Politigram: Case Studies in Political Meme Posting
Politigram: Case Studies in Political Meme Posting
Guest post
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.
I’ve spent the last few years interviewing Gen Z meme posters from across the political spectrum. This long form project began in 2018 when I wrote an essay called Politigram & the Post-left, 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 many more.
The story follows a group of young social media users, across various platforms, as they drift in their political beliefs. Members of this group generally begin on the progressive left but overtime become anarcho-primitivists. Over the course of a few years, they lose hope in industrial society and get radicalized by climate change. At the end, they gather into a core group on Discord which disseminates the writings of active eco-terrorist groups alongside instructional manuals for how to make improved explosive devices.
Politigram is a portmanteau nickname 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. Through a series of written and audio interviews, I spent the next few years mapping 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 dystopian futures they expect to unfold within their young lifetimes. These conversations span a wide gamut from Egoist Communization, Pan-Constitutional Monarchism, Post-Libertarianism, Unconditional Accelerationism, Leftcom Internationalism and many more.
Bonbiwaffen is a far right accelerationist cult, organized around the worship of a cute TikToker. They produce adorable memes, videos and propaganda, juxtaposed with horrific acts of political violence. Their proposed solution is to accelerate all political conflicts in order to stoke violent revolution and allow a new society to rise from the ashes.
Perhaps the most aesthetically fascinating and politically frightening group I encountered was a loose organization called Bonbiwaffen.
Bonbiwaffen is a far right accelerationist cult, organized around the worship of a cute TikToker. They produce adorable memes, videos and propaganda, juxtaposed with horrific acts of political violence. Their proposed solution is to accelerate all political conflicts in order to stoke violent revolution and allow a new society to rise from the ashes.
Politigrammers revel in adding as many prefixes and suffixes to their ideology as possible. (Remember, these are mostly kids in middle school.) These hyper-specific categories are colloquially referred to as “e-deologies”. E-deology is an internet slang term used to describe complex ideological labels and niche personal branding in the chaotic landscape of online politics.
Over the course of this written interview series I observed several significant trends across the Right and Left. 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.
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.
On the right, there is noticeable shift away from the free market evangelism that characterized conservative politics for the millennial generation. No one under the age of 25 is a “lolbertarian”. They make jokes about Ayn Rand and call Paul Ryan a cuck. Everyone believes in climate change. Young conservatives have aligned themselves with an older set of values that emphasize tradition and hierarchy. They no longer seek to fix market failures by further deregulating the economy. Instead, a heterodox economic populism has emerged among the young right. Many of them are economic protectionists and some are isolationists. Young people are wary of trade agreements and critical of America’s military presence overseas. Rallying cries like “support our troops” seem far less effective when most people believe that there is a deep state forcing the government to go to war.
The online energy that first emerged around Trump’s candidacy has now become a real political program in National Conservativism. There is a burgeoning economic realignment that is presently gathering institutional support. However, it remains unclear what actions Trump may take and where his rhetoric and policy will diverge.
On the Left, there remains a big eco-anarchist hangover that is bolstered by a techno-pessimism towards all climate technologies. There is a strong emphasis on land rights and renewable energy (particularly wind and solar). Themes of communization and the abolition of work are ubiquitous. Hastily summarized, communization theory argues that “communism” is not a process. The revolution is not lead by a vanguard party or achieved through organized workers. They believe that the transition is instantaneous and leaderless. Zoomers would prefer to get a bunch of friends together and start a commune than to engage in 20th century labor struggles.
The great irony of these sentiments is that the past few years have seen surprising gains for organized labor within the US. The online left seems largely unconcerned or unaware of this progress. Unlike the NatCon right, few of these online agitations seem to have made inroads onto real world politics.
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.
Today it feels nearly impossible to imagine a better world. Not surprisingly, these Gen Z speculations on the future come out rather grim and far to the left, right, up, down and sideways. 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.
My Political Journey
In mapping these online spaces I soon became fascinated by the political journeys of so many young people who ping-pong around the political spectrum. My Political Journey is a short form podcast series of interviews with young radical posters (ages 16 - 22).
