The genius parade continues this week with co-host Dale Beran, author of It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office. All three of us writers are legit blown away by Beran’s layered and penetrating coverage of the chan-verse-to-Capitol Riot pipeline. After last week’s journey led by Dr. Annie Kelly through the anti-feminism of the high-testosterone sites that prepped cyberspace for QAnon, Beran takes us deep into the cosplayed souls of the man-child nihilists who created an online politics of chaos, and served it up to the MAGA movement. Equal parts deep-internet history, social psychology, and critique of late capitalism, Beran’s lamentation to based and wasted youth still manages to hold out some hope for the future — and we’re going to ask him why.Show NotesThe Return of AnonymousWho Are the Incels of 4Chan, and Why Are They So Angry?It Came From Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office
-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem
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Okay, Dale, we are going to get into your book today.
I'm looking forward to this.
You can stay in touch with us and up to date with us at Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, all of our channels, as well as on Patreon at patreon.com slash conspirituality, where for $5 a month, you can help support us as well as get access to our Monday bonus episodes.
Conspiratuality 62, manifesting something awful with Dale Buran.
The genius parade continues this week with co-host Dale Buran, author of It Came From Something Awful, How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump Into Office.
All three of us writers are legit blown away by Buran's layered and penetrating coverage of the Chan-verse-to-Capital-Riot pipeline.
After last week's journey led by Dr. Annie Kelly through the anti-feminism of the high testosterone sites that prepped cyberspace for QAnon, Buran takes us deep into the cosplayed souls of the man-child nihilists who created an online politics of chaos and served it up to the MAGA movement.
equal parts deep internet history, social psychology, and critique of late capitalism, Baran's lamentation to based and wasted youth still manages to hold out some hope for the future somehow, and we're going to ask him why.
Thanks so much for taking the time, Dale.
It was an extraordinary book.
We're really excited to talk with you about it.
Sure, yeah.
Thank you for having me.
I think Matthew read it a little while ago, but Derek and I have both been listening to the Audible version over the last week or so, and so I know I can speak for myself.
I'm deeply immersed in all of this and have had your voice in my ear for the last several days for multiple hours, so it's nice to see you in person.
Yeah, great to be here.
Thank you so much for reading the book.
That is often more than many interviewers do, so that's wonderful.
I've been listening to it on my, and I'm not an audiobook person, but Matthew suggested it and I was really happy you read it because you bring life to it, which is great.
Sometimes audiobooks are tough for me because it's someone who isn't the author reading it.
It's very dry, but you give a lot of life to it.
But I'll chime in and say that there are so many takes on this history that we've looked at.
And I mean, not just we as a podcast, but as a society about the evolution of where we've landed at Donald Trump as president.
And yours really pointed out aspects that I had not thought of.
And you made a clear history along the lines from Stuart Brand to Donald Trump, which is something I've often thought about that early 70s.
You know, this is very much in line with this podcast of the wellness people moving into tech spaces and then moving to the right.
And even the way and I know we'll get into this, that you describe how it moves from progressive spaces to the far right through the technology was really succinct and amazing.
So thank you for that.
We've got a lot of detailed questions, and to save some legwork off the top, I've got a pretty tight synopsis of your book, and I hope that helps situate us, but also the listeners, squarely in your world.
So, It Came From Something Awful is like a double entendre title because it both names one of the earliest, mostly young male internet forums that took their lead from the Anon boards in Japan.
Which was called Something Awful, but also it pegs the origins of the MAGA movement's deep web infrastructure in this real clusterfuck of aggrieved, inflammatory, ironic, self-isolating users that yearned to tear everything about their hypocritical and imprisoning world down, even as they knew they were somehow keeping it alive with their demoralized consumerism and gaming.
And you lead readers through this, like, really messy development of that infrastructure until we have a history of the underbelly of the internet, and we're able to connect the dots in this kind of parade of online ecosystems that are all trying to out-disrupt each other.
So, from Something Awful, to the boards of 4chan, to, you know, subreddits, to 8chan, to WizardNet, and incel groups, All of them share this form in which users both hide themselves through anonymity, but they also, like, really overshare their most intimate anxieties.
And they create this new form of cathartic agitprop, the meme, which just completely scuppers every rule of cultural exchange and political discourse with its, you know, reductive cruelty.
That can always be disclaimed as ironic, like you can't really know what the memer believes.
So it's a world in which there is no good faith, and you really track how it leads to a presidency devoid of good faith.
And then, like two other things I'll say is that, you know, the flesh on that historical skeleton really comes through your study of the psychopolitics of late capitalism as it soaks in this online acid.
And one aspect of this is that you spend a lot of time on the kind of bipolar dialectic at the heart of these competing online groups.
So there's right versus left, men versus women, fascists versus communists, those who yearn for meaning and those who deny it exists.
And, you know, the attacks and counterattacks come so fast and furious that the content is almost always lost.
And then the last layer that you add, though, is possibly unifying or hopeful, because I think you point out that whatever the behaviors and the politics of the Chancellors are, they share a kind of central despair.
That they have been betrayed by every promise offered by a counterculture that never follows through.
They all watched punk, grunge, gaming, and the internet itself get co-opted into this great corporate machine, and that machine collapses history into this never-ending sales pitch.
So, it offers everything from everywhere, all at once, on these flat screens, without depth.
And you write about this with a lot of poetry that is just really refreshing.
And no one really knows where they're from or where they're going.
Or where they came from, because as you point out, the chan boards delete themselves.
But in the end, you also propose that if there's hope in something awful, it's in the honesty of those who inhabit it.
We have to say that they're in touch with their despair, and you write, quote, it's really only the first step in a long journey, recognizing one's own misery when the world insists that you ought to be content.
I hope that's fair.
I hope that that gives a good context for for going forward.
Do you think is there anything I got wrong there or that you want to clarify?
That's a very beautiful summary.
Thank you so much.
Yeah, I loved it.
It was a very eloquent summary of the whole of the whole book.
Yes, I thought it was great.
Good.
OK, well, we hopefully we've landed then.
Derek and Julian, what did you want to get into first?
Well, I think an origin story is in order, because obviously this is a large undertaking to try to describe how message boards led to Donald Trump.
So what was the moment you realized you wanted to tackle this topic?
It happened by accident a little bit, where I had been thinking about writing a piece on 4chan.
This was before Donald Trump was elected, and I had tried to write about 4chan Like, in 2008, back when it had started becoming a political movement and protesting Scientology, right when it started to invent the internet meme, I'd gone to one of the protests, and it was just so weird because I was standing, as they describe in the book, like,
on a New York Street corner where all of these internet kids were protesting this cult created by this, uh, this dead science fiction author.
Um, and it was just, there was so many layers of weirdness.
I just couldn't, couldn't put it in words.
Um, and then in 2016, um, As 4chan was pushed into the far right, they had actually been harassing artists.
And if you don't, if you recall, there was a fire at a place called Ghost Ship, which was like an artist space.
And 4chan had already gone to the far right at that point.
And they resented these people who were on the left that were artists.
And so they started harassing artists.
This is before Trump got elected.
And some of my friends actually got harassed.
And I was sort of trying to explain to one of my friends who was targeted by 4chan what 4chan was and how they were sort of these ridiculous nerds and like trying to kind of give the history that I eventually wrote.
And I realized I was like, oh, people should probably know this.
So I ended up writing a piece.
I thought, you know, 200 people would read it or something.
And it just went viral.
