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This article discusses ways of framing Locative Media through critical theories of new media, particularly Giles Deleuze's "control society hypothesis" and Bruno Latour's "parliament of things". It considers artistic practices that combine data visualization and location-awareness in order to represent public space. If Locative Media largely reworked the Situationist practice of psychogeography, in which the city was the primary site of contestation, the article looks at practices which contest ideas about Nature, in order to create "structures of participation" to address a "crisis in political agency" (Jeremijenko). The conclusion shifts Latour's discourse on networks of non-human agency to the cognitive level in order to consider the potential impact of ubiquitous technology in terms of being.

Previously theorised as vehicles for expressing progressive dissent, this article considers how political memes have become entangled in the recent reactionary turn of Web subcultures. Drawing on Chantal Mouffe's work on political affect, this article examines how online anonymous communities use memetic literacy, memetic abstraction, and memetic antagonism to constitute themselves as political collectives. Specifically, it focuses on how the subcultural and highly reactionary milieu of 4chan's /pol/ board does so through an anti-Semitic meme called triple parentheses. In aggregating the contents of this peculiar meme from a large dataset of /pol/ comments, the article finds that /pol/ users, or anons, tend to use the meme to formulate a nebulous out-group resonant with populist demagoguery.

Background: This article examines how the rhetorical style of the "alt-right" builds a political audience through a study of the Rebel, a Canadian YouTube news channel. Analysis: This study analyzes the rhetoric of two hosts on the Rebel, Lauren Southern and Gavin McInnes, and finds their style marked by the use of the vernacular slang associated with subcultural communities of the alt-right. Conclusion and implications: The unique rhetorical style on display points to micro-celebrity culture and techniques as a key to the proliferation of the alt-right. Contexte : En étudiant la chaîne canadienne the Rebel, cet article examine comment la rhétorique de la « droite alternative » construit une audience politique. Analyse : Nous analysons la rhétorique de deux hôtes, Lauren Southern et Gavin McInnes, et trouve que leur style est marquée par l'utilisation de l'argot vernaculaire associé aux communautés du « alt-right ». Conclusions et implications : Leur style exposé comment la culture et les techniques des micro-célébrités influence la prolifération de l'alt-right.

At the fringes of an increasingly hegemonic platform economy, there exists another web of anonymous forums and image boards whose unique "mask culture" the article aims to deconstruct by tracing its roots in the cyber-separationist imaginary of early internet culture, in a way that can be seen to undermine the new "face culture" of social media platforms like Facebook. The practices that characterize this "deep vernacular web" are anti- and impersonal rather than personal, ephemeral and aleatory rather than persistent and predictable, collective rather than individual, stranger-rather than friend-oriented, and radically public and contagious rather than privatized, filtered, and contained. Characterized by its ephemerality and anonymity, and preoccupied with dissimulative identity play, memes, and trolling, the set of subcultural attitudes that characterizes this part of the web can be summarized by the ironic and intentionally misspelled phrase "Teh internet is serious business." By exploring the vernacular significance of this saying and how it can be seen to articulate an oppositional attitude to the currently hegemonic platform culture, this article simultaneously aims to contribute to contemporary debates on the reactionary turn in internet culture associated with the global rise of the alt-right.

