What were the enabling conditions for the spread of the Obama Hope image? In an interview, creator Shepard Fairey attributes it to a kind of grassroots movement supported by motivated individuals and the Internet. This account is certainly correct, insofar as grassroots dynamics, motivated individuals, and the Internet did contribute to the ubiquity of Obama Hope. However, it is worth emphasizing the partiality of such account; characterizing the overall spread of the image as a grassroots phenomenon overlooks or downplays the importance of centrally-organized and hierarchical forces to the development and circulation of the Obama Hope image, which some believe included the official Obama campaign (see Gries, Still Life). Commercial entities such as Paste Magazine also played a key role in Obama Hope’s broad circulation because, in producing Obamicon.me, Paste provided easy-to-use image generation, sharing, and web hosting. As Laurie Gries notes, the website was one among many digital technologies available to create your own Obama Hope style image, but “Obamicon.me differentiated itself from other Obamifying technologies in allowing Obamicons either to be saved onto visitors’ computers via a simple right click and then uploaded to Flickr or Facebook, which many people have done, or archived and shared in the obamicon.me gallery so that comments can be made in response to an image and links can be established” (Still Life 253). Although “the Internet” was certainly involved in the viral success of the image, the decentralized network configuration—or the technical structure— of the Internet is no guarantee of decentralized politics. In fact, the creation of streamlined tools to generate images and the popularity of social platforms to share those images introduced significantly more centralization to virality than the phrase “the Internet” itself might suggest.
The instant and immediate removal of millions of user-generated Obamicons shows how, despite the accounts of decentralization that dominate not only discussions of the Obama Hope phenomenon but also the more general phenomena of user-generated content and virality, centralization is in some ways more salient on the web than in other physical spaces. Although anyone with the time, resources, and ability can make a website, and anyone with the URL and an internet connection can visit the website, most Internet traffic is routed through search engines like Google to major websites, or takes place in walled gardens like Facebook or Netflix. As a result, the distribution of web traffic (and, subsequently, attention) depends on commercial monopolies, which means that viral phenomena—from memes to social movements—are subject to centralized control. Compare the spreading of the Obama Hope image through the more traditional means of street art: pasting and graffiti. These methods are typically carried out by individuals or small collectives of individuals and require a greater investment of time and materials, whether prints, paste, or paint. These methods also typically entail a degree of personal risk for, as many places have regulations against the spread of street art. Once placed, street art images are subject to variable life spans that depend on the content of the image, the physical and social dynamics of the area, and the interests of property owners, police officers, street artists, and others. Since Obamicon.me remained online through 2013, it is likely that images created with and collected at the site outlived a majority of their street counterparts. However, there are very different dynamics of control at work with images on the Internet compared to images on the street. An Obama Hope image pasted on a city wall is subject to local jurisdiction and distributed factors such as regulations, traffic, neighborhood dynamics, means of enforcement, the weather, and so on. An image created and hosted on Obamicon.me is subject to more centralized control, living and dying according to the corporation that holds the servers, with very little opportunity for contestation or negotiation.12
Since one of the distinguishing features of digital visual culture is that it is networked, it is important to pay attention to the characteristics of these networks. If images are hosted on a single platform, that platform is likely to be subject to the actions of a corporation and will be available only as long as the interests of the corporation are served keeping it online. The same features that contribute to viral phenomena (ease of use, sharing, monetization) are often ones that render them vulnerable to removal. As Jill Lepore cautions, “a lot of people do believe that if it’s on the Web it will stay on the Web. Chances are, though, that it actually won’t.” The takedown of Obamicon.me website is not an isolated incident. Consider the takedown or substantial transformation of other web platforms such as GeoCities and MySpace, where entire online communities now only exist in fragments, saved to individual computers, as cached pages, or in archived-but-unorganized collections. Likewise, consider the controversial policy changes that image hosting service Photobucket implemented in June of 2017, when the company disabled the free hosting of images on third party sites and required users to pay an annual fee of $399 (US). The service, which has been around since 2003, removed hosted images and replaced them with an image of a speedometer and the following message: “Your account has been restricted for 3rd party hosting.” The error message image also urged users to upgrade their Photobucket membership level. These error message images now litter websites and online marketplaces like Etsy and eBay, as most users have refused to upgrade their accounts (Garun). While the spread of viral images may be partially explained as a grass roots phenomena, especially given the geographic distribution of the various people involved in virality, the case of Obamicon.me shows an important way in which centralizing forces are at work in digital visual culture, and this centralization comes with important political implications.
Although the web has signaled a move away from the primacy of media institutions like broadcast television and the press, circulation (and its failure) continues to depend on institutions—just not those we might expect. Consider the institutions guiding the web, the sets of standards that make pages load consistently and globally, the commercial institutions that get in on trends, finding ways to try and monetize them. The huge spike in web traffic on Obamicon.me generated advertising revenue that led users to other Paste Magazine content and helped contribute to the relevance of the Paste brand (FOLIO). When those goals were no longer being met, the company could (and did) pull the content and features offline. While the collection of Obamicons were an important part of the cultural heritage of Obama’s election and presidency (Gries, Still Life), fueled partisan divides and supported dog-whistle politics (Gries, "Obama Zombies"), represented a facet of the democratization of online activism (Bayerl and Stoynov), and served as an exemplary of remix culture on the web (Edwards), these factors were not salient to the institutions and infrastructure that enabled the cultural phenomena—namely Paste Magazine. As a commercial entity, Paste was primarily, if not exclusively, concerned with the ways that Obamicon.me did (and later did not) contribute to the profitability of the company. The values and commitments of a platform need not, and often do not, align with the values and commitments of its diverse users—to say nothing of the values and commitments of the scholar, journalist, or public critic. This is not to say that Obamicons did not perform important cultural and political functions, but rather that these functions were dependent upon, at least in part, technological infrastructures built and supported by underlying economic imperatives.
Commercial tools to create, host, and share digital images always serve multiple masters. The spread of Obamicons online was not an exclusively grassroots movement; indeed, the spread was enabled by and participated in advertising-supported economic models and the fight for attention and engagement. Researchers should not forget the different motivations, beneficiaries, and commitments of the attention economy when examining the outputs of digital visual culture, the images shared on the Internet. While social media has many parallels to street art and activism, cities are not unplugged once they no longer serve business models—at least, not immediately and without comment.
12. Ownership of servers is a crucial mechanism of control for online content. If one owns the servers responsible for hosting a site as Paste Magazine did, then one has the authority to determine whether the site is available online. A similar dynamic of control was at work in the closure of early personal webpage community GeoCities, which was taken offline by Yahoo! in 2009. Although individual users can save copies of their content to their personal machines or make it available through other locations online, such as posting their Obamicon on a blog or social network site, without access to the original files and control of a server, there is no way to preserve the full context and functionality of a site online.↩