Online Communities and Institution-Building: An Interview with Josh Citarella

Lucas Gelfond

Josh Citarella is an artist and internet culture researcher based in New York City. He's the founder of Do Not Research, a collaborative platform for writing, visual art, and more. I first came to his work a few years ago, reading Politigram and the Post-Left, a pioneering analysis of how Internet political subcultures form and flourish. He's also an avid Twitch streamer and podcaster.

I've always felt like his work grasps internet culture in a way few others can—stunts like eating two pounds of meat and six raw eggs per day to mimic male internet fitness influencers or a coordinated campaign to spread awareness of Mark Fisher's book Capitalist Realism in Instagram political communities. We talk over Discord audio.

LG: You’ve written a lot about specific sorts of internet spaces, particularly those filled with really politically engaged young men. How have you intervened there, and do you intend to do more of it? I imagine an alternate world in which you were like a left-wing Andrew Tate…

JC: That’s funny…

LG: I guess—have you considered that?

JC: In 2019, I wrote a piece that was first published on [networked culture podcast] New Models called Irony Politics and Gen Z, where I laid out what I refer to as ‘gradients of politicization,’ which uses the analogy of the funnel. To give a very compressed description of this, it shows how people get interested in new ideas, begin to wade down rabbit holes, become tacit supporters, then active supporters, essentially [laying out] a framework for how people’s political views transform over time.

These diagrams are now really relevant for a variety of fields, from advertising to counter-terrorism, [...] it’s tremendously important in today’s internet. At the time, I saw what I thought was an incorrect assumption from a lot of the mainstream media: that people are born with these ideological convictions, that they are just awful people with terrible ideas and there’s nothing you can do about them. I wanted to show that people get slowly acculturated to an idea, and they can [be] persuaded over time. If that were true, they could actually be persuaded in other directions as well.

In that article I mentioned a few different content creators that were unique to that period [like philosophy YouTuber] ContraPoints and Destiny, the Twitch streamer, who both did a lot of work in what people used to call ‘deradicalization.’ We’re obviously in a very different period now, and I think we’ve made a lot of headway on these ideas: yes, clearly people can be persuaded and you can change their mind.

[...] I’m interested in discussing these things, but don’t particularly care about being an influencer. It’s kind of just thrust upon me, unfortunately, as part of the requirements of the job. I want to say, with regards to your idea of a left-wing Andrew Tate: part of the success of [left-wing Twitch streamer] Hasan Piker….

LG: That’s a good point…

JC: [...] is that he’s just a handsome guy who is muscular and works out. His physical appearance is something that a lot of young men aspire to, and because of that they admire him they want to model themselves after him, and they are amenable to his political ideas.

It is actually that simple because—keep in mind—we're talking about people who are maybe 15 years old. They don't have a rigorous political understanding of anything being discussed, they just want a figure to identify with in this formative period, so that's really important.

LG: You talk a lot about elite capture of academia and media. It seems like a lot of your projects, like Do Not Research are efforts at building alternate institutions, or creating a consensus reality.

JC: People don’t understand what a platform is, period. It’s not often clear to people what the difference is between something like a magazine, which has a board of editors, or a museum, which has a board of curators, who sit around a table and deliberate about what they will produce versus the infrastructure of a social platform where you, me, your mom, dad, aunt and uncle, really anybody can upload to YouTube. There’s no editor or curator between what those individuals have to say, and the rest of the world potentially.

Laying that out is a rather important distinction, but there’s a slippery rhetorical area where people assume that this distinction is meant to be a defense of the existing institutions. It’s very clear that I’m not a strong proponent of the New York Times, or existing cultural institutions, I’m actually very critical of those things. The reality is that the platform method of organizing culture, society, and news has been utterly disastrous, it’s actually been worse than the corrupt institutions.

My take on this is that—if the institutions are not salvageable, they’re not worth saving, they’re already in a process of decomposition, they’ve been captured by elite donor interests, and so on—the task before us is not to all split up into atomized cultural producers, where we’re competing on these giant platforms making money for Google. Instead, we should be organizing new institutions. I would say Do Not Research is an example of that.

There’s likely some better founding principles that we can instill in the very beginning. I think having institutions that are entirely run by donor money and philanthropic money, they’re predisposed to being captured by those interests. A powerful donor can just pull their yearly contribution and now the whole project goes under. You essentially cede editorial control to the people who fund the organization.

