For posters, the semionauts who “create pathways through culture by reorganising history to bring forward new ideas.”1

What Children Post

Deleuze deems the intervention of a map to be necessary when parsing affects experienced by children in Chapter 9 of Essays Critical and Clinical titled What Children Say.

Some children never stop posting online about what they are doing or trying to do: exploring milieus, by means of dynamic pipelines, and drawing up maps and predictions of them. Children think of the world in the form of maps. They colour them in, invert them, superimpose them, populate them with leaders and mascots: Anita Sarkeesian and Milo Yiannopoulos, Yanis Varoufakis and Gunther Fehlinger-Jahn, Polandball and friends. Looking at online movement through pipelines, with their routes, their detours, their barriers, their agents, they form a dynamic cartography. The loop of posting and receiving feedback forms a journey along pipelines. The arrangements of imaginary and verified trajectories give way to unique arrangements of concepts and symbols in the medium of posting.

Where children post

The historical conception of a post is:

“a piece of information including text, various media and hyperlinks published on the internet and available...to the general public. Blog posts, unlike institutional journalism are by definition subjective, informal and open to comments and criticism. In reality, blogs represent individuals and institutions, and their authority fluctuates accordingly. Describing blogs as open/democratic media is as cloudy and meaningless as the very definition of contemporary democracy.”2

Platforms have since emerged as the dominant architecture for posting. Here, the experience of contemporary institutional journalism veers toward the subjective, informal, and open qualities of blogposting. The New Yorker creates a Substack; blue-ticks copy slogans and live-react to events under the guise of reporting; the ABC set dresses their host’s millennial WFH style newsroom. Posting folds legacy cultural outputs into the inherent logic of the Web 2.0 meta, that is: “unfettered copying, and user-generated content owned by the platform itself.”3 Hippies became hackers, then technicians, then disruptors, and creators of new wealth, “turn[ing] cyberspace into the economic property of certain Americans.”4 The anachronistic legacy of a degrowth Freedom Club Figure is shattered by cheaper, faster-moving, albeit amateur apparatuses for the arrangement of complex systems.

Even a virtual milieu is made up of qualities, substances, powers, and events: the For You Page, for example, with its materials (infinite scrolling, rabbit-holes), its noises (the aura of reggaeton phonk), its subjects (KOLs, thought-leaders), or its dramas (Nick Fuentes ratios Drew Pavlou and Elon Musk on X after Drew calls him a fed). Its trajectory merges not only with the subjectivities of those who travel through it, but also with the subjectivity of the milieu itself, insofar as it is reflected in those who travel through it. Pipelines express the identity of the journey and what one journeys through. The people you know are replaced with speculation as cultural production.

Degens seek profits in the trenches of pump.fun by trading Kirk Coin after his assassination. Prediction markets generate information, with the aim to create tradable assets out of any difference in opinion. Polymarket hooks into Ukraine’s open-source DeepState Live tool, which provides real-time mapping of Russia’s invasion. Kalshi is soon embedded within CNN’s newsroom. For children, to leisure is to toil, a task of movement, folded within the space of markets and symbols where everything can be a slot machine. Specific logics derive from stateless virtual noise, providing stimulus and feedback to superimpose over real geographies. There is no crying in the casino.

How children post

Shitpostbot5000 automatically posted every half hour in the mid 2010’s, selecting both a ‘source image’ and a ‘template’ at random, combining them into a new image to varying degrees of successful interpretation.5 In the event the ‘bot’ posted something somewhat interpretable, individuals commented ‘sentient?’ as if there was emergence in the business of posting. Like with surfing clubs in the 2000’s, “the nature of these games is purely semiotic, i.e. concerned with arrangement of signs, their belonging to certain cultural modes/discourses, and a capacity to generate meaningful statements.”6 Collections of images and symbols within each post have syntagmatic relationships with one another, fitting into a logical chain. Each respective component is a reflexive paradigm of mutually exclusive information; each is easily replaceable and cheap.

“The people who post those awful reaction pictures have the right idea. By themselves, those pictures make no sense. They need context, and shitpostbot will provide that context.”7

The core gameplay loop continues, the possibility for syntagmatic chains increases in complexity. The available index of “origin codes and the cultural context which has to be referenced in decoding the language of the post” grows, even as nothing ever happens – more events being catalogued and referenced.8 Lurk moar, catch-up, preserve the semiotic trajectory of posting and decoding. In this medium, “within the order of the image,” the signifiers of political-economy are often viewed alongside those of vibes-and-culture, at the “expense of genuine conviction and organisation towards material change.” ‘First as Tragedy, Then as LARP’ emerges as a “reworked Marxian adage.”910 Syntagms are shared and adapted across disparate places, between political parties and fandoms – evolving across the board as paradigms change. Fans of the TV show Invincible share brainrot edits with phonk in the background on TikTok – as does the Australian Labor party. One account helps secure a landslide federal election victory. Oftentimes between authenticity and irony, children rely on feedback and metrics from peers or analytics to dictate future trajectories. The evolving methods of expression frames ideology and identity in the style of posting through syntagmatic chains. For example, ancom, ancap, anprim share ‘an’ (for anarchist) as a prefix. ‘Cap,’ ‘prim,’ and ‘com’ are paradigms in this chain (capitalist, primitivist, and communist respectively). L/acc, r/acc, and e/acc share ‘acc’ (for accelerationist) as suffix with ‘l,’ ‘r,’ or ‘e’ for left, right, or effective as paradigm. All paradigms are interchangeable, forming the trajectory by which children map a process of movement along pipelines.

