BuzzFeed Is a Commie Plot

My kinda clickbait:

Vox‘s Dylan Matthews
reports that in 1996, BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti
published an essay in the journal Negations titled
“Capitalism
and Schizophrenia: Contemporary Visual Culture and the Acceleration
of Identity Formation/Dissolution.” Peretti’s paper, which
draws heavily on the Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson and
the post-structuralists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, explores
“how identification functions in the media saturated world of late
capitalism and, more importantly, the issue of how identities can
be fostered that resist the logic of commodification.”

Hey, it was 1996. They say if you weren’t engaging radical
critical theory in the ’90s, you weren’t really there. What’s great
about this find is that, in Matthews’ words, the paper “more or
less lays out (and critiques) Buzzfeed’s entire business model—a
full decade before the company was founded.” In the young Peretti’s
view, Matthews writes,

Capitalism needs people to have
moments of schizophrenia, where their personal identities
are in flux, but it also needs them to be able to recover from
those moments with new identities, which can fuel new consumption
so as to realize the identities in question. “Capitalism needs
schizophrenia, but it also needs egos,” he writes. “The
contradiction is resolved through the acceleration of the temporal
rhythm of late capitalist visual culture. This type of acceleration
encourages weak egos that are easily formed, and fade away just as
easily.”

So you may, say, identify as
someone who went to summer camp, but that’s not a durable
identity, so you’ll soon need to pick up another, like, say,

someone raised by conservative parents. And the way this
identification will happen is through images and video, through
“visual culture.” Presumably, in this late capitalist world,
someone who creates a website that can use pictures and GIFs and
videos to form hundreds if not thousands of new identities for
people to latch onto will become very successful! Especially so if
they allow brands to create and channel these identities themselves
by, say, hosting a “Which
Barbie Doll Are You?” quiz from Mattel or a video of “Awkward
Things We All Do In Our Teens But Would Never Admit” from a
company selling acne cleanser.

There is more, which you can read
here. And if you really want to get into the woods, you can
read
this year-old post by Eugene Wolters of Critical
Theory, which is where Matthews picked up the story. Wolters
raises the possibility that Peretti is “a subversive
genius who is using Buzzfeed to destroy our mode of production,”
making BuzzFeed “one giant resistance.” When Matthews
asked Peretti “whether he saw Buzzfeed as embodying the trends
described in the paper or as subverting them,” the cagy commie
replied “lol.” I think that means “Lacan
Our Lord.”

So this story is doubly useful. First you can deploy it to
persuade your parents that the advanced degree in critical theory
that they’re financing is the first step toward becoming a
successful Internet entrepreneur. Then you can use it to convince
your old comrades that your Web company is a cleverly camouflaged
weapon against neoliberalism.

For further developments, follow @MarxFeed on Twitter.