The Posted Protest

In December 2024, Dean Kissick published an essay on Harper’s titled The Painted Protest – How politics destroyed contemporary art. The essay provoked a (digitally) loud response, consisting of direct and indirect tweets, substack takedowns, snarky articles, and namedrops in podcast episodes. Given his position as an art critic and editor of Spike magazine, as well as being affiliated with dimes square, Angelicism01, and the formerly-dirtbag-left cultural scene, Kissick has been the subject of similar criticism before. The criticism often coming from the proximal international-but-NYC affiliated crowd which exists at one of the many intersections of art and other things (in this case digital subcultures, cultural and literary criticism). Many took issue with his essay’s undertone of reactionary nostalgia, a yearning for the art world’s sexy and glamorous recent-past, one which he was himself a part of. For Kissick, the contemporary, institutional art world is centered around meaningless performances of identity that uphold a liberal-democratic status quo — one which no longer exists. This is obviously not a groundbreaking thesis, a lot of discussion about cultural production revolves around the struggle for hegemonic narratives, particularly in the age of networked media.

Kissick’s argument echoes Dutch art critic collective Keeping It Real Art Critics (KIRAC)’s notorious 2018 “Stigma” video wherein they held a debate at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. KIRAC denounced identity-focused curatorial practices at the Stedelijk museum in Amsterdam, vaguely arguing for a return to meritocracy in the institutional art world. A perspective which emerges from the dull shows that have become ubiquitous in the contemporary cultural landscape. On that, we agree: the art world is boring, institutional cultural production feels stagnant and uninspired. Nonetheless, we think that Kissick missed the mark with his article, he wasn’t able to accurately identify or construct the reasons for the very real frustration we often feel when we go to an opening or visit a critically acclaimed show. Not only that; we also feel this frustration elsewhere. 

Neoliberal wokeness as a guiding philosophy for the art world has trickled down and permeated into many other spheres of cultural production, both at the highest levels of media and at the more personal user-levels of content creation and dissemination. Remember the Instagram Infographic Military Complex? It was 2016, Donald Trump’s first term, Brexit, the advent of the alt-right. A breach in the perceived progressive consensus. The solution? Sharing information! Becoming a proud awareness raiser through story reposts of pastel millennial flat illustrations, amorphous conglomerates of diverse humans surrounded by snarky talking points. Remember the 2020 BLM black square protest? “Blackout Tuesday,” created by music executives at Atlantic Records, was the initiative from which the online protest stemmed. What began as a boycott in which black Americans were encouraged not to buy or sell anything on a particular day to show economic strength and unity, turned into users posting a single photo of a black square. At a time in which the silence-is-violence rhetoric invaded feeds, everyone — from celebrities to influencers to micro-influencers to friends — were asked to publicly display their political affiliation and support for the movement. Not engaging in these posted protest strategies resulted in accusations of complicity with police brutality, white supremacy, and systematic racism. The posted protest packaged what was a digital performative platform alignment into an essential and absolutely necessary form of solidarity. The black square was the perfect solution: a post that could simply fit into anyone’s feed without fucking up its aesthetics while showing that you were on the right side of history. But that easy fix was then labelled problematic as feeds were overtaken by the black squares, possibly obfuscating useful exchange of information on the IRL protests. 

More recently, all eyes on Rafah underwent a similar cycle of judgment. In certain circles, it was inconceivable not to be posting in support of Palestinian resistance. What, however, became possibly the most shared image on the issue (more than 47 million times according to Wikipedia), was an AI-slop image, an image which masked the brutal violence of the Israeli occupation through distorted and uncanny generative reproduction. What this iteration of slacktivism did, besides once again cementing the perceived significance of posting as protest, was marking an update in its visual dialect. We no longer need photo-journalism, nor graphic design: the ultimate form of digital protest is generative AI. Capable of representing something real through entirely artificial compositions. Capable of simulating the real by marking its absence. In front of the complete dissolution of stable narratives, in front of the complete destruction of a common epistemological ground, it is the banality of an AI image that evades and rides the tides of algorithms. Instead of stable narratives we now have stable diffusion.

