This essay is an early ethnographic exploration of the Dark Web Social Network (DWSN), a social networking site only accessible to Web browsers equipped with The Onion Router. The central claim of this essay is that the DWSN is an experiment in power/freedom, an attempt to simultaneously trace, deploy, and overcome the historical conditions in which it finds itself: the generic constraints and affordances of social networking as they have been developed over the past decade by Facebook and Twitter, and the ideological constraints and affordances of public perceptions of the dark web, which hold that the dark web is useful for both taboo activities and freedom from state oppression. I trace the DWSN's experiment with power/freedom through three practices: anonymous/social networking, the banning of child pornography, and the productive aspects of techno-elitism. I then use these practices to specify particular forms of power/freedom on the DWSN.

In Web 2.0, there is a social dichotomy at work based upon and reflecting the underlying Von Neumann Architecture of computers. In the hegemonic Web 2.0 business model, users are encouraged to process digital ephemera by sharing content, making connections, ranking cultural artifacts, and producing digital content, a mode of computing I call ‘affective processing.’ The Web 2.0 business model imagines users to be a potential superprocessor. In contrast, the memory possibilities of computers are typically commanded by Web 2.0 site owners. They seek to surveil every user action, store the resulting data, protect that data via intellectual property, and mine it for profit. Users are less likely to wield control over these archives. These archives are comprised of the products of affective processing; they are archives of affect, sites of decontextualized data which can be rearranged by the site owners to construct knowledge about Web 2.0 users.

What are “alternative social media”? How can we distinguish alternative social media from mainstream social media? Why are social media alternatives important? How do they work? Why do people make them? What do they tell us about contemporary corporate social media and its related phenomena: surveillance, privacy, power, self-expression, and sociality? This essay answers these questions by theorizing alternative social media. The empirical data for this alternative social media theory are drawn from previous work on alternative sites such as Diaspora, rstat.us, Twister, GNU social, and the Dark Web Social Network. These cases are used to build a generalized conceptual framework. However, this article does not solely theorize from these examples, but rather seeks to contextualize and historicize alternative social media theory within larger bodies of work. In addition to generalization from examples, the theory is informed by two threads. The first thread is the work of alternative media scholars such as Nick Couldry, Chris Atton, and Clemencia Rodriguez, who have done the historical and theoretical work to define alternative media. The second thread is a synthesis of works exploring the technical side of contemporary media, coming from new fields such as software studies. The threads and empirical analyses of sites such as Diaspora, Quitter, and rstat.us are combined into a theoretical matrix that can account for the processes and technical infrastructures that comprise social media alternatives and explain why they are distinct from sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google, as well as why they are important.

Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze, Eva Illouz, and Mark Andrejevic, this paper critiques the personal branding literature, particularly as it applies to Web 2.0 social media. I first describe the three-part logic of personal branding: dividuation, emotional capitalism, and autosurveillance. Next, in a sort of mirror image to the self-help literature of personal branding, I offer a critical "how to" guide to branding oneself in Web 2.0. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of why personal branding can be seen as a rational choice, given the circumstances of globalized capitalism and precarious employment. Individuals who brand themselves willfully adopt the logic of capitalism in order to build their human capital. However, I ultimately argue that the obsession with personal branding is no antidote for life in precarious times.

Online interactions are often understood through the corporate social media (CSM) model where social interactions are determined through layers of abstraction and centralization that eliminate users from decision-making processes. This study demonstrates how alternative social media (ASM)—namely Mastodon—restructure the relationship between the technical structure of social media and the social interactions that follow, offering a particular type of sociality distinct from CSM. Drawing from a variety of qualitative data, this analysis finds that (1) the decentralized structure of Mastodon enables community autonomy, (2) Mastodon’s open-source protocol allows the internal and technical development of the site to become a social enterprise in and of itself, and (3) Mastodon’s horizontal structure shifts the site’s scaling focus from sheer number of users to quality engagement and niche communities. To this end, Mastodon helps us rethink “the social” in social media in terms of topology, abstraction, and scale.