Talking to Nazis like Richard Spencer, or even the boot boys, is like looking at bugs in a terrarium. When I was young, I assumed the way the American landscape was changing around me was somehow temporary. Why did all of these advertising and entertainment shifts occur in the mid-twentieth century and increase so wildly that today they dominate almost every aspect of our lives? And oddly, the first escape out of these oppressive expectations didn’t come from the counterculture, but from Hugh Hefner and Playboy magazine.

Artists did not reach outside art, but inward toward fantasy and self-reflection, only able to produce Romantic art: proof that there was more to the world than what it was, that it could be imaginatively reinvented. 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). Now, the wrecking ball that capitalized on all of it has some limited brains, no more guardrails, and a seemingly endless run at impunity. All of this dovetailed with the use of sex in the workplace as Playboy had modeled it: as a way to sell status, pleasure, and permission.But by the time the obvious, glaring crisis arrives and the true scale of the problem becomes clear, it’s far too late. Anyone intending to take it on should also be aware that at least in the audio version, all the slurs referenced are pronounced, and there are a lot.

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. However, what I would suggest is reading Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland first, since It Came From Something Awful takes a high-powered microscope to the Petri dish of 4chan/8chan, which is only a small part of how the culture of the United States went completely bonkers, to the event horizon of irredeemability—but it is an incredibly important part, because the denizens of these sites are the true underbelly of society at large—in Japan, probably everywhere, but most destructive here in the US. Beran, unlike Nagle or some other Fisher acolytes, doesn’t add hatred and ax-grinding to the problems this intellectual inheritance brings with him. 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. 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.For this purpose—just as 4chan would later—it adopted Nazi imagery in an attempt to shrug off co-optation. Eventually, in Beran’s aggrandizing telling, 4chan’s crescendo of furious nihilism delivers President Trump to America.

It Came from Something Awful is the fascinating and bizarre story of sites like 4chan and 8chan and their profound effect on youth counterculture. 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.I think that some of this is fairly insightful, but I think that other sections are just frankly wrong. 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.

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.

ALSO, the link between original 80s/90s Hikikomori and 00s/10s online culture in the west is VERY noticeable and I'm sure everyone reading this can cite (at least) one person they know who's been lost to online culture. So when the intricately duplicative art of mass media nests in the soul like a cuckoo, replacing real experience with simulation, it is not so much a flaw as a feature. I still sometimes try to imagine the reception on “the old internet” that I only watched from a distance to the idea that anyone was entitled to sex… well, between the rise of both internet porn and dating apps (the latter of which could be seen to quantitatively prove nerds’ inadequacy) and the egging on of cultural/political entrepreneurs like Milo Yiannopolous, Mike Cernovich, and eventually Trump’s man Steve Bannon, a new crew of culture industry vultures found ways not just to commodify a counterculture’s dissent, but to weaponize it. I remember reading an interview with David Simon about the real life people that inspired the main characters on The Wire: The street level wheelers and dealers that sway with the tides of power and sometimes influence it in their own weird way, all connected in a twisted ecosystem. True journalists at The Atlantic, The New Yorker, NPR, and ProPublica, amongst numerous others, have undertaken the role of resistance to the unraveling of this fragile Republic, but I fear the moronic masses are just too overwhelming, the apathetic too despondent, and the system of wanton greed and disinformation too ironclad.