Like, it was right after Trump got elected, sort of anticipated a lot of the things that I guess happened shortly after with Trump and the Internet.
And after that, then the sort of book just Spiled out of control from there, like so many other things on the internet.
That Scientology moment is really fascinating.
I'd kind of put a post-it on it because you describe the representative of the Church of Scientology in his silver iridescent suit standing on the steps, right?
And he's gesturing towards this group of kids who are wearing the anonymous V for Vendetta masks, which you flag as like the first time this mask appears in real life, right?
Breaking through the screen into the outside world.
And then there you are, equally kind of in some kind of role play, right?
Because you have a notebook that says Reporter's Notebook on it, which you use to get past the police line, so you can go and talk to the guy on the steps of the Scientology building who says, these are all terrorists, they're a terrorist organization and we're protected by the First Amendment because we're a church or something like that, right?
Right.
And then you go and talk to the kids.
And the kids all give you inside joke trolling responses to any questions that you ask them.
And so all of this is such a bizarre, surreal kind of postmodern moment of the internet making this incursion into the real world in this trollish kind of way.
And yet, it seems like we can draw lines from there, say, to Charlottesville and perhaps even to the Capitol insurrection in terms of this trollish organizing.
What, how have you thought about that in hindsight?
Yeah, for sure.
I mean, it was definitely a very weird moment where everyone was sort of lying to each other where, yeah, the Scientology guy didn't know who these people were, really, where they were coming from.
And he just automatically said that they were a terrorist organization.
4chan was lying about where it was from.
It was saying, oh, I'm from Newgrounds or some kid's website.
And I was never really, I wanted to be a reporter, I wanted to be a writer.
And so I just had a notebook that said Reporter's Notebook.
And even though all I knew was that I knew about 4chan, that's sort of all I knew.
So I was really a user in a sense, going to interview other users.
It was very strange.
It, I guess, sort of like heralded this now common thing that happens where the internet leaks into real life, where Charlottesville much later on, when the alt-right spawned a 4chan, was also a manifestation of all these internet memes and ideas and conflicts that were happening online, kind of spilling out into real life.
And it was sort of horrific when it happened because obviously it didn't translate into real life where a lot of these men thought they would look a certain way because they had been hyping themselves up with like nonsense fascist ideology online and then they get there and they look ridiculous right when it comes into real life and it's horrific as it sort of conflicts with like how it actually How they imagine they are and how it actually appears.
So yeah, and now it's just sort of become a pattern where political movements coalesce this way and then sort of the border between real life and the internet kind of gets effaced.
What's wild about it with Scientology is as an outsider who knew nothing about that online fringe kind of world at the time, I think to me, and certainly to a lot of people I knew, it seemed like Anonymous was this, you know, sincere activist movement that was making a statement, right?
And in some ways they were choosing a sort of anti-corporate, there was an anti-corporate and anti-exploitation angle they were taking, and yet You know, seeing it from the angle that you give us access to, it's like, oh, wow, this was this was sort of the ultimate trolling event of its time.
There was an expression, I don't think this made it in the book, but there was sort of a common expression among Anonymous that Anonymous was Anonymous' own worst enemy.
So it was always sort of like tearing itself apart.
So there were, it started as this trolling movement and people who wanted to create mass pranks.
And then when all these kids were networked together, all these sort of young men were like, oh, well, we're kind of bullies.
What's the biggest bully we can find?
At first, it's just a neo-Nazi online.
Then it's like, oh, well, we defeated him.
We added him as FBI informant.
Then they're like, well, Scientology, that's a big bully.
Maybe we can we can mess with them.
And then after that happens and does fairly well, they're like, well, what about major corporations?
What about the military industrial complex?
That like those are those big power structures that all of us as hackers hate and as young rebellious men hate.
And they make a sincere go at it.
So then they do indeed become sincere.
A lot of them sincere activists.
And there's sort of a split between the old school trolls who are like, no, we're nihilists to the heart.
There's we have no political agenda and people are like, no, no, actually, I found agency in this.
This is actually real power here.
We can make an effect so that, you know, there was that conflict in the group.
But, yeah.
Yeah, so ultimately what happened was that they were pretending at first, and then everyone believed them.
So that mask became the face, right?
They realized that people, you know, they said, oh, we're an international hacktivist collective that is millions strong and a secret shadowy society that is very powerful.
And people loved that story.
So that gave them power, right?
Even if it was just a bunch of message boards.
Yeah, and so just the last thing here, because for me it's so emblematic of the book, is that there's this, there's almost this realization that I see you painting in an anthropological way, that here's this new form of social experiment that reveals An enduring kind of human truth, right?
That even if we're finding community through isolation and cruelty and helplessness and nihilism, somehow what evolves is a quest for meaning and power and agency and group identity, which is just, yeah, it's absolutely fascinating.
That then, of course, spills over into the world, as you were just saying.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's true.
That's a very nice takeaway.
And I think, yeah, that's what I tried to kind of get across in the book when all of these sort of young men got together, even starting in the early 90s, right before 4chan on Something Awful.
And then on 4chan, they started from a place of sort of deep nihilism, where they're like, nothing matters.
But that's sort of, you can't stay there long comfortably.
It's like, nature or borrows a vacuum.
It's that sort of idea where something needs, so they can only be nihilist for so long and then suddenly they're back to like, well, how do we cobble together a value system?
How do we kind of build something?
Because nothing, being in a place of nothing actually is not comfortable.
So you see them doing that over the years.
So at first they sort of built this anarcho, kind of anarchist, anti-corporate, anti-power structure thing called Anonymous.
And then the FBI, when that was effective to some degree, the FBI arrested all of the main figures.
And then in the vacuum that followed, there was again a nihilism that then got built up into this sort of like the delusion of fascism and sort of this like hatred towards modern society, or at least power structures, or at least this idea that maybe they should attack the power structures from the far right.
There's one more origin story question I want to ask because it'll lead into, and I think unlock a lot of the, of where we get to.
And some of this is speculation on my end, but I would love to hear your, your idea behind it because I don't think you touched upon this.
But you do mention that in Japan, Japanese kids that were focused on academics did not understand how to play.
And they would have all of these fantasies of murdering their father or going and killing people.
And because they were so focused, we'll say, on STEM or STEAM sort of academia, And you've painted a picture of people who, you know, you keep referencing, living in the mother's basement and such.
But I wonder, this phenomenon of these people who collect, they obviously are not socially attuned, especially with Gamergate and the misogyny that was happening there.
Now, I grew up being bullied, but I was also constantly playing sports and with people around me, even the bullies, and there was real contact that happened.
And whatever happened, it still made me a pretty well-adjusted adult.
But you mentioned at one point that it seemed like these people are just kids stuck in adult bodies when you're talking about gamers specifically.
So there's psychological or social traits that you've picked up, especially spending so much time in these spaces.
And do you think that there are some some traits that persist when it spills out into the real world that kind of disassociates them from reality that most of us share?
Yeah, good question.
I mean, I think for sure.
Yes, I wish.
I think this kind of became more clear after the book was written that what happens if you spend a lot of time online is that you really get You really depart from reality, that you can kind of believe more fantasy.
You can construct a very delicate, elaborate fantasy world that, as soon as it contacts reality, it starts to shatter like a sandcastle or something.
But the further you stay, the longer you stay indoors and away from that, the more elaborate it can become.
You know, I've also heard, there's been a little bit of writing on sort of like newer generations and younger people having difficulty making friends because they're just spending all this time online, right?
