Flarf 'poetry' and the Facebook Tagging Algorithm

"Flarf poetry, an avant garde practise that emerged alongside the internet and involving mining search engines for ‘found text’, has been recently taken up by a community of ‘Alt Lit’ poets and transplanted into the context of Facebook. The community surrounding the ‘Alt Lit’ poet Steve Roggenbuck has recently discovered that Facebook’s own ‘tagging’ algorithm provides a serendipitous access to found texts, in the form of groups, ‘like’ pages, apps and check-ins, which can all be ‘tagged’ as hyperlinks in Facebook comment threads and other posts. These are then strung together to form a strange new kind of poetry, with a distinctly ‘Facebook’ flavour. The practise is interesting for its playful and expressive engagement with code, in the form of Facebook’s impenetrable tagging algorithm, which forms the opaque basis of the practise. At the same time, some commentators have described the practise as a “raging against the machine” of Facebook’s commercialisation of personal information, a kind of fight from within (or usurpation of) the machinery itself. In this paper I will discuss the logic behind the Facebook-tag flarf poem, discuss some implications of writing poems using these found phrases and structures and doing so as part of a community. I will argue that the repurposing of Facebook’s tagging algorithm as an expressive medium is itself a found practise, transmitting from person to person much like an Internet meme - viewable as a kind of virus running like code inside the human brain. Facebook-tag-flarf poetry will be contextualised within a larger movement of playfully or expressively repurposed technology, such as twitter bots and the ‘@_ebooks’ phenomenon."