824051

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ECS0010.1177/1367549418824051European Journal of Cultural StudiesSzarecki

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European Journal of Cultural Studies

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Decentring the vernacular © The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1367549418824051
https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549418824051
power in networked culture journals.sagepub.com/home/ecs

Artur Szarecki
University of Warsaw, Poland

Abstract
The article investigates non-linear dynamics of networked culture, emphasizing the
entangled relations of power that transcend the dialectic of the vernacular and the
institutional, along with its back and forth movement between subversion and co-
optation. To that end, it focuses on a controversial digital marketing campaign for the
Ministry of the Interior in Poland, analysing its initial reception, subsequent remakes
and more enduring political effects. In particular, it demonstrates how the public
outcry it generated interacted with other media events, proliferating connections
in a non-dialectical manner. Consequently, the unfolding of the campaign involved
a multiplicity of often incongruous potentials of expression that fluctuated around
enduring cultural patterns, ultimately reinforcing attitudes and institutions that the
backlash was supposed to challenge.

Keywords
Affect, cultural complexity, digital marketing, digital media, vernacular web

Introduction
Networked culture is often positioned as the realm of vernacular practices. At times,
these accounts can be overly one-sided, overstating active participation to create a cele-
bratory image of a democratized web (e.g. Benkler, 2006). However, a more balanced
view can recognize the prevalence of vernacular expressions in networked culture, while
emphasizing their interconnectedness with and porosity to the institutional structures of
power. The vernacular, in this view, is no longer separable yet still discernible from the
institutional through its capacity to enact alternate agency (Howard, 2008a, 2008b), or its
adherence to mundane, everyday social contexts and communicative conventions

Corresponding author:
Artur Szarecki, Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw, Krakowskie Przedmieście
26/28, Warszawa 00-927, Poland.
Email: szarecki.artur@gmail.com
2 European Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)

(Burgess, 2006, 2010). Although such accounts are more likely to capture the open con-
nectedness of networked interactions, I want to argue that they are, nevertheless, depend-
ent on a binary logic incongruent with non-linear dynamics of the web.
The digital media ecology is never still; there is an ongoing movement of information
that underlies the continual production of difference within networked culture. This
dynamic interconnectedness involves recursive relationships which introduce ambiva-
lence and uncertainty into the system. That is to say, the logic of the network is never
binary but ternary: in any encounter there is always a third element affecting the other
two (Pasquinelli, 2008). In other words, any two participants of networked interaction
are not only altered by one another but also transformed in and through the very process
of dynamic interweaving in which they participate (Jörg, 2011: 151). Therefore, regard-
less of how much dialectical work goes into relativizing the contradistinction of the
vernacular and the institutional, such accounts still retain the overarching dualistic
framework which subordinates movement to the predefined positions it connects
(Massumi, 2002). It presupposes grid-like patterning where there are only temporary
aggregations of transversal flows entangled in complex, always evolving webs of rela-
tions (Taylor, 2001).
To account for the non-linear dynamics of networks, we have to approach cultural
phenomena in their ‘moving interconnectedness’ (Hannerz, 1992: 167). That is, to con-
ceive them as always in the process of becoming, focusing on passage and transition, by
examining them in relation to their own potential to vary (Massumi, 2002). In this sense,
we are primarily dealing with events which are comprised ‘not of units but of dimen-
sions, or rather directions in motion’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 21). This entails a
different understanding of networks. Instead of imagining them as static structures
defined by positions – a series of nodes connected by links – we should adopt a proces-
sual view of networks that privileges flows that unfold through time and space in the
process of dynamic interweaving. In this view, nodes are an emergent effect of this pro-
cess, resulting from multiple flows encountering each other and temporarily coagulating
into metastable patterns. Consequently, cultural events are expressive of this generative
dynamic, unfolding via intertwined flows that work together to affect the outcome. This
is why no single network location can determine the full implications of a cultural event,
as its spreads and bifurcates throughout the network, interfering or resonating with other
events and more enduring patterns. Investigating networked culture, then, necessitates
mapping out this dynamic interplay to determine how it conditions what eventuates.
I will attempt to elucidate this approach through a case study of an animated promo-
tional film released by the Ministry of the Interior in Poland. The Sad Bus video pre-
miered in June 2014 as part of a marketing campaign for a digital app that allows people
to check the technical condition of vehicles that carry children on school trips and sum-
mer holidays. However, the controversial form of the video met with public outcry. It
was condemned for its alleged discriminatory connotations, launching a heated debate
that spanned across different media. Concurrently, the video was parodied by amateur
users who posted their own versions on YouTube. These remakes were not simply repli-
cating the responses that already surfaced in the media; rather, the controversies around
the Sad Bus video bifurcated into multiple and often discordant attitudes. The emergence
of vernacular expressions, then, was from the very beginning attracted by other media
Szarecki 3

events, proliferating connections via networked flows in a non-dialectical manner.