That it's sort of more difficult to go outside and do that, and I would certainly believe that.
But this idea that like, Yeah, how elaborate your fantasy and your ideas can get when you kind of stay beside the screen.
I mean, I think that the 2020 and the pandemic certainly reflected a lot of that too, right?
Where you got a lot of people who were stuck indoors, older people, and they got enamored of QAnon, which was another 4chan invention.
Um, or whatever it was, like cryptocurrency or like elaborate collectibles or whatever, like people, you kind of saw that people, because they were indoors all the time, all of this stuff that kind of diminishes as soon as you go outdoors got very much more real to them, right?
And sort of took on this reality that the further you get from the screen, the more it disappears.
So yes, that's certainly something that happens.
I mean, I guess the effect I talk about in the book is the fishbowl effect, where you get a bunch of people together online, and if one says, oh, I'm an incel, that means that I'm naturally born to be on the bottom of society.
You get 10 of those people, they all reinforce each other, and suddenly they can't leave.
And that happens no matter whether it's like anorexia or suicide, suicidality, all sorts of mental health issues and all sorts of sort of, they kind of convince themselves that it's very real, because they're together online.
There was also something you referenced multiple times around, you know, not only identifying with things like being an incel, but a sort of A general owning that it seemed like a lot of these guys had with being autistic.
With saying, you know, we are autistic and this is where we gather and this is what, in a way, this is kind of like our superpower while at the same time we feel like we're at the bottom of the heap.
It's been very surprising sort of at first.
I didn't know exactly who was on 4chan, right?
I had to go and find that out.
I had to guess, right?
I kind of knew anecdotally.
I've sort of now been covering it for years and years.
Yeah, actually a significant amount of people on there are on the spectrum somewhere.
And it's not ironic.
They're celebrating their autism sometimes.
And a lot of the times it just happens to be that I mean, I'm not the psychiatrist, but just sort of meeting some autistic folks that were on 4chan, what happens is, yeah, it becomes sort of an unhealthy place to retreat.
That it becomes comfy, it becomes easy to do that, and that that's sort of their predilection.
They sort of cultivate, create this, cultivate a little nice fantasy world that they can live in, and then it becomes more and more difficult to leave it.
And yeah, that ended up defining 4chan and then sort of just defining online space, right?
As these other, you know, social networks sort of resembled 4chan, you get that sort of monetized.
You know, the fishbowl effect seems to be this extremely poisoned chalice, which, as you describe, it provides community through, you know, a sense of bonding through identity or circumstance.
But the anonymity and the disembodied quality of where people are meeting means that they don't really have any real world responsibility to each other.
What's really important is that the connection is maintained within the fishbowl.
And that's why, you know, the incel gets punished if they report that they actually had sex or, you know, the person who, you know, we can think of a lot of examples, I suppose.
But what's so strange is that the anonymity, the sharing of circumstance and identity, it serves to boost the kind of emotional crisis sense within the spaces it serves to boost the kind of emotional crisis sense within the spaces that you describe without there being any kind of like social buffering or comfort that can provide it or that can
I guess the metaphor I used was a little bit like junk food, right?
Where it turns out if you sell a product that is not very satisfying, but sort of gives you like a momentary relief, right?
So you eat Cheetos, they're not really filling you up, but that actually makes you want to buy more, right?
In the same way you kind of sell an ersatz social network, right?
You sell interaction online, and it's momentary relief because it's sort of fake social interaction.
It feels good for a moment, but it never really fills you up, so you end up going back and back.
Over and over again.
Yeah.
And if and if the content that's being shared or the sort of sub themes within the discussion in that space is already sort of hinged upon a disillusionment with the outside world or its betrayals, you know, your coverage of the nihilism that arises in these spaces out of the fact that
Everybody feels cheated and let down by the promises of capitalism and consumerism.
And that not only that, that every time there's an attempt made at countercultural thought or expression, that that immediately gets snapped up into the next round of sales pitching.
And so I'm wondering, like, How you developed your political economy analysis through all of this because it's really kind of a through note that is so strong, you really sink into this, you Gen X sore spot of, wow, I heard Kurt Cobain saying, here we are now, entertain us.
And I was driving my car and I had to pull over because I was crying.
And then six months later, they're selling us fucking sweater at whatever Target was back then.
So yeah, how did you come to that?
I kind of started with the question I was writing in the book, which Well, I had to really answer for this weird culture that 4chan had grown out of when it was started in 2003 and then off another site called Something Awful, which was also very dark and cynical.
And it reflected just the generation.
That was my generation and our generation, right?
Where we were sort of obsessed with being nihilists or sort of having no interest in anything, right?
That was sort of like the cultural malaise of the rock bands and so forth at the time, too.
So, and I used, you know, there were other thinkers who wrote on this, like Barbara Ehrenreich and Zizek and so forth, like a lot of people write on this similar idea, but I used it here to explain this idea that, like, what had really occurred was that Yeah, there were these countercultural movements which were about sort of like joy and breaking out of these sort of rigid societal constructs in the 60s and enjoying life and sort of like taking pleasure from life.
But capitalism and marketing quickly snatched all that up and said, well, let's sell you that, right?
Let's use those ideas to sell you products.
And in fact, that's very limiting, right?
Then you just get the little joy chopped up when you're supposed to only enjoy when you buy something.
And so by the 70s and 80s, that marketing culture had just grown exponentially in this sort of post-war economy.
And that by that point, by the late 90s, everyone was just sort of jaded because everything had been co-opted over and over again.
And the response was, well, I'll just have nothing in my heart, so nothing can be stolen, right?
Like, let's just give up.
There'll be nothing to be co-opted.
And that was really the environment out of which, you know, 4chan grew up.
And then, you know, obviously those dynamics are still happening where they invented memes and then, of course, the first, or internet memes rather, and the first thing, when internet memes blow up in 2007, you know, the first person, people that cover them in the Wall Street Journal, and they ask, well, how can we monetize?
How do we go viral?
Right.
And then, you know, later on, when the alt-right is emerging, they take Pepe the Frog on 4chan, which is a kind of meme about being a loser in your mom's basement.
And as they see it getting co-opted and sort of used in pop culture and used to sell things, then they code it in racist symbols, because the idea is the old 4chan playbook, like the old punk playbook, where they say, I'll just cover it in swastikas or anything that will make it poisonous.
Make the frog poisonous distasteful to some corporation trying to snatch it up and use it.
Yeah, and so we have, you know, the, I don't know what you would call it, like a repurposing of irony.
In very weird forms, which begins, as you write, as, you know, it's another strategy to evade capture by the marketers.
That irony really is a way of a generation expressing, you're not going to buy me.
And you're not going to sell me back to myself.
And so that twists around into, well if I can make Pepe completely deplorable to anybody who would want to monetize him, then that actually works for me regardless of the fact that I've just poured out hate speech onto the internet.
It's such a strange and very humanizing actually turn of events because I think that You know, on the first blush, most people will encounter Pepe with swastikas and think, oh, the, you know, the swastika Nazi skinhead has entered the room and this is what they believe.
But I think the story that you tell is that, no, it's very difficult to know what people actually believe beyond the fact that they are in a form of broken despair.
The irony is sort of used as a protective measure and then, yeah, as a way to sort of confuse themselves in a sense where if they kind of keep deconstructing everything and then they're left with nihilism, like you say, it just sort of like ends up reinforcing the dynamics they were trying to resist where they're in their bedroom playing video games all day, consuming these little products that make them feel good for an instant, consuming the fantasy worlds as a way to make them feel good for an instant and then bad in the long term.
