Nephila is a studio interested in adversarial play, shared fictions, and anomalous forms of cognition. In November 2025, Nephila organized an event centered on Chinese subcultures - in collaboration with JY Yan, Yannis Siglidis, and Jenn Leung, showcasing tactical demos, swarm software, reversed interpolations, and dirty products for a dirty era.

Written at the time of a global inflection point, between frozen tariffs, AI bubbles, and power shifts in a multipolar world, this report dives into the aesthetics, strategies, language, and identities defining Chinese subcultures, where platform logics are evolving into more opaque and alien forms. As 2025 unfolded, from TikTok refugees to the rise Deepseek, it became clear that China's influence as a global upstream source is shifting into the cultural realm. Chinese netizens have been navigating platform monopoly, censorship, and growth at an unprecedented scale in a compressed period of time. For this reason, the Chinese internet is one of the places where identity formation moves and reinvents itself faster than other parts of the world. From Ghost Fire Boys racing scooters through county towns to Tucool reclaiming the "Made in China" aesthetic, from civil servants cosplaying institutional stability to jellyfish girls lying in drainage ditches—these movements reveal how a generation navigates scripted reality while creating spaces where genuine expression becomes possible.

Importantly, this report is not merely a taxonomic exercise. It’s also a provocation for rethinking the very architecture of our platforms, networks, and software, and how these can be reimagined to make space for identities that are fluid, collective, and autonomous by design, asking: What does it mean for a product to be dirty? To refuse to be clean, optimized, categorizable? To reflect the chaos and uncertainty of the moment we are living in? What might platforms look like that don’t try to make you legible or marketable? Or technologies that leave space for unscripted, undefined behaviors and beings to emerge?