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"Kill All Normies", Angela Nagle posted:"What we now call the alt-right is really this collection of lots of separate tendencies that grew semi-independently but which were joined under the banner of a bursting forth of anti-PC cultural politics through the culture wars of recent years. The irreverent trolling style associated with 4chan grew in popularity in response to the expanding identity politics of more feminine spaces like Tumblr. This, itself, spilled over eventually into ‘real life’ in the ramping up of campus politics around safe spaces and trigger warnings, ‘gamergate’ and many other battles."  Angela Nagle, a left-wing cultural critic and journalist for the Baffler, has written the first widely read treatise on the 'alt-right'. At about 200 pages "Kill All Normies" is a quick read that offers a brief history and wide survey of prominent alt-right figures, some of the major events that gave birth to the movement, and some of the cultural and political antecedents to the alt-right movement, and even a limited taxonomy of its major factions. The initial reaction to Nagle's work has been mostly positive, with laudatory reviews rolling in from across the political spectrum. It's not every day that a book on contemporary politics manages to get glowing reviews from Jacobin, the National Review and the New Republic, and that alone makes this a book worth reading: Jacobin posted:Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Donald Trump sheds a crucial beam of light on our present moment. It accomplishes this because its author did the dirty work: Nagle read, aggregated, and interpreted the actual mass of 4chan, Tumblr, and Twitter messages that have accumulated online over the last half-decade. (“Thank god,” writes Amber A’lee Frost, “because I’m sure as hell not doing it.”) National Review posted:An entertaining new book explores the roots and rise of the Internet’s most infamous subculture. After the culture wars of Western politics went online and were appropriated by Millennials, something strange happened. You could see it when Jeopardy! champion and Twitter personality Arthur Chu surveyed the phenomenon of young men pushing against the influence of feminist criticism on their entertainment and declared, “As a dude who cares about feminism sometimes I want to join all men arm-in-arm & then run off a cliff and drag the whole gender into the sea.” Those on the left side of these wars claimed to be victims as individuals even though, as a collective, they were capable of bullying people out of their jobs and harassing them to to the point of suicide. Taught by self-esteem con artists and children’s media that everyone is special in their own way, this generation in turn taught itself that everyone is oppressed in their own way. The New Republic posted:In Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right, published by Zero Books, Angela Nagle plumbs the depths of the noxious digital morass that fed off Trump’s rise. Where some have seen unfathomable chaos, Nagle—an academic and journalist who’s covered digital subcultures extensively—aims to faithfully document the online culture wars that “may otherwise be forgotten.” By presenting one of the few holistic and sensible taxonomies of the alt-right, Kill All Normies offers a bulwark against desultory assessments of the movement that blur the myriad of ideological differences that make the movement’s origins and goals feel impenetrable. It is also a wake-up call to those on the left-liberal spectrum that it is high time they got their act together. It's worth asking how somebody in 2017 managed to write a book that is earning praise from the brocialist left, the lieberal centre and the cuckservative right. And the answer is simple enough. This book tells them what they want to hear. Nagle wrote her PhD on online misogyny and her work for the Baffler gives her an ideal perch from which to write this book and I was greatly excited to actually read it. My initial impression was highly positive but on reflection this book needs some work. There are no citations, no interviews, very little concrete data and a great deal of impressionistic analysis. Nagle demonstrates her scholarly erudition with references to Nietzsche and de Sade as well as to certain noteworthy events in the history of the 'culture wars' such as William F. Buckley's debates with Gore Vidal up to the infamous Gamergate controversy but at other times she seems to uncritically accept the alt-rights presentation of itself. Why, then, has this book proven so appealing across the political spectrum? Probably because one of its core messages is that the contemporary alt-right emerges, to a large degree, from the excessive conditions created by parts of the liberal left, especially as it manifested online in the early 2010s. For Nagle, this 'tumblr-liberalism' has much to answer for: it has spurred a right-wing backlash, continues to drive young people away from left-wing causes, acts as a mask for neoliberals who oppose any kind of economic populism, and cultivates styles of argument and habits of mind that leave the left incapable of meeting and defeating alt-right arguments on their own merits. How you feel about that argument will play a big role in how you feel about the book. But rather than me writing a tiresome essay on the book lets just start talking about it! In this thread I will periodically post excerpts and summaries of the book, chapter by chapter, in the hopes of keeping the discussion moving. However, I encourage people to talk about any part of this subject that interests you. For those who haven't read the book you should be able to follow easily enough just reading the excerpts. Much of Nagle's work is also directly anticipated by three essays she wrote for the Baffler, all of which are available here. An article she wrote for Jacobin, also discussing the alt-right, is available here. A google books preview of Kill All Normies can be found here. And for the reading challenged, here's an interview with Nagle on El Chapo Traphouse IMPORTANT NOTE This is a discussion Thread for talking about Nagle's book and any related topics. That includes some contentious topics like gamergate. Talking about gamergate is fine but any rants are going to end up with people getting probated Helsing has issued a correction as of 16:24 on Jul 17, 2017 |
