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It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office
An insider's history of the website at the end of the world, which burst into politics and memed Donald Trump into the White House.
The internet has transformed the ways we think and act, and by consequence, our politics. The most impactful recent political movements on the far left and right started with massive online collectives of teenagers. Strangely, both movements began on the same website: an anime imageboard called 4chan.org. It Came from Something Awful is the fascinating and bizarre story of 4chan and its profound effect on youth counterculture.
Dale Beran has observed the website's shifting activities and interests since the beginning. 4chan is a microcosm of the internet itself--simultaneously at the vanguard of contemporary culture, politics, comedy and language, and a new low for all of the above. It was the original meme machine, mostly frequented by socially awkward and disenfranchised young men in search of a place to be alone together.
During the recession of the late 2000's, the memes became political. 4chan was the online hub of a leftist hacker collective known as Anonymous and a prominent supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement. But within a few short years, the site's ideology spun on its axis; it became the birthplace and breeding ground of the alt-right. In It Came from Something Awful, Beran uses his insider's knowledge and natural storytelling ability to chronicle 4chan's strange journey from creating rage-comics to inciting riots to--according to some--memeing Donald Trump into the White House.
The internet has transformed the ways we think and act, and by consequence, our politics. The most impactful recent political movements on the far left and right started with massive online collectives of teenagers. Strangely, both movements began on the same website: an anime imageboard called 4chan.org. It Came from Something Awful is the fascinating and bizarre story of 4chan and its profound effect on youth counterculture.
Dale Beran has observed the website's shifting activities and interests since the beginning. 4chan is a microcosm of the internet itself--simultaneously at the vanguard of contemporary culture, politics, comedy and language, and a new low for all of the above. It was the original meme machine, mostly frequented by socially awkward and disenfranchised young men in search of a place to be alone together.
During the recession of the late 2000's, the memes became political. 4chan was the online hub of a leftist hacker collective known as Anonymous and a prominent supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement. But within a few short years, the site's ideology spun on its axis; it became the birthplace and breeding ground of the alt-right. In It Came from Something Awful, Beran uses his insider's knowledge and natural storytelling ability to chronicle 4chan's strange journey from creating rage-comics to inciting riots to--according to some--memeing Donald Trump into the White House.
290 pages, Kindle Edition
First published July 30, 2019
119 people are currently reading
2452 people want to read
About the author
Dale Beran
5 books35 followersDale Beran used to write the webcomic A Lesson Is Learned But the Damage Is Irreversible but transitioned into writing about real trolls and digital goblins in early 2017 mostly for laffs but also some chuckles. He updates his blog once every thousand years at daleberan.com
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September 15, 2019I had big hopes for this book, having read the author's Medium post about 4chan and "beta males," but after about 200 pages, I found myself increasingly disappointed and sometimes mystified by the author's spotty understanding of real world politics. The book is on its firmest ground when describing the dynamics of 4chan, Something Awful, Otakon, Anonymous, and even, to an extent Tumblr. When discussing these internet phenomena, Beran is often insightful. As some other reviewers have noted, he is much more sympathetic to Tumblr, including Zoe Quinn, than Angela Nagle is. His analysis of the role of depression in these internet cultures is probably the best part of the book. He is mistaken, however, to attribute so much causality to internet fora as if they, whether interpreted as reactions to a low-wage economy or vapid consumerism, were the cause of the Trump victory, rather than to see them as one part of a broader history of racism, sexism, and radical religious conservatism that all also contributed to Trump's particular right-wing populism. It's a nice hook for a publisher, but 4chan and Tumblr are eddies in the current, not "skeleton keys."
When he tries to apply what he learned by frequenting these spaces to broader social movement history and theory, his analysis is as benighted as anyone else whose primary knowledge developed by following internet rabbit holes. His understanding of left history seems limited to whatever Mark Fisher, Zizek, or anyone else published in Jacobin or Current Affairs has said. There is almost no mention of the history of race, racism, or civil rights activism, not to mention feminism in the book. There are plenty of howlers here. His source on the Enlightenment left is the counter-revolutionary Alexis de Tocqueville, whom he relies on to assert that the 18th century Enlightenment ideal was to create a "worldwide coalition against the consolidation of power in the hands of the few." This interpretation of the "economic left" - itself a bizarre conflation of liberalism and populism from which Marxism is absent - would be news to Africa, South America, and Asia. It would also be news to Marxists and New Left activists to learn that it was 21st century campus leftists (whom he had earlier criticized for being liberal rather than radical) who first "broke with" such unifying 18th century (ahem, liberal) enlightenment ideals. He describes January 2017 women's march, at which Angela Davis and Linda Sarsour were major speakers, and which was attended by a number of economic justice organizations and labor unions, as organized and populated entirely by "liberal centrists" - as if no one attended, or even could have attended both it and Disrupt J20 held the day before. He attributes Caitlyn Jenner's coming out in 2015 to the "ideology" of Tumblr leaking into the broader culture, rather than acknowledging that transgender politics had long preceded the internet (and did not originate with Judith Butler). He describes "antifa" and "black bloc" as organizations, which are somehow also always "college students" and Tumblr denizens in costume. He equates all feminism and gay rights politics with "counter-culture" (which he also associates with Hugh Hefner), towards the end, proclaiming that "who you sleep with" (just like "how you dress") doesn't threaten "the power structure". It's maddening to me as both a socialist and a historian of social movements that so much of what passes for socialist politics these days is so shallowly informed about the history of even U.S. social movements.
When he tries to apply what he learned by frequenting these spaces to broader social movement history and theory, his analysis is as benighted as anyone else whose primary knowledge developed by following internet rabbit holes. His understanding of left history seems limited to whatever Mark Fisher, Zizek, or anyone else published in Jacobin or Current Affairs has said. There is almost no mention of the history of race, racism, or civil rights activism, not to mention feminism in the book. There are plenty of howlers here. His source on the Enlightenment left is the counter-revolutionary Alexis de Tocqueville, whom he relies on to assert that the 18th century Enlightenment ideal was to create a "worldwide coalition against the consolidation of power in the hands of the few." This interpretation of the "economic left" - itself a bizarre conflation of liberalism and populism from which Marxism is absent - would be news to Africa, South America, and Asia. It would also be news to Marxists and New Left activists to learn that it was 21st century campus leftists (whom he had earlier criticized for being liberal rather than radical) who first "broke with" such unifying 18th century (ahem, liberal) enlightenment ideals. He describes January 2017 women's march, at which Angela Davis and Linda Sarsour were major speakers, and which was attended by a number of economic justice organizations and labor unions, as organized and populated entirely by "liberal centrists" - as if no one attended, or even could have attended both it and Disrupt J20 held the day before. He attributes Caitlyn Jenner's coming out in 2015 to the "ideology" of Tumblr leaking into the broader culture, rather than acknowledging that transgender politics had long preceded the internet (and did not originate with Judith Butler). He describes "antifa" and "black bloc" as organizations, which are somehow also always "college students" and Tumblr denizens in costume. He equates all feminism and gay rights politics with "counter-culture" (which he also associates with Hugh Hefner), towards the end, proclaiming that "who you sleep with" (just like "how you dress") doesn't threaten "the power structure". It's maddening to me as both a socialist and a historian of social movements that so much of what passes for socialist politics these days is so shallowly informed about the history of even U.S. social movements.
March 11, 2020
If you follow me on here you know that I've been reading a LOT of books trying to understand the modern alt-right and this is by far the most cogent and insightful. In fact, I get it now. And what I get is that I can't get it because the whole thing has been gestating in some parallel internet world that I have never engaged in. I've never been on reddit/4chan/video game sites/tumblr and apparently these online spaces created distinct language and culture and norms and so the alt right and even some parts of the progressive left that I have a hard time understanding--actually can't be understood without knowing a little bit about these spaces. This book filled the gap and gave a lot of nuanced and insightful framing.
So you should come for the background to the alt right, but stay to understand the left as well! The part in the book where he contrasts 4chan and the tumblr ecosystem was just riveting and really just helped me see things in a new way.
So you should come for the background to the alt right, but stay to understand the left as well! The part in the book where he contrasts 4chan and the tumblr ecosystem was just riveting and really just helped me see things in a new way.
January 3, 2020
Problems:
-Beran misgenders Chelsea Manning
-Though not entirely inaccurate (from my perspective, at least), Beran's depiction of Tumblr culture and "SJWs" feels reductive, simplifying (and sometimes casually dismissing) the viewpoints of these groups as a means of direct comparison to 4Chan and the alt-right.
That being said, this book IS about 4Chan and the alt-right, and of all the books I've read on internet culture, this one (from my perspective) creates the most comprehensive history of the alt-right's formation and comes closest to capturing the foulness that is 4Chan.
Other books that have attempted to understand the psychology of trolls get to one or two aspects of the lifestyle and mindset: the LULZ, the libertarianism, the boredom. Very rarely, however, do they dive deep into the sadness and self-loathing, and the extreme darkness that leads to the anger and, inevitably, violence of young alt-righters.
So, too, does Beran put 4Chan and the alt-right in a context larger than I've previously seen. Other books, it feels like trolling sprang from the head of Zeus fully formed. But Beran goes back, back to the early days of the internet, and before then to the idealism and radicalism of the 60s. It's illuminating, to see where all this comes from.
Not perfect, but incredibly gripping.
