Daniel De Zeeuw
Biographic Data
| ID | 269922 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Daniel De Zeeuw |
| GIVEN NAMES | Daniel |
| FAMILY NAME | De Zeeuw |
| SIGNATURE | DE ZEEUW D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Amsterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2116-9054 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 10 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 26 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 10 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Computational Gallerte
In Capital , Marx describes ‘abstract human labor’ as a jelly-like, amorphous substance: Gallerte , often translated as ‘gelatinous blob’. Turning from questions of consumption (or outputs) in debates on ‘AI slop’ to the ‘sloppy’ side of AI production (or inputs), this essay draws a speculative line from Marx’s account of labor as Gallerte to how current AI models similarly metabolize the linguistic and cultural labor of the post-industrial worke…
On Psyop Realism
This article charts the emergence of a “psyop-realist” aesthetic in online culture and art. Embodying the feeling of unreality of the pandemic years, psyop realism speaks to new anxieties of influence brought about by the convergence of military psyops, mis- and disinformation, and behavioral manipulation as a paradigmatic condition of being “terminally online.” The article first turns to Trevor Paglen's recent work on psyops, tracing what he see…
Post-truth conspiracism and the pseudo-public sphere
Rather than seeking to recuperate the ideal of a digital public sphere or lament its demise with the rise of social media platforms, in this paper I seek to identify the dangers of precisely this insistence to imagine the Internet as a public sphere. It is this curious insistence and persistence that, I claim, may feed into precisely those post-truth media dynamics such critical accounts worry about and rally against. The success of viral conspir…
Reactionary sensemaking
Internet memes used to be funny, but somewhere in the mid-2010's, a darker dimension surfaced. This editorial explores this ‘reactionary turn’ in digital culture through a collection of articles and commentaries on ‘the micropolitics of online oppositional subcultures’. In the special theme, these range from commentaries on how misogyny and hate speech exploit platform affordances to articles tracing the growth and spread of arcane memes and anti…
The Conspiracy to End All Conspiracies
Based and confused
Current research on the weaponisation of far-right discourse online has mostly focused on the dangers of normalising hate speech. However, this often operates on questionable assumptions about how far-right terms retain problematic meanings over time and across different platforms. Yet contextual meaning-change, we argue, is key to assessing the normalisation of problematic but fuzzy terms as they spread across the Web. To redress this, our artic…
A God-Tier Larp? QAnon as Conspiracy Fictioning
The QAnon movement, which gained a lot of traction in recent years, defies categorization: is it a conspiracy theory, a new mythology, a social movement, a religious cult, or an alternate reality game? How did the posts of a (supposedly) anonymous government insider named Q on an obscure online imageboard in October 2017 instigate a serious conspiracy movement taking part in the storming of the US Capitol in early 2021? Returning to the origins o…
Dissimulation
At the fringes of the platform economy exists another web that evokes an earlier era of Internet culture. Its anarchic subculture celebrates a form of play based based on dissimulation. This subculture sets itself against the authenticity injunction of the current mode of capitalist accumulation (Zuboff). We can imagine this as a mask culture that celebrates disguise in distinction to the face culture as embodied by Facebook’s “real name” policy …
Tracing normiefication
This article presents a cross-platform analysis of the QAnon conspiracy theory that was popularized online from 2017 onward. It theorizes its diffusion as one of normiefication: a term drawing from Web vernacular indicating how ideas and objects travel from fringe online subcultures to large audiences on mainstream platforms and news outlets. It finds that QAnon had a clear incubation period on 4chan/pol/ after which it quickly migrated to larger…
Teh Internet Is Serious Business
At the fringes of an increasingly hegemonic platform economy, there exists another web of anonymous forums and image boards whose unique “mask culture” the article aims to deconstruct by tracing its roots in the cyber-separationist imaginary of early internet culture, in a way that can be seen to undermine the new “face culture” of social media platforms like Facebook. The practices that characterize this “deep vernacular web” are anti- and imper…
Teh Internet Is Serious Business
At the fringes of an increasingly hegemonic platform economy, there exists another web of anonymous forums and image boards whose unique “mask culture” the article aims to deconstruct by tracing its roots in the cyber-separationist imaginary of early internet culture, in a way that can be seen to undermine the new “face culture” of social media platforms like Facebook. The practices that characterize this “deep vernacular web” are anti- and imper…
A God-Tier Larp? QAnon as Conspiracy Fictioning
