Book Review & Analysis: It Came from Something Awful by Dale Beran

It Came from Something Awful:

How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office

by Dale Beran

      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.

 

Book Review & Analysis: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism:

The Fight For a Human Future In the New Frontier of Power

by Shoshana Zuboff

      The postmodernist philosopher Michel Foucault once wrote about the Panopticon, a prison designed for maximum surveillance, control and domination over its prisoners. This prison makes it possible for the officials running it to see everything the inmates do yet also makes it impossible for the inmates to see what the officials do or even who they are. How such a facility can be achieved using the simple structures of architecture is immaterial to this discussion. Such a prison, presumably intended solely for criminals, may be unnecessary in these days because we have technology that does the same job and does it more effectively. This technology is called the internet and instead of being inhabited by individuals incarcerated against their wills, it is inhabited by voluntary participants. Some might argue that comparing the internet to a maximum security prison is a false dichotomy, but Shoshana Zuboff lays out a strong case for this argument in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

The concept behind surveillance capitalism is that digital technology is used to harvest data from its users. This data, which is extracted from the internet and SMART technologies like smart phones and smart cars, is sold in bulk to data processing companies which then sell it to big corporations who re-insert it into advertisements on internet websites or else use it to micromanage things like car or health insurance rates, mortgage interest rates, and access to employment or education. The ultimate goal of big tech companies is behavior modification as internet targeted advertising is used to push and pull people in the direction of spending more money to the benefit of the technocrats holding the whips and reins of digital power over us.

Zuboff effectively uses comparisons to historical turning points, specifically the Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age, to contextualize the present time as a later, third stage of capitalist development. The top echelons of Silicon Valley are rightfully likened to the robber barons of old but with one major difference: where industrialists like Edison and Ford sought to make money by manufacturing products for public consumption that would be useful for the consumers, the current tech industry offers little in return for the massive amounts of data they collect. While it is true that we get a lot of free benefits from search engines like Google and social media sites like Facebook, the price is that these firms are used to watch and monitor us to mine as much data as they possible can about all aspects of our lives. This isn’t just a matter of what content we look at online. Cellphones track our locations using GPS, data is collected on the amount of time we spend online and what times we use the internet, data is collected on the length of sentences we write and how effectively we use punctuation, and things like the like buttons and emojis on Facebook are used to track our moods and interests. Internet data miners seek out information about what motivates us unconsciously, what manipulates our emotions, and what could be going on in the deepest recesses of our own consciousness. If you’ve ever wondered why your toaster or your vacuum cleaner needs to have a microchip, the reason is that SMART technologies of all varieties are transmitting information about your behavioral patterns to household items like cell phones and WiFi routers which then get scraped for as much data on you and everyone else as can possibly be collected. Data is extracted from our lives the way oil is extracted from the ground and our individual best interests are not a part of the equation. All this is being done for the profit and power of giant corporations.

Of course there are obvious ethical problems with this whole structure of surveillance capitalism. The most obvious one is the invasion of your privacy. Tech companies are not only monitoring our outward behavior, but also digging deeply into our minds with internet technology to monitor our psyches and use the information to control us. The author falls back on the existentialist philosophy of Sartre and Beauvois to say we have a human right to the inner sanctuary of our private thoughts and also the right to make choices about our individual futures. She doesn’t go into a deep analysis of existentialism, but she does use it as a theoretical basis for resistance to surveillance capitalism.

On the other hand, while tech companies are invading our privacy, it is impossible for us to access information about them. She uses the medieval citadel as a metaphor to describe how big tech has isolated themselves from our scrutiny by building defensive walls, both legal and digital, to ensure that we never know exactly what they are up to. This asymmetrical political and economic structure has returned us to a type of medieval society divided between an inaccessible, all powerful aristocracy and a class of peasants and serfs with diminishing abilities for class mobility.

Another ethical issue mentioned by Zuboff is that of behavior modification. She relies heavily on the radical behaviorist program of psychologist B.F. Skinner to make her case. Skinner was a determinist whose core idea is that people have no free will. Choice is an illusion and human behavior is simply a matter of responding to stimuli in the surrounding environment. Skinner believed that thoughts and emotions, the things that make us human, are unnecessary and that human societies can reach perfection by setting the right environmental parameters, turning humans into little more than machines, albeit machines without negative things like wars or poverty. Whether humans are happy or not was irrelevant to him. Zuboff argues that Skinner’s radical behaviorism is the theoretical starting point for surveillance capitalism as the purpose of targeted advertising is the use of environmental stimuli for the purpose of behavior modification, all for the benefit of the leaders of the tech industry whose goal is to maximize profits by making us spend money without thinking.

