize into eco-extremisism or anarcho-primitivisism. Within the space of a few years, they lose hope in any possibility for reform, reject industrial society and become radicalized by climate change. Towards the end of this story, these young users gather into a core group on Discord where they disseminate the writings of active eco-terrorist groups alongside instructional manuals for how to make improvised explosive devices.
At the time, I thought this would be just one of many similar ethnographies to soon be published on these topics. But it’s depth of immersion and level of access remains unique compared to other writing that I have seen. Few projects allow you to follow or document a real radicalization arc.
Politigram is a portmanteau for “political Instagram”, an online subculture of mostly young white males between the ages of 12 and 22. Similar communities exist on Reddit, 4chan, Tumblr and just about every other platform. Instagram seems to skew the youngest of them all. Their activities resemble a gamified form of identity play, where teens try on and off new political labels like they’re swapping characters in an MMORPG video game.
The text is a tour of radical online subcultures, all drawn from primary sources. At the time, this material was considered “too edgy” for most institutions and so I chose to self-publish. You can read the full 134 page text here on Substack (there’s a lot of images, its only around 20,000 words). You can also find the printed book available online.
After the essay, I spent the next few years interviewing Gen Z meme posters from across the political spectrum. These projects, in written and audio form, map a broad cross section of this unique memetic and ideological space.
20 Interviews
20 Interviews is a written interview series. It represents a cultural, political and aesthetic snapshot of these fleeting online communities. I sat down with 10 posters from the Right and 10 posters from the Left, ages 15 - 22, to ask them about the political futures they expect to unfold within their young lifetimes. This project was first published as a physical bound book and was later remediated as a series of episodic posts on Substack. The conversations span a wide gamut from; Egoist Communization, Pan-Constitutional Monarchism, Post-Libertarianism, Leftcom Internationalism and many more.
Perhaps the most aesthetically fascinating and politically frightening group I encountered was a loose organization called Bonbiwaffen. Bonbiwaffen is a far right accelerationist doomsday cult, organized around the worship of a cute TikTok cosplayer. They produce adorable memes, videos and propaganda, juxtaposed with horrific acts of political violence. Their proposed solution is to accelerate all conflicts in order to stoke violent revolution and allow a new society to rise from the ashes.
Over the past few years they have been repeatedly deplatformed from Instagram and other services. Today, they are primarily organized across a handful of Telegram channels. But every few months they crop up and make a new series of accounts on open social media. This cyclical process seems to repeat with a rotating community of several hundred to several thousand adherents across various platforms.
Today’s young online political spaces are vastly different from the shitposting antics of a few years earlier. As the influence of these communities has spilled over into the real world, memers have become more politicized, better educated and with fewer traces of irony.
My Political Journey
While mapping these online spaces, I became fascinated by the political journeys of so many young people who bounce around the political spectrum. My Political Journey is a short form audio-only podcast series of interviews with young radical posters (ages 16 - 22).
“My Political Journey: R” tells the brief story of a 16 year old Anarcho-Communist who was an Eco-Fascist at age 13. In the week before recording this episode, she attended a Black Lives Matter protest in a nearby major city. She describes her mental health journey and political evolution from liberalism, to neoconservativism, to the far right and ultimately to the radical left.
“MPJ: J” was a Bernie supporter in 2016 who is now a neo-reactionary. “MPJ: N” is a Left Communist who was educated on 4chan’s /leftypol/. “MPJ: X” is an Unconditional Accelerationist who gives us an extensive tour of online subcultures. “MPJ: V” is a 17 year old Marxist who was a right-wing troll at age 13. These and many other first person experiences are explored in this series.
In each of these interviews, we map the online subculture and media environments that shape young people’s ideas as they move through different networks and ideological worldviews. We try to isolate the influences, life experiences, online content and memes that cause someone to shift in their political beliefs.
