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

Product Information

The WIRED conversation illuminates how technology is changing every aspect of our lives—from culture to business, science to design. So when the intricately duplicative art of mass media nests in the soul like a cuckoo, replacing real experience with simulation, it is not so much a flaw as a feature.

I’m not sure why I avoided the fate of women like the user Loli-Chan, who was groomed by trolls from a young age to trade sexual images for virtual currency. 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. It's a blow-by-blow study of the devolution of American culture, especially during the past few years: the rise of the radical 'proud boys'; the use of the word 'cuck' to insult liberals; the proliferation of offensive memes; the seemingly endless racist, inflammatory rhetoric; and the death of 32-year-old Heather Heyer, who was hit by a car driven by a white supremacist in Charlottesville in 2017—an event that prompted Donald Trump to say there were good people on both sides. His analysis of the role of depression in these internet cultures is probably the best part of the book. 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.And as I learned more about the culture of different sites, I watched from the sidelines as the internet, my window into what the rest of the world was like, fought over the election, and the trolls won.

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. Even the hippies’ boundless transcendence is chopped up and sold by the hour as meditative yoga sessions. By not weaving this into the history of 4chan sooner, the author fails to understand or outline for his read the ways in which 4chan /already was/ right leaning long before what he claims to be a new rightward shift in /r9k/ users. Dale Beran has observed the anonymous messageboard community’s shifting activities and interests since the beginning. I had big hopes for this book, having read the author's Medium post about 4chan and "beta males," but after about 200 pages, I found myself increasingly disappointed and sometimes mystified by the author's spotty understanding of real world politics.

True journalists at The Atlantic, The New Yorker, NPR, and ProPublica, amongst numerous others, have undertaken the role of resistance to the unraveling of this fragile Republic, but I fear the moronic masses are just too overwhelming, the apathetic too despondent, and the system of wanton greed and disinformation too ironclad. The most impactful recent political movements on the far left and right started with massive online collectives of teenagers. 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.