Stochastic Poasting

Unpacking Right Wing Meme Culture

I’m going to be very uncool here; I’m going to analytically dissect online meme culture. I know. I can hear my kids’ eye rolls from here. But it’s worth doing.

In this post, I am going to describe a dynamic I’ve come to describe as “stochastic poasting,” to help others make sense of the phenomenon. It’s common in right wing online space—which is a weird space, to be sure. But it’s more than weird; it’s becoming mainstream. So I figured I’d put into words what I’ve observed, especially since we’re rapidly moving past niche online culture, toward wholesale embrace of poaster culture by, for example, the White House.

Let’s break it down.

Poasting

To “poast” is to engage in online activity—often on X/Twitter, but also on message boards, or in chats—that is shaped by heavy irony, lots of memes, and frequently transgressive jokes. Poasting is about dominating online discourse by shaming or mocking your opponents into oblivion, and finding your people who get all the inside jokes.

Memes are key to effective poasting. Memes are often static images (sometimes GIFs) with text overlaid, meant to communicate a sidelong meaning. It could be a still image from a film, or a viral photo that got memefied. Sometimes, text isn’t even necessary; the meme is sufficiently well-known that the image itself does the job.

Memes and poaster culture typically drip with irony. To the point where sometimes it’s irony within irony, and the only way you know is because you’ve seen how your people use the uber irony and can avoid getting caught in the embarrassing situation of reading it literally. This Russian nesting doll of irony is typically used to demarcate Us and Them. Those who get it are in the club; those who are too dense to get the very inside joke are out.

A poaster mimicking an enthusiastic FB post, and getting a journalist to fall into the poasting trap.

This is important. Because discourse is mediated less through sentences and paragraphs, and more through innuendo and sarcastic shibboleths, the rules of engagement are tailored toward unidirectional speech. In other words, if you agree with us, we’ll chortle and banter; if you try to argue with us, we’ll make fun of you and walk away. Poasting is designed to insulate the poaster from having to actually defend their statements with logic, rationality, or fact. They can just roll their eyes and move on.

Stochastic Poasting

I like to refer to this dynamic with an adjective: stochastic poasting. The word “stochastic” describes a randomness in the discourse. But it is not true chaos; it is a structured, intentional chaos. Stochastic poasting injects ideas, images, phrases, or theories that are extreme and lay beyond the Overton window into online conversations. Often these are calculated to generate a reaction, frequently because of some association the poaster know it will evoke. However, the hit-and-run nature of stochastic poasting enables the poaster to throw up his hands with plausible deniability. “I was only joking, chill!”

A good example of this was the kerfuffle over “White Boy Summer” last year; a series of memes and videos published by edgy right wingers promoting and celebrating WBS. When they predictably received loads of critical pushback, they defensively shot back they were just having a good time, they’re not white supremacists, everybody chill out. So what if there’s Nazi propaganda mixed in; so what if some of the language resembles language from yesteryear’s KKK; we’re all just having a good time people.

Stochastic poasting sets people who are used to more traditional forms of discourse back on the defensive. By the time normies like most of us have scrambled to interpret and understand the memes and odd phrases going viral, the poasters have lulzed and moved on to their next meme.

Presidential Poaster

This would all be an interesting, novel observation if it weren’t for the fact that the official media accounts of the United States Federal government have taken to poasting. Scroll through the official White House X/Twitter account and you’ll see the dynamic I’m talking about.

That’s the social media account of the office of the President of these United States of America, folks.

We live in a cultural moment in which the most powerful office of the land is enthusiastically engaged in stochastic poasting. I wish we lived in a more serious time, but this is what we have. And now you know what to call it, and what it means.

—Till next time.