REPLATFORMIZATION: RACIAL CAPITALISM AND THE STACK-CONSCIOUSNESS OF KIWI FARMS

Resumen

Over the past decade, service providers have taken on larger roles in the regulation of violent digital networks. As reactionary platforms like Gab and Parler emerge to cater to far-right users estranged from mainstream social networking sites, their stack suppliers – domain registrars, web hosts, app stores, etc. – may enforce their Terms of Service, revoking access to services, in what José Van Dijck et al. term “deplatformization.” Deplatformization has proven circumstantially effective as in the 2021 destruction of Parler by Amazon Web Services. However, reactionary platforms have responded by building their own service providers, marketing them as “cancel-proof,” and seeding a cottage industry of far-right infrastructure firms immune to deplatformization. In this trend, which I term “replatformization,” far-right networks scale their capacity to fracture and terrorize online publics. This paper investigates replatformization through a diachronic analysis of the stack of Kiwi Farms, a text forum known for its deadly transmisogynistic harassment campaigns, its history as “victim” of service denial by multiple firms including Cloudflare, and its in-house solutions such as DDoS mitigator “KiwiFlare” and web host “Final Solutions LLC.” Anchored by materialist critical theory, I argue that the replatformization of far-right platforms reifies the role of reactionary digital networks within the social reproduction of racial capitalism. I trace an emerging reactionary Stack-consciousness as KF users become a vanguard in digital service provision. Efforts to regulate online hate culture must attend to the fact that the private ownership of the means of mediation empowers reactionary webmasters with inordinate leverage.