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Abstract

This paper outlines a cultural critique of the Joe Rogan Experience. Framing the podcast as an adaptive cultural platform, I emphasize how it is ideologically informed by both the established infrastructure and dynamics of communicative capitalism and Joe Rogan’s ethos as a comedian. The paper discusses three ways Joe Rogan and his format negotiate their relationship with platform infrastructures. The first is Rogan’s relationship with Spotify and his interest in shaping “cancel discourses” and, subsequently, his own role as an embedded, “uncancellable” skeptic. The second is the combination of Rogan’s roast universalism and pioneering speech-a-ton format, designed to establish an infrastructure for platforming his cohort of podcasting comedians on YouTube. The third is Rogan’s relationship with platform-owner Elon Musk, whose communicative capitalist agenda has political implications. The paper establishes a theoretical connection between studies of platformisation and the under-studied cultural influence of podcasting comedians.

Keywords

Joe Rogan platformisation infrastructure cancel culture comedy social media

Introduction: Theorizing JRE as an Adaptive Cultural Platform

By most accounts, the Joe Rogan Experience (JRE) is the biggest podcast in the world. It consists in longform conversations between host Joe Rogan and guests coming from disparate areas of popular culture: comedy, sports, science, tech, showbiz, politics, and more. Given the extended length of the format, topics range far, and wide—from banal commentary on current events to deep dives into “difficult” issues like evolution, psychedelics, technology, politics, free speech, UFOs, and conspiracy theories. As a seasoned stand-up comedian, TV anchor, and mixed martial arts commentator, Rogan approaches those topics from an “everyman” perspective, establishing an informal rapport with his guests, in some cases through markedly masculine affectations like smoking cigars. Examples of some of the show’s most viewed episodes reflect the comedian’s broader interests: Elon Musk (technology and communication), Bob Lazar and Jeremy Corbell (conspiracies and aliens), Jordan Peterson (free speech and controversies), and Edward Snowden (technology, information, liberty). Rogan’s sustained awe and curiosity contribute to the spontaneous atmosphere of the show, while his status as a comedian and self-declared ignorance about most of the areas of knowledge traversed by the conversation contributes to the casual, non-informational character of the show. Over the years, this formula has proven wildly successful: since 2009 the show has accumulated more than 2000 episodes, averaging around two hours and a half in length and millions of listeners per episode.

Despite its established presence across multiple social media platforms and within Internet pop culture at large, JRE has also developed a reputation for being politically edgy. During the Trump presidency, while it was based primarily on YouTube, JRE was often criticized for hosting a range of controversial figures associated with the “alt-light” (Nagle 2017) or the so-called “intellectual dark web” (Weiss 2018), becoming a reference for those dismissing “woke culture” and “social justice warriors” from the right (Sobande et al. 2022). After his podcast was acquired exclusively by Spotify, Rogan received further criticism for defending the use of Ivermectin as an alternative cure for Covid-19 (Burton 2023) and, less than a year later, for a resurfaced video compilation that showed him use the N-word in a range of occasions on the podcast (Aratani 2022). Despite controversies, however, JRE thrives as one of the most widely accessible and influential cultural formats in the world.

This paper argues the best way to understand JRE’s cultural impact is to frame it as an adaptive cultural platform, embedded within the established dynamics of platform capitalism (Srnicek 2015) and communicative capitalism (Dean 2014). By engaging in practices of cohortification, re-platforming, and framing infrastructural discourse, Rogan plays an active role in shaping the cultural dynamics of platformisation (Poell et al. 2019). More specifically, I explain how this role is ideologically determined by Rogan’s foremost cultural allegiance: protecting an idea of free speech (and business model) that is grounded in what I describe as roast universalism. Significantly, this communicative ethos is informed by his primary identification as a (white, male) comedian, a situated perspective from which Rogan approaches and influences “cancel discourses” (Ng 2022), with a subsequent impact on the definition and perception of “cancel culture” as a cultural phenomenon.

The paper thus offers a cultural critique of JRE as a format. In so doing, it proposes an interdisciplinary theoretical framework to approach podcasting comedians as an important and under-studied example of primarily male influencers, with specific cultural stakes in negotiating with platform infrastructures.

