Ghosts of the Affective Economy: Refusals of Meaning in the Virtual Ethnographic Settings of <i>Vaporwave</i> and <i>the Backrooms</i>

ABSTRACT Ethnographic interviews and forms of participant observation that focus narrowly on the verbal and textual expressions of collaborators and community members have real limitations. While recognizing these limitations is not new in anthropology, confronting and mitigating them must be continually rediscovered and renegotiated in new ethnographic contexts. In the marginal online community concerned with producing the virtual world known as The Backrooms , these limitations have appeared starkly in preliminary and ongoing ethnographic fieldwork. Participants in public forums and in private formal interview spaces have been reluctant, or even explicitly refused, to engage verbally or textually with questions of meaning. Within the context of such a digitally mediated and dispersed community, these refusals produce new challenges to ethnographic methodologies. In what follows, I draw upon existing ethnographic literature on the Vaporwave community, itself shaped by the concept of hauntology, to find guidance for studying marginal online communities like The Backrooms and specifically to understand how to sustain the ethnographer's project of ascertaining significance without fetishizing the pursuit of explicitly acknowledged (verbalized or written) meanings.