Building on cyberethnographer Ruby Justice Thélot’s ARTnews meditation on AI and digital folk art creation, critic Louis Bury lists ten examples—art, books, essays—that speak to this tension in 2025. Bury’s picks include Dean Kissick’s dissection of “The Vulgar Image,” Agent 5.5’s QAnon-esque John Pork TikTok lore, artist Maya Man’s “funhouse vision of TikTok vernacular’s over-the-top banality” for the Whitney, and Nadia Asparouhova’s cult hit book Antimemetics (2025).

There might be hope for the internet after all: In a piece for Mozilla Foundation’s Nothing Personal imprint, co-matter strategists Severin Matusek, Nick Houde, and Paloma Moniz chart an emerging ecosystem of radical networks and alternate digital infrastructures that prioritize values and community over growth. Are.na, Metalabel, New Models, Subvert, or the Cyberfeminism Index are all examples of a “post-naive” internet era and builders determined to change the status quo.

Net art veterans Cory Arcangel, JODI, Dirk Paesmans, and UBERMORGEN playfully probe the gamified mechanics of the attention economy in “Entertainment at all costs” at Wouters Gallery Brussels. UBERMORGEN contributes slogans decrying platform dynamics—“Drama Marketing,” “Trauma Dumping”—while Paesmans’ Pokemon Go Museum (2025) uses AR to riff on the commodification of cultural spaces. The show dissects how leisure has been weaponized into perpetual engagement—the churn of an endless content economy.

“Ambient Propaganda” at Utrecht’s IMPAKT Centre for Media Culture examines the shift from top-down to ambient influence, a new regime “where ideology is subconsciously incorporated into everyday digital culture.” From TikTok trends to political fandoms, the featured works by Noura Tafeche, Lesia Vasylchenko, Total Refusal, Paolo Cirio, Fantastic Little Splash and others highlight “how the boundaries between self-expression, performance, and ideological reproduction have blurred.”