Joshua Citarella Understands The Internet
An interview with culture's translator
I do not know what to call Joshua Citarella. Neither does he. When I asked how he is currently introducing himself, Citarella responded “poorly.” Alas, there is not yet a single term for artist-writer-mememaker-podcaster, or at least not one anyone would willingly use to refer to themselves.
In lieu of a title, a description: Joshua Citarella is someone who has spent an inordinate amount of time trying to make sense of the internet.
Usually, pursuing sense of this kind is a fool’s errand. The internet reveals itself only to those wading in its trenches, and most understanding is local. But Citarella’s internet immersion is very trenchant indeed. It is precisely this immersion that has made him one of today’s most important thinkers.
Beginning his career as part of the post-internet milieu active in the early 2010s, Citarella’s first immersive capacity was that of a fine artist. Later, he dug in as a documentarian; his 2018 book Politigram And The Post Left is an unequaled record of radicalization in the age of the internet, wherein Citarella traces a pipeline of politically disillusioned youth from meme pages to genuine extremism. Do Not Research, the internet arts and writing platform Citarella runs, made him a curator.
As society writ large reckons with internet culture’s impact on the ‘real’ world, few are better positioned to guide this burgeoning understanding than Citarella. And his latest endeavor, Doomscroll, is a perfect vehicle for this guideship. The podcast is hardly a year old, and it has already featured some of the most influential and prescient political, social, and artistic thinkers of our day, from legacy children like Ezra Klein, to new age savants like Adam Friedland and Hasan Piker, to purer theorists like Vivek Chibber and (in her own way) Grimes.
If the foregoing has not divested a reader of their desire to label Citarella, the best might be ‘storyteller.’ The critique embedded in his art, the record of Politigram, the editorial mission of DNR, and the conversations on Doomscroll all comprise a single narrative thread, and Citarella is its steward. It is a story told through many mediums in many voices. It is a story about the internet and culture, but also about American politics and the class struggle that precedes them. It is a story of new mediums, technology, social consciousness, what ‘they’ took from ‘us,’ and how ‘we’ might get it back.
It’s a good story. Hopefully the following conversation contributes to its telling.
Noah Jordan: When you began your professional art practice, what were your artistic convictions? What did you want to accomplish with your art?
Joshua Citarella: The guiding philosophy of my practice was best encapsulated by an essay from Brad Troemel called ‘The Accidental Audience.’ What Brad proposes is that as images circulate through the internet they are decontextualized, and new audiences don’t understand them exactly as artworks. To us, this represented an opportunity to embed political and cultural critiques into images—memes—that would virally spread through the network.
We started to create these conglomerations of brands that seemed contradictory, for example a brand like Hot Topic and Old Navy, but were both owned by the same parent company. By jamming these things together, we thought we were slowly raising the critical awareness of people on these networks, and that eventually this process was self-bankrupting and would eliminate any sense of counter cultural or consumer identity. The last sense of collectivity revealed at the end of that process would be class. That is an academic way of describing the ridiculous shitposting we did for a few years.
Noah Jordan: Today do you feel that the purpose of your artistic project is the same? Or has it changed?
Joshua Citarella: Usually, the potentials of a new technology become manifest in the worst possible way. The tactical media process Brad outlines in ‘Accidental Audience’ became the toolkit and strategy for far right meme posters who found ways to exploit the viral transmissibility of memes and embed them with different political critiques.
I see a direct through line from that [early] work to the viral memes I wrote about in 2018 with Politigram and the Post-Left. And now on Doomscroll, a lot of the content we discuss is pulled from the questions raised in that chaotic warfare of memes. It’s a similar line of inquiry. But the medium has substantially changed.
Noah Jordan: I want to ask you about a piece of yours, SWIM A Few Years From Now. You made it in 2017, and it depicts your life in a hypothetical near future.
Joshua Citarella: I think we said 5 to 10 years in the future. So we’re coming up on it pretty soon.
Noah Jordan: So how does your life today stack up against the life you predicted?
Joshua Citarella: Well, we have not yet felt, fingers crossed, the severe impact of extreme weather in New York. In that dystopian future, New York City is flooded up to the first and a half floor and everyone gets around by canoe.
Some things that are the same. I’ve never been a salaried employee anywhere. I’m going to be 39 in January. I would have expected to have landed in some type of regular employment by that age. But that has never happened to me and it hasn’t happened to a lot of my generation. We’re all perma-lancers.
What I can recognize, from participating in Do Not Research and seeing young artists cultivate their practices over the past 5 years, is that the material circumstances I was able to scrape together as a freelancer back then are not available to people coming into this creative profession 10 years later. The circumstances they live in, the total income they have, the percentage of it that goes toward rent, all are much more dire.