The first section discusses JRE’s investment in “cancel discourses” (Ng 2022) and association with the loosely assembled brand of the “intellectual dark web” (Weiss 2018). Contextualizing Rogan as a libertarian gateway to more extreme right-leaning content (Sienkiewicz and Marx 2022), I start to outline how JRE’s flirting with platforming, de-platforming, and re-platforming edgy personalities is functional to his infrastructural ambitions. I also highlight the contradiction between Rogan’s situated hypermasculinity and his dismissal of “social justice warriors” in the name of universalist rationality.

The second section focuses on Rogan’s identification with a cohort of primarily male comedians and the “equal opportunity offense” ethos of the late-90s, early-2000s. I highlight how this “roast universalism” informs the shaping of cancel discourses within the community, challenging and reinforcing the notion of “cancel culture” at the same time. To highlight the importance of these discourses to the specific milieu of podcasting comedians, I compare their investment in infrastructure to the “recursive public” (Kelty 2008) of free software geeks, with the crucial difference that the former already exist within communicative capitalism (Dean 2014).

The third section discusses Rogan’s relationship with digital platforms more specifically, identifying three platforming practices: on YouTube, JRE’s cohortification engenders an infrastructure based on platformed personality (Rosamond 2023); on Spotify, JRE adopts re-platforming of both controversial guests and the podcast itself to negotiate the boundaries of platformed speech; in conversation with platform-owner Elon Musk, Rogan personally contributes to the framing of infrastructural discourse.

The conclusion proposes that JRE has an ambivalent relationship with cancel culture. On one hand, the show’s participation in cancel discourses by challenging the restrictions of single platforms and their content policies contributes to reify and define “cancel culture” as a circulating cultural object (Ahmed 2014). On the other, by cultivating a personality-driven brand that adapts to the best platform offering, Rogan consolidates his “fuck you-money” and de facto defuses the threat of cancelation, albeit eternally invoking it. JRE thus represents a critical nexus where comedy, technology, and infrastructural power converge: its success takes the power away from platforms, while also playing into the hands of those in the platforming class who, like Elon Musk, support specific ideologies despite promoting the “de-politicization” of social media.

The Slippery Politics of JRE: Masculinity in Crisis and Cancel Culture

Along with increasing pop cultural influence, JRE has become a significant referent for the definition of, and discourse about, “cancel culture.” The podcast’s perspective has been characteristically skeptical, but what this section aims to highlight is how this approach is consistent with Rogan’s cultural investment in platform infrastructure.

According to Ng (2022, 5), who has offered the most comprehensive critical account of the concept to date, cancel culture encompasses both cancel practices (calls to boycott a specific cancel target through different degrees of divestment, often social media-driven) and cancel discourses (discussion and commentary about cancel practices and their aftermath). Especially in the aftermath of the #metoo movement, Rogan and his guests regularly discussed the former (Russo 2021) and contributed to the latter. Their contribution fed mostly into what Ng calls “second-order cancel discourses,” that is conversations that happen on different platforms from those that did the so-called canceling (Ng 2022, 5). This point is important to my general argument, since Rogan’s relationship with platforms and platforming is not limited to or dependent on a single platform, and the framing of “cancelation” is often conveniently blurry.

In this respect, one of the benefits of Ng’s framing is there are multiple perspectives and dimensions to what “canceling” means: sometimes it is an enduring damnatio memoriae that disqualifies a life’s achievements, other times it means shifting to a less lucrative job, others again it is the pressure of self-censorship without any material loss. For an individual to be canceled, they generally need to have been featured somewhere—whether the proverbial “map” or, more materially, a media platform. “De-platforming” is in fact one of the practices most associated with cancel culture, albeit some (e.g., Nagle 2017) consider it counterproductive. The argument is often that, in many cases, the de-platforming controversy results in more exposure and the exiled personality is often re-platformed somewhere else. In this respect, Rogan has often been smart in platforming or re-platforming the right characters at the right time, gaining cultural relevance without really risking his own platform. Some of Rogan’s most fringe guests have been anti-feminist Milo Yiannopoulos, popular conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, Proud Boys-founder Gavin McInness, and eugenicist Stefan Molyneux. These guests represent a small minority compared to the 700+ over the show’s history, however the fact they have been “de-platformed” at one point or another has made JRE quite divisive. This was most evident when the podcast came to be associated with the loosely-assembled cultural constellation deemed the “intellectual dark web” (Weiss 2018)—an improper infrastructural metaphor that actually refers to a range of highly visible figures, many of whom known to have lost their platform only to gain a much bigger one.