And yeah, that's the sort of duality of Pepe, right, who now he's returned to his normal meaning of being a sad loser in your basement doing that.
But briefly, he took on that sort of like poisonous, toxic version of himself because so many young men were like angry and they wanted to either express that ironically or a little bit or they sort of Got enamored of that radical ideology and they said, well, you know, if if modern society, if I'm going to be on the bottom, well, I want it all destroyed.
And I want, you know, some sort of fantasy, like fascist fantasy from the from like romantic fantasy to replace it instead.
Yeah, so, I mean, those were the strange places the nihilism evolved, right?
Because, you know, imagine 10, 20 years on these boards, right?
Like, how long can you stay there as sort of, like, the fantasy worlds grow, they get larger, and then the economic and sort of, like, prospects for young people diminish in the outside world when you combine those two.
Two things.
I mean, you just get more and more people kind of living the Pepe lifestyle.
I wanted to say, Matthew, something clicked in what you were just asking, which is, I'm not going to let you sell me back to myself, but I also heard, I'm not going to let you continue to link via a marketing agenda my innate emotional responses and needs to products.
And so what I'm going to do, because I can't get away from your marketing that is everywhere, that defines the culture that I find myself at the bottom of, that tries to sell me on the idea that I can be at the top too if I become a happy, shiny fucking consumer, is that I'm going to shut off those social emotional responses and coat all of them in a kind of irony that says, oh, yeah, you're right.
You're right.
Anything matters.
Especially if those responses revolve around depression as we heard Annie Kelly describe last week that it was it was well it's in your book too as well Dale that depression quest is at the heart of
Gamergate, or at the beginning of it anyway, where here's a game designed by a woman designer that is about, I mean, I'm not quite sure how the game works, but I understand that it's about navigating one's depression.
And that can't possibly be for anyone else.
It's, It can't be monetized by anybody else, not least of which by somebody from Tumblr, but it can't be monetized.
It can't become a thing that other people play and that you would have to pay for.
And so this becomes an object and a target of incredible hatred and online violence.
Yes.
That's a good take.
I wonder, I don't even know if Depression Quest was, uh, you had to pay for it.
It might've been free, but they might've just resented the idea that, um, they really resented the idea that a woman felt more depressed than that.
That was that, that was the wild, that was how fishbowled they were.
What could a woman possibly have to be depressed about, you say, right?
Because she can she can get laid anytime she wants.
Yeah, that was the quote from Wizard Chan where they where it started.
Yeah, they felt like that doesn't even make any sense to me because they had never really encountered or met very many women.
Yeah.
You open your book talking about consumerism with the history of consumerism.
And we're talking about what it does to your mental health and soul.
But we grew up with newspaper and television advertisements, for example.
I worked in both of those, both in commercials and in print newspapers.
And there was a lot of market testing, there was a lot of figuring out what people wanted, but algorithms are something altogether different.
And have you looked into the effects of what the algorithms and the constant bombardment of the way consumerism shifted with the internet, how that affected the psychology of the people you are writing about?
I tried to touch on this in my book, but it was such a complex subject that I think a lot of good reporting has been done after on it as well, after my book came out.
But yeah, that's an excellent point, that that's indeed what happened, that engine for figuring out what people want and sort of setting and calibrating people's desires.
Using advertisement, which is, you know, what Marcuse wrote about in the 1960s, I used in my book, right, that analysis of co-optation and so forth.
The algorithms, AIs, like these vast computers, all of this computing technology is now devoted more than anything to do that for us, to addict us to our phones and so forth, right?
I think that the social dilemma is a doc that came out, a very good demonstration of that.
Yeah, so as that occurs, as sort of that gets more intense, yeah, I mean, I think for the online spaces, I mean, people just get, it's even more and more difficult, right?
I think we're all, we all have a little bit of that otaku in us now, at least for the most part.
Like, I'm addicted to my phone, right?
I can't, sometimes I can't put it down because those, Sort of engines are sort of turning to addict me to these online places to show me ads and so forth just for these very ridiculous reasons like they make a fraction of a penny when I look or whatever.
So yeah, I mean it.
I'm not sure I mentioned this term in my book, but, you know, there was the red pill, which means, for 4chan, you embrace this conservative ideology or far-right ideology.
And then they talked about the black pill, which is the nihilist pill, where they just said, well, I'm just going to give up.
I'm just going to live forever, getting manipulated in the fantasy world or whatever.
So, yeah, I mean, it's...
Yeah.
And I guess in that sense, sort of like the otaku-ism does frame a modern problem that everyone has, right?
Where now everyone has that little bit of like, well, how much are we going to be in the screen and how much are we going to get tempted to be there?
Just to roll back a little bit, can you define otaku for our listeners?
Sure, yeah.
Otaku was a term from the 80s in Japan describing this sort of new type of person who was like super fan, who spent all their time watching anime or sort of obsessed or dropped out of life sometimes or working from home, really living in these sort of new consumer electronic fantasies, internet, video games.
That got picked up and imported to the U.S.
when sort of similar things were happening in the U.S.
And we had, you know, 4chan started, they used to meet at a convention in Baltimore that I write about in the book called Otakon.
And now, as we're sort of like in this world where You know, there's more inequality, young people have a harder time getting ahead, and fantasy worlds and electronic consumer-like entertainment products are everywhere and expanding.
Now it's that idea is sort of everywhere, right?
It's sort of like just part of our social landscape or sociological landscape.
You know, speaking of the technology, It marries the disillusionment that you describe in the political economy as you draw on sources like Mark Fisher and Baudrillard to describe the What the technologies do to our sense of time and narrative and being able to visualize what would happen in the future.
I've got a quote here that I'm going to read back to you.
I think you're quoting from Baudrillard, you write, the vague notion that at some point in the 1980s history took a turn in the opposite direction, he wrote, implies a linear narrative.
When in fact, we've fallen out of linear space and into the realm of the screen, quote, where normal time, normal ideas of action and progress no longer apply, unquote.
And then you say, progress and forward movement died in the cascading virtual worlds of screens where radical young people find not only their coalitions, but themselves and their sense of reality fragmented in a hall of mirrors.
And I remember reading that For the first time, and I know that you're talking about 20 years ago, and it takes my breath away, really, because that is my everyday experience, that I come to this office in my basement and I turn on the screen and the world flattens into this landscape of, you know, boredom and
Boredom, but, you know, I don't know, apathetic fascination at the same time.
But the main thing that's happening is that the speed of everything that's flashing across it really arrests the fact that, you know, I'm getting a day older and, you know... The world is on fire.
And the world is on fire.
And my children need to do something other than deal with my glazed face at the end of the day.
So yeah, I just think that I really appreciate that, and I'm just wondering, when you felt that in yourself, when you felt the flatness of the screen kind of take time away, I was always very suspicious of it.
I felt like I've slowly been seduced by it, where I used to kind of not really like computers that much, even though I'm sort of nerdy and like to do similar things.
Like, I would sort of, like, I remember, you know, in the mid-2000s, not wanting a computer kind of near where my bedroom was, right?
I wanted, like, in another room.
And I wanted to limit my time.
And sort of slowly, I think probably everyone's experience is that, like, I was very wary of them, but slowly over years, yeah, like now there's everywhere.
