It Came from Something Awful

How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office

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Pub Date 30 Jul 2019 | Archive Date 13 Apr 2020
St. Martin's Press | All Points Books

Description

How 4chan and 8chan fuel white nationalism, inspire violence, and infect politics.

The internet has transformed the ways we think and act, and by consequence, our politics. The most impactful recent political movements on the far left and right started with massive online collectives of teenagers. Strangely, both movements began on the same website: an anime imageboard called 4chan.org. It Came from Something Awful is the fascinating and bizarre story of sites like 4chan and 8chan and their profound effect on youth counterculture.

Dale Beran has observed the anonymous messageboard community's shifting activities and interests since the beginning. Sites like 4chan and 8chan are microcosms of the internet itself—simultaneously at the vanguard of contemporary culture, politics, comedy and language, and a new low for all of the above. They were the original meme machines, mostly frequented by socially awkward and disenfranchised young men in search of a place to be alone together.

During the recession of the late 2000’s, the memes became political. 4chan was the online hub of a leftist hacker collective known as Anonymous and a prominent supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement. But within a few short years, the site’s ideology spun on its axis; it became the birthplace and breeding ground of the alt-right. 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.

How 4chan and 8chan fuel white nationalism, inspire violence, and infect politics.

The internet has transformed the ways we think and act, and by consequence, our politics. The most impactful recent...


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ISBN 9781250189745
PRICE $28.99 (USD)
PAGES 304

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Featured Reviews

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<p>Sometimes, you read a book that shines on a light on some of the most unpleasant parts of our culture and society, and you suddenly feel as if you have fallen into an utterly unfamiliar world. <em>It Came from Something Awful</em> is just such a book.</p>
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<p>Dale Beran takes us deep into the dark, sinister, bleakly cynical parts of the internet that many of us would probably never explore on our own. Here we find the truly toxic, nihilistic folk who inhabited spaces such as 4chan, primarily young men dissatisfied with their lot in life and determined to take it out on whomever got in their way. He draws fascinating (though not always sustainable) connections between the counterculture of 1960s and the present, showing how the relentless ability of capitalism to commercialize resistance has generated precisely the feeling of nihilism that has become so toxic and that has left a generation of young men feeling powerless, angry, and dangerous. </p>
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<p>Beran's book succeeds the most when he is detailing the complex history and terrifying personalities that inhabit this online world. While some of the names are familiar, others are less so, and it is clear that he has a very close inside knowledge of this strange new world that most of us have probably never encountered. He doesn't let himself get too bogged down in the technical aspects of it, either. His is very much a story of a generation of young men who, confronted with profound inequality and the growing power of various social movements, found solace in the ability to take nothing seriously.</p>
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<p>Until, of course, they did. As Beran explains, as the 2000s wore on, the bleak cynicism expressed by these young men became ever more vitriolic and dangerous, until at last it burst into the open with the murderous rampages that became so much an unfortunate part of the American landscape. And then, of course, there was the greatest troll of them all, Donald J. Trump, who was the apotheosis of those mens' desires, the cure (it seemed) for everything that ailed them. </p>
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<p>At times, Beran's argument seems to mistakes his premise for his conclusion, i.e. he goes in with the conclusion that Trump was brought into power by these men, and that is what he proves. However, I think that the title (and the book's big argument) may be overstating the case that a bit. There's no question that a very visible part of Trump's support came from just the sort of young men that Beran profiles, but I was left wondering just how many of these people actually voted, and how many of them just amplified Trump's brand and normalized him for those who actually did vote for him.</p>
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<p>Relatedly, it sometimes felt as if Beran's political leanings were encouraging him to deflect the blame for the rise of the alt-right everywhere but on the men themselves: neoliberalism, capitalism, Hillary Clinton (because of course), and the advent of the internet and the anonymity that it provides. In my view, there is a very distinct difference between providing an excuse for someone's behavior and explaining it. The former implies an abrogation of guilt, while the latter is an attempt to aid in understanding. Certainly, Beran wants to accomplish the latter, if for no other reason than that we must continue to address the societal forces that rendered the alt-right possible. However, he is not always as successful as I think he should be in blaming these men for their own horrible impulses. </p>
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<p>Overall, however, I found Beran's book to be compulsively readable, mostly because it confirmed so many of the things I already suspected to be true. From GamerGate to PizzaGate to the march on Charlottesville, the men that he chronicles in <em>It Came from Something Awful</em> are truly a pestilence, and we must continue to fight them. If we don't, we run the risk of continuing to allow them to control the contours of the debate. Supreme Court Justice Brandeis once said that sunlight is the best disinfectant. While that is true in some instances, I do worry that books like this contribute to that unfortunate trend of giving these unsavory people exactly the sort of attention that they crave. It is, unfortunately, the inescapable double-bind of the world that we live in. If it does nothing else, Beran's book provides us a valuable form of understanding.</p>
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<p>It's up to us to do something with it.</p>
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Was this review helpful?

Where did it all come from? Russian trolls, 4chan, online disinformation and harassment campaigns, the prevalence of toxic discourse in social media today. Election manipulation and fabricated natural disasters. The endless morass of lies, anger, and hate that seem to spill out from every corner of the Internet.

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.

I took issue with some of the phrasing in the book, in particular, with not *-ing out certain offensive terms. That criticism aside, I strongly recommend It Came from Something Awful to anyone interested in what happened to make the Internet of today the way it is -- and how this evolution has affected spaces outside the Internet as well.

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The author's painstaking research and attention to detail is obvious in the writing of this book. There were many facts that I only discovered after reading this!

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This is a good read. It bogged down a little at times but got my interest back in the next chapter of two.

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