Rather, it involved multiple encounters that recomposed the field of interactions in asym-
metrical and contradictory ways, forming temporary configurations in the acts of cap-
ture, and then dissolving them back into the ongoing cultural flux.
Mapping the unfolding of the campaign, then, demonstrates how structures of power
can adapt to the fluctuations brought about by affectively charged events. In cultural
studies, affective approaches have been sometimes castigated for privileging ‘the unex-
pected, the singular, or indeed the quirky, over the generally applicable’, to envision a
reality free from social constraints (Hemmings, 2005: 550). However, in the aftermath of
the Sad Bus campaign, the affective excess was channelled back into enduring cultural
patterns, reinforcing the asymmetrical power relations that permeate Polish society. This
involved multiple feedback loops whereby the backlash was transformed in a way that,
ultimately, reinforced attitudes and institutions against which it was initially directed. As
such, the unfolding of the campaign challenges the capacity of the vernacular to enact
alternate agency or its communicative distinctiveness from the institutional, instead
pointing to the resilience of power which subsides in networked dynamics, transcending
the dialectics of the vernacular and the institutional altogether.
In the course of the article, I will attempt to map out the complex interplay of forces
involved in the unfolding of the campaign, drawing on a diversified set of empirical
materials, including the Sad Bus video and its remakes on YouTube, as well as a variety
of responses that appeared in its aftermath: blog posts and comments made on social
media, mentions in television news programmes, as well as pertinent newspapers articles
and interviews. The line of argument proceeds from analysing meaning, to emotion, to
affect, followed by a more general account of complexity inherent in the unfolding of the
event. In the first section, I describe the campaign and subsequent responses, examining
how the Sad Bus video figured in the public discourse. Then, I turn to memetic remakes
of the video, to demonstrate how the initial opposition of the vernacular backlash and
institutional justifications bifurcated into multiple emotional reactions, many of which
were rooted in prejudicial attitudes. In the next section, I introduce the notion of affect to
analyse the workings of power involved in the unfolding of the event, going beyond the
binary mode of subversion and co-optation. Finally, I provide a summative account of
the campaign’s unfolding and its political effects. Mapping the non-linear dynamics of
the event, as it interacted with other events in the network, I demonstrate that despite
establishing its alterity from institutional structures, the backlash ultimately reinforced
enduring cultural patterns and corresponding asymmetries of power.

Decoding the Sad Bus video

In June 2014 the Centre for Informatics Technology, a government think-tank estab-
lished by the Ministry of the Interior, came up with an idea for a digital app that allows
users to verify the technical condition of buses and coaches travelling throughout Poland.
After entering the licence plate number, the app accessed central records to provide
information on the validity of the vehicle’s insurance, the results of the obligatory techni-
cal inspection, whether it was marked as withdrawn from traffic or stolen, and so on. By
using the app, then, people could identify faulty vehicles and report them to the authori-
ties, contributing to the overall improvement of safety on the roads.
4 European Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)

In order to bring the app into general use, the interactive advertising agency K2 was
asked to prepare the marketing campaign. Established in 1997, it was an up-and-coming
company having already worked with some of the top brands and organizations in
Poland. Its approach primarily hinged on customer engagement through online interac-
tions, putting participatory media at the heart of their marketing activities. Coincidentally,
this strategy also allowed making the most of heavily limited funds that the Ministry of
the Interior allotted for the campaign. Attempting to generate buzz with next to nothing
in terms of budget, K2 came up with a provocative idea, turning it into a short animated
clip, accompanied only by a press release.
The Sad Bus video premiered on the official YouTube channel of the Ministry of the
Interior on 24 June, and immediately met with angry responses from the viewers. It tells
the story of a battered old bus who realizes that he is becoming obsolete and gradually
gives in to sadness and misery, as indicated by his witty licence plate: ‘S4D 2562’.1 To
make matters worse, he is bullied by other, shiny white vehicles with plates that read
‘GR34T 892’,2 and by children who paint the word ‘FILTHY’ on his side. Visibly moved,
with tears in his eyes, the protagonist comes up with a desperate idea to cover himself in
a white sheet in order to pass off as one of the newer vehicles. Unfortunately, a sudden
gasp of wind exposes his plan to the dismay of passengers waiting at the bus stop.
Overcome by grief, he decides to drive to a junkyard where he plans to end his life.
However, when standing on the conveyor to the press machine, he notices a colourful
butterfly and regains his zest for life. A ray of sunlight shines through the clouds as the
butterfly turns the conveyor off and the bus smiles again. Then, the red-haired female
operator turns the power switch back on, and he gets crushed into a cube with his head-
light-eye gouging out. The screen goes dark and a message in white letters appears:
‘Have no mercy for a faulty bus that carries your child’. Finally, a voiceover informs the
viewers about the website and the app where they can check the technical condition of
all vehicles driving on the roads.
The video is based on a theme often found in children stories where a likeable but
slightly odd character is excluded or harassed by his peers, yet ultimately finds happiness
and fulfilment. A similar storyline is adopted, for example, in Ugly Duckling, The
Hunchback of Notre Dame or Shrek. The Sad Bus video, however, rejected the happy
ending in favour of a shocking finale that betrayed the sympathies of the viewers. This
resulted in a torrent of unfavourable responses. Out of almost 30,000 ratings on the
Ministry of the Interior YouTube channel, 80 percent were negative and the comment
section had to be closed. However, in many other forums people were expressing their
outrage, accusing the video of excessive cruelty and immorality. Some even suggested
that it directly encourages discrimination and humiliation of the handicapped and the
elderly. Within 24 hours since its premiere, the agitation spread from the Internet to other
media. The video was discussed in television, press and radio, becoming the most thrill-
ing news in an otherwise uneventful summer period.
Despite mounting controversies, K2 unconditionally stood by its marketing strategy.
Arek Szulczyński, the creative director of the agency, explained in an interview that,
while it might polarize the audience, ‘the controversial storyline is more likely to stuck
with the viewers’ as it invokes strong emotions. In other words, it will ultimately pay off,
because by capturing the attention of so many people the ad will be more effective in
Szarecki 5

