Joshua Citarella is an artist, internet culture researcher, and content creator. You might know him from his photography and art pieces which have been featured in galleries around the world, from his Twitch streams where he talks about following very-online diet and exercise routines, or his keen and perceptive writing on internet culture and politics. Josh is also a part of Do Not Research, a decentralized arts/research institution specializing in internet culture.
AIDAN: For people who don't know about Do Not Research, what is it and where is it at right now? And you know, like, how does it feel to have this web that you have helped weave with other people and see all the different things spinning off of it?
JOSH: Yeah, over 200 other people now. It is an arts organization that started in the Discord attached to my podcast and books and a variety of other materials that I've been publishing. And there was a reading group that started in the summer of 2020 that then formed new collaborations, all sorts of artworks, essays, video works, multimedia works. We gathered all of this material together, started publishing it on a blog. The first post was in March of 2021. And we're now in February of 2024. So it's been running for quite a long time, which is exciting. It's a tremendous undertaking to organize all this material. The blog is published about twice a week for over two years now. So we've released two just-over 400 page length books that are all of the text published to the blog. There's not other projects like it. I think of it as a new experimental format that we are learning in real-time for how to coordinate creative communities that have a shared interest and like-minded people who have been able to find each other through a content stream on the internet, largely memes, videos, podcasts, essays, that then collects a group around that core set of ideas.
They produce work that is in a similar genre or sympathetic to the same themes. And yeah, the task is to build a new institution from all of these atomized islands across social media. So this is our best attempt at doing that.
We are in the process this year of registering as a 501c3 to make it a tax exempt nonprofit in New York State. So yeah, we'll continue publishing the blog. We just accepted work for the next year. And then obviously new projects come up and other sorts of things happen during the timeline. But the core output of this organization is an online magazine largely organized through Substack reposted to Instagram and other different channels. And that material will run for another year, which is surreal to say.
AIDAN: In a sense, it reminds me a little of like Swifties or like WallStreetBets, like these communities where they're fandoms organizing on forums or sites or whatever, and they start to do things, they put out content, put out products around core themes. But like, you're registering as a 501c3. Do you see more organizations following that model? Is the internet turning into more organizations that are concrete rather than.. cyber?
JOSH: Yeah. I mean, this is this is the fascinating question. And I think a lot of the conversation around DAOs, you know, maybe a year ago, two years ago, were people interested in figuring this thing out. I don't think they fully solved it. And I'm not entirely convinced that a 501c3 is entirely the perfect path for the organization. It's not a conventional magazine structure because there is a community attached to it. In relation to the piece that we mentioned a moment ago, it’s this giant Do Not Research mapping project, which is obviously a parody of the popular Deep State mapping project — this schizophrenic diagram that traces infinite numbers of conspiracy theories and connections between the deep state, the government, COVID, planned and mixed great resets, you name it, New World Order type of stuff, all types of new age beliefs.
Those are the materials that we're interested in discussing, how the internet is transforming culture and politics. And for that piece specifically, it was a task to visualize the community because you know, a lot of the things that you're mentioning, I would say they're they're proportionally larger in scale in that, you know, this could be tens of thousands of people on a subreddit or hundreds of thousands of people on a subreddit. And DoNotResearch is just about to grow past Dunbar's number, the, you know, 150 to 250 number of people that you can easily recall within your recent memory, you know, at an organization that's at the scale of 1000 people, you will start to forget a face or a name at a certain point. But right now, I think everyone who's involved in the community remembers all of the posts and names and, and, you know, everything that's happened within the last few years. But it's now growing past that, which is, you know, an intentional goal that was set that these organizations have to move towards something. Otherwise, in the chaotic landscape of the internet, they just dissipate, they disappear. Like, “it was a cool scene that you were a part of for a few months, but it doesn't last.”
And so building institutional context and expert insights into these fields — which are largely undiscussed in other institutions — that is a task, and thus it must continue into the future and build into some intentional organization. So I think the easiest fit for that is to do a conventional nonprofit at this time. If there was one button I could push and make a DAO that fulfilled all of the, you know, necessary infrastructure of micropayments to contributors and access to private RSS feeds and then gated access to communities, that would be great. But that infrastructure doesn't exist. So for right now, 501c3 is I think the smartest decision that we can make to continue it.
AIDAN: So about the second post, about the sort of material culture of personal computing and computers — I hear a little bit of an echo in that of what you were saying that, you know, scenes can be ephemeral. You're in them for a few months and then they're gone. But people sort of want something that feels solid, that they can sit in. Do you think it's a similar thing, like with people who are interested in modding computers, that you're making something concrete out of the internet, which often feels very, you know, in flux. How do you see material culture as part of our understanding of the web?