Zuboff’s passages on behavior modification are the weakest parts of her argument. Not only does she spend far too much time describing the program of Skinner for the purposes of the narrative, but she also never sufficiently sites specific instances of tech industry leaders referring to Skinner or behaviorist psychology. While she acknowledges that the motivations and activities of big tech are inscrutable, she also has to take a major leap of faith to make the case that behavior modification is the main purpose of data extraction from internet usage. Being opaque and inaccessible, the motivations and theories of big tech leaders is impossible to verify so she inserts Skinner’s radical behaviorism to fill in this gap in her knowledge. Admittedly it does fit all too well. Given this absence of certainty, it might be tempting to use it as grounds for dismissal of this part of her argument, however if you further research this subject, there is reason to take her word seriously. There are a lot of videos of lectures and conferences involving engineers and code writers from major tech companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, video game designers, and others who confirm that websites and cell phones are designed to be addictive because the longer users spend on these sites, the more data they can collect and that translates into higher profits for tech billionaires and advertisers. If Skinner is not speficially the godfather of surveillance capitalism, there is a lot in his theories that justify and support it.

The author does give some examples of how the internet has been used for coercive purposes. Since information about the Pokemon Go game has been leaked, it is known that the app was designed for the purposes of behavioral control. The game’s players are led to public spaces to collect characters on their phones and yet Pokemon Go players may not be directly aware that these public locations are often near businesses that collude with the game’s creators to expand their customer bases.

Other experiments mentioned were conducted by Facebook. One posted the names of users who voted in an election to motivate more people to vote; comparisons with geographical areas used as control groups shows that rates of voter participation were higher in places where people saw the pro-voting information than in places where they didn’t. Another experiment involved manipulating the Facebook algorithm to boost stories with positive emotional content to the top of newsfeeds in an attempt to make people more happy in what they post. Facebook metrics showed that they had a 2 percent success rate. The former Facebook experiment was obviously more successful than the latter, yet Zuboff insists that the latter still proves Facebook can manipulate people’s moods. I’m no great statistician, but I know that two percent is within the margin of error and otherwise is too small a percentage to be regarded as anything other than random chance so maybe this isn’t the best evidence that could have been used. This leads to two more problems. The ethical issue that Zuboff raises is that since the end of World War II, experimentation on humans is considered, under international law, to be illegal without the informed consent of the participants. Therefore, behavior modification experiments conducted clandestinely by big tech might be a violation of human rights. Second is that Zuboff does not provide an abundance of compelling evidence that big tech behavior modification is in any effective. With such paltry evidence it could be written off as tin foil hat paranoia and yet there is abundant testimony from big tech insiders that behavior modification is the goal of digital technology. Zuboff’s argument has some shortcomings that should not be there.

In conclusion. Shoshana Zuboff has written a compelling argument detailing what surveillance capitalism is and why it needs to be resisted. Some of the support she offers to defend her argument is not strong, but with easily gathered information coming from outside her writing, it remains intact. Then, it is important to remember that her grievance is not with the technology of the internet itself, but how it is being used by the ideological leadership of Silicon Valley. While they are motivated by a philosophy of libertarianism, radical individualism, and anarcho-capitalism, we should note that ultimate freedom for those at the top of society’s hierarchy means totalitarian oppression for the rest of us. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism details an aberration from the original intent of the internet and resistance to big tech is necessary for us to maintain our rights, our freedom, and our dignity. The fact that things like VPNs, ad blocking apps, and the dark web are widely used indicate that massive amounts of people are resistant to internet surveillance and the nightmarish visions of the future promoted by Silicon Valley. Of course, the masses will most likely continue on their path blindly as unthinking cell phone zombies, but others like hackers, luddites, and various strains of progressive thinkers will continues to eat away at the barriers to our freedom. Only time will tell if our future will be one of the internet’s Panopticon prison or one of freedom for all. 

 

Book Review & Analysis: New Dark Age by James Bridle

New Dark Age:

Technology and the End Of the Future

by James Bridle

      There’s no doubt about it. The internet age has arrived and digital technology has taken over our lives whether we like it or not. Instead of ushering in a new age of enlightenment, James Bridle in New Dark Age examines the ways in which our technology is taking us into a renewed medieval era of ignorance and corruption. If you think it’s too soon to become pessimistic about the effects of the internet, you’d be surprised at how much evidence Bridle has collected to demonstrating its detriment ro our world.