With time, Rogan’s engagement with overtly anti-feminist figures in a time of highly gendered social and political polarization has made the show a point of reference for those preoccupied with the emergence of so-called “woke” culture and “social justice warriors,” usually framed by JRE as unreasonable (Phelan 2019; Sobande et al. 2022). Significantly, framing himself as a rational skeptic with universalist values belies the highly situated socio-cultural milieu from which both Rogan and his most frequent guests come from. An overwhelming majority of JRE’s guests have in fact been male, with the most frequent coming from the worlds of stand-up comedy and mixed martial arts (JRE Library 2023), both of which are marked by hypermasculine dynamics.

While Rogan is unapologetic about his masculinity, his political profile has always been kept ambiguous. Despite his reputation and proximity to some high-profile Donald Trump supporters (like comedian podcaster Anthony Cumia or UFC-founder Dana White), Rogan has never endorsed Trump, or even had him as a guest. In terms of party politics and US establishment, in fact, Rogan has openly supported and hosted politicians like Bernie Sanders, Andrew Yang, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., demonstrating particular affinity to causes like universal basic income (UBI). While the comedian is not too easily pinpointed politically, Sienkiewicz and Marx (2022, 117) classify him as a libertarian, emphasizing JRE’s infrastructural role. They look at the right-wing media comedy complex as a system founded on targeted audience as real-estate and primarily digital media platforms that offer a convenient infrastructure for those audiences to bump into each other. In this scenario, Sienkiewicz and Marx frame podcasts like JRE not so much as strongholds for the conservative community, but rather as a conduit that facilitates communication between those spaces, roping in passers-by in the process. Significantly, Sienkiewicz and Marx (2022, 131–2) also highlight how polarizing guests can be very useful, as more moderate libertarian comedians who refuse the “culture wars” narrative fail to emerge.

In this respect, it is fair to say Rogan is comfortable with political ambiguity and knows how to play the numbers game. In the podcast the host expresses in fact different degrees of sympathy toward the guests: some of them he criticizes more openly (e.g., Gavin McInness), while others (like Jordan Peterson) have become regulars, and their framing of “cultural marxists” or “social justice warriors” is often taken at face value. Rogan’s celebration of free speech also manifests at different degrees: the comedian has shown sustained support to Alex Jones (whose failures Rogan sympathetically attributes to alcohol and drug problems), but did not invite back Milo Yiannopoulos, whose joke about being abused as a child (made on JRE) cost him a prestigious book deal. This suggests Rogan is well aware of the implications of what Emily Rosamond calls “reputational warfare,” a way to “capitalize on reputational volatility at large scale” (Rosamond 2020, 18), including “through real options frameworks” (22). Rogan’s willingness to listen to highly controversial figures like Milo Yiannopoulos or Gavin McInness in the name of his free-speech ethos can arguably be seen as a cynical form of gambling on those who have been canceled or are about to become canceled. In other words, getting away with teasing the fringe by adopting a generally skeptical approach (although not as often an openly critical one) is integral to Rogan’s brand. After all, the Rogan who engaged in conversations with anti-feminists on JRE is also the Rogan that sold vitamin supplements to “optimize” the brain (Peele 2020).

Despite the opportunism and claims to rationality outlined above, there is however an affective dimension in the situated perspective of JRE regarding cancel culture, which also has political implications. I propose it is fair to situate Rogan as a sort of “South Park conservative,” a term coined by Anderson (2005) to describe edgy, non-liberal voices coming up in an increasingly decentralized media landscape. Written before social media, Anderson’s account discussed formats like talk radio and Vice Magazine, which challenged what he saw as the hegemonic liberal bias of mainstream US media. In the current platform-driven era, this notion reflects Rogan’s framing of “cancel culture” as encompassing both activist call-outs on social media and top-down government censorship (more relevant to the later phases of JRE’s controversy). Within a commercial arena where visibility is crucial, comedians’ investment in cancel culture is thus very community-specific, as its threat serves to reinforce their identity, as well as their countercultural value. Circulating the idea of cancel culture is then at once instrumental and visceral. As Ahmed (2014, 10) writes: “[E]motions are not ‘in’ either the individual or the social, but produce the very surfaces and boundaries that allow the individual and the social to be delineated as if they are objects. [They] create the very surfaces and boundaries that allow all kinds of objects to be delineated. The objects of emotion take shape as effects of circulation.” As a cultural object, then, “cancel culture” exists insofar as it is circulating and elicits emotions all around, conveniently driving the flows of attention toward edgy content and those who platform it.