-Beran misgenders Chelsea Manning
-Though not entirely inaccurate (from my perspective, at least), Beran's depiction of Tumblr culture and "SJWs" feels reductive, simplifying (and sometimes casually dismissing) the viewpoints of these groups as a means of direct comparison to 4Chan and the alt-right.
That being said, this book IS about 4Chan and the alt-right, and of all the books I've read on internet culture, this one (from my perspective) creates the most comprehensive history of the alt-right's formation and comes closest to capturing the foulness that is 4Chan.
Other books that have attempted to understand the psychology of trolls get to one or two aspects of the lifestyle and mindset: the LULZ, the libertarianism, the boredom. Very rarely, however, do they dive deep into the sadness and self-loathing, and the extreme darkness that leads to the anger and, inevitably, violence of young alt-righters.
So, too, does Beran put 4Chan and the alt-right in a context larger than I've previously seen. Other books, it feels like trolling sprang from the head of Zeus fully formed. But Beran goes back, back to the early days of the internet, and before then to the idealism and radicalism of the 60s. It's illuminating, to see where all this comes from.
Not perfect, but incredibly gripping.
October 5, 2020
The quality varies wildly in quality and feels as if certain chapters were included to pad the length. I found the analysis of Tumblr to be particularly shallow. I'm certain that there is a great book waiting to be publishing on the history fringe politics on the internet, but this isn't it. That being said, the research on Bannon and Evola was enlightening. I wish more time was spent interrogating the roots of neo-fascism and less on regurgitating the ideas of Baudrillard and Zizek.
February 13, 2020
This book is incredibly informative and insightful. The power of a shitposting, nihilistic subculture to influence the language and arguments that form our discourse is disheartening but necessary to understand.
November 2, 2020
I remember reading an interview with David Simon about the real life people that inspired the main characters on The Wire: The street level wheelers and dealers that sway with the tides of power and sometimes influence it in their own weird way, all connected in a twisted ecosystem. Heroes and villains who make up the story of a city, yet most people do not know their names. This book shines a light on some of the funkier alleyways and personalities of "the chans," illustrating over a number of chapters, for instance, the connection between a guy who wanted to start a message board to trade anime porn and the ascension of the alt-right and QAnon (which since this was published has broken even more into the real world in awful, tangible ways). Navigating cause and effect in this post-truth, post-irony online space is no easy task, but Dale Beran gives it all a thorough and thoughtful examination through a lens that incorporates generational ennui, systemic failure, and mass media as likely suspects in this slightly depressing societal whodunnit. His opinions on The Matrix are odd/off, but that's okay, he's clearly not a movie person.
Note of optimism: many of the alt-right superstars named have been so thoroughly disgraced and deplatformed since time of writing, their sphere influence is about the size of a softball. Unfortunately, the ideologies persist, but that's a bigger fish we'll be dealing with the rest of my life.
Note of optimism: many of the alt-right superstars named have been so thoroughly disgraced and deplatformed since time of writing, their sphere influence is about the size of a softball. Unfortunately, the ideologies persist, but that's a bigger fish we'll be dealing with the rest of my life.
September 4, 2019
IT CAME FROM SOMETHING AWFUL is a better version of KILL ALL NORMIES (a book that many people, including myself, overrated at the time of its publication but whose flaws are now clearer in the wake of Angela Nagle's open embrace of right-wing positions and personalities.) Beran benefits from his personal experience on 4chan and Tumblr - he views himself as one of the troubled Extremely Online men who could've become an alt-right nihilist. The story he tells - online shitposting getting more and more political, Gamergate, Steve Bannon and other figures pushing the 4chan trolls towards helping Trump getting elected, his perception of the flaws of identity politics and contemporary pop culture - is very familiar, but Beran has an intellectual crowding, drawing in particular on Marcuse. (He shares the Frankfurt School's hatred of Hollywood movies, especially THE MATRIX, whose openness to multiple interpretations is missing from his perception of it.) His chapter on Tumblr is far more sympathetic than Nagle's, yet he's still critical of its popularized version of Judith Butler's feminism and queer theory and suggests that something dangerous came from the 4chan crowd discovering that line of thinking. (One problem with the "identity politics are neoliberal" dismissal is that it can't account for the central place of transphobia in the current conservative mindset or come up with a way to fight; instead, Beran dismisses LGBTQ identity as totally co-opted by capitalism, like every counterculture from the '60s forward, without grappling with the murderous persistence of homophobia and transphobia.) The closing chapter suggests that socialism is returning in online spaces as the only real alternative to fascism and that it's the only way that American democracy can survive. Even if I disagree with some of Beran's ideas, this is a very compelling attempt to understand how online culture turned so malevolent.
January 12, 2020
I think this is the most important book I've ever read.
I became active on the internet (mostly on Reddit) in late 2014, just a kid looking for a place to discuss my favorite books and cartoons. And as I learned more about the culture of different sites, I watched from the sidelines as the internet, my window into what the rest of the world was like, fought over the election, and the trolls won.
This book explained to me what has always been going on in the back of my internet experience. I would assume most of the people who run in the same circles as me have a basic understanding of how and why Donald Trump was elected, and the roll the internet played in it, but this book was still mind blowing for me in how well-researched and well-explained it was. All these complex systems intersecting to create more hate and ignorance, and I suppose the only way to defeat that ignorance is to understand how it spreads. We can feel pity for the people sucked into the 4chan hate machine, though we still can't justify their actions. Still, I feel inspired to build a society where young people aren't pushed towards those sorts of conclusions. I'm going to try to approach my online interactions with more empathy now, and I want to consider all the broader questions and systems that go into a single bad outcome.
This book didn't explain everything that played a hand in the last election, (such as how Facebook and Fox brainwashed seniors, and how anti-feminism played a role), but I think doing that would require me to get a PhD in sociology just to understand it. I understand enough, and I will continue to gather information the piece this all together. I understood before that capitalism sucked, but now I understand why.
I became active on the internet (mostly on Reddit) in late 2014, just a kid looking for a place to discuss my favorite books and cartoons. And as I learned more about the culture of different sites, I watched from the sidelines as the internet, my window into what the rest of the world was like, fought over the election, and the trolls won.
This book explained to me what has always been going on in the back of my internet experience. I would assume most of the people who run in the same circles as me have a basic understanding of how and why Donald Trump was elected, and the roll the internet played in it, but this book was still mind blowing for me in how well-researched and well-explained it was. All these complex systems intersecting to create more hate and ignorance, and I suppose the only way to defeat that ignorance is to understand how it spreads. We can feel pity for the people sucked into the 4chan hate machine, though we still can't justify their actions. Still, I feel inspired to build a society where young people aren't pushed towards those sorts of conclusions. I'm going to try to approach my online interactions with more empathy now, and I want to consider all the broader questions and systems that go into a single bad outcome.
This book didn't explain everything that played a hand in the last election, (such as how Facebook and Fox brainwashed seniors, and how anti-feminism played a role), but I think doing that would require me to get a PhD in sociology just to understand it. I understand enough, and I will continue to gather information the piece this all together. I understood before that capitalism sucked, but now I understand why.
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December 3, 2019Meh. This book is an expansion on a Medium post by a guy who gives a lot of TED talks. It's basically a super long think piece, with all the accuracy and sourcing you would expect from the average hot take by a guy who likes to name drop Žižek. Adjust expectations accordingly.
October 28, 2019
First off
>Accidentally
Secondly it's easy to tell where Beran falls on the political spectrum. I could have done without the smarmy passive aggressive remarks about far-right activists. Whether you like them or not your point is diminished when you resort to childish name calling. Little to no mention about the numerous assaults by members of antifa.
Thirdly "Is it okay to punch a Nazi in the face?" no, unless he punches you first.
Apart from that I enjoyed the book. He's well versed on the lore, explains how and when the climate on the boards changed and what affect that had in the real world. Decent book just could have done without the bias and smarmy comments.
breh
>Accidentally
Secondly it's easy to tell where Beran falls on the political spectrum. I could have done without the smarmy passive aggressive remarks about far-right activists. Whether you like them or not your point is diminished when you resort to childish name calling. Little to no mention about the numerous assaults by members of antifa.
Thirdly "Is it okay to punch a Nazi in the face?" no, unless he punches you first.
Apart from that I enjoyed the book. He's well versed on the lore, explains how and when the climate on the boards changed and what affect that had in the real world. Decent book just could have done without the bias and smarmy comments.
breh
October 4, 2025
[ audio ]
2.5
for bookclub
I guess it's good I know some of this stuff.
It rounded out the edges for other books I've read: Men Who Hate Women by Laura Bates and We Are Proud Boys by Campbell, both of which are disturbing reads that talk about the online zeitgeist of disturbance that oozes into the real world with no detail on 4chan specifically... (also: Doppelganger by Naomi Klein, great book, glimpses into this mirror image world less specifically).
The book itself could be a lot shorter, but maybe that's just me, I would have been happy with the cliff notes. Also, the author cites the same handful of books/authors, so if it's going to be this long I guess I'd hope for a wider net.
The book club convo will be interesting, funny, and probably disturbing and exhausting... if others even read it haha.
2.5
for bookclub
I guess it's good I know some of this stuff.
It rounded out the edges for other books I've read: Men Who Hate Women by Laura Bates and We Are Proud Boys by Campbell, both of which are disturbing reads that talk about the online zeitgeist of disturbance that oozes into the real world with no detail on 4chan specifically... (also: Doppelganger by Naomi Klein, great book, glimpses into this mirror image world less specifically).
