It had to happen. As the internet grew in popularity and became an all-pervasive part of American culture, subcultures of young people coalesced around ideological identities, just like they used to in the offline world. As these subcultures grew in number and strength, eventually they clashed in online spaces with battles over speech and representation acting as a proxy for territorial domination. Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies is said to be the first work of sociology to document and analyze these subcultures, showing how and why dialectical concepts of liberal and conservative, left wing and right wing, and libertarian and authoritarian have broken down and been replaced by definitions we haven’t come to terms with yet.
In the earlier days of social media, chat rooms, forums, and video games, the seeds of a new free speech movement were sown. Free speech advocates included tech-utopianists, anarchists, libertarians, hackers, trolls, activists, and others who saw the internet as a self-regulating communal space where any restrictions on speech were unwelcome. What could possibly go wrong? Sites like Something Awful, Reddit, Tumblr, and 4chan allowed users to anonymously post whatever they wanted, so it wasn’t long before things like racism, gore, and illegal forms of pornography began showing up. Some of the people posting these things were trolls or pranksters with no ideological commitments other than a desire to shock and offend people in the name of humor.
Then came the watershed moment of GamerGate. If you don’t know what GamerGate was, it is probably a good sign that you actually have something interesting to do with your life other than spending excessive amounts of time playing video games. But it is the conflict and turning point in online culture that defined the subcultures that Angela Nagle writes about. GamerGate happened when a teenage girl attempted to open the way for other girls to participate in online games which, until then, had been an exclusively male space. This started a flame war in which the girl got bombarded with hate speech, harassment, death threats, and doxxing. The conflict split the tech-utopianists into rival factions roughly divided along lines of right- and left-wing ideologies.
On one hand, various white supremacists, neo-nazis, incels, and right-wing libertarians gathered under the banner of free speech. But free speech for this ilk was never about the freedom to speak truth to power as the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s originally set out to be. Rather it was about the right to be as offensive as possible and then whining when people pushed back against their vitriolic drivel. There were a lot of trolls who were simply posting racist or sexist jokes for the sake of being obnoxious, but some more strategic actors saw potential in this free speech movement and began recruiting the trolls into active politically oriented organizations. It was a harvest of internet idiocy that became known as the alt.right, although I think “alt.wrong” is a more appropriate designation. The full-time, persistently annoying babbler Milo Yiannapoulis brought this gathering of douschebags to the attention of Steve Bannon at Breitbart News, forming them into a constituency with ideas that filtered into mainstream politics, snowballing into what we now know as the MAGA movement and forming the cult of personality around Donald Trump, the worst president America has ever had. One of the sparks that lit the fire of a fascist uprising in America was started on an internet forum by a bunch of socially inept jerks who couldn’t get laid.
The left-wing online community didn’t exactly meet the challenge of the alt.right in a mature fashion, unfortunately. Made up mostly of radical feminists, gender identity activists, so-called Social Justice Warriors, the self-appointed PC police, and “woke” activists, this new group of leftists were little more than a gang of middle-class white mean girls who chased most of their would-be leftist allies away from the left, sometimes directly into the welcoming arms of the alt.right. Characterized by a strong authoritarian streak and a penchant for refusing to tolerate anybody who disagreed with them, they were anything but liberal and, in fact, eventually rejected liberalism as a form of fascism. Logic and the free exchange of ideas were never their strong points. They became advocates of censorship and supporters of some really bizarre ideas. Nagle points out that they claim there are more than fifty genders, some of which are supernatural or based on cartoon characters, all of them being legitimate except for the category of cis gendered males. Females who act like cis gendered males are perfectly acceptable though, as if that makes any sense. Even worse, these bullies have cannibalized their movement and isolated it from the rest of society rather than making adjustments to it. People who try to associate with them get attacked on grounds of ideological impurity and chased away. Reminiscent of the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, their constant refrain is “off with their heads.” They also bear a strong resemblance to Robespierre in his Reign of Terror at the end of the French Revolution when everybody he thought of as being insufficiently revolutionary, which was most people, were sent to be beheaded on the guillotine. Their ideas and behavior were so bizarre that a lot of people who might have been sympathetic to their cause turned tail and ran in the other direction. Nagle explains this as a form of social capital, in which social prestige and privilege are made to be a scarce commodity so that those who have it can horde it, using it as a weapon of power and domination.
