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

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The reductionism is too much to bear for any not in the full throes of a Trump-equals-Hitler fantasy—a psychosis apparently shared by both the alt-right and the left. By the leftist Dale Beran, for that matter. Remember the claim that the OK hand gesture is a white-power symbol? It Came From Something Awful takes far too seriously 4chan's memes. In that, however, Beran is joined by far too many people. 4chan is significant because the media over-reports its invented and obnoxious memes, which then causes the actual alt-right to adopt them, which then confirms them as actual symbols of the alt-right. And round and round the circle goes. 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. It’s natural that we expect the end of a story—the end of an empire—to have some drama. The author doesn’t identify this pattern until Chapter 10, when he finally writes that “it turned out a surprisingly large amount of 4chans culture aligned with the sensibilities of /pol/. After all, a majority of the boards were filled with racist and homophobic slurs” and “hyper offensive trolls had defined 4chan’s culture since the earliest days.” 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. Withdrawn outsiders were not newly attracted to online extremism- the creation of /pol/ as an explicitly Neo-Nazi-friendly board just gave them a new place to play with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.

Bloc is a tactic, not an organization, a uniform or an identity.” Garrison Davis, “Uprising” podcast episode 10 Selfhood was annihilated by anonymity.” Even the quasi-responsibility associated with a consistent screen name makes people accountable. When no one is watching everyone is terrible. You might not personally care about Donald Trump, the rise of white supremacy and how Charlottesville happened but if, like me, you are interested in how the world has got to where it is now and what might need to be done to prevent things shifting even further, this book is a good place to try and gain some understanding of it all. well worth a read, but perhaps not whilst you are trying to have a relaxing holiday. The Richard Spencer punching incident gets described near the end of the book. Just a couple chapters from the end. I’ll confess that’s where I quit reading. It was the second time I put the book down, and I just can’t make myself try for a third. p>Beran's book succeeds the most when he is detailing the complex history and terrifying personalities that inhabit this online world. While some of the names are familiar, others are less so, and it is clear that he has a very close inside knowledge of this strange new world that most of us have probably never encountered. He doesn't let himself get too bogged down in the technical aspects of it, either. His is very much a story of a generation of young men who, confronted with profound inequality and the growing power of various social movements, found solace in the ability to take nothing seriously.

Kit

But if the reader can drop the idea that Trump is Hitler. Drop the idea that the alt-right is actually the cause of Trump's election. Drop the idea that 4chan was capable of swinging an election. Drop the reflexive left-is-good/right-is-evil rhetoric that Beran indulges. Then what remains in It Came From Something Awful is still something that should interest both sensible liberals and sensible conservatives. The book is, at its best, a psychological study of a set of people, mostly young men, who found themselves in the early 2000s off on the far edges of statistical distribution. They were underemployed and unfinanced, but clever in a morally unserious way. And they had all the time in the world to spend online. this book purports to explain how a loosely-associated group of Internet trolls set in motion (or continued a movement?!) political wheels that put our beleaguered president in the White House. it fails in its mission.

Pairing this book with Kathleen Belew's 'Bringing the War Home' bridges the gap between white supremacist groups and online culture b/c her book explores recruitment tactics by WS groups which has heavily infiltrated 8chan/kun and discord. In some sense, It Came From Something Awful is simply a particular explication of a general truth we've known for some time: The glory of the Internet is that it allows like-minded people to find one another—and the horror of the Internet is that it allows like-minded people to find one another. Book lovers, stamp collectors, and model-airplane enthusiasts can all band together to share their hobbies. So can neo-Nazis and child molesters. Or in the case of 4chan and 8chan, Beran claims, a bunch of disaffected teenage boys began by "talking online about Japanese anime" on the "Something Awful" chatboard, and they gradually morphed into the alt-right. this new generation did not regard themselves ‘unto gods,’ as the 60s generation had described itself, able to remake the world in their image. Rather, their identities and requests were much reduced. They had long ago turned inward to parse worlds of fear, anxiety, and depression until their safety became the subject of their external demonstrations. Their objections were rooted in the assumption that they were powerless and marginalized. They weren’t interested in shattering what had proved to be unbreakable institutions that had made universities into funnels for computer-assisted meritocracies. Instead, they were focused on battles they could win, which generally meant consumer-style demands.” So they started using their cleverness, creating nihilistically tinged comic memes for one another—memes that played against cultural norms. And since the only culture they knew was one of liberal triumph, they took anti-liberalism as their vehicle. They made fun of the culture's pieties, and they toyed with the things that culture had said was wrong, particularly sexism and racism.Capitalism has trained successive generations of young people to center their thinking on personal gratification through media infused with the countercultures it has already consumed. Now that so many lead lives streaked with fears of a sudden catastrophic economic collapse, these small pleasures and affirmations appear doubly fascinating.” 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. If you're a normie who can't quite wrap your head around exactly why so many Internet goons have anime girl avatars, or how popular online political action shifted from occupying Zuccotti Park to mass trolling actress Leslie Jones and the female reboot of Ghostbusters, then Beran's book provides a good overview of Internet culture. But he also gets at the undergirding feeling behind all these actions...a convincing argument that we're all caught up in simulations of political change rather than actually affecting it." --Andrew Limbong, NPR However, this Hefnerian vision of manhood was still tied to economic achievement. Like the breadwinner version of manhood, it encouraged conformity and merely changed the system of rewards.