Now I'm just always got the screen in my face and there are these powerful AI engines like behind, you know, the social media that addict us to looking over and over again.
And now everything, of course, comes to the screen, so it's hard to avoid them.
Um, but yeah, I was just very enamored of those beautiful ideas like that, that you just quoted from the book from, from Baudrillard and Mark Fisher, where they both kind of wrote about this idea that
Yeah, at some point it really feels like, yeah, we didn't, we stopped moving forward and just sort of things flattened into a screen virtual world where I remember kind of driving along the highway where I grew up and like there were all these sort of like crummy little temporary, like, you know, 7-Elevens and strip malls and it just looks cheap and temporary when it got thrown up when I was a kid.
And they're still there, right?
They're just sort of still there, aging, not really built to last, right?
Just there.
And it feels like, well, I just expected them to vanish because they look so temporary.
And that's what Mark Fisher writes about, where it really feels like Like, you know, imagine, like, the political change or sort of the societal change between, like, 1930 and 1960 or something, right?
Or 1900 and 1930.
And now, what happened in the last 20, 30 years, right?
Like, the internet a little bit, but politically, right?
Has there been, like, a big shift?
So it really feels like a lot of the times we sort of ground to a halt and sort of just retreated into fantasy world or fantasy spaces, yeah.
Well, it feels like the internet that you're describing is this toxic mirror image of the neoliberal Fukuyama promise that we've arrived at the end of history and that capitalism is fulfilling all of our needs in some way and that there's nothing more to really accomplish once sort of American-style consumption is everywhere and free trade is open.
That's what's being said in the political sphere and being called the end of history.
But then the technology that people are actually using every day is presenting that as a kind of like historical junkyard, which is the other thing that you refer to over and over again, is that is that the thing about the flattened screen of history is that is that the thing about the flattened screen of history is that people on these boards can find anything
And they can dredge immediately the deepest, darkest, like psychic junk to the surface and plaster it there because it.
Everything just exists in two dimensions.
You don't have to reach farther into some archival library to pull out the most terrible piece of shit, right?
You don't have to go to some lab that's protected in a vault or something like that to get the worst virus.
It's all right there for you.
Everything is there for you.
Things that pretend to be pleasurable and things that are absolutely horrible.
They're all there and they're all there at once.
And you say the last quote from Baudrillard that I have here is that this creates also this feeling that like nobody really owns it either.
That he described it as a sense of collective irresponsibility.
That it's just kind of there and flat and what the hell.
Right.
Yeah, there's a paralysis that comes with it.
And certainly a paralysis that comes with being overwhelmed with too much information.
And I feel like that was the sort of prevailing part of the sort of prevailing neoliberal idea that like.
Oh, history has ended or that like it's too much, it's too complicated.
We have managers, we manage it and you have to be a specialist and you get a little piece like you can major after, you know, 12 years in policy school, then you get to like manage this little fund.
But you could never, you know, get the whole picture or say like, no, that whole thing is screwed up.
So yeah, that was part of it.
And then, yeah, the other part I think that you're touching on, which is this idea like Matt Fury.
There's a film that I worked on a little bit called Feels Good Men about Matt Fury, the creator of Pepe the Frog and the co-optation of Pepe.
And he kind of calls it Garbage World, where he grew up in this space.
He's about our age and grew up with all this consumerist junk.
And he worked in a thrift store when he came up with Pepe.
And he's like, there was just all this garbage they sold us.
And also it was sort of psychic garbage, because it's like advertising campaigns for movies, like hype for certain products or action, whatever.
And then all of that became the like chopped up little pieces of garbage that became something awful in 4chan.
And they were sort of like lobsters, like getting little pieces floating to the bottom and then like fashioning them into memes.
And those were memes where you sort of like take all that bits of garbage that was designed to be garbage.
And it's designed to be thrown away and forgotten.
Like it had one use, which was to convince someone to buy a product in like 1989.
Yeah.
But it's like stuck in everyone's heads.
And so what can we do?
All we can do is like have a little bit of power by refashioning it into a dumb joke.
It's also the power of the scavenger, right?
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
You can repurpose it.
Now you own it in a sense.
Yeah.
Has Jordan Peterson entered the chat?
Now that we have a lobster reference.
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Ultimate.
Yeah.
He's the ultimate lobster.
Yeah.
The ultimate garbage world.
He's like the biggest one down there.
You seem to have a special disdain for Jordan Peterson.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, I probably spent too much time like in retrospect now, all of these Which it was already clear to some extent when I finished the book, but this sort of what happens in the alt right and the far right spaces is that these the people that get elevated are sometimes the stupidest ones.
So that means that that that's why they get elevated.
But that means they only have a shelf life of like a year or two and then new ones take their place.
So now there's like a new set of them.
So but yeah, so I spent some time like sort of just tearing apart some of these foolish figures that were at first Gamergate sort of hucksters and grifters on 4chan or sort of adjacent to 4chan.
And then they became the first leaders of the alt-right.
Yeah.
And then, of course, yeah, like one of them, Baked Alaska, who was a Gamergate YouTuber.
There are your dots to connect.
I wanted to ask you about GamerGate.
You talk about how prior to the GamerGate controversy, which was in 2014, There's this gradual progression on 4chan from anti-corporatism and rejection of mainstream values, as we've discussed, into this hyper-competitive masculinity, explicit misogyny and racism, and then this is combined with organized raids onto other, often sweet and innocent message boards, as well as the rise of that much more female-dominated website Tumblr, which maybe we'll talk a little bit more about later.
Can you just say a little more about Gamergate?
Because not everyone knows about it and how it perhaps represented this political turning point in terms of the demographic that you cover.
You know, like so much, so many other things that we're talking about, it really was sort of like this piece of cultural garbage that everyone thought would be forgotten, but turns out to be very relevant now in retrospect, where as 4chan, so anonymous A lot of the leaders were arrested in 2012.
So there was sort of on 4chan, there was this anonymous, a movement called Anonymous that was pro sort of far right and sort of very activist.
And after, after that got shattered by 2014.
Wait, did you just say Anonymous was pro far right?
Oh, I'm sorry.
Sorry.
No, pro far, pro left.
Yeah, kind of pro-left, pro-libertarian sometimes.
After that got shattered in 2012, by 2014 there's sort of a new set of far-right extremists on 4chan and young men and incels that are dropped out of life.
And they became obsessed with a video game developer named Zoe Quinn, who was also to some extent a 4chan-er.
She dated someone who was on 4chan, and that jilted ex started complaining about her a ton.
Created like an anonymous style like old school trolling campaign against her where all of these young men who are really angry at their lot in life, angry at women because they really felt like they had no romantic success, all let it out on her and sort of targeting her for a year.
This spawned sort of a group of like adjacent YouTubers who promoted themselves.
And this eventually coalesced into a political movement where all these young men on 4chan decided, well, because I really resent women and I really resent life and sort of modern life and feminism, well, I'm going to become a hyper conservative traditionalist that wants this world wiped away, this modern world wiped away.
And then, you know, in the past, I would have been assigned a wife or I would have had a place in society, sort of really a fantasy.
And that that just becomes the alt-right out of out of that movement.
Yeah.
And Anita Sarkeesian is part of that story.
Yeah.
Yes.
She was also targeted.
She had a like a YouTube channel that was sort of critiquing games in a feminist way.
It was like very light.
It was like, you know, why does the why does Mario rescue the princess rather than the other way around?
Right.
But that was enough.
