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

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One other aspect of the failures of the left in my opinion is how the Left overlooked the realm of Desire that is almost necessarily not satisfied in our contemporary societies. Nagle discusses the frustrated sexuality of the regular young male today and it is a legitimate discussion insofar that it makes up a portion of the frustrated young male who is not politicized until he is pushed towards the misogynistic underbelly of the Web which is again, not necessarily Nazi, but a couple of steps away from it at best. Desire, in this case, is also a desire for the commodity, of course, which also necessarily dissatisfies. When you have the means to buy a given commodity, it fails to restore a sense of satisfaction but rather perpetuates it even further. When you are not able to buy it, well, in an intuitive fashion, you are dissatisfied in a world of instant satisfaction, pornographic images and incessant advertisements. The left’s complete immersion and self-satisfaction with identity politics (LGBT and the alphabet goes on as Zizek was lambasted by critics from the Left when he criticized some of the aspects of the politics of gender in a recent article debate, you can Google it) leaves the room for this new brand of extreme right to tap into the frustration and insecurities of the young male. I thought there were interesting arguments about transgression in art and the way the response to girls and women's voices in all male spaces (such as 4Chan) is so strong and hateful. She even suggested some historical precedents for the latter! Amazing in a book without any footnotes. She seemed really impassioned by the way women are victimised by simply being women on these forums - I would say she's feminist but elsewhere in the book she blames feminists for alienating men and turning them into MRAs.

First of all: Holy shit. This is a book that I have been waiting to read for quiet some time now, but the level of insight and highly comprehensive discussion of what is going on in the cultural wars on the Web by Nagle exceeded my expectations. It reminded me of early works by Naomi Klein which combined the journalistic approach to the material at hand with detailed, but still accessible discussion of the theoretical aspect of the subject. Then things gather misogynistic momentum with #gamergate (the Middle Eastern conflict of the Internet) and /b/. Add some white nationalism and identitarianism and you get /pol/ and The_Donald. I really wanted to like this book. I really, really did. It blends all the right topics--politics, sociology, Internet culture--and I spent a significant portion of my adolescence on both Tumblr and 4chan, so the subject material is both familiar and fascinating to me. I sat down to read it with true eagerness...and emerged horribly, horribly disappointed. Three main points: I thought I knew quite a bit about this topic already, but I learned so much from this book, particularly about the historical context of these movements. Thoroughly and enthusiastically recommended to anyone with an interest in the current political climate as it manifests in online culture. Related: a lot of things the Left thought were inherently left (anarchism, transgressive art, focusing on culture wars rather than elections) can be used effectively by the Right.a b c d e f g Nagle, Angela (12 August 2017). "The roots of the alt-right". Vox (Interview). Interviewed by Illing, Sean. Archived from the original on 9 July 2021 . Retrieved 14 March 2018. Either way, it's clear where her sympathies lie, given that she's so much more careful in delineating shades of right than she is with anything else.

Kill All Normies is an accessible but unpatronising study, perfectly balancing academic critique, political commentary and assured, intelligent, non-embarrassing writing about the internet and its unique subcultures. It is so refreshing to read something like this, that comes at the topic from a left-leaning perspective but refuses to toe the line with regards to the frustrating, ever-shifting rules of engagement that now seem to define online discourse. The version I read had some typos and needed a bit of tightening up from an editorial perspective, but it was a review copy. And that is genuinely my only criticism. Somehow Nagle also manages to write a conclusion that tears everyone a new arsehole AND ends on a contemplative note. A pretty great bit of critical theory about how the alt-right have arrived to they are, although it's let down by some bizarrely vituperative passages about the identity politics of Tumblr. And I wasn't totally convinced by the idea that 4Chan and other such forums are just taking transgression, as celebrated in art, to its logical conclusion. It's not just another twist in the culture wars. It's not as though critics and artists haven't historically differentiated between types of transgressive art and what individual works are saying. I don't think transgression for transgression's sake has ever really existed or been 'successful' in art? I don't know enough to say.Nagle, Angela (12 July 2020). "Will Ireland survive the Woke Wave?". UnHerd . Retrieved 14 December 2021. I also recommend these two podcasts where Ms. Nagle (and Ms. Frost in the 2nd one) discuss the book and related themes in the context of socialism. This is what cultural criticism should be: it draws on academic theory while remaining readable, is capable of impassioned polemic and clear partisanship while remaining relentlessly fair regarding matters of fact, and in general, it knows its stuff. (Like Nagle, I am perhaps overly familiar with the forms of online discourse she describes; and that she was able to do so so accurately makes me trust her on everything else - for instance, on the fascinating history of how representations of "the mainstream" have been gendered.) Liu, Catherine (30 July 2017). "Dialectic of Dark Enlightenments: The Alt-Right's Place in the Culture Industry". Los Angeles Review of Books. Archived from the original on 31 July 2017 . Retrieved 14 March 2018. For all that the title reads "4chan and Tumblr," her understanding of the online left is woefully inadequate. The book reads as though Nagle took her understanding of Tumblr simply from watching people on 4chan make fun of it, rather than doing any actual research herself. She completely misunderstands the divisions and subculture of the online left, and minimizes complaints about racism, sexism, and homophobia without even attempting to explain the left's point of view. She editoralizes the story of Gamergate with her own complaints about immature a hobby gaming is (irrelevant, and insulting besides) and how horrible a game she thought Depression Quest was, as if making a horrible game justifies death threats and ongoing harassment. She even goes so far as to equate people desiring to chop off their own limbs with transgender rights and the "spoonie" chronic illness community, which is...troubling, to say the least. (To be fair, she seems to understand so little about the spoonie concept that I'm not sure she actually understands it's a chronic illness community.)

