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An Interview with the Infamous DNR Meme Account Admin
On the occasion of “@donotresearch_thefifth” deactivation by Instagram at +30k followers, artist & writer Jak Ritger gives us a brief history of post-pandemic shitposting and interviews legendary pseudonymous poster “Eugene”, about making the perfect meme, online culture and the future of posting.
Follow the new DNR meme account: @donotresearch_thesixth
Follow: @donotresearch_thesixth
It often feels like we’re stuck in an infinite time-loop of Spring/Summer2020 when it comes to posting. With hindsight, you might even say that that period represented the zenith of meme culture on Instagram. I have absolutely no data to back that up, but there was a particular feeling in the air. Home-bound COVID delirium, an impending presidential election and just a general sense of cataclysm brought us a wave of no-holds-barred, chaotic and completely uncensored IG memepages. The First Wave saw Meaningful Images Only and mio_XXX_bucket. The next wave was the one that really blew it wide open, with ‘Incellectuals’ (combination of incel and intellectual) and their assorted billions of offshoot ‘minion’ pages. The admin groupchats directed the content flows and these chats ended up being possibly even more influential than the public pages themselves in terms of the networks and lore they created.
This was the birth of what terminal posters have described to me as “doing a bit” - posting so rapidly and in a stream of consciousness fashion such that the content becomes a character, ie, Monster Truck Admin who posts 12 monster truck videos over and over again. This posting-as-performance had already been explored on the text-only Weird Twitter movement of the mid-2010s with posters such as @dril and @brooklynjuggler, but this was maybe the first time it had been expressed through the extremely-networked-images of Instagram.
I was intrigued to see this development as an avid consumer of said shitposts - image detritus that could subvert your expectations and make you laugh. It could be a long block of text that turns and mocks you for reading it, or an image-text with such intensity it overruns your ability to categorize it. Or, sometimes, something more politically potent, usually heterodoxing Liberal-Conservative binaries in favor of a more “based” Populist / Left-Wing approach. During the final days of Bernie’s primary run, Incellectuals spun off the “YBC super-pac” to raise money and campaign for the candidate. Yes-Big-Cock ended up renting a video board with aggressive Sanders messaging and drove around key voter districts.
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This moment felt like a shift from the late-stage politigram that was so focused on theory (fakemarkfisher, realbaudrillard, etc) towards an interest in purely doing bits. After the Sanders collapse there was also a tangible sense of moroseness that seemed to set in, the bits got darker and meaner, but election season meant content was flowing. Carousel grid posts + story share became the black market of the attention economy. “Meme dealers” would trawl the pages and curate a specific flavor of [REDACTED]-ness. This was Joshua Citarella’s first taste of Instagram virality: posting extremist political content to Stories as a kind of “Radicalized Teenager” Meme Dealer. An account would get to 100k, get deleted and start over. The networked nature meant perma-bans were impossible but the discovery of content required curation - quite the opposite of today, where shit-posts are served up on a platter on the Explore page.
The Third Wave were themed accounts that used the -cellectuals suffix to spoof or riff on a celebrity, place, or piece of cultural content. These third wavers became known as “Minion accounts” for their tendency to don a repetitive single-mindedness of the Minions from Despicable Me. It was also at this time (peak pandemic) that Josh’s endurance conspiracy-streaming of the so-called ‘Chart of Truth’ developed into Monday Night Memes. The Twitch chat moved into discord and started the Capitalist Realism book club. By the fall of 2020, during a Monday night stream, I saw someone had started “@JoshCiterallectuals”. There were just two posts.
That weekend I was driving down to Pawtucket, RI to help my partner, K8, shoot her short film. The sky was an eerie, hazy orange from the West Coast wildfire cloud that had creeped over to the East. Whilst driving I received a Discord message from a certain talented Chicago artist I had never met, asking if I wanted the proverbial keys to the Josh-Citerallectuals account. During breaks in shooting the final scene, I signed in with the login deets — it was legit. I quickly posted in the #memes Discord channel to see if anyone else wanted access. The poster who would later stream as News/ACC was one of the first to respond. I’d never chatted with him outside of Book Club and he was sketched out, treating the whole thing like a clandestine operation and asking me to slip a specific word into a post on #Memes channel in discord, which I did. The security-hygiene somehow made everyone comfortable to form a group chat to manage our fledgling meme account together.
One of the first posts I remember contributing time to (beyond a mindless re-shitpost) was a FanCam video of Josh’s Boogaloo Boys cosplay on Twitch that I made with @LabMatt. In the years since, the meme account has gone through many story arcs, periods of potent activity and periods of relative austerity, with admin group-chat members coming and going, and posting energy waxing and waning. The meme account has been a massive group effort, a collective bit pretending to be the radical bomb-throwers we wish we were but, for many reasons, are not.