Right.
Because these young men felt like, well, video games are my last line of retreat.
They're the only thing I have.
I go into video games where I experience this sort of fantasy where women love me and it's misogynistic and they felt like, oh well, if a feminist critic is attacking that and suddenly I don't get video games where I get to do that, well that's the last thing that I have.
Really kind of delusional and out there, but that was sort of the...
What game makers had been selling gamers for a long time, kind of cultivating that idea.
So as that as that shift starts to happen in terms of the alt-right emerging, now we're approaching the 2016 election.
And how to define the alt-right is often a point of confusion.
I like that you described three subgroups.
You said young right wingers on the boards who are fascists, racists and betas, older Nazis and street brawlers like those on The Daily Stormer.
And oddball suit intellectuals like Jared Taylor and Richard Spencer, who actually coined the term alt-right.
I'm curious to what extent you think the players within the Trump 2016 campaign were deliberately seeking to encourage the troll army on the chans.
And to what extent the support on the chans was based on actual alt-right beliefs versus this like absurdist nihilism and the entertainment value of just subverting, you know, having some power to subvert the political process.
Right.
To the first question, there are substantive connections, but with the Trump campaign, you know, I think they were flying by the seat of their pants, so...
The extent to which they anticipated or knew that these subgroups would appear or help them or exist, probably very little.
But when they appeared, they did use them.
Particularly Steve Bannon, when he ran Breitbart, hired Milo Yiannopoulos, who was just sort of like this bizarre blogger, right-wing blogger.
And Milo Yiannopoulos started writing about Gamergate, and he became sort of a Gamergate figure.
And so through that ban and learned about Gamergate, he learned about 4chan and 8chan and said, oh, well, they get mad about Gamergate.
Well, I can turn them on to Trump then.
That was sort of the direct quote in the book.
And he did do that before he became Trump's campaign manager and then probably after he gave Milo Yiannopoulos a lot of money through Robert Mercer, this eccentric billionaire, to go around in a bus and activate this coalition.
So there were real efforts to activate it.
How much of a role it played is almost impossible to say.
It's more like they 4chan always has set the cultural tone.
We get all these words from 4chan, like all these terms and all these memes, and they were sort of like doing that, right?
They were setting the sort of cultural landscape that, and spreading a lot of misinformation that made it into the news that helped Trump's campaign.
Yeah, and so it's almost like the campaign accidentally stumbles into like, oh, we can use this, and it turns out a lot of them are Nazis.
Well, we'll just kind of ignore that and just try to fold it all in and exploit it as best we can, right?
Right.
Yes, exactly.
Like they, I mean, they were just, they, yeah, they didn't want to make that distinction.
And there was a lot of crypto fascism going on where people who were clearly fascists and Nazis knew very, very introitly to Now, at the same time, as you briefly cover in the book, Tumblr is emerging, and it seems to me as a kind of parallel digital lab experiment, right, to 4chan and 8chan, where this demographic, though, is much more involved in agonizing over moral questions and political identity in much more earnest ways.
What becomes foundational here, you reference, is the existentialist and perhaps to some extent later postmodern idea that existence precedes essence, right?
So we all get to choose who we are.
But on Tumblr, as will start to be the case elsewhere on social media, concrete moral codes emerge as gospel.
And you write, once a stance has been decided, users rush to echo the original conclusion and condemn those who disagree.
And then as exemplified most famously by a YouTube video from the Yale Halloween controversy, professors at universities who were used to a kind of Socratic debate style were wholly unprepared for this new approach to moral philosophy and political activism.
And it seems to me this is sort of on the other side of this whole story, right?
Can you describe just, if you like, what happens when Tumblr goes to college?
Sure, yeah.
So there's this other social media site called Tumblr, which was sometimes a rival to 4chan, had more women and young women on it than men, was sort of artsy, kind of interesting site.
But it had sort of developed its own ideology, unlike the 4chan nihilistic, sort of everything is permitted and everything should be offensive and there are no rules in a sense.
Tumblr started developing this very sort of rigid set of values where, just because of the way the structure of the site worked, where you could sort of Always add something, always addend to a post.
So instead of 14, every post would be deleted almost instantly.
So that sort of framed the nihilism.
But on Tumblr, the post never got deleted.
Another person could always say something.
So it sort of like became this like rabbinical scroll or like text where people started like annotating it and people would agree, you know, this is right and this is right.
And there was a very sort of like Complicated idea about identity because it was teenagers.
So sort of like that was the big issue.
Like, what is my identity?
Who am I?
And a lot of that politics now just got kind of folded into the newest version of left wing thought and politics.
So that is also with us, even though Tumblr is now defunct.
We still have these sort of same phenomenons where, you know, sometimes the right kind of like complains about cancel culture.
I sort of write about in my book, like this idea of pylons, just where the idea that like someone will post something and then there is a very tempting idea on social media where everyone can then pile on and say like, you're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong.
And it's, and it's delightful.
It kind of gets you a kick and then addicts you to social media.
But of course it's in the, in the end sort of absurd.
But, um, that idea that like, uh, social media sort of allows for this sort of strange, like moralistic fantasy role play.
And also this idea that, like, the cultivated, the way that social media works, where it cultivates this sort of little world for yourself about your identity and who you are and your choices and what you get to pick.
That structure of social media then became sort of a political structure, a set of political ideas.
So, you know, some of those ideas I agree with, and some of them are interesting.
I don't dismiss all that at hand, but I find it just fascinating that, like, it was built this way, in my opinion, through social networks.
I have two related questions following on what Julian has brought up, and the first is kind of technical, which is, as you're describing the genesis and the implications and the political shifts that characterize Gamergate and where it goes and what it inspires, I'm thinking about the harder turn described by Annie Kelly last week towards
you know, quite violent misogyny that starts to show up in pickup artist sites and boards that starts to show up in, you know, on WizardNet and in in-cell spaces.
You know, Part of my brain wants to make causal connections between these things, but in calendar terms, it's probably not like that.
Am I right?
Is it like Gamergate is swelling in one space, and is that parallel to other misogynistic discourses, and then they sort of find each other?
Or how do you think about that landscape, and is it more about correlation than you know, this guy moves from here to here.
I mean, we have baked Alaska who actually does move from here to here, but in most cases, we're talking about groups that are bumping up against each other and influence each other, right?
Right.
I mean, I think it's fair to make that causal connection.
You know, I kind of tell the story from the lens of 4chan, but obviously there are many other sites at this time, sometimes maybe for deeper underlying sociological reasons, but maybe just also because there's a lot of spread of information on the internet where you
You know, parallel to, you know, the boards on 4chan and 8chan at the time, the other copycats of worse 4chan that were devoted to incels and so forth, you know, they would visit the Reddit boards and the pickup artist boards, and YouTubers would start to realize, hey, there's this huge audience on 4chan, if I just sort of talk about the same thing, And same thing with these pickup artists, a lot of whom were trying to make money.
So they just sort of realized the audience was there.
And of course, it was growing demographically for all sort of the like sociological and economic reasons that we kind of were already talking about.
So, yeah, it all kind of it did sort of happen in parallel and was related.
So, you know, for example, WizardNet, you know, there was a WizardChan, and those people went to both, right?
And WizardChan kind of predated 8chan, and it was where GamerGate began, and then it moved to 8chan.
And yeah, I'm sure some of those same users were on these other spaces and Reddit and the other wizard sites and so forth.