One way to mitigate that risk is to have a bunch of low-cost contributors in the form of a Patreon or a Substack, these Web 2.5 solutions are good alternatives in the short term, but also necessarily tip into these attention dynamics of the web to date. If you extrapolate that out and see what floats to the top in some of these environments, it’s often political narratives with a really brittle worldview that doesn’t hold up to criticism. It activates hyper-dedicated, niche communities that are looking to exclude uncomfortable facets of the world. It also skews heavily toward entertainment, we’re essentially talking about ticket prices here.

For me, I think there’s an ideal mix of this, where you’re looking to blend a few different money streams to offset the negative incentives of each. A proper institution should not be entirely reliant on donors, and it should not be entirely reliant on subscriptions.

There’s some new stuff being built now—I’m enthusiastic about what Metalabel is building, to reconstruct what I would describe as the ‘digital equivalent to the old form of record labels,’ which is vastly preferable to the streaming economy. There’s similar things for writers who are influential, but maybe not interested in the weekly grind of Substack.

I think the task upon us now is to build those things. This is not an abstract, theoretical puzzle to solve in your mind; this is the difficult work of having to fundraise and convince people to contribute something, and then provisioning an organization. For example, Do Not Research has been publishing for almost two years now, twice a week.

LG: That’s crazy.

JC: Yeah, on my desk right now I have a 412-page book we published last year, and this summer [editor’s note: a few months ago! Interview recorded in June!] we’re going to launch our second book, which is 402 pages.

That’s an extraordinary amount of creative labor from all of the contributors. There’s also the material cost of doing these things and the administrative clerical work, which is otherwise invisible. People need to be paid to do that—it’s not, like, a passion project where you’re writing something, it’s doing spreadsheets, the CMS on the back end of the website, and all of the boring stuff.

LG: I don’t remember exactly where it was, but in an interview you said something to the effect of: “I have seen the evolution of all these different governance systems and ways of organizing society, and my mind is pretty made up.” Are there new ways you’re excited about organizing cultural institutions?

JC: [...] I think we’re making a model for other people to follow. I recently recorded a podcast with [Kickstarter and Metalabel co-founder] Yancey Strickler, who had a great example, the Dischord Records model. They had a set agreement in advance with payment splits, and every release had a 10 dollar price tag on it. It was really clear, and upfront, and worked out to be sustainable for everybody.

I think we’re in a period of trying to figure out exactly what those things are going to be. There’s a way to support Do Not Research on Substack, there’s a shop that’s attached to it where people can buy books. We redistribute the profits from Do Not Research as honorariums to all of the contributors; this is more of a proof-of-concept right now because we’re not talking about a ton of money. We’re trying to find a stable and durable way to continue doing it. I’m not necessarily sure there’s a ton of people who are building in this space just yet—I don’t think there’s another organization that started on a Discord that is now publishing 800 pages in two years.

I do feel rather convinced, having done this now for so long, that there’s a lot of young people who are graduating school, who correctly realize that a curator is not going to follow their individual account on social media. They’re not early adopters, so they don’t have too many options for sticking it out on their own and being a bootstrapping entrepreneur or whatever, so it’s almost necessary.

The incentives for them are to squad up with a like-minded peer group. Realistically, a curator will follow an arts organization that is publishing, say, 50 or 100 people a year. That provides opportunities for visibility for your work, it gives you a peer group within which you can discuss ideas, get worthwhile recommendations for reading, or thinking about what even is a topic worth making work about, those things are often pretty murky to people who’ve recently graduated. I think we’re in this experimental phase, where we’re making a model for peer-to-peer-organized arts education.

What is the structure of Syntax?

LG: It’s a great question, because we’re wrestling with the exact thing you’re talking about right now. Even though we’re publishing digitally there are still labor costs, which, as recent grads, we don’t yet have the resources for. We’re definitely looking to fundraise in the future, but of course there are tradeoffs with any sort of funding source. Either way, that was very much our idea—none of us are in a place to go out on our own, and the idea was to band together and build something as a group that can grow more than anyone could individually.

JC: That is absolutely the right decision. I’m going to paraphrase something from [technological researcher and frequent Citarella collaborator] Mat Dryhurst, but the first thing to be aware, I’m a bit older than you, I’m 36.

LG: I’m 22.