The book itself could be a lot shorter, but maybe that's just me, I would have been happy with the cliff notes. Also, the author cites the same handful of books/authors, so if it's going to be this long I guess I'd hope for a wider net.
The book club convo will be interesting, funny, and probably disturbing and exhausting... if others even read it haha.
September 13, 2019
Very thorough and pertinent within today's political context and how the internet plays a role in it. It shows that the author has done a lot of research, on top of experiencing certain internet subcultures as he was a teenager and young adult. He has this sort of understanding about it that is very hard to have unless you have the actual experiential knowledge. The writing is captivating and I recommend this book to anyone.
July 28, 2023
I think that some of this is fairly insightful, but I think that other sections are just frankly wrong. The author attempts to cite sources but most of his claims about internet culture are just claims, and many don’t match my experiences in the same online spaces at all. He also oversteps his abilities as an amateur sociologist and makes sweeping and simply wrong claims about a wide variety of social movements in the second half of the book.
My main gripe with this book is that it fails to strike the right balance between summarizing extraneous detail and excising necessary detail. It seems to make overly broad generalizations in places where the topic doesn’t interest the author, and on the flip side it goes into extreme detail when something does. This makes things feel unbalanced and a bit untrustworthy, to me.
I do think that for a certain audience this is probably a really useful and interesting read - in particular if you were not online in these spaces during these years and were only aware of, say, Anonymous from the (odd and often incorrect) news coverage coming out of mainstream publications, then this book will go a long way towards giving you more context and a more accurate impression of what is actually happening when online groups mobilize. It’s probably also valuable if you’re trying to understand the mentality of the people who have been radicalized towards the alt right and how and why that movement felt natural or appealing in the sorts of online cultures where it began to flourish.
I, however, am not either such audience.
My main gripe with this book is that it fails to strike the right balance between summarizing extraneous detail and excising necessary detail. It seems to make overly broad generalizations in places where the topic doesn’t interest the author, and on the flip side it goes into extreme detail when something does. This makes things feel unbalanced and a bit untrustworthy, to me.
I do think that for a certain audience this is probably a really useful and interesting read - in particular if you were not online in these spaces during these years and were only aware of, say, Anonymous from the (odd and often incorrect) news coverage coming out of mainstream publications, then this book will go a long way towards giving you more context and a more accurate impression of what is actually happening when online groups mobilize. It’s probably also valuable if you’re trying to understand the mentality of the people who have been radicalized towards the alt right and how and why that movement felt natural or appealing in the sorts of online cultures where it began to flourish.
I, however, am not either such audience.
August 4, 2019
Highly recommended. Check this out if you want to understand how Internet subcultures have had overweighted influence on politics, on the left but mostly on the right.
October 30, 2019
Pretty good book. Stylish prose and very informational. I take issue with some of the arguments about Tumblr but other than that I liked reading this. Very engrossing. Part of the reason I think the book captured my interest was because I really was the demographic of young white guys and very well could have been radicalized by these neo nazi pieces of shit. I'm lucky I got out of the suburbs and into school and into therapy. But I used to hang around people who think drawing a swastika is edgy or saying "jew" to someone then claiming irony is the height of intellectual prowess. But it was all the same antisemitic bullshit. The real question for me is why I was allowing my passivity to overtake me during those years.
I like Beran's use of quotation at the beginning of each chapter. I think he gets really good when he ties together his own personal narrative with the richness of the text and the technology of the last twenty years. It can be hyperspecific but you can still access it through imagination.
I think this book should be read by people who have kids and don't understand how easily these organizations are trying to get your son to become a kind of foot soldier for 21st century white supremacy and misogyny.
Think American History X and Fight Club.
Anyway, not exactly plesasurable reading but in this day and age of constant sludge a nice analysis.
I like Beran's use of quotation at the beginning of each chapter. I think he gets really good when he ties together his own personal narrative with the richness of the text and the technology of the last twenty years. It can be hyperspecific but you can still access it through imagination.
I think this book should be read by people who have kids and don't understand how easily these organizations are trying to get your son to become a kind of foot soldier for 21st century white supremacy and misogyny.
Think American History X and Fight Club.
Anyway, not exactly plesasurable reading but in this day and age of constant sludge a nice analysis.
February 25, 2021
The book is funny in the way that 4chan is funny. We can laugh at all the absurdity, but in the end, it's only to distance ourselves from the fact that it is all too real. Beran's account of how counter-culture is ultimately ground up and subsumed by capitalism, only to be repacked and sold back to you as self liberation/definition is surprisingly compelling. This readability might come at the expense of complexity, as Beran paints a narrative that is one-sided and definite, but the general thesis, in addition to tracing the history of 4chan, makes me apologetic of any shortcomings the book has academically. Read it with a critical eye, and it's something of a tragi-comic masterpiece for people who have wallowed too much amongst the internet meme-factories but still retained a flicker of hope.
June 20, 2022
Like most histories of tye start of subcultures it fails because it misses too much in an attemp to sanitaries the history of the subculture
December 19, 2022
I’ve come to call it the Mark Fisher school of social criticism. Mark Fisher, for those of you unfamiliar, was a British cultural studies writer who wrote about contemporary culture, especially online culture. If you’ve heard the phrase “capitalist realism,” that’s one of his. His work has proven highly influential on many writers in the same areas, in terms of ideas, themes, and tone. I think it is fair to say, at this point, that he is the object of what could be called a cult (think more like the Marian cult or the cult around Foucault, not Heaven’s Gate). A lot of writers in the “online discourse hell” space hail Fisher as not just an influence, but as something of a prophet, a saint figure, complete with martyrdom at the hands of the force that Fisher understood as fundamental to contemporary life: the depression and malaise induced by late capitalist existence.
I don’t want to dismiss Fisher intellectually, and I don’t want to downplay people’s emotional attachment to a writer who they felt understood what they themselves were going through, and who died, leaving a lot of people feeling bereft. That said, the thought produced by Fisher’s epigones has a lot of severe weaknesses, and a meta-weakness- the cult of Fisher, for all of its wide-ranging criticality, does not do self-criticism very well beyond ritual invocation of its own fecklessness and inability to effect change.
I’d like to say that this book encapsulates the Fisher school’s weaknesses and its strengths, but that’s only maybe a quarter true. It doesn’t have all the weaknesses of the Fisher school. “It Came From Something Awful” doesn’t have the wounded defensive quality Fisherite work often does, and doesn’t show the sympathy for the far right that often occasions displays of that defensiveness. Beran stumbles into other Fisher school mistakes, but not those, thankfully. The book’s strengths, on the other hand, are less that of Fisher and his epigones and more that of fairly solid, middle-of-the-road history or journalism: fine research, well-organized findings, the relating of an important and interesting story. I suppose where the Fisher school comes in at all is that the author’s embeddedness in some of its precepts undermines him, turns what could have been a great work into a decent one.
I avoided this book when it first came out for a stupid but honest reason: it’s title, subtitle, and cover all made it look deeply inane. But some commentators who I take reasonably seriously took this seriously, and for a while I was trying to keep up with altright-explainers, so I figured I’d give this late entry a try.
Right off the bat, Beran distinguished himself from other writers on the subject (most notably Fisher-cultist turned “main reason people googled ‘social patriot’ circa 2019” Angela Nagle) by actually knowing what he was talking about. Talking to Nazis like Richard Spencer, or even the boot boys, is like looking at bugs in a terrarium. Actually going into their spaces, especially the fora, is more like levering open a rock and sticking your face into what’s underneath. Journalists and scholars don’t like it, and usually can’t tell when someone fakes it (the sheer lack of new information in “Kill All Normies” should have been a clue, but hey, it was 2017). But Beran not only did it- he had been doing it for a while, at least lightly. He was a habitue of the titular “Something Awful” and no stranger to the chans, especially in the early days. He actually talked to people involved, not just founder figures like “Lowtax” Kyanka, “Moot” Poole, and Fredrick Brennan, but everyday, anonymous users of the boards.
And it shows. Beran lays out a sensible, comprehensible history of anonymous forum culture. He starts with early, pre-web message boards like the Well — which tried allowing users to be anonymous, but quickly wrapped up that experiment — to the beginning of contemporary forum culture with Something Awful (I had friends who were big into it on the early aughts) to the terrible marriage of Japanese anime image boards and American entrepreneurial innovation we came to call the chans.
In terms of interpretation of this story, Beran is on somewhat shakier ground, but makes some decent connections and points. His biggest point is about a conjuncture between the spread of forum culture and the death of counterculture. By the time the late nineties rolled around, every single counterculture since the Beats, including mutually antagonistic ones such as hippies and punks, and even those that eschewed the whole game, like grunge, had been co-opted, defanged, and commoditized by the overarching capitalist monoculture. Seemingly the only thing the culture industry could not sell, by the time Lowtax was starting Something Awful, was the rejected backwash of Gen X grunge ‘tude: cynicism, indifference, and a certain soupçon of fascination with gory death and sexual violation (it turns out that somebody could indeed sell those things, but I guess the fora habitues were past caring by then).
I split the difference on this. It’s an unsubtle reading and ignores or misreads some important factors (I’m still rewriting my birthday lecture which covered some of this ground- patience!). But it’s not so wrong as to be unusable, and also probably represents something like the historical common sense of a lot of the people who helped make the forum culture, and at least part of the story as understood by many participants in it today (including, mutatis mutandis, the Fisher cult).
