Note of optimism: many of the alt-right superstars named have been so thoroughly disgraced and deplatformed since time of writing, their sphere influence is about the size of a softball. Speaking from personal experience, I can tell you that not only is antifa not a group — and that “black bloc” isn’t one (from Philadelphia? Hell, if you want to blame the internet for the many weaknesses of today’s left, tumblr wouldn’t be where I’d look- I’d look at Twitter, which Beran does little with, mostly treats as a neutral medium. That said, this book is a useful and thought provoking look at the rise of the alt right online and it’s real world consequences and implications. I’m probably making this sound worse than it is, but I think that’s because the good parts and the bad parts stand in the starkest contrast in this book.

Beran explores the psychology of young, disenfranchised masculinity that 4chan represents and the sociopolitical context that molded its minds. Into the gap left by both the decline of Anonymous and the collapse of the “hope and change” Obama dream — and I think a lot of us undersell exactly how high the hopes were for Obama because we don’t want to review how badly most of us, myself included, suckered — came the same sort of nihilism of the kind of people who, at the turn of the millennium, made mocking teenage suicides a sport… but changed. I think that some of this is fairly insightful, but I think that other sections are just frankly wrong. Trump as our illustrious sociopathic, narcissistic, egotistical, pathological wrecking-ball liar-in-chief.Hippies were opposed to the isolating competition of capitalism and the shallow material world of commodification and consumption. It Came from Something Awfulis the fascinating and bizarre story of sites like 4chan and 8chan and their profound effect on youth counterculture. The oppressive hierarchy of the workaday world, the daily grind of bosses and obligation, was combined, weirdly, with its opposite, the frequent promises of the modern world for adventure and stimulation.

Just as acquiring all the commodities in a bachelor pad earns the playboy the right to impress women and therefore the reward of sex.

In her 1983 book The Hearts of Men, Barbara Ehrenreich described how, prior to the 60s countercultural revolution, men were constrained into the ideological role of breadwinner. It Came from Something Awful is the fascinating and bizarre story of 4chan and its profound effect on youth counterculture. If you’re still not sure about the difference between lols and lulz or online harassment and Russian meddling, Gorman will enlighten you in this deeply sourced, deeply personal account of digital aggression. 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). I stayed to confirm my suspicions that there was something off about the way the world reacted to me—the old 4chan slogan, “tits or GTFO,” directed at any female person on the platform, cleared things up fast.