Behind the Safety of the Keyboard

 “Kill All Normies – Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right” by Angela Nagle, 2017

This review of internet trolling, subcultures and hyper political correctness reveals the post-modern cultural politics of the web. If you think much of the internet right now is mostly ironic humor or trolling from ‘left’ or right, you are on point. At least this author thinks so.

Nagle shows how rightist trolling started as a vicious cultural response to feminism and the liberal left. It was also a misogynist response to identitarian political correctness that denounced men for not supporting Hillary Clinton as ‘sexists.’ 

WRONG CHANNEL

Nagle shows that the post-modern alt-right ‘meme’ culture started on 4Chan. She digs out early internet meme wars around the documentary Kony 2012, the killing of the gorilla Harambe; the role of Milo Yiannopoulos; and the grand-daddy of all, the anti-woman, cluster-fuck that was Gamergate. Many streams were pulled together to create the internet “Alt-Right” and ‘alt-light’ – violent anti-feminists, South Park libertarians, incels, white supremacists, Beta boys, sad gamers and post-modernist nonsense. You aren’t supposed to take anything seriously – until you are. An infantile take on sex seems to be the real fulcrum of obsession - witness “The Manosphere.” Though one point on the latter... extensive surveys of Grindr indicate women do 'date up' to the top 10% of men – younger, tall, monied and handsome - while men accept the top 50% or so. This leaves more men 'out of the running,' many of whom are working-class.  Nagle notices this too and suggest this might be a sexual source of anti-feminism.  Nevertheless Nagle takes apart the Manosphere in detail.

The ostensibly ‘ethereal’ existence of the internet is key in this discussion.  Left anarchist John Perry Barlow described it in his EFF cyber-utopian manifesto as “the home of the Mind.” This ignores the very real physical reality of the internet – corporate ownership, advertising, electricity generators, massive server farms and hardware like cables, satellites, computers, cell phones and so on. In a way, Barlow manifested a form of bourgeois idealism and utopianism that separated the ‘thing’ from the ‘idea.’ The internet 'thing' is really a product of the military, then academe and now corporations.

Nagle thinks the soft Right of useless shitposters is feasting on the anti-political, aesthetic idea of a ‘fun transgressiveness’ – poking holes in the liberal order. The growth of a real hard right, which is on-the-ground, armed, violent and fully reactionary, may deflate that internet method as inadequate and jokey – just as the left is moving towards union organizing, joining socialist organizations and getting out on the streets as the George Floyd protests revealed – not just appearing at Zoom events or virtue signaling. Nagle’s aging view of alt-right history as ‘transgressive’ – i.e. birthed from hipsters, libertines, sadism, insanity, sociopaths, nihilism, romanticism and pranks – is more academic post-modern culture theory than class analysis. She even incorrectly blames 'the New Left”, Herbert Marcuse and Gramsci, as if style was content.

COUNTER THIS CULTURE

In this context, Nagle joins with conservatives who attack the 1960s counter-culture as one source of this crypto-fascist nonsense... a 'culture-war' she admits the left won. She calls the counter-culture “principle free.” Really? Nearly every '60s' struggle related to class questions and were not purely 'cultural,' as the false dyad between class and culture implies. The fight against the Vietnam War kept more U.S. working class men from dying, as it did Vietnamese. The fight against Jim Crow raised a layer of the working class that had been under almost fascistic rule in the South. The fight for women's rights strengthened a wing of the working class in its ability to get jobs and equality without being permanently pregnant. 1971's Earth Day was the first mass step in protecting the human environment, which working-class people suffer from the most. Stonewall was connected to the ability of gay working-class people not to be second-class citizens in jobs or education. Even weed use put a dent in the drug war being waged against the most oppressed stratas of the working class. Nagle maintains that the AFL-CIO and George Meany opposed McGovern in 1972 to defend class issues against identitarianism! The real reason is because they supported the war as hardened anti-Communists. I guess she didn't live through it and just read about it in some academic paper.

Limbaugh - a troll's Troll

Radio personality Rush Limbaugh might have been the first modern right-wing 'troll.' He was a supporter of the Republican Party and its neo-con goals, developing the term “feminazi” long before Gamergate. His ilk called strikers 'terrorists.' He was the modern Father Coughlin; a confident blowhard who was paid to say any vile thing he wanted. Nagle pins it on the more sober Pat Buchanan who in a famous speech in 1992 at the Republican convention called for a culture war. She thinks traditional conservative 'Schafly' anti-feminism is dead, somehow missing the growth of political Christian female fundamentalism on the Right.

I waited for some general point to be made that might illuminate why the internet 'medium' is so fraught.  I waited in vain. I think it relates to a general disassociation between people on the human plane, so idiotic comments or 'theories' can be made that would never pass in a conversation or actual debate. This kind of 'conflict' is the product of profound alienation, isolation, narcissism and a lack of human contact and organization, which the medium encourages.

TUMBLIN' DICEY

Nagle tracks the debate between the Clinton identiarian liberals and the 'materialist' left Sandernistas. (The actual dialectical materialist left is left out...) She analyzes in detail the weird world of Tumblr, which according to her is the liberal version of 4Chan. It focuses on diversity and 'gender-fluidity' instead of economic inequality. She lists 19 of the 100s of 'genders' on Tumblr. She says they relate to another subculture called 'otherkin' that has people 'identifying' as various fantasy animals or types – a literal Comic Con. Bourgeois feminist theorist Judith Butler claimed that all gender was socially-constructed; a figment of cultural ideas. However, the ability to have babies is not socially-constructed. It is a very real material fact essential to the continuation of the human species. Nor is the need for sex “socially-constructed.” Ultimately seeing gender as a purely social phenomenon is an anti-materialist idea, very similar to other idealisms that says reality is only in our minds. Or as the Sokol joke goes, “Gravity is a social-construct.”  As an example, try to have a reasonable discussion about trans medical procedures – I dare you – without getting screamed at as ‘transphobic.’ If you are on-line on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit or other forums, you know.

Tumblr World

Nagle thinks the right has won the internet culture war so far, as the weaknesses of purely identitarian Democratic Party / Tumblr culture politics are obvious – combinations of drones and gay marriage; poverty and police love; billionaires denouncing 'privilege;' trans rights but not workers' rights; 'bearing witness' while doing nothing; guilt combined with arrogant abuse; being pro-Islamic and anti-Christian fundamentalist - a real circus of contradictions. When Marxist Mark Fisher commented on the violent treatment of anyone who questioned this politics he was insulted and hounded for years – not by rightists but by identitarian uber-liberals.

If you are interested in the culture wars on the internet, this book will be a hoot. It is not a materialist analysis, but a cultural one. It is somewhat dated, as in her quaint description of the Proud Boys. But that is something expected in this vaporous world.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: “Red Pill” or “The Matrix,” “Capitalist Realism” (Fisher); “Fashionable Nonsense” (Sokol); “Mistaken Identity” (Haider); “Toward Freedom – the Case Against Race Reductionism” (T Reed); “Elite Capture,” “CypherPunks” (Assange); “Scorched Earth,” “Bit Tyrants,” or the words “Alt-Right” and “subculture.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

The Cultural Marxist

July 29, 2022