One thing Beran gets, that a lot of writers both in and out of the internet-discourse fail to grasp, is that a lot can change in twenty years, and it’s not all meaningless signifier churn. At various points, the people on the boards bestirred themselves to do things other than swap funny or grotesque pictures, and abuse themselves and others. Anonymous grew out of 4chan, and while a lot of people pooh-pooh it now, whatever else it represented, it represented at least some people rejecting Gen Xer nihilism for some sort of collective, values-based project. And then, of course, various snitches snitched and it collapsed. A more organized movement probably would not have collapsed like that, but when you’re organized by whoever can talk the biggest on an IRC channel…
Into the gap left by both the decline of Anonymous and the collapse of the “hope and change” Obama dream — and I think a lot of us undersell exactly how high the hopes were for Obama because we don’t want to review how badly most of us, myself included, suckered — came the same sort of nihilism of the kind of people who, at the turn of the millennium, made mocking teenage suicides a sport… but changed. It got sharper and even meaner, weirdly more desperate, more violent. The rise of the incel culture seems to have been a leading indicator, that the nihilism was going to leave the realm of jokes and pranks and start getting bloody… and, for the product of groups of supposedly anything-goes jokesters, weirdly self-serious. I still sometimes try to imagine the reception on “the old internet” that I only watched from a distance to the idea that anyone was entitled to sex… well, between the rise of both internet porn and dating apps (the latter of which could be seen to quantitatively prove nerds’ inadequacy) and the egging on of cultural/political entrepreneurs like Milo Yiannopolous, Mike Cernovich, and eventually Trump’s man Steve Bannon, a new crew of culture industry vultures found ways not just to commodify a counterculture’s dissent, but to weaponize it.
Here is where things start to fall apart in this book. First, so the blame doesn’t all go to the Fisher school, Beran relies way more on Hannah Arendt for his analysis of the right than makes sense. I tend to think this probably comes down to a mixture of simple… I don’t want to say ignorance, but maybe just unawareness of the way the study of fascism has gotten past/around the grand old lady, and the ways in which Arendt’s analysis actually coheres rather nicely with the hopelessness of the Fisher school. Even here, Beran isn’t completely off-base, and makes good use of some of Arendt’s ideas about déclassé upper class types allying with similarly deracinated lower orders to create fascist mobs, which suits the likes of Yiannopoulos and his gamer cohort to a T. But there’s some extreme flattening of historical patterns here that make it hard to see the differences between now and the periods Arendt writes about. I’m something of a lumper myself but it got a bit out of hand here.
This leads to the overarching weakness of the book, where it meets up with the weakness of the Fisher school of contemporary-awfulness analysis (and, in a weird way, Arendt). The Fisher school is so thoroughly invested in the all-encompassing awfulness of our lives under late capitalism that it can’t see anything else… including features of that awfulness that aren’t part of its pre-established menu of tropes and laments. Basically, they really, really don’t get offline. The further Beran gets from a screen (he laments “the screen” without getting into why it’s so much worse than “the page” or “the stage” or “the epic poem”) the less he knows what he’s talking about. Unlike some Fisher epigones, his hopelessness about/spite towards the left doesn’t lead him to hate on online libs/leftists to the detriment of his analysis. His chapters on tumblr are quite thoughtful.
But leftist opposition to the altright, to Trump, and to other instantiations of the right-wing resurgence we’ve seen post-2008 didn’t come from, or even mainly from, tumblr teens and their concerns for personal validity. Hell, if you want to blame the internet for the many weaknesses of today’s left, tumblr wouldn’t be where I’d look- I’d look at Twitter, which Beran does little with, mostly treats as a neutral medium. Speaking from personal experience, I can tell you that not only is antifa not a group — and that “black bloc” isn’t one (from Philadelphia?? Beran claims) either — but that whatever concerns those of us who do antifascist direct action may share with the stereotypical tumblr-teen, they/we didn’t get into this because they/we were mad about racist Halloween costumes. To think this betrays the ways in which Beran — and here is where his weaknesses sync up most completely with the Fisher school — really cannot imagine a world apart not from the internet, but from his version of the internet, to the extent that even googling what black bloc does not seem to have occurred to him.
Beran, unlike Nagle or some other Fisher acolytes, doesn’t add hatred and ax-grinding to the problems this intellectual inheritance brings with him. He does not seem to actively resent anyone who would actually try, however unlikely they are to succeed, to do something about our capitalist-depressive-realist state (and potentially show up the poster-philosophes in the bargain), which I’ve seen a lot of in online essays and comment sections. But the ways in which cynicism and the barest filigree of theory fill in for commitment to thoroughgoing understanding — which would imply much more work, in the archive and the long watch of thought, even if you don’t think it would also imply taking to the street, as I and my comrades do — did a lot to hamper his work. I’m probably making this sound worse than it is, but I think that’s because the good parts and the bad parts stand in the starkest contrast in this book. Moreover, the good parts are good in a simple way — they do the job — and the bad are better fodder for comment… perhaps reflective of the larger incentive structure motivating the fecklessness of the Fisher school. In any event, this book is better than many, for all of its flaws, but somewhat disappointing. ****
I don’t want to dismiss Fisher intellectually, and I don’t want to downplay people’s emotional attachment to a writer who they felt understood what they themselves were going through, and who died, leaving a lot of people feeling bereft. That said, the thought produced by Fisher’s epigones has a lot of severe weaknesses, and a meta-weakness- the cult of Fisher, for all of its wide-ranging criticality, does not do self-criticism very well beyond ritual invocation of its own fecklessness and inability to effect change.
I’d like to say that this book encapsulates the Fisher school’s weaknesses and its strengths, but that’s only maybe a quarter true. It doesn’t have all the weaknesses of the Fisher school. “It Came From Something Awful” doesn’t have the wounded defensive quality Fisherite work often does, and doesn’t show the sympathy for the far right that often occasions displays of that defensiveness. Beran stumbles into other Fisher school mistakes, but not those, thankfully. The book’s strengths, on the other hand, are less that of Fisher and his epigones and more that of fairly solid, middle-of-the-road history or journalism: fine research, well-organized findings, the relating of an important and interesting story. I suppose where the Fisher school comes in at all is that the author’s embeddedness in some of its precepts undermines him, turns what could have been a great work into a decent one.
I avoided this book when it first came out for a stupid but honest reason: it’s title, subtitle, and cover all made it look deeply inane. But some commentators who I take reasonably seriously took this seriously, and for a while I was trying to keep up with altright-explainers, so I figured I’d give this late entry a try.
Right off the bat, Beran distinguished himself from other writers on the subject (most notably Fisher-cultist turned “main reason people googled ‘social patriot’ circa 2019” Angela Nagle) by actually knowing what he was talking about. Talking to Nazis like Richard Spencer, or even the boot boys, is like looking at bugs in a terrarium. Actually going into their spaces, especially the fora, is more like levering open a rock and sticking your face into what’s underneath. Journalists and scholars don’t like it, and usually can’t tell when someone fakes it (the sheer lack of new information in “Kill All Normies” should have been a clue, but hey, it was 2017). But Beran not only did it- he had been doing it for a while, at least lightly. He was a habitue of the titular “Something Awful” and no stranger to the chans, especially in the early days. He actually talked to people involved, not just founder figures like “Lowtax” Kyanka, “Moot” Poole, and Fredrick Brennan, but everyday, anonymous users of the boards.
And it shows. Beran lays out a sensible, comprehensible history of anonymous forum culture. He starts with early, pre-web message boards like the Well — which tried allowing users to be anonymous, but quickly wrapped up that experiment — to the beginning of contemporary forum culture with Something Awful (I had friends who were big into it on the early aughts) to the terrible marriage of Japanese anime image boards and American entrepreneurial innovation we came to call the chans.
In terms of interpretation of this story, Beran is on somewhat shakier ground, but makes some decent connections and points. His biggest point is about a conjuncture between the spread of forum culture and the death of counterculture. By the time the late nineties rolled around, every single counterculture since the Beats, including mutually antagonistic ones such as hippies and punks, and even those that eschewed the whole game, like grunge, had been co-opted, defanged, and commoditized by the overarching capitalist monoculture. Seemingly the only thing the culture industry could not sell, by the time Lowtax was starting Something Awful, was the rejected backwash of Gen X grunge ‘tude: cynicism, indifference, and a certain soupçon of fascination with gory death and sexual violation (it turns out that somebody could indeed sell those things, but I guess the fora habitues were past caring by then).
I split the difference on this. It’s an unsubtle reading and ignores or misreads some important factors (I’m still rewriting my birthday lecture which covered some of this ground- patience!). But it’s not so wrong as to be unusable, and also probably represents something like the historical common sense of a lot of the people who helped make the forum culture, and at least part of the story as understood by many participants in it today (including, mutatis mutandis, the Fisher cult).
