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

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If you're a normie who can't quite wrap your head around exactly why so many Internet goons have anime girl avatars, or how popular online political action shifted from occupying Zuccotti Park to mass trolling actress Leslie Jones and the female reboot of Ghostbusters, then Beran's book provides a good overview of Internet culture. But he also gets at the undergirding feeling behind all these actions...a convincing argument that we're all caught up in simulations of political change rather than actually affecting it.”―Andrew Limbong, NPR 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. I have an abiding fascination for how certain ideas and movements have taken hold in the last few years – the pace of change has frankly been astonishing since the turn of the millennium – and I have done a lot of reading around the subject in the past few years. One of the themes that has been recurring in all of my reading is the power of social media in spreading ideology and misinformation, and the role of 4chan in all of this cannot be underestimated. For this reason, I was drawn to this book as soon as I came across it. The Richard Spencer punching incident gets described near the end of the book. Just a couple chapters from the end. I’ll confess that’s where I quit reading. It was the second time I put the book down, and I just can’t make myself try for a third.

If you're a normie who can't quite wrap your head around exactly why so many Internet goons have anime girl avatars, or how popular online political action shifted from occupying Zuccotti Park to mass trolling actress Leslie Jones and the female reboot of Ghostbusters, then Beran's book provides a good overview of Internet culture. But he also gets at the undergirding feeling behind all these actions...a convincing argument that we're all caught up in simulations of political change rather than actually affecting it." --Andrew Limbong, NPR This co-optation didn’t end with the hippies, but rather inaugurated a mad half century in which an ever-expanding mainstream consumer culture chased down and trapped the countercultures that harassed it. Each time a counterculture was snagged, it was then transformed, like a vampire, into a soulless husk that served the enemy. These critiques came from leftist cultural critics like Charles Reich and Marcuse, but also conservatives such as Catholic political commentator Reinhold Niebuhr and liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith. 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. In some sense, It Came From Something Awful is simply a particular explication of a general truth we've known for some time: The glory of the Internet is that it allows like-minded people to find one another—and the horror of the Internet is that it allows like-minded people to find one another. Book lovers, stamp collectors, and model-airplane enthusiasts can all band together to share their hobbies. So can neo-Nazis and child molesters. Or in the case of 4chan and 8chan, Beran claims, a bunch of disaffected teenage boys began by "talking online about Japanese anime" on the "Something Awful" chatboard, and they gradually morphed into the alt-right.

It Came from Something Awful

If you're a normie who can't quite wrap your head around exactly why so many Internet goons have anime girl avatars, or how popular online political action shifted from occupying Zuccotti Park to mass trolling actress Leslie Jones and the female reboot of Ghostbusters, then Beran's book provides a good overview of Internet culture. But he also gets at the undergirding feeling behind all these actions…a convincing argument that we're all caught up in simulations of political change rather than actually affecting it.” —Andrew Limbong, NPR p>Overall, however, I found Beran's book to be compulsively readable, mostly because it confirmed so many of the things I already suspected to be true. From GamerGate to PizzaGate to the march on Charlottesville, the men that he chronicles in It Came from Something Awful are truly a pestilence, and we must continue to fight them. If we don't, we run the risk of continuing to allow them to control the contours of the debate. Supreme Court Justice Brandeis once said that sunlight is the best disinfectant. While that is true in some instances, I do worry that books like this contribute to that unfortunate trend of giving these unsavory people exactly the sort of attention that they crave. It is, unfortunately, the inescapable double-bind of the world that we live in. If it does nothing else, Beran's book provides us a valuable form of understanding.

I think that some of this is fairly insightful, but I think that other sections are just frankly wrong. 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. He also oversteps his abilities as an amateur sociologist and makes sweeping and simply wrong claims about a wide variety of social movements in the second half of the book.

So they started using their cleverness, creating nihilistically tinged comic memes for one another—memes that played against cultural norms. And since the only culture they knew was one of liberal triumph, they took anti-liberalism as their vehicle. They made fun of the culture's pieties, and they toyed with the things that culture had said was wrong, particularly sexism and racism. Young people are often extremely passionate. Sometimes they’re wrong. Sometimes they’re right and go about things in the wrong ways. Often, it’s a mixture of the two (just like older adults). ‘It Came From Something Awful’ falls apart at the endPDF / EPUB File Name: It_Came_from_Something_Awful_-_Dale_Beran.pdf, It_Came_from_Something_Awful_-_Dale_Beran.epub

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." ― Publishers Weekly p>Dale Beran takes us deep into the dark, sinister, bleakly cynical parts of the internet that many of us would probably never explore on our own. Here we find the truly toxic, nihilistic folk who inhabited spaces such as 4chan, primarily young men dissatisfied with their lot in life and determined to take it out on whomever got in their way. He draws fascinating (though not always sustainable) connections between the counterculture of 1960s and the present, showing how the relentless ability of capitalism to commercialize resistance has generated precisely the feeling of nihilism that has become so toxic and that has left a generation of young men feeling powerless, angry, and dangerous.

Certainly not for everyone....this book really traces the pathway from the emergency of image boards in Japan to Q, although it doesn't quite get to 2021 Q (for obviously reasons aka publishing date). It gets into the Hikikomori in Japan - and the parallels to a lot of online/chan culture in the 10s - and into 2chan, 4 chan, Jim Watkins and the develoution to 8chan/8kun (where Q is from). It hits ALL those subcultures we remember from the 00s and 10s: japanophiles (aka weeaboos), menanists, MRAs, ANONYMOUS, bronies, NEETs - I once spent part of a tattoo session while the artist describted her brother as a 'neet', HUGE section on gamergate and how these 'anti-social justice' crusades laid the foundation for Buggalo Boys and the Q movement.Hippies, following on the heels of the Beats, were also opposed to consumerist society and were equally interested in transcendence. Like the European Romantic artists of the nineteenth century, they were fascinated by the boundless capacity for human experience, achievement, and connection. In this spirit, they created novels, paintings, and music that celebrated the infinite worlds contained within the self. The reality is far less exciting. Any political unit sound enough to project its power over a large geographic area for centuries has deep structural roots. Those roots can’t be pulled up in a day or even a year. If an empire seems to topple overnight, it’s certain that the conditions that produced the outcome had been present for a long time—suppurating wounds that finally turned septic enough for the patient to succumb to a sudden trauma.