JOSH: Yeah, you know, it's an interesting puzzle. I think the puzzle has been endlessly fascinating for me because it includes all of the political questions of how you organize large groups of people around shared interests and, you know, how you parcel out scarce resources and also have an organization that feels legitimate that has the trust of all the different contributors and things like this. So in particular, Personal Computers by Filip Kostic, the book is, it's a collection of a disparate community of, you know, insanely modded out computers that verge onto art sculpture that would be shown in a gallery.
And it's not especially collected anywhere. So what Filip has done is essentially collect this massive volume of images, several hundred pages, and then reproduce them as the volume, as the anthology to put a name and context to this emergent aesthetic that happened online. And the book is, I think, clearly the most viable form of doing that, both for its process of archiving, its accessibility at the price point, and distributing it amongst a group of people who care about the project enough that 10 years from now, let's say there's several hundred copies of the book, some of them may become water damaged, somebody moves, they misplace the book, you know, they tear a page by accident, but you've distributed the risk of that archive to several hundred people, and among one of them will be someone who stewards that volume, that context, that important work into the future in perpetuity and safeguards it from, you know, the digital dust and decay that happens on the internet, where we have learned (that archives are fragile).
I'm a millennial who saw Facebook groups that were super active and super interesting just eventually became deleted and we lost, in some cases, years of intellectual debate and scholarly research and really quality material. Part of building syllabi and publishing on Do Not Research is going back through 10 years of peer organized reading groups and actually reading the syllabus from 2011 that, you know, this reading group of just like scrappy, young, curious art kids. What were the essays that influenced them, and then going back and, you know, picking out the gems that were interesting, that had foresight, that have some kind of predictive capacity that tells us where we are now. They could see it back in 2011. What did they understand that we don't understand now, that accurately predicted the place that we're at? So all of that is to say that the book is obviously the ideal method of distribution and archiving. So, yeah, I think that was the right choice. It's an incredible book.
I have one myself, I keep it on the desk. And, yeah, yeah, I think what is kind of not yet figured out is moving beyond books to sell some type of artworks and other types of, I'm not yet sure. I see people now selling artworks in the Discord for, you know, admittedly like a small price, it's not like an art market, but there's people who are, they have found ways of like-minded people in the community that will support their work basically at the materials cost. So, you know, at least you're not going into debt to make your art practice.
There's some other form of organization that we're going to figure out through this process, but for right now the book is like the min-maxed form of distribution, archival, and so forth. So, I'm just very excited to have that. And the pictures from the book just look beautiful, like you could see it in a gallery and you'd be like, oh yeah, that belongs here.
AIDAN: Yeah, it would be a great show for a museum, modded computers of the 2010s. It made me think of, there was like, scholarship about it in the 90s, Sherry Turkle and stuff. These objects that are our gateways into the internet, so how do they fit into our lives and how do they feel? And I guess I'm thinking about, you know, these desktop computers as really personal objects that people are adding to with their own creativity and their own individual flair. Now that we're in this era of spatial computing or internet of things, do you think people will be able to mod? Will modding culture sort of continue, or do you think it's a really specific moment?
JOSH: I'm probably of the mindset that like, before Facebook existed, you could hand code your own website and make it ultra customized. But what brought on the just immense population of people who now use the internet, get all of their news and consume all of their goods and their groceries and everything through it, the onboarding mechanism was Facebook, which does not allow for a lot of customization. So I think what you see happen is there's an explosive type of creativity in the early years where people, you know, find new ways of doing things.
I really love the craft of it. And then eventually that is kind of roughly figured out for what will unlock this technology to a mass scale. And so probably I think the future looks more like Apple and Google Nest and things that you have one account on that is kind of in the cloud, which is not really customizable as opposed to like the Shenzhen style of, you know, building a custom Samsung that's also half iPhone that also connects to your laptop.
And I just don't think there's going to be the same amount of customization, because it just can't reach the same scale of an audience, you know, which is, I think, sadly, a loss for many of us who are creatives because it reduces the diversity and complexity and niche subcultures, all the things that we admire about technology and creative life. That's the interesting part of it. So when everything is reduced to Facebook, it's maybe less interesting than LiveJournal or MySpace, which allowed for just a huge gamut and gradation of different creative forms of expression. And that was maybe a more interesting internet.
AIDAN: I know personally I discovered you and Do Not Research through Instagram. There seems to be… well, ideally these sort of de-atomized communities could eventually come together and be a bit of a check on these boring platforms or at least have more influence than individual creators do in kind of determining how the algorithm flows or whatever. But there's always going to be a relationship, isn’t there? Could you ever totally detach from the platforms once you reach, not the Dunbar number, but maybe another critical mass? And then in that case, if there is sort of an element of detachment going on, like… do you still have faith in normies?
