# Dark Academia: A Case Study on Internet Aesthetics in Performatism ## 1. Introduction Since its emergence, the Internet has continuously transformed people's lives at an unprecedented speed. This transformation is not only technical and economic in nature: The Internet connects, permeates, and shapes cultures. Like no medium before it, the digital world dominates everyday life in an almost totalitarian manner, forms an omnipresent aesthetic framework, and at the same time enables new forms of decentralized cultural production through the mimetic dissemination and collective shaping of ideas and cultural artifacts. The outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, which is still ongoing at the current time, two years ago represents one of the greatest global disruptions in recent history, which also accelerated this digitalization of cultural life and propelled many digital trends into the cultural mainstream. Particularly in the Northern Hemisphere, cultural production, consumption, and discussion shifted almost entirely to the digital realm. The boundaries between virtual and analog worlds increasingly blurred, while the Internet became the primary medium for communication and culture. Analog theaters, cinemas, and concerts were canceled; schools and universities moved to screens in people's own homes for long periods. Young people of Generation Z—born between 1997 and 2011 (cf. Dimock, 2019)—such as pupils and students, whose identity formation, character, and persona development heavily depend on interactions with cultures and peer groups, therefore immersed themselves even more intensely than before in digital cultural spaces, as they exist on social media platforms primarily like Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, Tumblr, and TikTok, to express themselves and define their identities.One of the trends that rapidly intensified through the surge in digitalization during the pandemic and entered the mainstream was the formation, popularization, and consolidation of a specific form of digital subcultures, known as Internet Aesthetics. Especially among students who were now deprived of campus life, a lasting popularity for Dark Academia and related aesthetics emerged.The goal of this present work is to analyze Internet Aesthetics as memeplexes using the example of the digital subculture Dark Academia, with the help of the theoretical framework of Performatism by Prof. Dr. Raoul Eshelman, and to show how these phenomena can be understood as part of a larger cultural paradigm shift after postmodernism. ## 2. Mimetic Subcultures and Internet Aesthetics ### 2.1 Memes To understand what Internet Aesthetics are and how they function, one must first at least roughly understand how culture in general works on the Internet. The special thing about the Internet is primarily that, at the elemental level, it enables the spread of memes, thereby the emergence of cultural mutations and the formation of so-called memeplexes, as well as their institutionalization in collective acts of spontaneous order, in an unprecedented quantity, freedom, and speed. One could also say: While earlier media like oral traditions and the printing press were a kind of primordial soup in which the first memeplexes formed, we are experiencing a Cambrian explosion in memetics on the Internet. But what are memes? The biologist Sir Richard Dawkins first established the concept of the mem or meme[2] as that of the elemental cultural replicator in his book "The Selfish Gene" from 1976, laying the foundation for memetics. According to memetics, culture in general can be described as an accumulation, production, dissemination, evolution, and reception of memes. Memes are the smallest conceptual units of information, such as an idea or a thought, that first arise as contents of consciousness in an individual's feeling and thinking abilities and spread to other individuals through communication and imitation. (cf. Bionity, 2022) Memes that refer to each other and condition one another form complex clusters, so-called memeplexes, such as religions, subcultures, and ideologies.Memes thus function—similar to genes in biological evolution—as the fundamental replicators in cultural evolution. Like genes, they "mutate": Individual modifications, reflections, or misunderstandings, as well as interactions with other memes, lead to changes, of which the "fitter" ones survive. Following Darwinian principles, those memes and memeplexes that are particularly adapted to the selection pressure spread in the long term. However, since their spread occurs through communication and not through biological reproduction, memes are not necessarily subject to the same factors in selection pressure as genes.Dawkins illustrates this, for example, with celibacy in religions: The meme of celibacy enhances the fitness of the entire memeplex of a religion in a Darwinian sense because, for instance, representatives of the Catholic Church can devote much more time and energy to spreading associated memes like faith and God. (cf. Dawkins, 2007, p. 330ff)Through the concept of the meme, Dawkins describes the dynamics of the entire cultural evolution: "Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. [...] Memes [should] be regarded as living structures [...] in the technical sense. If a person implants a fertile meme in my mind he literally parasitizes my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell." (Dawkins, 2007, p. 321)As described above, the Internet is the perfect medium for an unprecedented explosion of memes and thus also their manifestation in cultural artifacts. This is because memes can reproduce and change in the cultural ecosystem of the Internet in entirely different ways than in previous communication media.2.2 The Two-Step Flow of Decentralized Cultural Production on the Internet In classic models of how communication functions in modern mass media, such as F.A. Hayek's Social Change Theory or Lazarsfeld's Two-Step Flow, the spread of information or memes is relatively hierarchical: There are opinion leaders like intellectuals, journalists, leading media, and celebrities who disseminate memes from the top down to the masses, with different groups—such as followers of a particular subculture—following different opinion leaders. Memes flow from those who have the means and influence to spread them to a mass of recipients. This model describes fairly well the media and thus largely the cultural situation up to the end of the 20th century:The broad masses of people received their memes from newspapers, books, television broadcasts, and other institutionally produced media, whose production was costly, so strong gatekeeper effects primarily favored elites, and contributing to their power maintenance gave memes a selection advantage, creating—as described by Antonio Gramsci—a cultural hegemony of high culture. Not just anyone could enter a newsroom to distribute their ideas nationwide in the newspaper the next day. Newsrooms were reserved for specialized journalists. Before the 20th century, opinion leadership was also dominated by elite specialists like heralds, nobles, and clergy. The same applied to the production of cultural artifacts: Books, sculptures, and later elaborate Hollywood films were so resource-intensive in production and distribution that they were often only possible through wealthy individuals or affluent institutions like states, churches, and corporations. The entry barriers and thus gatekeeper effects for participation in cultural production only decreased through technological changes over the centuries. Even subcultures in the 20th century were largely dependent for their development on memes disseminated by resource-rich publishers, television stations, or at least a small student newspaper. Then came the Internet, and at the latest with the introduction of smartphones, it changed everything: Every person with Internet access can participate in cultural production at virtually zero cost, create and post images, share their own thoughts through videos or texts, and search cyberspace for like-minded people using hashtags and search engines and connect with them, even if they live on the other side of the world. The memes of even the smallest fringe groups can thus form massive memeplexes through global communication—a unpleasant side effect is that even outlandish views, such as that the Earth is flat, can form entire movements, because even if there are only one or two crazies in every major city who believe it, through the Internet they can form a community of thousands of