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

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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. All warned that if America did not stop producing tremendous waste and absurd new visions of what was considered affluent to sell, the country would eventually become a nightmarish version of itself, in which the fabric of its values and communities (not to mention its public services) would tear under the weight of industrial marketing. It is the essential source of information and ideas that make sense of a world in constant transformation. It is a truly fascinating devolution, one historians will be writing about for another fifty years as they comb through digital records.

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.The piece was unusual for its deep familiarity with and empathy for the desires of 4chan’s anonymous users. 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. 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. 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. Young boys ill-equipped to handle the realities of life are the direct fault of those that spawned them.

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. 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. 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. 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.As some other reviewers have noted, he is much more sympathetic to Tumblr, including Zoe Quinn, than Angela Nagle is. 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.