And as the groups coalesce and on that side of the ledger they share this sense of nihilism and perpetual disillusionment, one of the things that really stood out about your description of Tumblr was that it really focused, and this became a point of resentment, on the possibility of
hope as being embodied or potentially manifested through an investment in one's uniqueness and in one's identity.
So all of the things that the 4chan user had already sort of discounted as not being part of their sphere of possibility anymore, over on Tumblr, there's this promise that's additive, as you say, like people can continue adding to the posts. as you say, like people can continue adding to the
And it made me, it makes me think of how, you know, you speak in the book, but also a little bit earlier in this conversation about how you can't remain nihilistic forever.
Yeah.
You said nature abhors a vacuum, and it makes a lot of sense to me that the thing, perhaps, that the 4chan user turns towards when they see This other demographic grabbing on to social meaning is they grab onto social meaning, but it's from the opposite side of the spectrum in the form of fascism.
And, you know, I was really moved by your description of how In, you know, out of nihilism, a fascist order or ideology is able to imagine getting ahead in life, the quote is here, by removing someone else or a whole group of people that are above you in the hierarchy.
And so Tumblr becomes targeted by 4chan in general terms but then the quest for meaning within the 4chan world takes on this very romantic and sort of heroic imagery.
And I just found that fascinating.
I'm wondering if I want to be careful about this.
I don't want to suggest that the hopeful world or more hopeful world represented by Tumblr provoked a fascist response in 4chan, but I'm wondering whether there's a dialectic going on where they actually have something that the boys realize they want, but they're going to create it on their own terms.
Yeah, I think for sure.
There's certainly like this very strange dialectic between those two sites, right?
Like as you say, it's like almost the exact opposite, right?
And yes, I think a lot of the times the campaigns On 4chan and 8chan, we're motivated by this sort of intense jealousy, where they really felt like, oh, here's someone who's figured it out in a way that feels okay.
And so I guess the calculus in their mind is like, oh, actually, no, they haven't.
It sucks.
And I want to get, you know, I want to attack them.
That's not a real answer.
Um, and yeah, I mean it, in some ways, yeah, it was certainly the same problem, right?
It's funny how it kind of drills very deep, very quickly.
And you're, and you kind of get into these philosophical issues about like, well, what do I care about?
Or like, what is my identity going to be?
Or like, who am I?
Or like, what do I actually want?
Um, and yeah, I kind of write about it in the book where, um, for a lot of people that I spoke to who are 4channers and sort of fell into this world, you know, it, It's like you're drowning in the nihilism.
And then and a lot of times what hyper conservatism or fascism offers is this sort of like very rote set of values, like an off the rack suit.
And so I put in the book where you can just sort of be like, well, all traditional values.
It's like a lot of them become Catholic or whatever to write like this idea that you can just adopt a value system.
And suddenly, you know, that means that if you believe in something, then you will.
You know, you have this set of rules that that means you You haven't given up and you're starting making your bed and working out or whatever.
And that's sort of how they describe it.
But of course, like in the end, it's so naive that it backfires because it's, um, you know, it, it, it sells them.
So it's just a different form of fantasy that is so divorced from reality and divorces them from other people because it's so angry that they just end up, um, falling back into the, to the black pill from the red pill from the, like back to the Nihilist.
There's something really interesting there too that you talked about, and you said something earlier, Matthew, about incels being punished if they had sex, and I'm not sure that's exactly right, because I got the impression, Dale, that there was this sort of As the self-improvement kind of masculine piece started to started to take over, there was a sense of like boards where if people graduated and everyone was like, oh, I'm so sorry to see you go, but congratulations.
Go have a wonderful life.
Or like, you're no longer a wizard because you've now had sex, but you're a fucking hero, man.
Yeah, both.
Both definitely occurred.
Yeah.
Like Frederick Brennan, who I still speak with.
Yeah, he's he's just grown like a ton.
And he's the founder of Atrian.
Incredible story, yeah.
Right, yeah.
He, you know, he moderated at Wizard Chan and sort of drank the incel Kool-Aid.
He believed it and then, yeah, he got kicked off because eventually he did lose his virginity and it was a blow to him, right?
He knew he had to leave because they were gatekeeping.
But yeah other times you know they'd be more like the softer boards that that was like the most hardcore board but the one on 4chan you say oh well I'm leaving I'm really trying to break away from this I'm trying to break out and they'd be like okay great that's so good because we know that this sucks and we know that like this is not healthy for
Yeah, and even though it's being sold to us cynically by these pickup artists and men's rights types of people, there is some of this ideology coming in of like, we can improve ourselves, we can be men again, and we can revert to some kind of fascist romantic fantasy of how in the past we would have been swinging a battle axe and, you know, having the most beautiful woman as our wife because we're entitled to that, but now we live in this godforsaken time where we don't get that.
Yeah, it mirrors the video games they play, right?
It is just exactly like the fantasy video games, right?
Yeah, and the thing that kept striking me, that I just wanted to mention right now because it's all the way through this conversation for me, is the social experiment quality of all of this within which, even though it's not really intended, a sort of Recapitulation of the history of moral and political philosophy ends up happening when you have a group of people together, right?
People are asking these questions, like you're saying, and even if you're starting from a place of nihilism, that's a position.
And then you start sketching out, well, what does it mean to be a nihilist?
And then you have a set of principles and a meaning to believe in, right?
Yeah.
And we talk a lot about the negative aspects of 4chan, but of course, 4chan was a super creative place in the beginning.
Probably more than other times.
But it was also this place where all this discourse took place, just like on Tumblr, where, yeah, they would have all these teens and kids and people trying to figure it out.
So there would be philosophical discussions and like literature boards.
And, you know, the talk of philosophy on 4chan is still probably, you know, the boards have diminished a ton.
But through the years, that was a big part of it.
We're just figuring out, well, you know, what what is the value system?
What is the proper one?
Last question from me.
Given that you cover in the book figures like Steve Bannon and Milo Yiannopoulos, Frederick Brennan, as you were just saying, Jim and Rowan Watkins, the emergence of early QAnon on the chans, what's it like to have written such an unlikely prelude, and I think very insightful prelude, that not a lot of people are hip to about the 2016 election, published then in 2019, only to find that this was in fact Now, a prelude to a longer and much stranger arc that intensifies all the way up to the Capitol insurrection this year.
I was surprised.
I have to say, I was secretly hoping in my heart of hearts that I would write this book and all of this would become beautifully irrelevant and I could just move on to writing about other topics.
Instead, the opposite occurred.
When I wrote the book, there were reviews that came out that were like, oh, is it really that important?
Is 4chan this relevant?
And I was like, I really hope they're right.
I hope that I've overemphasized this nonsense.
But instead, QAnon, which was a 4chan invention of the owners of 8chan, Jim and Ron Watkins, they ran it for the longest time.
Yeah, all the characters I write about in the book, and that very much played a big role in January 6th and storming the Capitol.
Yeah, I mean, no one was more surprised than myself.
I guess I was just more optimistic.
I was really hoping that, you know, I know that the underlying problems were there, right?
You know, the sort of sociological and political ideas that spawned Trump, they really haven't been addressed in a meaningful way.
But I kind of thought it would just take a different form, like a different disgusting form, not the Chan form anymore.
But I guess there was really a long life to these, like, 4chan memes and the figures who were kind of behind the sites.
Because, yeah, I mean, in the weeks leading up to January 6th, Ron Watkins, you know, was being retweeted by Trump all the time.
