Folklore Institute

“We paint everything with a broad brush when it comes to online culture, especially politics. Commentators treat the “Online Right” as monolithic when in fact it’s always been a fractured ecosystem of incompatible ideologies. It’s home to everything from genuinely hateful extremist groups to mainstream conservative movements that operate within acceptable discourse — yet for over a decade we’ve treated it as a single bloc. Only now, when the cracks are glaring, do we begin to make distinctions, and even then only sometimes.”

https://open.substack.com/pub/defaultfriend/p/a-note-on-online-political-subcultures

I think one of the major insights I’ve had while reading Katherine Dee’s research is that the plurality of online cultures is far more vast, complex, and contradictory than one can easily imagine. As a result, we often see a flatland effect — seeing online as a 2D world, when it is more of a 4D one.