TUNG TUNG TUNG
April 27, 2026
I took three articles and let their authors discuss my take on postdigital propaganda. This may qualify as yet another attempt at content slop. Slop, til you drop
Setting: A panel, somewhere — maybe Transmediale {LOL}, maybe a sidebar at a CCS conference, maybe just a Discord call that someone recorded. Marcus Bösch's Postdigital Propaganda manuscript has been circulated in advance. Each panelist has read it.
Walker opens. He's the most willing to play in academic registers, and he likes the framework. "What Bösch calls infrastructural conditioning is what I've been trying to describe through Deleuze and Guattari — the rhizome of online and offline, the de/reterritorialization loop. His four dimensions are basically a more rigorous version of what I'm circling around in the Tung Tung / Epstein piece. Where he's helpful for me is that he names the locus precisely: it's not in the actor, not in the message, not even in the platform as channel — it's in the recursive ecology. That's a real conceptual gain. The orchid and the wasp don't have intentions. They have a relationship."
Afif pushes back first, but gently. "I think the framework is doing something important, but I want to ask whether it can hold what it claims to hold. Bösch is very clear that postdigital propaganda is structural — it's a condition, not a campaign. Fine. But then everything that uses the same infrastructural logic falls inside the frame. Dana Dawud's Palcorecore operates through exactly the four dimensions he identifies. So does the Open Secret network. So does Zein Majali's Propane. These works are unmistakably political — they're naming a genocide, they're tracing colonial intervention — and they work through affect, accumulation, hyperimposition, the same algorithmic aesthetics. Are they propaganda? In Bösch's structural sense, yes. In any meaningful political sense, no. Or — and this is what I want to push him on — yes, but in a way that the word 'propaganda' is going to have trouble carrying."
Walker: "He flags this. The normative problem in section 5.3."
Afif: "He flags it as a problem to be solved later. I think it's the central problem. If your framework can't distinguish between Palcorecore and the AfD audio meme except by appeal to a deliberative-conditions criterion that the framework itself hasn't developed, then the descriptive layer is doing more political work than it's admitting. Calling something a 'condition' makes it sound neutral. But choosing what counts as the condition, and what the condition does politically, isn't neutral."
Monteanni comes in here. "I have a different concern, which is about where affect actually lives in the framework. Bösch locates platformized affect at the algorithmic governance layer — affect as ranking signal, recommendation system selecting for affective intensity. That's correct, but it's the back end. The front end — the thing I've been calling sensonarrative power — is in the body. The screen, the OLED, the distance from the face, the cyanotic blue light. Tung Tung Tung Sahur doesn't propagate because TikTok's algorithm decided he was emotionally intense. He propagates because the kentongan rhythm and the AI uncanniness lodge in your nervous system in a particular way that you then need to reproduce. The algorithm reads what your nervous system has already done."
Walker: "Isn't that compatible with Bösch's account? He says the algorithm reads, targets, and deepens each user's affective state through feedback loops. That's what you're describing."
Monteanni: "It's compatible but it's not the same emphasis. If you locate affect in the recommendation system, your interventions will be regulatory — content moderation, algorithmic auditing. If you locate affect in the embodied encounter with the screen, your interventions are different — they're about media ecology in Nassif's sense, about the rooms we're in, about the ambient sensorium. I think the framework underweights this because it's written from political communication, not from media studies of the body. But the AfD audio meme works on the same neuro-tactile substrate that Tung Tung Tung Sahur does. The fact that one is electorally consequential and the other is a toy in a Dongguan factory tells you something about the substrate's flexibility, not about a difference in mechanism."
Afif: "This is where I think we converge. Bösch's framework is most powerful when it's diagnostic — it gives us a vocabulary for naming what's happening. It's weaker when it tries to be discriminating, because the same mechanisms produce Palcorecore and the AfD ecology and Tung Tung and the Trump-as-Sith-lord image. The framework can describe all four. It can't, on its own terms, tell you which of them matters or how. That's not a flaw — that's actually what an honest structural account looks like. But it means the framework needs to be paired with something else to do political work. And I'd argue that something else is the kind of curatorial, formal, aesthetic attention that a magazine like Dazed or a network like Open Secret cultivates — close reading of works, attention to intention, attention to the specific affective grammar a piece is mobilizing."
