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

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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. 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. Hippies, following on the heels of the Beats, were also opposed to consumerist society and were equally interested in transcendence. In some cases, that distance has driven them to extremism, but it's also made them uniquely able to reflect the world back at the rest of us. Reading Dale Beran’s chronicle of 4chan, the anonymous imageboard where some of the internet’s worst scandals have been fomented, feels like scrolling through the forum itself…Beran explores the psychology of young, disenfranchised masculinity that 4chan represents and the sociopolitical context that molded its minds.

You might not personally care about Donald Trump, the rise of white supremacy and how Charlottesville happened but if, like me, you are interested in how the world has got to where it is now and what might need to be done to prevent things shifting even further, this book is a good place to try and gain some understanding of it all. Beran was monitoring the infested trenches of these sites and the sad sacks of moldering meat that dwelled there, from the anime-pillow-masturbaters to the “marble-cake” makers (seriously, don’t Google that—just imagine the worst), to the women-haters and LGBT-bashers, to the Guy-Fawkes-hacktivists eventually routed by the FBI, to the cowards and cretins and Hilter-wet-dreamers who filled the vacuum, and to the Robert Mercer—Steve Bannon—Milo Yiannapoulos triad exploiting the vacuum, and the deplorable masses they coerced into following them all the way to Donald J. stars -- This is one of those books in the vein of ON THE CLOCK that I found absolutely rattling, and which will stick with me for long after reading.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. 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.

Beran's account of how counter-culture is ultimately ground up and subsumed by capitalism, only to be repacked and sold back to you as self liberation/definition is surprisingly compelling. This book shines a light on some of the funkier alleyways and personalities of "the chans," illustrating over a number of chapters, for instance, the connection between a guy who wanted to start a message board to trade anime porn and the ascension of the alt-right and QAnon (which since this was published has broken even more into the real world in awful, tangible ways). In this spirit, they created novels, paintings, and music that celebrated the infinite worlds contained within the self. 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? He was a habitue of the titular “Something Awful” and no stranger to the chans, especially in the early days.

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. 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. The buildings, after all, looked temporary; ramshackle strip malls, Pizza Huts, and 7-Elevens thrown up chockablock—all of it devoted to a transient purpose, meeting a momentary need in the marketplace. 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.