Becoming Red-Pilled: Affective production in online countercultural collectives

Abstract

Advances in information and communication technologies present remarkable potential for globally dispersed people to connect and engage around a variety of interests. While online communities seemed to initially offer vast potential for social cohesion, their ephemeral nature continues to raise doubts about their ability to facilitate meaningful togetherness. It has also been suggested that the largely automated nature of commercially driven social media can excite aggression and polarisation and thus bring about far-reaching negative social outcomes. Drawing from a long-term immersive online ethnography of the Red Pill, a conspiratorial collective battling their conception of feminine power in society, we adapt Bernard Stiegler’s philosophy of technology to assess its production of affect and social cohesion. Our findings reframe online counterculture, emphasising how its expressions are predicated on a techno-affective overdetermination that forecloses the possibility of meaningful participation and community-building.