like-minded people, whereas previously they would have been limited to monologues. This leads to a massive fragmentation of the public sphere and culture; the end of the dominance of leading and high cultures, as well as the emergence of numerous multipolar, increasingly democratically operating cultural bubbles.The old models of hierarchical meme dissemination are therefore only limitedly applicable to the Internet. They still describe well primarily two spaces on the Internet: Once, news sites of established media and broadcasting stations (in Germany, e.g., Bild, SZ, ARD, ZDF) as well as what I will soon describe as the personalized part of digital cultural spaces. In the emergence of culture and especially of subcultures, however, we can observe almost the opposite, namely a bottom-up process in which anonymous collectives produce new memeplexes. The anonymous mass replaces the individual artist.To understand this reversal of the cultural production process from a hierarchical to a quasi grassroots-democratic, decentralized structure, one must keep in mind that the emergence and spread of memes on the Internet takes place in quasi two different spheres:On the one hand, there are the personalized social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok. Here, people usually present themselves under their real names and with their real faces. Companies and political organizations also operate here. In many ways, these social media platforms mirror the communication spheres of the analog world: they provide a forum for social exchange, presentation of one's persona, and also commercial or political advertising. The accumulation and defense of social status, the building of followings in the form of followers, and the monetization of attention play a central role similar to in the old, analog world. There are also hierarchical opinion leaderships in the form of influencers, whose functioning still largely corresponds to Lazarsfeld's Two-Step Flow model. The structures on these platforms are significantly more decentralized and permeable than in earlier media landscapes, but they correlate largely with the old, hierarchical structures, so that politicians, famous actors, and traditional media houses have the greatest influence there in the production and dissemination of memes.What is particularly interesting in the formation of new memeplexes is that on the Internet, they are increasingly, and especially in digital subcultures like Internet Aesthetics, not created by the opinion leaders of the personalized social media platforms. They increasingly find their birthplace on anonymous, decentralized platforms like Reddit, 4chan, Pinterest, and to a certain extent Tumblr and various wikis. In contrast to the personalized sphere of the Internet, users here are usually completely anonymous, and it is often technically and structurally hardly or not possible to generate social status, followers, or monetary compensation through activity on the platform. Memes spread here through a quasi grassroots-democratic voting (e.g., down- and up-votes on Reddit) and especially through imitation in the form of copying and further dissemination. Due to the absence of external incentives, the focus of these anonymous platforms is not status or money, but genuine exchange or the pursuit of common projects (especially on wikis). This depersonalization leads to a dynamic that is often described as a kind of swarm intelligence or a kind of subconscious of the Internet. (cf. Mills 2011) The results are often impressive: In spring 2020, for example, tens of thousands of small investors from the subreddit r/wallstreetbets organized relatively spontaneously to collectively aggressively buy the stock of the company GameStop, which had been massively short-sold by hedge funds, and thus provoke a short squeeze.The plan worked. The massive purchases forced the hedge funds to close their put positions at a loss, and the stock price shot up from €15.50 to €277.00. The success of this populist revolt on the financial markets eventually even occupied the American financial regulators and politics; further actions followed. Some economists— like most of the academic establishment— are still scratching their heads in confusion today. (cf. FT, 2021)A meme spreads on these anonymous platforms like Reddit independently of the originator; only its own fitness counts. A comparable ecosystem in which memes could spread so freely and uninfluenced by personal factors like prominence, morality, or power never existed before. Sites like Reddit are quasi completely deregulated, free marketplaces of ideas, where political correctness, social position, conformity, or reputation count for nothing in contrast to the old world. This extremely free flow of memes leads to new memeplexes forming relatively spontaneously again and again, which then have a particularly high fitness due to their configuration and spread virally in an explosive manner. Accordingly, these anonymous platforms are an almost endlessly bubbling source of cultural innovation. The cultural avant-garde is no longer found in the institutions of high culture or embodied in the genius of an individual artist; it is found in the anonymous depths of these digital swarm intelligences. Countless new memeplexes first emerge there from the interaction of numerous anonymous individuals before they are later adapted by influencers on personalized platforms and fed into the mainstream.Such spontaneous memeplexes include so-called Internet Aesthetics, which could be described as a kind of digital subculture, although most of them at the current time correspond at least much more to sentiments that represent blueprints for a subculture. Some of them, like Dark Academia, have meanwhile developed into actual digital subcultures that already spill over into the analog world through fashions and institutions.2.3 Internet Aesthetics as Digital Subcultures But what are Internet Aesthetics? They refer to a specific form of digital memeplexes, whereby the name Aesthetics is somewhat misleading because it does not refer to the philosophical discipline of aesthetics. The word Aesthetics as an Aesthetic was first adapted by users of the Millennial and Z generations in the early 2000s to describe their individual aesthetic preferences, which they presented online, for example, through so-called moodboards, collages of digital images, sounds, and videos, and which were meant to express their life feeling. (cf. Elieson 2021)The Aesthetics Wiki—a site created and moderated by an anonymous collective, a prime example of institution-building through spontaneous order on the Internet—therefore defines (Internet) Aesthetics as:"A collection of visual schema that creates a mood. […] Aesthetics have now come to mean a collection of images, colors, objects, music, and writings that creates a specific emotion, purpose, and community. It is largely dependent on personal taste, cultural background, and exposure to different pieces of media. This definition is not official and can be debated. There is currently no dictionary definition that captures the complexity of this phenomenon, which arose in the Internet youth. Rather, people who participate in the community „know it when they see it.“." (Aesthetics Wiki FAQ, 2022)Initially, these aesthetics were primarily presentations of individual sensations, whose dissemination first became popular with the launch of the microblogging platform Tumblr in 2007. Platforms more focused on images, like Pinterest launched in 2010, which makes it child's play to create, share, and collect collages from digital media, gave this self-expression through collecting media that expressed a coherent sensation a further boost. Users began to imitate each other under certain hashtags and refer to one another, forming denser meme clusters. The introduction of Instagram in 2010 and TikTok in 2016 made social media and thus the creation, dissemination, and collection of digital media mainstream. (cf. Elieson 2021) Over time, through constant imitation (mimesis), individual such digital collages gained broader followings of imitators who saw their own identity reflected in the individual aesthetics and further expanded them. Thus, over time, some, like the aesthetic Dark Academia, developed not only extensive collections of memes but linked with further memes and formed ever larger memeplexes: subcultures with their own value conceptions, moral conceptions, fashions, and schisms. Some recursed to old subcultures of the analog world, others developed into independent digital