This discussion on Doja Cat is raising important issues of white supremacy, colourism, biracial identity, being a POC raised alone by a white parent... but there's an element of needing to contexualise her behaviour within 'deep internet' subcultures.

A lot of us on this bird app, esp. those of us in our 30s, may have started with Prodigy chat, AIM, ICQ... the more committed ones were found in IRC (internet relay chat). Then there was the dark web/deep web spaces where the illicit stuff (Silk Road and other darknetweb sites)..

... where human trafficking, weapons/drug exchange exist alongside organising coups. Cyber anthropolgist @BiellaColeman's book "Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous" explores the hacktivist world but also portrays the isolation w/in hacker culture

and the ways in which a subversive culture manifests into deeply 'racist, juvenile, & mysogistic space'. She describes this in her essay 'Phreaks, Hackers & Trolls: The Politics of Transgression and Spectacle". Now, very little has been studied about the participation...

of people of colour in these spaces. There is great need for a racialised lens. Doja herself has explained that her cyber identity resulted in her dropping out of school as she was spending nearly 10-13 per day online in these communties. h/t @ZalUIbaorimi

@ZalUIbaorimi brought this to my attention in her nuanced discussion of belonging and race is specific social setting. Doja's chat groups are most likely deep internet folks (we call them all incels as pejorative though that actually is not the full composition of this group).

What is seen are the interesections between race-play (not at all healthy in the deep web cyber context), voyeurism, and the specatacle of abuse that is a commonality within these normally exclusive spaces. The enforcement of masculity & white supremacy dominates these spaces

And in that sense the discussion regarding Doja's ability to meander into that space accepting the spectacle of her humiliation for the enjoyment of her cyber peers deeply conflicts with her success in predominantly black artistic spaces (hip hop culture).

But in 2020s, there's a new new taxonomy of internet denizens. With Reddit, 4chan, Metafilter, the dynamics of internet communities have changed since the 90s. On top of the key issues of race, belonging, sex, white supremacy, there is also the psychology of internet use at play

Overall, Im just simply trying to add deepnet spaces as another layer of hugely conflicting and contradictory behaviour. Doja's ultimate and maybe fatal mistake was assuming that by assimilation through accepting racial humiliation, she'd be accepted as one of the boys.

these spaces usually protect each other. Sadly for her, the illusion was not fully understanding the limits of her blackness. Her attempts to 'be one of the boys' by playing into the spectacle was never going to secure her private inclusion.