At the intersection between concepts of the literary and emergent forms of database aesthetics lies a contemporary model for theorizing serial production. This paper investigates the underexamined concept of seriality and the way it has been reconfigured in digital media. Using Homestar Runner as the central case study, I provide a survey of these issues surrounding the literary, database and seriality and the way they figure in this Flash website. I will then trace the propensity of electronic literature for what has been described as a technologically conditioned melancholia and relate this to the serial constructs within Homestar Runner.

This paper examines the way in which time and space are figured within a new genre of what we are calling "eccentric games" and a site-specific video sharing application called Trover by Dan Provost. Taking Valve’s Portal as our case study, a chiasmatic relationship emerges between these different modes of eccentric media. In order to access eccentric space the video games we examine appropriate the logic of film whereas Provost's video application Trover is informed by an eccentric logic of games.

Drawing from media theory’s preoccupation with the ramifications of “presence,” this essay identifies iterations of instantiation: the proliferation of moving images across social media that aestheticize presence through derivative motions. This aesthetic presentation overwhelmingly saturates trending influencer content. I interpret a now ubiquitous form of influencer expression, viral dances and gestures, as exemplary of instantiation’s affects. Motions on TikTok typically convey series of bodily, facial, and verbal expressions uniquely modulated directly towards and for the viewer. These TikToks are commonly accompanied by “slowed + reverbed” pop songs, sped-up “nightcore” remixes, or meditative soundscapes with modulated frequencies which aesthetically suggest a sonic suspension or sustainment of presence. Through instantiation, experience is conditioned and identity becomes reducible to the reification of presence, encapsulating the viewer’s attention to the screen and ultimately limiting aesthetic expression through mediation to a direct model of user-engagement. These capitalist logics of instantiation pervade beauty, wellness, and lifestyle content, encouraging us to “stay present” while conditioning our experience of the present moment. This conditioning binds our mediated expressions to an externalization of desire rather than inward reflection, suggesting a need to both better understand and crucially defy our current orientation towards “being present.”

This dissertation examines the cultural politics of the “techlash”—a widespread critical turn against Big Tech post-2016—by interrogating the underlying anxieties, historical contexts, and ideological constructs that shape this phenomenon. Techlash media examines a constellation of texts that narrativize why the internet failed to deliver on its promises of increased economic prosperity and democracy. The introduction frames the techlash as a response to the failures of digital technology to fulfill its utopian promises. It argues that contemporary concerns about media, technology, and credibility are deeply rooted in historical crises under late capitalism. By contextualizing these concerns within broader socio-economic shifts, the introduction sets up the dissertation’s exploration of how credit, both financial and social, becomes entangled with notions of credibility across cycles of tech hype and panic.

The first chapter, “Filtering Bubbles: The Nostalgic Cultural Politics at the Extreme Center of The Social Dilemma,” identifies the 2020 Netflix documentary as emblematic of a broader reactionary and nostalgic impulse within techlash discourse. It explores how the film mobilizes cultural anxieties about distraction, digital addiction, polarization, misinformation, and the loss of “authentic” human connections. The chapter argues that the discursive focus on “filter bubbles” and algorithmic manipulation reflects a desire to return to a pre-digital era of presumed media neutrality and objectivity that never was. This nostalgia is critically interrogated as a form of cultural politics that seeks to stabilize a crumbling liberal consensus by scapegoating “superhuman” technology.

The second chapter, “FIRED! On the Reification of the Attention Economy and the Mystification of Digital Advertising,” challenges the attention economy thesis. It argues that the concept of the attention economy is a misnomer, obscuring the actual dynamics of digital advertising. The chapter traces the genealogy of the attention economy, revealing its roots in neoliberal economic thought and critiques the mystification of digital advertising. I position digital advertising as neither a new form of value creation nor a revision of old feudal rentiership. Instead, I argue digital advertising, which represents the largest bulk of capital underwriting the internet’s nominally free consumer services, as akin to a de facto social credit system.

The third chapter, “‘So Creepy It Must Be True!’ Techno-orientalism, Techno-nationalism, and the Social Credit Imaginary,” delves into the construction of the social credit imaginary in Western media from around 2016 through the early 2020s. By analyzing the convergence of techno-orientalist tropes and techno-nationalist rhetoric, the chapter argues that fears of China’s Social Credit System (SCS) are less about actual technological practices in China and more about Western anxieties over surveillance, control, and post-industrial conditions of work. The chapter dissects how cultural artifacts like the dystopian Black Mirror episode “Nosedive” project these fears, and despite lacking any Asian characters or aesthetics, have been used to code surveillance technologies as Chinese, “creepy,” and in turn serve as a foil to justify the market dominance of tech platforms.

The coda, “Fragment on Machine Bias: from cybernetic to dialectical critique,” shifts the focus to the discourse of bias in AI and digital technologies. I show how critiques of tech bias resonate with cybernetic logics, which seek to correct biases within computational systems without consideration of the socio-economic conditions that bias technological development writ large. The chapter advocates for a dialectical critique that situates technological bias within the broader contradictions of capitalism, emphasizing the need to understand bias as a structural feature of technology under capitalism rather than as an aberration to be corrected. This coda calls for a more radical rethinking of how we engage with technology, moving beyond surface-level fixes to address the underlying forces driving technological development.