I once heard somebody, I forget who, say that the internet is like a city having good neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods, the latter should only be approached with caution or avoided altogether. Although it’s an overly simplified simile, it does contain some truth as there are some websites that just aren’t good places to visit. I’d like to extend the simile further by saying that aside from good and bad neighborhoods, all cities have sewers too. The sewers of the internet are the chan message board websites, most especially the /r/ thread on 4chan and just about everything on 8chan. `Dale Beran’s It Came from Something Awful details the development and history of these internet sewers and the role they played in the rise of Donald Trump and the alt.right.
To begin with Beran gives a brief history of American counter-cultures from the 1960s to the 2000s. He brings up the hippies, the punks, and what he claims to be the nihilist zeitgeist of the 1990s, mostly in relation to grunge music and the overlap with the growing incursion of the internet into American life. His explication of these counter-cultures is flimsy and he doesn’t seem to know much about them. His declaration of the 1990s as being a decade of nihilism is a strange way to define a counter-culture too; he seems to be confusing the concepts of a youth subculture with a counter-culture, the former simply being whatever trends the sub-class of young people are following and the latter being a cultural group that forms in direct opposition to the beliefs and practices of the dominant host culture. But so be it. This book isn’t really about those social movements anyways. The most legitimate aspect of this book’s opening is the tie almost imperceptible ties between the hippies and two prominent aspects of the later internet culture. One connection is the creation of usenet groups in the 1970s, something developed by nerdy hippies with a fascination for computers. The other is the practice of hacking developed by phone phreaks who invented ways of using digital technology to steal phone services from AT&T.
Beran makes the connection between the original usenet groups, newsreaders, and the chan sites which originally developed in Japan. Then a message board website called Something Awful came on the scene. Young American computer nerds with a fascination for Japanese manga and anime began to use it and eventually left due to content restrictions established by the moderators. They started their own site called 4chan and everything went to hell from there. Considering that Something Awful is mentioned in the title, that pioneering discussion forum doesn’t play a prominent role in this historical narrative; maybe this book could have had a better title.
Most of 4chan’s users were teenagers, some as young as twelve, who had maximal computer skills and minimal social skills. The worst of these kids congregated on the sub-forum /r/, which stands for “random”, becoming a free for all where anything gross, offensive, or darkly humorous was posted. These geeky, socially awkward, sometimes autistic gamers and socially challenged digital jerks were originally apolitical, but something brewed to the surface of their clique. A group of hacktivists developed, organized a protest against the Church of Scientology, helped coordinate the Arab Spring, and initiated the Occupy Wall Street movement which turned out to be a revolutionary dud. These hacktivists grew to become the anarchist-libertarian hacker collective that came to be known as Anonymous.
Not everybody on 4chan went along with this move towards the radical activist Left. Some of them took their offensive racist and sexist humor to a new level, turning into politics and embracing white supremacy. Another subgroup known as incels began to form. These were boys who spent too much time watching porn and developing neurotic complexes because they reached the age of eighteen without losing their virginity. One of them joked that if you reach the age of thirty without losing your virginity, you become a wizard, and eventually a community of wizards grew around that concept. I’d say that’s a pretty cool joke despite it all. If the incels ever came up with anything clever, that was it. They branched off into what is now known as the manosphere, a sector of the internet that is inherently misogynist, prurient, traditionalist, and extremely right wing. The better of these incels started working on self-improvement to make themselves more attractive while others formed the Pick Up Artist community. Even worse, some became chronic whiners and women-haters, sometimes even turning to murder to vent their frustrations. Out of this toxic milieu of masculine stupidity came things like the Pepe the Frog cartoons, a contemporary symbol of inadequacy similar to what Charlie Brown was in previous generations, and other practices like shitposting, bullying, and trolling. Trolling itself turned into a type of right wing online activism.
So far so good, at least in terms of the narrative thrust of this book. This first half is well-detailed and interesting to those of us who had no knowledge of these chan websites when they were in full swing. The second half of the book is a little less exciting, mostly because the subject of the 4chan trolls falls into the background and the politics of MAGA , the alt.right, and the alt-light take over the story.
