So what, then, does shitposting offer as a response to precarity in creative and cultural industries, like higher education and creative work?
Scroll. Tap forward. I’m so demure, I’m very mindful. Scroll. Tap backward. I need 2 ctl + alt + delete myself!! Tap. Tap. Tap. No one told me existing in the context that came before me would be this hard. I girlbossed a little too close to the sun. Ugh, another Dimes Square meme? Tap. Tap. Scroll down. I’m like Kendall Roy/Patrick Zweig/Mark Fisher/ insert your mediocre white sopping wet meow meow here but a girl. Swipe left. Meme admin girlfriend, touch grass boyfriend. I could fix her. No–I could fix them. While you were making fancams, I was getting removed for violating Instagram’s community guidelines. We are not the same! Tap. Tap. Swipe up. Become ungovernable. Become unhireable. In my girlblogger era (derogatory). Tap. Swipe up. Tap. Tap backward. Quirked up and esoteric. Delete my account. Delete my account. DELETE MY ACCOUNT!
What am I doing here? Why can’t I decide what to post? Will I be taken seriously? Imagine calling this cultural criticism. Imagine submitting this as part of an annual review file to determine if I am ‘tenurable’ enough. Imagine sharing this article on professional social media accounts, like, “yes! I’m literally comparing shit to data files!” Will this make me a standout academic? Does Instagram need to accumulate yet another meme account with half-baked theoryposts? Shit stains: platform hygiene can’t wash away the permanence of a shitpost! We’ll just keep posting and posting and posting and posting and posting and posting and posting…
I shake the haze from my eyes and blink slowly. How long have I been scrolling for? I could have been writing. I could have been editing. I could have been promoting my academic brand. And yet… here I am.
I close Instagram. I put down my phone. I open the Word document.
Back to work.
**
Swiping for the Stink
Emerging from the bowels of the Web, shitposting is a crass and multimodal media practice of user-generated memetic content that intends to disrupt and derail normative platform use. Though typically associated with alt-right hate speech and disinformation, this is neither an essay about your typical toxic technocultures nor is it a demonstrative guide to becoming the next top influencer. This is, perhaps in a roundabout way, an essay about breaking the rules, embracing the absurd, and playing a different game—a game where mediocrity and imperfection reign.
As a mediated practice, early shitposting saturated the bowels of content aggregation platforms, like Reddit and 8chan, then spilled into Tumblr’s diarrheal microblogging infrastructure of contained reblogging. It was not until the late 2010s that Instagram users, overwhelmingly Gen-Z women, began using the platform to engage in another form of shitposting, colloquially known as girlblogging. Through each carefully cultivated post, girlbloggers satirize popular feminism, and consumer culture through Mitski mood boards and Franz Kafka memes. Shitposts aren’t beautiful: many of the images are grainy, deep-fried palimpsests. Yet they entail a careful act of curation that both builds on what came before and prepares what will emerge in the remixed, recycled after.
In September 2022, I joined the Instagram shitposting ranks. For the last two years, I’ve been (semi-)anonymously making shitposts as part of an ethnographic project that examines how silly, introspective, vulnerable, or outright bad content reconfigures concerns about cultural production and authenticity within the creator economy. After months of observation, I began making, collecting, and curating (mostly) original shitposts. Initially, I began shitposting to express my experiences as a disabled academic worker with a chronic gastrointestinal condition. I was also writing my dissertation and applying for tenure-track academic positions during this time. As I continued shitposting, I began drawing similarities between the aspirational pulls of digital creative labor and academic work.
Like influencers, aspiring academics chase the promise of some future windfall by, among other things, building a “brand,” often with highly unstable sources of income. But instead of a brand deal it is a tenure-track job. As feminist media scholars like Brooke Erin Duffy and Sophie Bishop explain, the creep of creative work infiltrates other cultural industries, like higher education. Though influencing may not be identical to training for a tenure-track professorship, both industries are mired by significant income disparities, an oversaturated market, and austere administrative governance. Aspirational labor obfuscates the precarity of the present by working toward a future where you have it all, a future that for current early career academic workers, may never exist.
On Publics and Privates: Platform Hygiene and the Sanitization of Creative Labor
Over time, my shitposting practices began to address how aspirational labor reinforces public-private binaries. Instagram is an interesting place to shitpost. Launched in 2008, the photo-sharing platform’s governing strategies appear to encourage hygienic user practices that emphasize cleanliness and public presentation that render visibility for “good content” (e.g., brand deals) while suppressing “bad content” (e.g., vulnerable confessions, blurry photos). Feminist media scholars Rachel Plotnick and T.L. Cowan discuss how Eurocentric norms around hygiene, race, and publicness ultimately inform the production of our digital personae, an ongoing process where users must sanitize and remove anything that disturbs the containment of “private” life. By applying hygienic practices to content creation, users believe their accounts will hold more value on the platform.