Post-Internet Art
“Post-Internet” is term coined by artist Marisa Olson and curator Gene Mchugh. It refers to a cultural period where the internet is no longer considered a novelty but a normal part of every day life. Generally speaking, people use this label to describe art, music or literature that came up along with social media.
This was the period where the internet first started to become real life. Much of the work in this genre deals with the concept of “digital dualism”, a phrase coined by Nathan Jurgenson, that describes the blurry distinction between IRL and URL. Many of the iconic works of this style blend elements of the real world with the digital in ways that are seamless or uncanny.
Post-Internet artworks often sparked debates over whether the work was “real” or an elaborate piece of “fake news”. This dynamic of sincerely engaging while also subtly trolling your audience became a hallmark of the genre. These blurry divisions between online and offline foreshadowed the sensational and pseudo-ironic politics that would follow a few years later.
This recent episode with Mike Pepi describes some of my peer group’s creative and intellectual background. Old head nerds on Tumblr may remember “The Jogging”, our infamous viral art blog. Later, I collaborated with Brad Troemel on a project called “UV Production House”.
SWIM, an 8 x 12’ life-size tableau, depicts a live-work micro-apartment in an anarcho-capitalist future where New York City is flooded up to the first and a half floor. This piece marks the departure where my work now focuses on explicitly political themes. On a material level, I mostly stop using my most familiar tool, the camera, and begin to build images almost entirely through Photoshop and other software. This lighting and portraiture, illuminated by a rear window, became the visual style of Doomscroll.
In 2021, I gave an address to the graduating class of the MA Contemporary Art Practice Program at the Royal College of Art in the UK. The talk reflects on ten years of creative practice and the lessons learned along the way. Today, I mostly show work in museums, institutions, or other non-commercial spaces.
Do Not Research
I’m the founder and senior editor of Do Not Research. DNR began in 2020 as a private Discord server gathered to discuss memetic tactics and emergent political trends. I spent my first few years as a content creator building up this non-profit arts organization. Since that time, we have published work from over 350 contributors, released three annual anthology books, organized exhibitions, numerous film screenings, panel discussions and more. We just launched our first education program which is really exciting.
At this point, the numerous criticisms of online platforms, their poor designs and harmful social effects, are plainly self evident. Since 2012, we’ve been reading good critiques of these tools. Shout out to Laurel Ptak’s influential “Wages for Facebook” essay.
Today, instead of posting and theorizing about an alternative, we need to actually build one. The left (whatever that means) has an endless supply of critiques with very few actually-existing alternatives to show for it. The central thesis of my work and research has argued that these online tools can and should be used toward different ends. DNR is the proof that, with a lot of hard work, you can actually make something that generates better outcomes. It’s certainly not easy — but it is required.
Supporters who join the Discord will soon realize that this project is unlike other online communities. It’s a highly curated space and not an open platform. Do Not Research is our attempt to build a new institutional structure that holds up against the overwhelming incentives of today’s internet. I’m happy to say that we have recently been approved for official non-profit status and are now a registered 501c3 organization in New York state.
After “The End of History”
Gen Z finds itself on the other side of Fukuyama’s so-called “end of history”, the widely held belief that western liberal democracy is the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the final form of human government. In recent years, establishment politics have become increasingly brittle while previously fringe ideas have reentered the mainstream. Faced with the brunt of an imminent social, economic and climate crisis, downwardly mobile young people now gather in online spaces to workshop some vision of a path forward. To resolve our current crisis there will necessarily be a vast expansion of the Overton window and these online spaces will undoubtedly play a part in it.
I hope this post gives you some insight into the unconventional path that leads up to this point. I can’t summarize every project but its a good place to start. I’m grateful for your support and look forward to building on this project further.
real ones remember the Jogging!
Still curious for an entry level explainer on why you went on the journey towards getting jacked, if it was an ironic body politic reclamation of right-wing aesthetics or strictly a sincere quest for the gainz
Joshua, pleeease see Eddington and get Ari Aster on the show! The man clearly has a lot to say on politics and the internet!