Another way in which political acts are performed online is through flags-in-bio, a phenomenon predominant on platforms which have broader username-display parameters, such as on X (formerly Twitter). Hyper-specific and increasingly complex flag-emoji compositions are ubiquitous in the bios or usernames of people engaging in online political discussion. The flags serve as flattened signifiers organized into equations and combinations of ideological affiliation: users with a Russian and Palestinian flag in their username will get into heated arguments with someone who has the trans, Vatican, and Israeli flag in theirs. The phenomenon of reducing complex ideologies to a few flag emojis emerges from the political milieu of digital spaces, with the amount of flags usually being directly correlated to a person's level of chronic online-ness. Political discussion in digital contexts relinquishes all nuance and takes place on the plane of flat symbols, only loosely indicating what a person stands for. Is the person with both the Palestinian and Russian flag in their bio anti-imperialist or not? It’s a form of political role-play that takes place on all plots of the politigram. The phrase “x flag in bio, opinion discarded” is ubiquitous in online political discussion and is suggestive of a pervasive attitude in platform-based discussion.

Popular political discourse, especially in networked environments, is almost entirely symbolic and antagonistic. In navigating this context, we find ourselves revisiting Chantal Mouffe’s political theory on antagonism and agonism: whereas antagonism is characterized by “struggle between enemies” agonism describes a political context that doesn’t strive for consensus, but acknowledges plurality and allows for struggle between adversaries.¹Chantall Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically, Verso She posits that disagreement and dissensus are inherent aspects of politics and rejects liberal-democratic politics which strive for unanimous consensus, something which is paradoxical and impossible. The consensus-mindset is an undercurrent of infographic posting, it presents an absolute truth and attempts to produce a consensus according to a rigid framework of political-correctness. Mouffe’s framework therefore allows us to understand the political characteristics of liberal-democratic infographic posting as consensus driven, and flag-in-username keyboard battles as antagonistic, leaving us with an agonistic void; space for a political struggle that doesn’t seek consensus or hegemony, but embraces conflict and divergence.

The Networked Commune

Many displays of online politics feel empty. We seem to be stuck in the belief that we can post our way into protest, we can post our way into change. This does not only apply to the type of content one shares, but also to the platforms one should inhabit to do so. Following the Donald Trump inauguration, our feeds were flooded by posts of people leaving mainstream platforms in an act of protest and defeat, defiance, and resignation in front of the now more-than-evident close relationship between the new US government with the Big Tech Stack. Mastodon, Bluesky, Pixelfed were some of the new (and not so new) players in the alt platform scene. 

The push to online places which are not part of the Google-Apple-Facebook-Amazon-Microsoft (GAFAM) stack is not a new phenomenon, though. Hackers and open-source enjoyers have historically led the creation of non-commercial internet spaces. Subcultures of the Dark Forests and web3 enthusiasts were also deeply engaged with crafting alternative internet imaginaries to the one of the corporate Clearnet. The concerns raised by the margins of the internet have only grown more pressing, as an increasingly hegemonic Clearnet has maintained and consolidated its power through tumultuous political processes, both materially and culturally. Many of the fears that once unsettled the fringes of the digital world — fears about the ever-expanding platformization of society and the hegemonic transformation of technology — have breached the mainstream. The entanglement of power and technology has become even more complex and perverted. The GAFAM-stack struggles to straddle volatile markets, navigating threats of bans, promises of governmental deregulation, and competition from Chinese firms. But the promises of a decentralized web 3 seem already obsolete and kitsch, AI threatens — or promises, depending on who you ask — to completely uphaul our lives. Alternative web 2 social media platforms emerge and die quickly, each potential exit path too perilous, complex or banal to be taken seriously. The move to an alt-platform quickly starts to feel like the call to start living in communes and reject industrial-capitalist societies; initiatives which notoriously tend to fail and usually cannot mobilize a significant number of people. Maybe today, more than ever it seems easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of META. 

