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Although it was once commonplace to suggest that digital media promoted democratization, recent events have generated increased momentum for scholars and critics who have long sought to trouble that assumption: from the Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro's use of WhatsApp as a propaganda tool, to the murky role of Cambridge Analytica and Facebook data in the Brexit campaign, to the Trumpsupporting alt-right on Reddit, 4chan, and 8chan, there has been something of a reactionary turn in digitally mediated cultures. It is now increasingly commonplace to suggest that digital media promotes radical right-wing politics.1 These democratizing and radicalizing commonplaces are misleading not only because they are contradictory, but because they are the outcome of an analytical bias toward the study of digital "content" that tends to ignore the material practices of digital culture. Despite recent advances in a range of nonhuman, nonrepresentational, and new materialist approaches to media, digital "content" is still often treated as a text to be mined for its representations. In this essay, I argue for an approach that subordinates representational content to digital form. I suggest that it is digital form—rather than representational content—that tends to carry the more potent ideological and affective charge. I offer the copypasta—a meaningless block of text routinely shared on message boards and recognizable only to the already-initiated—as an archetype of digital culture. As a form, the copypasta coagulates affect and refuses representational meaning. As I will describe below, the copypasta is a paradoxical form: an archetype of a digital culture that is often defined by the circulation of content, the copypasta nevertheless refuses its own content. It coagulates digital affects but holds a position against digital flows.
The copypasta is a reactionary form. As Corey Robin argues, reactionary ideology is not simply a longing for tradition. Instead, reactionary politics tends to adopt the form and appearance of radical politics: both declare war on the present, but reactionary politics absorbs radical tactics to launch a counter-revolution pushing against, not with, the tide of democratic equality.2 In this respect, the copypasta may appear, in the Rancièrian sense, as a moment of "the political," a disruptive "excess of words" that issues a challenge to the reigning neoliberal order of discourse. But this challenge does not take the...