The Anthropological and Philosophical Context of the “Do Not Research” Project

The “Do Not Research” (DNR) project presents itself as a complex cultural object: it is at once an artistic endeavor, a media platform, a digital community, and a philosophical statement. Its paradoxical name is not a literal command but an ironic critique of a contemporary online information ecosystem where the populist imperative to “Do Your Own Research” often leads to epistemic collapse. The project’s founder, Joshua Citarella, embodies its core tensions. His personal and professional trajectory from a post-internet artist concerned with digital aesthetics to a self-styled digital ethnographer of online political subcultures provides the foundational narrative for the entire enterprise. His evolution from observing the network’s artifacts to observing its inhabitants mirrors the project’s own development from a private chat server into a multi-faceted publishing and community-building operation.

This report posits that “Do Not Research” can be understood as an anthropological experiment in building a post-institutional community for knowledge production and a philosophical response to the crisis of trust and expertise that defines the post-Web 2.0 era. It functions as both a subject of study as a unique online subculture in its own right, and a proposed methodology for studying the digital present. By examining its anthropological context, from its roots in post-internet art to its ethnographic study of online political movements, and its philosophical implications, concerning institutional critique and the nature of online knowledge, this report will analyze DNR as a significant and provocative intervention into the way culture is produced, disseminated, and understood in the 21st century.

Anthropological Context

The Aesthetic and Methodological Foundations of DNR

The origins of the “Do Not Research” project are deeply embedded in the artistic and critical currents of the early 2010s, specifically the post-internet art movement. This context is essential for understanding the project’s later shift toward a more anthropological and sociological mode of inquiry. Founder Joshua Citarella’s artistic practice evolved from a focus on the aesthetic effects of the internet to an ethnographic investigation of the communities that inhabit it, a transition that laid the methodological groundwork for DNR.

The Post-Internet Condition: Post-internet art is not a movement concerned with a time after the internet, but rather one that operates from an “internet state of mind”. It describes art created with an inherent consciousness of the networks through which it is conceived, produced, and circulated. This sensibility is defined by an acknowledgment of the blurring boundaries between online and offline realities and a critical engagement with digital culture, corporate branding, and the pervasive effects of ubiquitous networking.

Citarella rose to prominence as part of this early 2010s movement, initially creating lens-based work and participating in collaborative online projects like “The Jogging” on Tumblr. His gallery exhibitions translated the aesthetics and logic of the digital world into tangible objects. Works like SWIM a Few Years From Now (2017), a triptych envisioning an anarcho-capitalist society, employed a “canny blend of analog photography and digital trickery” and used images sourced from the internet, giving the piece the “slickness of a dystopian IKEA catalog spread”. This early practice demonstrates a sophisticated engagement with the semiotics of digital culture and the “intricate traps of image production today”.

The Ethnographic Turn: Mapping “Politigram”: Around 2016, Citarella’s work underwent a significant methodological shift, moving from aesthetic commentary to a more direct anthropological investigation of online communities. This “ethnographic turn” centered on “Politigram” (Political Instagram), a loose network of niche accounts where Gen Z teenagers explore and debate radical political ideologies through memes. This research culminated in two self-published books, Politigram & the Post-left (2018) and 20 Interviews (2020), which documented ideologies ranging from eco-extremism and neoreaction to anarcho-primitivism and post-leftism.

The methodology employed was a form of digital ethnography. It involved deep immersion and “spending a really deep engagement in these spaces,” making connections with users, and conducting interviews to understand their “intimate and personal view of the world”. This approach, described as a “pioneering analysis” of internet subcultures and the “real primary research” underpinning his later work, marked a departure from simply creating objects about the internet to actively studying the subjects within it.

This evolution was not an abandonment of his artistic practice but rather a logical extension of post-internet art’s core concerns. The post-internet movement was defined by its consciousness of the network and its impact on culture. Citarella’s early work reflected this by translating digital aesthetics into physical gallery objects, critiquing the network’s effects from a distance. The Politigram project, however, shifted this focus from the digital object to the digital subject, investigating the formation of political identity and community within the network itself. This required a new set of tools, moving beyond image-making to adopt ethnographic methods like participant observation and interviews. This progression represents an evolution of post-internet’s critical impulse, applying its network-aware lens not just to aesthetics, but to the human communities shaped by those networks.

Community Dynamics and the Politics of the Pipeline

A central anthropological concern of the DNR project is the phenomenon of online radicalization. Citarella’s research provides a nuanced analysis of the so-called “pipeline,” while the structure of the DNR community itself can be interpreted as a direct response to the isolating and polarizing dynamics of that process.