Noah Jordan: In light of that, and as a person who is both fluent in the internet and has had success as an artist, what is your take on the potential of art today? Bearish, bullish?
Joshua Citarella: The stuff we discuss in the context of the art world seems niche and insignificant but it has cascading influences onto the broader role of institutions in society.
In an historical overview, capital ‘A’ Art is defined by a continuity of certain institutions. It’s hard to reach back to the Salons de Refusés in Paris at the beginning of Impressionism and create a clear narrative that brings you up to today.
The problem is with the internet, a revolution in publishing and distribution, the floodgates were blown open and the platforms replaced institutions. There’s a staggering statistic from, I believe, 2014. That year, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day fell right before the weekend. Quantitatively, the number of photographs uploaded in that 3-day weekend exceeded the entirety of every photograph taken in the history of mankind up until that point. Keep in mind, that statistic is now 10 years out of date. The scale of this transformation is almost impossible to calculate.
The current institutions, because of this revolution in publishing, are basically in irreparable decline. I’m not sure there’s a direct through line from Impressionism to modernity to contemporary art to the internet and now memes. That story is too fragmented and a lot of people aren’t buying it. Smaller institutions with a more humble narrative and shorter lineage are making more sense to people right now.
On Doomscroll, you spend a lot of time dealing with the nuts and bolts of building a better collective future. What do you think the role of beauty is in bringing about this new future?
The role aesthetics plays in politics is a huge conversation right now. The hazard in these conversations is that fascism has great aesthetics because their policy platform is just garbage. All they got to offer you is some cool vibes and architecture. And the degree to which people on the left have not properly considered the role of aesthetics and politics is being reformulated now. For example, the Zohran media approach has been a fantastic success.
One thing to untangle: as we were educated in art there was a general dichotomy of pretty work is stupid and ugly work is smart. I’m being extremely reductive here, but it’s important to emphasize just how reductive our understanding of this was. You would walk around a museum or an art fair and you would see something that was aesthetically pleasing and beautiful. And you’d be like, Ah, this is here because of its formal qualities and it’s nice to look at. And then you’d walk around the next corner and you’d see this hideous wall work or grotesque sculpture and you’d be like, Wow, there must be some really smart ideas here because this thing looks like shit. That left a lot of space open to exploit and we often ended up with ugly work that was also full of bad ideas. So it makes sense that people are rejecting contemporary art. They think it looks like trash and they prefer things that are beautiful because they don’t deceive the viewer.
Why is art’s relationship with beauty so twisted right now? Can the internet play a role in changing that?
Art is one of the rare instances other than going to church where if you don’t understand it, it’s somehow your fault as a viewer. If you’re listening to a piece of music and you don’t like it, you’d be like, this is terrible. Or you’re eating food that tastes bad, you’d spit it out.
But uniquely in art we see things that are wretched, and we assume that it’s the fault of our own uninformed taste. With the internet and this massive opening of the floodgates for aesthetics, most people have just opted out. The monopoly that those institutions had over aesthetics, over taste, over discourse, has eroded. And I’m tempted to say that it is actually a good thing.
I want to talk about your work documenting the dark ideological corners of the internet. Many people have no idea the world you were entrenched in even exists. Speak to those people. You went digging on the internet. What did you find?
In 2018, I wrote a cyber ethnography of young meme posters, ages 12 to 17, charting their political journey down a radical, nihilistic left-wing pipeline. They begin as various lefties—Bernie supporters, anarchists, communists—then over years, through platform shifts, memetic propagation, clarifying belief systems, and losing faith in society, they descend into post-left. Over the course of the book, people enter through accessible internet meme culture, and end up in chat rooms distributing communications from active terrorist groups and IED manuals. It’s a first-person document of this radicalization arc. Probably around a hundred people make it all the way through.
Within that text I also map what was happening in young political meme circles at that time, all of these different radical factions that have become incredibly niche and granular. My project over the last few years has been to chart the expansion of these ‘e-deologies’, which are incredibly niche, baroquely complex, hyphenated belief systems like anarco-primitivist-caliphatism, queer-anarcho-transhumanism, libertarian-neo-monarchism. I could go on.
I did this work as an artist to document the internet. When I published, I expected a dozen similar pieces with primary sources, but now almost 8 years later, no others exist.
Are you completely inured to these niche ideologies? Or do you come across ones that interest you?
Yeah, you know, the dharmic eco-reactionaryism is really making a compelling argument here. No, I think the conventional first instinct is to try and shut this thing down because it’s dangerous. That has been incredibly unsuccessful. Actually what you need to do is slowly and deliberately litigate all of those ideas. And I have a strong conviction that at the end of the day, social democracy does actually win.