subcultures. A first major wave of Internet Aesthetics and the subcultures based on them spilling over into mainstream discourses occurred during the U.S. presidential elections in 2016. After several years of intense culture wars and camp formations in the digital space, particularly between the Alt-Right movement on 4chan and the Social Justice movement on Tumblr, Alt-Right users began to feed their aesthetics into the mainstream of personalized social media and attach their own memes to existing successful aesthetics—even with quite great success, as the transgressive and extreme nature of far-right memes often generates high attention in a deregulated environment and thus experiences rapid replication. Not a few commentators attributed a significant role to these digital culture wars, waged with the means of memetics, in Trump's victory. (At this point, reference must be made to the brilliant book Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right by Angela Nagle from 2017, which analyzes these digital culture wars.)A vivid example of the development and political adaptation of digital memeplexes into their own subcultures is the splitting of Synthwave and Vaporwave. Synthwave is an aesthetic that combines futuristic-dystopian visual images in the style of Western science fiction from the 1980s with energetic electronic music, while Vaporwave is a very similar aesthetic that primarily combines images from Japanese sci-fi of the 1990s with UI designs from operating systems like Windows 95 and more relaxed electronic music.Both aesthetics shared a retro-futurism that resonated with cypherpunk subcultures around the turn of the millennium, experienced great popularity, intermixed in the early 2000s, and splintered into countless microgenres and smaller subcultures in the 2010s, which then expanded the visual schemas and music with political and moral values.Among these waves were digital movements like the Alt-Right-formed Fashwave (neo-fascist politics) or Labourwave (Marxist politics) and Sovietwave (Soviet nostalgia) or also apolitical ones like Simpsonwave (an aesthetic that primarily glorifies drug consumption, using especially electronic-psychedelic music and images or videos of a Bart Simpson in a stoned or depressed state). Vaporwave memes then began to flow from the anonymous spheres of the Internet into personalized social media like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, where they found followers among influencers like young, online-socialized artists like Yung Lean or Lil Peep, who often mainstreamed them in combination with rap elements and drug consumption memes. At the same time, however, political artists like the musician Akira The Don also hijacked the rising popularity with their own productions like the Meaning- or JBPWave inspired by the Canadian right-wing intellectual Jordan B. Peterson.Soon, the images of the various waves and the associated value conceptions also appeared in the feeds and YouTube recommendations of normal users who otherwise had little to do with the impersonal scouts of the Internet and the Internet Aesthetics and emerging subcultures that arose there. By the end of the 2010s, Internet Aesthetics were already widely spread, but most were limited to a memeplex of moods and aesthetic preferences, of which very few had consolidated into real subcultures with their own worldviews and conceptions of the world. Exceptions were primarily some explicitly political ones that had existed on the Internet for longer, like the crypto-anarchists emerging from the cypherpunks or those referring to earlier political movements like the memeplex around the Alt-Right, as well as quite clearly those referring to a drug culture like Drugcore or Simpsonwave.This changed, however, at breakneck speed around 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic swept across the world and propelled the cultural life and the identity and meaning search of young people even more into the digital world. With analog events missing, digital culture finally became the primary space to express oneself and find meaning. More and more Internet Aesthetics consolidated into real subcultures, and influencers began to adapt them and carry them into the mainstream. Not only that, more and more Internet Aesthetics formed their own value conceptions, worldviews, and fashions and began to shape the slowly reawakening analog life of young people during the course of the pandemic.Collective projects emerged, like the Aesthetics Wiki in May 2020, where users map the ever denser and expanding landscape of Internet Aesthetics with collectively authored articles.Finding the aesthetic that corresponds to one's own life feeling and curating one's digital persona accordingly has become an increasingly relevant part of one's own identity formation among adolescents. One of the most noticed and developed among these new subcultures is Dark Academia. 3. Dark Academia as a Popular Internet Aesthetic 3.1 The Popularity of Dark Academia Among the Internet Aesthetics that have developed into an independent subculture with mainstream appeal, the Dark Academia originating from the Anglophone world is probably the most popular as of spring 2022. It should be noted, however, that there are already signs that its (first) zenith was in 2021, when even classic German-language media like Die Zeit and the FAZ began reporting on it. An evaluation of search queries on Google Trends suggests, however, that interest in Dark Academia has stabilized at a high level from early 2021 to early 2022. (see Fig. 1 in the appendix.) There is no shortage of influencers who have dedicated their entire social media persona to the subculture, like R.C. Waldun, iphilgoodyou, or Ruby Granger, anonymous channels that distribute suitable playlists and quotes, as well as heated debates about splits into new subcultures like Light Academia or about the inclusivity of the subculture in the form of video essays on YouTube as well as (mostly student) media. Meanwhile, there are even online shops like TheDarkAcademic that exclusively target fans of this subculture. 3.2 The Origins of Dark Academia Dark Academia has its origins in the depths of time, primarily in the literature of the 19th century. The first elements, the first memes, can already be found in ancient literature. The term #DarkAcademia first appeared as a hashtag in 2015 on the microblogging platform Tumblr, namely in connection with visual representations of and discussions about the novel "The Secret History" by the American author Donna Tartt, which was already published in 1992. Anonymous users created and posted collages of images that captured the life feeling of the characters, the themes, and moods of the novel and titled them as #darkacademia. Other users began using the hashtag for images and quotes with similar moods, even if they had nothing to do with the novel, so the hashtag slowly emancipated itself from the novel and became its own micro-genre. Thus, from these quasi digital book clubs, an own Internet Aesthetic grew, which also integrated elements from similar fictional works like the films Dead Poets Society and Kill Your Darlings, the novel If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio, as well as the Harry Potter book series and especially its films. (cf. Aesthetics Wiki, 2022)Initially, especially around 2017, blogs dealing with art history and classical architecture adapted the visual styles associated with the hashtag #DarkAcademia. Mostly, these were photos of old buildings, especially universities like Oxford and Harvard, mixed with quotes from classics of literature and films about life at elite boarding schools and universities. With the growing lists of film and book recommendations on various blogs aimed at fans of this style, soon an entire canon of films and books emerged that formed a memeplex expressing a Dark Academia life feeling, which is only vaguely linked to the novel. It did not take long for #DarkAcademia to spread to other social media platforms—so the subreddit r/DarkAcademia was founded on December 26, 2018, likewise in 2018 and 2019 Dark Academia began to spread on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, where it experienced a strong upswing around New Year 2020, which accelerated to a hype with the beginning of the first lockdowns in February and March 2020.The novel "The Secret History" by Donna Tartt is only conditionally relevant for Dark Academia at this point, but it is relatively helpful for understanding Dark Academia as a movement, as it contains, like a seed, many