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

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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. It's a nice hook for a publisher, but 4chan and Tumblr are eddies in the current, not "skeleton keys. Turns out it’s way harder to strangle someone to death than it looks in the movies,” that man said, alongside images of the woman’s dead body.

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. In fact, 4chan was home to a deep history of racism, sexism, homophobia, and generalized hate that the author fails to fully recognize. That being said, this book IS about 4Chan and the alt-right, and of all the books I've read on internet culture, this one (from my perspective) creates the most comprehensive history of the alt-right's formation and comes closest to capturing the foulness that is 4Chan. Instead, they discovered it was far more profitable to simply generate false needs by convincing people “to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate. Properly adorned with the latest stereos, liquors, and the rest of the items advertised in the magazine, the pad was supposed to attract an endless procession of pretty young girls.Hippies, following on the heels of the Beats, were also opposed to consumerist society and were equally interested in transcendence. After all, a majority of the boards were filled with racist and homophobic slurs” and “hyper offensive trolls had defined 4chan’s culture since the earliest days. The most impactful recent political movements on the far left and right started with massive online collectives of teenagers. Trump as our illustrious sociopathic, narcissistic, egotistical, pathological wrecking-ball liar-in-chief. The Fisher school is so thoroughly invested in the all-encompassing awfulness of our lives under late capitalism that it can’t see anything else… including features of that awfulness that aren’t part of its pre-established menu of tropes and laments.

When the real issues come up, healthy states, the ones capable of handling and minimizing everyday dysfunction, have a great deal more capacity to respond than those happily waltzing toward their end. Each time a counterculture was snagged, it was then transformed, like a vampire, into a soulless husk that served the enemy. 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. As Beran explains, many Gen Xers and millennials, raised to expect boomer-era prosperity, instead found themselves scuttled by the Great Recession: jobless or doomed to 1099-R subcontracting gigs, drowning in debt, unable to make real-world romantic attachments, slowly realizing that the future they’d been promised was canceled.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 Came From Something Awful” doesn’t have the wounded defensive quality Fisherite work often does, and doesn’t show the sympathy for the far right that often occasions displays of that defensiveness. His source on the Enlightenment left is the counter-revolutionary Alexis de Tocqueville, whom he relies on to assert that the 18th century Enlightenment ideal was to create a "worldwide coalition against the consolidation of power in the hands of the few.

Useful, with some key flaws- read if you want one perspective on the way the internet has shaped our current political realities. was the online hub of a leftist hacker collective known as Anonymous and a prominent supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Just a few years after punk died, Madonna was prancing onstage in the same studs and spikes, singing about how “we are living in a material world and I am a material girl,” flirting with the same duality of pleasure and permission that existed at the center of marketing. Talking to Nazis like Richard Spencer, or even the boot boys, is like looking at bugs in a terrarium. Reading Dale Beran’s chronicle of 4chan, the anonymous imageboard where some of the internet’s worst scandals have been fomented, feels like scrolling through the forum itself…Beran explores the psychology of young, disenfranchised masculinity that 4chan represents and the sociopolitical context that molded its minds.In other words, the more unsatisfying the substitution (for example, processed food for fresh), the more profitable the enterprise. It embraced everything mainstream culture wasn’t: anything ragged, filthy, offensive, brutal, disgusting, or weird. And to appeal to the hippies’ interest in exploring nature and the body, industry and marketing produced expanding waves of workout gear, cosmetics, and outdoor equipment.

It’s possible that part of this flaw comes from a misunderstanding of how ‘the best’ posts rose to the top of 4chan. His analysis of the role of depression in these internet cultures is probably the best part of the book.Actually going into their spaces, especially the fora, is more like levering open a rock and sticking your face into what’s underneath. As it stands, all we have is 4chan, and books like It Came From Something Awful: grainy upchucks of memes and scandals and news items spattered across the internet, leaving stains of so many different partially digested ideas.