Angela Nagle

How internet subcultures are conquering the mainstream, from from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the alt-right.

The Online Culture Wars from Tumblr and 4chan to the Alt-right and Trump

Kill All Normies

Recent years have seen a revival of the heated culture wars of the 1990s, but this time its battle ground is the internet. On one side the "alt right" ranges from the once obscure neo-reactionary and white separatist movements, to geeky subcultures like 4chan, to more mainstream manifestations such as the Trump-supporting gay libertarian Milo Yiannopolous. On the other side, a culture of struggle sessions and virtue signalling lurks behind a therapeutic language of trigger warnings and safe spaces. The feminist side of the online culture wars has its equally geeky subcultures right through to its mainstream expression. Kill All Normies explores some of the cultural genealogies and past parallels of these styles and subcultures, drawing from transgressive styles of 60s libertinism and conservative movements, to make the case for a rejection of the perpetual cultural turn.

Online Culture Wars From 4Chan And Tumblr To Trump And The Alt-Right

John Manoogian III

Great book, fast read. Should be required reading for all Americans under 70. The book does three things exceptionally well:

1, it paints a picture of how the [online] Alt-Right and Alt-Light aren’t a monolith sprung from inchoate American white rage, but rather a coalition of about five or six Internet tribes, profiled in detail.
2, Despite the fact that the biggest champions of “Internet as crucible for a new decentralized, networked form of politics” were left-leaning, in the last decade it has been a New Right, and not the traditional left, whose coalition deployed the Internet for the maximum possible effect on presidential elections.
3, how “transgressive”, nihilist online communities, perhaps once considered likely “safe spaces” for libs, have been equally if not more owned by a new online community with zero interest in moving left, but who simply enjoy the power of these new online tools to impose their world on the Internet and the world outside it.

There are a few chapters and passages that might benefit from an editor; buffing out some of the academic jargon in a few sections (a few too many postmodern hegemonic whatever's), and smooth out some of the prose, but all in all, an extremely good and quite timely book.

Side note: It’s disappointing but not surprising to see that the author Angela Nagle's Twitter account is now gone, after being active as recently as three days ago. Wondering, after so many other women critics have been run off the Internet after criticizing the Alt-Right / Alt-Light / Manosphere, whether that was a Twitter self-deportation or whether harassers fraudulently got Twitter to suspend her account, or?

Lindy

Putting aside for a moment that the book would be entirely opaque to anyone who hasn't lived it; that it is in urgent need of every kind of editing from content to organizational to basic copy (e.g."Aids crisis" on pg. 63); that the author believes political horseshoe theory, that military combat veterans are the only people who can truly lay claim to PTSD, that The Young Turks are a great leftist news site, and that MRAs seek egalitarianism; the conflation of feminism and the sexual revolution; and a whole bunch of other things I could list-- yes somehow putting that all aside, I just have to say: Andrea Nagle, learn to citation.

I don't care if things are in perfect Chicago style, but I do care about being able to trace the transit of words and ideas across people, spaces, and contexts, and Nagle's loose and highly referential style makes it near impossible. Academia and mainstream magazines would consider it plagiarism. It might fly on Tumblr (the platform which Nagle decries as intellectualism's rock bottom).

I will now provide two illustrative examples of what I find frustrating. 

1) It's abundantly not clear where Nagle gets her information, because she didn't conduct any interviews. In a section about the histories 4chan, Anonymous, and hacking, Nagle blockquotes  this 2013 article by Sanjiv Bhattacharya for Esquire on pages 29-30. So I know that in the process of researching hacker weev, Nagle read this. Bhattacharya does not mention the suicide of Mitchell "An Hero" Henderson, which Nagle discusses on page 33. Early in her discussion, Nagle mentions This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture, a copy of which I do not have on me; it may well be the source of Nagle's info on Henderson. EDIT 30/10: (view spoiler)[I have read through This Is Why and it is not a citable source on Henderson; while the events are mentioned, the author provides no level of detail or quotes from trolls or the family.  (hide spoiler)]

However: earlier in the book, on page 15, Nagle quotes this 2008 article by Matthias Schwartz for The New York Times. In this article, Schwartz both interviews weev and describes the trolling surrounding Henderson's death.