essential aesthetic and worldview elements of the subculture. Some commentators also speak of "The Secret History" as a kind of Bible for Dark Academia. That is a quite fitting comparison, considering that very few Dark Academics have actually read the novel, let alone understood it. (cf. Elieson, 2021)The plot of the novel "The Secret History" is told from the perspective of the character Richard Papen, who, coming from a poor family, drops his pre-med studies in California and switches in 1983 to the liberal arts Hampden College in Vermont, New England, to study ancient Greek there as a scholarship student. The eccentric professor of classical philology Julian Morrow teaches his handpicked five students isolated from the rest of the university. He initially refuses to admit Richard to this elite circle. This only increases Papen's fascination for this anything but ordinary group. Its five members—Henry Winter, Edmund "Bunny" Corcoran, Francis Abernathy, and the twins Charles and Camilla Macaulay—all come from wealthy families, wear clothing that seems more from the first half of the 20th century and stands out on campus: expensive tweed jackets, leather shoes, luxurious Montblanc Meisterstück fountain pens, vests, and ties. They seem to lead completely aestheticized lives, dedicated to the fine arts, preferences for drug and alcohol excesses, and classical works like the writings of Plato and Homer, with little interest in the contemporary world. Some of them react surprised to Papen's remark that people have already been on the moon. Henry Winter takes the reactionary lifestyle so far that he lives largely without electricity and illuminates his apartment filled with books with candles and kerosene lamps. Despite warnings from other lecturers, Papen, driven by an obsession to belong to this esoteric clique, manages, through demonstrating his philological skills and lies about his origins, to be admitted as the sixth student by Morrow to his courses. Gradually, Papen integrates into the clique, spends weekends with them at a country house belonging to Francis's family, and immerses himself with them in passions for an aesthetic life and the study of classical philology, while always having to lead a double life, as he constantly pretends to also come from a rich family. Over time, however, he notices that the clique itself is plagued by a secret: Henry, Charles, Camilla, and Francis tried to experience the Dionysian mysteries from ancient reports themselves by holding a bacchanal one night in the woods near the campus. In the ensuing mania, they murdered a farmer. Bunny, who had been excluded from the bacchanal due to his chaotic personality, figured them out and has been blackmailing the group since then. The clique eventually conspires to murder Bunny, which they succeed in by Henry pushing him off a cliff while the rest, including the initiated Papen, watch.Bunny's death is classified as an accident by the authorities, but Professor Morrow learns the truth through a letter left by Bunny and disappears virtually overnight. The psychological consequences disintegrate the group: they fall into alcoholism and psychotic states, Charles rapes his sister Camilla, who seeks protection with Henry. Charles eventually tries to murder Henry with a pistol, but Henry disarms him. To cover up Charles's murder attempt and thus the group's secret, Henry commits suicide in front of his friends after giving Camilla a farewell kiss. The group falls apart traumatized. Although they are never legally prosecuted for their murders, they are marked for the rest of their lives. Charles goes to a detox clinic and breaks off contact with his sister and friends. Francis attempts suicide, fails, and marries—although he is homosexual—a woman to avoid being disinherited by his grandfather. Richard Papen, plagued by an unrequited love for Camilla, ends up as a depressive academic in English literature. The novel follows in many ways the schema of one of the classical Greek tragedies with which the characters deal in their studies with Morrow.Ironically, one of the obvious interpretations of this novel, due to its tragic form, is to read it as a drastic warning against obsessions with aesthetics, elitist arrogance, and academic superiority. This is even highlighted at several points through foreshadowing, among others in a dialogue between Henry and Morrow: "“Death is the mother of beauty,” said Henry. “And what is beauty?” “Terror.”" (Tartt 2017, p.58)Dark Academia glorifies this terror: the fully aestheticized, elitist, reactionary, and decadent lifestyle of wealthy young intellectuals who devote themselves to humanities passions and Faustian obsessions for Dionysian and macabre states of mind, regardless of the consequences. That is also what makes the Dark, the dark in this Internet Aesthetic.But not only the lifestyles of the characters from "The Secret History" are prototypical for Dark Academia, also their habitus. Dark Academia is an amalgam of preferences for classical literature, the life feeling of Romanticism in the 19th century, the elitist education of past times with its focus on ancient Greek and Latin. "All of these historic periods were reflected in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. The sublime, picturesque and beautiful are concepts frequently repeated by the narrator, Richard Papen; the main characters vacation in a remote mansion and get drunk, discuss intellectually stimulating topics and lived decadently, like the Romantic poets did in their famed Geneva trip; and the ritual for Bacchanal is a representation of the same fascination with the irrational." (Aesthetics Wiki, 2022)However, it must be noted here that over the years and in the course of mainstreaming, Dark Academia has strongly emancipated itself from the radically elitist and macabre elements from "The Secret History." Likewise, the excessive consumption of drugs and alcohol plays no visible role in the subculture, in contrast to many of the canonical novels. Most Dark Academics, as written above, have never read "The Secret History," but joined the subculture out of a fascination for the academic life feeling and its aesthetic images. Especially among young female students, who make up the largest group within the movement, often an identification with Hermione Granger from the Harry Potter books seems to be the trigger for interest in Dark Academia, less so with Henry Winter. Most accordingly live a rather tame variant, consisting of dressing old-fashioned, reading books by candlelight, glorifying diligent learning, and listening to classical music.For not a few people, Dark Academia is less about actual values—like every subculture, it attracts a crowd of people who copy its clothing fashion for popularity reasons without being strongly involved in the culture itself. Even though the movement's clothing fashion is based on the clothing style of the Anglo-Saxon upper class of the late 19th century as well as the 1940s and 1950s, Dark Academia as a subculture is quite democratic.The appropriate clothing can often be easily found in second-hand trade, and many of the classicist elements that are still found in Tartt's novel have disappeared in the course of mainstreaming.3.3 The Elements of Dark Academia 3.3.1 Overview The Aesthetics Wiki describes Dark Academia as of 03.03.2022 as follows: "Dark Academia is a popular (and the original) academic aesthetic that revolves around classic literature, the pursuit of self-discovery, and a general passion for knowledge and learning. […] Dark Academia’s visuals stem primarily from upper-class European cultures of the 19th century, Gothicism, and American Prep. The upper class of this time period emphasized a liberal education in which Latin, rhetoric and classics were taught subjects. These are now seen as unusual and slightly esoteric, creating an allure that presents schooling as not dreary or boring, but one that cultivates mystery, curiosity, and diligence that isn’t commonly seen in contemporary schooling. Pretentiousness is celebrated within the Dark Academia community. Romanticizing education and moments in life is the core appeal of the aesthetic. […] Dark Academia includes motifs of criminality, danger and mystery. Secret societies, cults and murder are common subjects within the aesthetic. Characters within the works of fiction associated with Dark Academia, specifically The Secret History and Kill Your Darlings, live decadent and self-destructive lifestyles involving drugs, moments of intense violence and secrets." (Aesthetics Wiki, 2022)3.3.2 Style and