Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right

by Angela Nagle

Recent years have seen a revival of the heated culture wars of the 1990s, but this time its battle ground is the internet. On one side the "alt right" ranges from the once obscure neo-reactionary and white separatist movements, to geeky subcultures like 4chan, to more mainstream manifestations such as the Trump-supporting gay libertarian Milo Yiannopolous. On the other side, a culture of struggle sessions and virtue signalling lurks behind a therapeutic language of trigger warnings and safe spaces. The feminist side of the online culture wars has its equally geeky subcultures right through to its mainstream expression. Kill All Normies explores some of the cultural genealogies and past parallels of these styles and subcultures, drawing from transgressive styles of 60s libertinism and conservative movements, to make the case for a rejection of the perpetual cultural turn.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Sociology, History, Cultural, Internet, Technology

138 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 30, 2017

About the author

Angela Nagle is an American-born Irish academic and non-fiction writer who has written for The Baffler, Jacobin, and others. She is the author of the book Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right , published by Zero Books in 2017, which discusses the role of the internet in the rise of the alt-right and incel movements. Nagle describes the alt-right as a dangerous movement but also criticizes aspects of the left that she says have contributed to the alt-right's rise. Since 2021, she has been publishing articles on a wide range of personal, political and cultural topics via the online publishing platform Substack.

Reviews

[A · Rating 1 out of 5]

I originally didn't want to read this book, only having read a few excerpts whining about Tumblr (more specifically, trigger warnings and gender identity) that made me not want to touch it. The book kept popping up on my newsfeed, and so I decided to read it to see if it fulfills its hype (Spoiler alert: it doesn't).


In the past, I spent 2 years on 4chan (on /b/) and 2+ years on Tumblr (following liberals and then marxists). That normally means nothing, but Nagle doesn't cite a single sentence in her book. There are no citations, no interviews, no statistics, nothing (Maybe I'm unfamiliar with how books of this genre are written, but you'd think she'd cite something)! So hopefully some of my experience there may pick up on things that others have missed.

Nagle sets the stage by comparing the Obama's 2008 presidential campaign with Clinton's 2016 campaign, wondering why Clinton's campaign was met with widespread internet mockery and memes - despite employing the same tricks as the Obama. She wants to map an Internet cultural history, one that explains how we got to this point, where the alt-right came from, how the left has changed during this, and how their battles ('culture wars', in her own words) are playing out. In the introduction she marks Kony 2012 and Harambe as significant trends in building the ironic internet mobs that were relatively unknown before recently. These points are brought up erratically, there's little to no proof or deeper explanation, it's like reading a summary on Wikipedia or KnowYourMeme with some surface level analysis thrown in. Nagle quotes a Chapo Trap House member as saying "Harambe mania really took off after the Orlando nightclub massacre in a gay club, carried out by a shooter pledging allegiance to ISIS" and leaves it at that[1]. How are they related? How was that statement proven? Nagle doesn't bother to explain further, a trend that continues throughout the book.

The first few chapters go over some of the history of what would influence or become the Alt-Right. NRx, Dark Enlightenment, the 'Alt-Light', GamerGate, Richard Spencer, 4chan, Milo, weev, MGTOW, The Rebel, Pat Buchanan, Breitbart, Alex Jones, and Mike Cernovich are just some of the names mentioned. A few are examined further, Nagle is hard to follow as she jumps from point to point, never constructing a good timeline for all this information she throws at you. She writes about some ideological splits between them, and gives many examples of disgusting ideas and actions carried out by some of these people/communities, particularity 4chan and Milo. While I was already aware of most of this, I can see how someone who is unfamiliar with all of this, and doesn’t know where to start, would find this valuable.

Nagle then puts forward her explanation for the behavior and attitude of 4chan and the alt-right: Transgression. Put simply, it's the intentional act of breaking social norms/convention, something very common on 4chan, if not its backbone. Examples are given from 4chan, and Nagle goes into some literary or philosophical discussion about it. I'm not well versed in literary criticism, philosophy, or whatever you would describe this portion of the book as, so I can't say much more about it. Nagle brings up 4chan & the alt-rights departure from traditional religious conservatives of the time. A significant part of the alt-right are Christian, but the 4chan affiliated crowd don't care about supposed Christian morals, willing to do and say things that are very unconventional and horrid. Not a huge revelation, but a useful thing to note. Her piece on Jacobin “Paleocons for Porn” is essentially a condensed version of chapter, if you want to get what she means but don’t want to read this book.

That's about it for the usefulness of the book, and to get to it you have to power through her complaints about trigger warnings and gender identity sprinkled throughout these chapters. Nagle clearly knows more about 4chan and the alt-right than Tumblr and internet left subcultures, since she really drops the ball when talking about the left. She lumps the left into one big tent, and obviously misunderstands the various factions and arguments being made. Among the few distinctions she makes among the left, she hilariously claims that the ‘real left’ consists of members such as The Young Turks, Owen Jones, Jacobin, and Chapo Trap House. You don’t hear about Marxists, Anarchists, ‘Anti-Imperialists’, and others, Nagles idea of politics left of ‘Tumblr’ stop at Chapo Trap House or Jacobin. She also scolds the left for ‘crying wolf’ when some called Trudeau a white supremacist and defended Hillary Clinton by calling those who disagree with her sexist, to her the Alt-Right is the real wolf. Aside from the ridiculous implication that the Prime Minister of a settler-colonial state like Canada can’t be a white supremacist and it’s just ‘crying wolf’, I’d be very surprised if there is any large group of people who would call Trudeau a white supremacist but also say not supporting Hillary is misogynist. There are NGO-careerists and bourgeois liberals who appropriate social justice theory to support people like Clinton and say that not being pro-Clinton is sexism. These are not the same ideologies that consider Trudeau a white supremacist, which includes marxists, anarchists, and whoever else. Nagle lumps anything she doesn’t like on the left into one big basket labelled ‘Tumblr-Liberalism’, she doesn’t bother making ideological divisions among the left, beyond Tumblr and the ‘real left’ mentioned above, despite doing so for the Alt-Right.


Nagles pseudo-horseshoe theory of the Tumblr Left and Alt-Right relies on the idea that the Tumblr Left are also intentionally transgressive like those on the alt-right[3]. To prove this ridiculousness and transgressiveness of the left, she spends a lot of time lampooning gender identity, trigger warnings, not easily visible disabilities, and uses loaded terms such as hysterical or sensitive when describing the left, particularly transgender and disabled people (the implication here is clear), but never the Alt-Right. If I hadn’t been told who wrote this, I’d think it was written by a Third Positionist. She claims that Pepe Memes and Otherkin are examples of a feedback loop of transgressiveness between the Alt-Right and Tumblr left. A quick look at the history of Otherkin shows how this is isn’t accurate, since the community been around since the 90s. Is it specifically the Alt-Right seeing Otherkin and deciding to ramp up their behaviour? Websites like 4chan consist of a transgressive user base, but their increased offensiveness could be ascribed to factors such as an increase of racist, misogynist, transphobic hate crimes/speech in general, something not addressed in the book. There’s no mention of how the Alt-Right love making up ridiculous fake profiles to mock transgender people, disabled people, women, and non-white people (and frequently can’t detect satire/jokes from serious suggestions). Are the ‘left’ (or the main culprits Nagle suggests: transgender, abused, or disabled people) supposed to answer for every unusual example, real or fake, that comes up relating to their oppression? This isn’t to say that the left doesn’t have to provide answers or education to people, but Nagles idea of a feedback loop of transgressiveness dumps the blame on the left for the Alt-Right (who spend much of their time looking for examples of oppressed people to mock/attack) or unrelated individuals. Nagle doesn’t spend time thinking about why the Alt-Right focuses on the left so much, saying "you may question the motivations of the rights fixation on these niche sections of online, but the liberal fixation on relatively niche sections of the new online right is similar in scale". Aside from lazily equating the right and left, there’s a very good reason why people often care about niches like 4chan - Because they're attacking and often killing them!


Nagle spends time sneering at what she considers the worst examples of the identity-focused left, such as people who have disabilities or issues that aren’t easy visible (Spoon theory and trigger warnings/PTSD are her examples), a long list of various uncommon gender identities she found on Tumblr, and people who are fixated with removing their own limbs (it’s disturbing that she considers the existence of trans people and hidden disabilities to be comparable to this). She doesn’t take a moment to consider potential reasons why people are saying/feeling these things, and simply writes them off as the outcome of identity politics and leftist transgression. Maybe the process of realizing one is trans is difficult, emotionally complex, and people express it in different ways? Are trauma and disabilities often undiagnosed, with some people finding help in diagnosing their problems that are ignored? Does patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism, etc., factor into this? You’re get none of that from Nagle, no consideration at all. She is glad to say things like “trigger warnings had to be issued in order to avoid the unexpectedly high number of young women who had never gone to war claiming to have post-traumatic stress disorder“, and puts non-binary and transphobia in air quotes, questioning their existence Would you think that someone who also says “Milo and his Tumblr dwelling gender fluid enemies", “transgenderism” and “gender-bending Tumblr users” would give you an unbiased take on the ‘Tumblr left’?