To be honest, without the fact of children I would not even be thaaaaat worried about these reactionary fringe groups, because they are so fringe by nature and the celebs have mostly imploded. She argues that these alternative forms of media have superseded mainstream media, but that is a sign of someone who spends all their life online and doesn't see how the vast majority of people still watch the news. If anything, the Trump presidency is the best thing to ever happen to mainstream media because they can position themselves as the #resistance and can benefit from outrage at whatever spectacle Trump has created. Nagle argues that the pain, suffering and victimhood-affirming culture of Tumblr-liberalism is one of these reasons for the failure and I think she is right. “Kony 2012” videos among others comes to mind in this rush to collect “virtue points” in this scarcity of virtue market on the Web. Also, the intra-left purge and exclusion of the critics of this self-pleasing activities is another example (Nagle gives the example of Mark Fisher who sadly committed suicide this year). Liu, Catherine (30 July 2017). "Dialectic of Dark Enlightenments: The Alt-Right's Place in the Culture Industry". Los Angeles Review of Books . Retrieved 14 December 2021. Nagle, Angela (2017). Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan And Tumblr To Trump And The Alt-Right. Alresford, UK: Zero Books. ISBN 978-1-78-535543-1. Angela, Nagle (November 2015). "An investigation into contemporary online anti-feminist movements". doras.dcu.ie. Archived from the original on 9 March 2018 . Retrieved 14 March 2018.

Nagle draws a line through history from the 'culture wars' of the 1960s to those of today, arguing that the transgressive, countercultural spirit historically embodied by the anti-establishment left has been sublimated much more effectively by the modern right. She also undertakes an in-depth (though concise) review of the many, many factions of what is often sweepingly referred to as the alt-right, from 'chan culture' to the alternately pathetic and terrifying 'manosphere'. Not only is this pretty fascinating in itself, it also brings to light the serious theoretical and academic roots of certain strands of this movement – something often ignored by liberal pundits who concentrate instead on clutching their pearls at the outrageous antics of high-profile figures like Milo and Alex Jones. The idea of a handful of demagogues and professional trolls riling up people who essentially don't understand politics has been a common theme (deployed with varying levels of sensitivity) in analysis of the Trump and Brexit victories; Nagle's study shows this to be dangerously reductive.

It could have been longer, for example, and could have touched upon many things that I felt should deserve more detail (e.g. the growing sphere of nu-atheistic pseudo-rationalism; the whole of neoreaction; accelerationism as it appears online, etc.). Right, so, this is all pretty deep stuff and we've got Gramsci and Adorno and all sorts, but a small section of the book attempts to "balance" things by taking a look at the equivalent of the alt-right, which is what Nagle refers to as the Tumblr-Left. These are the contemporary liberals who have, in the mind of many leftist thinkers, chosen to identity politics the defining cause of the left, rather than economic equality. That's about it for the usefulness of the book, and to get to it you have to power through her complaints about trigger warnings and gender identity sprinkled throughout these chapters. Nagle clearly knows more about 4chan and the alt-right than Tumblr and internet left subcultures, since she really drops the ball when talking about the left. She lumps the left into one big tent, and obviously misunderstands the various factions and arguments being made. Among the few distinctions she makes among the left, she hilariously claims that the ‘real left’ consists of members such as The Young Turks, Owen Jones, Jacobin, and Chapo Trap House. 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. She also scolds the left for ‘crying wolf’ when some called Trudeau a white supremacist and defended Hillary Clinton by calling those who disagree with her sexist, to her the Alt-Right is the real wolf. Aside from the ridiculous implication that the Prime Minister of a settler-colonial state like Canada can’t be a white supremacist and it’s just ‘crying wolf’, I’d be very surprised if there is any large group of people who would call Trudeau a white supremacist but also say not supporting Hillary is misogynist. There are NGO-careerists and bourgeois liberals who appropriate social justice theory to support people like Clinton and say that not being pro-Clinton is sexism. These are not the same ideologies that consider Trudeau a white supremacist, which includes marxists, anarchists, and whoever else. Nagle lumps anything she doesn’t like on the left into one big basket labelled ‘Tumblr-Liberalism’, she doesn’t bother making ideological divisions among the left, beyond Tumblr and the ‘real left’ mentioned above, despite doing so for the Alt-Right.Did Nagle use Schwartz's article as a source of information in this part of the book? Is this plagiarism? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