Fashion Dark Academics share their life feeling online particularly in the form of short videos on TikTok and YouTube, as well as images and texts on Reddit and Tumblr. A compilation of Dark Academia clips from TikTok that capture the essential elements of their aesthetic can be found here, for example: [https://youtu.be/gtvNDTJlVZg](https://youtu.be/gtvNDTJlVZg). The images are often dark, dimly lit, or bathed in autumn colors like beige, giving them an old, mysterious aura; the music is either classical (e.g., Chopin) or plays with dramatic texts like the popular song in the scene Achilles Come Down by the band Gang of Youths. In video clips and on images, utensils of a humanistic study in the past are often seen: old, worn books with leather bindings, quill and ink, candlelight. In general, everything related to learning, books, and writing is romanticized and glorified.In addition, images are often posted or incorporated into collages of white marble statues and shots of prestigious buildings of educational institutions like Oxford or Trinity College, libraries and castles, as well as generally Gothic, neoclassical, or Beaux-Arts architecture. Posted paintings on Dark Academia accounts often come from the European epochs of the Baroque, Renaissance, Romanticism, and Neoclassicism or are new works in the styles of these old epochs.In general, a strong Eurocentrism dominates in the images, sounds, and literature canon of Dark Academia, which is sharply criticized by some commentators of the movement—and is also softening in places, as many Dark Academia influencers are non-European ethnically and currently more and more suitable memes from Islamic and Asian cultures are being introduced.The fashion in the clothing of Dark Academics is largely oriented toward a mixture of school uniforms of the upscale education system in the Anglo-Saxon area of the 1940s; burgundy cashmere sweaters, white shirts, suits and ties, but also coats and dresses from the Victorian era, Romanticism, and French existentialism. Stereotypical clothing styles of humanities professors are also imitated: the mostly beige tweed jacket with elbow patches and the black turtleneck sweater are found in virtually every Dark Academia wardrobe. Brown leather shoes with laces are welcome, although black Doc Martens are also frequently adapted as a more cost-effective and practical solution. The ballpoint pen and laptop often disappear—at least when posing for social media—in favor of elegant fountain pens or even typewriters, with a cup of coffee in the background. Reading classics of the 19th century and Greek antiquity, learning Latin, ancient Greek, and French, as well as generally posing with books and often discussing contents, stand at the center of the fashion-framed self-presentation as a young, traditional intellectual who still lives in a world full of humanistic and romantic ideals.To outsiders, Dark Academics often appear at first glance like amateur actors who have dressed up to look like people from the 19th century or boarding school students from Harry Potter films. Likewise, it seems at first glance like a strange, reactionary trait when nineteen-year-old women in 2022 film themselves writing letters to friends with a quill and sealing them with wax. But this aesthetic, this visual style and the fashions, are an essential framework that first enables the conveyance of a belief in the Dark Academia philosophy.3.3.3 Life Philosophy As in the style, so in the philosophy, the romanticization of a humanistic education stands at the center of thinking. This attitude is most strongly evident in the probably most frequently shared quote in Dark Academia circles. (cf. Appendix Fig. 4) It comes from the teacher John Keating, not unlike Julian Morrow, in the film Dead Poets Society (German: Der Club der toten Dichter) from 1989:"We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, ‚O me! O life!… of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless… of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?‘ Answer. That you are here – that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?" (Dead Poets Society, 1989) And again: Dead Poets Society is a tragedy. The characters who believe Keating's words and live them out ultimately shatter at the end of the film against reality, and one even commits suicide. Dead Poets Society is at its core, like The Secret History, a postmodern deconstruction of a romantic attitude toward life, which first constructs the romantic worldview to then shatter it—but Dark Academics skillfully ignore this part. Dark Academia makes use of these two works, but takes them not as warning and deconstruction, but as instruction to construct a life feeling and a system of aesthetic and ethical values worth believing in, even if postmodern books warn against it.The fascinating thing about Dark Academia as an aesthetic is that, despite its origin in the technology-enabled digital world, it is so thoroughly anti-technological. Like Henry Winter in "The Secret History," it seems to live in the wrong century. It orients itself in its images and music more toward the Romanticism and Victorian era of the 19th century than toward the neurotic images of our present. It expresses a longing for an analog world, a world in which classical education and esoteric knowledge, the decelerated academic work by candlelight with a fountain pen, stand at the center; a longing for transcendence, a higher world beyond the pragmatism and rationalism of the capitalism- and technology-driven world of the present. Dark Academia is a digitized escape from our technocentric world, mediated through technology; it is a rejection of a world in which the humanities are decaying in favor of STEM subjects, and expresses this rejection through the platforms created by STEM subjects. In many ways, Dark Academia is full of contradictions and irrationalities—but which subculture is "reasonable"?The two memes at the heart of Dark Academia are Romanticism in its most passionate form, an idealization of the traditional, of high goals, of Dionysian forces; and on the other side, an Apollonian obsession with expanding one's educational horizon on a humanities level. The Dark Academia influencer R.C. Waldun even went so far in a video to call Dark Academia a second Renaissance and a return of its Studia humanitatis; expressing the hope that the subculture's followers could long-term generate a new, discourse-wide popularity for classical literature and education. (cf. Waldun, 2021)All this is held together and framed in an aesthetic, audio-visual style that imitates the images of a time when such a romantic attitude and such a humanistic faith still seemed realistic. Yes, the recourse to images, clothing, and habitus of late modernity in the aesthetic of Dark Academia function as an aesthetic framework that first makes belief in the values of Dark Academia plausible. It is difficult in the 21st century not to look disillusioned at the humanistic ideals of late modernity and Romanticism; but if one dresses as if the 20th and 21st centuries had not yet happened, one can much more easily transport oneself back in time and believe in these values. Wearing old-fashioned clothes and sharing images of old buildings and posing with literary classics is therefore not a strange quirk of the Dark Academics that was later simply loaded with romantic and humanistic values—this aesthetic style first enables the belief in these values.Dark Academia is performance, a cultural garment woven from the shreds of actually already believed-dead, deconstructed ghosts of the past. It is the longing for a humanistic world like the one last believed in before postmodernism. And that leads us to the question of how Dark Academia as a phenomenon of aesthetically mediated belief in humanistic education and tradition actually fits into our post-postmodern world. For this phenomenon cannot be grasped solely through technological development and changes in material conditions; one must also see the great cultural paradigm shift after postmodernism, of which Dark Academia is undoubtedly a part. Here, Raoul Eshelman's Performatism comes into play. 4. The Theory of Performatism as Post-Postmodernism 4.1 Postmodernism and Its End How does a collective phenomenon like the Internet Aesthetic Dark Academia fit into our zeitgeist and through what means—beyond the purely technical level of memes—does it unfold its effect? To understand this, one must understand where we stand today: In the ruins of postmodernism. But what was postmodernism? Postmodernism itself