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I recently came across an article on the internet that I found so interesting and outlandish that I had to share (here it is if you want to read for yourself: https://www.vox.com/2014/5/20/5730762/buzzfeeds-founder-used-to-write-marxist-theory-and-it-explains).

We’re all of course familiar with the media company (if you can call it that) that is Buzzfeed. Curator of quizzes, bad memes, and some of the worst news reporting to be found anywhere on the internet, Buzzfeed still manages to attract our clicks year after year. Despite my abject disdain for everything Buzzfeed is and stands for, I still find myself taking their quizzes and looking at their articles almost without realizing that I’m doing it. Why do I keep seeing and engaging with their content?

Shockingly, neo-Marxist critical theory may hold the answer. According to the Atlantic, Buzzfeed has almost 900 employees and garners more than one billion views per month. The man behind the business model of the company, Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti, studied the neo-Marxist critic Gilles Deleuze and the commodification of the internet while at MIT. Peretti wrote a paper in which he criticized the intersection of media, advertising, and identity construction in late stage capitalism. Peretti identified a new paradigm in entertainment media (he used the example of MTV) in which entertainment is designed to construct an identity and to compel viewers into internalization of this identity. Advertising portraying some product as integral to the maintenance of the constructed identity follows the entertainment content, thus artificially constructing desire in the consumer. For example, take a show like Man vs. Wild. The show cultivates an identification with a rugged, adventurous lifestyle in its viewers and the advertisements which go along with the program display clothing, tents, and other implements which facilitate that rugged lifestyle. The viewer thus has a desire to buy these products, even if that is not a lifestyle in which they usually indulge. This new paradigm of marketing breaks down the boundaries between entertainment and advertisement, making the two virtually indistinguishable.

This is exactly the mechanism that Buzzfeed uses to generate revenue. There are no ads in their content: rather, the content is the advertisement. Corporations can pay for stories, and stories which were paid for are no different (at least on a stylistic level) from those which were not. For example, an article like “11 Stories of the Worst Times to Run Out of Storage” (a real article, by the way), was likely paid for by some player in the technology industry. The obvious goal of the article is to get you to identify yourself as someone who needs more storage, and thus entice you into buying more.

Now it may seem that Peretti just sold out and abandoned his morals to use his advanced understanding of late capitalism to make some money. And, honestly, that’s probably my interpretation too. But there is another option.

The theorist that Peretti cited in his paper, Gilles Deleuze, is an accelerationist. This means that he believes that in order to end capitalism, we must be as ultra-capitalistic as possible to put stress on the weaknesses of the structure and hasten its ultimate collapse. For the reasons stated above, Buzzfeed clearly fits into this definition of ultra-capitalistic. So maybe, just maybe, Buzzfeed is out there as capitalism’s destroying angel, bringing the system down by embodying it to the furthest possible extent.