It Came from Something Awful
How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
How 4chan and 8chan fuel white nationalism, inspire violence, and infect politics.
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 sites like 4chan and 8chan and their profound effect on youth counterculture.
Dale Beran has observed the anonymous messageboard community's shifting activities and interests since the beginning. 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. They were the original meme machines, 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.
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From the festering online ids of nerds comes America's vitriolic right-wing politics, according to this scintillating study of the ideology of 4chan. Expanding a widely shared article published on Medium.com, Beran recounts 4chan.net's history as a social media platform for disaffected, socially awkward, deliberately offensive white man-boys steeped in nihilistic trolling and jokey memes like the now-infamous Pepe the Frog. 4chan'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. (He also explores the opposing movement of intersectional-justice focused identity politics spreading from Tumblr to left-wing campuses.) Writing in funny, caustic prose right-wing provocateur Gavin McInnes is "a punk venerating the square suburban values of the 1950s" Beran dissects the noxious political runoff of 4chan's "depravity and weirdness." Equally stimulating is his argument, invoking cultural theorists from Hannah Arendt to Herbert Marcuse, that capitalism's blend of Darwinian competition and consumerist fantasia makes everyone feel like powerless losers. Beran's focus is narrow and doesn't encompass the full roots of Trumpian politics, but he offers smarts insights into its most lurid constituency. Photos.
Customer Reviews
I was in the middle of reading this when the El Paso shooting happened.
It was absolutely surreal to find myself reading the passage in this book about killers leaving their last words on 8chan and then seeing the news, as it was unfolding, of the shooting in El Paso, Texas this past weekend (August 3rd, 2019). I sat there wondering if the shooter had left their last words on that site only to find out a few hours later that he, in fact, did. So I navigated over to 8chan for the first time to see this all for myself. 8chan was shut down only a few days later but in the short time I was on the site I witnessed the very things this book describes. The El Paso shooter was being hailed as a saint. They were reciting his name just like in that memorable scene from Fight Club when one of the members died during their nefarious deeds. Everything Mr. Beran describes in this book is spot on accurate. It was just so bizarre to read about it and then watch it play out in real time. I’ve never before experienced that with a book on current affairs.