Both these movements of “if only we posted the right thing" (pastel infographic, black square, all eyes on Rafah, etc.) and “if only we posted it on the right platform" (web 3, dark forests, decentralized, etc.), feel performative. The existence of these not-so-exit strategies indicates a relevant strive to different ways of being online, but their energy feels misplaced, ending up working indeed as a performance more than anything else. This line of thinking also perpetuates the Californian ideology that the right tech will save us, will liberate us, if only it is owned by the right people, if only it's used in the right way. They are points in the long list of failures of (neo)liberal democracy, of ‘wokeness’, of neoliberal identity politics, of the ways of thinking which have been clearly insufficient in countering the seemingly ever expanding goop of late stage capitalism. In New Dark Age, James Bridle carefully unpacked former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s argument that the Rwandan genocide could not taken place in the 2010s because devices capable of sharing information (smart phones, computers), would have prevented it.²James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future, Verso According to Schmidt, diffused photo documentation would lead to political intervention. Putting aside the obvious naivety of this statement, the very well documented and consistently shared genocide taking place in Palestine is still ongoing despite mass information sharing. People know what’s going on. In fact, it is the most documented genocide in history so far. The Palestinian struggle has been the subject of hypervisibility in contemporary history, to the extent that their suffering has turned into a spectacle.

This is why the All Eyes on Rafah AI-slopified awareness-raiser is so politically void. When suffering becomes a spectacle, and Palestinians become exclusively victims, they are politically disempowered. In her book, Visual Occupations, Gil Hochberg proclaims that in the Palestinian context it’s “not that the world must be given an opportunity to see, but rather that the world spends too much time seeing, and that this seeing secures no political intervention.”³Gil Hochberg, ‘“Nothing to Look At”; or, “For Whom Are You Shooting?” The Imperative to Witness and the Menace of the Global Gaze’, Visual Occupations This is made evident by the turn to AI or a black square: the suffering of marginalized people is a given, so much so that confirmation through visual evidence is no longer even a prerequisite for (sl)ac(k)tivism. Infographics and information sharing is one path to radicalization, but it is politically ineffective if it's the only one available: the endless sharing of information is not the means to an end. 

We are rightfully wary of institutions who embrace artists with practices of institutional critique, insofar as it paradoxically allows institutions to performatively engage with self-reflexive critiques whilst maintaining their positions as the vanguards of culture. We should therefore take on a similar position towards platform-critiques or digital modes of protest that take place on the platform. Institutional-capture and platform-capture are two sides of the same coin. Moreover, we should be careful in constructing resistance strategies to techno-fascism through a techno-epistemological framework. In her contribution to Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989, Marina Vishmidt argues for infrastructural critique as an artistic strategy, rather than institutional critique. She underscores the notion that infrastructures are the invisible structures and systems which underpin certain forms of repetition, including — on an abstract level — the repetition and perpetuation of oppressive systems, such as capitalism and racism. She thereby encourages the critique of infrastructure, rather than solely the critique of structures which exist upon it. This line of thinking should be extended to new media theory, we should engage in infrastructural critique, perhaps even going one step further and engaging in epistemological critique; interrogating our ways of knowing and sense-making insofar as they are entangled with or emerge from techno-epistemological frameworks.

We are not trying to place ourselves above the posted protest. We too, are victims of techno-optimism and solutionism, and we still believe that there are ways of posturing yourself online which to some extent can co-opt platforms. Some of these actions are a form of “anarchist calisthenics” — a new term we just learned from TikTok — an exercise in questioning power through small acts of defiance to get used to deserting the state. Yet we also do know that such a posture means very little in front of the MAGAlithic stack. It is a symbolic reappropriation, a temporary solution. Fascists are lifting weights, flexing their muscles, bodybuilding in front of our eyes. And we sit here… posting? The new hegemony, represented by the tech bro, is getting weirder and gnarlier and uglier and more and more pathetic. Our enemy has never been this lame. But wokeness is still somehow lamer.