Chapter 5 starts with a bold, unsubstantiated claim: that the internet left caused the right to react and move more right, partly due to “making increasingly anti-male, anti-white, anti-straight, anti-cis rhetoric normal on the cultural left” brought on from identity politics (which she doesn’t bother defining). She constantly speaks about ‘culture wars’, these supposedly society changing cultural battles fought by certain subcultures (i.e. 4chan vs Tumblr) that are also a feedback loop, making each other more ridiculous and vicious with their transgressive behaviour. Since 4chan and many other Alt-Right hubs are online, it makes you wonder where these clashes are actually going on. Nagle says college campuses are a location of these culture wars, where according to her, no-platforming and identity politics have run amok. She doesn't explain how the Tumblr left has managed to gain their influence on campuses, nor does she use any compelling examples against no-platforming[2]. She doesn’t explain why we should oppose No-Platforming aside from relying on the supposed ridiculousness or ‘hysteria’ of the No-Platformers, and saying that the people being No-Platformed are people of importance. Nagle focusing on the act of No-Platforming (‘free speech’) rather than the individuals being No-Platformed is telling. She doesn't present alternatives and instead falls back on this idea that we should us our Free Speech™ to debate the Alt-Right and win the ‘culture wars’. What do you do when your opponent has no respect for ‘actual’ discussion? What do you do when they call for violence towards you and then say you rejected free speech when you refuse to debate them? Fascists don’t give a shit about free speech, they’ll use every tool available at their disposal to further their movement. It doesn’t mean that the left will win with just No-Platforming or whatever tactics she says are common among the ‘Tumblr left’. The left will need to be much more organized and prepared for the spread of Fascism in the west, but there’s no way the left will succeed by doing university debates with people like Milo or Jordan Peterson.

It’s ironic that Nagle supports the ‘material left’ (which to her means Bernie Sanders, Jacobin) and wants left politics to be less about identity and more about economics (ignoring the fact that those two are often related), since she fails to make a class analysis at any point in the book. Does it matter that most of the Alt-Rights class background is (petty)-bourgeois (upper/upper-middle class, what many non-Marxists would call it)? Do any of the recent economic changes in the US affect the rise of the Alt-Right and spread of fascism? Did the Vietnam War shape the ideologies and views of the left and right during the 60-70s that Nagle talks about? How does capitalism and the US state (Police, CIA, FBI/COINTELPRO, NSA) impact the ideas and actions on the left and right? Nagle doesn’t touch upon any of this.


She also doesn’t even bother to come off as impartial or having integrity throughout the book, where in a section about GamerGate she says Zoe Quinn’s video game Depression Quest  “looked like a terrible game featuring many of the fragility and mental illness-fetishizing characteristics of the kind of feminism that has emerged online in recent years” (God forbid someone makes a game that they feel may help people understand others or their own depression, amirite?). Then she explains her view on videogames, saying that as an adult your emotional energies should be used better elsewhere. Why should I, the reader, give a shit? People assume this book will be about the history of the alt-right, they don’t want thinkpiece-style writing about how much you like a certain video game and what you think about adults playing video games. The hypocrisy is even more apparent when, despite criticizing ‘identity politics’ throughout her book, she feels comfortable using it to defend Jacobin She states it’s not correct to call it a magazine of choice for the white left, because “its two key founders [are] the children of Jamaican and Trinidadian immigrants, and ... its logo [is] based on the Black Jacobin”. Somehow, the contents of the magazine can’t be representative of their ideas, just their founders identities!

If you know nothing about the alt-right, its allies, predecessors, etc., you may get some value out of this book. You’ll have to get through a lot of sloppy writing and jabs at transgender people to get to it. The history of the Alt-Right and how the left can fight it is a topic that should be looked into, but it deserves to be written about by a better author than Nagle.


Footnotes


[1] Harambe/Pulse Shooting


When I saw the part quoting Chapo Trap House as saying the Harambe meme exploded after the Pulse shooting, I couldn’t believe what I was reading. I decided to see if that claim was potentially true (since the author doesn’t bother verifying it) so I went on Google Trends. If you compare ‘Harambe’ vs. ‘Pulse’ (https://trends.google.com/trends/expl...), you’ll see that the searches for ‘Pulse’ skyrocketed when the pulse shooting occurred and fell off a week after, while ‘Harambe’ rose and fell at very different times (DicksOutForHarambe or JusticeForHarambe have nothing, and changing the location to exclusively the United States doesn’t change much either). Obviously truly tracking how much a meme was used would go beyond just using GoogleTrends, but you can still get an idea of if a claim is potentially true (in this case, absolutely not). Did nobody bother to edit her book? There are so many typos, sloppy & unfinished arguments, and claims without evidence that I’m surprised anyone would print this in this state. The connection between Trump and the alt-right, a major selling point of the book, is barely elaborated on. The only explanation I have for this is that this book is a cash grab.


Also, no less than 4 times does the author mention the pulse shooting. She makes sure to let you know it was done by/for Islam, saying he was an Islamist and how he swore allegiance to ISIS and Al Baghdadi. Incredibly enough, she ignores how even the CIA said they found no connections between Omar Mateen and ISIS, as well as how he was a security guard that tried to become a cop. You’d think something that was brought up 4 times (without even explaining how it relates to her points) would be accurate!



[2] No Platforming


Nagle mentions a few names to explain the supposed horrors of No-Platforming, such as Germaine Greer, Maryam Namazie, and Jordan Peterson. It’s incredible that Greer (who holds to her transphobic views), Namazie (who defended Charlie Hebdo and said Islamism is ‘a new totalitarian global threat’), and Peterson (who allies with the alt-right and went on numerous transphobic screeds) are among her choices. She overstates the actual impact that No-Platforming has, saying the Greer’s name was run through the dirt and she was transformed overnight to rubbish. A quick search of Greer and No-Platforming shows out of the first 10 news results, 8 talk about how No-Platforming is bad. Greer and all the others will do just fine if she isn’t allowed to speak at one university, Jordan Peterson gets an astounding $50,000+ per MONTH. Am I supposed to feel bad that these people were No-Platformed when they seem to be enjoying it?



[3] On the ‘Tumblr Left’


I don’t think Tumblr Left is an apt label for what Nagle tries to describe. It’s hard to settle on a label that would encompass what Nagle is talking about, since she lumps together many groups and ideologies based on how some of them present their views/arguments. Tumblr doesn’t have a homogenous user base like 4chan, and you can see websites like Twitter containing the same ideas that people ascribe to Tumblr. The implied Social Justice association with Tumblr is a result of years of mockery by those on the Alt-Right (mainly Reddit/r/TumblrInAction and 4chan). When I was on 4chan 6 years ago, it was obviously bigoted and people spent their time mocking Social Justice communities, but people didn’t pay as much attention to Tumblr. Slowly I saw people ascribing Tumblr to these mocked ideas (they often looked at Tumblr for material), and eventually ‘Tumblr’ became a dog-whistle (much like SJW) for ‘crazy’ feminists and non-white/transgender/disabled people, who also happen to have vibrant colored hair. Nagle doesn’t seem to realize this and is guilty of it herself, using ‘Tumblr’ to mention those who care about many social justice issues, and frequently calls them hysterical, unhinged, neurotic, etc.

[Shadiya · Rating 1 out of 5]

Some interesting stuff on various internet subcultures, but otherwise yeesh. Nagle is willing to sympathise with the bigoted subcultures present on 4chan/reddit in order to interpret the ideas & motivations behind their politics, but is largely unwilling to do the same with tumblr, even when they stem from legitimate grievances.

She seems to have it in for trigger warnings in particular, culminating in this winning line:

Trigger warnings had to be issued in order to avoid the unexpectedly high number of young women who had never gone to war claiming to have post-traumatic stress disorder.

So if you're not a combat veteran & you claim to have PTSD, you're probably just faking!

The whole book has these little moments where Angela Nagle abandons the pretense of impartiality and decides to be venomous about innocuous undeserving shit (including a jab at Zoe Quinn that seemed to be totally irrelevant to the topic at hand), but the PTSD comment struck me as pointed and nasty in a way I wouldn't expect in a book from an ostensibly left wing publisher. I'm really not impressed.