grew out of ruins, from the ruins of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, from the ruins of destroyed lives and worlds in the Holocaust, Holodomor, and the Gulag Archipelago. When the tsunami of horror and destruction of two world wars finally ended in the late 1940s, it left behind not only destroyed landscapes, bombed-out cities, and extinguished lives, but also the utopian visions of ideologies and the aesthetic ideals of modernity were hardly more than ruins. They all seemed complicit in the catastrophes, and none was credible anymore. As Eshelman writes: "[…]. The counter-reaction called postmodernism arises less from consciously designed programmatic considerations […] than from the diffuse endeavor never to let the catastrophic errors of modernity arise again. From this, one turned away from utopianism and clearly marked ideological positions, rejected the search for authentic individual experience as illusory self-deception, and refused to declare one's own works as completely new […]." (Eshelman, 2016, p.18)Modernity had imploded in catastrophes. Out of fear of new implosions, the cultural creators of postmodernism refused all old and new convictions. This absurdly leads to the adoption of anti-convictions aimed at ironizing and deconstructing every belief: "Almost throughout, one finds a fundamentally disillusioning attitude that undermines, leads ad absurdum, or makes principally impossible authentic inner experience, the uncovering of a deeper, hidden meaning, or the sudden synthesis of the new from the old." (Eshelman, 2016, p.20)Postmodernism also turned away from beauty and aesthetics in its art—after all, the aestheticization of politics was, according to Walter Benjamin, the basis of fascism; after all, beauty always seduces to believe in something higher, from where the utopian is not far. The result was a kind of anti-art: Abstract paintings, substanceless marketing as anti-art like with Andy Warhol, photos of ugly industrial areas by Bernd and Hilla Becher, and affectless faces by Thomas Ruff. (cf. Eshelman 2016, p.24)Fundamentally, the essence of the general cultural movement from 1945 to 1990 in postmodernism was that of disillusionment, anti-aesthetics, and irony, of distancing from all convictions, but also a constant victim ethic that sees all individuals as externally determined and critically attacks any power centers, regardless of their actual effects, in the course of discourse theories. However, the worldview of postmodernism is not only one of complete disillusionment and refusal attitude regarding political visions and aesthetics: Pair relationships, especially the romantic ideal of monogamous love and intact families, are regularly portrayed as impossible in postmodern works. Metaphysically, postmodernism was even more nihilistic and empty: there is no transcendent way out, no hope for God or salvation in it. Postmodernism was a nihilistic behemoth, born in the horrors of Auschwitz, thriving under the horror of the nuclear Damocles sword in the Cold War; a monster of a zeitgeist that, like Nietzsche's last man, cynically mocks and deconstructs everything that strives for something higher and more beautiful.With the crumbling of the Iron Curtain and the nuclear threat, however, the crumbling of postmodernism soon set in. In the 1990s—as Donna Tartt's novel appeared—cultural and humanities scholars began to perceive a paradigmatic shift in culture and increasingly capture it theoretically. The debates about whether and in what new cultural epoch we find ourselves today—over thirty years after the beginning of this turning point—are far from concluded, and countless theories about new, post-postmodern or also metamodern paradigms and structures compete with each other in academic discourse, continuously evolving. However, the theoretical framework that has the strongest explanatory power for phenomena like Dark Academia is Raoul Eshelman's theory of Performatism.4.2 Performatism as Post-Postmodernism According to Eshelman, counterpositions to postmodernism begin to form in the mid-1990s, which "not only [offer] criticism [of it], but above all also aesthetically attractive narrative or stylistic strategies. […] The unspoken focus of this directional shift against postmodernism is an aesthetic that places viewers or readers—whether they want it or not—into a believing attitude through formal means." (Eshelman 2016, p.30) Eshelman recognizes in this the beginning of a new epoch, whose properties he systematically develops in his work and which he calls Performatism, since its essential element is the seduction to belief through formal means—per forma. However, this belief is not to be understood religiously or ideologically; it also has no "pre-specifiable content […] Rather, it is generated through aesthetic procedures […] This aesthetic is, mind you, no naive mediator of bliss or hope. The reason for this is our thoroughly secular condition, which encounters all cultural phenomena with fundamental skepticism […]." (Eshelman 2016, p.42) This skepticism, a legacy of postmodernism, is not completely discarded in Performatism, but it nevertheless prevents us from simply placing ourselves in a believing attitude. "Rather, we must so to speak be 'tricked' into entering a believing attitude. This can happen through formal, aesthetically mediated 'tricks,' i.e., by means of artistic devices that leave us hardly any other choice than to believe in a certain something in a work." (Eshelman 2016, p.42)"Why this turn toward aesthetically mediated belief?" (Eshelman, 2016, p.47) Well, for one, meanwhile enough generations have been born without memory of the Second World War and some already without recollection of the existence of the Soviet Union and its nuclear threat. One grew weary over time of the irony and anti-aesthetics of postmodern cultural artifacts, longed for more positive and optimistic media; especially because after the fall of the Iron Curtain, the march of global capitalism brought unprecedented prosperity and technological wonders like the Internet, which hardly fit the postmodern pessimism. One grows weary over time of the corrosive epistemology critique and victim ethic of postmodernism (even if it has expanded its dissemination in the discourse in recent years in the popular space, especially around topics like gender and racism); moreover, through the deconstruction of every belief in postmodernism, people starve spiritually in the long term and long all the more for belief—even if it is only a game in the course of cultural consumption. "[The] development [of Performatism] becomes more understandable if one understands belief not institutionally or metaphysically, but rather cultural-anthropologically, as a basic property anchored in humans that enables societal life to come about at all. Belief is thus not only a matter of the individual or the church, but necessary for a society to function at all. This applies, by the way, also to secular societies like ours, in which religion no longer plays a determining role." (Eshelman, 2016, p.48)In Performatism, culture thus slowly approaches belief again, without which it cannot function for long, but only cautiously, only aesthetically through the creation of formal frames within the context of a single work—even if a certain re-ideologization of recent years suggests that the formal frames are also increasingly offering entry points for new content fillings.4.3 The Characteristics of Performatist Cultural Artifacts Raoul Eshelman's "thesis is that in works of culture [in Performatism] the techniques of belief act upon us again, without us always being aware of it." (Eshelman, 2016, p.11) This is a necessary turn, since—starting from Eric Gans' generative anthropology—"many societal behaviors [have] an originally sacred function [and] conversely: Sacred functions still play a central, albeit not always visible role in the worldly activities of our society." (Eshelman, 2016, p. 14) The sacred is essential for the existence of civilization, as it binds resentments and first enables peaceful coexistence, so the postmodern disillusionment could not be a permanent solution, and we now formally turn back to belief. From this, Eshelman highlights three moments that are essential in cultural development in Performatism: "(1) Unity thinking (monism), (2) performatively or aesthetically mediated belief (in contrast to religious dogma), and (3) the return of the beautiful." (Eshelman, 2016, p.14) These moments manifest in multifaceted ways in the properties and inherent worldviews of