The QAnon movement, which gained a lot of traction in recent years, defies categorization: is it a conspiracy theory, a new mythology, a social movement, a religious cult, or an alternate reality game? How did the posts of a (supposedly) anonymous government insider named Q on an obscure online imageboard in October 2017 instigate a serious conspiracy movement taking part in the storming of the US Capitol in early 2021? Returning to the origins o…
Based and confused
Current research on the weaponisation of far-right discourse online has mostly focused on the dangers of normalising hate speech. However, this often operates on questionable assumptions about how far-right terms retain problematic meanings over time and across different platforms. Yet contextual meaning-change, we argue, is key to assessing the normalisation of problematic but fuzzy terms as they spread across the Web. To redress this, our artic…
Dissimulation
At the fringes of the platform economy exists another web that evokes an earlier era of Internet culture. Its anarchic subculture celebrates a form of play based based on dissimulation. This subculture sets itself against the authenticity injunction of the current mode of capitalist accumulation (Zuboff). We can imagine this as a mask culture that celebrates disguise in distinction to the face culture as embodied by Facebook’s “real name” policy …
Tracing normiefication
This article presents a cross-platform analysis of the QAnon conspiracy theory that was popularized online from 2017 onward. It theorizes its diffusion as one of normiefication: a term drawing from Web vernacular indicating how ideas and objects travel from fringe online subcultures to large audiences on mainstream platforms and news outlets. It finds that QAnon had a clear incubation period on 4chan/pol/ after which it quickly migrated to larger…
Teh Internet Is Serious Business
At the fringes of an increasingly hegemonic platform economy, there exists another web of anonymous forums and image boards whose unique “mask culture” the article aims to deconstruct by tracing its roots in the cyber-separationist imaginary of early internet culture, in a way that can be seen to undermine the new “face culture” of social media platforms like Facebook. The practices that characterize this “deep vernacular web” are anti- and imper…
Based and confused
Current research on the weaponisation of far-right discourse online has mostly focused on the dangers of normalising hate speech. However, this often operates on questionable assumptions about how far-right terms retain problematic meanings over time and across different platforms. Yet contextual meaning-change, we argue, is key to assessing the normalisation of problematic but fuzzy terms as they spread across the Web. To redress this, our artic…
A God-Tier Larp? QAnon as Conspiracy Fictioning
The QAnon movement, which gained a lot of traction in recent years, defies categorization: is it a conspiracy theory, a new mythology, a social movement, a religious cult, or an alternate reality game? How did the posts of a (supposedly) anonymous government insider named Q on an obscure online imageboard in October 2017 instigate a serious conspiracy movement taking part in the storming of the US Capitol in early 2021? Returning to the origins o…
Post-truth conspiracism and the pseudo-public sphere
Rather than seeking to recuperate the ideal of a digital public sphere or lament its demise with the rise of social media platforms, in this paper I seek to identify the dangers of precisely this insistence to imagine the Internet as a public sphere. It is this curious insistence and persistence that, I claim, may feed into precisely those post-truth media dynamics such critical accounts worry about and rally against. The success of viral conspir…
Reactionary sensemaking
Internet memes used to be funny, but somewhere in the mid-2010's, a darker dimension surfaced. This editorial explores this ‘reactionary turn’ in digital culture through a collection of articles and commentaries on ‘the micropolitics of online oppositional subcultures’. In the special theme, these range from commentaries on how misogyny and hate speech exploit platform affordances to articles tracing the growth and spread of arcane memes and anti…
The Conspiracy to End All Conspiracies
On Psyop Realism
This article charts the emergence of a “psyop-realist” aesthetic in online culture and art. Embodying the feeling of unreality of the pandemic years, psyop realism speaks to new anxieties of influence brought about by the convergence of military psyops, mis- and disinformation, and behavioral manipulation as a paradigmatic condition of being “terminally online.” The article first turns to Trevor Paglen's recent work on psyops, tracing what he see…
Computational Gallerte
In Capital , Marx describes ‘abstract human labor’ as a jelly-like, amorphous substance: Gallerte , often translated as ‘gelatinous blob’. Turning from questions of consumption (or outputs) in debates on ‘AI slop’ to the ‘sloppy’ side of AI production (or inputs), this essay draws a speculative line from Marx’s account of labor as Gallerte to how current AI models similarly metabolize the linguistic and cultural labor of the post-industrial worke…
Law (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Media studies (6 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Politics (5 works) · Social Media and Politics (5 works) · Art (4 works) · Misinformation and Its Impacts (4 works) · Aesthetics (3 works)