Stand-Up Ethos: Roast Universalism and the Speech-a-Ton

Rogan’s comedy is at the margins of most discussions about his impact. Nonetheless, I argue that to understand JRE’s political profile and cultural influence it is crucial to consider the convergence of Rogan’s investment in a community of reference and his interest in infrastructure. In this section I flesh out this argument further, emphasizing how the practice of stand-up comedy under platform capitalism (Srnicek 2015) and communicative capitalism (Dean 2014) informs JRE’s strategic infrastructural role. This role is twofold: on one hand the podcast promotes the discursive value of roast universalism, on the other it pioneers what I call the speech-a-ton—one of the longest and yet most shareable forms of content available today. Drawing from different theories, I propose comedians share some of the values of early Internet and free culture, albeit with the crucial difference that their speech-based, non-technical work already inhabits communicative capitalist values.

Across the several audiences he appeals to, the community Rogan identifies the most as “his people” is comedians. I argue Rogan’s communicative ethos is grounded in the “equal opportunity offense” style of the US stand-up scene of the 1990s and 2000s, which often drew from a palette of racial, gender, and cultural stereotypes popular in Boston and New York comedy clubs, insult-based comedy roasts, and radio shows like Stern or Opie and Anthony, where “shock jock” humor was always de rigueur. It is no surprise, then, that Rogan’s roast universalism clashes with identity-focused forms of social media activism in particular (feminism, trans rights, etc), bringing the situatedness inherent to identity politics into the disembodied stereotype map of roast comedy and the “context collapse” (Marwick and Boyd 2011; Wesch 2009) of platformed speech circulation.

Notably, Rogan was an early adopter of podcasting as a format for the freeform discussion of edgy topics, but he was not the only one from the aforementioned comedy milieu. For example, after getting fired from Opie and Anthony because of racist tweets (Zarrell 2014), Anthony Cumia successfully went on to create the Anthony Cumia Network (later Compound Media), a platform that at one point hosted Proud Boys-founder Gavin McInness, among others. Cumia has been a big influence on Rogan, who has openly admired his independent attitude toward platforms and his status as “uncancellable” (The Joe Rogan Experience 2021). Nonetheless, Rogan’s own approach to infrastructuring speech has so far kept him outside of any (pay)walled garden.

In this respect, it is useful to compare Rogan’s role in discussions over free speech and “cancel culture” to the “recursive public” (Christopher 2008) of tech geeks. In his anthropological study of free software geeks, Christopher (2008, 10) coined the term “recursive public” to describe heterogeneous and distributed groups of people who share an investment in the very infrastructure allowing their existence as a public: “[F]or instance, a Free Software project may depend on some other kind of software or operating system, which may in turn depend on particular open protocols or a particular process, which in turn depend on certain kinds of hardware that implement them. The ‘depth’ of recursion is determined by the openness necessary for the project itself.” A recursive public is independent, driven by practice rather than ideology, and lives by “an ethic of justice shot through with an esthetic of technical elegance and legal cleverness.”

Among the many differences, there are some conceptual similarities between the practice of successful libertarian podcasters like Rogan and certain ideas typically associated with information activists, geeks, and Kelty’s “recursive publics.” For example, in a chat with Michael Malice (The Joe Rogan Experience 2023b), Rogan states that podcasts are non-rival, while in another with Lex Fridman (The Joe Rogan Experience 2023a) they agree ideas are just happening through people rather than being their property. Beyond emphasizing the openness and collaborative nature of podcasting, putting practice over ideology is also crucial, as illustrated in the previous section on political ambiguity. In terms of recursion, the comedians in Rogan’s entourage regularly appear on each other’s podcasts, where they often talk about the “craft” of comedy and their podcasting careers. Conversations regularly touch upon the issue of “cancel culture” as both a sincere cause for concern and memetic punchline. It is in fact an open secret now that some of the most successful among podcasting comedians have been “canceled” before—the most famous example being Shane Gillis, who was dropped by SNL and is now one of the top accounts on Patreon (Graphtreon 2024). These meta-conversations can be seen as “recursive” in the sense that each comedian’s podcast is dependent on traffic coming from recommendations (discursive AND algorithmic) from bigger podcasts, with JRE being the biggest and YouTube providing the ultimate technical infrastructure. From being an external threat, cancelation thus becomes a topic of conversation and ethical motivation to invest in the platforming, cross-platforming, and re-platforming of peers.

