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

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PDF / EPUB File Name: It_Came_from_Something_Awful_-_Dale_Beran.pdf, It_Came_from_Something_Awful_-_Dale_Beran.epub The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online’ by Whitney Phillips and Ryan Miltner When I dug into the book, I found out this argument represents the first third of it at most, and my problems with the latter chapters make me call the whole thing into question. It came from where? 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 Though not entirely inaccurate (from my perspective, at least), Beran's depiction of Tumblr culture and "SJWs" feels reductive, simplifying (and sometimes casually dismissing) the viewpoints of these groups as a means of direct comparison to 4Chan and the alt-right.

I have to say, the book was not at all what I was expecting from the title and the cover. I think the title and the cover give the impression that the book was probably a bit light-hearted and salacious, but this is not at all the case. It is, in fact, quite a dense, meticulously researched and considerate treatise on how the internet, particularly the ‘Wild West’ corners of certain message boards, played a large role in the rise of strident nationalism and widening gulf between left and right in politics. I took this on holiday with me and, to say that this is not light, sunlounger reading, would be an understatement. It takes quite a lot of concentration to follow some of the chains that the author explores in this book, it is quite the workout for the brain, but ended up being quite fascinating and illuminating.

It Came from Something Awful

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 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. I avoided this book when it first came out for a stupid but honest reason: it’s title, subtitle, and cover all made it look deeply inane. 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. 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.

Maybe hashtag activism, for all its flashiness and vaunted successes (the Arab Spring, #MeToo), doesn’t actually work. Schradie considers how conservative digital activism has achieved greater success IRL. Or, to take an example from the news, what are we to make of social media? Examining this topic in a narrow but interesting way, Dale Beran has penned It Came From Something Awful, an expansion of a 2017 essay in which he claimed that the peculiar 4chan discussion board provides "the skeleton key" for understanding "the rise of Trump."The reductionism is too much to bear for any not in the full throes of a Trump-equals-Hitler fantasy—a psychosis apparently shared by both the alt-right and the left. By the leftist Dale Beran, for that matter. Remember the claim that the OK hand gesture is a white-power symbol? It Came From Something Awful takes far too seriously 4chan's memes. In that, however, Beran is joined by far too many people. 4chan is significant because the media over-reports its invented and obnoxious memes, which then causes the actual alt-right to adopt them, which then confirms them as actual symbols of the alt-right. And round and round the circle goes.

p>At times, Beran's argument seems to mistakes his premise for his conclusion, i.e. he goes in with the conclusion that Trump was brought into power by these men, and that is what he proves. However, I think that the title (and the book's big argument) may be overstating the case that a bit. There's no question that a very visible part of Trump's support came from just the sort of young men that Beran profiles, but I was left wondering just how many of these people actually voted, and how many of them just amplified Trump's brand and normalized him for those who actually did vote for him.

Further, the person who punched Richard Spencer has never been identified. We don’t know their place of origin, their name, or group affiliation if any. And antifa isn’t a specific group, either, certainly not one with well-defined “chapters,” as if it were the Moose Lodge.Same as with Fantasyland, though I don’t normally do non-fiction here I feel like this book has informed a lot of what I’m dealing with in my writing, so I feel it’s appropriate to put here. As Marcuse put it, after “true needs” such as “nourishment, clothing, [and] lodging at the attainable level of culture” were met, the industrial engines that generated these goods didn’t simply shutter their factories and declare their jobs done. 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.” These items could be sold again and again because they created a “euphoria in unhappiness.”6 This book attempts to answer that question, and it does a marvelous job. While the narrative is occasionally twisted, a careful reading recovers the thread every time. The style is both academic and sufficiently relaxed to use the language of online spaces. The research is thoroughly supported. The characters are well fleshed out -- I think this is a particular strength of this book, introducing online personas with their real-world equivalents and tracing their trajectories from one platform to another. Overall, this book is a very solid narrative-based analysis of the factors behind the emergence of today's online environment, in all its wonder and toxicity.

Other books that have attempted to understand the psychology of trolls get to one or two aspects of the lifestyle and mindset: the LULZ, the libertarianism, the boredom. Very rarely, however, do they dive deep into the sadness and self-loathing, and the extreme darkness that leads to the anger and, inevitably, violence of young alt-righters. this book purports to explain how a loosely-associated group of Internet trolls set in motion (or continued a movement?!) political wheels that put our beleaguered president in the White House. it fails in its mission. Pairing this book with Kathleen Belew's 'Bringing the War Home' bridges the gap between white supremacist groups and online culture b/c her book explores recruitment tactics by WS groups which has heavily infiltrated 8chan/kun and discord. there was a teeming mass of people out there who knew with fatalistic certainty that there was no way out.”My main gripe with this book is that it fails to strike the right balance between summarizing extraneous detail and excising necessary detail. It seems to make overly broad generalizations in places where the topic doesn’t interest the author, and on the flip side it goes into extreme detail when something does. This makes things feel unbalanced and a bit untrustworthy, to me. Deadnaming is the practice of referring to a transgender individual by their discarded birth name, or any former name they used before transitioning. It can be complicated for journalists to handle the initial transition of a famous person, but even then most LGBTQIA+ folks argue there’s no excuse for deadnaming. But if the reader can drop the idea that Trump is Hitler. Drop the idea that the alt-right is actually the cause of Trump's election. Drop the idea that 4chan was capable of swinging an election. Drop the reflexive left-is-good/right-is-evil rhetoric that Beran indulges. Then what remains in It Came From Something Awful is still something that should interest both sensible liberals and sensible conservatives. The book is, at its best, a psychological study of a set of people, mostly young men, who found themselves in the early 2000s off on the far edges of statistical distribution. They were underemployed and unfinanced, but clever in a morally unserious way. And they had all the time in the world to spend online. 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. One thing Beran gets, that a lot of writers both in and out of the internet-discourse fail to grasp, is that a lot can change in twenty years, and it’s not all meaningless signifier churn. At various points, the people on the boards bestirred themselves to do things other than swap funny or grotesque pictures, and abuse themselves and others. Anonymous grew out of 4chan, and while a lot of people pooh-pooh it now, whatever else it represented, it represented at least some people rejecting Gen Xer nihilism for some sort of collective, values-based project. And then, of course, various snitches snitched and it collapsed. A more organized movement probably would not have collapsed like that, but when you’re organized by whoever can talk the biggest on an IRC channel…