In 2006, Jonah Peretti, technology director and co-founder of Huffington Post, started a modest lab for experimenting with data analytics and content circulation on the web. He was interested in understanding ‘viral culture’: the nebulous processes by which certain stories would explode online, moving rapidly and unpredictably across then-ascendant social media platforms and blogs. The project was a logical extension of Peretti's earlier experiments with digital networks. From early in his career he had an interest in, and proclivity for, understanding the spread of viral content. A 2001 e-mail exchange between Peretti and Nike over his request to have custom sneakers emblazoned with the word ‘sweatshop’ was a high-profile early example of something from the web ‘going viral’. A few years later, Peretti pioneered the monthly ‘Contagious Festival’ at Huffington Post, an open competition with simple rules for entrants: create a website that garners the most views in a month, win $2500. Of these early days, he says, ‘I got really fascinated by the idea of people sharing things with each other and thought it could be a bigger network than a social media network.’ Peretti set the project up as a lab in a basement in New York's Chinatown and gave it the name BuzzFeed.

BuzzFeed appears, superficially, to be a cultural phenomenon quite different from the techniques of population administration and measure discussed in Chapters three and four. I will show in this chapter that BuzzFeed listicles, and the algorithms that generate them, are expressions of a similarly logistical orientation to the world, which approaches it as a standing-reserve of material to be marshalled towards human ends. Listicles may get all the headlines (especially those heralding the scorn of cultural critics), but within the BuzzFeed platform are operational lists geared towards data mining and computational processes that employ the same techniques of compression, calculation, and circulation observed in Chapter three and four. The list form is a heuristic that allows us to see the logistical and infrastructural operations of digital culture that are typically hidden from view; it enables comparison between listing activities in contemporary networks and those in the trajectory of the modern ‘thinking cap’ sketched out above.