[Blair · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was expecting to be interested in this, but I didn't expect to be so impressed by it. Angela Nagle writes so even-handedly and with such a fair critical eye about recent iterations of disruptive political groupings on both the right and left. On the right is the now-notorious alt-right, divided between the 'alt-light', typified by meme-making/gleefully antagonistic trolling/use of 4chan-derived argot, and the more genuinely fascistic tendencies often masked by the headline-grabbing behaviour of alt-light figures such as Milo Yiannopoulos. On the left is what Nagle sometimes refers to as 'Tumblr-liberalism', the extremely performative culture of calling-out, victimhood and competitive identity politics that seems driven by (and here I will quote Nagle quoting the late Mark Fisher, as it couldn't be paraphrased any more perfectly) 'a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd'.

Nagle draws a line through history from the 'culture wars' of the 1960s to those of today, arguing that the transgressive, countercultural spirit historically embodied by the anti-establishment left has been sublimated much more effectively by the modern right. She also undertakes an in-depth (though concise) review of the many, many factions of what is often sweepingly referred to as the alt-right, from 'chan culture' to the alternately pathetic and terrifying 'manosphere'. Not only is this pretty fascinating in itself, it also brings to light the serious theoretical and academic roots of certain strands of this movement – something often ignored by liberal pundits who concentrate instead on clutching their pearls at the outrageous antics of high-profile figures like Milo and Alex Jones. The idea of a handful of demagogues and professional trolls riling up people who essentially don't understand politics has been a common theme (deployed with varying levels of sensitivity) in analysis of the Trump and Brexit victories; Nagle's study shows this to be dangerously reductive.

Kill All Normies is an accessible but unpatronising study, perfectly balancing academic critique, political commentary and assured, intelligent, non-embarrassing writing about the internet and its unique subcultures. It is so refreshing to read something like this, that comes at the topic from a left-leaning perspective but refuses to toe the line with regards to the frustrating, ever-shifting rules of engagement that now seem to define online discourse. The version I read had some typos and needed a bit of tightening up from an editorial perspective, but it was a review copy. And that is genuinely my only criticism. Somehow Nagle also manages to write a conclusion that tears everyone a new arsehole AND ends on a contemplative note.

I thought I knew quite a bit about this topic already, but I learned so much from this book, particularly about the historical context of these movements. Thoroughly and enthusiastically recommended to anyone with an interest in the current political climate as it manifests in online culture.

I received an advance review copy of Kill All Normies from the publisher through NetGalley.

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[David M · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book that makes a compelling case that sociopathy is in fact a bad thing.

Also, that nerds are actually much worse than jocks.

A highly unsympathetic cyber genealogy of the 'alt-right' that is at the same time an unsparing account of the vicious stupidity of woke liberal twitter shaming.

Reading it will likely leave you in a state of deep despair and misanthropy. Hard to avoid the conclusion that we simply lack the intellectual tools to escape collective ruin.

*
A truly terrible review from Counterpunch

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/08/...

Leftists who respond to her critique of toxic left-wing sectarianism with, uh, toxic left-wing sectarianism... Hard to judge the level of self-awareness sometimes. It all goes to illustrate Nagle's central point about the dire paucity of ideas in our culture right now. Given that no one can conceive a realistic alternative to capitalism, we're all resigned to terminal entropy. Seemingly the best thing on offer is membership to one or another hate-filled sect.

[Miranda · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was very disappointed by this book. I grew up on and with the Internet and I love reading about culture wars. However, in addition to inexcusably sloppy editing and bad writing (Please, someone ask Angela Nagle about "Barak" Obama or Peter "Theil," or why she's apparently on a first name basis with Milo Yiannopoulos despite consistently referring to others by their surnames), the book lacks any kind of affection for any of these subcultures. That is, I would have expected her to take a side. Any side. Or to at least offer something other than complete misanthropy. Instead, this book is filled with equal-opportunity contempt. Both the far left and the far right are worthy of criticism, but it is very hard to take a putative critic seriously if they write as sloppily as Nagle (multiple sentences without verbs, inconsistent style, claiming to probe the depths of an abstruse set of subcultures without any information that might orient the lay reader) while also spewing vitriol, such as her implication that women can't have PTSD (whaaaaa?). Yes, it is important to explore some of the reactionary aspects of the left, but her continual equation of self-indulgent Tumblr-types with far-right men who doxx, threaten, and in a few cases, even murder women is appalling.

Honestly, I think that if this book had not been rushed to press, it might have been a lot better. The organization is schizophrenic and it often reads like a last-minute thesis, with tons of pretentious theories thrown in, quoted, and not really discussed or examined, just taking up space. Takes one to know one: It's good to know I'm not the only one who writes that way, I guess. But I'm not published. Even a few very simple editorial changes, like offering embedded links in the eBook edition or a glossary of some of the otherwise inscrutable terms, could have made this a better book. Further, she does not have a clear argument, other than both extreme sides are reactionary. I don't think she's asking productive questions, such as why people want to identify as victims or what can be done to correct this situation.

It's a shame that this is not the book society needs, but rather, the one it deserves. The world is overdue for a serious and nuanced investigation of online subcultures, ideally one with at least a tiny bit of affection for the potentials of the "digital public"...or just, you know, humanity in general. At least this was short.

[Sara Salem · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pretty terrible. Sympathises with the alt-right while providing a weak analysis of the left, and ultimately seems to blame the left for the rise of the right.

[William · Rating 2 out of 5]

tl;dr: Eh ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Nagle brings a lot of valuable research and firsthand reporting to helping people make sense of the various facets of the alt-right, but it wasn't nearly as compelling as I was expecting from a book about the internet communities that have emerged in the past decade. The best parts are the really detailed outlines of the various factions of the right's anti-feminist and white supremacist groups, as well as the philosophical explanations of the anti-moral subversive nature of 4chan.

But the key part of Nagle's argument is that the Tumblr-left and the alt-right are locked in a feedback loop where each group reacts to each other's perceived ridiculousness and become more entrenched in their own ideologies. I agree with this argument, but Nagle makes it seems like the Tumblr-left's grievances against white supremacy and systematic misogyny are not legitimate and the products of a victimhood culture (one portion includes a long excerpt from a tumblr blog that details a variety of non-mainstream gender identities, meant to highlight the ridiculousness of the proliferation of alternative gender identities by younger internet denizens who are likely trying to sort out very complex personal feelings). I don't know, personally I think that feedback loop is there, but we shouldn't be blaming the Tumblr-left for reacting to a group of people who say that they should be murdered/raped/driven off the internet.

I think this book is good for people who want to learn more about the factions of the right on the internet, but I feel like Nagle has expressed her better ideas more succinctly in standalone articles like Paleocons for Porn (which is really good and everyone should read it)

[Valdimar · Rating 1 out of 5]

edit: its only about 3 months old, but has already aged poorly

https://medium.com/@differengenera/an...

mostly a fun, easy read, but drifts off into some very sketchy territory, especially when discussing tumblr and trigger warnings. Completely put off by the following quotation, where Nagle seems think that you can't get PTSD from anything other than war: "Trigger warnings had to be issued in order to avoid the unexpectedly high number of young women who had never gone to war claiming to have post-traumatic stress disorder."

[Lindy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Putting aside for a moment that the book would be entirely opaque to anyone who hasn't lived it; that it is in urgent need of every kind of editing from content to organizational to basic copy (e.g."Aids crisis" on pg. 63); that the author believes political horseshoe theory, that military combat veterans are the only people who can truly lay claim to PTSD, that The Young Turks are a great leftist news site, and that MRAs seek egalitarianism; the conflation of feminism and the sexual revolution; and a whole bunch of other things I could list-- yes somehow putting that all aside, I just have to say: Andrea Nagle, learn to citation.

I don't care if things are in perfect Chicago style, but I do care about being able to trace the transit of words and ideas across people, spaces, and contexts, and Nagle's loose and highly referential style makes it near impossible. Academia and mainstream magazines would consider it plagiarism. It might fly on Tumblr (the platform which Nagle decries as intellectualism's rock bottom).

I will now provide two illustrative examples of what I find frustrating.

1) It's abundantly not clear where Nagle gets her information, because she didn't conduct any interviews. In a section about the histories 4chan, Anonymous, and hacking, Nagle blockquotes this 2013 article by Sanjiv Bhattacharya for Esquire on pages 29-30. So I know that in the process of researching hacker weev, Nagle read this. Bhattacharya does not mention the suicide of Mitchell "An Hero" Henderson, which Nagle discusses on page 33. Early in her discussion, Nagle mentions This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture, a copy of which I do not have on me; it may well be the source of Nagle's info on Henderson. EDIT 30/10: I have read through This Is Why and it is not a citable source on Henderson; while the events are mentioned, the author provides no level of detail or quotes from trolls or the family.