Notably, many girlbloggers resist Instagram’s sanitized platform logics, or ideologies that optimize user visibility. They neither care about going viral nor curating the perfect grid. Unlike the lifestyle influencers who dominate Instagram’s Explore feed, girlbloggers and other Instagram shitposters don’t appear to aspire for platform stardom. Instead, we aim for another form of creative labor, one that aspires to be, well…mid.
Through embracing this mediocrity, I’ve found shitposting to be a useful medium for critiquing platform logics which equivocate publicness with so-called “normality.” For example, in a November 2023 post, I respond to the platform hygiene saturating content creation:
The meme, consisting of actor Jeremy Strong wearing an oversized yellow scarf, includes a caption that reads, “Sorting out the rinsta posts from my finsta posts. It’s not unlike sorting feces piss and goo from the bones and animal scraps. It’s not unlike the ways a platforms organizational tools sort and categorize our data.” I made this meme after reflecting on psychoanalyst Dominique Laporte’s book, The history of shit (1977), which analyzes how fifteenth-century French legal edicts shaped cultural perceptions of (un)cleanliness and the public-private divide. One such law, referenced in the post, dictated norms around how French citizens should dispose of different forms of waste. In turn, practices around proper waste removal reinforced ideas of what public life should be like—and who could participate.
The meme also refers to the platform vernacular “rinsta” and “finsta.” These portmanteaus, which respectively refer to a “real Instagram” and a “fake Instagram” also helped me think through the public/private division of digital persona curation. Rinstas are typically reserved for the user’s public-facing persona and house “good quality” posts. Conversely, finstas are private accounts that obscure the user’s identity, often featuring bad pictures, perverse memes, and vulnerable captions—the self we are encouraged to censor on our “real” Instagram accounts. Ultimately, the argument I make in the meme is two-fold: Instagram’s platform logics reinforce these public/private binaries, which are shown through the comparison between trash sorting and deciding which types of content belong on specific accounts. Moreover, the idea of “good” content versus “bad content” results in self-surveillance from users themselves—is this post enough for the platform? Will I be seen, or will I be censored and hidden by Instagram’s algorithmic recommendation infrastructure?
Such ideas contribute to what disability historian Susan Schweik refers to as “the ugly laws”—American ordinances that made it illegal for visibly disabled, racialized, or poor people to be seen in city spaces. As These long-standing beliefs are now encoded into a platform’s algorithmic recommendation infrastructure, reproducing how ableism and racism shape who gets to be seen in public while hiding those who don’t ‘belong’ away from Instagram’s explore page, which many creators on the app equivocate with reaching peak platform visibility.
This meme then furthers a critique about the relationship between platform hygiene, value, and visibility. Platform hygiene’s sanitary logics reinforce biased, binary divisions between public and private. I wondered if I had posted the same caption on my personal account and how it would be perceived by my followers, by the algorithmic infrastructure. Perhaps the post would be out of place and ranked poorly by the recommendation system, so it would be like the post didn’t exist anyway. Shitposting, then, became a helpful method to name and reflect on these obfuscated ideologies. But there’s a limitation in naming—what can shitposts do to interrupt biased platform moderation? Or labor disparities? Are we just trapped in all this?
I scroll up through the word doc with gritted teeth and parse through the close reading of my shitpost. I read it again as the creep of self-doubt percolates in my chest. Fellas, is it cringe to analyze your own posts?
As a content creator, I make my silly little shitposts with the knowledge that once it’s out in the universe, my audience is free to interpret whatever I share. But analyzing my own shitposts as an academic feels immobilizing: what is disruptive about a shitpost if I’m treating it like a scholarly text? Am I just leaning into the cringe or taking myself too seriously? Does blending my creative practice with my professional world violate the academic brand I’ve been coached to cultivate? What am I even doing here?
I breathe in. I breathe out.
Back to work.
Shitposting and aspirational media work
As I began wrestling with these tensions, I directed my shitposting practices to concretely address the frictive relationship between mediocrity and platform visibility. Are shitposts the spaces where we dump our excess stuff? Our feelings, our fears of not being ‘good enough?’ For instance, in one meme I made in winter 2024, I reflect on a moment when I received an Instagram push notification congratulating my “visibility” after receiving 1,000 likes on a post (a feature available to those with business accounts). I remember feeling a bit nauseous. Was there nothing beyond visibility?
I didn’t know what to do with the complicated feelings bubbling up inside me, but I knew I had to get them out. I closed out of Instagram, and within 10 minutes, I reopened the app and posted a new shitpost.
The new meme used a blank white square canvas. At the top, I wrote, “To be a woman is to perform,” a satirical nod to a TikTok meme that references the exhaustive labor of existing in a patriarchal manosphere. Below is a screenshot of my engagement notification: “People are checking out your post! You earned a new achievement.” In the bottom left corner, I’ve pasted an unsmiling alt-girl wojak with vivid green e-girl hair. In the context of Instagram shitposts, girl wojaks add an affective layer of acknowledgement and feeling. (I also use this particular girl wojak as a stand-in for myself as I have the same hairstyle, though my front pieces are magenta, not green.)