What posts mean

Conducting archaeological studies on the posts of children establishes a profound link between the poster’s unconscious, memory, and the stimulus shared. It is a memorial, commemorative, or monumental conception, the individual’s feed being nothing more than terrains capable of conserving, identifying, or authenticating pre-existing belief. In the cycle of posting, what children post is not an afterward, a simple extension of parental personages, or coherent affirmation. A virtual milieu is not solely capable of conserving, identifying, or authenticating children’s presuppositions. A system of feedback alters suppositions in unpredictable ways – posting is a looping process. 60 years prior to Shitpostbot, Mumford writes that the repeated exposure to images necessitates reflexively stripping them of meaning in the interest of effectiveness.

“Then, by a reciprocal twist, the emptier a symbol is of meaning, the more must its user depend upon mere repetition and mere sensationalism to achieve [its] purpose. This is a vicious circle, if ever there was one.”11

This repetitive sensationalism does not mean the contents of a post, nor its poster’s material reality be taken as uncorrelated or dismissed as irrelevant. There is some relationship between the two, decodable through a bespoke process of repetitive erasure and reappropriation of symbols. To an outsider – who only decodes images by conceiving of each symbol as ideological or archaeological – this process renders the post opaque to them.

Pipelines are superimposed in such a way that each ideology finds itself modified in the following, rather than finding its origin in the preceding one: from one belief to the next, it is not a matter of searching for an original, but of evaluating displacements. Every stage of a pipeline is a redistribution of impasses and breakthroughs, of thresholds and enclosures, which necessarily funnel from top to bottom, severity rising as more and more casuals are filtered. There is not only a reversal of directions, but also a difference in nature: a poster’s unconscious no longer just deals with history and chronology, but with trajectories and becomings; it is no longer an unconscious of commemoration but one of mobilisation, an unconscious whose ideas take flight rather than remaining buried in the ground. Posting is then an impersonal process in which chains are composed somewhat like a cairn, with stones carried in by different voyages and beings in becoming that may or may not depend on a single author. Only a conception such as this can tear posting away from the personal process of memory and the collective ideal of commemoration.

There are pipelines everywhere for those with eyes to see

A bipartisan federal initiative to restrict Australian children’s access to platforms is launched and championed at the UN General Assembly. ‘Let Them Be Kids’ appears on the front pages of Murdoch’s numerous papers. In December 2025, the Sydney Harbour Bridge is bathed in green and gold – the same slogan projected onto the pylon. Some children flood the Prime Minister’s TikTok account with comments that the ban “didn’t work” and that they’ll “be here forever.” During account creation, they set their location to Ireland or Italy and skip age verification entirely, subverting geography, a pseudo-exit. Some are fine with YouTube Kids and Cocomelon – marching happily toward another Elsagate. Others flock to Discord and other private chat clients, further away from supervision. This is a larger trajectory against a tide of slop and the lack of privacy in the clearnet ‘commons.’ No longer will the study of /b/ or /r9k/ suffice as No-Lives-Matter and 764 become new indications of what is possible. Ham-radio operators received images from the International Space Station on 145.800 MHz FM; cheap RTL-SDR dongles, antennae to the sky, 2 minutes on, 2 minutes off, mode PD120. Semionauts continue to rearrange history and bring forward new ideas. They remake subjectivities and desires, mapping their actions within the apparatus in seemingly unknowable trajectories.

Every post is made up of a plurality of trajectories that coexist and are readable only on a map, that change direction depending on the trajectories that are retained. In this regard, Félix Guattari defines a schizoanalysis of what children post that opposes itself to psychoanalysis. “Lapses, parapraxes, and symptoms are like birds that strike their beaks against the window. It is not a question of interpreting them. It is a question instead of identifying their trajectory to see if they can serve as indicators of new universes of reference capable of acquiring a consistency sufficient for turning a situation upside down.”

  1. Brad Troemel, Peer Pressures (LINK Editions, 2011). ↩
  2. Marcin Ramocki, Surfing Clubs: organized notes and comments (Halifax, 2008). ↩
  3. Mike Pepi, Against Platforms – Surviving Digital Utopia (Melville House Publishing, 2025). ↩
  4. Florian Röetzer, “Outer Space or Virtual Space? Utopias of the Digital Age,” in The Virtual Dimension, ed. John Beckmann (Princeton Architectural Press, 1998). ↩
  5. https://www.shitpostbot.com/top/2017 ↩
  6. Ramocki, Surfing Clubs. ↩
  7. https://www.shitpostbot.com/ ↩
  8. Ramocki, Surfing Clubs. ↩
  9. Paul Sutherland, “LARP Politics and Hyperreality,” Do Not Research, published May 6, 2024. ↩
  10. Tomi Faison, “First As Tragedy Then As Larp,” Do Not Research, published Oct 31, 2023. ↩
  11. Lewis Mumford, Art and Technics (Columbia University Press, 1952). ↩