One thing Beran gets, that a lot of writers both in and out of the internet-discourse fail to grasp, is that a lot can change in twenty years, and it’s not all meaningless signifier churn. At various points, the people on the boards bestirred themselves to do things other than swap funny or grotesque pictures, and abuse themselves and others. Anonymous grew out of 4chan, and while a lot of people pooh-pooh it now, whatever else it represented, it represented at least some people rejecting Gen Xer nihilism for some sort of collective, values-based project. And then, of course, various snitches snitched and it collapsed. A more organized movement probably would not have collapsed like that, but when you’re organized by whoever can talk the biggest on an IRC channel…
Into the gap left by both the decline of Anonymous and the collapse of the “hope and change” Obama dream — and I think a lot of us undersell exactly how high the hopes were for Obama because we don’t want to review how badly most of us, myself included, suckered — came the same sort of nihilism of the kind of people who, at the turn of the millennium, made mocking teenage suicides a sport… but changed. It got sharper and even meaner, weirdly more desperate, more violent. The rise of the incel culture seems to have been a leading indicator, that the nihilism was going to leave the realm of jokes and pranks and start getting bloody… and, for the product of groups of supposedly anything-goes jokesters, weirdly self-serious. I still sometimes try to imagine the reception on “the old internet” that I only watched from a distance to the idea that anyone was entitled to sex… well, between the rise of both internet porn and dating apps (the latter of which could be seen to quantitatively prove nerds’ inadequacy) and the egging on of cultural/political entrepreneurs like Milo Yiannopolous, Mike Cernovich, and eventually Trump’s man Steve Bannon, a new crew of culture industry vultures found ways not just to commodify a counterculture’s dissent, but to weaponize it.
Here is where things start to fall apart in this book. First, so the blame doesn’t all go to the Fisher school, Beran relies way more on Hannah Arendt for his analysis of the right than makes sense. I tend to think this probably comes down to a mixture of simple… I don’t want to say ignorance, but maybe just unawareness of the way the study of fascism has gotten past/around the grand old lady, and the ways in which Arendt’s analysis actually coheres rather nicely with the hopelessness of the Fisher school. Even here, Beran isn’t completely off-base, and makes good use of some of Arendt’s ideas about déclassé upper class types allying with similarly deracinated lower orders to create fascist mobs, which suits the likes of Yiannopoulos and his gamer cohort to a T. But there’s some extreme flattening of historical patterns here that make it hard to see the differences between now and the periods Arendt writes about. I’m something of a lumper myself but it got a bit out of hand here.
This leads to the overarching weakness of the book, where it meets up with the weakness of the Fisher school of contemporary-awfulness analysis (and, in a weird way, Arendt). The Fisher school is so thoroughly invested in the all-encompassing awfulness of our lives under late capitalism that it can’t see anything else… including features of that awfulness that aren’t part of its pre-established menu of tropes and laments. Basically, they really, really don’t get offline. The further Beran gets from a screen (he laments “the screen” without getting into why it’s so much worse than “the page” or “the stage” or “the epic poem”) the less he knows what he’s talking about. Unlike some Fisher epigones, his hopelessness about/spite towards the left doesn’t lead him to hate on online libs/leftists to the detriment of his analysis. His chapters on tumblr are quite thoughtful.
But leftist opposition to the altright, to Trump, and to other instantiations of the right-wing resurgence we’ve seen post-2008 didn’t come from, or even mainly from, tumblr teens and their concerns for personal validity. Hell, if you want to blame the internet for the many weaknesses of today’s left, tumblr wouldn’t be where I’d look- I’d look at Twitter, which Beran does little with, mostly treats as a neutral medium. Speaking from personal experience, I can tell you that not only is antifa not a group — and that “black bloc” isn’t one (from Philadelphia?? Beran claims) either — but that whatever concerns those of us who do antifascist direct action may share with the stereotypical tumblr-teen, they/we didn’t get into this because they/we were mad about racist Halloween costumes. To think this betrays the ways in which Beran — and here is where his weaknesses sync up most completely with the Fisher school — really cannot imagine a world apart not from the internet, but from his version of the internet, to the extent that even googling what black bloc does not seem to have occurred to him.
Beran, unlike Nagle or some other Fisher acolytes, doesn’t add hatred and ax-grinding to the problems this intellectual inheritance brings with him. He does not seem to actively resent anyone who would actually try, however unlikely they are to succeed, to do something about our capitalist-depressive-realist state (and potentially show up the poster-philosophes in the bargain), which I’ve seen a lot of in online essays and comment sections. But the ways in which cynicism and the barest filigree of theory fill in for commitment to thoroughgoing understanding — which would imply much more work, in the archive and the long watch of thought, even if you don’t think it would also imply taking to the street, as I and my comrades do — did a lot to hamper his work. I’m probably making this sound worse than it is, but I think that’s because the good parts and the bad parts stand in the starkest contrast in this book. Moreover, the good parts are good in a simple way — they do the job — and the bad are better fodder for comment… perhaps reflective of the larger incentive structure motivating the fecklessness of the Fisher school. In any event, this book is better than many, for all of its flaws, but somewhat disappointing. ****
May 17, 2020
Marc Maron mentioned this book in one of his podcasts last year (2019) (http://www.wtfpod.com/). This is, in essence, a pulling-up of the rug to reveal all the vermin writhing underneath it, written in such a way that basically any village idiot could understand (I didn’t even hear about these sites until Gamergate hit mainstream media, and I’ve never once been within the sites themselves). However, what I would suggest is reading Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland first, since It Came From Something Awful takes a high-powered microscope to the Petri dish of 4chan/8chan, which is only a small part of how the culture of the United States went completely bonkers, to the event horizon of irredeemability—but it is an incredibly important part, because the denizens of these sites are the true underbelly of society at large—in Japan, probably everywhere, but most destructive here in the US. Beran was monitoring the infested trenches of these sites and the sad sacks of moldering meat that dwelled there, from the anime-pillow-masturbaters to the “marble-cake” makers (seriously, don’t Google that—just imagine the worst), to the women-haters and LGBT-bashers, to the Guy-Fawkes-hacktivists eventually routed by the FBI, to the cowards and cretins and Hilter-wet-dreamers who filled the vacuum, and to the Robert Mercer—Steve Bannon—Milo Yiannapoulos triad exploiting the vacuum, and the deplorable masses they coerced into following them all the way to Donald J. Trump as our illustrious sociopathic, narcissistic, egotistical, pathological wrecking-ball liar-in-chief. Chaos in real-time. It is a truly fascinating devolution, one historians will be writing about for another fifty years as they comb through digital records. All are monsters in Fantasyland.
I suppose Benjamin Barber’s Consumed is also useful, because the prime driver of all these social-psychological dynamics is capitalistic hyper-consumerism, exacerbated by the internet, with its rampant narcissism and voyeurism, the proliferation of pornography, and all the harmful byproducts of being a “loser”, or a “beta” as the chanverse calls it. It is within these trenches of low-self-esteem misery that so many are easily swayed by fantasies, lies, disinformation, and conspiracies, and will latch on to any concept of strength, and being an “alpha”, that they adore—and the crazier the better. We can blame the advertising universe, the media universe, rabid capitalism, reality TV, the male-centric gamer-scape, and so much more, but this really, truly falls on parenting—or the utter lack thereof. Young boys ill-equipped to handle the realities of life are the direct fault of those that spawned them. Period.
I do understand how many of the chan-dwellers are mentally and physically “handicapped”, be it autism or sociopathy or manic depression or bone fragility or type-1 diabetes or just simply socially awkward to the most extreme side of the spectrum (i.e., chronic virginity), etc. That’s no excuse for spewing mindless vitriol and hiding behind complete anonymity. One more reason we need healthcare for all—including mental healthcare—so we do not foster more lone-wolf gunmen, more women-stalking murderers, more angst-ridden men-children, more Nazi-saluting gun-toting gym-rats. (Plenty of books to read on those psychological dynamics.) We are biological organisms programmed by our histories, experiences, exposures, interactions, and circumstances. To understand how someone becomes who they are, some deep empathy and understanding is in order. Analysis is a must. Beran does this well.
As a terribly useful aside, please read George Packer’s recent essay for The Atlantic titled “How to Destroy a Government” (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/...) The system has been rigged for decades on both sides of “the aisle”. Now, the wrecking ball that capitalized on all of it has some limited brains, no more guardrails, and a seemingly endless run at impunity. True journalists at The Atlantic, The New Yorker, NPR, and ProPublica, amongst numerous others, have undertaken the role of resistance to the unraveling of this fragile Republic, but I fear the moronic masses are just too overwhelming, the apathetic too despondent, and the system of wanton greed and disinformation too ironclad. We truly are in a PSYOPed world, and It Came From Something Awful highlights a crucial thread to the puzzling Gordian knot of it all.
My Buddhist leanings allow me to extend an arm towards the important tenet of the impermanence of all things. Maybe it’s our turn to fall into the dustbin of History as a failed experiment. Time will tell. Patrick Wyman wrote a nice piece for Mother Jones, that “liberal rag” of defending the oppressed, with his article titled “How Do You Know You’re Living Through the Death of an Empire?: It’s the Little Things” (https://www.motherjones.com/media/202...
“We’re all creatures of narrative, whether we think explicitly in those terms or not, and stories are one of the fundamental ways in which we engage with and grasp the meaning of the world. It’s natural that we expect the end of a story—the end of an empire—to have some drama.
The reality is far less exciting. Any political unit sound enough to project its power over a large geographic area for centuries has deep structural roots. Those roots can’t be pulled up in a day or even a year. If an empire seems to topple overnight, it’s certain that the conditions that produced the outcome had been present for a long time—suppurating wounds that finally turned septic enough for the patient to succumb to a sudden trauma.
That’s why the banalities matter. When the real issues come up, healthy states, the ones capable of handling and minimizing everyday dysfunction, have a great deal more capacity to respond than those happily waltzing toward their end. But by the time the obvious, glaring crisis arrives and the true scale of the problem becomes clear, it’s far too late. The disaster—a major crisis of political legitimacy, a coronavirus pandemic, a climate catastrophe—doesn’t so much break the system as show just how broken the system already was.”