My own belief system has been thoroughly tested. You will encounter questions and philosophical frames that you had never even considered before. If you don’t go through this process, you don’t actually know what underlies your beliefs. We all think that we do but we don’t really. It’s very painful, very difficult, but ultimately very important. There’s hundreds of years of political philosophy that underlies a lot of basic assumptions that we have now, many of them are just completely unfamiliar to us today and need to be relearned.
With Doomscroll, you’re investigating a very different part of the cultural ecosystem. Do you ever see logics or political patterns you encountered in the shadows of the internet emerging in conversations with these media heavyweights?
Yeah. In some cases, I take questions, quotes, and memes directly from the Gen Z memeplex and ask them to prominent media figures on the show. There’s a direct through line in many cases. For example, I feel very confident about making the austerity case for single payer health care. Which is a very labyrinthine argument, but it’s still undefeated. Basically, you’re making the fiscally conservative argument for what the left already wants. And it wins because it’s true. It was something that I first stumbled upon in the niche corners of the internet.
And so that’s maybe one of these examples where if you survey the entirety of this insane discourse and jam together these different ideologies that seem nonsensical, you might find one gem that is so true it cuts through all of the discourse on the right, all the discourse on the left and can become a dominant narrative.
Watching Doomscroll, one sees conservative-liberal binaries get scrambled again and again. There are conservative impulses on the left, and an inherently progressive accelerationist ideology is the driving force behind a new right-wing coalition. What value, if any, is a conservative-progressive binary today?
These terms are slippery and I’m not totally convinced that people even know what side they’re on in some of these cases.
So, I’ll give one example of this that I’m paraphrasing from the artist Daniel Keller: if you look at a map of the United States you see these dense urban metropolitan blue clusters on a broad map of red. These [metropolitan] voters are very upset about the way the country is being governed, and some of them talk about exiting, mostly because their wealth is being redistributed to the vast swaths of red in the country with whom they disagree. That proposal is actually Curtis Yarvin’s vision from the early 2010s. The liberals are now looking to manifest it in the real world, while [Yarvin] would otherwise be considered their ideological opponent. So the degree to which the edges of this political spectrum are deeply deeply confused is hard to underestimate now.
I am very hesitant to dismiss conservative criticisms of progressive liberal elites because what I see underlying that is a class rage that we can harness to achieve European-style universal basic services in the United States. I don’t see a revolution coming anytime soon. It’s never happened in a democratic country and so I’m pretty sure any change is going to happen through votes. And I don’t see an electoral majority that excludes those people. But that means fundamentally redrawing the lines of the political map along the basis of class. And amongst that class, there will be deep cultural disagreements. But they will all need to coordinate their political activity to achieve the class agenda.
What scares you today?
Anyone who is deeply organized on the left is usually not familiar with how crypto works. And the degree to which exitarians—a specific strand of libertarians looking to exit traditional nation states—are resourced and organized is something that needs to be taken seriously.
The neoliberal project, for almost a hundred years, has been to build a distributed patchwork of special economic zones that facilitate capital flight out of the social democratic countries. They’ve been phenomenally successful at that. So the thing that worries me is that there are very few people who understand how stark of a conflict stateless capital is going to be for any 21st century version of social democracy.
What would you want them to understand?
The important thing is that unlike currencies that could be frozen by the state and clawed back through law, [cryptocurrency] is a technical infrastructure that makes it impossible for the state to expropriate. The tech is definitionally stateless.
What heartens you?
I think we have successfully discredited a lot of the unpopular activism that was doing damage to the coalition and turning regular people off. Like Verso Books posting “abolish the family” every Thanksgiving. So we’ve got a better foundation now. And I think there are fair economic arguments to make that some forms of socialization and universal basic services are more economically competitive. So I think that stands a good chance.
What do you do to unwind?
I’m very thinly spread. I try to play video games but don’t get much time. I also hike.
What is your favorite thing to do on the internet?
I used to enjoy meme posting but I got shadowbanned. I still like posting in Discord and private groups. Having a club of friends with shared interests is meaningful.
Any artists or creators making sense of the world today you want to mention?
Just a few that come to mind are Jreg, a YouTuber who does comedy material but he is immensely knowledgeable and has a lot of foresight; Trevor Paglen, a fine artist who’s one of my biggest inspirations; Jonah Freeman just had an excellent show in Mexico City; Josh Kline is the artist who wrote the book for what I hope art can do; Harris Rosenblum I’m a big fan of; Tomi Faison and Filip Kostic did this project, Transcendence Creative, that was my favorite show that I saw two years ago; also @doomcroll_forever on Instagram. No connection to the show whatsoever, but a lot of people have sent it to me and the memes are great.
What’s next for Doomscroll?
We’re doing 40 episodes next year.
Sounds like a big lift.
It’s like a movie every week.
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His symbology stuff is really amazing.
Great interview. Joshua is a force of nature re: Art x Politics