facilitating the improvement of road safety. However, while there is no doubt that K2
representatives expected a certain level of discontent over the form of the video, the
accusations of discriminatory practices seemed to have taken them by surprise. In
response, they insisted that people simply failed to grasp the cunning message of the ad.
The premise behind the Sad Bus video was to lure viewers into an emotional trap by
eliciting sympathy towards an antagonist. Watching the ad, people should experience a
shock upon realizing that they had been empathizing with a piece of junk that carries a
threat to the lives of their children. Therefore, K2 representatives argued, if they still
experience pity or sorrow at the end, it means that they did not get the ad; they failed to
decode its ‘correct’ meaning.
Similar arguments were used on the Ministry of the Interior’s Facebook profile, where
the PR team argued that the ad ‘has nothing to do with social exclusion’ and suggesting
otherwise is ‘unjust, to say the least’. According to them, the message is clear: faulty
buses should not carry passengers, and ‘there is no sense in looking for a hidden agenda
where there is none’. Therefore, the viewers should simply overcome their sentimental
attachments because, in the end, it is all about the safety of their children.
However, the practical exegesis of the ad’s meaning provided by the representatives
of K2 and the Ministry of the Interior did not account for the fact that processes of decod-
ing are always socially and culturally mediated, and, as such, do not necessarily have to
coincide with the intended meaning. The symbolic content of the ad is clearly structured
around a series of oppositions, such as young and old, or fit and unfit, where the former
term is valorized positively (‘GR34T’), and the latter negatively (‘S4D’). Furthermore,
the implied distinction between white and colourful buses with the use of the word
‘FILTHY’ might suggest racist connotations,3 and the scene when the protagonist envi-
ously looks at a poster of a shiny new bus can be read as a remote reference to the con-
struction of the female beauty myth. Therefore, there is plenty in the video to suggest an
implicit discriminatory message against minority groups. Because these connotations
were at odds with publicly espoused values, however, the pushback against the ad did not
necessarily coincide with the divisions of age, health, race or gender. Instead, it traversed
social boundaries and gained popular support.
The Sad Bus video, then, clearly polarized the public into two opposing interpretive
communities (Fish, 1989). One was castigating the ad for its implicit discriminatory
message, and the other was defending it against the backlash by suggesting that adverse
reactions were overzealous and diverted attention from the ‘real’ issue, that is, the safety
of children.
The emergence of these two interpretative communities can be interpreted in terms of
hybridized vernacular agency. According to Glenn Howard (2008a, 2008b) the rise of
digital media has significantly enhanced the possibilities of vernacular interaction and
communication. However, these activities are performed in a technological environment
designed and maintained by powerful institutions. As a result, the expression in digital
media is always a confluence of vernacular and institutional agencies and interests. In
this view, then, the vernacular web emerges from the multiplicity of online interactions
whenever they assert their alterity from the institutional. Consequently, Howard advo-
cates a concept of ‘dialectical vernacular’ that acknowledges its interdependence on the
institutional while preserving its capacity to transform it from within.
6 European Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)

Accordingly, the responses to the Sad Bus video can be regarded in terms of hybrid-
ized vernacular expressions that were articulated on a variety of institutionally owned
sites – like YouTube or Facebook – and yet expressed a set of shared expectations that
explicitly deviated from the intentions of K2 and the Ministry of the Interior. In other
words, by condemning the ad and its creators, they asserted alternate authority. Moreover,
the emergence of the vernacular web informed subsequent reports by mainstream media,
which quickly seized on the controversy surrounding the campaign. On television, most
of the noteworthy news broadcasting programmes – including ‘Wiadomości’ on the
state-owned TVP1 and ‘Fakty’ on the largest commercial station, TVN – commented
critically on the ad, and the largest and, arguably, most influential newspaper in Poland,
‘Gazeta Wyborcza’, ran a scathing column about it.
This might suggest that vernacular expressions have the capacity to influence and
transform the institutional realm and shape public perception. However, in the next sec-
tion, I will investigate memetic remakes of the video to show that neither vernacular nor
institutional responses to the ad were as uniform as the preceding account might have
suggested. In fact, they comprised a spectrum of intentions and emotions – from com-
petitive drive, to populist sentiments, to fear of others – that do not fit in with the struc-
tural opposition of two interpretative communities of shared expectations.