artifacts of performatist culture. In the following, some central ones are sketched that will be relevant for the later analysis of Dark Academia from a theoretical perspective.4.3.1 Aesthetics Instead of Anti-Aesthetics In Performatism, aesthetics returns to the forefront of culture, after an anti-aesthetics and a critical attitude toward beauty dominated in postmodernism. Beauty is again something inherently good. "Performatism develops fundamentally positive projections. Beauty is first formally produced, through the creation of a closed (narrative or architectural) space to which one can take distance and which acts holistically on one." (Eshelman 2016, p.176)4.3.2 Sign Theory – Mimesis Instead of Discourses In postmodernism, the interpretation of signs and discourses dominates, from which a radical epistemology critique, relativism, and a conviction of the external determination of humans follows. In Performatism, on the other hand, "Mimesis (imitation) and intuition (intuition) […] are determining. Language and signs are often simply or unambiguously understandable and can be successfully repeated or applied through imitation or gut feeling." (Eshelman, 2016, p.174)4.3.3 Ontology of Transcendence Instead of Prison of Immanence In the fundamentally pessimistic postmodernism, an ontology dominates that knows neither transcendence nor metaphysics, only the imprisonment of humans in an endless immanence from which there is no escape. In Performatism, at least the hope for an escape returns. "Transcendence is held out (but not always achieved). The basic attitude is (cautiously) optimistic." (Eshelman 2016, p.175)4.3.4 Subjectivity and the Overcoming of Separation In postmodernism, "The basic state of protagonists […] is that of a discursive external determination that allows no inner unity to arise. […] Attempts to overcome these states end in failure." (Eshelman 2016, p.177) In narratives in Performatism, especially in novels and films, the discursive external determination falls away; people become actors again who reclaim their autonomy—mostly starting from a position of postmodern separation, successfully overcoming it.4.3.5 Seriousness Instead of Irony In postmodernism, the basic attitude was ironic; human goals and intentions were sketched defatistically and cynically as absurd. In Performatism, one turns away from this. A new seriousness sets in: "The basic attitude is serious, in the sense that human goals and intentions—no matter how senseless or skewed they may be—nevertheless have a prospect of realization. Whoever believes in it gets along best with the world." (Eshelman 2016, p.176)4.3.6 Narratives – Formal Belief Through Double Framing In postmodernism, the endeavor dominates to deconstruct narratives and belief through endless regresses and disillusionment strategies. In Performatism, on the other hand, the narrative technique of "Double Framing" emerges. Performatist works clamp an outer work level with an inner scene that obliges us to believe in something." (Eshelman 2016, p. 174) A principal secular restraint remains from postmodernism, but belief and the importance of narratives, of convincing stories both in fiction and in society, return, and a bit like in the progressive universal poetry of Romanticism, the separation of aesthetic and content levels is dissolved through a closer clamping and framing. 5. Dark Academia as a Phenomenon of Performatism 5.1 The Return of Aesthetics and Mimesis In Performatism, aesthetics and beauty return to culture—and nowhere does this happen probably so explicitly and radically as with Dark Academia, at whose center stands an obsession with aesthetics. Eshelman writes that in Performatism, beauty is first produced in a narrative or architectural space (cf. Eshelman 2016, p.176). Internet Aesthetics like Dark Academia expand the conception even further, because on the Internet, all possible media—images, videos, music, video games, virtual realities, narratives—are intertwined to create digital, multidimensional spaces that merge several memeplexes into larger ones and create a matrix through strong inter- and paratextuality whose effect goes far beyond the simple reception moment. Dark Academia with its roots in Romanticism goes even further and strives, following the model of progressive universal poetry, for a complete aestheticization of the entire life and habitus. Whoever steps through the aesthetic frames that Dark Academia forms is not only per forma made to admire beauty and aesthetics; the subculture actively encourages aestheticizing oneself, becoming part of the collective artwork called Dark Academia through mimesis, by adapting one's own social media feed, one's own wardrobe, and finally one's own lifestyle to the aesthetic frame.5.2 Formal Aesthetic Trick and Belief The entire Dark Academia can be described as a great, collectively created trick that places the followers into a believing attitude in the face of romantic and humanistic values through aesthetic, formal means like music and fashion. Rationally, many of the romantic values in Dark Academia as well as the traditionalist actions are no longer convincing, no longer credible; but the memeplex tricks the users through the visual images, the network of associations from which Dark Academia is woven, into a frame in which they can do nothing else but at least formally believe in the transcendence of the underlying forces of Apollo and Dionysus.Dark Academia functions like a large walkable artwork, a collective artwork that strives to extend its frame over the entire experience of its recipients. Like a performatist artwork, Dark Academia does not convince with logical or pragmatic reasons—it creates an aesthetic frame within which belief and transcendence are possible.5.3 Promise of Transcendence Postmodern subcultures were mostly empty at their core, thus nihilistic and relativistic. They filled this empty core, lacking a concrete belief, more or less with purported values masked either with nonconformist hedonism (Beatniks, Hippies, Punks), escapism (Goths), or systematic greed (Yuppies), or entirely unmasked despair (Emos). Quite different are performatist Internet Aesthetics: They invite belief precisely with their form, and some even formulate explicitly ideological longings (e.g., Fash Wave, Soviet Wave). In contrast to a religion or a political subculture, Dark Academia formulates no explicit utopia or belief in the existence of a God, but similar to Romanticism before it, it hints at a transcendence as a liberation from the immanence of our world. For this, Dark Academia has on one side incorporated a series of memes that serve as simple, unifying (ostensive) signs, on the other, its aesthetic promises a transcendence of the relativistic, technologized, multipolar, and capitalist society of the present. The aesthetic and the values of Dark Academia all refer in their attitude to the existence of higher, imperishable values going beyond the rational and thus the physical world, thus transcendent values like beauty, humanism, Romanticism, esoteric, Faustian knowledge, and Dionysian creative forces.5.4 Subjectivity and Overcoming Separation Globalization, urbanization, capitalism, postmodern culture, and most recently the pandemic have triggered an epidemic of loneliness, as they destabilized and deterritorialized traditional social structures like families. Dark Academia, like all Internet movements, enables an overcoming of this isolation. Users form communities by networking with like-minded people from around the world. Global peer groups take the place of locally limited families and friends. Especially during the physical separation in times of lockdowns, the popularity of Dark Academia rose because it enabled young students to experience the lost campus life or a strongly romanticized version of it online and to reclaim their autonomy. Even a global catastrophe like the pandemic could not prevent Dark Academics from acting self-determinedly and socially. This performatist overcoming of isolation is not only visible in the modus operandi of Dark Academia. It is also explicitly found in the narratives that determine the subculture: The prototypical protagonist is a young intellectual who, after a time of intensive, isolated learning, meets with others and engages in roaring intellectual debates with them, recites his poems to them, or shares artworks—whether online or analog plays no role in practice. The digital often appears more real, even hyperreal.5.5 Seriousness and Lack of Irony Dark Academia arose from users on the Internet starting to take