Give it a gander and decide for yourselves, educated bibliophiles, then fall back into your palantir screens and veg out at the futility of it all.
I suppose Benjamin Barber’s Consumed is also useful, because the prime driver of all these social-psychological dynamics is capitalistic hyper-consumerism, exacerbated by the internet, with its rampant narcissism and voyeurism, the proliferation of pornography, and all the harmful byproducts of being a “loser”, or a “beta” as the chanverse calls it. It is within these trenches of low-self-esteem misery that so many are easily swayed by fantasies, lies, disinformation, and conspiracies, and will latch on to any concept of strength, and being an “alpha”, that they adore—and the crazier the better. We can blame the advertising universe, the media universe, rabid capitalism, reality TV, the male-centric gamer-scape, and so much more, but this really, truly falls on parenting—or the utter lack thereof. Young boys ill-equipped to handle the realities of life are the direct fault of those that spawned them. Period.
I do understand how many of the chan-dwellers are mentally and physically “handicapped”, be it autism or sociopathy or manic depression or bone fragility or type-1 diabetes or just simply socially awkward to the most extreme side of the spectrum (i.e., chronic virginity), etc. That’s no excuse for spewing mindless vitriol and hiding behind complete anonymity. One more reason we need healthcare for all—including mental healthcare—so we do not foster more lone-wolf gunmen, more women-stalking murderers, more angst-ridden men-children, more Nazi-saluting gun-toting gym-rats. (Plenty of books to read on those psychological dynamics.) We are biological organisms programmed by our histories, experiences, exposures, interactions, and circumstances. To understand how someone becomes who they are, some deep empathy and understanding is in order. Analysis is a must. Beran does this well.
As a terribly useful aside, please read George Packer’s recent essay for The Atlantic titled “How to Destroy a Government” (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/...) The system has been rigged for decades on both sides of “the aisle”. Now, the wrecking ball that capitalized on all of it has some limited brains, no more guardrails, and a seemingly endless run at impunity. True journalists at The Atlantic, The New Yorker, NPR, and ProPublica, amongst numerous others, have undertaken the role of resistance to the unraveling of this fragile Republic, but I fear the moronic masses are just too overwhelming, the apathetic too despondent, and the system of wanton greed and disinformation too ironclad. We truly are in a PSYOPed world, and It Came From Something Awful highlights a crucial thread to the puzzling Gordian knot of it all.
My Buddhist leanings allow me to extend an arm towards the important tenet of the impermanence of all things. Maybe it’s our turn to fall into the dustbin of History as a failed experiment. Time will tell. Patrick Wyman wrote a nice piece for Mother Jones, that “liberal rag” of defending the oppressed, with his article titled “How Do You Know You’re Living Through the Death of an Empire?: It’s the Little Things” (https://www.motherjones.com/media/202...
“We’re all creatures of narrative, whether we think explicitly in those terms or not, and stories are one of the fundamental ways in which we engage with and grasp the meaning of the world. It’s natural that we expect the end of a story—the end of an empire—to have some drama.
The reality is far less exciting. Any political unit sound enough to project its power over a large geographic area for centuries has deep structural roots. Those roots can’t be pulled up in a day or even a year. If an empire seems to topple overnight, it’s certain that the conditions that produced the outcome had been present for a long time—suppurating wounds that finally turned septic enough for the patient to succumb to a sudden trauma.
That’s why the banalities matter. When the real issues come up, healthy states, the ones capable of handling and minimizing everyday dysfunction, have a great deal more capacity to respond than those happily waltzing toward their end. But by the time the obvious, glaring crisis arrives and the true scale of the problem becomes clear, it’s far too late. The disaster—a major crisis of political legitimacy, a coronavirus pandemic, a climate catastrophe—doesn’t so much break the system as show just how broken the system already was.”
Give it a gander and decide for yourselves, educated bibliophiles, then fall back into your palantir screens and veg out at the futility of it all.
October 3, 2021
I was surprised to learn this was the work of one of the creators of the fantastic webcomic "A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible".
I would give this book three stars for editing. It may have been smoother with more work, as it ends up repeating itself quite a bit. Beran is erudite in his approach though, and the content is four stars—perhaps it could have been more in-depth, and it's not always clear how intimately tied to the subject are the theorists and pieces of media referenced by the author, as with Jean-Paul Sartre's fundamental concept that "existence precedes essence" in relation to Tumblr.
Anyone intending to take it on should also be aware that at least in the audio version, all the slurs referenced are pronounced, and there are a lot. So if that's a deal-breaker you might want to stick to hardcopy.
That being said, this is an important book for understanding how we got here. For me personally it also instilled an awareness of the myriad ways the font of Internet culture seeped into my particular corridors of the web.
I absolutely recommend reading this book if the above doesn't put you off, and ideally with a group to really parse out its content. There's a lot.
Readers may also be interested in Neoreaction a Basilisk.
I would give this book three stars for editing. It may have been smoother with more work, as it ends up repeating itself quite a bit. Beran is erudite in his approach though, and the content is four stars—perhaps it could have been more in-depth, and it's not always clear how intimately tied to the subject are the theorists and pieces of media referenced by the author, as with Jean-Paul Sartre's fundamental concept that "existence precedes essence" in relation to Tumblr.
Anyone intending to take it on should also be aware that at least in the audio version, all the slurs referenced are pronounced, and there are a lot. So if that's a deal-breaker you might want to stick to hardcopy.
That being said, this is an important book for understanding how we got here. For me personally it also instilled an awareness of the myriad ways the font of Internet culture seeped into my particular corridors of the web.
I absolutely recommend reading this book if the above doesn't put you off, and ideally with a group to really parse out its content. There's a lot.
Readers may also be interested in Neoreaction a Basilisk.
December 2, 2021
4.5 stars -- This is one of those books in the vein of ON THE CLOCK that I found absolutely rattling, and which will stick with me for long after reading.
It starts as an introduction to how a subset of Internet trolls became an outsized influence in American culture and politics, and ends being a big-picture view of how two generations of young-to-middle-aged adults were essentially destroyed by cultural cynicism and a punishing economic system. We all feel equally helpless to stop it, but have responded in wildly different ways. Meanwhile, the powers that be use it all for grist for the mill to sell us more things to help us express those competing identities.
This is one of those books that make you want to curl up into a ball and twitch, but I say that in a good way. If no one ever dismantled the mess we’re in and magnified its pieces, it would only empower its worst elements and manifestations.
It starts as an introduction to how a subset of Internet trolls became an outsized influence in American culture and politics, and ends being a big-picture view of how two generations of young-to-middle-aged adults were essentially destroyed by cultural cynicism and a punishing economic system. We all feel equally helpless to stop it, but have responded in wildly different ways. Meanwhile, the powers that be use it all for grist for the mill to sell us more things to help us express those competing identities.
This is one of those books that make you want to curl up into a ball and twitch, but I say that in a good way. If no one ever dismantled the mess we’re in and magnified its pieces, it would only empower its worst elements and manifestations.
February 8, 2024
Impressively researched, convincingly argued, and thoroughly depressing. Doesn't so much take you through the looking glass as push you face-first into it, then drag your flattened cheek through the shards. Anyone who grew up in the false dawn of the early internet will feel a mixture of nostalgia, horror, and dislocation: the feeling you get on a long trip, when you stop to regard your progress, and realize you've gone the wrong way.
April 5, 2022
It Came from Something Awful is basically a fascinating history of the internet, 4chan, hackers, memes, internet culture, and what all of this has to do with the alt-right. Although I think Beran's takes on the left, identity politics, and antifa are somewhat misguided, overall, I think Beran had some interesting takes on reality versus fiction and on making sure we're destroying the system, not just engaging with it.
But more than anything, I wish Beran could please change the title and cover of this book because both are too ugly for the actual content lol.
But more than anything, I wish Beran could please change the title and cover of this book because both are too ugly for the actual content lol.
January 23, 2022
Useful, with some key flaws- read if you want one perspective on the way the internet has shaped our current political realities.
-
This book is helpful for understanding the contributions of right wing ‘chan’ or internet culture to the election of Donald Trump and the current state of American politics. The author does a phenomenal job highlighting the way the Trump campaign, and specifically Bannon, explicitly sought to mobilize right wing internet users for Trump. He also offers something many authors fail to: a definition of fascism, and repeated, clear descriptions and explanations of fascist ideology on the chans. He even touches on the way that billionaires like Thiel and Mercer are dark money funders and encourages of the manipulating of chan users.
That said, the book has some troubling limitations. Some of the author’s digressions to discuss philosophical metaphors or fascist mysticism feel excessive or indulgent, and he both overestimates the power of and paints an overt utopian picture of Tumblr. In fact, the idea that feminist theory and LGBT identity politics emerged primarily on Tumblr ignores the deeper real world history of these ideas. Like fascism, they weren’t just a product of the internet. Further, his writing seems often dismissive of the concerns raised by activists whose beliefs he assigns to Tumblr culture. Meanwhile he seems to ignore Twitter and Facebook almost entirely- perhaps because they don’t neatly fit into the 4chan/Tumblr, fascism/identity politics binary he constructs?
