It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump Into Office

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One more reason we need healthcare for all—including mental healthcare—so we do not foster more lone-wolf gunmen, more women-stalking murderers, more angst-ridden men-children, more Nazi-saluting gun-toting gym-rats. However, as the new wave of hippie counterculture spread across the country, society responded in a novel way. I think he gets really good when he ties together his own personal narrative with the richness of the text and the technology of the last twenty years.

Artists did not reach outside art, but inward toward fantasy and self-reflection, only able to produce Romantic art: proof that there was more to the world than what it was, that it could be imaginatively reinvented. Reading Dale Beran’s chronicle of 4chan, the anonymous imageboard where some of the internet’s worst scandals have been fomented, feels like scrolling through the forum itself.Journalists and scholars don’t like it, and usually can’t tell when someone fakes it (the sheer lack of new information in “Kill All Normies” should have been a clue, but hey, it was 2017). That being said, this book IS about 4Chan and the alt-right, and of all the books I've read on internet culture, this one (from my perspective) creates the most comprehensive history of the alt-right's formation and comes closest to capturing the foulness that is 4Chan. He attributes Caitlyn Jenner's coming out in 2015 to the "ideology" of Tumblr leaking into the broader culture, rather than acknowledging that transgender politics had long preceded the internet (and did not originate with Judith Butler).

Actually going into their spaces, especially the fora, is more like levering open a rock and sticking your face into what’s underneath. Un-coincidentally, one of the books that sparked the countercultural revolution, Herbert Marcuse’s 1964 One-Dimensional Man, happened to be on the subject of societal expectations and calibrating one’s own sense of inner gratification. Unlike some Fisher epigones, his hopelessness about/spite towards the left doesn’t lead him to hate on online libs/leftists to the detriment of his analysis. These critiques came from leftist cultural critics like Charles Reich and Marcuse, but also conservatives such as Catholic political commentator Reinhold Niebuhr and liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith. The power of a shitposting, nihilistic subculture to influence the language and arguments that form our discourse is disheartening but necessary to understand.It starts as an introduction to how a subset of Internet trolls became an outsized influence in American culture and politics, and ends being a big-picture view of how two generations of young-to-middle-aged adults were essentially destroyed by cultural cynicism and a punishing economic system. I still sometimes try to imagine the reception on “the old internet” that I only watched from a distance to the idea that anyone was entitled to sex… well, between the rise of both internet porn and dating apps (the latter of which could be seen to quantitatively prove nerds’ inadequacy) and the egging on of cultural/political entrepreneurs like Milo Yiannopolous, Mike Cernovich, and eventually Trump’s man Steve Bannon, a new crew of culture industry vultures found ways not just to commodify a counterculture’s dissent, but to weaponize it. I suppose where the Fisher school comes in at all is that the author’s embeddedness in some of its precepts undermines him, turns what could have been a great work into a decent one.

He also oversteps his abilities as an amateur sociologist and makes sweeping and simply wrong claims about a wide variety of social movements in the second half of the book. a convincing argument that we're all caught up in simulations of political change rather than actually affecting it.Anonymous grew out of 4chan, and while a lot of people pooh-pooh it now, whatever else it represented, it represented at least some people rejecting Gen Xer nihilism for some sort of collective, values-based project. Part of the reason I think the book captured my interest was because I really was the demographic of young white guys and very well could have been radicalized by these neo nazi pieces of shit. But it’s not so wrong as to be unusable, and also probably represents something like the historical common sense of a lot of the people who helped make the forum culture, and at least part of the story as understood by many participants in it today (including, mutatis mutandis, the Fisher cult). But within a few short years, the site’s ideology spun on its axis; it became the birthplace and breeding ground of the alt-right.

In terms of interpretation of this story, Beran is on somewhat shakier ground, but makes some decent connections and points.

For me personally it also instilled an awareness of the myriad ways the font of Internet culture seeped into my particular corridors of the web. The disaster—a major crisis of political legitimacy, a coronavirus pandemic, a climate catastrophe—doesn’t so much break the system as show just how broken the system already was. The author attempts to cite sources but most of his claims about internet culture are just claims, and many don’t match my experiences in the same online spaces at all. Strains of counterculture perished, and new mutations were born with adaptive counterstrategies to avoid being immediately devoured. His analysis of the role of depression in these internet cultures is probably the best part of the book.