“R” is a 16 year old anarcho-communist who was an eco-fascist at age 13. “J” was a Bernie supporter in 2016 who is now a neoreactionary. “N” is a left communist who was educated on 4chan’s /leftypol/. “X” is an Unconditional Accelerationist. “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, memes and content push someone to change their political beliefs.
“Z” was a young conservative who got into politics through Gamergate. He’s a practicing Muslim and the child of first generation immigrants from south Asia. He spent most of his time on YouTube watching creators like Sargon of Akkad and Louder with Crowder. But he soon found himself alienated by the Islamophobia he encountered on their channels. As a result he began to lean much more libertarian.
He began to read Joseph Proudhon and learn about anarchist markets. Abruptly, his father’s business went bankrupt. Soon after, his parents divorced and he moved to a low income neighborhood with his mother and siblings. From Joseph Proudhon he now gets into Karl Marx. He’s around age 16 and begins devouring left wing content.
But “Z” again finds himself alienated by the left-wing communities he encounters online. While people often talk about mutual aid and helping the less fortunate, his real world experiences at the food pantry are always with conservative religious people doing charity work.
In the end, the family’s local mosque holds a fundraiser and collects a big donation to help rehouse them. The kids are in school. The mom is employed. And the donation helps them to afford rent in a new apartment.
Today, “Z” works in a factory (I suspect that this is an Amazon fulfillment center but I am unable to confirm that in the interview). It may not surprise you to learn that he is also a Dungeons & Dragons player. His character is a Dragonborn knight who battles an evil lich named “Jeff BeelzeBezos”.
These personal stories give context to the chaotic landscape of online politics. Meeting the people behind the accounts and listening to their experiences always reveals a deeper human story.
I’m not a journalist. I don’t have a blue check on any platform. I used to teach in art schools and now I write and talk about radical subcultures on the internet. I think that the honesty, generosity and participation of these subjects could only happen because they trusted me to represent their stories accurately, even when I disagreed with what they said. I’ve done my best to approach these subjects with empathy and an earnest hope to better understand how they view the world.
“The Biggest Red Pill is Just Reality Itself”
Today, liberal democracy feels very uncertain. History is back. We are once again talking about Fascism and Socialism and ideological narratives that were thought to have been over just a generation ago. As fewer people are able to access the benefits of the American mainstream, teens naturally move towards the further edges of the political spectrum and seek new solutions.
At the bottom of these “disinformation” rabbit holes, the only real clarity to be found is that everything is ideological. Ideology creates self-validating and mutually exclusive frameworks for understanding the world. “Disinformation” is itself an ideological statement which begs the question; who is the arbiter of this truth? Social media has helped to fracture our consensus of “the center” but this is only one piece of a long arc of cultural, economic and historical narratives that are now all coming to a head. Soon, the “center” will be realigned by a hard break to the left or right.
In the past few years, I’ve watched hundreds of young people shift from irony to ideology and subsequently cross over between many various sets of beliefs. This young generation, on the whole, feels a great uncertainty looking forward. The pervasive sense that you are living in a society whose best days are behind it, tends to point your political imagination toward dark places. Everyone questions everything until they are ultimately forced to choose a side.
Editor’s note: Let’s bully Mr. Citarella into a regular column on default.blog… Please leave a comment below as evidence this is a good idea! Don’t embarrass me Deeheads…
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“While people often talk about mutual aid and helping the less fortunate, his real world experiences at the food pantry are always with conservative religious people doing charity work.” — I wonder how it affects us to push everyone into these neat labels. Of course we can observe trends, but it just seems to work against our favor in the long run
This is modern journalism at its finest. People always shit talk Gen Z but have no real understanding of them. Internet based subcultures are some of the most toxic ideology breeding grounds to have ever existed in human history. Echo chambers gone radical.
These kids are similar to us in their humanity, but live very different upbringings than most millennials/gen x/boomers are familiar with. There is a darkness that looms over the American dream these days that causes wide ranging mental illness in youth that live primarily online.