JC: Okay, so we have roughly a half generation between us. I graduated in 2010 in the environment of the 2008 valley of the labor market. There were awful conditions for potential employment. We did have the benefit of social media, but that’s kind of all we had.

In that period, everyone was let loose. There were no gatekeepers, everyone was their own atomized creator on social media. The ‘independence economy,’ as Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst will often refer to it, broke apart all of the old models, where people had group formations of magazines in the literary and art world, and record labels in the music world.

We learned in that process that there were ways in which people were creatively, but also materially, reliant on each other. There were some examples of spillover value being created in one place that would ease the cost somewhere else. When everyone is atomized in this independence economy, the profits are really, really concentrated and the losses are very heavy for everyone who’s not at the winning side of the table.

These things are actually cyclical. There are forces in which people are incentivized to break apart, and there are forces where people are incentivized to come together. These things correspond to different periods of creative life, and we’re now re-entering this ‘interdependence economy’ where people will return to these group formations of magazines, record labels, and so-on. That process is really just happening now, and I think we’re going to see that happen over the next five years.

LG: What are ways in which you’ve designed Do Not Research’s structure, or specific choices you’ve made in hopes of it lasting for many decades? I’m imagining some of the goal is for Do Not Research to be able to outlast you, or bus factor or whatever.

JC: Yeah, absolutely. In my mind, this is a five-year project of creating a strong signal of content that will gather all of these incredibly talented people as it has done so far. At the end of that period I hope to step down as creative director, be on the board of trustees, maybe recommend stuff from afar, but we’d appoint another creative director and the institution carries forward. We’d continue publishing on the blog, doing pop up events, screenings, art exhibitions, and so on.

I'll just lay out a little bit of my background here. I attended the School of Visual Arts, I studied photography, I'm properly educated in something similar to an art school, if not an art school exactly. That said, I really credit my most important education to taking part in three different art and tech reading groups across about 10 years in New York City with different, peer-organized, groups.

LG: What were they?

JC: The very first one was something run by Bruce High Quality Foundation University called Chatroom that was organized by Brad Troemel. The second one was called “cloud-based institutional critique,” which was organized by Mike Pepi. The third was called, “will this be live streamed?” which was organized by me. Those two peers, Brad and Mike, are people who I workshopped a lot of these ideas with, for literally years at a time.

I learned that these peer-organized groups would run for about a year and a half, because all of the work was concentrated on one or two people, and done on a volunteer basis. Inevitably, people would slowly get picked off because one person had a job whose shift schedule changed, another person had to leave the city for a project, and there was not an easy way to recruit new people in.

Learning from that experience, in terms of Do Not Research, there has to be the right incentives for this thing to continue, in such a way that the boring administrative work is not done through volunteer work. It has to be paid, there has to be enough of an incentive for someone to do it when they don’t want to. The organization has to be permeable in such a way that people can enter it, and they have to be able to find it somewhere on the internet. Otherwise, if it's closed and invitation only, eventually the group dwindles. So, if people who were there on the ground floor doing a lot of work in the beginning decide to go away for six months or a year, when they come back, it will still be here. That durability is actually really important.

[...] We've gone through all the different shifts of people doing work on the back end, different changes in the staff and hosting for the blog and, and all of these things. We have managed to survive all of those shocks, it has continued to work. [...]

LG: Interesting, yeah. It seems like much more of the model today is people hanging out in group chats, or spaces that are not so publicly available. What do you think has catalyzed that last shift?

JC: I don’t know. I’m paraphrasing from Caroline Busta of the New Models podcast: she analogizes these private spaces as like a gated community. You’re driving down the highway of web2, and there’s all these advertisements and billboards. Eventually, you see one that looks kind of interesting, maybe you take an exit, you go into this private cul-de-sac and you’re like ‘oh, this one is kind of cool, maybe I’ll stay here for awhile.’ You don’t need to be endlessly driving down the road of billboards.

I would say that the bubble of podcasting itself was grown out of a dissatisfaction with the attention-economy discursive space of web2. People were dissatisfied with flame wars, 140-character limits, engagement hacks, and divisive content. They wanted a more substantial long-form conversation, and they were so desperate that they were willing to pay; it was an absurd thing to spend money on the internet a few years ago, and now it’s very commonplace. I actually much prefer my newsfeed now that I pay a very marginal sum of money for it, it’s time much better spent. We realized in hindsight that a lot of these problems were the simple problem of advertising—that’s what a lot of it has always been.

