Teh Internet is Serious Business On the Deep Vernacular Web and Its Discontents

At the fringes of an increasingly hegemonic platform economy, there exists another web. Preoccupied with dissimulative identity play, LARPing, and satirical invective, this other web seems to have hung on to the subcultural ethos of the anonymous infrastructures characteristic of an earlier anarchic era of “.net culture” that Julian Dibbell poetically described as “digital other-worlds” (1998: 11). Associated with an ever expanding network of “chan” boards, this deep vernacular web (DVW hereafter) has so far remained relatively untouched by the larger shift toward social media platforms. In distinction to the ubiquity of the "Platformized web" experience of social media and of apps (Helmond 2015), the analysis that follows develops the theory of an other, marginal web of anonymous forums and imageboards, which exist below the mainstream surface web. In contrast to this mainstream web, the practices that characterize the DVW are anti- and impersonal rather than personal; ephemeral and aleatory rather than persistent and predictable; collective rather than individual; stranger- rather than friend-oriented; radically public and contagious, rather than privatized, filtered and contained.