Angela Nagle does not just report on what she found in her online field work. She provides a theoretical framework as a framework for interpreting these subcultures. The main idea comes from the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci and his theory that culture preceded politics. Societal changes originate in social movements and cultural shifts then proceed into the realm of politics. What the alt.right did that was lacking in their leftist counterpart was use strategy to push their outre beliefs and practices into the mainstream. The left, on the other hand, isolated themselves from mainstream acceptance by pushing most people away from their clique. The free speech fascists were better at utilizing online tools to further their agenda whereas the politically correct left whittled themselves down to irrelevance by acting like tyrants. If One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest serves as a possible metaphor here, the online left took on the role of Nurse Ratched and the alt.right took on the role of Randall McMurphy.
Such a classic novel and movie, espousing classical liberal ideas about freedom and individual liberties, being used as a reference point here is not as far fetched as you might suppose. The alt.right were influenced by other leftist counter-cultural figures like Michel Foucault, Mario Savio, Abbie Hoffman, and Robert Anton Wilson and so concepts of transgression and rebellion are brought into the discussion. Nagle claims techniques of past radical leftists were stripped of their contents and adapted to right-wing ideologies in a bizarre counter-shift away from the growing authoritarian tendencies of the radical left. Nagle also brings the Marquis de Sade, Nietzsche, the Surrealists, the Beat Generation, and Georges Batailles into her discussion of transgression since they advocated the complete liberation and free flow of the id. The unrestrained pursuit of human desires, no matter how destructive, was the modus operandi of the tech-utopianists’ free speech milieu on 4chan before it became a recruiting ground for MAGA fascism.
The author’s theoretical analysis takes up most of this short book, but still lacks depth in the end. She identifies ideological patterns and introduces a simple theory to anchor her discussion, but then doesn’t proceed much beyond its initial introduction. Her conclusion is also objectionable. As a moderate feminist, she claims that rebellion is a strictly male-dominated activity-space and that transgression has used up its usefulness as a means of critiquing society and therefore should be abandoned. While you could make the case that rebellion has been primarily done by men, history has provided no shortage of women who rebelled against the establishment. The fictional character of Eve transgressed when she ate the forbidden fruit. The 19th century Russian anarchists called People’s Will were led by two women. We’ve also had Emma Goldman and the Suffragette Movement. Angela Davis was a prominent Black Power activist in the 1970s. The arts have provided transgressive works by Frida Kahlo and Diane Arbus. Musicians like Wendy O. Williams, Lydia Lunch, and the Riot Grrls of the hardcore punk scene have been just as loud and provocative as any male counterpart you can think of. The list goes on and on. If we abandoned rebellion and transgression then our society would stagnate and change would be impossible. Just because transgression can be embraced by people she disagrees with that doesn’t mean that it has no place in the human experience. If the alt.right has their way and turns America into a fascist dictatorship, then transgression and rebellion will be necessary to save our country from self-immolation anyhow.
All I can say is that Kill All Normies is successful at accurately documenting and introducing its subject matter from a sociological standpoint. Its theory is simplistic and incomplete, but for the purposes of this brief study it is functional. Forget about Angela Nagle’s conclusion. This book is a beginning inquiry into the subject of online subcultures and their spread offline into the broader society; it does not exhaust its subject. Finally. There is one big gap in the analysis that needs to be confronted. Why is age not mentioned as a factor in these online communities? She is obviously writing about either teenagers or immature adults, so why is the subject of adolescent social behavior never brought into the discussion? The larger question is, why would such a small group of geeky kids have such an outsize influence over the course and conduct of the host society? Teenagers don’t know enough about the world to make rules for the rest of us. We already know that when young people try to fix the world’s problems, disaster can often be the result. Allowing this to happen in our time says something about where we are as a nation and the negative social impact the internet can have if we don’t keep it in check.
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