seriously the romantic attitude toward life that postmodern works like The Secret History and Dead Poets Society deconstructed, and building on it first collectively an own aesthetic and then a literature and value canon. Irony, disillusionment strategies, and cynical deconstruction, thus the cornerstones of postmodernism? Nothing is further from Dark Academia, after all, it is about maximal aestheticization and romanticization, carried by a performatist belief. With an Apollonian seriousness and thoroughness, one devotes oneself to believed-dead languages, values, and cultures, refuses some technological convenience, and argues passionately about values and as objectively perceived facts. The signs are unambiguous, human longings, goals, and dreams are to be taken seriously.5.6 The Formal Return of the Occident At the center of many postmodern currents and narratives stood the hypercritical, ironic subversion of the great narratives of the Occident in favor of an anti-ideology. Dark Academia remains politically and ideologically passive to agnostic, but per forma it ties into the symbols of modernity and the great narratives of the Occident that perished with it. More than that: Its aesthetic as framing and the narratives and values on the content level are tightly interlocked. And yet: No one in the Dark Academia scene expresses the wish to abolish the Internet and actually return to the time of colonialism and imperialism of the 19th century; on the contrary, self-criticism of Eurocentrism now belongs to good tone in the scene. But the humanistic ideals of the 19th century, its dreams and visions, the aesthetic of its imperial, upward-striving architecture and literature? The opulence of ornaments and sacred works and buildings, the study of classical Aristotelian virtues and Platonic teachings, the narratives of the Enlightenment and Romanticism of the individual's self-determination and the possibility of beauty and wisdom? All these narratives declared dead by postmodernism and mocked by it, the Dark Academics welcome with open arms and subject them to a critical but optimistic examination and appropriation. Instead of radically and uncompromisingly breaking with modernity as the cultural currents of postmodernism did, the Dark Academics revive what they consider valuable, dig in history to reconnect with the great intellectual traditions. History has loosened from its shock rigidity and continues—albeit more reflective and critical and thus aware of the dark dangers—but again hopeful and optimistic. 6. Some Concluding Thoughts The theoretical framework of Performatism, as developed by Raoul Eshelman, offers insightful perspectives on how our culture changes after postmodernism and how new cultural artifacts unfold their effect. It provides largely an adequate description of some of the most important basic features of our epoch. It can even, as this work hopefully could show using the example of Dark Academia, describe and explain some of the most important mechanisms of more complex cultural phenomena like new digital subcultures. However, in the investigation of digital cultural spaces, the currently still greatest gaps in the theory of Performatism also open up, as the framework currently still neglects digitalization—the factor I consider the most important in the cultural change of our time—too much. Eshelman writes that from his view it is "doubtful" whether digitalization "can really sustainably change the basic mechanisms of high culture […] But it is [from Eshelman's view] dedicatedly not the driving force behind the performatist turn. Culture is primarily made by people and not by media, which can be used this way or that." (Eshelman 2016, p. 46) Even if I fundamentally agree with the last sentence, in my view, the way and which people make culture changes fundamentally through digitalization. User-generated content (from anonymous users) is now the main form of cultural consumption for most people, and so-called high culture has been running after the trends created by the digital, anonymous masses for years. When I read novels or watch films created in recent years, I often see in them the extractions or even more frequently a clumsy imitation of what I often already saw years earlier in the vast meme pools of the collective creativity of the anonymous, digital worlds.Digitalization is probably not the triggering force behind the performatist turn, but it is the kerosene that is currently flowing into its engine room at immeasurable speed and transforming this turn. The emergence of entire new subcultures that know no gurus or leaders, only collective masses as fathers and mothers, and that then shape the discourses and products of high culture, is something new. It follows the performatist schema, but I believe there is more behind it—and the look at memetics and the obvious formations of new communities in the neotribalism of the Internet, only touched upon here, could enable us an even deeper insight than a sole consideration of a supposed high culture, which is mostly nothing but the filtered and deprived of many essential elements extract of the entire, today largely digital culture.Moreover. To understand our epoch, it is not enough to analyze the distillates from the flow of culture—the highly polished works of a supposed high culture and pop culture. We must rather pay attention to the new sources that have changed. The sources are namely increasingly the ever more powerful swarm intelligences of digital meme pools, from which the flow is increasingly fed, while old sources like power centers are overwhelmed by them. Whereas formerly the anonymous masses were culturally the mental slaves of ideas of intellectual elites and artists, whose existence they were only rarely aware of; today the gray-haired men and women at the tops of the old cultural institutions are increasingly the mental slaves of the memes of digital movements of anonymous masses, whose existence they are only vaguely aware of. As a most recent milestone of this expansion of digital culture, its incorporation and subjugation of the old world and its hierarchical structures, one can see, for example, that even traditional auction houses like Sotheby's now trade in digital art.Internet Aesthetics and digital subcultures like Dark Academia are only the beginning. The Internet lays a global net of infinitely further and more numerous aesthetic frames over humanity, and in these frames, new possibilities open up that go far beyond new belief and formal promises of transcendence. Some call what is being born here Cyberspace, Virtual Reality, or Metaverse—whatever one calls it, it is more than the birth of a new epoch, it is rather a new leap in cultural evolution as perhaps last occurred when language was invented. Above all, it is a populist cultural revolution that—as already sketched in this work—shatters the dominance of a however defined high culture carried by elites and fundamentally reverses the flows of cultural production and relocates the culture-shaping power at least in the Western, uncensored Internet into the darkness of the anonymous masses. A humanities practice that neglects digitalization and the populist cultural revolution driven by it and contents itself with the analysis of an increasingly irrelevant high culture therefore cannot suffice in the long term when it comes to fully describing our epoch. The theory of Performatism offers a solid and intelligent starting basis, but there is still a lot of exciting work ahead of us. 7. 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Available online at [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDjEGVOelp0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDjEGVOelp0), last updated on 15.04.2020, last checked on 05.03.2022.Waldun, R. C. (2021): Why Dark Academia Is The Modern Renaissance – YouTube. Available online at [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoZ88tm3mSI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoZ88tm3mSI), last updated on 27.03.2021, last checked on 05.03.2022.[1] born between 1997 – 2011 (cf. Dimock, 2019)[2] from ancient Greek μίμημα / mīmēma "imitated things"[3] Example of an early DarkAcademia YouTube video from 2019: [https://youtu.be/J5DE7ZqJVcQ](https://youtu.be/J5DE7ZqJVcQ)This is a term paper for the seminar: Performatism or Culture after the End of PostmodernismLecturer: Prof. Dr. Raoul EshelmanWinter Semester 2021/2022Ludwig-Maximilians-University MunichFaculty of Languages and LiteraturesGrade: 1.0DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.10291.30244