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

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The book spends an inordinate amount of time on explaining the economic situation of the generations it encompasses and the gen But if the reader can drop the idea that Trump is Hitler. Drop the idea that the alt-right is actually the cause of Trump's election. Drop the idea that 4chan was capable of swinging an election. Drop the reflexive left-is-good/right-is-evil rhetoric that Beran indulges. Then what remains in It Came From Something Awful is still something that should interest both sensible liberals and sensible conservatives. The book is, at its best, a psychological study of a set of people, mostly young men, who found themselves in the early 2000s off on the far edges of statistical distribution. They were underemployed and unfinanced, but clever in a morally unserious way. And they had all the time in the world to spend online.

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 It Came from Something Awful 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.

I would give this book three stars for editing. It may have been smoother with more work, as it ends up repeating itself quite a bit. Beran is erudite in his approach though, and the content is four stars—perhaps it could have been more in-depth, and it's not always clear how intimately tied to the subject are the theorists and pieces of media referenced by the author, as with Jean-Paul Sartre's fundamental concept that "existence precedes essence" in relation to Tumblr.Revisiting Gamergate was a maddening experience, making me feel crazy all over again for not grok-ing why my co-workers were so mad about ‘ethics in games journalism’ and how that tied to right wing politics. The section on how Depression Quest actually mirrored the very people who sought to destroy those surrounding the game was simply brilliant. Beran is at his best here. I think this book should be read by people who have kids and don't understand how easily these organizations are trying to get your son to become a kind of foot soldier for 21st century white supremacy and misogyny.

As Marcuse put it, after “true needs” such as “nourishment, clothing, [and] lodging at the attainable level of culture” were met, the industrial engines that generated these goods didn’t simply shutter their factories and declare their jobs done. Instead, they discovered it was far more profitable to simply generate false needs by convincing people “to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate.” These items could be sold again and again because they created a “euphoria in unhappiness.”6p>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. It Came from Something Awful is just such a book.

Beran recounts 4chan.net's history as a social media platform for disaffected, socially awkward, deliberately offensive white man-boys steeped in nihilistic trolling and jokey memes like the now-infamous Pepe the Frog. 4chan's mutating ethos, he contends, married the victim culture of its self-labeled low-status 'beta males' to the alt-right's prescription of white nationalism, patriarchy, and fascist power politics as a salve for the grievances of dispossessed men, culminating in a half-sincere, half-cynical embrace of Donald Trump." -- Publishers Weekly As my parents’ generation replaced forest and farmland with pavement and a multitude of stores selling ever more elaborate and specific items, I wondered, naively, what would come next: What would replace these things that were built to disappear? Would my generation drastically alter the landscape of America as the previous one had? The answer, of course, was no. What would replace these stores was more stores, piled on top of one another in a mad jumble. Odder still, many people seemed unhappy with this development. The vast parking lots, for example, were friendly to shopping but inimical to human beings. And this is to say nothing of what economists label the “externalities,” all the hidden costs that go into production, like the pollution in the air and the destruction of the environment—once a mere tragedy, now an existential threat in the form of global warming.

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. These critiques came from leftist cultural critics like Charles Reich and Marcuse, but also conservatives such as Catholic political commentator Reinhold Niebuhr and liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith. All warned that if America did not stop producing tremendous waste and absurd new visions of what was considered affluent to sell, the country would eventually become a nightmarish version of itself, in which the fabric of its values and communities (not to mention its public services) would tear under the weight of industrial marketing. Capitalism has trained successive generations of young people to center their thinking on personal gratification through media infused with the countercultures it has already consumed. Now that so many lead lives streaked with fears of a sudden catastrophic economic collapse, these small pleasures and affirmations appear doubly fascinating.”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. To younger generations who only had the myth of such jobs, America and perhaps existence itself appeared as a parade of empty promises and advertisements.”