After time, even the most avid posters will atrophy. Once you lose the rhythm of the bit, it can be hard to get it back. More recently my role seems to be more that of a “negative admin” - deleting borderline bannable posts, instead of actively posting myself. We use the same dark logic as firing squads - where half of the rifles fire blanks, who-posts-what remains anonymous. We all share the blame or reward for the response to a meme (and possible account deletion) so each poster is ultimately unsure if the .jpg they posted was the one that went too far and got the account banned or muted again, or conversely, if it was the one that went viral and skyrocketed the account’s exposure. @JoshCiterallectuals suffered the fate of TOS violation and was promptly reincarnated under the @donotresearch handle, although confused at times with the official blog account @do.not.research, it is only loosely connected and should be thought of as its evil twin.
I recently caught up with Eugene, the most prolific shitposter I’ve ever met and who — looking back now — is responsible for the majority of content on the Do Not Research memepages. Appropriately, the page has just recently passed into its seventh incarnation (RIP joshcitarellectuals; donotresearch_ ; donotresearch_ascended; donotresearch_reloaded and donotresearch_thefifth, gone but not forgotten).
Jak: Do you remember when you joined the account, or the first posts you made? Pretty sure I started posting in the latter half of 2020, shortly before the presidential election that year.
Eugene: I'd been posting pretty frequently on the Discord and I already had an absurd backlog of images in my camera roll. Thanks to lockdowns in Melbourne and elsewhere, there was very little 'life' happening worth documenting so my phone was becoming increasingly clogged up with meme garbage, detritus from a life that I was living mostly online. Some of which I'd gathered and some which I was also making myself. The meme page felt like a good outlet for this stuff - particularly in the way we saw it as a kind of positive or legitimate 'political' project - we'd all been exposed to Josh's writing around 'planting a meme', 'marxist memes for tiktok teens' etc and like you say, there was a certain self image then of the pages as a certain chaotic, left-pilling project.
You invited me to the GC and it was bombs away, really. The election gave us plenty of raw material, particularly as we were actually spending time back then on Photoshop making stuff ourselves before Instagram's story creation tools really got up to scratch. We'd also basically agreed anyone with access should post whatever they wanted. The point was to be ideologically elusive to some degree. And this was before certain memes had become so political and poisoned - like trad, retrvn, etc. One of our first posts to go viral was some stupid 'Retvrn to monke' image that Hasan Piker reposted.
J: Holy shit, I forget about that. Yes, there definitely was a positive feeling to the meme page in the beginning. I remember around that time we did group effort to generate #FreeAssange memes, as he was facing extradition to the U.S. It felt like it was possible to use memetic warfare to break through the noise. I wonder when your feelings changed? Do you recall a moment or era when it started to feel like the possibility of memes-as-political-messaging became foreclosed?
E: Yeah, we were definitely captivated by the idea of hyperstitioning or meme magicking something into a reality. Maybe we can partially take credit for the Assange thing. I guess there was a kind of perverse optimism that we could exploit these platforms to nudge perceptions and seed different realities. And honestly, taking a leaf out of the book of all those minion accounts that preceded us - we really pushed this. We were basically posting 24 hours a day, across all timezones. I got to know EST, GMT pretty well and would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night to post stuff because that Euro/East/West coast overlap was the sweet spot. We basically took over people's timelines with images. Lil Internet described it as 'overclocking semiotics to the point of meltdown'.
I'm not really sure when that optimism and sense of political potential shifted. A simplistic answer could be that over time we were collectively burnt out by online pictures, to no substantive effect. Maybe it's no coincidence that 'nothing ever happens' was coined during the Biden era. It's easy to feel fried by the whole posting dynamic - you get so locked into the dopamine loops and the engagement mechanisms of these platforms, and how to effectively game them. It's like the most hollowing version of crack, drawing you into this vortex of self perpetuating garbage and decontextualised imagery that would make Byung Chul Han scream.
You also notice that platform dynamics tend to push you away from any constructive political messaging. It's not really fun or funny to engage with that stuff - it tends towards that 'wall of text' leftism meme. Earnestness is mostly taboo and cringe on the internet. The stuff that really gets engagement will be problematic to some degree - it has to prod the limits. This is what provokes engagement from different ends of the political spectrum, that addictive, gleeful, reactionary naughtiness. Just look what happened to the word 'based' — more or less entirely co-opted by right wing circles. So I feel there's a kind of inevitable tendency to start echoing the worst kind of shit imaginable — beginning with an ironic larp. I think the actual 'vibe shift' happening is the distinction between those who've become more self aware and cognisant of this dynamic, and willing to move against or beyond it, versus those who've continued the larp and become hypocritical, evil and destructive, the actual degenerates.
J: That is really key, this idea of getting 'lost in the sauce' — starting to believe the LARP and moving further and further into a political position. This entrenchment is echoed in the idea of "audience capture." We have seen a bunch of accounts blow up and then try to convert viral attention into podcast listenership or DJ careers. No shade, all the power to them, but there always seems to be a difficulty in this effort.
