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The manufactured impostor not only thrives on what once fed the real need, but attempts to murder its rivals by extinguishing desires for genuine experience. Just as acquiring all the commodities in a bachelor pad earns the playboy the right to impress women and therefore the reward of sex. I stayed to confirm my suspicions that there was something off about the way the world reacted to me—the old 4chan slogan, “tits or GTFO,” directed at any female person on the platform, cleared things up fast. In some cases, that distance has driven them to extremism, but it's also made them uniquely able to reflect the world back at the rest of us.
stars -- This is one of those books in the vein of ON THE CLOCK that I found absolutely rattling, and which will stick with me for long after reading. We’re all creatures of narrative, whether we think explicitly in those terms or not, and stories are one of the fundamental ways in which we engage with and grasp the meaning of the world. 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. 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. In It Came from Something Awful, Beran uses his insider’s knowledge and natural storytelling ability to chronicle 4chan's strange journey from creating rage-comics to inciting riots to—according to some—memeing Donald Trump into the White House.
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. Furthermore, the hatred the author describes as emerging out of /r9k/ is part of an ongoing pattern.
I absolutely recommend reading this book if the above doesn't put you off, and ideally with a group to really parse out its content. There is almost no mention of the history of race, racism, or civil rights activism, not to mention feminism in the book. His analysis of the role of depression in these internet cultures is probably the best part of the book. Withdrawn outsiders were not newly attracted to online extremism- the creation of /pol/ as an explicitly Neo-Nazi-friendly board just gave them a new place to play with those ideas.
Just a few years after punk died, Madonna was prancing onstage in the same studs and spikes, singing about how “we are living in a material world and I am a material girl,” flirting with the same duality of pleasure and permission that existed at the center of marketing. 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). I’m not sure why I avoided the fate of women like the user Loli-Chan, who was groomed by trolls from a young age to trade sexual images for virtual currency. By not weaving this into the history of 4chan sooner, the author fails to understand or outline for his read the ways in which 4chan /already was/ right leaning long before what he claims to be a new rightward shift in /r9k/ users. When the real issues come up, healthy states, the ones capable of handling and minimizing everyday dysfunction, have a great deal more capacity to respond than those happily waltzing toward their end.
Dale Beran has observed the anonymous messageboard community’s shifting activities and interests since the beginning. Though not entirely inaccurate (from my perspective, at least), Beran's depiction of Tumblr culture and "SJWs" feels reductive, simplifying (and sometimes casually dismissing) the viewpoints of these groups as a means of direct comparison to 4Chan and the alt-right.It's a nice hook for a publisher, but 4chan and Tumblr are eddies in the current, not "skeleton keys. Instead, they discovered it was far more profitable to simply generate false needs by convincing people “to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate. If you’re unable to wander through the beauty of un-despoiled nature, you can do so in a video game. 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.
My Buddhist leanings allow me to extend an arm towards the important tenet of the impermanence of all things. One of the themes that has been recurring in all of my reading is the power of social media in spreading ideology and misinformation, and the role of 4chan in all of this cannot be underestimated. It's maddening to me as both a socialist and a historian of social movements that so much of what passes for socialist politics these days is so shallowly informed about the history of even U.
Another problem with this book is that it takes free swipes at problematic right wing figures like Milo Yiannopoulos, Gavin McInnes or Jordan Peterson.
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