The Problem of the “Pipeline”: The “alt-right pipeline” is a conceptual model describing how individuals, particularly young men, are gradually radicalized online. The process often begins with provocative but relatively mainstream right-wing content (such as anti-feminist or anti-”SJW” material) and, through algorithmic recommendations and community linkages, progressively exposes the user to more extreme ideologies. Citarella refers to this process as “the funnel,” noting that while platform algorithms play a significant role, the phenomenon is not entirely passive. He argues that politicization is also a proactive search for “ideological clarity.” When mainstream media and institutions fail to provide satisfactory answers or are perceived as hypocritical, individuals are driven to explore fringe ideologies to close the “loopholes in one’s worldview”. This search is particularly potent for young, impressionable users who are actively forming their political identities and are predisposed to anti-establishment narratives.

DNR as Counter-Forum: The DNR community was conceived as a structural response to the pipeline. It began as a private Discord server, an “enclosed, gatekept space” of the kind Citarella predicts will become more common as the open web becomes saturated with AI content and paywalls. The community’s activities stand in stark contrast to the isolating, algorithmically-driven nature of the funnel. It originated with a collective reading group on Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism and evolved into a hub for “lively community exchanges,” collaborative research, and artist critiques. This dialogic and communal model is explicitly framed as part of an effort to build a “leftwing alternative” to the right-wing pipeline, harnessing the energy of online politicization for progressive ends.

The community model of DNR functions as more than just an alternative in content; it is a structural inversion of the pipeline’s epistemological purpose. The pipeline leads to the formation of echo chambers, which operate by actively discrediting outside sources and reinforcing the trust placed exclusively in insiders. The DNR project, by contrast, was founded on the collective study of an external theoretical text, grounding its initial discourse in a shared engagement with an outside source. Its subsequent form as a publishing platform featuring over 200 contributors actively imports a diversity of external voices rather than systematically excluding them. This structure necessitates an engagement with difference and complexity, which is the direct opposite of an echo chamber’s function to simplify a worldview and eliminate cognitive dissonance. In this way, DNR is designed not as a leftist echo chamber, but as an “epistemic forum” intended to break the isolating dynamics of pipeline-driven radicalization.

Philosophical Context

DNR as Post-Internet Institutional Critique

Beyond its anthropological study of online communities, “Do Not Research” is a project deeply engaged with a philosophical critique of the institutions that govern art and knowledge. Drawing from a rich history of institutional critique within the art world, DNR extends this tradition into the post-internet era, shifting the focus from deconstruction to the creation of a viable alternative.

The Diagnosis: The Failure of Legacy Institutions: Citarella’s work is animated by a sharp critique of traditional cultural and academic institutions. He argues that they are failing under the economic pressures of neoliberalism, where rising costs of living and insufficient forms of patronage have made creative pursuits untenable for many. This economic precarity has, in his view, led to a state of “deep political rot,” where institutions have been captured by “elite donor interests” and are no longer capable of fulfilling their public mission. He likens working within these decaying structures to “waiting for a promotion to assistant captain on the Titanic”.

This critique extends to academia, which he sees as facing a “crisis for the value of higher education.” He observes that the most meaningful learning for students often happens outside the classroom, through alternative media like podcasts, rendering the traditional university model increasingly illegitimate. The art world is similarly faulted for its market dynamics, which can force complex ideas into commercially viable but conceptually inappropriate forms, such as painting.

The Lineage: Institutional Critique: This diagnosis places Citarella’s project in conversation with the art movement known as Institutional Critique. Emerging in the late 1960s, artists engaged in this practice began to question the supposed neutrality of the gallery and museum. They sought to expose the unacknowledged mechanics of the art world, its funding structures, curatorial biases, and ideological underpinnings; by juxtaposing the institution’s ideal, public-facing mission with the material reality of its operations. This form of critique asks the viewer to reflect on the often-invisible systems of power and preference that dictate what art is made, seen, and valued.

The Prescription: Building a Crowdfunded Alternative: “Do Not Research” can be understood as a project of constructive institutional critique. Rather than attempting to deconstruct the legacy institution from within, Citarella’s “class-conscious effort” is to build a new, alternative institution from the outside. This new model is designed to address the specific failures he identifies in the old one. DNR is structured as a crowdfunded, non-profit arts organization that operates without the high material overhead of a physical gallery. It is committed to compensating its contributors with honorariums or royalties, a direct response to the exploitative economic conditions faced by many creative producers. Furthermore, it attempts to create a more resilient financial structure by blending multiple funding streams such as low-cost subscriptions via Patreon or Substack and potentially donor funding, to mitigate the negative incentives and vulnerabilities associated with relying on a single source. The ultimate goal is to create a sustainable, “peer-to-peer-organized arts education” model that can exist and thrive despite increasingly adversarial economic circumstances.

