The Dark Subcultures of Online Politics - Joshua Citarella - #1032

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
I really love what you do. I think it's very interesting, very unique.

**Joshua Citarella** (0:03)
That's incredible high praise from the greatest cinematic podcast that I think exists. I mean, there's only so many people in the game that produce really beautiful video footage, and I think you seem to be in maybe the top spot there, so it's a great honor.

**Chris Williamson** (0:19)
Thank you. Some may accuse me of old style and no substance.
I'll take whatever I can get. How do you describe what you do? You meet somebody at a cocktail party and they say, so what is it that you're interested in? What do you say?

**Joshua Citarella** (0:35)
I suppose I first try to avoid the cocktail party if at all possible, but I used to say artist because that was what I did. I would show work in galleries and museums. Now I say artist and internet culture writer. I'm a podcaster though. Most people know me for podcasting, so about a year ago, maybe a little over a year ago, I launched Doom Scroll. We're now on episode 36, 35, something like that. It's a real transformation in that I used to publish to an audience of 10,000 dedicated intellectuals, and now it's 100,000 weekly viewers, and it's just a very, very different game.

**Chris Williamson** (1:11)
What is it that you're interested in? What is it you focus on?

**Joshua Citarella** (1:16)
I guess it goes back to 2018 I wrote this book. It was a self-published book, really a long-form essay called Politigram and the Post Left, that was looking at the memetic activity of teenagers, 12 to 17 at that time. Mostly people on what we would then call the post left. That means a little bit of something different now, which you might associate with like post liberal, new rights, what have you. Previously, Bernie supporters, now people who have gone through that like Bernie to Trump pipeline, that's generally what we call post left. At that time, it meant eco-anarchy, green anarchy, anarcho-primitivism, people who would reject industrial society and were 14 years old posting on Instagram. And I wrote a pretty extensive ethnography of how those people got into those politics.

**Chris Williamson** (2:05)
That sounds niche. That sounds somewhat niche. No kidding.

**Joshua Citarella** (2:09)
Yes. Yeah. It was extremely niche. I think it has held up pretty well, considering that was eight years ago now. And it laid kind of the foundation for a lot of the memetic ecosystem that we live in now. So if you look at those like early, you know, this is all primary sources of people who were meme makers, like teenagers who were shitposting on the bus to school. There are early inklings of how our media environment exists now.
So, yeah, I think while it was previously niche to audiences of hundreds or thousands, we now see those same narratives and in some cases literally the same memes posted to audiences in the hundreds of thousands or millions. So the scale on these things, we call it early detection. How do you find something that is going to get big in the future? It's like political trend casting.

**Chris Williamson** (3:00)
Wow, fascinating. What is it that predicts whether something is going to become big in the future or whether something is going to die a death like most memes probably do?

**Joshua Citarella** (3:12)
Well, this was part of the debate at that time, whether this was part of a trend cycle that has a bell curve, of early adopters, late adopters, it gets big and then it dies off. I think the key to that is the underlying analysis of knowing what is a problem that won't go away, or what is a problem that won't easily go away, what is the trend line that you're following. And if you're looking at downward mobility in the United States for most working people, that's been pretty steady for like 40 years. So I don't think that's a trend cycle. And basically what I was mining at that time was kids in this Gen Z bracket who are looking at a life that is very different from Millennials, very different from Gen X. They don't have that same boomer upward mobility where the future they're looking towards is in some cases pretty grim. And so it was understandable about why they would want to reject technology or get into radical politics and do something to upend the status quo.

**Chris Williamson** (4:13)
How do you come to think about what's happening with young people in politics at the moment? I think I've heard you say that it's qualitatively different than it was in the past.