An Uninspired Left

The frustration Dean Kissick feels at the museum is the same we feel online in front of politically impotent moments of digital collective action. Their impotency subsequently leads to frustration, which often turns into paralysis rather than effective organizational modes. This isn’t only the case in digital contexts, leftist strategies seem to fail as a whole, and to make matters worse, even social-democratic values have been uprooted — a politically fertile moment seized by the popular-right to gain an immense amount of traction; a vibe shift. The right seems inspired, embracing new strategies and instrumentalizing the absence of stable narratives. The right has embraced and weaponized conspiracy-theory as a strategy, using it to position themselves as counter-hegemonic. We, as leftists, instead tend to mourn a revolutionary past; we lack inspiration. 

As mentioned, the one thing Kissick was able to do in his essay was tap into a collective frustration with the institutional art world. We think he was correct in noticing that the neoliberal identity politics which underpin a lot of contemporary curatorial practices is one of the reasons for our discontent, although he doesn’t explicitly make this distinction. The Bakunin’s Barricade fiasco at the Stedelijk Museum serves as a poignant example of these politics. Artist Ahmet Öğüt recreated the concept of a barricade which was supposed to be used in Dresden’s 1849 socialist uprising.  which integrated paintings from the National Museum’s collection. The inclusion of the paintings was a way of turning the bourgeois order’s values against themselves, using them to shield the revolutionaries from state violence. Öğüt’s work could only be purchased by an institution if they also signed a contract obliging them to lend the work, including several paintings from their collection, to protestors engaged in a sociopolitical movement to protect them from state violence, honoring the history of the barricade and allowing the institution to exercise its (supposed) social responsibility. Although Öğüt did not handle in good faith, as he added an (intentionally) ambiguous clause to the contract that would allow the museum to include replicas of paintings instead of the actual works. But Bakunin’s Barricade and its contract would nonetheless oblige the museum to lend the barricade, with or without paintings, to those who demand it.

During the 2024 student protests in support of Palestinian liberation, a collective consisting of cultural workers and artists requested the work to be used at one of the student encampments to protect students from police brutality. But, as expected, the museum offered a compromise that undermined the value of the work, and the collective who requested it did not accept. Hereby, the logic underpinning cultural institutions is uncovered: radical politics, revolutionary gestures even, are supported symbolically, but sociomaterial intervention will never take place, nothing ever actually changes. Cultural institutions embody the conflation of social-democracy and neoliberalism: they technocratically maintain a ‘consensus’ status quo and relinquish any radical politics in doing so. They are simply the vanguards of culture, nothing more. Protest can only take place in the white cube, not on the streets. It is the same logic that underpins digital protest strategies: performative gestures emptied of their political content, increasingly complex and jargon-heavy infographics, and an overall culture of virtue signalling devoid of action. 

Boris Groys identifies the neoliberal identity politics that emerge from this center-left way of thinking as the mirror stage of the upper class. Identity and class are disentangled and “the upper class proportionally includes all the identities that can be found in the lower classes—even if the majority of the population remains as poor and exploited as before.” This leads us away from class consciousness and towards an even deeper internalized responsibility for our precarity. This disarticulation renders neoliberal identity politics counterproductive, and moreover, confusing. Protesting according to these logics doesn’t work. We’re a long way away from identity politics’ origin as a framework for understanding the complexities of political organization among diverse identities as derived from queer, black feminist socialists.⁴Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else), Pluto Press Through the swift neoliberalization that this framework has undergone, identity politics paradoxically undermines its original political goals.

When #blackouttuesday prompted Spotify — a company that systematically exploits black artists (among others) by significantly underpaying them for their streams — to add an 8 minute silence to their platform out of respect for George Floyd, what are we supposed to think? David Guetta’s rooftop DJ set in which he played an EDM remix of an MLK speech— “the world is going through difficult times and America also actually, [...] this record is in honour of George Floyd, shout out to his family” — was something that was easy to make fun of, but it was characteristic of the empty virtue signaling required by neoliberal identity politics as a passport to enter the public realm of cultural production.