Memetic variation and emotional topologies

The intensity of responses to the Sad Bus video, occurring regardless of whether people
could decode the implied meaning of the ad, suggests that its impact cannot be reduced
to the level of interpretation alone, to a purely semiotic encounter between exegesis and
critical hermeneutic. The very effect of the ad relies on an embodied activity of the
viewer who will individually perform ‘emotion work’ (Hochschild, 1983), converting
the negative feelings that accompany the ‘death’ of the protagonist into a positive con-
cern for the safety of children. In other words, it requires transmutation of an immediate
and involuntary somatic response into a conscious and intentionally directed emotion.
Therefore, the subsequent backlash against the ad suggests that many viewers failed to
perform the emotion work required for its intended effect. This might be because the
sense of the danger to children is not really evoked in the video. It amounts to an implicit
and rather vague background of the story, while the viewers’ attention remains focused
on the predicaments of the main protagonist. Consequently, the video met with mixed
responses that involved diverse emotional orientations.
According to Sara Ahmed (2004), emotions accumulate over time, produced by the
constant circulation of objects and signs. Thus, the more the video itself, as well as the
subsequent feedback, spread across the network, the more intense reactions it generated.
The emotional surplus soon spiralled beyond the bounds of the two interpretative com-
munities delineated in the previous section, transcending the dialectic of vernacular
backlash and institutional justifications.
This process can be illustrated by examining the remakes of the Sad Bus video that
started to appear on YouTube soon after its premiere. In Limor Shifman’s (2014) terms,
this indicates a transformation from a viral to a memetic video. While the former
involves a single digital item that propagates in multitudinous copies, the latter
Szarecki 7

comprises a collection of user-generated derivatives that come into being through

practices of circulation, imitation and transformation of digital content. As a complex
of interrelated ideas and forms of expression, a meme, then, can be regarded as a form
of public discourse in which different memetic variants represent diverse voices and
perspectives. Consequently, Shifman’s account privileges the democratizing potential
of new media, positing memes as the ‘new vernacular’ or ‘(post)modern folklore’ that
enables novel forms of participatory politics.
However, while many memes can, in fact, be regarded as remediations of vernacular
creativity, resulting from quotidian practices of recombining cultural resources (Burgess,
2006, 2010), increasing numbers of memes are now being produced by professionals
working for institutionalized digital media platforms. Moreover, the differences between
both types of expression are increasingly difficult to pinpoint, since they often employ
similar techniques of production, share aesthetic qualities and operate according to the
same principles. This confluence is noticeable in some of the more popular remakes of
the Sad Bus video. While most of them retained, to a large extent, the original storyline
and aesthetic style, they nevertheless attempted to inscribe new meanings into the ad,
congruent with the prevailing structures of feeling (Williams, 1977).
One way of appeasing the public was by offering alternative endings that played on
the surrounding controversy. For instance, in one version, instead of being crushed in the
press, the bus leaves the junkyard and spends the rest of his days in a museum as an
admired exhibit. A similar storyline finds the protagonist restored by two ‘sexy’ female
mechanics and proudly showing off to the chagrin of the white buses. He also takes part
in an automotive event, appreciated by the reporters and the audience alike.
Despite appealing to popular sentiment, however, none of those remakes is really an
expression of vernacular creativity. The first one was produced by another advertising
agency, MillionYou, and the second by a film studio, Crazy Wolf. Therefore, both repre-
sent institutional agency and interests, attempting to exploit the emotional responses
generated by the Sad Bus video for self-promotional purposes. At the same time, they are
practically indiscernible from vernacular versions that also proliferated on YouTube.
Perhaps, only the emotional tone of the latter tends towards satisfying more ‘atavistic’
drives and desires. In one user-generated version, the butterfly lands on a pile of wrecked
cars causing it to fall on the woman operating the press, and allowing the protagonist to
make an escape. Together, they go to a repair shop where the bus is renovated and
equipped with a new licence plate that reads ‘H4A PP6Y’.4 He starts to drive as a ‘special
line’ and even picks up the injured woman from the junkyard. In yet another version,
however, the same woman appears inside the press in lieu of the bus, and gets crushed
into a gory pulp. There is also a video that repeats the crushing scene in a loop, over and
over again.
These remakes can be read in terms of emotion work that allows people to cope with
the dissonance caused by the ad. As Bengt af Klintberg (1996) argues, fantasies of
revenge, a popular motif in many folktales and contemporary legends, often provide a
socially acceptable form of releasing culturally suppressed urges and feelings. Within the
vernacular web, the female character from the junkyard was often referred to as the ‘red-
haired official from the Ministry of the Interior’, and became one of the main objects of
ire. Bringing death upon her, therefore, comprises a symbolic act of revenge on those
8 European Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)

