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

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Where did it all come from? Russian trolls, 4chan, online disinformation and harassment campaigns, the prevalence of toxic discourse in social media today. Election manipulation and fabricated natural disasters. The endless morass of lies, anger, and hate that seem to spill out from every corner of the Internet. 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. I think that some of this is fairly insightful, but I think that other sections are just frankly wrong. The author attempts to cite sources but most of his claims about internet culture are just claims, and many don’t match my experiences in the same online spaces at all. He also oversteps his abilities as an amateur sociologist and makes sweeping and simply wrong claims about a wide variety of social movements in the second half of the book. 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

This co-optation didn’t end with the hippies, but rather inaugurated a mad half century in which an ever-expanding mainstream consumer culture chased down and trapped the countercultures that harassed it. Each time a counterculture was snagged, it was then transformed, like a vampire, into a soulless husk that served the enemy. It’s odd to see something you’re privy to the history of, but my history gets fuzzy before 2008 for 4chan, because I was on Newgrounds (actually), and Vampire YA Book forums. In another world where I had worse chances with romance and a worse family, I could’ve become what this book discusses. 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… 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." 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.while one could posit that what was written on 4 Chan, Tumbler, et al. provided a sliver of insight into the public's attitude towards the body politic, those digital graffiti were hardly generally representative. PDF / EPUB File Name: It_Came_from_Something_Awful_-_Dale_Beran.pdf, It_Came_from_Something_Awful_-_Dale_Beran.epub The biggest weakness of the book, however, comes in the first half. The author’s description of the way chan culture developed into a right wing space is limited by an over emphasis on consumerism and economics at the expense of attention to other social conditions. The author argues that economic frustration stimulated the members of boards like /r9k/ to retreat online, where they became ever more despairing. From there, he argues, resentment of women pushed them right on feminism, and he claims that he same happened with race. This argument is fundamentally flawed because it suggests that anti-feminism and white supremacist beliefs naturally emerged from economic frustration and isolation. In fact, 4chan was home to a deep history of racism, sexism, homophobia, and generalized hate that the author fails to fully recognize. The retreat online was not just economic- the frustrations expressed by the proto-incels of /r9k/ was also the result of the impossibility of fully attaining the high standards of masculinity set by gender norms and the media these users consumed. Furthermore, the hatred the author describes as emerging out of /r9k/ is part of an ongoing pattern. Anonymous’ assaults on women like Jessica Slaughter were not misguided applications of a new collective power they didn’t know what to do with, they were intentionally malicious acts that were part of a history of maliciously assaulting (under the guise of trolling) women, minorities, and people perceived as weaker than the anons- a history that was concurrent with the anti-corporate actions the author highlights to imply Anonymous was left-leaning. Even before those raids, the use of homophobic language on the boards, the naming of groups like the GNAA, and similar patterns throughout the history of 4chan clearly demonstrate that it was a space that cultivated racism, sexism, and a host of other forms of hate. I split the difference on this. 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!). But it’s not so wrong as to be unusable, and also probably represents something like the historical common sense of a lot of the people who helped make the forum culture, and at least part of the story as understood by many participants in it today (including, mutatis mutandis, the Fisher cult).

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. Selfhood was annihilated by anonymity.” Even the quasi-responsibility associated with a consistent screen name makes people accountable. When no one is watching everyone is terrible. there was a teeming mass of people out there who knew with fatalistic certainty that there was no way out.” 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.As written, it’s an awful mess. Published under a Creative Commons license ‘It Came From Something Awful’ Isn’t A Good Book’It Came From Something Awful’ Isn’t A Good Book by Kit O’Connell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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 Full Book Name: It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office But Marcuse’s insight was that this system of commodification and permission is not limited to sex or even enjoyment, but expands to what he called “the conquest of transcendence,” in which all that is sublime—one’s personal dreams and the boundless horizon of self-actualization and experience—is circumscribed and applied as rewards for conforming to society.

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Revisiting Gamergate was a maddening experience, making me feel crazy all over again for not grok-ing why my co-workers were so mad about ‘ethics in games journalism’ and how that tied to right wing politics. The section on how Depression Quest actually mirrored the very people who sought to destroy those surrounding the game was simply brilliant. Beran is at his best here.

Useful, with some key flaws- read if you want one perspective on the way the internet has shaped our current political realities. When he writes about antifa or Tumblr, it starts to feel like Beran’s primary sources were Fox News and 4chan. That’s the problem with Beran buying into this particular version of the modern “culture wars”— it seems all but impossible to write about them without laundering some right-wing talking points about kids these days. You can hear the echoes of white supremacy and its adherents’ imagined “war for Western civilization.” I’ve come to call it the Mark Fisher school of social criticism. Mark Fisher, for those of you unfamiliar, was a British cultural studies writer who wrote about contemporary culture, especially online culture. If you’ve heard the phrase “capitalist realism,” that’s one of his. His work has proven highly influential on many writers in the same areas, in terms of ideas, themes, and tone. I think it is fair to say, at this point, that he is the object of what could be called a cult (think more like the Marian cult or the cult around Foucault, not Heaven’s Gate). A lot of writers in the “online discourse hell” space hail Fisher as not just an influence, but as something of a prophet, a saint figure, complete with martyrdom at the hands of the force that Fisher understood as fundamental to contemporary life: the depression and malaise induced by late capitalist existence. This too was articulated by many postwar writers who inspired the counterculture revolution. Many argued the same point: the industrialized economies of wealthy nations like the United States, having fulfilled the basic needs of their citizens, have now turned from manufacturing things they didn’t need to, in effect, manufacturing need.5

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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. 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. The media seemed eager to believe the mad myth of Anonymous, which made sense because it was the invention of sensationalist media.” This book is helpful for understanding the contributions of right wing ‘chan’ or internet culture to the election of Donald Trump and the current state of American politics. The author does a phenomenal job highlighting the way the Trump campaign, and specifically Bannon, explicitly sought to mobilize right wing internet users for Trump. He also offers something many authors fail to: a definition of fascism, and repeated, clear descriptions and explanations of fascist ideology on the chans. He even touches on the way that billionaires like Thiel and Mercer are dark money funders and encourages of the manipulating of chan users. 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?