Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan And Tumblr To Trump And The Alt-Right

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She also doesn’t even bother to come off as impartial or having integrity throughout the book, where in a section about GamerGate she says Zoe Quinn’s video game Depression Quest “looked like a terrible game featuring many of the fragility and mental illness-fetishizing characteristics of the kind of feminism that has emerged online in recent years” (God forbid someone makes a game that they feel may help people understand others or their own depression, amirite? Think of any progressive intellectual of any significance from the last century and try to imagine them surviving today. Thus there are hundreds of genders, Marxist universalism is misogynist, and effacement of agency requires reparations through any number of micro-payment platforms.

I have been fascinated for many years by the rise of the alt-right, a phenomenon that I have followed in gaming communities and Reddit forums, but it was very nice to see the disparate narrative of the online alt-right phenomenon brought together so well. Then she explains her view on videogames, saying that as an adult your emotional energies should be used better elsewhere.Nagle says that the term “started on 4chan and translated to ‘lol’ in comment boards on the multiplayer videogame World of Warcraft“. On the right is the now-notorious alt-right, divided between the 'alt-light', typified by meme-making/gleefully antagonistic trolling/use of 4chan-derived argot, and the more genuinely fascistic tendencies often masked by the headline-grabbing behaviour of alt-light figures such as Milo Yiannopoulos. Somehow, the contents of the magazine can’t be representative of their ideas, just their founders identities! Chocolate eating-vibrator waving” (in Nina Power’s immortal words), consumer-friendly feminism of Lena Dunham did not help Hillary much as one can see.

Gamer groups, various white nationalist and Christian conservative groups, and the remnants of the pick-up artist community congealed into a loosely affiliated, predominantly male movement referred to as the Alt-Right. Nagle mentions a few names to explain the supposed horrors of No-Platforming, such as Germaine Greer, Maryam Namazie, and Jordan Peterson. In the past, I spent 2 years on 4chan (on /b/) and 2+ years on Tumblr (following liberals and then marxists). Angela Nagle describes the methods of American right-wing populists on the Net and explains why they are so successful.

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right is a 2017 non-fiction book by Angela Nagle published by Zero Books. Angela Nagle strikes me as an uncommonly sane voice in a culture war defined by astounding cruelty, extremism and intolerance. I decided to see if that claim was potentially true (since the author doesn’t bother verifying it) so I went on Google Trends. Nagle frames this adoption of transgression by the political right, in relation to the concept of moral transgression, which can be traced to the eighteenth century figures of Marquis De Sade, The Surrealists, Friedrich Nietzsche, Punk subculture, and contemporaneously in the 1990s 'male rampage films' like American Psycho and Fight Club. Nagle presents her work as an attempt to map the online culture wars that occurred in the early 2010s and how it resulted in the development of alt-right which played a major role in the election of Donald Trump.

Hillary Clinton tried to repeat this formula in 2016 by dancing on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, drafting in Beyoncé once again, assuring listeners of her penchant for hot sauce and attracting feminist celebrities like Lena Dunham with the ‘I’m With Her’ slogan. In WoW there are two factions, Alliance and Horde, and each speaks its own language, Common and Orcish respectively. Nagle explains that an online culture that only responds by blocking and hiding in safe spaces has completely forgotten how to hold an argument and adequately respond when the need arises.I say that however while being fully aware I don't suffer any discrimination or major challenges based solely on either my identity or my class/economic situation. I don't care if things are in perfect Chicago style, but I do care about being able to trace the transit of words and ideas across people, spaces, and contexts, and Nagle's loose and highly referential style makes it near impossible. As old media dies, gatekeepers of cultural sensibilities and etiquette have been overthrown, notions of popular taste maintained by a small creative class are now perpetually outpaced by viral online content from obscure sources, and culture industry consumers have been replaced by constantly online, instant content producers. You don’t hear about Marxists, Anarchists, ‘Anti-Imperialists’, and others, Nagles idea of politics left of ‘Tumblr’ stop at Chapo Trap House or Jacobin.