However: earlier in the book, on page 15, Nagle quotes this 2008 article by Matthias Schwartz for The New York Times. In this article, Schwartz both interviews weev and describes the trolling surrounding Henderson's death.

He writes, regarding Henderson:

Someone hacked Henderson’s MySpace page and gave him the face of a zombie. Someone placed an iPod on Henderson’s grave, took a picture and posted it to /b/. Henderson’s face was appended to dancing iPods, spinning iPods, hardcore porn scenes. A dramatic re-enactment of Henderson’s demise appeared on YouTube, complete with shattered iPod. The phone began ringing at Mitchell’s parents’ home. “It sounded like kids,” remembers Mitchell’s father, Mark Henderson, a 44-year-old I.T. executive. “They’d say, ‘Hi, this is Mitchell, I’m at the cemetery.’ ‘Hi, I’ve got Mitchell’s iPod.’ ‘Hi, I’m Mitchell’s ghost, the front door is locked. Can you come down and let me in?’ ” He sighed. “It really got to my wife.” The calls continued for a year and a half.

Here's a quote from Nagle, pg. 33:

[...] Henderson's MySpace page was hacked, while another placed an iPod on Mitchell's grave, took a picture, and posted it to 4chan. His face was pasted into spinning iPods and hard-core porn scenes, and a re-enactment of Henderson's death soon appeared on YouTube.
Mitchell's father recieved prank calls to his house, in which callers said things like: 'Hi,
I've got Mitchell's iPod' and, 'Hi, I'm Mitchell's ghost, the front door is locked. Can you come down and let me in?'

Did Nagle use Schwartz's article as a source of information in this part of the book? Is this plagiarism? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

2) On pages 70-72, Nagle quotes a list of gender-related terms which she assures the reader is "directly from Tumblr." One of the items is "Cadensgender- a gender that is easily influenced by music." I deeply suspect that this entry and a few of the others are the work of a troll, but there is no way to investigate because nowhere does Nagle provide the username of the list's creator(s) or a url where this took place. A practice of the alt-right is to make the left look stupid as possible via trolls which are taken to be legit representatives by outsiders, and Nagle fell for it hook, line, and sinker. It's ironic that in a book so occupied with the practice of trolling the author probably got trolled herself. But of course I have no way of verifying anything ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Kaitlyn · Rating 1 out of 5]

Really disappointed by this. I'm fascinated by internet subcultures and the seedy underbelly of the web. I'm deeply interested in politics. This book seemed like a slam-dunk.

Its a joke. For the sake of brevity I'm just going to make a list:
-There is a laughable lack of editing. Numerous names and terms are mis-spelled, including President Barack Obama's name. On the first page. In the first paragraph. On the first line.

-There is a lack of organization. It jumps around from topic to topic, time to time, person to person, sometimes within the same paragraph or sentence. Arguments are brought up, suddenly dropped in a tangent, and then picked back up.

-There is a lack of clarity on how words are used. Let me explain - Nagle will throw out terms that either 1) have multiple meanings/uses, and she should identify how she uses the word and use it consistently, or terms that 2) she can't/shouldn't expect the audience to be familiar with in this sort of medium and should define when using it. This is a really basic writing skill. This is the bare minimum for anything meant to document/disseminate an event or present an argument. She also uses several terms - largely from the left - incorrectly throughout the text.

-There is a lack of citations. By which I mean, there are absolutely no citations, references, footnotes, or links on any sources for this book. There are some parts that seem largely informed by word-of-mouth than any direct observation or scholarship, and some parts that, if I did the same thing, would get me kicked out of school for plagiarism. When you are claiming to "map the online culture wars that formed the political sensibilities of a generation, to understand and to keep an account of the online battles that may otherwise be forgotten but have nevertheless shaped culture and ideas in a profound way from tiny obscure subcultural beginnings to mainstream public and political life in recent years." that kind of sourcing and documentation is important, otherwise all you really provide is a random, biased, half-assed anecdote.

-There is a lack of objectivity. Again, if you want to provide a map, a historical account, an analysis, you should have at least a little. Except Nagle can't resist stopping the narrative to throw shade now and then. A reader can't expect you to present information completely or accurately if you say a game you've never played is shit, seemingly because you hate how you assume the game works based on a biased view of a person involved in making the game.

-There is a lack of understanding of the actual topic. Nagle is certainly familiar with the Alt-right (I presume from being in the thick of it), but has absolutely no understanding of the left. Nagle seems either willfully ignorant or intellectually lazy of the different forms of feminism (which, given her thesis topic, is astonishing to see here - my guess is on laziness), of the different sub-cultures of Tumblr, etc. She deliberately cherry-picks extreme examples of the left (my God, does she actually think people honestly use demon-gender?) while doing the opposite for the Alt-Right. She rails at censorship via No-platform without knowing how the first amendment works. (No, you don't get to force private entities that don't want you there to let you speak, let alone pay you to speak.) She whines incessantly about trigger warnings without knowing anything about PTSD. She speaks authoritatively about the scientific stance on sex and gender...except she gets that wrong, too. There's SO MUCH to critique and point out about the left - and rather than look at that from an honest and informed perspective and raise valid and insightful criticisms, Nagle seems to regurgitate alt-right hyperbole and get the majority of her information from a game of Telephone.

-There is a lack of material. This book is incredibly short - there's so much that wasn't covered, or wasn't covered adequately. This could have been an actual book. Buuuuut the brevity of the text and the profound lack of sources and editing point to this being a rushed work meant to generate a small bump of income.

I'm so happy I didn't pay money for this.

[Matthias · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Prefatory edit: to acknowledge the elephant in the room as of Nov 2018, Nagle has been (correctly) excommunicated from the left for some pretty atrocious arguments she made. While I normally think the correct position is to separate out the creator of a work from the work itself, it's hard not to read this as an empirical confirmation of some of the main critiques levelled at KAN, that it was undergirded by a kind of cultural conservatism. I continue to think that there's something valuable in KAN's analysis, just as I think there are valuable-to-read culturally conservative sorta-Marxists out there (Lasch, MacIntyre, and so on), but I think there's also an element of justified egg on my face for this review. Regardless I leave it and the star rating unmodified.)

This is what cultural criticism should be: it draws on academic theory while remaining readable, is capable of impassioned polemic and clear partisanship while remaining relentlessly fair regarding matters of fact, and in general, it knows its stuff. (Like Nagle, I am perhaps overly familiar with the forms of online discourse she describes; and that she was able to do so so accurately makes me trust her on everything else - for instance, on the fascinating history of how representations of "the mainstream" have been gendered.)

I really have only two complaints, one major, one minor. The major complaint is that, for an avowed materialist, there is very little materialism here - almost all the cultural phenomena are understood in terms of continuations of and/or reactions to other cultural phenomena. Of course, providing an adequate materialist explanation would be a fully separate research project; but Nagle's ontological commitments, and some of the subjects she touches upon (for instance, her discussions of Thomas Frank and "populism,") call out for more nods in this direction, even when her immediate topic (the online culture wars) and thesis (that the valorization of transgression for its own sake is inherently self-defeating and vacuous, and that as a positive political project the left was always stupid to embrace it) are essentially cultural.

The minor complaint is that while Nagle is both a clear writer and a flavorful writer, much of the prose feels a bit underedited, at a purely technical level. Commas and other punctuation marks are frequently not where they should logically be; sometimes conjunctions are missing; it all has the feel of a first draft (or one of my reviews here lol). Since the author's publications elsewhere (for instance, Jacobin) lack this deficiency, I lay the blame on Zero Books. Of course, as noted, this is pretty minor as far as things go.

All in all, a fascinating read even for readers for whom the immediate subject matter is old hat; and if it leaves certain questions wanting for answers, I can only hope that it successfully provokes them.

[Ashley]

"What the Tumblrites embody is a taxonomical politics which is driven (drive in psychoanalytic terms) by the techno-fetishist belief in pure communication and individual empowerment. It is in this way that language has become so central to politics. The clarification of terms, the bracketing of difference and the weighing of utterances from different subject positions, cis-males at the bottom, all attempt to make the banality of online life urgent and political. In a manner that mirrors the data colonisation of the social by new media companies, every difference must be celebrated, problematised and deconstructed. Thus there are hundreds of genders, Marxist universalism is misogynist, and effacement of agency requires reparations through any number of micro-payment platforms. Any slight sarcasm or scepticism about these facts is violence. The claim to truth of such politics is purely affective, as challenging political statements from a left-ethical position may elicit the refrain its not my job to do the emotional labor of explaining this to you. The political speech-act becomes about amplifying marginal voices towards an in-group consensus, and the concept that ideas be rigorously scrutinised in debate ‘seems to anguish, offend and enrage this tragically stupefied shadow of the great movements of the left.’"

https://overland.org.au/2017/07/the-a...

