@catturd2 and the Cyborgian Memeification of Ignorance

• In Event: Pedagogies of Ignorance and Authoritarian Epistemologies: Cyborg Surveillance States, Meme Warfare, and MAGA Drag Queens

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
This paper takes up the public pedagogy of Phillip Buchanan, the far-Right, TruthSocial/X influencer known as @catturd2, exploring how this account (as well as similar influencers across platforms) has worked to shift political and cultural discourse toward the production of ignorance. From my analysis, I suggest that this ignorance is not an absence of knowledge, but rather the production of affective, memeified knowledge that resists discourses of argumentation, debate, expertise, and ethics.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
This analysis is premised on Tuana’s (2006a, 2006b) “epistemologies of ignorance” framework that recasts ignorance not as lack, but rather, “constructed, maintained, and disseminated and [...] linked to issues of cognitive authority, doubt, trust, silencing, and uncertainty” (2006b, p. 194). From this foundation, I take up both Haraway’s (1991) figuration of the cyborg and Fanon’s (2004, 2008) psychoanalytic exploration of colonialism’s affiliative identity to explicate the structure and pedagogical import of @catturd2’s discursive mode.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
This project took up Jackson and Mazzei’s (2023) thinking with theory anti-methodological approach, in which researcher, data, and theory are engaged as an assemblage of meaning making. As such, analyses were produced via multiple readings of theory with/against/across data, which allowed for novel sociological and cultural understandings of ignorance within @catturd2’s discursive moves.

Data sources
Data sources for this inquiry included @catturd’s tweets/posts on both X and TruthSocial, retweets/reposts that took up/extended the account’s ideas, as well as multiple interviews with Buchanan.

Results
Through the lens of Donna Haraway’s (1991) cyborg, @catturd2 is best understood as a meme cyborg—a posthuman, semi-autonomous actor that fuses human affect and desire with the processes and discursive nature of social media technologies - algorithmic amplification and division, bot engagement, and platform logic. However, rather than taking up cyborg hybridity in Haraway’s liberatory or feminist mode, @catturd2 realizes Haraway’s cautions around the cyborg’s potential service to capitalism and militaristic fantasy. @catturd2 exists as a distributed persona, a synthetic subject produced by machines, followers, and the platform itself, a cyborg public sphere that floods timelines, reterritorializes discourse, and manipulates public perception without the need for verifiable truth. Teaching through automation, emotional mirroring, and memetic aesthetics, @catturd2 prioritizes instantaneous emotional gratification over any kind of sustained, complicated critical inquiry and rigid, Manichean affiliation over debate and deliberation.

Scientific or scholarly significance
Reading @catturd2 against the lens of the cyborg illustrates how emotionally laden disinformation becomes an epistemological, even ontological, framework for the far-Right. By repeatedly mocking mainstream media, science, and critical thought, it teaches users to inhabit an affective posture of permanent mistrust and reactive certainty. The resulting public is not ignorant in the traditional sense, but productively misinformed. @catturd2 does not reflect cultural ignorance; it produces and monetizes it, transforming epistemic crisis into entertainment and shaping material and digital spaces into ironic, reactionary sites ripe for MAGA’s fascist ends.

Author

• Jake Burdick, Purdue University