The biggest weakness of the book, however, comes in the first half. The author’s description of the way chan culture developed into a right wing space is limited by an over emphasis on consumerism and economics at the expense of attention to other social conditions. The author argues that economic frustration stimulated the members of boards like /r9k/ to retreat online, where they became ever more despairing. From there, he argues, resentment of women pushed them right on feminism, and he claims that he same happened with race. This argument is fundamentally flawed because it suggests that anti-feminism and white supremacist beliefs naturally emerged from economic frustration and isolation. In fact, 4chan was home to a deep history of racism, sexism, homophobia, and generalized hate that the author fails to fully recognize. The retreat online was not just economic- the frustrations expressed by the proto-incels of /r9k/ was also the result of the impossibility of fully attaining the high standards of masculinity set by gender norms and the media these users consumed. Furthermore, the hatred the author describes as emerging out of /r9k/ is part of an ongoing pattern. Anonymous’ assaults on women like Jessica Slaughter were not misguided applications of a new collective power they didn’t know what to do with, they were intentionally malicious acts that were part of a history of maliciously assaulting (under the guise of trolling) women, minorities, and people perceived as weaker than the anons- a history that was concurrent with the anti-corporate actions the author highlights to imply Anonymous was left-leaning. Even before those raids, the use of homophobic language on the boards, the naming of groups like the GNAA, and similar patterns throughout the history of 4chan clearly demonstrate that it was a space that cultivated racism, sexism, and a host of other forms of hate.
The author doesn’t identify this pattern until Chapter 10, when he finally writes that “it turned out a surprisingly large amount of 4chans culture aligned with the sensibilities of /pol/. After all, a majority of the boards were filled with racist and homophobic slurs” and “hyper offensive trolls had defined 4chan’s culture since the earliest days.” By not weaving this into the history of 4chan sooner, the author fails to understand or outline for his read the ways in which 4chan /already was/ right leaning long before what he claims to be a new rightward shift in /r9k/ users. Withdrawn outsiders were not newly attracted to online extremism- the creation of /pol/ as an explicitly Neo-Nazi-friendly board just gave them a new place to play with those ideas.
It’s possible that part of this flaw comes from a misunderstanding of how ‘the best’ posts rose to the top of 4chan. The author describes the survival-of-the-funniest trial that memes underwent on 4chan, but fails to acknowledge what we know well today: the ‘best’ content doesn’t emerge from free upvoting on the internet. What emerges is the content that gives the most satisfying or intense emotional response. This is why the funniest memes succeeded in 4chan, but it is also why /news/ “became Stormfront” and /pol/ so quickly grew in popularity.
That said, this book is a useful and thought provoking look at the rise of the alt right online and it’s real world consequences and implications. I would recommend it to anyone trying to understand how the internet shaped our present political realities, but I would caution them to read it alongside other works like Marantz’s Anti-Social.
-
This book is helpful for understanding the contributions of right wing ‘chan’ or internet culture to the election of Donald Trump and the current state of American politics. The author does a phenomenal job highlighting the way the Trump campaign, and specifically Bannon, explicitly sought to mobilize right wing internet users for Trump. He also offers something many authors fail to: a definition of fascism, and repeated, clear descriptions and explanations of fascist ideology on the chans. He even touches on the way that billionaires like Thiel and Mercer are dark money funders and encourages of the manipulating of chan users.
That said, the book has some troubling limitations. Some of the author’s digressions to discuss philosophical metaphors or fascist mysticism feel excessive or indulgent, and he both overestimates the power of and paints an overt utopian picture of Tumblr. In fact, the idea that feminist theory and LGBT identity politics emerged primarily on Tumblr ignores the deeper real world history of these ideas. Like fascism, they weren’t just a product of the internet. Further, his writing seems often dismissive of the concerns raised by activists whose beliefs he assigns to Tumblr culture. Meanwhile he seems to ignore Twitter and Facebook almost entirely- perhaps because they don’t neatly fit into the 4chan/Tumblr, fascism/identity politics binary he constructs?
The biggest weakness of the book, however, comes in the first half. The author’s description of the way chan culture developed into a right wing space is limited by an over emphasis on consumerism and economics at the expense of attention to other social conditions. The author argues that economic frustration stimulated the members of boards like /r9k/ to retreat online, where they became ever more despairing. From there, he argues, resentment of women pushed them right on feminism, and he claims that he same happened with race. This argument is fundamentally flawed because it suggests that anti-feminism and white supremacist beliefs naturally emerged from economic frustration and isolation. In fact, 4chan was home to a deep history of racism, sexism, homophobia, and generalized hate that the author fails to fully recognize. The retreat online was not just economic- the frustrations expressed by the proto-incels of /r9k/ was also the result of the impossibility of fully attaining the high standards of masculinity set by gender norms and the media these users consumed. Furthermore, the hatred the author describes as emerging out of /r9k/ is part of an ongoing pattern. Anonymous’ assaults on women like Jessica Slaughter were not misguided applications of a new collective power they didn’t know what to do with, they were intentionally malicious acts that were part of a history of maliciously assaulting (under the guise of trolling) women, minorities, and people perceived as weaker than the anons- a history that was concurrent with the anti-corporate actions the author highlights to imply Anonymous was left-leaning. Even before those raids, the use of homophobic language on the boards, the naming of groups like the GNAA, and similar patterns throughout the history of 4chan clearly demonstrate that it was a space that cultivated racism, sexism, and a host of other forms of hate.
The author doesn’t identify this pattern until Chapter 10, when he finally writes that “it turned out a surprisingly large amount of 4chans culture aligned with the sensibilities of /pol/. After all, a majority of the boards were filled with racist and homophobic slurs” and “hyper offensive trolls had defined 4chan’s culture since the earliest days.” By not weaving this into the history of 4chan sooner, the author fails to understand or outline for his read the ways in which 4chan /already was/ right leaning long before what he claims to be a new rightward shift in /r9k/ users. Withdrawn outsiders were not newly attracted to online extremism- the creation of /pol/ as an explicitly Neo-Nazi-friendly board just gave them a new place to play with those ideas.
It’s possible that part of this flaw comes from a misunderstanding of how ‘the best’ posts rose to the top of 4chan. The author describes the survival-of-the-funniest trial that memes underwent on 4chan, but fails to acknowledge what we know well today: the ‘best’ content doesn’t emerge from free upvoting on the internet. What emerges is the content that gives the most satisfying or intense emotional response. This is why the funniest memes succeeded in 4chan, but it is also why /news/ “became Stormfront” and /pol/ so quickly grew in popularity.
That said, this book is a useful and thought provoking look at the rise of the alt right online and it’s real world consequences and implications. I would recommend it to anyone trying to understand how the internet shaped our present political realities, but I would caution them to read it alongside other works like Marantz’s Anti-Social.
May 2, 2023
scary but important :'(
September 19, 2024
I had to read this book for one of my political science classes. It’s such an easy read, but it was certainly something. It states things as fact, sometimes with few citations. It’s also just about 4chan, so it’s at times just very disturbing. That’d not necessarily the book’s fault, but is instead the nature of the subject matter. It laid things out very easily yet ends rather abruptly. At the end the author states that he’s going to provide optimism at the end of a pessimistic book and then proceeds to actually provide some of the most pessimistic commentary of the entire book. It’s an interesting read, but not one I would’ve picked up on my own. I also wouldn’t pick this one up again.
November 29, 2022
It Came From Something Awful is a would-be good history book bogged down by its own over-used lens of late-capitalistic-ennui. I was hoping for a more focused look at the history and results of the motions of what actually came from Something Awful; but the tired lens moves the author off track time and time again, padding its pages on what would be much better spent on what the reader is actually there for.
It’s odd to see something you’re privy to the history of, but my history gets fuzzy before 2008 for 4chan, because I was on Newgrounds (actually), and Vampire YA Book forums. In another world where I had worse chances with romance and a worse family, I could’ve become what this book discusses.
The bits that were important to learn, and disturbing to learn were the following: the horrifying story of Loli-Chan, the details of Anonymous’ occasional lucidity in targeting Scientology and, accidentally, Palantir, the existential horror of Doglas Rushkoff’s quote on page 245, and finally, an insight into the Janitor who penned the essay that lead to 4chan leaning into anonymity: Shii.
Shii points Beran to an obscure book recommended to him on /lit/, The Twenty Days of Turin, which fits, Borgesian, into 4chan’s kaleidoscope of anon. It is a horror novel surrounding a mysterious library that contains entirely anonymous entries, which the population plumb their cores and more to fill the pages and pages and pages of the library. They begin to only dream of a dry lake, emptied of their innards. They begin dying at random as well by the invisible hand of a giant statue in a public square. Note: I ordered the book and am waiting for it to come in. I’m working off of the author’s summary of Shii’s summary, making this information third-hand.
Revisiting Gamergate was a maddening experience, making me feel crazy all over again for not grok-ing why my co-workers were so mad about ‘ethics in games journalism’ and how that tied to right wing politics. The section on how Depression Quest actually mirrored the very people who sought to destroy those surrounding the game was simply brilliant. Beran is at his best here.
The book spends an inordinate amount of time on explaining the economic situation of the generations it encompasses and the generations that precede it, but not enough on some of the other factors that generated the ennui that 4chan and its family vomit continuously. You can only believe in nothing for so long, but Beran doesn’t show much of an out besides nihilism -> traditionalism, socialism, or communism.
Beran is at his best examining these internet communities with a microscope and interviewing people on the ground. Beran is at his worst pontificating on connections to Zizek’s philosophical, sophomoric drivel (imo, Zizek is sophomoric, not Beran).