In other words, Rogan and his entourage of edgy podcasting comedians—whom he frames as the “last line of defense” against wokeism (The Joe Rogan Experience 2024)—see themselves as playing a key infrastructural role. This is facilitated by Rogan’s pioneering of a format based on longform conversations that veer from low-stakes banter to inspired takes on hyper-complex topics, with subjects often changing before solid points can be discerned. These three-hour speech-a-tons are more easily consumed as smaller clips, usually re-posted with click-bait titles by a multitude of fan accounts. This re-circulation is useful to amplify the allure of the edgiest clips, while at the same time offering the “missing context” excuse in case of bigger controversies.

The JRE entourage is thus inherently embedded in what Jodi Dean calls “communicative capitalism,” where speech does not provide a “critical outside” (Dean 2014, 4). In this context, the radical status of any message or conspiracy theory is not really important: “What matters is not what was said but rather that something was said. No opinion or judgment is worth more than any other (they each count as one comment on my blog, one like, one tweet). Each adds something to the flow. Facts, theories, judgments, opinions, fantasies, jokes, and lies circulate indiscriminately” (Dean 2014, 6).

The “roast universalism” of the comedy community is thus important not only to Rogan’s authenticity and identification with a specific milieu, but it provides a wider discursive protocol for content circulation that allows the JRE format to extend its appeal while minimizing its informational value (and accountability).

JRE as Infrastructure: Platforming the “Embedded Skeptic”

After discussing the relationship between JRE and cancel culture, and contextualizing Rogan’s communicative ethos within his community of comedians, this section finally zooms in on the infrastructural role of the podcast. I discuss three platforming practices, each anchored to a different platform: the cohortification of Rogan’s fellow comedians on YouTube, the podcast’s re-platforming to Spotify and then back across to YouTube, and Rogan’s framing of infrastructural discourse through his relationship with Elon Musk, current owner of X (formerly Twitter).

In terms of cohortification on YouTube, I draw from Emily Rosamond’s theoretical framework to approach Rogan and his entourage. Rosamond (2023) describes “YouTube personality” as a quality of the platform itself, an “open-ended construct” rather than anything owned by any one individual. As “an ambiguous assemblage of persons, performances, platforms and their techno-cultural artifacts (videos, ‘likes,’ etc.)” personality can thus be seen as a medium, a performance genre, and a platform infrastructure (3–4). As mentioned in the previous section, and also suggested by Sienkiewicz and Marx (2022), Rogan’s entourage of fellow comedians and frequent JRE guests represents a community that is cohesive enough around the issue of platformed free speech to amount to a public with specific infrastructural interests. Rosamond’s focus on personality as a pivotal concept is however necessary to highlight both the situated nature of the host’s allure and the way this cultural capital enables crossing over to other platforms—all of this, while YouTube keeps putting their personality to work. In terms of monetization, in fact, “YouTubers compensate for the paucity of YouTube’s monetization offer, rerouting traffic away from YouTube, to augment its offered terms (for instance, by linking to donation and crowdfunding sites, such as Patreon and Ko-Fi)” (Rosamond 2023, 4). Rogan’s clips exist on YouTube, but his podcast is also on Spotify; his fellow comedian podcasters Andrew Schulz and Tim Dillon have some of the most remunerative Patreon accounts, while others publish their specials on OnlyFans TV or become big on Cameo. According to Rosamond, the circulation of platformed personality as a socio-technically configured asset is in fact oriented toward generating future revenue streams, rather than sales (8). This process is intertwined with the “cohortification” of users into groups through algorithmic sorting and recommendation, to then be addressed as a community thanks to their convergence around and through YouTube personalities (34–5).

Joe Rogan seems then the perfect catalyst for “platformed personality capitalism” (Rosamond 2023, 38), not least because of the uncompromising comedic ethos that constitutes his most valuable platformed personality asset. This element is very relevant to Rogan’s second platforming practice: re-platforming.