On 4 December 2016, a man entered a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor armed with an AR-15 assault rifle in an attempt to save the victims of an alleged satanic pedophilia ring run by prominent members of the Democratic Party. While the story had already been discredited (LaCapria), at the time of the incident, nearly half of Trump voters were found to give a measure of credence to the same rumors that had apparently inspired the gunman (Frankovic). Was we will discuss here, the bizarre conspiracy theory known as "Pizzagate" had in fact originated a month earlier on 4chan/pol/, a message forum whose very raison d'être is to protest against "political correctness" of the liberal establishment, and which had recently become a hub for "loose coordination" amongst members the insurgent US 'alt-right' movement (Hawley 48). Over a period of 25 hours beginning on 3 November 2016, contributors to the /pol/ forum combed through a cache of private e-mails belonging to Hillary Clinton's campaign manager John Podesta, obtained by Russian hackers (Franceschi-Bicchierai) and leaked by Julian Assange (Wikileaks). In this short time period contributors to the forum thus constructed the basic elements of a narrative that would be amplified by a newly formed "right-wing media network", in which the "repetition, variation, and circulation" of "repeated falsehoods" may be understood as an "important driver towards a 'post-truth' world" (Benkler et al). Heavily promoted by a new class of right-wing pundits on Twitter (Wendling), the case of Pizzagate prompts us to reconsider the presumed progressive valence of social media protest (Zuckerman). While there is literature, both popular and academic, on earlier protest movements associated with 4chan (Stryker; Olson; Coleman; Phillips), there is still a relative paucity of empirical research into the newer forms of alt-right collective action that have emerged from 4chan. And while there have been journalistic exposés tracing the dissemination of the Pizzagate rumors across social media as well as deconstructing its bizarre narrative (Fisher et al.; Aisch; Robb), as of yet there has been no rigorous analysis of the provenance of this particular story. This article thus provides an empirical study of how the Pizzagate conspiracy theory developed out of a particular set of collective action techniques that were in turn shaped by the material affordances of 4chan's most active message board, the notorious and highly offensive /pol/.

In this paper we develop an empirical, big data approach to analyze how alt-right vernacular concepts (such as kek and beta) were used on the notorious anonymous and ephemeral imageboard 4chan/pol/and the fan wiki Encyclopedia Dramatica. While 4chan/pol/is broadly regarded as an influential source of many of the web's most successful memes such as Pepe the Frog, Encyclopedia Dramatica functions as a kind of satirical Wikipedia for this meme subculture, written in high concept and highly offensive vernacular style. While the site's affordances make them distinct, they are connected by a subcultural style and politics that has recently become increasingly connected with violent right-wing activism, forming a loose subcultural language community. Contrary to "memetic" theories of cultural evolution in media studies, our analysis draws on theoretical frameworks from poststructuralist and pragmatist philosophies of language and deploys empirical techniques from corpus linguistics to consider the role of online platforms in shaping these vernacular modes of expression. This approach helps us to identify instances of vernacular innovation within these corpora from 2012-2020—a period during which the white supremacist "alt-right" movement arose online. Through these analyses we contribute both to ongoing interdisciplinary attempts to bridge the gap between cultural-theoretical and computational-linguistic approaches to studying online subcultures, and to the empirical study of the vernacular roots of the "toxic memes" that appear to be an increasingly common feature on social media.

Abstract
Contemporary politics seems to be saturated with irony. In the context of social movements, this creates a perplexing mix of sincerity and insincerity, in which ambivalence and irreverence are coupled with deep conviction and (sometimes deadly) serious action. Writing as a multidisciplinary collective, the authors have witnessed irony playing a crucial role in diverse social movements — from BlackLivesMatter activists in Ghana, to post-crash political imaginaries in Greece, to the Boogaloo Bois in the United States. Across these cases, the authors argue that irony becomes an important means of gathering, orienting, and animating political collectives, in two ways. First, within contexts of deep uncertainty or instability, where it can be extremely hard to trace political cause and effect and to know how to act effectively, irony provides a useful interpretative tool. Irony allows actors to position themselves between competing values, and attend to contradictions, enabling them to imagine common cause and possible futures within a radically unsteady world. Second, irony generates intensities in excess of understanding. Irony can generate surpluses of meaning, cultivate spaces of play and freedom from responsibility, and amplify the felt potentiality of ideas through memetic repetition. Such intensities have the capacity to spill over into decisive action. The authors conclude by unpacking the implications of these ironic forces for engaging in politics today.

There is growing awareness about how social media circulate extreme viewpoints and turn up the temperature of public debate. Posts that exhibit agitation garner disproportionate engagement. Within this clamour, fringe sources and viewpoints are mainstreaming, and mainstream media are marginalized. This book takes up the mainstreaming of the fringe and the marginalization of the mainstream. In a cross-platform analysis of Google Web Search, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, 4chan and TikTok, we found that hyperpartisan web operators, alternative influencers and ambivalent commentators are in ascendency. The book can be read as a form of platform criticism. It puts on display the current state of information online, noting how social media platforms have taken on the mantle of accidental authorities, privileging their own on-platform performers and at the same time adjudicating between claims of what is considered acceptable discourse