In a second piece with Geert Lovink, Marc Tuters of OILab discusses the use of memes in conversation with Walter Benjamin’s theory of dialectical images. In doing so, it attempts to develop how memes can be understood as a continuation of Benjamin’s mention of ‘genuine images in language’, with the objective “to contemplate this seemingly regressive art [of meme-creation] in relation to a liberatory theory of image in Benjamin’s spirit”.
blog posts
- ‘Disjointed’ memes from the local fringe: on the dank memes of a leftist Romanian subculture
- Mapping 4chan/pol/’s country flags
- An overview of 4chan/b/ archives: What is left of the Internet’s cesspool?
- The Gamification of ‘Lone Wolf’ Terrorism on 4chan and 8chan
- Travelling tokens: Following extreme terms from 4chan/pol/ to Breitbart
- Doomscrolling till daylight: How r/politics witnessed the 2020 US elections
- The Birth of QAnon: On How 4chan Invents a Conspiracy Theory
- Reactionary Wokeness: How Redpilling Became a Thing on Reddit
- Normiefication of extreme speech and the widening of the Overton window
- Infinity’s Abyss: An Overview of 8chan
- Not So General: Mapping Issue Publics on 4chan/pol
- 4chan’s YouTube: A Fringe Perspective on YouTube’s Great Purge of 2019
- The Baker’s Guild: The Secret Order Countering 4chan’s Affordances
- Who are (((they)))?: On Online Hate, Tasteless Transgression, and Memetic Versatility
- QAnon: On Protest LARPing and the Normiefication of 4chan’s Bullshit
- Freedom and taboos in the international ghettos of the web
- Rendering legible the ephemerality of 4chan/pol/
- The Rise and Fall of Kekistan: A Story of Idiomatic Animus as Told Through Youtube’s Related Videos
- ‘Deus Vult!’: Tracing the Many (Mis)uses of a Meme
- Arktos’ Reformulation of the Far-Right
public
- [publication] 4chumblr’s divorce: Revisiting the online culture wars through the 2014 Tumblr-4chan raids
- [publication] Memecry: Tracing the repetition-with-variation of formulas on 4chan/pol/
- [publication] How Science Gets Drawn Into Global Conspiracy Narratives
- [publication] Inside the Cult of Stefan Molyneux: A Historical Exploration of Far-Right Radicalisation on YouTube
- [publication] Based and confused: Tracing the political connotation of a memetic phrase across the Web
- [publication] A God-Tier LARP? QAnon as Conspiracy Fictioning
- [publication] Deep state phobia: Narrative convergence in coronavirus conspiracism on Instagram
- [publication] ‘Who is /ourguy/?’: Tracing panoramic memes to study the collectivity of 4chan/pol/
- [publication] A Prelude to Insurrection: How a 4chan Refrain Anticipated the Capitol Riot
- [publication] A free market in extreme speech: Scientific racism and bloodsports on YouTube
- [publication] The Internet Hate Machine: on the Weird Collectivity of Anonymous Far-Right Groups
- INC’s Critical Meme Reader co-edited by Jack Wilson and Daniël de Zeeuw
- [publication] On the Vernacular Language Games of an Antagonistic Online Subculture
- [publication] Why Meme Magic is Real but Memes are Not: On Order Words, Refrains and the Deep Vernacular Web
- [publication] Fashwave and the False Paradox of Ironic Nazism
- Amazon misinformation research featured in Buzzfeed News
- Talk on anti-Semitic memes in De Balie [Dutch]
- [publication] Book chapter in Book of Anonymity
- OILab disinformation research in NRC Handelsblad [Dutch]
- “‘I don’t believe in facts’. Manufacturing reality in times of crisis” – panel at SPUI25