JOSH: I think it's important to remember that it is okay for people to have bad taste. There may be some people who just prefer the cable TV version of the internet, which is TikTok and Instagram reels and they like cooking videos and that's fine and that's okay for them. What I'm interested in is finding a sustainable way to produce the weird creative projects that I've found to be the most fascinating part of creative life. That's the stuff we come here for and it's increasingly difficult and expensive to make. So yeah, finding ecosystems that can support what I care very much about — but I also don't need to have my particular taste be hegemonic, the most popular thing. Like, I'm okay to be in a subculture that's for a niche group of people that really care about this stuff.
AIDAN: So on to the last post, the Dark Forest Anthology. What is that idea? And is it a way to bring back that kind of modding subcultural vibe?
JOSH: It's something like that, yeah. The Dark Forest theory of the internet was first published by Yancey Strickler, who is a partner at MetaLabel and was a co-founder of Kickstarter. He published this essay to a private news feed of 500 readers, just an essay sent to his friends, the kind of original Dark Forest. And then it was widely shared with people, grew to a much larger audience, orders of magnitude bigger within a few weeks from that.
The Dark Forest theory of the internet is inspired by Cixin Liu’s, Three-Body Problem which proposes a theory of alien life in the universe, where it's called the Fermi paradox, where although there are other forms of life and other entities in this Dark Forest, they don't make themselves visible because there are predators out roaming the Dark Forest. And so the idea is that, you know giant Web 2 platforms like Twitter or YouTube or Instagram have become increasingly adversarial with the terrible toxic physics of the attention economy that increase flame wars and sensationalism and divisiveness and don't really allow for complex conversations and often get in the way of the truth because it's so difficult to have meaningful exchanges within the design of today's current platforms. So when you extrapolate that to a theory of how to organize internet communities, what that means is largely private spaces which are gatekept by either an editor or a curator where you have to personally invite people to a private community or they're gatekept by a small affordable paywall, usually a $5 rolling subscription on a Patreon or a Substack. And then within that context the conversations that unfold are not optimized ,meaning that they're not subject to the attention dynamics of giant Web 2 platforms where you can very easily be clipped out of context, quote tweeted, things can be blown up, you know, many orders of magnitude to a larger audience and a joke that was maybe funny between me and my dozen friends, at the scale of a million people it's going to offend, you know, five different groups for five different reasons and you just can't control the context.
So all of that is to say that I think the big Web 2 platforms built very effective unbundling technologies to liquidate forms of magazines and other institutions, and now everyone can be their own atomized individual island. But as a result, we're also, you know, feeling like we don't have context, we don't belong anywhere and it's often not a very safe path to pursue. So, you know, what do you do when you're going through a PvP zone?
You got to have your crew, your guild to go with you because otherwise you might get ganked by somebody in the hostile territory. And so I kind of envisioned this period of the internet, these dark forest communities as like rebuilding guild-like structures, rebundling atomized creative producers into magazine-like structures and, you know, that creates the value and the context for all the work that comes out of it. I think that is basically like the task of our generation right now is finding people that you can collaborate with rather than compete with. There is a real scarcity of attention on the internet because there's just so much information. So you and your peers, although you might be interested in the same things, you are actually in competition with each other rather than collaboration. But if you take all of your Substacks and you make them one, you are now in collaboration with each other and you all, that rising tide floats all of those boats. And that includes profit sharing, attention sharing, opportunity-sharing, and all those sorts of things. So, that leads us to where we are now, which is that we have a theory without the practical tools to do it.
So the Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet, this book which we recently released, traces the organic evolution of this idea from Yancey Strickler to Maggie Appleton to Venkatesh Rao, Peter Limberg, Rebecca Fox, Arthur from Trust in Berlin, Carly Busta from the New Models podcast, myself, Leith Benkhedda, who is active in both Do Not Research and New Models, and also in Trust. And then Cixin Liu wrote a kind of closing thesis for this anthology of essays, which are generally theorizing this period of the internet and trying to figure out how to move forward.
One of the solutions to that is to co-publish a book and to split all the profits from the book, meaning that instead of me trying to compete with NewModels, we're each publishing a book and then we have a crossover audience and they can only afford to buy one, we can publish together and that means more material for the fans or the consumers of the content and then profit-sharing between us. It actually works out to the benefit of everybody involved. And that's a platform design question, it's a market question, it's a political-theoretical question. It's endlessly fascinating, but I feel rather optimistic for this next period of the internet, mostly because it can't get worse than it already is. Not that it's going to get so much better. It's just that it really can't get much worse.