Platforming the Joe Rogan Experience: Cancel Culture, Comedy, and Infrastructure

Abstract

This paper outlines a cultural critique of the Joe Rogan Experience. Framing the podcast as an adaptive cultural platform, I emphasize how it is ideologically informed by both the established infrastructure and dynamics of communicative capitalism and Joe Rogan’s ethos as a comedian. The paper discusses three ways Joe Rogan and his format negotiate their relationship with platform infrastructures. The first is Rogan’s relationship with Spotify and his interest in shaping “cancel discourses” and, subsequently, his own role as an embedded, “uncancellable” skeptic. The second is the combination of Rogan’s roast universalism and pioneering speech-a-ton format, designed to establish an infrastructure for platforming his cohort of podcasting comedians on YouTube. The third is Rogan’s relationship with platform-owner Elon Musk, whose communicative capitalist agenda has political implications. The paper establishes a theoretical connection between studies of platformisation and the under-studied cultural influence of podcasting comedians.