This approach represents a significant evolution of the practice of institutional critique, one that is uniquely suited to the digital age. First-wave Institutional Critique was fundamentally site-specific, operating within the physical confines of the gallery or museum to expose its internal contradictions. Post-internet art, by contrast, treats the network as its primary site and is predicated on disintermediated, platform-based models of distribution. As a post-internet artist, Citarella diagnoses the physical institution as a lost cause and thus sees little value in working within its decaying framework. He instead leverages the tools of the post-internet condition like crowdfunding platforms, Discord servers and Substack newsletters, to build a parallel institutional structure online. This shift from a deconstructive to a productive mode of critique is a fundamental development, reflecting a sensibility where creating a new, decentralized network is seen as a more viable and urgent task than attempting to reform an old, centralized institution.

Expertise and Trust in an Age of Epistemic Collapse

The project’s name, “Do Not Research,” is its most direct philosophical intervention. It is a deeply ironic statement that engages with the crisis of knowledge, expertise, and trust that characterizes the contemporary online information environment. The name functions as a critique of the prevailing “Do Your Own Research” culture and proposes, through the project’s structure, an alternative epistemological model.

The DYOR Imperative and Epistemic Collapse: The injunction to “Do Your Own Research” (DYOR) has become a central tenet of online discourse, particularly within contrarian and conspiratorial communities. Philosophically, however, this ethos is deeply problematic. It is often deployed not as a genuine invitation to inquiry, but as a “thought-terminating cliché”: a slogan used to shut down debate and reassert belief without scrutiny. This mode of “research” is typically driven by powerful cognitive biases, most notably confirmation bias, where individuals seek out information that validates their pre-existing beliefs while ignoring contrary evidence. Compounding this is the Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias in which people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability, leading non-experts to feel dangerously overconfident in their capacity to evaluate complex scientific or social topics.

This phenomenon is symptomatic of a broader erosion of public trust in legacy institutions, including government, media, and academia. Citarella acknowledges that this distrust is not entirely unfounded, pointing to decades of institutional failures, austerity-driven decay, and capture by elite interests that have legitimately damaged their credibility. In this vacuum of trustworthy authority, the individual is thrown back on their own resources, leading to the precarious and often counter-productive imperative to become one’s own expert on every conceivable topic.

“Do Not Research” as Epistemological Provocation: The project’s title is a direct, ironic counter-signal to this state of affairs. It functions as an epistemological provocation, critiquing the profound naivete of the DYOR ethos. The name implies that in a polluted and complex information environment, unguided, individual “research” is an epistemically hazardous activity. It is an activity more likely to undermine knowledge by reinforcing falsehoods and threatening justification, than to produce it. The command “Do Not Research” is a warning against the hubris of the atomized individual researcher and a commentary on the unreliability of the tools at their disposal.

The DNR Model: Mediated Expertise and Collective Inquiry: In place of the flawed epistemology of DYOR, the DNR project proposes an alternative model: one of collective, mediated inquiry. Where DYOR champions the isolated, autonomous individual, DNR re-establishes a social and institutional framework for producing and vetting knowledge. Information is not simply found; it is created, curated, and debated. Knowledge is produced by a community of over 200 contributors, presented through a platform with editorial direction, and then discussed within a community forum. This structure represents a return to an institutional model of knowledge production, but one that aims to be more transparent, participatory, and community-based, building trust through its process rather than demanding it based on legacy status.

This model can be understood as an attempt to operationalize what philosopher Neil Levy terms “exploratory inquiry”. Levy distinguishes between two modes of lay research. The first is “truth-directed inquiry,” where a non-expert attempts to discover the definitive truth on an expert topic; an approach that is epistemically risky and characteristic of the DYOR movement. The second is “exploratory inquiry,” where the goal is not to establish truth but to gain understanding of a topic, while still maintaining a baseline deference to expert consensus. The DNR platform functions as a framework for this latter mode of inquiry. It provides its audience with curated articles, research, and art from a community of semi-experts and engaged amateurs. The audience is not expected to become primary researchers on fringe politics or internet culture, but to engage with the presented material, discuss it, and thereby develop a more nuanced understanding. This process aims to rebuild a form of trust; not in decaying legacy institutions, but in the specific, transparent, and collaborative process of the DNR community itself. The project’s title, therefore, is a warning against the former and an invitation into the latter.

Addressing Critiques and Ethical Contradictions

While the “Do Not Research” project presents itself as a progressive and critical intervention, it has not been immune to significant criticism. The most trenchant critiques focus on the project’s methodology, particularly the relationship between the researcher and the subjects of study, raising profound ethical questions about power, representation, and the purpose of the research itself.

