Late last year, while having a very normal time in my post-viral fatigued brain, I felt the very normal urge to drop absolutely everything and make some interactive fiction about anarchist raccoons. Raccoon vs. Wetherspoons elaborated on an analogy that I’d made in my post on this blog, Why Aren’t Leftist Video Essayists on Peertube? - at some point, your use of corporate (digital) spaces means actively choosing not to support community-owned alternatives.
I just don’t think that success on Youtube is equivalent to “basement culture”. Youtube is not your cool friend’s underground venue. To give another British corporate analogy, it’s a Wetherspoons - and by all means, play gigs at the Wetherspoons because god knows we need to do whatever we can to support our art! But don’t neglect the chance to build something better together.
In a strange coincidence, a week later Dorian Electra started posting about Wetherspoons full English breakfasts, and on 21st December they flew to the UK on a last-minute flight, apparently just to hold an impromptu fan gathering at a Wetherspoons in London. (Photos below are nicked from their Threads posts)



The whole thing is dripping in the disorienting combination of irony and sincerity that I love about Dorian Electra’s work. The initial premise is an effusive declaration of love for a food that is notoriously considered bad taste. Wetherspoons’s proximity to far right politics is probably not coincidental to Electra’s choice of venue - their work often involves ironic reclamations of far-right imagery, such as Pepe the Frog in their second album My Agenda. Their posts narrating the event explicitly aligned with Wetherspoons workers such as the shift manager (as opposed to any brand partnership with Wetherspoons the corporation). Photos show an intimate gathering of fans, getting close to a celebrity in an incongruously pedestrian setting. This particular deployment of cultural symbolism probably could not have been achieved in an independent cafe or a DIY queer space.
In Raccoon vs. Wetherspoons, I use the pub chain as an allegory for Youtube, and I think the same analogy applies to other corporate social media platforms, particularly during the current moment of online mass-migrations. I give the player multiple opportunities to divest from corporate spaces, in favour of struggling community-run projects. I hope that the more times you declare “I’m still going with Wetherspoons”, the more you’re confronted with how embarrassing and self-serving that choice is. In the end, I want to show that although use of corporate spaces gives you a larger platform, it ultimately isolates you. I intentionally avoided using a variable to measure your degree of commitment - you do not accumulate political alignment points over time, and you can choose at any moment to change course and connect authentically with communities that are actually practising the values that leftist essayists espouse.
A major difference between Dorian Electra’s appropriation of Wetherspoons and my allegorical use of it is that while I use Wetherspoons as an example of corporate culture and mass reach, in Electra’s intervention, Wetherspoons has symbolic power because of its association with low-brow culture and bad taste, figuratively and literally. In both instances, Wetherspoons is deeply uncool, but while I’m leaning into my Romantic attachment to community-run spaces as intrinsically cool and punk, Electra is adopting a position of ironic detachment from these aesthetic signifiers. Reasonable people can disagree on whether the same detachment then carries over into the material politics of what they’re doing.
Dorian Electra probably doesn’t have much of a choice about the level of detachment at which they operate - they are too famous to just show up and be a person (a major theme of their third album, Fanfare). That is on full display here, as their trip to the pub becomes a major social media event, with its own merch shirts, not to mention a sizeable carbon footprint. It’s probably not as simple as the ability in Raccoons vs. Wetherspoons to change course at any moment, abandoning the choices that support a larger audience in favour of those that support a flourishing community. Working within the constraints of celebrity culture, Electra often chooses to make art that emphasizes the contradictions of our cultural moment - in this case, having a down-to-earth interaction with ordinary people, while also engaging in the incredibly bourgeois act of flying halfway around the world just to have breakfast.