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

WHERE! WAS! THE! EDITOR!!!!!! what the hell!!! Clearly from the chapter railing against Tumblr politics, we know Nagle is NOT someone who would ever be ~decolonizing grammar~. So what is the explanation for this????? Was there just no copy editor? Did I accidentally read a draft edition? There were sentences with words missing, there were repeated sentences within a paragraph that seemed to indicate she changed her mind about where to place it in the sentence but forgot to delete the original placement. There was even a chapter in which she misspelled a person's name in the chapter name, and then proceeded to switch between spellings throughout the chapter! When you quote someone and it doesn't work grammatically with the sentences you've added, you're allowed to use brackets to insert a lil [the] or [that] to make it make sense! It was so poorly written that I almost forgot to focus on her argument, but that itself was so shoddily constructed that I guess I had the same complaints all over again.

I wanted to read this ever since it came out. I was on tumblr in the year of our lord 2014 and attended Oberlin College at that time, which is basically used as punching bag in the same way as tumblr is. In fairness, it sometimes was like being on a tumblr dash but in real life at all times. Being a freshman I basically absorbed all of this uncritically and had the same tumblr identity politics as everyone around me, but I was also OBSESSED with lurking on incel forums and even turned in essays analyzing Return of Kings for school. I absolutely read Elliot Rodger's manifesto in full. I considered myself immune from any ideology on those forums because I am basically the exact type of stacy girl that incels hate. All of this is to say, I have been paying attention to both of the worlds in this book for several years and was very excited to read something that would synthesize all that knowledge and draw some useful conclusions.

Unfortunately, this book was trying to do way too much and yet not enough. Is she trying to draw the history of conservatism and counterculture to see how we arrived at the Alt Right? Not really. Is she trying to analyze what the situation is now (well, in 2017) and see how we can move forward? Not really. Is she even drawing any useful conclusions from her observations at all? Idk! Nagle dabbles in religion, gender, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, gender, feminism and more but never really delves into using any of these lenses to understand the alt right. It's mostly explaining who people are in that world. The tumblr section reminded me of that tweet that's like "twitter is just making up a guy in your mind and then getting mad about it". Because it's not like there aren't real things to be mad about here, but rehashing a dumb tumblr post that was probably made by a 15 year old as a a serious threat to intellectual discourse is making a mountain out of a molehill.


The problem with writing books about the internet is that things change so quickly. Milo Yiannpolus is irrelevant and I haven't heard about him in years. Jordan Peterson is finishing up his arc in a drama the most genius writer couldn't have come up with. I just read an article about Lauren Southern leaving the alt right due to all the misogyny (lol) and now she is pregnant with a mixed baby. Steve Bannon has been arrested for fraud. TikTok didn't even exist when this was written. I wondered why Nagle never brought up BreadTube and the proliferation of people who think (nobly or misguidedly or pure grifterly or straight up concealing their own altrightness depending on your view) that the best chance the left has for success is to lure AltRight people into the Left, like Vaush or Contrapoints. But I don't even remember if Breadtube was a thing back in 2016. Simping, Egirls,OnlyFans, the Cancel Culture Letter, Liz Breunig TradCath, fucking QANON, there are so many topics that fit into this discussion that did not exist at the time of writing but the discussion feels a bit incomplete without mentioning.

Tumblr itself is dead and now Twitter is rehashing the discourses of 2014-15 with gems like "Height gap relationships are pedophilia" and, as of the day writing this, the discourse is about not giving money to white homeless people "because they had a 400 year head start and still fumbled the bag". In some ways, I guess you could argue that the tumblr side of things has not changed all that much and has maybe gotten worse, but the thing is Nagle does not meaningfully engage with the Tumblr people or the broader left in this book. She never stops to think about the many reasons why people are drawn into that world or the points they do have; it feels more like she included that section just as insurance against SJW accusations. Like she felt like she could not make her points about the alt-right without getting called a SJW, so she had to make sure to quickly disavow the Tenderqueers. I myself have some disdain for tumblr politics, especially because I held those convictions for a lot of formative years, but I think she was unfair in this book and was only using them as a foil for 4chan people, which is an imperfect mirror.


I don't really know who Nagle is, but my guess is that she falls into the same dirtbag left camp as like Anna Kachiyan and Aimee Terese etc. I guessed this because she name drops the same people like Lasch and Paglia and the like, who I haven't read but I barely even gained any insight into here because it seemed like more of a name drop as an in-group signifier rather than any real engagement. But anyway, I'm guessing since it's published by zero books and she talks about Mark Fisher a bunch that she's a leftist but there is no class analysis or discussion of material conditions anywhere in this book. Online is important and online and real life impact eachother, but you would never know that from reading this. While you could treat Trump's victory as the big win, she didn't spend too much time analyzing the ways in which the Alt Right aided his election and I think stuff like Charlottesville might not have happened at this point.

Nagle is anti-gamer, which I used to passively be before I fell in love with one. Now I think that they're no worse or better than any other fandom. And gaming culture itself is having all kinds of reckonings, like the current sexual assault reckoning going on in the smash community. I understand why people are dismissive of video games, because I was too simply because they aren't my preferred way of enjoying media. But to outright dismiss it as not worth thinking about is writing off HUUUUUUUUGGGGE swaths of people and it is only growing larger as children would rather watch a streamer play a game than watch a movie. To bring up gamergate and then not bother to go deeper into gaming culture seems like a mistake to me.

That ties into another issue I had with this book. She never talks about Algorithms! Which is one of the largest factors as to how someone gets into right leaning content innocently. If she is so concerned with online politics leeching into real life and becoming more mainstream, dismissing the passive internet habits of children is such an oversight. I don't know if the PewDiePiePipeline was a topic of discussion when this was written, so maybe that's why. I do feel deeply concerned when I see my young cousins' internet behavior or hear what my friends who work with children report. Youtube is the most used website in the world and the ways that it can lead children down dark paths seems like it should be more of a concern to her.

To be honest, without the fact of children I would not even be thaaaaat worried about these reactionary fringe groups, because they are so fringe by nature and the celebs have mostly imploded. She argues that these alternative forms of media have superseded mainstream media, but that is a sign of someone who spends all their life online and doesn't see how the vast majority of people still watch the news. If anything, the Trump presidency is the best thing to ever happen to mainstream media because they can position themselves as the #resistance and can benefit from outrage at whatever spectacle Trump has created.

The inversion of the usual Feminine Chaos vs Masculine Order dichotomy that is laid out in the MGTOW view of the world wherein rebellion is masculine and femininity represents domesticity and control is interesting and I would have liked more on that. There could be a meaningful look at the way that gender informs both the alt right and tumblr groups, because to be honest dealing with Gender in various ways is a huge driving force for both groups. Instead she writes off the tumblr MOGAIS as nothing more than ridiculous.

I also liked that she shows how there is just as much infighting on the right. I see lots of calls for left unity online with the reasoning is that the Right is so united, but that is not the case at all. She highlights the differences in belief of different groups and explains why they hate each other just as much as they hate the mainstream.

Another good point was the assertion that being against the mainstream does not automatically entail leftism or anything positive. This calls to mind the recent discourse wrt "academically studying punk" from TikTok/Twitter. Nagle raises good points about how counterculture is viewed and how social currency works in cultures that define themselves against the mainstream, but again, MORE!!!!

This book was so weirdly organized that I really could not figure out who her audience was. I assumed it was someone like me who is addicted to the internet and already knows who all these people are, because she was dropping names with no explanations. This was fine as I said, but then she did explain them later so I was like ??? The book was not aimed at converting anyone and I think it would honestly just offend both 4channers and Tumblr users. And there was no class/material analysis so that turns off a bunch of the left. Anyone who is a "normie" would probably not be interested in the topics at hand especially since as I said they are talked about with the assumption that the reader already knows. The only thing I can think of is maybe Red Scare types who think that culture is the only force worth looking at. Culture is very important and I think the topics in this book are really important to talk about, but I can't say it enough: this was going too shallow on too many angles. Anyway 3/10 bc I suppose I don't have vehement disagreements on the surface but the argument is so shallow and messy that I was not entirely sure what to take away in the end, and I think she was overly sympathetic to the AltRight without extending the same nuance to the denizens of Tumblr.

ALSO: she never considers the fact that plenty of the more unhinged Tumblresque takes out there are actually THE WORK OF 4CHAN manipulating social justice rhetoric in order to troll!! That is such a huge interplay! How can a book about 4chan and tumblr overlook this????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Baglan · Rating 5 out of 5]

First of all: Holy shit. This is a book that I have been waiting to read for quiet some time now, but the level of insight and highly comprehensive discussion of what is going on in the cultural wars on the Web by Nagle exceeded my expectations. It reminded me of early works by Naomi Klein which combined the journalistic approach to the material at hand with detailed, but still accessible discussion of the theoretical aspect of the subject.