Like he joined the legal team.
That's someone who, you know, was running 8chan.
Who could have predicted that?
If anyone could have, you could have, and you were surprised.
Well, Frederic, who, you know, who was running 8chan before, or founded 8chan before he sold it to Jim and Ron Watkins, he was very insistent.
He figured out before other folks that Jim and Ron Watkins were behind it.
And we did collaborate on a piece, a Reply All piece, where we were the first to point the finger at, you know, to say who QAnon is, to say that it's Ron Watkins, essentially, and Jim Watkins.
And I think Colin, probably the filmmaker who made Q Into the Storm, also knew at that point, and probably figured it out before us, but his work took a little while to come out.
So I guess I predicted some of it, but yeah.
Julian just brought up some of the figures that end up rolling this ball towards the White House.
And in episode 42 on our podcast, we had Kalen Robertson join us.
And he talked about being red-pilled at the moment where he sees Milo Yiannopoulos and McInnes, Gavin McInnes, kissing each other, ironically, outside of the Pulse nightclub after the massacre.
And you have this description from late in your book that I think pulls so many of your threads together all at once.
You write, Yiannopoulos and McInnes were the final demented regurgitation of youth counterculture, which had passed through a 50-year-long digestive tract of corporate co-optation.
The weird creatures that emerged were Frankenstein's monsters, stitched together abominations, abhorred by humanity and holding together pieces of themselves that would never mend because they were already dead.
Freakishly, McInnes was a punk venerating the square suburban values of the 1950s.
Even weirder, Yiannopoulos channeled 1980s gay counterculture to teach hordes of young straight men who couldn't find girlfriends That they should give up on life and play video games all day.
So, question number one is, like, how much opium did you have to smoke to put all of those fucking things together?
Because that characterizes the book, is, like, you are describing the infrastructure of what ends up becoming a huge movement of conspiracy theories.
And you are doing it with a lot of pins in the corkboard, and it doesn't really feel like corkboard guy, but the number of things that you have to bring together is amazing.
And I guess it's reflective, too, of the internet itself.
And I'm wondering if that has kind of influenced your writing style, is you have had to look at everything at once.
Well, yeah, I mean to answer your question, I think the only thing I was high on was just having to think about 4chan for like three years.
I just see my job as taking all like this sort of endless firehose of information and trying to organize it into a simple surveillance.
A set of ideas that actually make sense, right, to sort of contextualize it.
So that was the idea, to try and take, discard the irrelevant stuff, put the relevant stuff in and sort of at least, maybe it's wrong, but at least try and present a system that says, hey, maybe we can just understand all of this elaborate nonsense this way.
We'd sort of step back and it just looks like this shape.
Rather than just like a bunch of gobbledygook.
So that was the idea.
And of course, I guess, you know, it's up to the viewer to decide if I succeeded.
I tried to, of course, you know, meet both and talk to both Yiannopoulos and McGinnis.
Yiannopoulos, I could not.
He snuck off when I was like, you know, like they wouldn't talk to me.
But I did go to an event where they were both there.
And McGinnis would talk to me.
He wanted to fight me.
One thing you realize about him is that he's very short.
Really?
Really?
How short?
How short is Gavin McInnes?
I'm like 5'8", and he's probably like 5'3".
Yeah, I was looking down.
You're kidding.
Yeah, I was looking down at him.
He's like a Tom Cruise dude.
Yeah.
And you know, so it was ridiculous.
Like I laughed, right?
And he was very mad that I laughed.
Oh my god, I had no idea!
I gotta process that.
Yeah, unfortunately, after the book had gone to print, I would have written it in there, and then it's not really relevant enough to write, and you're like, maybe.
But yeah, he was dressed in all white, and then I spoke to a friend who knows him personally from years ago, and he said, yeah, Gavin dresses in all white because he thinks it makes him look bigger.
Oh man.
And then afterwards, his prop boys apologized to me.
They're like, oh, sorry.
Foolish characters, right?
So, you know, it's like, how do you make sense of people so ridiculous that, you know, that were so successful at being so ridiculous?
Well, but you also humanize the landscape by showing them as being individuals who are also, you know, manipulating a vast number of people.
You end on this really kind of haunting note of hope.
In a way, where you write that the internet has provided a means by which nastiness can be excavated and collected in a reservoir, but the font of all that unhappiness is not human beings but their context.
Fortune is not the waste byproduct of some natural capacity of the mind to be weird and cruel.
Rather, it's the byproduct of cruel societal artifices, our culture's emphasis on materialism, entertainment, culture, and self-gratification.
And I suppose to the extent that McInnes is going to, people like McInnes and influencers and grifters like that are going to manipulate those very properties.
We just, we can't forget the human beings that are, you know, at the center of their thrall.
Yes.
Yeah.
For sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean that, yeah, that sentiment really came out of this idea that like a lot of the times that was how it was considered that, oh, people are toxic.
That's why the internet is toxic.
This experiment on the internet, well, turns out people are just so terrible that that's why we can't have this free exchange of information.
And yeah, I think it's something else that's going on.
I think it's these other sort of problems that are infecting the internet.
The hardest part to listen to, and I mentioned earlier when we started about misogyny being an underpinning,
Was when you were talking about Gamergate and you were actually reading the text of what was being said, some of which I've heard, but some of which I have not, and how just plain disgusting it is and what happens when a group of boys who have no actual experience talking to women get together and think that they might be thinking.
And as I'm listening to this, I'm realizing you spent so much time in these spaces.
How is your mental health after spending so much time there?
Oh, it was terrible.
Oh, God.
Yeah, it was like, you know, that scene in Harry Potter where Gandalf has to drink all the poison to, like, get the key?
It kind of felt like that, where I was like, all right, I'll just keep drinking the poison.
Yeah, it took me a while.
I was kind of like, after the book, I was like, all right, it'll be over.
I'll just not write about this anymore.
But then I sort of reached a point where I guess I got a little inoculated to it.
Now I just sort of accept it as, now it doesn't sort of, it doesn't really affect me as much.
And not in sort of a numb way, but you know, Matthew yesterday you were talking about just in like, you know, the idea that part of the process is sort of like ripping away the surface, you get to like the kind of like diminished human beings that are actually there, like the actual sort of like, just the very human figures that are kind of behind all this, right?
Derek, like the idea that like, you know, there's people that wrote that, you know, when I finally got to interviewing enough of them, like a lot of them are really sad young men who some of them are really, have really extreme autism where they really have mental health issues or they're just in a terrible place in their life.
And a lot of them will never really sort of climb out of it.
And then, but it's also been heartening to see a lot of, or some of them at least, I think, You know, Frederick among them, where a lot of them just learned.
A lot of them, it was a phase in their life.
They were in this sort of quavering, quivering identity crisis.
And they realize, well, I'm going to kind of change into something else, or it's like not working.
Dale, one thing that I want to thank you for as we close up is that I have two sons.
They're five and eight now and you used the word inoculation in your last comment and what I'm really happy about is that at a certain point I'll be able to hand them this book as a tour guide through this particular part of internet and world history and It'll be informative.
It'll be empathetic.
And I think that it will allow them, it will help them see that their online relationships are grounded in a kind of historical materialism and relational reality that they have to respect and take care of.
And I think that's like really, really important for young men of the future to have.
So I just wanted to thank you for that.
Oh, thank you.
Well, thank you guys.
So much.
Your questions were just, yeah, so thoughtful and nuanced.