My worries right now are not so much about the young, but the “credulous older newcomers” [218] who lack the internet literacy to know when 4chan is playing another game of fantasy into reality. It’s in Ron Watkins’ “Q”, in Trump’s self aggrandizing, and in the force of American Evangelical Christianity.
Quote On Charlottesville. Note: the 2008 protests were against Scientology, after Anonymous hacked them.
“For example, when I spoke to some boys carrying 4chan flags during the summer protests, they explained to me that they were opposed to white supremacy. 'But your Kek flag is based on a neo-Nazi flag,' I countered. 'and you’re marching with neo-Nazis.' 'It’s parody,' one boy insisted. Partly this was true. In addition to being 4chan’s newly appointed patron god, Kek was another way of saying LOL. The boy was marching for nothing, but the loopiest form of nothing I had ever seen. Around his neck hung a large gleaming pendant I recognized as the snaky symbol of Scientology. It was simply a nod to tradition; he couldn’t have been older than twelve when the 2008 protests occurred.” [231-232]
It’s odd to see something you’re privy to the history of, but my history gets fuzzy before 2008 for 4chan, because I was on Newgrounds (actually), and Vampire YA Book forums. In another world where I had worse chances with romance and a worse family, I could’ve become what this book discusses.
The bits that were important to learn, and disturbing to learn were the following: the horrifying story of Loli-Chan, the details of Anonymous’ occasional lucidity in targeting Scientology and, accidentally, Palantir, the existential horror of Doglas Rushkoff’s quote on page 245, and finally, an insight into the Janitor who penned the essay that lead to 4chan leaning into anonymity: Shii.
Shii points Beran to an obscure book recommended to him on /lit/, The Twenty Days of Turin, which fits, Borgesian, into 4chan’s kaleidoscope of anon. It is a horror novel surrounding a mysterious library that contains entirely anonymous entries, which the population plumb their cores and more to fill the pages and pages and pages of the library. They begin to only dream of a dry lake, emptied of their innards. They begin dying at random as well by the invisible hand of a giant statue in a public square. Note: I ordered the book and am waiting for it to come in. I’m working off of the author’s summary of Shii’s summary, making this information third-hand.
Revisiting Gamergate was a maddening experience, making me feel crazy all over again for not grok-ing why my co-workers were so mad about ‘ethics in games journalism’ and how that tied to right wing politics. The section on how Depression Quest actually mirrored the very people who sought to destroy those surrounding the game was simply brilliant. Beran is at his best here.
The book spends an inordinate amount of time on explaining the economic situation of the generations it encompasses and the generations that precede it, but not enough on some of the other factors that generated the ennui that 4chan and its family vomit continuously. You can only believe in nothing for so long, but Beran doesn’t show much of an out besides nihilism -> traditionalism, socialism, or communism.
Beran is at his best examining these internet communities with a microscope and interviewing people on the ground. Beran is at his worst pontificating on connections to Zizek’s philosophical, sophomoric drivel (imo, Zizek is sophomoric, not Beran).
My worries right now are not so much about the young, but the “credulous older newcomers” [218] who lack the internet literacy to know when 4chan is playing another game of fantasy into reality. It’s in Ron Watkins’ “Q”, in Trump’s self aggrandizing, and in the force of American Evangelical Christianity.
Quote On Charlottesville. Note: the 2008 protests were against Scientology, after Anonymous hacked them.
“For example, when I spoke to some boys carrying 4chan flags during the summer protests, they explained to me that they were opposed to white supremacy. 'But your Kek flag is based on a neo-Nazi flag,' I countered. 'and you’re marching with neo-Nazis.' 'It’s parody,' one boy insisted. Partly this was true. In addition to being 4chan’s newly appointed patron god, Kek was another way of saying LOL. The boy was marching for nothing, but the loopiest form of nothing I had ever seen. Around his neck hung a large gleaming pendant I recognized as the snaky symbol of Scientology. It was simply a nod to tradition; he couldn’t have been older than twelve when the 2008 protests occurred.” [231-232]
September 7, 2024
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.
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.
February 11, 2021
There was a lot to like here, but there also was a lot to question.
There is no doubt in my mind that online culture facilitated Donald Trump's presidency. But they didn't singlehandedly voted Donald Trump into presidency and too often, Dale Beran is trying to fit a square shaped peg into a circular hole in order to make his thesis work. He avoids, eschews and mixes a lot of different occurrences and phenomenon in order to get a straight narrative arc, but it is simply not there. For example, Beran only spends a couple paragraphs discussing the Anonymous raid on right-wing message board Stormfront, which literally brought the Nazis to 4Chan. 4Chan didn't breed Nazis. It was simply a place where they arrived and preached their crap to a vulnerable crowd. It is an important even in online right-wing radicalization and there is almost no context offered because it doesn't fit the thesis of toxic development of internet culture. Not cool.
Another problem with this book is that it takes free swipes at problematic right wing figures like Milo Yiannopoulos, Gavin McInnes or Jordan Peterson. I have no problems admitting these guys have terrible ideas on how the world should work, but what does calling the Proud Boys a bunch of cosplaying bros achieve exactly? These guys were recently declared a terrorists organization in Canada. They're not silly, they're dangerous. They are not going to disappear if you call them names They're just going to get angrier. I'm all about calling people out on their crap, but Beran spent a lot of time making fun of right-wing figures for who they are instead of what their do. That doesn't solve anything. That makes it worse.
It Came From Something Awful is an informative book. It provides great historical perspective on online radicalization by giving the who and the when. But you won't find the whats and the whys in this book. You'll find a lot tone-deaf pnw3ge instead. I consider myself a left-leaning person, but this book will not convince anyone that they're wrong about anything. It's only going to further polarize people.
There is no doubt in my mind that online culture facilitated Donald Trump's presidency. But they didn't singlehandedly voted Donald Trump into presidency and too often, Dale Beran is trying to fit a square shaped peg into a circular hole in order to make his thesis work. He avoids, eschews and mixes a lot of different occurrences and phenomenon in order to get a straight narrative arc, but it is simply not there. For example, Beran only spends a couple paragraphs discussing the Anonymous raid on right-wing message board Stormfront, which literally brought the Nazis to 4Chan. 4Chan didn't breed Nazis. It was simply a place where they arrived and preached their crap to a vulnerable crowd. It is an important even in online right-wing radicalization and there is almost no context offered because it doesn't fit the thesis of toxic development of internet culture. Not cool.
Another problem with this book is that it takes free swipes at problematic right wing figures like Milo Yiannopoulos, Gavin McInnes or Jordan Peterson. I have no problems admitting these guys have terrible ideas on how the world should work, but what does calling the Proud Boys a bunch of cosplaying bros achieve exactly? These guys were recently declared a terrorists organization in Canada. They're not silly, they're dangerous. They are not going to disappear if you call them names They're just going to get angrier. I'm all about calling people out on their crap, but Beran spent a lot of time making fun of right-wing figures for who they are instead of what their do. That doesn't solve anything. That makes it worse.
It Came From Something Awful is an informative book. It provides great historical perspective on online radicalization by giving the who and the when. But you won't find the whats and the whys in this book. You'll find a lot tone-deaf pnw3ge instead. I consider myself a left-leaning person, but this book will not convince anyone that they're wrong about anything. It's only going to further polarize people.
March 8, 2021
Certainly not for everyone....this book really traces the pathway from the emergency of image boards in Japan to Q, although it doesn't quite get to 2021 Q (for obviously reasons aka publishing date). It gets into the Hikikomori in Japan - and the parallels to a lot of online/chan culture in the 10s - and into 2chan, 4 chan, Jim Watkins and the develoution to 8chan/8kun (where Q is from). It hits ALL those subcultures we remember from the 00s and 10s: japanophiles (aka weeaboos), menanists, MRAs, ANONYMOUS, bronies, NEETs - I once spent part of a tattoo session while the artist describted her brother as a 'neet', HUGE section on gamergate and how these 'anti-social justice' crusades laid the foundation for Buggalo Boys and the Q movement.
Pairing this book with Kathleen Belew's 'Bringing the War Home' bridges the gap between white supremacist groups and online culture b/c her book explores recruitment tactics by WS groups which has heavily infiltrated 8chan/kun and discord.
This is a really interesting and important look on a modern culture phenomenon that is driving a lot of political action and violence in the US, but most Americans don't know the birthplace or history of Q and the modern alt-right movement. I've never been to 8chan -- spent very little time on 4chan but was curious about it in its earlier periods - but we can't escape the impact of some of its driving subcultures. To combat them, we need to understand their history and origins.
ALSO, the link between original 80s/90s Hikikomori and 00s/10s online culture in the west is VERY noticeable and I'm sure everyone reading this can cite (at least) one person they know who's been lost to online culture.
Pairing this book with Kathleen Belew's 'Bringing the War Home' bridges the gap between white supremacist groups and online culture b/c her book explores recruitment tactics by WS groups which has heavily infiltrated 8chan/kun and discord.
This is a really interesting and important look on a modern culture phenomenon that is driving a lot of political action and violence in the US, but most Americans don't know the birthplace or history of Q and the modern alt-right movement. I've never been to 8chan -- spent very little time on 4chan but was curious about it in its earlier periods - but we can't escape the impact of some of its driving subcultures. To combat them, we need to understand their history and origins.
ALSO, the link between original 80s/90s Hikikomori and 00s/10s online culture in the west is VERY noticeable and I'm sure everyone reading this can cite (at least) one person they know who's been lost to online culture.
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