Neoliberal identity politics functions as a tool for center-left, neoliberal-democracies, being used to maintain a sociomaterial status quo whilst morality-washing its proponents. We truly are living in the age of hyper-politics as coined by Anton Jäger: “Questions of what people own and control are increasingly supplanted by questions of who or what people are, replacing clashes of classes with the collaging of identities and morals.” Is it so farfetched to believe that identity-politics-as-only-possible-leftist-politics seed was planted by the CIA to undermine class consciousness? 

​​But the culture war keeps moving forward, tides are turning. Trump 2 promises to get rid of ‘wokeness’ and replace it with something much worse. The increasingly techno-fascist political landscape, however, can't shake the cringiness of Silicon Valley funko-pop-ism. Being a leftist might slowly become edgy again. Throughout the past decade, any resistance to the liberal-democractic hegemony, whether in the form of irony-pilled, alt-right trolling, or dirtbag-left provocation, was deemed a cancellable offense. What happens when the hegemony shifts to the right? A crisis of symbols seems to be taking place all over the West: corporate rainbow logos are deleted from social media manager’s laptops, diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI) policies replaced by dodgy DOGE, the BLM mural close to the White House removed. As these identifiers disappear, the alt-right trolls of yesteryear are now mainstream. And there’s nothing more cringe than being mainstream. Perhaps this is the point where we, as leftists, should feel inspired. Take the Dutch mediascape, where the infamous right-wing media outlets PowNed and GeenStijl, which have always been cringe, are now finally being acknowledged as such. Trolling pro-Palestinian protestors doesn’t resemble the legacy of videos in which SJW’s were trolled to elicit an over-the-top reaction, content which popularized these media outlets over the past decade. That role is now reserved for the pro-Israeli and right-wing protestors, who throw fits when confronted with evidence of genocide or other injustices. This is well demonstrated by Left Laser, a Dutch leftist, grassroots media outlet providing critical journalism in the Dutch political landscape. From fringe to cringe, the evolution is clear.

Members of the dirtbag-left of roughly ten years ago either gave up on political posting, or have taken the right-wing reactionary pipeline, e.g. [REDACTED]. But maybe the ground is now fertile for a dirtbag-left revival. With the advent of the Soy Right, contrarian and edgy leftist strategies could be effective in undermining the pervasiveness of right-wing and fascist rhetoric. Dirtbag-leftism could be an effective left-populist strategy insofar as it rejects the neoliberal identity politics that have come to be characteristics of vaguely progressive center-left politics which seek to uphold socioeconomic stratification. The ongoing ‘dark woke’ trend gestures at this kind of attitude. We need to make the dirtbag-left left again. 

Just Kill the CEO

To the feds: I’ll keep this short.

When was the last time you felt politically inspired? When was the last time you did because you were online? Have you ever been radicalized by the web? Do you get political inspo from podcasts? If you were to assassinate a CEO, which podcasters would get in trouble for their role in your radicalization?