Nagle discusses the ongoing (or lost?) cultural war between Tumblr liberalism vs. 4-chan inspired alt-right while both of the terms comprises of highly heterogenous elements. Internet, once lauded as the free, “horizontal” space of a new kind of anarchical democracy (not long ago but around 2013 many of the liberal left still saw and hailed the new “democratic” terrain of the Internet) today has been dominated by the misogynistic, Nazi-sympathizing Man’s Rights activists.

Her historical account of what happened over the last 10 years is remarkable. Once a place of “progressive boosters” of the first-generation users of 4-chan, the transgressive and cynical culture of the website becomes a fecund terrain for rape and death threats, organized bullying that leads to suicides and depressions, complete annihilation of lives of regular teenagers and famous scientists alike.

The discussion of transgression for transgression’s sake is great. When one considers the inter-war and post-WWII origins of the proliferation of “transgressive” politics or what I call “Nietzschean left”, the turn of events become even more remarkable. A remnant of the transgressive left politics of 1960s, actually 1968, how transgression and cynicism is weaponized by the extreme-right vanguard (in the base, only a fierce anti-PC sentiment is prevalent) seems more contingent than it is a necessary trait of this line of thought. The turn of events looks like it resulted because of numerous failures of the Left.

Nagle argues that the pain, suffering and victimhood-affirming culture of Tumblr-liberalism is one of these reasons for the failure and I think she is right. “Kony 2012” videos among others comes to mind in this rush to collect “virtue points” in this scarcity of virtue market on the Web. Also, the intra-left purge and exclusion of the critics of this self-pleasing activities is another example (Nagle gives the example of Mark Fisher who sadly committed suicide this year).

One other aspect of the failures of the left in my opinion is how the Left overlooked the realm of Desire that is almost necessarily not satisfied in our contemporary societies. Nagle discusses the frustrated sexuality of the regular young male today and it is a legitimate discussion insofar that it makes up a portion of the frustrated young male who is not politicized until he is pushed towards the misogynistic underbelly of the Web which is again, not necessarily Nazi, but a couple of steps away from it at best. Desire, in this case, is also a desire for the commodity, of course, which also necessarily dissatisfies. When you have the means to buy a given commodity, it fails to restore a sense of satisfaction but rather perpetuates it even further. When you are not able to buy it, well, in an intuitive fashion, you are dissatisfied in a world of instant satisfaction, pornographic images and incessant advertisements. The left’s complete immersion and self-satisfaction with identity politics (LGBT and the alphabet goes on as Zizek was lambasted by critics from the Left when he criticized some of the aspects of the politics of gender in a recent article debate, you can Google it) leaves the room for this new brand of extreme right to tap into the frustration and insecurities of the young male.

The weird question to be asked is then how to answer such an effective version of “Gramscian” right who successfully waged a cultural war against the cultural Marxism? (this is an incredibly effective misnomer as the war is waged on politically correct liberalism) Nagle doesn’t shy way from the question in an equally strong conclusion chapter. She claims that “trolling the troll” is not effective. One should definitively leave the privilege-checking, victimhood-loving trenches of identitarian politics for a start. Staunchly anti-xenophobic and also positively built left populism might be one of the answers. “Chocolate eating-vibrator waving” (in Nina Power’s immortal words), consumer-friendly feminism of Lena Dunham did not help Hillary much as one can see. Another question to be asked could be if a newly reinvigorated left aesthetics is possible along the lines of Guy Debord, Beatniks and others or the 1960s wave of transgressive left-wing aesthetics is completely compromised by the alt-Right. While the economic (what Nagle calls “materialist”) left has never been in a complete alliance with the anti-authoritarian aesthetics of the 1960s, it is a question that should be re-asked again.

All in all, 5 stars and a strong recommend.

[Karl Hallbjörnsson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some reservations toward this book. It seems mostly just as if it's unfinished; typos abound, strangely wrong quips about PTSD, unclear and sporadic theses, repeatedly bafflingly caricaturistic presentations of Friedrich Nietzsche, etc. It felt like the book was in dire need of a good editor most of the time.

It seems to me that the book could have been an important and momentous document of the internet „wars“ of recent times, but that it got rushed and a little hamfistedly thrown into publication before reaching a decent level of finishedness.

It could have been longer, for example, and could have touched upon many things that I felt should deserve more detail (e.g. the growing sphere of nu-atheistic pseudo-rationalism; the whole of neoreaction; accelerationism as it appears online, etc.).

All in all, a disappointing text — I only hope that the work inspires others to attempt more thorough, finished and polished shots at describing these tumultuous online atmospheres. It's a very interesting topic, after all.

[Jonfaith · Rating 1 out of 5]

In academia, the ‘cultural turn’ saw a radical shift in scholarship whereby universities made culture the focus of contemporary debates. It also meant a shift in emphasis toward meaning and away from a positivist epistemology of discerning objective truth.

Pretty sure that Nietzsche wouldn’t care for this text. The writing is atrocious. Just bad. His name is used here as a shorthand for Nazi misogyny. While the author is incessant in bemoaning the lack of nuance in these dreaded “online culture wars “ there doesn’t appear to be a focused interest in nuance in the analysis. It is grotesque and offers a parenthetical titillation. It references the film Fight Club seemingly on every other page. I didn’t enjoy this experience though I did find myself comparing much to what Heidegger referred to as a “placeholder of the Nothing.”

I am still undecided as to whether there is a dearth of ideas in this book or it is simply the case that I don't care. It was personally noteworthy that the thinkers of the online culture wars are personages of negligible interest to me: Mark Fisher and Nick Land. Ms. Nagle afforded more space to the former but overall the critical element was adrift if not absent. There was a nice citation from Baudelaire of all people.

[Sander Philipse · Rating 1 out of 5]

Nagle's account of the rise of the alt-right is rendered analytically useless by a largely uncritical repetition of alt-right mythology (are they actually reacting to Tumblr, or to empowerment?), a failure to account for power structures, race-blindness (whither Black Lives Matter?), hostility to the entire concept of marginalized groups making particular claims, ignorance of many continuities (money and all) with and historical precedents for right-wing 'transgressive' racism and misogyny, and an inability to define her own terms and conceptualizations--is it really analytically useful to treat the mainstream of the Democratic party as functionally identical to genderfluid teens on Tumblr?

[E.C. · Rating 1 out of 5]

i hate this book. it's written like a rushed undergraduate thesis, smarmy and self-projecting. i've been in and out of the internet circles in question (4chan in particular) for years and as someone who watched this culture beget itself, the lack of citations and references is offensive. the editor of this book should be dragged behind a barn and sternly lectured. myriad mistakes include mispellings of the names of popular figures (including "barak" obama), vague references to statistics, and the absurd amount of chunky, biased 2-paragraph long block quotes nagle uses to pepper the text...without sourcing. to be completely frank, i feel this was rushed to publication because of the amount of "hot-button issues" nagle attempts to touch on, and it shows.
if you're looking for a tightly-written, humble, and (above all) informative book about the proliferation of reactionary conservativism on the net...look elsewhere!

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can't recommend this one highly enough. And to everyone. Essential to understanding how the death spiral of our national discourse *can only be understood dialectically.* Nagle makes the compelling case that the success of the alt-right and what she calls the alt-light (not really overtly Nazi, more capitalizing on the newfound glamour of fascist thought) in their endeavor to shift American culture toward a misogynistic, overtly racist direction is rooted in the so-called left's reliance on the "politics" of transgression (think the Piss Christ).

So while in no way drawing a false equivalence between the folks behind #gamergate, et al (the sort that dox a person and encourage people to rape and murder them), and cultural studies majors, this book is a really fierce critique of the left's desire to look sickly (literally bragging about all the unseen illnesses folks have), it's demoralization in the face of constant defeat, and how, since the cultural turn, it has decided that racking up virtue tokens was more important that gaining power here in the material world by showing how deftly that can use the eye-roll-inducing jargon of identitarian politics.

The level of erudition brought to link really skeevy online chatroom discourse into a theoretical home tying it to the broader sweep of 20th and 21st century history, this book does an essential service for the left. In understanding how our own behavior stokes the reaction we love to denounce (and often doesn't look to do much more than that), we are able to short circuit the mirror game and focus on what's important: taking power back from the racists and sexists manipulating the simmering resentment that is America. And we do this by highlighting what unites us - our alienation and exploitation.

