This article examines the transformation of terrarium building from a colonial-era hobbyist practice into a contemporary YouTube-based citizen science movement, analyzing how this shift reflects changing conceptualizations of nature's relationship to capital. Through a case study of AntsCanada, a prominent YouTube channel focused on ant-keeping terraria, the article demonstrates how traditional terrarium design's “logic of closure” has been subordinated to a “logic of function” within social media's attention economy. The channel's evolution from simple ant colonies to complex community terraria reveals how contemporary platform capitalism preserves and mobilizes multiplicities of nonhuman matters of concern as speculative inventory for future business opportunities. Drawing on actor-network theory and Alain Badiou's theory of multiplicities, the article argues that this YouTube entrepreneur exemplifies the new vectoralist class in the current software capitalism, where profit derives not from direct resource extraction but from redirecting system excesses into new affordances. The article concludes that while this vectoralist approach to scaling ecosystems appears to mirror Badiou's concept of truth procedures, it ultimately serves as capitalism's novel instrument for capturing nonhuman multiplicities.
Sungyong Ahn (Tue,) studied this question.