who are blamed for stirring up the emotional turmoil in the first place, and, as such, pro-
vides relief by restoring a sense of agency and justice.
However, the vernacular fantasies of revenge, despite expressing feelings banned
from the institutional order, in fact perform a similar function to the more conciliatory
professional versions. Both attempt to re-establish the status quo by promising some kind
of resolution. Here, the vernacular and the institutional align. This is because, the latter
encompasses diverse agencies and interests that can adapt to and reappropriate the for-
mer. Thus, the memetic variations examined so far, while diverging from the official
stance of K2 and the Ministry of the Interior, can, nevertheless, benefit other institutional
actors, for instance, competing advertising agencies and other commercial companies
that want to exploit the popularity of the video, as well as the surrounding controversy,
for their own profit.
However, not all remakes of the Sad Bus video provide alternative endings to offer
emotional comfort. Some introduce far-reaching modifications that completely alter the
original content, introducing new and often conflicting meanings. The vernacular, too, is
far from unitary.
The most popular remake, with nearly 1 million views, makes a reference to the Polish
Air Force plane crash in Smolensk on 10 April 2010. The acting president of Poland,
Lech Kaczyński, along with numerous government and army officials, died in the acci-
dent. The animated video again features a battered and miserable protagonist – the ‘sad
plane’, driving slowly on the runway and leaving a blood-red trail behind. Laughed at by
children and wrestling with suicidal thoughts, he finally finds comfort after meeting a
duck.5 However, as soon as the plane takes off, happy and smiling, there is the sound of
an explosion and the famous photo of shirtless Vladimir Putin, with flames in the back-
ground, appears on the screen.
The video, then, pertains to the popular belief that the plane crash was, in fact, an
assassination carried out by Russian secret service, perhaps even on the direct order from
the president Putin himself. Although the Polish prosecutor’s office found no evidence of
explosion during the official investigation, the belief in hostile action prevailed in count-
less conspiracy theories, propagated through dubious scientific conferences and books.
The narrative was also adopted by Antoni Krauze in his 2016 film Smoleńsk, in which an
initially sceptical reporter gradually comes to the realization that the crash had to be
caused by explosives, unequivocally suggesting a deliberate attempt to destroy the plane,
albeit without specifying the culprit. The film had the backing of the ruling Law and
Justice party which came to power in 2015. One of its most prominent members, Antoni
Macierewicz, who became the Minister of National Defence in the newly formed gov-
ernment, ran a parliamentary taskforce to determine the real cause of the crash. Defying
the official findings of the previous commission, formed under the rule of his political
adversaries, the Civic Platform, he became the most vocal proponent of the explosion
hypothesis. While his investigation did not provide any definite proof, relying on cir-
cumstantial evidence and pseudo-scientific experiments, the annual reports issued by the
investigators kept on agitating the public, introducing deep rifts into the fabric of Polish
society.
In another popular version, the mockery is directed at a grey bus with a licence plate
‘TU5K’, a reference to the Polish prime minister at that time, Donald Tusk. The logo of
Szarecki 9

his party, the Civic Platform, is painted on the side of the vehicle, as well as the slogan
‘We shall do more’, with an asterisk and small-print postscript: ‘to steal from you’. While
the storyline remains basically unchanged, it makes subtle use of visual cues that pertain
to divisions on the political scene in Poland. Accordingly, the children tag the protagonist
with the word ‘THIEVES’, and the shiny white buses are marked with the logo of the
New Right, a political party then led by the controversial Janusz Korwin-Mikke. Finally,
the slogan at the end has been changed to: ‘Have no mercy for an unfit government that
steals from you every single day’.
In a similar fashion, the so-called ‘ZUS version’ attempts to turn the original storyline
into a critical political commentary.6 Besides the title, only two details – the beginning
and the ending – were slightly altered. The video starts with displaying the words ‘green
island’ as a reference to Civic Platform’s slogan from 2010 that highlighted Poland’s
steady economic growth in spite of the ongoing financial crisis that caused all other
European countries to be in the red. It also introduces yet another variation on the final
expression that now reads: ‘Have no mercy for the old and the weak’.
Therefore, both these remakes can be read as exposing a severe discrepancy between
the government’s story of success and the harsh realities of life in Poland, particularly for
the subaltern classes. In this sense, they feed into populist critiques of public institutions
that accuse ruling elites of abusing their power and privileges, instead of taking care of
the needs of ‘ordinary’ people. Such narratives, however, have been seized by other insti-
tutional actors, predominantly associated with right-wing politics, to increase their hold
on the public sphere.
Finally, there is a very short remake under the heading ‘terrorist version’. It depicts
the bus carrying a bearded passenger in the taqiyah cap on the back seat. As he screams
what sounds like a battle cry, the bus gets blown into pieces. In the comment section, the
creator explained that he didn’t use the call ‘Allahu Akbar’ because he thought the movie
might be removed from YouTube for violating its terms of use. However, he added, ‘we
all know what it’s really about’. An additional clue is provided by the character of a reli-
gious extremist who was copied and pasted from an American animated sitcom, Family
Guy. In one of the episodes, the dim-witted main protagonist, Peter Griffin, is lured to
convert to Islam, only to find himself inadvertently involved in a terrorist plot. In one
scene, he is taught how to ululate, that is, how to emit a loud high-pitched voice in a
modulated manner. In fact, the sound of ululation is traditionally associated with celebra-
tions, but both the Family Guy scene and the remake of the Sad Bus video appropriate the
practice to extend the symbolic link between Muslim culture and religious extremism. In
this way, they effectively equate Islam with terrorism.
All of these remakes, then, share a particular emotive orientation. They project a sub-
jectivity endangered by imagined others whose very presence threatens to disturb social
order by challenging dearly held values, such as freedom, justice, wealth and so on. The
power-hungry Russian autocrats, the corrupt national elites, or the erratic and remorse-
less Islamic terrorists function as symbolic figures to trigger such emotions as fear,
resentment, outrage and hatred. In this sense, the remakes of the Sad Bus video are part
of a larger ‘economy’ that involves the circulation of words and images to produce a dif-
ferentiation of ‘us’ and ‘them’, positing imagined others as the cause of ‘our’ adverse
feelings (Ahmed, 2004). In this sense, the work of emotions involves ‘sticking’ signs to
10 European Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)