As mentioned before, in 2020 Rogan was one of few podcasters to be offered an exclusive deal with Spotify. His move to the platform was particularly discussed, as it was accompanied by several controversies. One was the threat of strike from a contingent of employees from the Swedish streaming platform, who wanted certain podcast episodes to be edited or removed, another was the surfacing of a compilation of short clips showing Rogan using the N-word, for which he apologized (Aratani 2022). While the company refused editing, some episodes were indeed removed in the transition from YouTube, including some featuring Alex Jones (Resnikoff 2020). Nonetheless, in a prime example of re-platforming, Rogan had Jones on as a guest on Spotify in the same year, proving his negotiation of acceptable guests was going to continue being part of JRE’s brand. This strategy worked: the podcast was never dropped by either YouTube or Spotify, the comedian gained a lot of followers, and Spotify did not suffer economically from the incidents (Perez 2022). JRE’s exclusive “re-platforming” from YouTube to Spotify was then voluntary and remunerative, but Rogan’s recent renegotiation of an even more lucrative deal with the platform now allows him to share the podcast on YouTube and Apple Podcasts. While some commenters have noticed the move is inconvenient in terms of the host’s habit of playing clips from YouTube, which was not an issue on Spotify and can now enable people to hit him with copyright strikes (Podcast 2024), others have said the return to YouTube and its recommendation algorithm makes podcast guests the real winners of the new deal (Itzkovitz 2024).

In line with previous sections, then, Rogan seems to be willing to comply with the standards of mainstream platforms, as long as the circulation of his podcast and its flexibility as an infrastructure are not limited to a single one. While this does not have any stated ideological connotations, the comedian’s third platforming practice—framing infrastructural discourse—explains the political implications of his role. These manifest in his interactions with what Wark (2004) has termed the “vectoralist class.” For Wark there is an asymmetrical relation between a class who owns and controls “the vector of information, its means of transmission and archiving, its interfaces and nodes of attraction” and the class that “makes information, shares information, passes it around, is sometimes paid a wage, is often precariously employed, or is not employed at all.” The incommensurability of what we users produce and what vectoralists recuperate as value is intentional, as the vector “is designed to obfuscate the labor on which it depends” (Wark and Wark 2019, 295). Comedian podcasters like Rogan, who inhabit communicative capitalism and platformed personality as a core or side-hustle, thus legitimate the vectors of content circulation, propelling attention flows on the trajectory of free speech rants. This happens even as they enact high-profile negotiations with digital platforms. Despite his mainstream status, in fact, Rogan has continued to use his embedded position to shape “cancel culture” as a public object of debate, although—unlike comedians like Russell Brand—Rogan has not joined any “alt-tech” platforms like Rumble or Truth Social, which usually (albeit not exclusively) cater to a conservative political milieu (Klee 2023).

In this respect, Rogan’s contrarian views have manifested most notably by criticizing the partisan moderation policies adopted by companies like Twitter (Wulfsohn 2022). One example was Twitter’s ban of Trump for inciting the Capitol events on 6 January 2021, which was seen by many as highly political, although it was presented as a violation of terms of conduct (Dwoskin and Nitasha 2021). The subsequent Twitter takeover by Elon Musk, allegedly motivated by an opposition to the “woke mind virus” and ideologically motivated content moderation (Farberov 2022), has in fact been a topic of discussion on JRE and framed in optimistic terms.

Rogan’s affinity with Musk dates back to the mogul’s Internet-breaking guest appearance on JRE, where the two smoked a blunt together and discussed characteristically intense matters. As argued by Ferrari Braun (2023) in his political economical analysis of Elon Musk as a business celebrity, Rogan’s podcast has had a significant influence in expanding the billionaire’s narrative as a crazy genius. Musk’s own “geek masculinity” (Salter and Blodgett 2018) worked well with Rogan’s and the billionaire got to perpetuate an image of success at a critical juncture for his company. Significantly, Ferrari Braun notices how Musk’s performance is aimed to outline an individual narrative that mistifies the systemic nature of the problems he is set to resolve—a personality-centered over-simplification that is bound to thrive in the context of Rogan’s speech-a-tons. Framed by “hegemonic values concerning masculinity, heterosexuality, and whiteness, but also a sense of collapse and failure,” his viral conversation with Joe Rogan is “a prologed exercise in formulating the shortcomings of financialised capital, and offering a hyperindividualised solution” (23–4). The role of politics is thus dismissed as “an arcane activity whose temporality cannot match the speed of innovation” (Ferrari Braun 2023, 16).

