Written by Ana Ghetu
Illustrated by Sylvain Chan
It’s 2 am, and my laptop screen is the only source of light in the room. I’m hours deep in scrolling through a maze of critical theory meme accounts with handles that range from ‘dank Deleuze’ and ‘edgy Hegel’ to ‘immanentized.eschatology’ and ‘anarchogoth’. Scroll through this supermarket of intellectual and political content and you’ll find references to niche theoretical concepts like fractal ontology, becoming-molecular, and cute accelerationism. In this online public sphere, philosophy coexists with memes, pop culture, internet slang, millennial humour and self-reflexivity, and the comments perfectly complete the picture of the Extremely Online Brain. Some of my favourites include people speculating on the ‘libidinal force’ of green M&M’s, the semiotics of electronic dance music, and how many AGI’s it takes to screw in a lightbulb.
This descent into the ‘internet rabbit hole’ of critical theory is not just idle scrolling—it’s a mode of knowledge production and exchange. Memes and digital culture flourished during the Covid era (which gave us doomscrolling), when many of us found ourselves with nothing to do than stare at screens all day. The frenetic curiosity driving critical theory memes (and their communities) also recalls early 00’s internet, before the algorithm dictated the terms of our attention. ‘Going online’ was a distinct activity that required the intention to sit in front of the computer screen and ‘surf the web,’ which often led to a hyperlink fever dream and all-night research session. There was – and still is – something magical about this kind of deep dive. Unlike the passive consumption of the social media feed, the rabbit hole requires effort; it rewards the obsessive, the archivist, the seeker. It’s the contemporary version of rifling through a dusty library, except books are replaced with intellectual shitposting (or whatever your personal choice of rabbit hole is).
There’s a complex ecosystem here of intertextuality, mass politics, and collective sociality, which supercharges the experience of consuming digital culture. Finding an enclave of like-minded people who understand the same references as you can foster a sense of belonging, and even produce identification with a larger collective or politics. Which begs a broader question: does the collectively produced internet culture, which functions as a language and a politics, actually forge something like a common world? Or is it just an illusion that we assign common meanings to the memes, viral videos and hot takes that we all come across online? While online communities can coalesce around shared interests and meanings, they can also reinforce filter bubbles, limiting exposure to a narrow spectrum of content and voices. This insularity raises concern for effective democracies and the circulation of diverse perspectives, but for some, part of its appeal is in being able to cultivate spaces for escapism from the mainstream.
Undoubtedly, there appears to be a kind of collective joy in sharing, liking, participating, and consuming online content. The obvious exception is when people attack each other in comment sections, erect boundaries of taste and morality and harden into ideologically sorting one another, or when the rabbit hole leads to darker places like QAnon, extremist forums, or toxic subcultures. Beyond these visible fractures lies the even more insidious reality of data extraction and platform monopolies. The fantasy of a ‘free’ internet is an anachronism, and like the software engineers in the Silicon Valley TV show whose dream of building a new, decentralised internet repeatedly eludes them, so do our attempts at claiming any real agency on the internet; our feeds are determined by algorithms, our online movements are extracted as highly profitable data, and creative possibilities are limited in the hands of a few major players. Critical theory accounts double as side hustles (sorry, Adorno!) with creators forced to navigate the precarious gig economy; increasingly, creative ‘labours of love’ are tethered to precarity, and must adapt to the demands of SEO.
Perhaps, then, this is a love letter to a practice increasingly squeezed by platform capitalism and, as such, one that relies on the potential of our astonishing collective power to imagine forms of production and togetherness which cannot be reduced to mere data relations.