bodies. That is, the memetic derivatives transmute emotional responses to the Sad Bus
video into ways of relating to variously defined others, marking particular bodies as a
threat and inciting antagonistic feelings towards them.
This process cannot be crammed into a dialectical frame that presupposes a structural
opposition between vernacular and institutional agencies. Instead, as the media event
unfolds, it proliferates connections in a field replete with varying tendencies that traverse
established boundaries. The memetic remakes are undoubtedly expressions of vernacular
creativity, making use of playfulness, mockery and impertinence that were usually consid-
ered as ‘weapons of the weak’ (Scott, 1985). To celebrate them as vernacular acts of resist-
ance, however, would be to give in to cultural populism (McGuigan, 1992). While
undoubtedly expressing some popular sentiments, these narratives directly contradict the
anti-discriminatory stance of the vernacular web that emerged in response to the original
Sad Bus video. Instead, they feed into xenophobic forms of social exclusion, creating con-
ditions for maintaining asymmetric relations within the network. As such, the remakes are
congruent with the neo-authoritarian political turn that has taken hold in Poland (Gdula,
2017), precipitated by the rise and increased impact of institutional structures comprising
right-wing political parties, populist movements and extremist groups that prey on the feel-
ings of fear, resentment, spite and hatred towards variously defined others.
The emergence of memetic derivatives, then, collapses the dialectic of the vernacular
and the institutional, understood both in terms of alternate agencies and distinct com-
municative conventions. As soon as we approach the event in its unfolding, it becomes
increasingly hard to identify a clearly defined set of interests, expectations or forms of
authority; rather, we are dealing with multiple agencies and forms of expression in con-
stantly evolving configurations. This entails a theoretical quandary: how to rethink the
workings of power to account for the non-linear dynamics of networked culture?

The resilience of power

Most considerations of vernacular expression on the web are contingent upon political mod-
els adopted directly from cultural studies that frame resistance in terms of semiotic struggle
between the ‘ruling bloc’ and subordinate groups. According to this approach, social power
is constituted through practices of subversion and co-optation of meanings that develop in a
dialectical manner within interconnected but discrete moments of production, distribution,
and consumption. In this context, vernacular expression is usually conceived as a set of
communicative conventions, coexisting with but, at the same time, distinct from dominant
ones and, therefore, affording alternate agency within the networked culture.
However, as Steven Shaviro (2003) argues:

the network is not a disembodied information pattern nor a system of frictionless pathways over
which any message whatsoever can be neutrally conveyed. Rather, the force of all the messages,
as they accrete over time, determines the very shape of the network. (p.24)

Consequently, in the networked milieu meanings cannot be isolated from their mode of
propagation. This is because the very process of dynamic interweaving is generative,
producing loops of relations that feed back into the network and affect what eventuates.
Szarecki 11