The connecting thread between the 4chan trolls and Donald Trump runs along two lines, according to Beran. One line runs from the trolls to Steve Bannon, publisher of Breitbart News, and white supremacist trust-fund baby with a ridiculous haircut Richard Spencer. Remember him? He’s the one whose video went viral after an antifa activist punched him in the face, setting off a flurry of Punch a Nazi GiFs and memes. These jerks were lurking on 4chan while the GamerGate scandal hit and saw these loser trolls as fodder for a right wing uprising. And they were right. The other thread involved Pepe the Frog whose meme got appropriated by white supremacists. When Dumb Donald Trump posted a Pepe the Frog meme on Twitter, the alt.right felt vindicated. This army of autistic internet losers, who previously saw themselves as the biggest nobodies in America, had caught the attention of the then-presidential candidate.
Then Douschebag Don got elected and it felt like America had been blasted with a nuclear powered stink bomb. Paramilitary militias, street gangs, and fraternities began popping up, looking a little too much like an American version of the Nazi brownshirts. The 4chan trolls, once acknowledged by Trump, were forgotten by him and began to fade from view. When they showed up at the Charlottesville white trash Unite the Right rally as pranksters wearing bizarre, inside-joke costumes, the fascists and the media ignored them.
Meanwhile, aging adolescent activist geeks were entering universities and behaving there the way they did online: the clique of stuck up juveniles with an overly-inflated sense of self-importance that they were. Without any awareness of how their actions were affecting others, they would shout down anyone, be it professors, guest speakers, or other students who they didn’t agree with. Rather than following the liberal educational tradition of examine an issue from all sides before forming an opinion, they sought to control all discussions and indoctrinate people with their ideologies. They had grown up blocking or deleting anybody on social media who they didn’t want to hear from and tried to apply the same method in the offline world. Unwittingly, they pushed a lot of people away from the Left and some of them went straight into the welcoming arms of the right. Cancel culture didn’t defeat sexism, racism, and homophobia; it exacerbated them and led to the election of the worst president in American history.
Most of the second half of the book is less about the online troll and activist cultures and more about the disastrous practices of the alt.right and the failed Trump presidency. This part is clearly written and true to what was reported during those shameful four years. But if you have been following the news all along, there is nothing here you wouldn’t already know. It will be valuable as a historical document in the future, but so soon after this happened the memories are too fresh for this to be of great interest. Anyways, I really don’t want to remember the Trump presidency but I feel like we have to because as the 2024 election approaches, we are faced with a second term with this senile wannabe autocrat and we aren’t out of the danger zone yet.
Dale Beran doesn’t go into much detail about political theory in this book, but there is one passage that is key to explaining a lot of what happened. Based on the works of Hannah Arendt, he explains that liberals believe in maintaining the political system while making constant adjustments in a move towards a better and more just society. Left wing extremists want to tear down the whole system and replace it with something else. Fascists are those who wish to maintain the political system, but feel they have been robbed of their rightful status in it so they seek to purge it of the unwanted elements of society who they feel are cheating them out of their entitled privileges. This is where we stand now with MAGA and the alt.right who want to purge America of immigrants, liberals, non-Christians, and people who aren’t white. Beran doesn’t attempt to define fascism so much as he attempts to explain the social conditions that make it appeal to conservatives on the right. He also opens the possibility that Leftist identity politics could lean towards fascism if the cause of purging white heterosexual men from the power structure takes hold. Whether this threat of identity politics is real or imagined is not relevant because a large portion of white people perceive it as real and perceptions count more than truth in their consequences. The mean-spirited, Nurse Ratched-style of scolding, shaming, guilt tripping, and preaching is only throwing fuel on the fire. We are at a point where Leftists need to re-evaluate their approach and tactics if they don’t want to be marginalized and buried for a long time to come.
For a long time I’ve been saying that the internet brings out the worst in humanity. In a small way, It Came from Something Awful partially justifies that view. It has allowed the worst elements in society to meet up in chat rooms where they indulge in vile ideas. These people strive to be the filthiest pieces of feces in the sewer and their ideas can spread rapidly around the world, faster than at any time before. The internet is so vast that these diseases can go unchecked since it is impossible to monitor everything happening on the net. Dale Beran shows how the internet has amplified the voices of the most rotten elements of society to a volume where so few voices of reason can ever be heard. And yet some of these chan trolls are lonely, scared teenagers, suffering from depression or other problems, who turned to these online spaces because they felt they had nowhere else to go. Adults need to do a better job of listening to young people. They can be listened to and understood without being elevated by technology to a position of power they shouldn’t be in. Until that starts happening, I fear things will only get worse, Welcome to the future.
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