He writes, regarding Henderson:
Someone hacked Henderson’s MySpace page and gave him the face of a zombie. Someone placed an iPod on Henderson’s grave, took a picture and posted it to /b/. Henderson’s face was appended to dancing iPods, spinning iPods, hardcore porn scenes. A dramatic re-enactment of Henderson’s demise appeared on YouTube, complete with shattered iPod. The phone began ringing at Mitchell’s parents’ home. “It sounded like kids,” remembers Mitchell’s father, Mark Henderson, a 44-year-old I.T. executive. “They’d say, ‘Hi, this is Mitchell, I’m at the cemetery.’ ‘Hi, I’ve got Mitchell’s iPod.’ ‘Hi, I’m Mitchell’s ghost, the front door is locked. Can you come down and let me in?’ ” He sighed. “It really got to my wife.” The calls continued for a year and a half.

Here's a quote from Nagle, pg. 33:
[...] Henderson's MySpace page was hacked, while another placed an iPod on Mitchell's grave, took a picture, and posted it to 4chan. His face was pasted into spinning iPods and hard-core porn scenes, and a re-enactment of Henderson's death soon appeared on YouTube.
 Mitchell's father recieved prank calls to his house, in which callers said things like: 'Hi,
 I've got Mitchell's iPod' and, 'Hi, I'm Mitchell's ghost, the front door is locked. Can you come down and let me in?'

Did Nagle use Schwartz's article as a source of information in this part of the book? Is this plagiarism? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

2) On pages 70-72, Nagle quotes a list of gender-related terms which she assures the reader is "directly from Tumblr." One of the items is "Cadensgender- a gender that is easily influenced by music." I deeply suspect that this entry and a few of the others are the work of a troll, but there is no way to investigate because nowhere does Nagle provide the username of the list's creator(s) or a url where this took place. A practice of the alt-right is to make the left look stupid as possible via trolls which are taken to be legit representatives by outsiders, and Nagle fell for it hook, line, and sinker. It's ironic that in a book so occupied with the practice of trolling the author probably got trolled herself. But of course I have no way of verifying anything ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Brendan M

This book is a giant missed opportunity. It is packed full of interesting ideas, but they are expressed in a knowing, ironic style which is at times impenetrable to the novice. The double irony is that one of Nagle's points is that forums like 4chan use irony as a deliberate strategy to make them inaccessible to novices.

This book reads like a first draft that, with further work, could be a compelling argument. It's certainly interesting and worth reading if you want to find some informed debate about the online culture wars. But this more reflects the lack of discussion of such issues in mainstream publishing. As a book, it's pretty terrible.

Maggie Gordon

While I didn't agree with all of her analyses, Nagle has crafted a much needed systemic look at internet culture and how it affects offline lives. This isn't simply a descriptive book either, as she takes academic theories and ideas and applies them to an area that is woefully under-theorized. Her focus is mostly on the alt-right, though her commentary on the modern left is not as unfounded as some reviews suggest. While Kill All Normies is not a perfect book, it's certainly worth some discussion and reflection.

Safiya 

I guess this book illustrates the dizziying American reality on the net and how social media networks are more than shaping our world.
I am amazed by the amount of infos the author gathered and tried to sort in order to stay as neutral as possible, on what it would seem to be a mine field.
Issues ranging from political ascending of the alt-right through the meme uniberse, feminism and LGBTQ+ communities are well documented, as well as cases when harassment transcended the internet to the real life...
Spooky...

Kieran Wood

This book is interesting. I suspect I was not the intended audience for it at all. This feels like a "internet history and culture for idiots" sort of book. If you were around for the horrible 2010's onward on the internet then there's not much new here. Like any book that focuses on history/politics it definitely has a slant to the telling of events, but it's not that bad. There are several more egregious examples of bias, and questionable stances (read other reviews for more details), but it doesn't make it impossible to read. For people like me though it felt like how I would expect my dad to give me a lesson on what "This new site I found called reddit" would be like.

But if you are expecting a more serious sort of book with detailed analysis, this is not it. Anecdotally even in less serious books I tend to put sticky notes in areas I think may be worth referencing back to eventually, and this is the first book in a long time that has 0 of those sticky notes. This is definitely a one and done kind of book.


P.s. Very hard to write a serious review for a book that has "dicks out for Harambe" so many times in the first chapter.

Kill All Normies The Online Culture Wars from Tumblr and 4chan to the Alt-right and Trump

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