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One other aspect of the failures of the left in my opinion is how the Left overlooked the realm of Desire that is almost necessarily not satisfied in our contemporary societies. Also, the intra-left purge and exclusion of the critics of this self-pleasing activities is another example (Nagle gives the example of Mark Fisher who sadly committed suicide this year).
Think of any progressive intellectual of any significance from the last century and try to imagine them surviving today. The title comes from the name given to normal people in some online chatrooms, particularly 4chan and 8chan. A quick look at the history of Otherkin shows how this is isn’t accurate, since the community been around since the 90s.I cannot really consider myself a leftist in the traditional sense any more, and this is in part because of the movements that Nagle and Fisher talk about. In many ways it is hard not to see so many of the "culture warriors" as being somewhat pathetic - whether it be attacking women simply because they are women or by feeling the need to hound someone out of a job etc. Obviously truly tracking how much a meme was used would go beyond just using GoogleTrends, but you can still get an idea of if a claim is potentially true (in this case, absolutely not).
It’s incredible that Greer (who holds to her transphobic views), Namazie (who defended Charlie Hebdo and said Islamism is ‘a new totalitarian global threat’), and Peterson (who allies with the alt-right and went on numerous transphobic screeds) are among her choices. The world is overdue for a serious and nuanced investigation of online subcultures, ideally one with at least a tiny bit of affection for the potentials of the "digital public". By which I mean, there are absolutely no citations, references, footnotes, or links on any sources for this book.Kony 2012” videos among others comes to mind in this rush to collect “virtue points” in this scarcity of virtue market on the Web. Examples are given from 4chan, and Nagle goes into some literary or philosophical discussion about it. Angela Nagle strikes me as an uncommonly sane voice in a culture war defined by astounding cruelty, extremism and intolerance. The alt-light figures that became celebrities during this period made their careers exposing the absurdities of online identity politics and the culture of lightly thrown claims of misogyny, racism, ableism, fatphobia, transphobia and so on.
The book - almost an essay with its 136 pages - at the end upsets both sides of the political co-ordinate system. While she doesn’t quite make clear how the real-world consequences of this online discourse—especially the election of Donald Trump—were precipitated by the online hate-pit, Nagle’s analysis is trenchant and timely. The history of the Alt-Right and how the left can fight it is a topic that should be looked into, but it deserves to be written about by a better author than Nagle. Let me explain - Nagle will throw out terms that either 1) have multiple meanings/uses, and she should identify how she uses the word and use it consistently, or terms that 2) she can't/shouldn't expect the audience to be familiar with in this sort of medium and should define when using it. Nagle says college campuses are a location of these culture wars, where according to her, no-platforming and identity politics have run amok.This is the bare minimum for anything meant to document/disseminate an event or present an argument.
Did the Vietnam War shape the ideologies and views of the left and right during the 60-70s that Nagle talks about? On the right is the now-notorious alt-right, divided between the 'alt-light', typified by meme-making/gleefully antagonistic trolling/use of 4chan-derived argot, and the more genuinely fascistic tendencies often masked by the headline-grabbing behaviour of alt-light figures such as Milo Yiannopoulos. On one side the "alt right" ranges from the once obscure neo-reactionary and white separatist movements, to geeky subcultures like 4chan, to more mainstream manifestations such as the Trump-supporting gay libertarian Milo Yiannopolous. These are not the same ideologies that consider Trudeau a white supremacist, which includes marxists, anarchists, and whoever else. When people get so far down the rabbit hole of obscure online political subcultures and forums it becomes impossible to relate to or explain things to a normie who is also seen as being partially to blame for the problems of the world because of their ignorant unenlightened state.
Since the author's publications elsewhere (for instance, Jacobin) lack this deficiency, I lay the blame on Zero Books. One should definitively leave the privilege-checking, victimhood-loving trenches of identitarian politics for a start. 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.
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