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‘What I’m not gonna buy’: Algorithmic culture jamming and anti-consumer politics on YouTube
Wood, Rachel
Wood, Rachel
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2020-07-08
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Abstract
This article is based on an analysis of ‘anti-haul’ videos on YouTube, where a vlogger
explains which beauty products they plan not to buy. Anti-haul vloggers have much in
common with ‘culture jamming’ movements, which use the communicative practices and
materials of promotional culture against itself to spread an anti-consumerist agenda. The
article argues that anti-hauls should be understood as the reinvention of ‘culture jamming’
techniques for a contemporary promotional culture that is platform based, algorithmically
governed, and mobilised through the affective, authentic performance of the ‘influencer’. I
refer to this manipulation of the platform’s visibility mechanisms to spread anti-consumer
messages as ‘algorithmic culture jamming’. The anti-consumer politics of anti-hauls
are contradictory and ambivalent. At the same time, I argue that anti-hauls also offer
important possibilities for political learning, personal and collective transformation, and
alternative creative pleasures outside of continual consumer accumulation.
Citation
Wood, R. (2020). ‘What I’m not gonna buy’: Algorithmic culture jamming and anti-consumer politics on YouTube. New Media & Society, 23(9), 2754-2772. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820939446
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SAGE Publications
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New Media and Society
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Article
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Wood, R. (2020). ‘What I’m not gonna buy’: Algorithmic culture jamming and anti-consumer politics on YouTube. New Media & Society, 23(9), 2754-2772. Copyright © 2020 (Copyright Holder). Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications.
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1461-4448
EISSN
1461-7315