Description
In 2009, the website Drawball.com provided users with a blank circular canvass upon which they could alter the colour of one pixel at a time. Quickly, this canvass took on the shape of the Polish flag, despite the efforts of other users to prevent this occurrence. When the US Capitol was stormed on January 6, 2021, observers noticed the presence of the national flag of Kekistan. This was unusual for two reasons: first, that the rioters were US nationalists; secondly, that Kekistan does not exist. When online spaces are colonised by citizen patriots and the flag of a fictional fascist state is flown as protestors storm government buildings, then we must acknowledge that contemporary geopolitical imaginaries go beyond material space.
Using the popular culture artefacts of Kekistan and Polandball, this paper argues that online spaces represent unique challenges for contemporary understandings of geopolitics. Through these cases, this paper interrogates the emotive politics of vicarious identification with fictional geopolitical entities and their manifestations in both offline and online spaces. Fundamentally, this paper is a provocation that asks us to question our preconceptions of what constitutes the geopolitical.
