It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump Into Office

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I wish more time was spent interrogating the roots of neo-fascism and less on regurgitating the ideas of Baudrillard and Zizek. 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. For this reason, their cultural movement was condemned by both mainstream breadwinning society and Playboy. 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.

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. 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. 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 feckles 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. Sites like 4chan and 8chan are microcosms of the internet itself–simultaneously at the vanguard of contemporary culture, politics, comedy and language, and a new low for all of the above.

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. As it stands, all we have is 4chan, and books like It Came From Something Awful: grainy upchucks of memes and scandals and news items spattered across the internet, leaving stains of so many different partially digested ideas. 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.

And so it went down the line: Anonymous protesters, all following Rule 1, trying to conceal 4chan from me, and obscure the source of the joke, just like a raid into a chat room, each hiding their motivations behind a mirrored chamber of repeated memes. 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.

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. This argument is fundamentally flawed because it suggests that anti-feminism and white supremacist beliefs naturally emerged from economic frustration and isolation. 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). In other words, the more unsatisfying the substitution (for example, processed food for fresh), the more profitable the enterprise. You might not personally care about Donald Trump, the rise of white supremacy and how Charlottesville happened but if, like me, you are interested in how the world has got to where it is now and what might need to be done to prevent things shifting even further, this book is a good place to try and gain some understanding of it all.

It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office is a 2019 book by Dale Beran, focusing on the intersection of Internet culture, alt-right, and Donald Trump's presidency. 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. We’re franker about the state of the world now, and 4chan’s “lol nothing matters” spoofing is partly responsible. The American countercultural revolution, the spirit of ’68 that started with the baby boomers then swept the globe, intended to remake the world into a more equitable and human-centered place. 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.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. 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. 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!

Other eras have gotten yearning sonnets or the Taj Mahal; our time has given us misogynistic meme culture and boxes of My Little Pony figurines covered in lonely teenagers’ ejaculate. When Hefner abandoned his own domestic, wage-earning existence and created the image of the single playboy, he fashioned an alternative masculine role. 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. Reading Dale Beran's chronicle of 4chan, the anonymous imageboard where some of the internet's worst scandals have been fomented, feels like scrolling through the forum itself. 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.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. 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". As some other reviewers have noted, he is much more sympathetic to Tumblr, including Zoe Quinn, than Angela Nagle is. 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. But by the time the obvious, glaring crisis arrives and the true scale of the problem becomes clear, it’s far too late.