IT CAME FROM SOMETHING AWFUL is a better version of KILL ALL NORMIES (a book that many people, including myself, overrated at the time of its publication but whose flaws are now clearer in the wake of Angela Nagle's open embrace of right-wing positions and personalities.

That said, the thought produced by Fisher’s epigones has a lot of severe weaknesses, and a meta-weakness- the cult of Fisher, for all of its wide-ranging criticality, does not do self-criticism very well beyond ritual invocation of its own fecklessness and inability to effect change. It is an important even in online right-wing radicalization and there is almost no context offered because it doesn't fit the thesis of toxic development of internet culture.Anonymous grew out of 4chan, and while a lot of people pooh-pooh it now, whatever else it represented, it represented at least some people rejecting Gen Xer nihilism for some sort of collective, values-based project. We can laugh at all the absurdity, but in the end, it's only to distance ourselves from the fact that it is all too real. The author attempts to cite sources but most of his claims about internet culture are just claims, and many don’t match my experiences in the same online spaces at all. It seems to make overly broad generalizations in places where the topic doesn’t interest the author, and on the flip side it goes into extreme detail when something does. He even touches on the way that billionaires like Thiel and Mercer are dark money funders and encourages of the manipulating of chan users.

Even the hippies’ boundless transcendence is chopped up and sold by the hour as meditative yoga sessions. 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.

If you’re still not sure about the difference between lols and lulz or online harassment and Russian meddling, Gorman will enlighten you in this deeply sourced, deeply personal account of digital aggression. In fact, the idea that feminist theory and LGBT identity politics emerged primarily on Tumblr ignores the deeper real world history of these ideas. In his best-selling treatise, Marcuse observed that America had begun weaving sex into every aspect of society in the 50s and 60s, transforming it into a dangling reward for conformity.

It’s an unsubtle reading and ignores or misreads some important factors (I’m still rewriting my birthday lecture which covered some of this ground- patience! He is mistaken, however, to attribute so much causality to internet fora as if they, whether interpreted as reactions to a low-wage economy or vapid consumerism, were the cause of the Trump victory, rather than to see them as one part of a broader history of racism, sexism, and radical religious conservatism that all also contributed to Trump's particular right-wing populism. I took this on holiday with me and, to say that this is not light, sunlounger reading, would be an understatement.

I consider myself a left-leaning person, but this book will not convince anyone that they're wrong about anything.

Reading Dale Beran’s chronicle of 4chan, the anonymous imageboard where some of the internet’s worst scandals have been fomented, feels like scrolling through the forum itself .It Came from Something Awful is the fascinating and bizarre story of 4chan and its profound effect on youth counterculture. Trump as our illustrious sociopathic, narcissistic, egotistical, pathological wrecking-ball liar-in-chief. Unfortunately, the ideologies persist, but that's a bigger fish we'll be dealing with the rest of my life. 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.