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Last March, Ezra Klein, the Times writer and notable podcaster, was a guest on “Doomscroll,” a smaller but impactful YouTube talk show hosted by Joshua Citarella, the thirty-eight-year-old artist, academic, and writer. Klein, a figure of the established liberal media, was dissimilar to “Doomscroll” ’s usual guests, who typically emerge from the fringes of leftist political thought and commentary. Since its inception a year prior, the program has presented figures such as Kyle Kulinski, a populist YouTuber who views political debate as a “brawl,” and Brace Belden, a Marxist podcaster who fought with a Kurdish militia in the Syrian war. In the Klein episode, he and Citarella concurred that they both envision a “constructive, advanced, techno-optimistic future,” as Citarella stated, but differ significantly on strategies to accomplish it. Nonetheless, Klein is an admirer. Citarella mentioned to me recently that Klein was among the first noted personalities to subscribe to a Substack newsletter that Citarella began in 2022, to report on obscure new forms of political extremism among young individuals on the internet. This undertaking, alongside “Doomscroll,” has aided in developing Citarella’s standing as an individual who can interpret internet trends and foresee the course of America’s political subconscious. During his discussion with Klein, Citarella remarked that many individuals still underestimate the significance of online politics. Klein responded, “That’s why I read your work.”
Citarella’s fascination with both leftist politics and digital means of communication stems from his earlier profession as an artist. In the early 2010s, after graduating from the School of Visual Arts, he was part of a rising group of practitioners of post-internet art, a modern category of works, created through digital tools and techniques, that embraced the internet as a main aesthetic of the era. Citarella was recognized for refined, peculiar digitally enhanced still-life compositions and highly realistic sci-fi scenes. He was showcasing his work in galleries and making enough sales to reduce his hours at a day job as a freelance photo editor. However, in 2015, the art market declined sharply, and his sales nearly ceased.
“I lacked a contingency plan,” he confided in me. The awareness of his own instability proved to be radicalizing. “You were accustomed to this severe division of prosperity, where you existed near the poverty level and socialized with billionaires at art showings,” he recalled. “It became evident that it was a sign of a deeply flawed society.” While working late shifts editing for luxury e-commerce companies, Citarella began studying economic theories that he hoped could clarify the events within the art market. He alternated between listening to archives of lectures from the right-leaning think tank the Mises Institute and to the Marxist scholar David Harvey’s detailed reading of both sections of “Das Kapital.” He started following Instagram accounts related to anarcho-capitalism, the libertarian-adjacent philosophy that has shaped prominent individuals on the right, which introduced him to other accounts that promoted strangely specialized belief systems, or “E-deologies.” It became apparent that many of the users operating these accounts were surprisingly young. “The account might publish a selfie on the school bus, and it turns out it’s a twelve-year-old,” he stated. While the adolescents’ political beliefs appeared ludicrous—“Dharmic Eco-Reactionaryism,” “Libertarian Neo-Monarchism,” “Traditional Primitivist Caliphatism”—their radicalization seemed extremely genuine. Citarella mentioned in a speech last year that some were “distributing manifestos from active eco-extremist organizations that contained instructions for how to build homemade explosive devices.”
Citarella began commenting on these accounts—a section of Instagram referred to as “politigram”—and, in 2018, he consolidated his discoveries into a self-published book, “Politigram and the Post-Left.” It swiftly evolved into an underground resource, both among the online communities that he discussed and among more seasoned pundits who were intrigued to discover a niche of online political activity that had escaped their notice. In subsequent years, Citarella started a Twitch stream, authored opinion pieces on online politics for the Guardian, and launched a podcast under his own name that achieved moderate success. However, his research had revealed that the most potent propagator of right-wing radical concepts was YouTube, where, according to a recent study at U.C. Davis, conservative users are disproportionately directed down “rabbit holes” of progressively extremist material compared to their left-leaning counterparts. He launched “Doomscroll” last September as what he has termed a “tactical media experiment,” created to establish a “new channel” that is optimized to guide politically inquisitive young individuals toward leftist concepts, countering the Svengali-esque hold of the right-wing media ecosystem that seems to have influenced the so-called “podcast election” of 2024. The show quickly gained a dedicated audience. By the second episode, featuring the cultural theorist Catherine Liu, it was receiving hundreds of thousands of views. In a recent episode, Kulinski, the fellow-YouTuber, characterized Citarella as “the closest thing I’ve seen to a ‘liberal Joe Rogan.’ ”
