‘Digital patronage and countercultural entrepreneurs: Instagram’s niche-meme community’ 

Upcoming

My doctoral project is a qualitative examination of “countercultural entrepreneurs” on Instagram. Through in-depth interviews and digital ethnography, I explore how a specific community of Anglophone “niche”- meme[1] creators on Instagram use entrepreneurial logic and countercultural production to create a network of patrons and artists. My main aim with this study is to answer the question of how niche-meme creators on Instagram monetise their content. This question helps me delve further into more detailed analyses of how this community utilises an “entrepreneurial ethos” (Bandinelli and Arvidsson 2012) to fund their countercultural digital art. This framework brings up certain ideological tensions between the community’s entrepreneurial activities and the political rhetoric they utilise in their creative work. 

Many, if not most, of these niche-meme creators are “diversified workers” (Gandini, Marketing Theory 16(1), 2016) having various streams of income through different types of work, whether this be freelance or dependent. They might have sponsored content, affiliate codes, partnerships with brands and companies hoping to reach different audiences, while at the same time explicitly critiquing capitalistic modes of production, neoliberalism and the precarious nature of freelance work through their art. Interestingly, some of these artists call attention to the politically contradictory way they create, highlighting the ideological inconsistencies between how they fund their art and what they hope to achieve with it.On the other hand, in the spirit of income diversification, the same set of niche-meme creators/artists run online businesses selling their merchandise, self-produced music, music and video production skills as well as using a patronage platform called Patreon, where they offer various kinds of content for a monthly subscription fee. This online, grassroots network of artists and patrons is more consistent with the unambiguous critiques of corporatism and neoliberalism they offer in their work. As I have been collecting my data, I have observed that the most crucial aspect of attracting patronage and funding for self-directed projects for niche-meme creators is the mastering of the logic of entrepreneurship and “the reputation economy” (Gandini, The Reputation Economy, 2016) in a highly countercultural setting. The way that these artists navigate this tension and what this case means for theorisations of creative digital labour is what most interests me in my doctoral research.

[1] There exists a specific category of meme art on “post-internet” (Connor 2017, Olson 2018) Instagram, which is inextricably referential, absurdist and vulnerable. I define this category as “the niche-meme”, as a sort of antithesis to the viral-meme. Their creators utilise the notion of “the grotesque” to achieve a self-confessed and intentional ugliness, that have the power to alienate more mainstream Instagram audiences.