The non-linear nature of these interactions means that the dialectical framework cannot
account for how antagonisms and struggles percolate within the network, how they feed
on each other creating resonances or interferences that lead to recomposing the field of
interactions and, in consequence, altering potential outcomes.
One way to overcome this is to introduce the notion of affect into the dialectical
framework. According to Deleuze and Guattari (1987), affects do not coincide with dis-
cernible emotions, as analysed in the preceding section; rather, they are ‘flows of inten-
sity’ (p.162) that disrupt ‘signifying projects as well as subjective feelings’ (p.233). To
put it another way, while emotions refer to how culture and subjectivity capture and
organize bodily states that have been registered, affects are transformations that pass
between these states, largely unnoticed, as they operate beneath sociolinguistic framing.
As such, they can cut across divisions on the signifying plane, traversing what is consid-
ered separate. Accordingly, Brian Massumi (2002: 32–33) likens affects to bifurcation
points, at which multiple and mutually exclusive potentials coexist within events, ‘in-
forming’ their unfolding. This corresponds with the ternary logic of networked culture
whereby any encounter always involves a surplus of energy that feeds back into the
interaction and alters its outcome (Pasquinelli, 2008).
Approached affectively, then, power works through the structuration of the field of
possibilities, immanently modulating potential interactions in order to control the pro-
cess of emergence itself (Anderson, 2012; Massumi, 2015). In this context, awareness-
raising media events, like the Sad Bus video, operate affectively by creating a basin of
attraction. That is, by pointing to an emergent threat such campaigns attempt to modulate
the flow of affect and facilitate expedient behaviour, eliminating the threat or minimizing
its after-effects within the population (Grusin, 2010). However, affective flows operate
in a mode of continuous variation, undergoing perpetual displacements, recompositions
and transformations that constitute the evolving network. Thereby, affect always exceeds
attempts to control and organize it, albeit only to a certain extent.
The Sad Bus campaign provides an accurate illustration of this dynamic. Addressing the
controversial character of the ad, Łukasz Lewandowski – the vice-president of K2 agency –
openly stated that the success of the campaign will be dependent on the number of people
using the app, adding that ‘if the video can prevent at least one accident of a faulty bus, it was
worth it’. His argument, therefore, was no longer concerned with forcing the ‘correct’ mean-
ing of the ad on the susceptible public; rather, it relied on considering the possible effects in
the social that the video might engender. That is to say, the success or failure of the campaign,
according to Lewandowski, are not dependent on individual or collective interpretations and
feelings, but on its capacity to alter people’s actions. In this sense, the campaign pertains
primarily to affect. It works by establishing connections and feedback loops between (1) the
images and signs that comprise the Sad Bus story, (2) a population composed of affectively
attuned bodies and (3) tragic outcomes of real-life traffic accidents. These relationships are
set up with the aim of triggering self-spreading practices of imitation.
Accordingly, the assessment of the campaign pertains not to its message but to its
future effects, to ‘what is not yet but can potentially become’ (Thrift, 2007: 31). People
can castigate the video any way they want, as long as they keep on using the app and,
thereby, contribute to improving road safety. Consequently, K2’s idea turned out to be a
spectacular success. A poll by a government think-tank, the Centre for Informatics
12 European Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)

Technology, demonstrated that 31 percent of Internet users were familiar with the Sad
Bus ad, making it the third most recognized social campaign in Poland. Furthermore,
43 percent of respondents stated that the video’s message was about prioritizing child
safety in transit, and 26 percent of parents with children who had contact with the cam-
paign visited the government’s website. Almost 60 percent declared they will use the app
in the future. Coincidently, during the summer holidays of 2014, police forces captured
over 5000 faulty vehicles, twice the number from the previous year.
As a result, at the Advertiser’s Club gala in May 2015, the Sad Bus was honoured as
the campaign of the year and received five other awards. After the ceremony, K2 repre-
sentatives could proudly announce that ‘sometimes hate is the best thing that can happen
to an ad’. The aftermath of the campaign, therefore, provides an apt illustration of how
institutional power can work immanently, acting directly on affect by organizing its flows
and generating feedback mechanisms that render affect measurable, so as to aggregate its
circulation around a fixed-point attractor. This process is necessarily selective, as affective
flows always elude capture. Lewandowski’s statement, then, could easily be reversed by
asking: how many discriminatory practices evoked by the ad are required to make it ‘not
worth it?’ After all, it is not just that people felt or interpreted the video as discriminatory,
but then went on to use the app anyway; rather, they were concerned about its undesirable
social effects. And rightly so. As we have seen, the memetic remakes of the Sad Bus video
acted as additional attractors, channelling the flow of affect in ways that resonated with
xenophobic patterns of behaviour. This suggests that the ad effectively contributed to the
rise of prejudicial attitudes in Poland, even if indirectly.
Its undesirable potential effects, however, are never raised within K2’s narrative, and
the affective flows that escape the institutional goal of increasing road safety are consist-
ently overlooked when evaluating the campaign. Thus, the efficiency of the Sad Bus
campaign is ascertained by discerning a closed circuit of centripetal affective flows that
spiral in towards a fixed-point attractor.

Towards cultural complexity

From its outset, the Sad Bus campaign unfolds not through back-and-forth movement
between two opposing positions – the dialectics of the vernacular and the institutional, of
subversion and co-optation – but through complex, non-linear flows in their dynamic
interweaving. This suggest that networked culture should be understood as an ongoing
‘organization of diversity’ (Hannerz, 1992), whereby shared meanings are temporary
coagulations that emerge from multiple, recursive interactions, only to dissolve again in
the continuous self-production of social reality (Grossberg, 2010). In this sense, each
cultural event comprises dynamic affective flows that coalesce together to produce par-
ticular configurations of meanings and emotions, which, in turn, feed back into their
underlying generative processes. Consequently, each event always intersects and is
inflected by other events, as they unfold within the network.
The dynamics of networked culture, then, do not hinge on the reconciliation of oppo-
sites; rather, they are determined by evolving interrelations among multiple events, form-
ing ‘layers within layers of burgeoning complexity’ (Vitale, 2014: 2). In this context, the
Sad Bus campaign can be conceived as a dynamic media event comprising a sequence of
Szarecki 13

