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Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan And Tumblr To Trump And The Alt-Right

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Ms Nagle: One of the darker products of the sexual revolution is that you have a generation of young men raised on very grim pornography and being able to be like the Marquis de Sade in the virtual or imaginary world but in the real world they have less agency, less human contact, fewer prospects and less stake in their community and society than ever before. Nagle’s caution that the left’s stagnant ideas, pedantry, and infighting have made it the weaker party of the two should surely lead those who want change to reflect on their methods.

She also doesn’t even bother to come off as impartial or having integrity throughout the book, where in a section about GamerGate she says Zoe Quinn’s video game Depression Quest “looked like a terrible game featuring many of the fragility and mental illness-fetishizing characteristics of the kind of feminism that has emerged online in recent years” (God forbid someone makes a game that they feel may help people understand others or their own depression, amirite? Chapter 5 starts with a bold, unsubstantiated claim: that the internet left caused the right to react and move more right, partly due to “making increasingly anti-male, anti-white, anti-straight, anti-cis rhetoric normal on the cultural left” brought on from identity politics (which she doesn’t bother defining). While taboo and anti-moral ideologies festered in the dark corners of the anonymous Internet, the de-anonymized social media platforms, where most young people now develop their political ideas for the first time, became a panopticon, in which people lived in fear of observation from the eagle eye of an offended organizer of public mass shaming. But the online nazis need an opposition, and if anything, I hope that Nagle’s book will help to galvanise those of us who think that we need to take the alt-right head on and beat them with their own weapons.

As old media dies, gatekeepers of cultural sensibilities and etiquette have been overthrown, notions of popular taste maintained by a small creative class are now perpetually outpaced by viral online content from obscure sources, and culture industry consumers have been replaced by constantly online, instant content producers. It seems mostly just as if it's unfinished; typos abound, strangely wrong quips about PTSD, unclear and sporadic theses, repeatedly bafflingly caricaturistic presentations of Friedrich Nietzsche, etc. Evaluating the Effectiveness of Deplatforming as a Moderation Strategy on Twitter, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 5 :CSCW2, (1-30), Online publication date: 13-Oct-2021. An episode of the Fusion Networks' TV series Trumpland directed by Leighton Woodhouse was based on the book.

A review in The Daily Beast said the book was plagued by "sloppy sourcing", [7] noting an allegation that parts of the book had been plagiarized.Another question to be asked could be if a newly reinvigorated left aesthetics is possible along the lines of Guy Debord, Beatniks and others or the 1960s wave of transgressive left-wing aesthetics is completely compromised by the alt-Right. Nagle seems either willfully ignorant or intellectually lazy of the different forms of feminism (which, given her thesis topic, is astonishing to see here - my guess is on laziness), of the different sub-cultures of Tumblr, etc. The title comes from the name given to normal people in some online chatrooms, particularly 4chan and 8chan. Nagle clearly knows more about 4chan and the alt-right than Tumblr and internet left subcultures, since she really drops the ball when talking about the left. I continue to think that there's something valuable in KAN's analysis, just as I think there are valuable-to-read culturally conservative sorta-Marxists out there (Lasch, MacIntyre, and so on), but I think there's also an element of justified egg on my face for this review.

A remnant of the transgressive left politics of 1960s, actually 1968, how transgression and cynicism is weaponized by the extreme-right vanguard (in the base, only a fierce anti-PC sentiment is prevalent) seems more contingent than it is a necessary trait of this line of thought.Since 4chan and many other Alt-Right hubs are online, it makes you wonder where these clashes are actually going on. It's ironic that in a book so occupied with the practice of trolling the author probably got trolled herself. Bush, who had waged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and embarrassed educated people with his Southern style, his regular gaffs and ‘Bushisms’, the feeling of shame among US liberals was captured by books like Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men. I suspect the author will be attacked by both right and left which is possibly the best endorsement I can give the book. The weird question to be asked is then how to answer such an effective version of “Gramscian” right who successfully waged a cultural war against the cultural Marxism?

Kill All Normies is an accessible but unpatronising study, perfectly balancing academic critique, political commentary and assured, intelligent, non-embarrassing writing about the internet and its unique subcultures. I have been fascinated for many years by the rise of the alt-right, a phenomenon that I have followed in gaming communities and Reddit forums, but it was very nice to see the disparate narrative of the online alt-right phenomenon brought together so well. Compare the first election won by Obama, in which social media devotees reproduced the iconic but official blue-and-red stylized stencil portrait of the new president with HOPE printed across the bottom, a portrait created by artist Shepard Fairey and approved by the official Obama campaign, to the bursting forth of irreverent mainstream-baffling meme culture during the last race, in which the Bernie’s Dank Meme Stash Facebook page and The Donald subreddit defined the tone of the race for a young and newly politicized generation, with the mainstream media desperately trying to catch up with a subcultural in-joke style to suit two emergent anti-establishment waves of the right and left. What makes Kill All Normies such an insightful book is the author’s insistence on the culpability of the left in creating the vacuum in which the Alt-Right expanded. Even a few very simple editorial changes, like offering embedded links in the eBook edition or a glossary of some of the otherwise inscrutable terms, could have made this a better book.Nagle focusing on the act of No-Platforming (‘free speech’) rather than the individuals being No-Platformed is telling. This is a phenomenon that was greatly described in Mark Fisher’s essay “ Exiting the Vampire Castle“, and Nagle sides with Fisher’s views that online communities have become problematic in their own right. Sadness at how polarized it appears online culture is and how it has clearly influenced mainstream politics in such an unpleasant way. When I saw the part quoting Chapo Trap House as saying the Harambe meme exploded after the Pulse shooting, I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Ruthless competitive individualism is being applied to the romantic and private realm and it's deeply anti-social.

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