The BACKROOMS of late capitalism

On May 14th, 2019, a post was made to 4Chan’s /x/ board that resulted in the creation of a vast internet subculture devoted to the creation and perpetuation of an imagined world called The Backrooms. Drawing on the technological affordances provided by an array of digital mediums, an abundance of world building practices emerged, expanding The Backrooms and generating a field of cultural contestation over lore, canon, and mythology. Following Pearce (2009) and others this paper will trace the process of “organic emergence” that distinguishes The Backrooms from more traditional “synthetic” conceptualizations of what constitutes virtual worlds. While the distinction between organic and synthetic virtual worlds is useful for expanding anthropological applications of the concept of virtuality, I argue against a rigid dichotomy between these two concepts. Synthetic worlds are always filled with organic social elements, unintended consequences arising from the strategic actions of developers. Simultaneously, organic worlds are not horizontal anarchist utopias and are home to many projects of institutional legitimacy. Through this distinction, I argue for a more nuanced and flexible approach to analyzing virtual phenomenon.  

The Backrooms are composed of depictions of places exhibiting uncanny valley features that invoke a sense of discomfort while subversively appropriating nostalgic aesthetics and references from the 1990s and early 2000s. The invocation of nostalgia as a primary representative mechanism in The Backrooms expresses yearning desire for a past that those who inhabit The Backrooms never experienced; a collective sentiment that “the last time everything was OK was before I was born.” I argue that The Backrooms are paradoxically subversive, and potentially counterhegemonic, in the uncomfortable representations of nostalgic places they depict. The shopping mall food court, the finished basement of a suburban home, the idyllic office space of the administrative bureaucracy, places that were once meaningfully mundane have been emptied of their human presence, distorted, and made to seem strange. This cultural aesthetic of what are colloquially referred to as “liminal spaces” in The Backrooms community are the liminoid sites of failed rites of passage premised on consumer experiences and the promise of a future that has since been cancelled. I contend that The Backrooms are a virtual vision of the future embedded in the past, saturated with the fear and anxiety of the unbearable atrocities of the present.