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When Hefner abandoned his own domestic, wage-earning existence and created the image of the single playboy, he fashioned an alternative masculine role. 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.
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. It’s just the part of the world that, for a long time, everyone was pretending not to see, creating that vague Wrongness that drove me to 4chan in the first place. 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.If no one ever dismantled the mess we’re in and magnified its pieces, it would only empower its worst elements and manifestations. WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. Furthermore, the hatred the author describes as emerging out of /r9k/ is part of an ongoing pattern. 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. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
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! 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. 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.
In fact, 4chan was home to a deep history of racism, sexism, homophobia, and generalized hate that the author fails to fully recognize. 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.
a convincing argument that we're all caught up in simulations of political change rather than actually affecting it. 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).Strains of counterculture perished, and new mutations were born with adaptive counterstrategies to avoid being immediately devoured.
The fact that Donald Trump managed to get himself elected as President of the United States of America, arguably the most powerful position in the world, is one of the scariest and most illuminating events of the recent past that has given us a good indication of the terrifying direction the world is currently heading. The book is on its firmest ground when describing the dynamics of 4chan, Something Awful, Otakon, Anonymous, and even, to an extent Tumblr. 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. Young boys ill-equipped to handle the realities of life are the direct fault of those that spawned them.s mutating ethos, he contends, married the victim culture of its self-labeled low-status 'beta males' to the alt-right’s prescription of white nationalism, patriarchy, and fascist power politics as a salve for the grievances of dispossessed men, culminating in a half-sincere, half-cynical embrace of Donald Trump.
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