It came from something awful: how a toxic troll army accidentally memed Donald Trump into office, by Dale Beran, 2019. 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. Dale Beran has observed the anonymous messageboard community’s shifting activities and interests since the beginning. Very rarely, however, do they dive deep into the sadness and self-loathing, and the extreme darkness that leads to the anger and, inevitably, violence of young alt-righters.

Many argued the same point: the industrialized economies of wealthy nations like the United States, having fulfilled the basic needs of their citizens, have now turned from manufacturing things they didn’t need to, in effect, manufacturing need.Trump as our illustrious sociopathic, narcissistic, egotistical, pathological wrecking-ball liar-in-chief.

We are biological organisms programmed by our histories, experiences, exposures, interactions, and circumstances. I avoided this book when it first came out for a stupid but honest reason: it’s title, subtitle, and cover all made it look deeply inane. The story he tells - online shitposting getting more and more political, Gamergate, Steve Bannon and other figures pushing the 4chan trolls towards helping Trump getting elected, his perception of the flaws of identity politics and contemporary pop culture - is very familiar, but Beran has an intellectual crowding, drawing in particular on Marcuse.Anonymous’ assaults on women like Jessica Slaughter were not misguided applications of a new collective power they didn’t know what to do with, they were intentionally malicious acts that were part of a history of maliciously assaulting (under the guise of trolling) women, minorities, and people perceived as weaker than the anons- a history that was concurrent with the anti-corporate actions the author highlights to imply Anonymous was left-leaning.

And what I get is that I can't get it because the whole thing has been gestating in some parallel internet world that I have never engaged in. If a man didn’t marry in his early twenties and begin earning a wage to support his family, he was considered abnormal and, in some ways, not really a man. The buildings, after all, looked temporary; ramshackle strip malls, Pizza Huts, and 7-Elevens thrown up chockablock—all of it devoted to a transient purpose, meeting a momentary need in the marketplace. 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.When the first modern American counterculture emerged in the form of the Beats, it challenged both the breadwinner and playboy archetypes by attempting to disassociate masculinity from wage earning. WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. His chapter on Tumblr is far more sympathetic than Nagle's, yet he's still critical of its popularized version of Judith Butler's feminism and queer theory and suggests that something dangerous came from the 4chan crowd discovering that line of thinking. It is a truly fascinating devolution, one historians will be writing about for another fifty years as they comb through digital records. This book shines a light on some of the funkier alleyways and personalities of "the chans," illustrating over a number of chapters, for instance, the connection between a guy who wanted to start a message board to trade anime porn and the ascension of the alt-right and QAnon (which since this was published has broken even more into the real world in awful, tangible ways).

As some other reviewers have noted, he is much more sympathetic to Tumblr, including Zoe Quinn, than Angela Nagle is. It's a blow-by-blow study of the devolution of American culture, especially during the past few years: the rise of the radical "proud boys"; the use of the word "cuck" to insult liberals; the proliferation of offensive memes; the seemingly endless racist, inflammatory rhetoric; and the death of 32-year-old Heather Heyer, who was hit by a car driven by a white supremacist in Charlottesville in 2017--an event that prompted Donald Trump to say there were good people on both sides.It’s possible that part of this flaw comes from a misunderstanding of how ‘the best’ posts rose to the top of 4chan. Unfortunately, the ideologies persist, but that's a bigger fish we'll be dealing with the rest of my life.