A superb work of dialectical analysis (in this case, mapping the interplay and unity within difference of various "systems" of thought) meant to liberate a mind stuck in the social media scroll, it was a great read and perfect for group discussion. But previous reviews have hit on on big flaw: the copy editing was horrendous and is staggeringly sloppy for such a short book. Clearly Zero Books was trying to get this out in a hurry.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

A shockingly comprehensive read in just 100 pages. I'll definitely need to reread it to absorb all of it, but (to me) the main themes were:

* Society changed significantly between the 2012 and 2016 elections, mostly as the result of online subcultures breaking into the real world (from the Left and Right) and stealing ground from the center-left and center-right.
* The Alt-Right has copied tactics from the Left circa 1960-now in order to successfully win a lot of followers, media attention and power.
* Related: a lot of things the Left thought were inherently left (anarchism, transgressive art, focusing on culture wars rather than elections) can be used effectively by the Right.
* Tumblr leftism is juvenile and bad (I think this is the weakest part of her thesis, but then again I'm a dirty Tumblr leftist)
* The Alt-Right are just as juvenile and bad, and are basically monsters to women
* The Right is just as divided and self-sabotaging as the Left - conservatives and the alt-right are frequently enemies.

Basically, an essential read for anyone interested in what the fuck is happening right now. I don't agree with everything she said (I think she unfairly ignores a lot of the good work identity politics has done for oppressed people everywhere), and for a book of 100 pages she obviously leaves some gaps and broad strokes that need more detail. But it's an excellent read and gave me a lot of background into how 20th century politics shaped the world I was born into.

[Todd N · Rating 5 out of 5]

I believe this book has the highest standard deviation of review scores of any book I’ve read on Goodreads, which for movies is a good indicator of a cult classic.

I’m not an extremely on-line politics person, so I found this to be an really concise and useful guide to the roots of the on-line right and how it all ties in to today’s broader political climate.

In those old John Hughes movies the rich jock kids were always the bad guys. Well, it turns out the shy, nerdy kids are actually way, way worse. They just didn’t have the Internet to post anonymously on yet. Mamas, don’t let your children grow up to be incels.

The book starts tracing things a bit further back than the Internet—unfortunately one of my heroes, H.L. Mencken, gets a shout out as an influence—but things really start to pick up in the manosphere with the PUA (See my review of The Game.) and red pill communities.

Then things gather misogynistic momentum with #gamergate (the Middle Eastern conflict of the Internet) and /b/. Add some white nationalism and identitarianism and you get /pol/ and The_Donald.

I was surprised that Voat, where people go when subreddits get shut down and Gab.ai, the right-leaning Twitter weren’t mentioned.

The on-line left, as in Tumblr, SJW, performative wokeness, and the other kind of identitarianism is briefly covered as well.

This book is a quick read, but if you want a brief overview, there is an accompanying documentary on the Fusion channel (that might require installing an app on your Tivo or AppleTV, but it’s totally worth it) also called Kill All Normies. You can find it here:
https://fusion.tv/video/585769/trumpl...

I also recommend these two podcasts where Ms. Nagle (and Ms. Frost in the 2nd one) discuss the book and related themes in the context of socialism.
https://soundcloud.com/deadpundits/ep...
https://soundcloud.com/deadpundits/ep...

Even though Ms. Nagle goes pretty hard at the on-line left (see the one-star reviews), she also seems pretty unhappy with the neo-liberals as evidenced by quotes like this: “In modern politics, liberal leaders are forgiven for drone bombing as long as they’re cool with gay marriage, while on the right, enacting policies that devastate families and stable communities was cheered on at any cost as long as it dealt a satisfying blow to the trade unions” So I’m guessing she’s an old-fashioned socialist-type leftie somehow trapped in the body of a millennial.

A few misc points:

- The left didn’t get rid of Milo. Rather than debating Milo and crushing him and his lame straw man ideas, the left worked to “deplatform” him and rioted when he came to UC Berkeley. Bill Maher had him on his show and actually compared him to Christopher Hitchens(!!). Eventually the right got rid of him when he crossed a taboo and was no longer useful to him.

- The on-line right has built this very welcoming Internet that is very accessible to normies through YouTube videos, absurdist memes, and a general sense of subversion (the last being the dominant mode of expression of cultural capitalism). People are likely to get sucked into it via a search engine or popular forums and impressionable voters (younger, disaffected, and/or stupid) are going to find a complete world view as long as they don’t think too hard about it.

- Contrast with the on-line left, which can be less welcoming. I’ll leave it at that.

- Even if the on-line right didn’t vote, they shifted the Overton window of acceptable discourse, which has had a large impact on politics.

Highly recommended. Things are moving quickly in politics, so parts of it are already feeling dated. The 2nd podcast linked is a good update to the book. Some of the copy editing is a bit sloppy too.

[Abby · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book. I really, really did. It blends all the right topics--politics, sociology, Internet culture--and I spent a significant portion of my adolescence on both Tumblr and 4chan, so the subject material is both familiar and fascinating to me. I sat down to read it with true eagerness...and emerged horribly, horribly disappointed. Three main points:

1. The writing is horrible from a technical viewpoint. Spelling mistakes, typos, and grammatical errors abound, some of which are egregious enough that they actually make the writing difficult to understand. She also fails to make a single citation throughout the entire book, which is a massive oversight.

2. There is no real timeline given, no narrative, no way of helping people to make sense of the facts she's presenting. This isn't a deep dive into online political culture and how it erupted into real life, as I expected. She mentions people and events here and there, and often muses on how the modern-day philosophical leanings of online culture tie back to various historical philosophies. None of it is very interesting, and none of it really provides any true insight into the online cultures she's describing, their history, or how they grew.

3. For all that the title reads "4chan and Tumblr," her understanding of the online left is woefully inadequate. The book reads as though Nagle took her understanding of Tumblr simply from watching people on 4chan make fun of it, rather than doing any actual research herself. She completely misunderstands the divisions and subculture of the online left, and minimizes complaints about racism, sexism, and homophobia without even attempting to explain the left's point of view. She editoralizes the story of Gamergate with her own complaints about immature a hobby gaming is (irrelevant, and insulting besides) and how horrible a game she thought Depression Quest was, as if making a horrible game justifies death threats and ongoing harassment. She even goes so far as to equate people desiring to chop off their own limbs with transgender rights and the "spoonie" chronic illness community, which is...troubling, to say the least. (To be fair, she seems to understand so little about the spoonie concept that I'm not sure she actually understands it's a chronic illness community.)

She's so invested in mocking the left that she's even willing to go against science to do it. Her criticism of women who have never been to war experiencing PTSD was particularly irksome to me. What in the world ever gave this woman the idea that only going to war could give people PTSD? Has she ever read so much as a basic introductory psychology textbook? Hell, did she even bother to read the Wikipedia article on PTSD? Various forms of trauma can cause PTSD, and anyone with even a basic understanding of psychology can tell you that sexual assault is easily one of the most common. I honestly don't understand how she could have made this statement if she'd bothered to do even the tiniest bit of research.

Which is the issue I have with her attitude in this book, in general: on both sides, she's more interested in making fun of and belittling the people she's discussing than making any real attempt to understand their beliefs. She criticizes Gabriella Coleman for speaking of Anonymous in positive terms in 2014, yet Coleman quite successfully did what Nagle fails to do--truly understanding the culture she set out to study. Nagle seemed to be too busy imagining herself morally superior to both sides to engage in any true attempts to understand. This book will give you plenty of fodder to mock online political cultures, but if you want to actually learn something, look elsewhere.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nagle posits the alt-right's misogynist, transphobic, and racist worldview is just a toxic, in it for the lulz, ironic reaction to overzealous social justice warriors with their fervent "Tumblr liberalism". The left's ascendency during the Obama years defined by its “culture of fragility and victimhood mixed with a vicious culture of group attacks, group shaming, and attempts to destroy the reputations and lives of others within their political milieu” escalated into hysteria. Increasingly the rhetoric at the edges became anti-male, anti-white, anti-straight, and anti-cis and it has been performatively adopted by the mainstream as it capes for Pride, #BLM and #MeToo.

In that sense Nagle takes alt-light figurehead Milo Yiannopoulos at his word, that the right has become the counterculture; modern day punks focused on transgression against the dominant morality, a big middle finger to the progressive status quo. The right has learned from the left, has better weaponized online aggression, and created more compelling myths that speak to those that can't keep up with the new woke language of gatekeeping, gender fluidity, cultural appropriation, white feminism et al. "America, Fuck Yeah" is just easier to grasp.