While Musk’s embodiment of different companies allows him to inscribe them in a personal narrative, Rogan’s investment in “free speech” is also framed as a heroic individual battle, one in which the comedian himself embodies a platform, thinks like a platform, and talks with other platforms as something that would happen naturally, with or without capitalistic imperatives. Rogan’s endorsement of people like Elon Musk, who single-handedly acquire the Twitter “public sphere” through the sheer power of money, proves in fact how, rather than establishing structurally independent networks and infrastructures, Rogan has become an avatar that personifies the value of uncompromising masculinity and platformed free speech. Rogan’s brand, defined by roast universalism and free speech ethos, thus bridges the countercultural hacker credo that “information wants to be free” with the ad-driven monetization of the pre-Cambridge Analytica tech industry, propelling a widely appealing call for post-political content circulation that transcends individual platforms and their policies, but is driven by personality as an infrastructure. In this scenario, “cancel culture” is a nebulous yet determining factor in the definition of both the content and the infrastructure itself.

Conclusion: “Cancel Culture” and “Fuck You-Money”

Discussing Joe Rogan and podcasting comedians enables us to better understand social media as infrastructures for the production of culture (Poell et al. 2021), as well as their anti-political implications. While more activist figures like Brand are barred as conspiracy theorists, Rogan grounding himself as a comedian—whose ethos requires exaggeration, contrast, and ambiguity—enables JRE to become an adaptive cultural platform. This is enforced on a discursive level by his investment in the free speech narrative, while on a material level it is sustained by his economic productivity (and that of his podcasting comedians cohort). In the context of cultural platformisation (Poell et al. 2019) and infrastructuralisation of platforms (Plantin et al. 2018), this virtuous cycle suggests comedy can be seen as a cultural catalyst for plarformization, a conduit for the infrastructuring of speech.

At the same time, Rogan’s stated neutrality addresses a market gap with indirect political implications. While scholars argue that “all platforms moderate” (Gillespie 2018), tech moguls like Elon Musk pretend to adopt anti-moderation stances or debunk existing, politically biased filters that penalize conservative users, although practices like shadowbanning are denounced by both right-wing commentators (Cole 2018, in Are 2022) and advocates of sex workers rights (Are 2022). The main driver for content moderation is protecting platforms from accountability, and moderation shifts like YouTube’s “adpocalypse” have been shown to encourage content homogenization and mainstreaming (Kumar 2019). Even when de-platforming is indeed the outcome of a political activist operation, it is always in the context of a neoliberal synergy with private corporations that draft policies to target “hate speech,” often with the result of pushing far-right communities to smaller, more extremist platforms like Gab (Mirrlees 2019, 39–40).

Crucially, then, cancel discourses featuring discursive platform critique as a type of content (e.g., what is done on JRE or other free speech-focused podcasts) work in tandem with the mission statements of emergent tech platforms, who need the content volume and follower numbers of excellent skeptics like Rogan. JRE’s political profile is thus less important than its communicative capitalist withdrawal from politics. The podcast operates a universalization of libertarian values like free speech and free enterprise as inherently (North) American, while at the same time minimizing the politics of the show (which is intended as non-informational and non-partisan). Rogan’s investment in infrastructures for free speech closely overlaps with those of a specific subset of the vectoralist class (e.g. Elon Musk), whose “fuck you-money” (an expression that is a political statement in itself) Rogan celebrates. Regardless of whether the comedians rumored to be “canceled” actually lose their job or simply get criticized on Twitter, ultimately it is the amount of speech they can produce and channel that matters the most. Rogan’s ambivalent relationship with cancel culture is thus a necessary discursive hook to facilitate content circulation as well as the proliferation of platformisation as a business model. Were Rogan ever de-platformed, his following might migrate en masse to make the fortune of the next platform (if not Truth Social or Rumble, perhaps Musk’s new X endeavor). The circulation-driven logic of platforms, combined with the increasing pressure toward their moderation, winds up reinforcing Rogan’s brand as an embedded yet “uncancellable” skeptic who profits from culture war narratives.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Nicola Bozzi

Author Biography

Nicola Bozzi is Lecturer in Critical Media Practice at the University of Greenwich. His academic research focuses on platformed identities and social media aesthetics. He also curates an occasional newsletter about comedy,media,and culture at letdowncomedy.substack.com. You can follow him on social media at @schizocities.

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