Bombing the Information Superhighway: Social Media Graffiti Creators, Platform Infrastructures, and the Visual Politics of Algorithmic Culture

This paper examines how social media graffiti creators adapt traditional graffiti practices to the infrastructures and visibility demands of digital platforms. Drawing from interviews and digital ethnography, the study analyzes how physical and digital practices become causally intertwined, as online circulation shapes movement, imitation, and aesthetic choices. Emerging media technologies such as drones, VR platforms, and mobile capture tools expand creative possibilities while introducing new forms of digital labor, surveillance risk, and neoliberal pressures of entrepreneurialism. Participants described balancing desires for visibility with concerns about anonymity and cultural dilution. The findings show that graffiti in hybrid physical-digital environments functions simultaneously as a tactic of resistance, a platform-shaped creative practice, and a form of labor negotiated within the digital platform economy.