Walker: "The Wolf Blitzer test, basically. What is this thing doing that traditional analysis can't read?"
Afif: "Yes, but more than that. The Wolf Blitzer test is a negative criterion — it tells you when traditional reporting fails. What I want is a positive criterion — what specifically is this work doing aesthetically and politically? Bösch can tell you that the AfD audio meme satisfies ecological saturation, directional coherence, and permeation. Those are useful. But they don't tell you what the meme is doing, only that it's circulating in a particular structural configuration. For Palcorecore, the same metrics tell you nothing about why the work is powerful, which has to do with hyperimposition, archival impulse, the specific way it places resistance imagery in motion."
Monteanni: "There's also a Eurocentrism worry I'd flag. Bösch's empirical sites are Ukraine, Gaza, the German federal election, the second Trump administration. The framework is derived from those cases. Tung Tung Tung Sahur is a Indonesian folk-Islamic sonic practice that gets algorithmically deterritorialized into a global meme — and that deterritorialization is part of what makes it work. The framework, as it stands, doesn't have much to say about how postdigital propaganda relates to cultural deterritorialization specifically. The kentongan is becoming a meme is also a question about the global asymmetry of which cultures get to be the algorithmic surface and which get processed by it. I think this is implicit in the synthetic plausibility dimension but it's not theorized."
Walker: "That's fair. Although I'd say the same dynamic shows up in the Italian Brainrot 'Italianness' — a phonetic costume, not a culture. The framework could be extended in that direction."
Afif: "Could I propose something? The framework as Bösch develops it is a theory of how political alignment emerges from platform ecologies. What if we read it inversely — as a theory of what artistic and curatorial practice has to confront if it wants to do political work in this environment? Open Secret is responding to postdigital conditions. So is Palcorecore. They're not outside the ecology — they're operating inside it, with awareness of the four dimensions, and trying to bend them. Curatorial practice as counter-conditioning. That's a different relationship to the framework than treating it as a description of harm."
Monteanni: "And that maps onto what I was saying about sensonarrative power. If the affective substrate is what's being conditioned, then aesthetic and curatorial work that intervenes at the substrate level — through form, through sequencing, through the specific neuro-tactile arrangement of a piece — is doing something the regulatory frame can't do. Counter-conditioning rather than counter-messaging."
Walker: "Which loops back to my point. The orchid and the wasp don't have intentions, but artists and curators do. The framework is descriptive at the structural level and prescriptive at the actor level, in tension with itself. Bösch resolves that by saying actors are repositioned, not dissolved. But what gets repositioned, in your reading, is the locus of political agency: from message-makers to ecology-shapers. That's a real shift. It changes what counts as political work."
Afif: "And it changes how we read works like Palcorecore. Not as messages with content, but as ecological interventions. The 'meaning' is in the conditioning, not in the propositions."
Monteanni: "Which is what I was already saying about Tung Tung Tung Sahur, just in a less politically charged register. Meaning is downstream of sensation, sensation is downstream of media ecology."
Walker: "So we agree that Bösch's framework is right but underdetermined. It tells us what's happening at the structural level. It doesn't tell us what to do, and it can't, because the same structures support both Palcorecore and the AfD ecology."
Afif: "Which is why curation, criticism, and aesthetic attention can't be replaced by structural analysis. They're doing different work. Bösch can tell you the AfD audio meme satisfies all four dimensions. He can't tell you why Palcorecore is good and the AfD meme is bad, in the political-aesthetic sense that we'd want to defend. That has to come from somewhere else."
Monteanni: "And from someone else. The framework is necessary. It's not sufficient."
Nice: "Reading the framework inversely doesn't dilute it; it gives artistic-political practice a theoretical home and gives the framework a constructive register alongside the diagnostic one."
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