These swings come fast and it will be interesting to see how the alt right evolves given their many pronged attack on journalism, constantly moving the Overton window and a pandemic that has backed people into corners looking for easy to grasp narratives that reassuringly tell them who to blame. The left seems to just resort to cultural politics, shaking their head at how dumb the right is and patting themselves on the back for how not-racist they are. That doesn't seem to be working and the rise of the dirtbag left seems like an interesting reaction to watch. I'd love for Nagle to tackle this again now that it's 5 years later.

[Andrew · Rating 1 out of 5]

It is deeply unfortunate that this incompetent and enormously biased book has—simply by virtue of it’s being published quickly after the 2016 election—become the go-to interpretation for the history of the alt-right. This book will do active harm to the attempt to understand the nature and trajectory of the alt-right. I just hope someone writes a good book on the subject soon.

Clarification (12/1): the bias I mentioned above is (surprisingly) directed toward what Nagle calls “Tumblr liberalism,” which she excoriates as if it is the “Social Justice Warriors” who irritated the alt-right into existence. There are multiple reasons why this is a horribly ignorant argument, but the first has to be the fact that the alt-right is not just a bunch of shitposters and trolls who only recently got off their asses and started publicly doing something.

Nagle also mocks identity politics across the board and often seems to have more respect for alt-right figures than left activists. She certainly finds the ideas of the alt-right more interesting than the ideas of, say, Judith Butler. If you agree with that evaluation, you’ll probably love this book, and you’re probably a horrible person.

[Conor Ahern · Rating 4 out of 5]

So this pithy book packs a lot in.

Reading this, I started thinking about the Internet as the opposite of what we consider to be Society. I'm venturing beyond my pay grade here, but Society seems good for, perhaps above all else, suppressing your amygdala a bit and clamping down on those animal urges. It's a functional trade--we swap immediate gratification for safety and predictability, in an equilibrium that is always changing based on who is contributing and what they bring to the equation. Essential to the bargain is the idea that you will likely be punished for any transgression; even if it turns out that your darkest tendencies aren't very uncommon, it's just too risky to ventilate them.

But not on the anonymous Internet. And Nagle paints the picture of the ghastliest, most macabre passel of ghoul-virgins you can imagine, marshaled by the likes of Milo Yiannopolous and his successors, inspired by Steve Bannon, and peopled by the faceless iconoclasts of 4chan. Nothing about their behavior is especially interesting or inspired—it's just transgression for transgression's sake, a mob of inattentive children having their fun with the god-mode of human interaction before it grows tedious, probably becoming libertarians if sufficient outside interaction and genetic luck speeds them to escape velocity, and becoming whiney incels ("involuntary celibates") if not. I have nothing but contempt for these people, clinging to their white pride and cartoonish misogyny, and it's hard to miss how the validation of crassness and spleen have pitched into the dynamic that gave us the modern Republican Party, headed by the biggest ass to ever bray.

Shortly after she chained herself to Twitter headquarters, I realized that I had, by pure chance, interacted with a pre-famous (and bottle blonde) Laura Loomer, heroine of sorts to this “movement,” when I went to the Women's March in early 2017. I told her (ignorantly but erroneously) that it was illegal for her to film me, and also that her MAGA hat sucked (accurately). She responded that once Trump was inaugurated, all of us "beta males" were going to find out what a real alpha can do. Well, Laura is back on her bullshit today and having some sort of lawn party on Nancy Pelosi's Napa estate, proving, ironically, that walls don't keep unwanted visitors out.

I am just so goddamn ready for the time when we aren't even given the opportunity to ignore these milksop reprobates...

[Antti Rautiainen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before reading this book, I read plenty of anarchist and leftist critiques, but they seem to miss the point. Yes, Nagle does not cite her sources, there is copypaste from wikipedia, and she is kind of lame and moralistic moderate social-democrat and so are her policy recommendations.

But that does not mean that the main point of her book, analysis of the online right is not highly talented and on point. With exception of the fifth chapter attacking "Tumblr feminism", and conclusions, this book is an instant classic.

[Cam · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was looking forward to this but was really disappointed after reading it. It's massively under-researched, with some extremely dubious conclusions that the critical theory stuff doesn't help support. Read my full review here: https://medium.com/@curple.turnle/i-d...

[Neutrino Increasing · Rating 1 out of 5]

Cool, Zero Books, you are so edgy and transgressive: so much that you are publishing books who do their best to present alt-right as cool edgy rebels all of whose failings are to be blamed on "The Left". After the Charlottesville tragedy, my tolerance for this sort of POV is all but completely gone.

[Bernard O'Leary · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pretty great bit of critical theory about how the alt-right have arrived to they are, although it's let down by some bizarrely vituperative passages about the identity politics of Tumblr.

Nagle proposes an interesting idea about the concept of the radical outsider who rejects mainstream morality and instead seeks his own identity, an idea that can be traced from De Sade through to Nietzche until you get to the counter-culture of the 60s.

They tried to weaponise moral transgression as a way of bringing down oppressive social structures, but this was a deal with the devil, argues Nagle. Liberalism is inherently moral and social, whereas transgressive edgelord types are fundamentally solipsists, rejecting all society and morality.

You could kind of see the problem right away: 60s free love movements being overrun by manipulative fuckbois, the situationist ethic of punk giving way to genuine nazis. In general, the 60s counter-cultural social values of equality and tolerance won out. But over the last 50 years, and during the 80s culture wars, we have elevated the Edgelord to be the ultimate aspirational role model, like Brad Pitt in Fight Club, because he doesn't take orders but does what he wants to do.

So all of this is the backdrop for an explosive, argumentative internet culture, combined with many other factors which have left a lot of people - mainly white men - feeling alienated and disenfranchised. Liberal society means embracing certain values; 4Chan offers the nihilistic thrill of completely rejecting society and walking your own path. It is, as Nagle puts it, a Gramscian counter-hegemony, which is racist and sexist precisely because the current hegemony (in most media at least) is anti-racist and anti-sexist.

Right, so, this is all pretty deep stuff and we've got Gramsci and Adorno and all sorts, but a small section of the book attempts to "balance" things by taking a look at the equivalent of the alt-right, which is what Nagle refers to as the Tumblr-Left. These are the contemporary liberals who have, in the mind of many leftist thinkers, chosen to identity politics the defining cause of the left, rather than economic equality.

It's an argument that's been done to death and I'm not going to rehash it here because Nagle didn't bother either. There's an interesting but undercooked theory about how the Tumblr-Left try to create "outrage scarcity", treating their oppression as a value commodity.

There's also two pages listing various gender identities that have been floated on Tumblr. There's no commentary or attempt to prove them wrong, just a whole "look at how stupid these people are" thing. The poor Tumblr-kin don't even get a bit of Gramsci to justify their behaviour. They don't even get Chomsky.

Now, I think the Tumblr-Left is stupid, but I would have liked some cultural theory about why they are stupid, rather than have it assumed. Nagle's real weak spot is in dealing with the left - she goes out of her way to mention that she sympathises with MRAs on some key issues, but never asks if identity politics are linked to real-life oppression, let alone whether there might be a link between social identity and economic equality (spoiler: there is).

Anyway, the book would be better without this section but there's still a lot to chew over here. Our society is still shaping the networks that connect us, but the networks are shaping us as well. It's important to think about how.

[Greg Brown · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nagle does a good job of laying out and explaining many of the alt-right's pet tropes and running jokes, but her analysis is really disappointing and ultimately buys into the right's same errant argument that "politics is downstream of culture". For a lot of the '90s and '00s, that assertion seemed to be true, as neoliberal aims took over both parties and so much of the material basis of politics went off-limits. When culture war is the entire game, of course it's going to seem like the most important thing and what ultimately decides elections.

But material forces are always going to reassert themselves, and the rise of the tea party and alt-right after the 2008 financial crisis isn't a coincidence. You have economic conditions that are uniquely immiserating and atomizing to the young, so you get a reactionary posture fueled and enabled by that material condition. I find it really hard to buy her argument that the "tumblr left" was so omnipresent and uniquely silly that it caused the reaction to occur, especially when—if you're arguing from that angle—a better thesis is that corporate-driven liberalism was constrained and forbidden from making any type of economic critique, and therefore paper-thin and rightfully rejected. And since socialist arguments were kept off the national table by the Democratic party before Sanders, of course they went for the other guys who were at least able to point out that the situation was fucked.

The other grating part about this book is the half-baked writing. It's mostly OK, but there are paragraphs clearly never seen by an editor, or even an editing pass. I get that some people aren't into semi-colons, but if you're listing things and including commas in the descriptions, you need to use semi-colons to demarcate those individual items. Other sentences are train-wrecks that read like they were written the night before a paper was due. As a whole, it feels like the book was rushed out to capitalize on the recency of the topic, and skipped the sort of editing consideration that would both improve it on the big-picture level and also make the sentences... uh, actual sentences.