Ezequiel Soriano - Shitpublishing Workshop (in-person workshop) [Hype Studies Conference 2025 presentation]

This workshop invites participants to rethink the attention economy, accelerated digital production, and the logic of hype through the lens of shitposting. Drawing from the aesthetics and tactics of shitposting—fast, ironic, low-effort content designed to disrupt online communication and exploit platform dynamics—we propose to engage in shitpublishing: the application of these practices to the creation of books.

In this hands-on session, participants will produce literary works that prioritize quantity over quality, copy over originality, play over innovation, and speed over coherence. Using uncreative writing techniques (Goldsmith, 2011), generative AI tools and online self-publishing platforms, we will pursue the deliberately absurd goal of creating and publishing as many books as possible in two hours.

Rather than rejecting hyperproduction, this workshop embraces and exaggerates it to expose and subvert its mechanisms. Here, form overrides content, resulting in a literature of emptiness that challenges dominant narratives around creativity, authorship, and cultural value. This playful intervention reflects on what it means to make something public in the age of platforms, blurring the boundaries between posting and publishing, signal and spam.

This workshop emerges from the adaptation of early hyperpublishing experiments, developed as an artistic research method within an ethnography of memes and digital vernacular creativity (Soriano, 2023), and is part of an ongoing artistic research on expanded publishing and shitposting (Soriano, 2024; 2025).

This workshop will be fully in person and unfortunately not available for online attendees of the conference. Participants are expected to bring a laptop (or tablet with keyboard). The maximum amount of participants is 30, first come, first served.