This book does not get off to a great start. The introductory essay introduces several themes that carry through the entire book. The main theme is the metaphor of the Dark Cloud of Unknowing, a phrase introduced by a medieval theologian who claimed there is such a cloud fixed between humanity and God, making it impossible for people to understand the deity and his ways. Bridle introduces this metaphor to explain how the computer screens that are usually in front of our faces are a dark cloud that prevents us from seeing what digital technology is doing. The device that is closest to us is the one that prevents us from seeing beyond our own noses. While the introduction isn’t necessarily a poor piece of writing, Bridle could have emphasized this Dark Cloud metaphor a little more as it is the thread that ties all the chapters together. Or at least it’s supposed to. This doesn’t become clear until about three chapters or so into the book.

The opening chapters give a brief history of computing and its relation to technology. Your average person seems to think that a computer is something you use to watch videos of cute animals, look up free pornography, or argue with people who don’t know what they’re talking about over things they don’t understand. The vast majority of those arguments are about politics and if you’re arguing about them on the internet, it’s a strong sign that you haven’t got a clue as to what’s really going on. But I digress. The point is that most people don’t understand that “computation” means to do math. So a computer is a machine that does math, or at least that’s what they were a century ago. Computers were designed by the military to compute probabilities of weather conditions. If the military could predict the weather, then they could more effectively conduct combat operations. Later, technicians realized they could use computers to analyze data about things like traffic, human behavior, and other scientific things. From the beginning, computing technology was developed for the purposes of predicting the future and asserting control over it. Despite what you may believe, those are still the primary purposes of computer technology today. That’s what data mining is all about, the surveillance of you to make predictions and subtly nudge you in the direction the technocrats in Silicon Valley want you to go in.

These historical chapters are somewhat interesting even if they are a bit incomplete. But it isn’t obvious from the start how they fit into the scheme of the book. This starts to become more clear in the chapter on the environment and how the permafrost in Svalbard is melting. As the permafrost melts, we begin to see how different parts of nature work together to form a network of interdependent entities that rely on each other for the stability of the planet. Then Bridle takes a risky narrative leap into comparing this natural network, now under severe threat from global warming, to the vast neural network we call the internet. From there he demonstrates how internet usage is driving an exponential increase in energy consumption, increasing the burning of fossil fuels for electricity, and becoming the leading cause of global warming in our times. Your cell phone and laptop are leaving a bigger carbon footprint than your car. Now the Dark Cloud of Unknowing metaphor emerges into clarity.

Although it takes a while to get going, this book takes on greater meaning as it progresses. The rest of it examines different ways in which the internet causes people to exist in a state of ignorance. One problem he brings up is science. New scientific discoveries are on the decline and there has also been a sharp increase in retracted scientific studies. One reason Bridle cites is that researchers have almost entirely abandoned the use of using models for studies. Instead they use large data sets as a substitute. This method has proven to be faulty, especially because data technicians do not actually understand what computer codes do once they are set to use. Algorithms can be written, but once set into motion, nobody really knows what they do or how they arrive at conclusions. The result has been less effective scientific studies that are riddled with errors, miscalculations, and misinformation. We suffer from this because in the real world this means lower quality medical care and the inability to solve complex problems related to things like global warming.

Other problems addressed by Bridle include the tendency people have to believe anything they see on a computer screen thereby causing them to disbelieve information they encounter offline, stock market flash crashes that result from bots being used to trade on the stock market, internet surveillance and data mining, the massive accumulation of junk data that is useless in large data sets, and the spread of disinformation and fake news coming from troll farms in Eastern Europe and Russia. The book ends with a chapter on ElsaGate, a term coined after the publication of this book. This is a scandal that happened when YouTube Kids became infected with disturbing violent and sexual content disguised as children’s entertainment that resulted in advertisers removing their ads from YouTube in protest after a public outcry. Although the ElsaGate content was inherently disturbing, Bridle makes the case that what is even worse is never knowing who or what is on the other side of the screen. The internet is so anonymous that we can never know who is posting these things or what their true intentions are. This is the menacing Great Cloud of Unknowing that we face every time we look at our screens.

James Bridle lays out his case clearly and precisely. He doesn’t leave much room for interpretation in these straight forward essays. To his credit, the writing is never pedantic or dry. Despite getting off to a weak start, it finishes by being accessible, clear, and thought provoking without sacrificing depth or nuance. Although New Dark Age is a thoroughly grim assessment of how the internet is harming our world, it isn’t entirely without hope. If we are entering into a new medieval period of history, just remember that the Middle Ages were followed by the Enlightenment and the Renaissance. Providing the human race survives long enough to get through these wicked times, there may be cause for celebration in the distant future.  

 

Book Review & Analysis: Kill All Normies by Angela Nagle

Kill All Normies:

Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right

by Angela Nagle

      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 19^th 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.