bifurcations. The K2 agency created the ad with a goal of improving safety on the roads,
which corresponds to a fixed-point attractor. However, the controversial form of the video
sparked controversy, resulting in an oscillation between two opposite attractors, corre-
sponding to the vernacular backlash and institutional justifications. In yet another turn, the
affective surplus generated by the ongoing circulation of interrelated images and texts per-
taining to the ad was transferred into increasingly disparate cultural circuits: conspiracy
theories concerned with the plane crash that killed the president of Poland, populist cri-
tiques of the ruling elites, and the Islamophobia industry. The event, then, increasingly
displayed fractal-like multiplication, as it was attracted by other media events that already
occurred and coalesced into more enduring cultural patterns.
Such patterns form the context in which any new event may or may not gain impact
and, consequently, destabilize or reinforce them (Boulton et al., 2015: 31). In other
words, establishing some kind of alterity is often not enough to bring about social change;
rather, the event has to pass a certain threshold of intensity and reach a tipping point at
which it can disturb the enduring patterns that uphold the status quo. This explains why
the backlash that accompanied the Sad Bus video failed to undermine institutional power.
The affective fluctuations introduced by subversive decodings of the ad lacked intensity
and were quickly re-channelled, via memetic variations, into enduring cultural patterns
of discrimination that permeate Polish society. Furthermore, K2 employed statistical
measures to create a feedback loop and channel affective flows back towards the initial
fixed-point attractor, that is, improving road safety. As a result, the backlash, in fact,
reinforced attitudes and institutions that it was supposed to challenge.
The campaign’s unfolding, then, demonstrates the resilience of power in networked
culture, its capacity to adapt and neutralize potentially disruptive events through imma-
nent, affective modulations that align them with enduring cultural patterns and corre-
sponding asymmetrical relations.

Conclusion
In this article, I argued that non-linear dynamics of networks challenge the established
ways of thinking about culture and power. Accounts that posit structural opposition
between the vernacular and the institutional, with its concomitant binary logic of subver-
sion and co-optation, fail to acknowledge the complex feedback loops that continually
recompose and transform networked relations, often in unpredictable ways. In contrast,
I advocated an approach that attempts to grasp networked culture in its ongoing transfor-
mation, by mapping the entanglements of multiple relations that both coalesce and dis-
solve in an ever-changing topography.
Accordingly, the Sad Bus campaign, conceived as a dynamic media event, did not
unfold according to the binary logic of vernacular and institutional push-and-pull; rather,
it proliferated connections in a non-dialectical manner to a multiplicity of incongruous
and mutually exclusive potentials of expression. Therefore, the emergence of vernacular
web that articulated oppositional meanings and emotions was just one fixed-point attrac-
tor in a series of ongoing differentiations.
In this sense, the vernacular web can be considered as an arbitrary ‘stop-operation’, com-
prising a retrospective ordering that pauses the ongoing event in thought, as it construes it
14 European Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)

(Massumi, 2002: 7). As a result, the non-linear dynamic of networked relations is caught in
a cultural freeze-frame and subordinated to positions it connects. Consequently, it can only
oscillate between two opposite poles which are predetermined: the heterogeneous irreduci-
bility of the field of emergence is construed in terms of a dialectical relationship between the
vernacular and the institutional.
This usually entails a claim that enacting some kind of alterity, usually discursive, by
the former amounts to a challenge to power. In contrast, the unfolding of the Sad Bus
campaign demonstrated that the vernacular and the institutional comprise multiple and
often contradictory agencies entangled in recursive relations. Consequently, making
such distinctions is prone to errors, as any alterity in the networked milieu is always
highly contextual and changeable. Furthermore, enacting alterity is often not enough to
undermine the structures of power which dynamically adapt to the fluctuations around
their core patterns. Accordingly, the vernacular backlash accompanying the Sad Bus
video, despite its anti-discriminatory orientation and contestation of institutional agency,
ultimately became a marketing success of both K2 and the Ministry of the Interior, while,
in the process, reinforcing prejudicial attitudes that it was attempting to challenge.
This process of continuous interweaving, involving multiple feedback loops, is at the
heart of networked culture, comprising its non-linear, generative dynamics. Therefore, if
we want to understand the workings of power in networked settings, we need to map out
cultural events in their ongoing transformation, as they continually interact with one
another, reinforcing or interfering with more enduring patterns.

Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the members of the Vernacular Culture Research Group at the
University of Warsaw – Paweł Dobrosielski, Piotr Filipkowski, Olga Kaczmarek and Marcin
Napiórkowski – for their suggestions regarding the initial draft of this paper.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article: The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for
the research, authorship, and/ or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Ministry
of Science and Higher Education in the Republic of Poland [Grant no.: 0107/NPRH3/H12/82/2014].

Notes
1. As in ‘Sad 2562’.
2. As in ‘Great 892’.
3. The original Polish word brudas is sometimes used as a derogatory term for people of a
darker skin tone.
4. As in ‘Happy’.
5. The president’s surname, ‘Kaczyński’, is a variation of the word kaczka, meaning ‘duck’.
6. The abbreviation ‘ZUS’ refers to the government’s social security institution.

ORCID iD
Artur Szarecki https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3950-6853
Szarecki 15

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Biographical note
Artur Szarecki is a Cultural Analyst and Music Journalist from Poland. He received his PhD in
cultural studies from the University of Warsaw in 2013. His research is focused on embodiment,
capitalism and popular culture. He also writes about music for Dwutygodnik (www.dwutygodnik.
com), and acts as an editor at beehype (www.beehy.pe).