We have gone through different cycles of political inspiration. We’re both extremely online, the digital spaces we have inhabited have been fundamental influencers of political beliefs. Tumblr and the origins of woke culture, Twitter discourse, TikTok takedowns, ever evolving conformations of non-political-political podcasts. Many pathways of internet radicalizations have presented themselves in front of us, and while online consumption does not fully equate political alignment, our multifaceted political identities have been through time shaped and reshaped by our digital media diets. And we are not the only ones; in December 2024, the same month that Dean Kissick’s essay was published, Luigi Mangione shot and killed United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson with a 3D printed gun. And while a lot of leftists engaged in wishful thinking, Luigi’s digital footprint showed otherwise. Luigi is not our leftist hero. Mainly because he’s not even a leftist. He’s entry-level politgram, in the first layers of the online politics iceberg. More aligned with the center-right, grey tribe, and effective altruism-adjacent ideologies that Silicon Valley is permeated with. A Silicon Valley which was often misunderstood as being pro-enlightenment, pro-reason, pro-democracy (and hence leftist?), but which has since its inception been a weird amalgamation of hippy countercultural beliefs masking hypercommercial goals and techno-fascism.⁵see Fred Turner’s From Counter-culture to Cyber-culture, 2006, University of Chicago Press Luigi likely selected United Health Care based on a market evaluation of political impact. It was a calculated, “rational” decision, along the lines of the effective altruism ideology. Effective altruism is the philosophical movement / subculture / social movement championed by the tech broligarchs (Sam Bankman-Fried is famously an early adopter of EA). This movement “seeks to maximize the good from one's charitable donations and even from one’s career” by using facts and logic. EA loves science and math and reason, “injecting science into the sentimental issue of doing good in the world.” The level of “logic” and “reason” employed by the key thinkers and supporters of the EA is one that could be displayed by, let’s say, the most annoying, snarky, fake-smart kid in middle school.⁶Foundational EA thinker MacAskill has this famous thought experiment in Doing Good Better. You’re outside a burning building, inside one there are both a child and a Picasso, but you can save only one of them. Which one would you choose to do the most good? For MacAskill, if you save the Picasso, you can sell it, use the money to buy anti-malaria nets in Africa, hence saving more lives than just the one of the kid in the burning building. Luigi’s selection of his target was likely based on this logic.

Weird political leanings aside, Luigi’s act has been positively received on almost all sides of the political spectrum. There was something about the simplicity of it which flipped a switch across beliefs. From the right, one could read this act as an effective altruist one. On the other side, could it be interpreted as an extreme exercise of left-populism? While an assassination is not exactly the type of grassroots initiative we envision on the left, it was unintentionally a left-populist gesture; it reduced the complexities of the healthcare insurance industry in the US to their symbolic and operational representatives and executives, and enacting change by directly killing one. We are not saying more people should be assassinated; but his act was significant, albeit not exactly the way Luigi maybe planned. He addressed the schism between the symbolic and the material. He actually did something, maybe even because of a Lindy tweet. No infographic explaining how healthcare insurance systematically exploits people will be as politically potent as Luigi’s act. Again, we’re not advocating for more assassinations, but the reception of this event, alongside the ever-increasing turn to right wing politics, does encourage us to reevaluate our political strategies as leftists. Luigi may not be our leftist hero, but he can be our leftist inspo.

Jeff Bezos says only opinions that support “personal liberties” and “free markets” will be welcome in the opinion section of the Washington Post. “Viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” Marc Andreessen has publicly declared socialism and collectivism the enemies of techno-optimists in his notorious 'techno-optimist manifesto'. The workings of capital are out in the open. So what now? Neoliberal identity politics has retreated into obsolescence, the center-left status quo is being uprooted, and the new-right has never been uglier, lamer, more socially inept than today. Cultural institutions and mainstream digital protest strategies — both of which continue to desperately cling to a center-left, (neo)liberal-democratic consensus — are uninspired and tired, leaving a void to be filled. There’s a gap. A space for a new leftist political project to be born. Inspired by the Palestinian resistance and by anti-fascism, inspired by the undeniable civil right victories of the last 50 years and by the information pathways opened by networked media, inspired by class consciousness and by solidarity, inspired by an embrace of the epistemological chaos we find ourselves in.

Marta Ceccarelli (1999) is a writer, blogger and independent researcher. She loves the web, internet (sub)cultures, memes, music and club scenes. blogreform is the Substack where her interests manifest through cultural analysis, experimental autofiction and more. She currently lives in Rome where she works for NERO.

Ruben Stoffelen (1999) is an Amsterdam based writer and independent researcher currently completing a research master in Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam and working at the Institute of Network Cultures. His research ranges from networked subcultures and visual culture to infrastructure and the built environment, whilst underscoring digital culture and the internet.

(banner image by @wonderful_cringe)