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

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The digitizing of criminal records, making it difficult to dodge the consequences of, say, multiple drunk-driving convictions in different states? Great for society, bad for individuals. Belongs in the lower-right quadrant. And the creation of electronic telephoning, allowing the solicitations of robo-calls? Negatives for both society and individuals. Goes in the lower-left quadrant.

My main gripe with this book is that it fails to strike the right balance between summarizing extraneous detail and excising necessary detail. It seems to make overly broad generalizations in places where the topic doesn’t interest the author, and on the flip side it goes into extreme detail when something does. This makes things feel unbalanced and a bit untrustworthy, to me. The teenage nihilism of the 1990s "endured well into the 2000s, longer than most youth cultures," Beran argues. But "like wine turned into vinegar, it could decay no further." It started as trolling, saying bizarre and awful things for the comedy of saying the bizarre and awful. Eventually, according to Beran, the people doing the trolling came to believe their own messages, saying bizarre and awful things because they thought the bizarre and awful were true. Thus the alt-right was born. And thereby was Trump elected. Facism resulted when these previously apolitical masses dispossessed by capitalism began to rebel against it, without discarding its cruel-minded competitive way of thinking.” I like Beran's use of quotation at the beginning of each chapter. I think he gets really good when he ties together his own personal narrative with the richness of the text and the technology of the last twenty years. It can be hyperspecific but you can still access it through imagination. I’ve got some serious issues with his arguments I’ll get into below, but it’s here that more and more obvious (to me anyway) factual errors start to creep in. This might be because I know some of the topics better.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 sensation of being on the bottom of an immense hierarchy was so pervasive that even those at the ivy-coated gates of power felt it keenly.” Young people are often extremely passionate. Sometimes they’re wrong. Sometimes they’re right and go about things in the wrong ways. Often, it’s a mixture of the two (just like older adults). ‘It Came From Something Awful’ falls apart at the end 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.

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… That being said, this is an important book for understanding how we got here. For me personally it also instilled an awareness of the myriad ways the font of Internet culture seeped into my particular corridors of the web. But avoiding that personal touch helps him avoid the trap of making false equivalences between chosen identities. Nobody gets murdered at ComiCon, whereas they do at rallies set up and attended by Internet trolls. The political actions of online goons have a much more powerful impact on the actual lives of brown people in the United States than people who happen to really like My Little Pony. The sections on Tumblr and teens searching for their sexual identity coinciding with the wider campus culture wars that get a lot of disproportionate attention comes off as less blamey and directly causal than other 4chan explainers like Andrea Nagle's Kill All Normies. 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 Useful, with some key flaws- read if you want one perspective on the way the internet has shaped our current political realities.

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In some sense, It Came From Something Awful is simply a particular explication of a general truth we've known for some time: The glory of the Internet is that it allows like-minded people to find one another—and the horror of the Internet is that it allows like-minded people to find one another. Book lovers, stamp collectors, and model-airplane enthusiasts can all band together to share their hobbies. So can neo-Nazis and child molesters. Or in the case of 4chan and 8chan, Beran claims, a bunch of disaffected teenage boys began by "talking online about Japanese anime" on the "Something Awful" chatboard, and they gradually morphed into the alt-right. 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. Very rarely, however, do they dive deep into the sadness and self-loathing, and the extreme darkness that leads to the anger and, inevitably, violence of young alt-righters. 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.