For this interview I spoke to Joshua Citarella (@JoshuaCitarella on social media), an artist, researcher, and Twitch streamer who studies niche online communities. He authored the book the Politigram and the Post-Left exploring esoteric online political beliefs. He’s done a lot of work exploring various “e-deologies” and the very online young people who create and subscribe to them.
We discussed the pros and cons of e-deologies, how gamer guilds practice market socialism, and the need to contest spaces, even if they are aestheticized as being right wing. We also spoke about the current problems facing leftwing media. Left media has settled with allowing platforms like Patreon to be our shared infrastructure rather than creating our own.
“E-deology” is an internet slang term used to describe the overuse of prefixes and suffixes to generate complex ideological labels. These hyper-specific categories are a gamified form of identity play and niche personal branding in the chaotic landscape of online politics.
More from Joshua Citarella
DKP is Market Socialism Video
Yung Chomsky on Physical Fitness and the Left Podcast
Joshua Citarella’s Patreon
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