A “Colonialist” Methodology

A recurring and forceful critique of Citarella’s work is that it adopts a “colonialist” attitude, treating its subjects who are often young, anonymous, and politically heterodox internet users as “primitive savages to be observed”. This critique, articulated in a detailed essay by Alexander Quiquero on the legacy DNR website, argues that Citarella writes from a “position of superiority” rather than “pure curiosity,” offering only shallow acknowledgments of his subjects’ complex realities. The analysis is characterized as dealing in “aesthetics only,” deploying memes and buzzwords in a “vapid way” that disregards their authentic context and fails to account for the “whole of a life” of the individuals involved. This approach, the critique alleges, transforms complex human subjects into a “content stream of 1’s and 0’s to be consumed and discarded”.

Ethical Quandaries of Digital Participant Observation

This critique can be situated within the established ethical frameworks of anthropological and sociological research, particularly those concerning participant observation. The DNR project brings several of these ethical quandaries into sharp relief in the digital context:

• Power Dynamics: There is an inherent power imbalance between an established, public-facing artist and researcher like Citarella and his often young, pseudonymous, and potentially vulnerable subjects. This differential can affect the nature of the interaction and the representation of the subjects’ views.
• Informed Consent: Obtaining meaningful informed consent is notoriously complex in pseudonymous online communities. It is difficult to verify age, ensure participants fully understand how their data and words will be used in a public-facing project, and navigate the continuous and dynamic nature of consent required in long-term ethnographic work.
• Representation and Harm: The critique that Citarella presents his subjects as “brain-numb pathetic idiot kids” highlights the profound risk of misrepresentation. Reducing complex, experimental, or ironic online identities to flat caricatures can cause psychological or social harm, especially when these analyses are circulated to a broad audience outside the original subcultural context.

Engagement vs. Objectivity

The tension at the heart of these critiques is vividly illustrated by Citarella’s “Auto Experiment: Hyper-masculinity,” in which he adopted the diet and fitness regimes popular in right-leaning “manosphere” communities. This project exemplifies the methodological paradox of his work. He engages in a deep form of participant observation to understand and build rapport with a subculture, stating that it allows young men “predisposed toward right-wing politics” to listen to him. Yet, he enters the experiment with a fixed political viewpoint and concludes that the political dimensions of these practices are “total nonsense”.

This reveals an unresolved tension between the project’s anthropological claims and its activist goals. Citarella describes his method as “anthropological in a good way,” aiming to “get at their core concerns”. Such a description implies an ethnographic stance of empathy, seeking to understand a culture from an insider’s perspective. However, his stated goal is explicitly political: to build a “broad coalition” for economic reform and persuade people away from what he deems “the wrong ideas”. The critiques suggest that this political objective ultimately overrides the anthropological one. This can lead to a form of engagement that feels extractive rather than empathetic, where subjects are not being understood on their own terms but are instead being observed as data points for a pre-existing political project. This conflict manifests as what critics term the “colonial gaze”: the researcher enters a community not simply to learn, but with the ultimate aim to correct. This stance compromises the core ethnographic principle of understanding a culture as it understands itself and inevitably invites charges of superiority and misrepresentation.

Synthesis of DNR’s Nature and Significance

The “Do Not Research” project emerges from this analysis as a deeply layered and contradictory endeavor. It is simultaneously an anthropological case study of digital community formation and a philosophical proposal for a new model of knowledge production in an era of institutional decay. Its origins in post-internet art provide the critical lens through which it views the network, not as a neutral tool, but as a primary site of cultural and political contestation. In response to the isolating dynamics of the algorithmic “funnel,” it has constructed a counter-forum: a dialogic community that inverts the logic of the echo chamber. As a work of institutional critique, it moves beyond the deconstruction of legacy art and media institutions to the ambitious production of a crowdfunded, community-driven alternative. As an experiment, DNR has achieved notable success, cultivating a highly active community, a recognized publishing platform, and a space for critical discourse outside the confines of traditional academia and mainstream social media.

Future Directions and Unresolved Questions

Despite its successes, the project remains fraught with the profound ethical and methodological contradictions that its own critical posture invites. The tension between its role as an anthropological observer and a political activist is unresolved, leading to valid critiques of its extractive and potentially superior gaze upon the very online subcultures it seeks to understand. Looking forward, DNR may be a prototype for the future of intellectual community, embodying a potential model for how critical discourse might survive in the “enclosed, gatekept spaces” of a paywalled and AI-saturated internet. Yet, this raises further questions. Does this model solve the problem of institutional decay, or does it simply create new, smaller, and potentially more insular institutions? Does the retreat of critical discourse into semi-private, subscription-based communities ultimately serve the public sphere, or does it risk further balkanizing it? “Do Not Research” offers a compelling and provocative model for navigating the digital present, but its ultimate legacy will be determined by its ability to resolve the profound ethical and epistemological challenges it so effectively identifies.