After posting, I felt better. Instead of trying to get noticed by my followers, this was just any old shitpost. I found that my shitposts felt more creative when I concentrated on getting out my thoughts instead of attempting to curate likes. But that’s a slippery slope: Instagram’s platform logics hailed me once more into what Kelley Cotter calls “playing the visibility game”: the platform recognized my post was valuable, and I’d be chasing after the gamified encouragement with each subsequent post. Would I now be pushed to post all bangers, all the time?
The mid labor of a shitpost is still creative labor. There is effort and think-time and money and person power that goes into its production. This moment offered me new ways to think about shitposting as faulty forms of culture making—a type of work that offers us distinct ways of thinking about visibility and precarity in creative and cultural industries.
Playing with excess: Shitposts as media containers
As I began making shitposts about the aspirational labor of academic work, I started noticing that it was not unlike making “traditional” influencer or creator content. However, unlike mainstream forms of creative labor, shitposts are rarely tidy, clean, or contained. They are frictive forms. To understand this, I turned to science and technology studies scholar Lewis Mumford’s work on “container technologies,” an umbrella term for objects that hold information in place, nurturing it, sustaining it. Mumford suggests containers are “transformatively feminine” technologies that are ideologically positioned to grow, fertilize, and preserve. While containers, like bowls, baskets, or mp3 files, hold information for users to experience, their presence is not noticed.
As I continued my shitposting, I wondered how shitposts might push the boundaries of containment. They hold thought, feelings, musings, vibes—but can they hold on to the dark emotions, vulnerability, and messy thoughts that must be suppressed on a sanitized platform? I reflect on these frictive tensions in a post from May 2024, where I considered how shitposting disrupts the sanitizing and aspirational boundaries between creative labor and academic work:
The shitpost features the aforementioned e-girl wojak and a pastel teal and pink gradient background. At the top of the meme, “Girls after finishing one year on the tenure-track” appears in white blocky letters. On the right side of the meme, it says, “Babe, it’s time to yearn again!” with logos for Taylor and Francis and SAGE, two major publishers of (paywalled) academic journals and books. On the left hand side, my e-girl wojak stand-in appears next to the phrase, “Yes, honey.” This post is a play on the “Yes, honey” meme, which surfaced in 2020. Initially referencing sadomasochist acts, girlbloggers remixed “Yes, honey” to satirize aspirational desires around work and social capital. It’s the latter interpretation of “Yes, honey” that inspired this particular shitpost. Following the completion of my first year on the tenure-track at an R2 institution, I needed to immediately pivot to working on submitting a series of manuscripts to peer-reviewed journals to secure contract renewal (and eventual tenure) with my employer. Crass comparisons aside, I ultimately fashioned this shitpost to reflect on the endless cycle of academic labor, a labor that’s intensified in the digital media age.
Here, I suggest shitposting offers points of reflexivity in the age of influencer creep. Early career academic workers who pursue tenure-track professorships are increasingly instructed to use public-facing social media to promote themselves and create visibility—not unlike an influencer. Akin to a full-time influencer or content creator, who is always writing, filming, editing, and posting toward the unguaranteed promise of “having it all,” non-tenured academic workers must also publish their work with the best journals or university presses, innovate their pedagogical practices, and serve their communities. Moreover, the pressures of public-facing scholarship additionally result in academic content creation—a genuine influencer creep crossover!
So what, then, does shitposting offer as a response to precarity in creative and cultural industries, like higher education and creative work? A shitpost crowns: pushing against hygienic platform practices to force new ways of culture making. It excretes in frictive fits and starts, and reveals what’s been hidden and sanitized. The passing thought that perhaps what you see was not what was put in. Layered in digital detritus, text, image, and aesthetic form fuse together, creating what Jonathan Sterne calls a “crystalized set of social and material relationships.” Shitposting’s entanglements result in an explosion of excess. Such overflows invite the possibilities of other information and cultural production—a series of practices that eschew aspiration and embrace the moment as it is. In this way, I understand shitposting as media spaces where we dump our extra stuff: our desires, our relationships with precarious labor, the pressures to be productive, to be normal, to be public. Within these leaky boundaries, shitposts afford us a respite, where we play alongside the fuzzy and faded liminalities that shape the extensions of ourselves.
Shitposting offers a space to let go, to pause, to process the sticky stuff. Within the strain, there’s a release and a relief: shitposts mediate how we notice aspirational labor and influencer creep seep into academic work. And, if nothing else, we’ll just keep posting, and posting, and posting, and posting, and posting, and posting, and posting, and posting, and posting….
Jess Rauchberg is an academic worker at Seton Hall University and semi-retired content creator who writes about inequalities in the creator economy. She has never gone viral (yet!).