“Doomscroll” has showcased numerous figures from the “dirtbag left,” the informal media sector recognized for its abrasive, aggressive manner, and he shares many aspects of the dirtbag political viewpoint, which is class-aware, labor-focused, and concerned with the counterproductive excesses of “wokeness.” However, compared with guests like Will Menaker and Amber A’Lee Frost, from the podcast “Chapo Trap House,” or Hasan Piker, the provocative Twitch streamer, Citarella comes across as composed, professional, and media-prepared in a conventional sense. Neat and understated, with a relaxed, authoritative demeanor, he presents each guest in objectively neutral terms and guides discussions without monopolizing them, an approach he calls “social-democratic Lex Fridman,” after the stoic computer scientist turned podcaster favored by the tech-right. The majority of “Doomscroll” interviews are recorded in a white studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, providing each episode with a stark uniformity. The editing, lighting, and overall production quality, achieved with a limited team of part-time personnel, rivals that of considerably larger video podcasts from media outlets like the Times. Citarella told me, “We have jokingly referred to it as ‘prestige podcasting.’ ”
For strategic purposes, he has also aimed to avoid exclusively engaging with those already convinced. “I believe most people’s media strategy is to seek a dedicated audience with an established editorial stance,” he stated. “That is, in essence, the editorial concept guiding every existing left-wing media channel currently, and it has brought us to our current position.” He has conducted polite and inquisitive conversations with ideological adversaries, including Dasha Nekrasova, the MAGA cheerleader from the podcast “Red Scare”; J. J. McCullough, the conservative Canadian journalist and popular YouTuber; and Aella, the libertarian-leaning, internet-famous sex worker and self-taught data scientist. He has also made a point of appealing to the “manosphere” by posting a series of syllabi that recommend both left-wing texts and fitness regimens. (A few years ago, he participated in an “auto-experiment” in “hypermasculinity”—lifting weights, consuming tree resin, sunning his testicles—in an attempt to refute a right-wing premise that men with left-wing politics possess “low T.”)
“Doomscroll” has been especially concentrated on leveraging the enthusiastic energy behind the widespread opposition to wokeness and redirecting it, in an orthodox Marxist manner, toward a more material understanding of the phenomenon. For this, he has sought guidance from academics like Liu, a recurring guest, who criticizes the “virtue signaling” of the professional managerial class; the sociologist Vivek Chibber, who believes that identity politics has resulted in a “rejection of radical scholarship” as it was historically defined; and Jennifer C. Pan, the writer whose recent book, “Selling Social Justice,” contends that the anti-racist movement has functioned as a facade to shield corporate interests and maintain the status quo. “ ‘Chapo’ and ‘Cum Town’ and those podcasts would authorize you to make fun of, like, the annoying woke libs,” Citarella told me. “Jen Pan’s book will provide you with rigorous and quantitative arguments about why universal policies like the New Deal benefit Black Americans.”
Citarella incorporates lighter content, such as a recent discussion with Matty Healy, the lead vocalist of the 1975 and Taylor Swift’s former boyfriend, to draw in viewers and balance his academic inclination. However, the majority of the podcast’s selection reflects his educational ambitions. In future episodes, Citarella intends to outline “left accelerationism,” a movement that strives to end capitalism through a combination of automation and universal basic income. When I questioned his confidence in the potential for such concepts to gain acceptance, he cited the example of the Mont Pelerin Society, the think tank founded by Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek that spawned neoliberalism. Initially, its members “were seen as somewhat fringe lunatics,” Citarella mentioned; over time, they succeeded in “essentially rewriting the entire political common sense of the world.” He added that online figures on the right, such as the neo-monarchist blogger Curtis Yarvin and the crypto entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan, have been introducing unconventional concepts into the conservative mainstream for years. Why can’t those on the left do the same?
I spoke with Citarella last week, shortly after Charlie Kirk, the right-wing activist and media figure, was shot to death by what appears to have been a highly online twenty-two-year-old. Tyler Robinson, the alleged shooter, engraved his bullet casings with video-game references and other messages that he characterized as “mostly a big meme.” Citarella noted that he’s been cautioning for over five years that too many individuals remain under the mistaken belief that “what happens on the internet isn’t real.” He added that “the professional commentary class” has been particularly shielded from the influence of digital discourse, because “they pay attention to the traditional sources of information, and they’re just not having the same media-environment experience as most people in the country.” Citarella’s approach implies that what is needed is an understanding of a type of post-internet politics, where, whether they approve or not, online life is recognized as fundamentally linked to the formation of modern belief systems.
Citarella explained that when he initially became interested in online radicalization, he would sometimes employ anonymous social-media accounts to share memes, to observe if he could introduce Gen Z communities to “rehabilitative ideas.” Years later, he noticed that memes he had created based on the Marxist cultural theorist Mark Fisher’s famous book “Capitalist Realism” had persisted in circulation. People had also begun generating new memes about Fisher’s work using Citarella’s templates. Currently, with “Doomscroll,” he hopes to accomplish something comparable on an increasingly broad basis. “It’s a four-year process to conduct interviews with Presidential contenders in 2028,” he remarked. If his podcast can be regarded as a type of art project, he added, “The medium I’m using now is influence.” ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
