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

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For this reason, their cultural movement was condemned by both mainstream breadwinning society and Playboy.

Senior correspondent Peter Rubin will review Yoko Ogawa's The Memory Police, out in translation August 13. I think he gets really good when he ties together his own personal narrative with the richness of the text and the technology of the last twenty years. The hippies became a “me generation” who explored their new horizons, literally, with new commodities.But some commentators who I take reasonably seriously took this seriously, and for a while I was trying to keep up with altright-explainers, so I figured I’d give this late entry a try. When the first modern American counterculture emerged in the form of the Beats, it challenged both the breadwinner and playboy archetypes by attempting to disassociate masculinity from wage earning. Each time a counterculture was snagged, it was then transformed, like a vampire, into a soulless husk that served the enemy.

This leads to the overarching weakness of the book, where it meets up with the weakness of the Fisher school of contemporary-awfulness analysis (and, in a weird way, Arendt). His recent article on Medium, 4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump, became a sensation that was shared and recommended by JK Rowling and Marc Maron, among many others.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.

One problem with the "identity politics are neoliberal" dismissal is that it can't account for the central place of transphobia in the current conservative mindset or come up with a way to fight; instead, Beran dismisses LGBTQ identity as totally co-opted by capitalism, like every counterculture from the '60s forward, without grappling with the murderous persistence of homophobia and transphobia. His chapter on Tumblr is far more sympathetic than Nagle's, yet he's still critical of its popularized version of Judith Butler's feminism and queer theory and suggests that something dangerous came from the 4chan crowd discovering that line of thinking. It Came from Something Awfulis the fascinating and bizarre story of sites like 4chan and 8chan and their profound effect on youth counterculture. It’s an unsubtle reading and ignores or misreads some important factors (I’m still rewriting my birthday lecture which covered some of this ground- patience! The breakthroughs and innovations that we uncover lead to new ways of thinking, new connections, and new industries.Seemingly the only thing the culture industry could not sell, by the time Lowtax was starting Something Awful, was the rejected backwash of Gen X grunge ‘tude: cynicism, indifference, and a certain soupçon of fascination with gory death and sexual violation (it turns out that somebody could indeed sell those things, but I guess the fora habitues were past caring by then). But within a few short years, the site’s ideology spun on its axis; it became the birthplace and breeding ground of the alt-right.

And if you are isolated, you can participate in the ersatz interaction of virtual communities, such as message boards and social media. 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. He was a habitue of the titular “Something Awful” and no stranger to the chans, especially in the early days. Hippies, following on the heels of the Beats, were also opposed to consumerist society and were equally interested in transcendence.It's maddening to me as both a socialist and a historian of social movements that so much of what passes for socialist politics these days is so shallowly informed about the history of even U.