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

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If you’re still not sure about the difference between lols and lulz or online harassment and Russian meddling, Gorman will enlighten you in this deeply sourced, deeply personal account of digital aggression. The author attempts to cite sources but most of his claims about internet culture are just claims, and many don’t match my experiences in the same online spaces at all. However, as the new wave of hippie counterculture spread across the country, society responded in a novel way. It Came from Something Awfulis the fascinating and bizarre story of sites like 4chan and 8chan and their profound effect on youth counterculture.

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. The manufactured impostor not only thrives on what once fed the real need, but attempts to murder its rivals by extinguishing desires for genuine experience. To me, the most interesting idea in the book is one Beran only touches on: why some people could pull up from the smug, furious, post-truth hate that consumed 4chan in the last decade while others could not. It's a blow-by-blow study of the devolution of American culture, especially during the past few years: the rise of the radical 'proud boys'; the use of the word 'cuck' to insult liberals; the proliferation of offensive memes; the seemingly endless racist, inflammatory rhetoric; and the death of 32-year-old Heather Heyer, who was hit by a car driven by a white supremacist in Charlottesville in 2017—an event that prompted Donald Trump to say there were good people on both sides.

Why did all of these advertising and entertainment shifts occur in the mid-twentieth century and increase so wildly that today they dominate almost every aspect of our lives? I'm certain that there is a great book waiting to be publishing on the history fringe politics on the internet, but this isn't it. It starts as an introduction to how a subset of Internet trolls became an outsized influence in American culture and politics, and ends being a big-picture view of how two generations of young-to-middle-aged adults were essentially destroyed by cultural cynicism and a punishing economic system. Young boys ill-equipped to handle the realities of life are the direct fault of those that spawned them.Dale Beran has observed the anonymous messageboard community's shifting activities and interests since the beginning.