OILab

New article post! shorturl.at/yJBr5 I mostly blame this brave attempt at updating digital methods for the 2020s "vibes" era of platforms on @hetsalwel.bsky.social - and we're continuing this research in '26 as a reading group "From Vectors to Vibes" - email us if you're interested in participating!

Release v1.51 The R Is in the month · digitalmethodsinitiative/4cat This updates adds several new processors, to help working with image datasets and LLM-based annotations; many bug fixes and small QoL updates to processors; various bug fixes and updates to mapping...

Just released: 4CAT 1.51 “The R is in the month”

Highlights:

📊 Classification evaluation: subpar F1 scores, now in 4CAT
🤖 New LLM processor options
#️⃣ Search by #hashtag on Telegram
🖼️ Image hasher: check for duplicate images!
🪰 A LOT of small bug fixes and improvements

github.com/digitalmetho...

Intensification - Kate Crawford - Eating the Future: The Metabolic Logic of AI Slop AI slop isn’t invested in the order of events or even looking like reality. The slop is not the territory: it just smothers it in synthetic goop. It’s flooding the zone with AI shit.

Interesting piece by @katecrawford.bsky.social on "metabolic media", though I personally prefer the term "excremental media" 🫠 (for my PhD I wrote about early (pre-AI) meme culture on 4chan/Reddit and how they already imagined the internet as a giant digestive tract tinyurl.com/38wer53p

Together with Marc Tuters and @robtoes.bsky.social I wrote an essay on the Charlie Kirk assassination, the Groypers - Nick Fuentes connection and the state of memetic political violence today oilab.eu/frozen-antag...

The New Legislators of Silicon Valley - The Ideas Letter Morozov describes a newly emerged Silicon Valley class of “oligarch-intellectuals,” billionaire tech elites who combine vast wealth, ideological ambition, and the philosophical pretense to reshape pub...

Essay by Morozov on tech-oligarchs: www.theideasletter.org/essay/silico...

Curtis Yarvin, le gourou des "Lumières obscures" qui veut peser sur la présidence Trump Quelques jours avant l'investiture de Donald Trump, le New York Times a publié une longue interview de l'idéologue neoréactionnaire Curtis Yarvin. Cet ex-entrepreneur de la tech est l’un des penseurs…

Marc Tuters spoke to @france24.com about Curtis Yarvin's recent NYT interview and the end of democracy [in French]: www.france24.com/fr/%C3%A9co-...

#dmi starting 2025 with Digital methods winter school! Doing a project on Femcel culture on Pinterest with Idil Galip

💡 New publication by Gavin Mueller and Marc Tuters on the playful subcultures of r/PoliticalCompassMemes!

'Gather, explore, collaborate' – new toolkit to enrich digital culture… KingsCAT is a cross-faculty initiative coordinated by the Digital Future Institute’s Centre for Digital Culture and the Department of Digital Humanities in collaboration with e-Research and…

We're pleased to announce the launch of KingsCAT 🐱, a new @4cat.nl instance to support social media research at King's created by
@digitalmethods.net @oilab.bsky.social
hosted by @kingsdh.bsky.social @digitalculturekcl.bsky.social @kingsartshums.bsky.social www.kcl.ac.uk/news/gather-... 🎊✨

🚨 New publication by @helmerstoel.bsky.social and @ddzeeuw.bsky.social 👇

Two images I showed in class yesterday to exemplify the inflated (and ridiculous) use of war metaphors (mostly by the right) and what that might tell us about the current state of (digital) culture more broadly... #war #metaphors #rhetoric

My dissertation is now publicly available here: hdl.handle.net/11245.1/387b...

It features reworks of six articles as well as four new chapters.

The sad, stupid rise of the sigma male: how toxic masculinity took over social media His heroes are Patrick Bateman, John Wick, Tommy Shelby and Walter White. He follows Andrew Tate and idolises wolves. And he has quickly become a laughing stock. Welcome to the world of the sigma male

Daniël de Zeeuw spoke to The Guardian about the memetic trope of the "sigma male" www.theguardian.com/society/arti...

A Hero’s Journey? Ideological Entrepreneurs and Reactionary Digital Politics - SPUI25 This is the first talk in a series that looks at how the disruptive affordances and practices of global digital culture relate to political reconfigurations symptomatic of a broader crisis of liberali...

If you're in Amsterdam, on 24 June, @profafinlayson.bsky.social will explain what “reactionary digital politics” is, how it is shaped by “ideological entrepreneurs,” and how this is reconfiguring our understanding of what it is to be political.

Sign up here: spui25.nl/programma/di...

A network graph of cross-mentions from subreddits to 4chan boards.

🎆 Happy new year! 🎆

To hit the ground running, @hetsalwel.bsky.social published a paper on the relationship between groups on 4chan and Reddit. How has this relationship developed? What do cross-site associations teach us about their collectivity?

🔓 here: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Caught in the loops of digital agency panic: On NPCs and internet addicts - NECSUS This paper seeks to recontextualise and update Timothy Melley’s concept of ‘agency panic’ to think about current discourses around online media influence and addiction. According to Melley, agen...

How do fears regarding a loss of agency persist in our networked condition?
@ddzeeuw.bsky.social and Jernej Merkelj write about "agency panic" to reflect on the growing idea that online, everyone is controlled. They do so by analysing the NPC meme and the trope of the Internet addict.
Read it here👇

💡 Emillie de Keulenaar wrote about "speech affordances" for Big Data & Society. Using the Kekistan meme as a case study, she explores how site affordances and moderation shapes speech across platforms.
👉 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

The New Clarity: Awakening in the Post-Truth Era - Lawrence Wishart Abstract: In the wake of Trump and �Brexit, the late 2010s gave rise to an ambient sense of a post-truth crisis. It signals the

⏰ new pub!
In the wake of Trump and Brexit, online movements became enthralled with the radical sense of waking up from a false reality.
In this chapter, Daniël de Zeeuw and Jan Overwijk try to make sense of this strange resurgence of ‘awakening’ and the experience of radical epistemic clarity.