It feels like the shitpost meme is a terminal form, it's the endpoint of a process of meaning making. A really good meme compresses everything it needs into a single image or joke. Does this track? What is the recipe for making the best memes?
E: I'm sure the form will be further refined as technology and attitudes evolve. Maybe we'll be getting direct injection of sensory cringe via Neuralink. Or perhaps the form will shift if there's a broader move to renounce these platforms entirely, particularly if Meta, Twitter/X et al continue to enshittify their products by intentionally and unintentionally flooding them with bots.
And yes, the most effective images are hyper-concentrated. They're super compressed with meaning, carry multiple interpretations etc - this is the stuff that generates commentary and engagement. Never explain or contextualise anything. This also helps maintain the ambiguity and intrigue (and plausible deniability) for the page. Never reveal too much authorship - "admin reveals" are self-serving and pornographic. There's also 'degrees of knowing' with the meanings, like the iceberg thing. You end up manufacturing a kind of in/out group for those who really 'get' the things you're posting - the more terminally online you are, the more you'll understand, granting you a certain obnoxious (and shameful) privilege in these spaces.
I don't think you can be too specific or prescriptive with ingredients. You want to refer to things happening in the 'real' world, without overdoing it. You want to make things self-referential, to build up a kind of lore for the page's in/out group. But you have to counterbalance this with being constantly elusive and self-negating to some degree, which can get exhausting. Ultimately, you want to be chaotic, offensive and utterly inconsistent - and this is where the rapid/overclocked posting becomes part of the form.
J: Do you think shitposting is a form of art?
E: I don't think it's art, really. Although I'm not of that world - they love having that conversation, don't they? It doesn't help that most of the commentary and critique on memes and 'internet culture' is total garbage, and becomes dated instantly. But I mean, there's certainly a 'skill' to it - recognising threads and critical points in the discourse, exploiting them and knowing what works. Maybe that's an 'art', but it's hard to see any dignity in it really.
J: Do you think that it is getting harder to shitpost? or less satisfying perhaps? It would seem that the platform physics shifted after Biden took office and the TOS became more restrictively enforced. Our account got deboosted, deplatformed, deranged and eventually banned six times. (hence donotresearch_thesixth) And then there was the introduction of 10-20 image sliders which I think has centralized meme circulation, so instead of seeing insanity from a ton of tiny accounts you just get served up the one big one that has a collection of the 20 safest / milquetoast posts of the day. But at the same time, there is a backslide towards more uncensored content as we have seen with Elon's X-ification of Twitter and the recent announcement that Meta will stop fact checking and allow more political content on its platform. There has also been such a shift towards short form video with the rise of TikTok in the past couple years, perhaps the image+text meme's days are numbered. What is your outlook for the humble craft of shitposting?
E: Honestly I think the kind of shitposting that captivated us is basically dead now. Not just for the reasons you mentioned, as well as the simple fact that a great deal of us are just burnt out on that form and a lot of it isn't that funny any more. But also, I think politically with the broader pendulum swing and the disintegration of polite liberal norms, shitposting in the way we used to see it just isn't relevant anymore, it carries no reactionary bite. The US just effectively elected an administration of shitposters, just look at all the current administration’s official accounts.
We're seeing all kinds of paranoiac, rage-baiting, feed-flooding, outrageous gesturing from all kinds of sources far beyond the humble schizo meme page. It feels like we're in a moment where coherent narratives seem less valuable or desirable, or at least from some strategic perspective they aren't engaging anymore. Certainty and coherence seems old hat. Trump blows his horn about protectionism and America First and yet will gladly put on the shameless globalist garb when it comes to claiming Greenland or I don't think he believes in nothing but a big part of the point is pure engagement farming, just like meme pages.
It all feels like shitposting now, no orthodoxy remains to stand against, at least until a new orthodoxy congeals out of this moment. So tbh I don't see much of a future for it in the short-to-medium term - all those 100K follower pages cranking out 20 slides of the most mid shit imaginable are certainly not doing anything worthwhile, if they ever were. At this point it's not even beating a dead horse, that horse is pure pulp on the pavement now.
That said - there'll never be a shortage of images and people willing to exploit them for reaction and attention, and maybe political gain. Regardless of form -whether static meme images, short form tiktoks and reels, there's always gonna be a fountainhead of content. In its current paradigm though, the 'shitpost' is spent. At least for me and many others, our capacity or willingness to engage in this kind of stuff has faded. I'm kind of hoping to see a return to humble words, in and of themselves. Pure textual impact. Maybe that's too ambitious though, with literacy rates and attention spans declining the way they are.
J: Welp, that is a nice sunny note to end on. Is there anything else you would like readers to know about the DNR shitpost account? Any last words?
E: Big shoutout to the groupchat that was spawned alongside this account and is honestly one of the best things to come out of it, a lovely group of patriots that aren’t just parasocial acquaintances but true friends. Godspeed, and here’s to de-locking-in for the rest of 2025.
Follow the new DNR meme account: @donotresearch_thesixth
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