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

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The author describes the survival-of-the-funniest trial that memes underwent on 4chan, but fails to acknowledge what we know well today: the ‘best’ content doesn’t emerge from free upvoting on the internet. I was surprised to learn this was the work of one of the creators of the fantastic webcomic "A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible".

But within a few short years, the site’s ideology spun on its axis; it became the birthplace and breeding ground of the alt-right.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. He also offers something many authors fail to: a definition of fascism, and repeated, clear descriptions and explanations of fascist ideology on the chans. This co-optation didn’t end with the hippies, but rather inaugurated a mad half century in which an ever-expanding mainstream consumer culture chased down and trapped the countercultures that harassed it. I have an abiding fascination for how certain ideas and movements have taken hold in the last few years – the pace of change has frankly been astonishing since the turn of the millennium – and I have done a lot of reading around the subject in the past few years.

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. Beran explores the psychology of young, disenfranchised masculinity that 4chan represents and the sociopolitical context that molded its minds.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. 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. The power of a shitposting, nihilistic subculture to influence the language and arguments that form our discourse is disheartening but necessary to understand. His analysis of the role of depression in these internet cultures is probably the best part of the book.

I do think that for a certain audience this is probably a really useful and interesting read - in particular if you were not online in these spaces during these years and were only aware of, say, Anonymous from the (odd and often incorrect) news coverage coming out of mainstream publications, then this book will go a long way towards giving you more context and a more accurate impression of what is actually happening when online groups mobilize. The joke with that latter example is that prospects are so grim that fictional characters are likelier romantic partners.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. But by the time the obvious, glaring crisis arrives and the true scale of the problem becomes clear, it’s far too late.

That being said, this book IS about 4Chan and the alt-right, and of all the books I've read on internet culture, this one (from my perspective) creates the most comprehensive history of the alt-right's formation and comes closest to capturing the foulness that is 4Chan. He attended Anonymous’ anti-Scientology protest in Time Square in 2008—perhaps the first time 4chan came together offline en masse—but as a wannabe reporter rather than as a Guy Fawkes–masked agitator. I didn’t credit 4chan with inventing sexism then, just as I don’t agree with Deran’s multilayered title now (“it” refers to both 4chan itself—whose ethos originated with the predecessor site Something Awful—and Trump). He describes January 2017 women's march, at which Angela Davis and Linda Sarsour were major speakers, and which was attended by a number of economic justice organizations and labor unions, as organized and populated entirely by "liberal centrists" - as if no one attended, or even could have attended both it and Disrupt J20 held the day before.The retreat online was not just economic- the frustrations expressed by the proto-incels of /r9k/ was also the result of the impossibility of fully attaining the high standards of masculinity set by gender norms and the media these users consumed.