LG: One of your most interesting and, I think, revelatory takeaways, is that your specific experience, or embodied identity, is seen as the only source of truth on the internet. Do you see this as purely a result of institutional decay?

JC: I think it begins with institutional decay, and it existed before social media. Social media has also added this massive amplification to all of those problems. For example, look at the explicitly libertarian designs of the early internet—what is that quote from John Perry Barlow?

LG: Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace?

JC: Yeah, he talks about industrial…

LG: [Pulling up document] “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” Et cetera.

JC: Yeah. The early beginnings of the internet are pretty explicitly libertarian. Libertarians do not believe in institutions and democratic deliberation around a table, they believe in market signals and price signals to direct society’s attention and resources. Pretty explicitly, I think the plan was to create an environment of alternative media to erode institutions, which made existing problems so much worse.

I’ve always been on the side where, I don’t know, industrial state and government authority kind of did some good things, you know: ending child labor, market regulations of not having wood chips in your infant formula. I tend to like those things. I’m not naive about the injustices and harms of authoritarian states or whatever, but I think this libertarian stuff is really just blatant nonsense to be honest, and a lot of that is amplified in the environment. I wrote about the most extreme examples—right wing bodybuilders and radical liberal online activists—about a year ago for Document Journal.

There are no legitimate institutions to resolve the truth claims from those communities. The source of verification for those claims is the individual body of the speakers themselves. We’re now socially in this process of having to entertain all of the narratives, even the crazy ones, and to try and rebuild some legitimate consensus between all of the competing voices. We’re in this process of rebuilding the institutions whose trust we lost in the dawn of neoliberalism and what’s been happening in the past 40 years of decay and erosion of our social institutions.

It's gonna be an uphill battle, but I’m actually rather optimistic about this. I think there’s an abundance of things happening now, like the CHIPS Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the Green New Deal in Europe. There’s important things, like state direction of the economy, which are incrementally breaking with the neoliberal model of austerity politics that we started discussing in the very beginning.

We shouldn’t get too hopeful for those things, but we are potentially at the beginning of an overturning of the consensus, between both the left and the right, that neoliberalism was actually a sound economic philosophy. It just seems like we are now actually ripe to reintroduce the role of the state, which also means rebuilding institutions and limiting the private sector and free markets, et cetera. Those things are vastly preferable ways of organizing society, so it’s a good time to be doing it.

LG: You already anticipated this. You mentioned Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ book Inventing the Future in an interview awhile ago—which I love, I think that book is fucking awesome!

JC: Hell yeah, that book is great.

LG: What else brings you hope or keeps you optimistic?

JC: Well, my syllabus begins with Capitalist Realism and very quickly brings people to Inventing the Future. It was very clear early on, as I was in these art and tech reading groups, that part of the problem was not having a political imaginary, and being trapped within the neoliberal vision of constant austerity, of declining profitability and cutbacks.

Having a positive vision of the future was actually the first task to be able to envision the other world, which I quite literally tried to do through the work making these giant life-size images, like 12 to 16 feet in scale. 

Forward Facing Politics (2018), one of Citarella’s early works. Photo Credit: Andy Johnson.

When I was younger, I really needed that political imaginary because I didn’t know what to hope for. Having gone through this material and rigorously thinking about these things, I now understand what a desirable world would be, and I can envision a clear path to get there. I think a lot of people who are suffering now from extreme depression, nihilism, and hopelessness, it’s because they probably can’t envision the positive scenario, but they definitely can’t envision a path to get there.

Unfortunately, if you’re browsing the internet, looking for a content streamer who’s going to give you a nice story or something to be motivated about, and give you a reason or narrative to live your life by, you’re not gonna find it. You do actually need to read some books, you do have to do some difficult work.

I think being a doomer is kind of like—you are succumbing to the incentives! They want you to be upset, they want you to be doomscrolling your phone. The idea of building something different, or doing something different is exactly what this system is designed to prevent you from doing. That’s how I maintain being an optimist.

LG: Cool.

JC: Oh, and go to the gym and have a hobby. Exercise, whatever it is, whatever your practice is. It can be art, it could be painting, going to the gym, having a sport, just having a hobby. Get your fucking head out of the news feed. That’s it. That’s very important. 

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