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Introduction: From Hope to Harambe Chapter One: The leaderless digital counter-revolution Chapter Two: The online politics of transgression Chapter Three: Gramscians of the alt-light Chapter Four: Conservative culture wars from Buchannan to Yiannopoulos Helsing has issued a correction as of 15:09 on Jul 26, 2017 |
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Jul 17, 2017 16:00
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i'd rather not give angela "nazis are the left's fault" nagle money but will be interested to look at the excerpts posted here
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Jul 17, 2017 16:12
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While the book definitely needed more work, I feel like this is a good jumping off point for 'normies' trying to come to terms with what the alt-right has become. Nagle's work tends to focus on particular individuals or memes (Harambe, Milo) that are representative rather than overarching. One of the better critiques I've read of the book - and there are some out there - comes from this blog post which Nagle herself noted as asking some of the same questions she asked herself as she was working on the book: https://politicsandletters.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/angela-nagle-v-judith-butler-243-us-192-2017/ A lot of the other criticism tends to be lazy and zero in on one argument of the book and overemphasize its importance. She connects the alt-right to 'tumblr-liberalism' and the cult of transgression that emerged from 1960s counterculture but people tend to see that connection as her blaming 'the left' in that they should take personal responsibility for the alt-right existing rather than a broader Trends and Forces argument. People who claim the former are being intellectually dishonest and only reading the parts of the book that they feel apply to them and ignore the majority of the book focuses on the alt-right. I will say there are a few oddly sympathetic moments to the alt-right that I would attribute to just underdeveloped ideas. Talking about how tumblr-liberalism has spilled into campuses and triggered (heh) a brain drain she cites Jordan Peterson as an example, without really explaining who he is or why that's really a loss. Given what Peterson has produced for the alt-right, I'm not really convinced. I also waffle on the criticism that she takes some of the ways the alt-right represents itself at face value. On one hand, she's explaining how the alt-right portrays itself and understands the world in order to make sense of what probably seems to people an incoherent internet rage machine. On the other hand she does at times break from that to make fun of the fact of how inconsistent and sad the men of the manosphere are, with the exception of the Proud Boys who, in her eyes, are at least consistent in how they approach women and the world. So her approach to the alt-right does seem uneven. Again, I think it's just underdeveloped ideas here and there. I find Nagle's feminism interesting. I imagine some tiresome people have accused her of being an anti-feminist, mainly because she doesn't really align with what I'd consider mainstream feminism. She invokes Dworkin and a few other feminist scholars of the 80s and their reaction to the transgression-based counterculture of the New Left, noting that often the destruction of sexual and moral boundaries tended to favour men, no matter how much women wanted otherwise. I definitely see that influence affecting her critique of the modern left. Nonetheless she's got some brutally succinct arguments about why progressive politics' love affair with the idea of transgression was a poisoned pill: “for progressive politics anti-moral transgression has always been a bargain with the devil, because the case for equality is essentially a moral one.” (from the NYMag review here). It's a good book and it's worth discussing and I'll keep commenting as we work through it. Dreylad has issued a correction as of 16:29 on Jul 17, 2017 |
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Jul 17, 2017 16:27
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Oh another useful thing is it breaks down how the alt-right is divided into different factions and how these different groups view one another. I see over and over on these forums about how the alt-right is this monolithic bloc, but it's clearly not true. Just as the alt-right views leftists as a feminist, SJW, cultural marxist bloc. Also, she points out that the alt-right is doomed to the same problems that plague the left that the alt-right draws inspiration from: infighting and an inability to summon any political strategy once they achieve power.
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Jul 17, 2017 16:43
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i bought this book but haven't read it yet. i think i can get to it this week, maybe this thread will inspire me!!!! i find the criticisms of her blaming the left for the creation of the alt-right suspect, but i will wait until i've read the thing until i cast judgement. given that the alt-right is 100% a reactionary movement, it seems to make sense to me intuitively. but we'll see!!
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Jul 17, 2017 16:49
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I'll get around to reading this book eventually. Like Nagle, Ive been stalking these people for a while now. Unlike her I don't blame the tumblr left.
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Jul 17, 2017 16:55
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havent read the book but im pretty sure all normies are going to kill themselves after the series finale of game of thrones.
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Jul 17, 2017 17:30
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i mean unless hbo unveils some got spinoff series which they probably will
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Jul 17, 2017 17:31
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I've already read but it's pretty short so re-reading on a chapter by chapter basis will be a piece of cake. I thought it was good but I do wish she cited stuff though. Some of the quotes in the tumblr-liberalism section seemed like they could've been fakeposts so I'd have liked to be able to check them out myself (although if you're writing a book like this, I'd hope you'd have a good fakepost detector).
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Jul 17, 2017 18:04
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That page/page and a half of weird sexual identities is straight out of tumblr.txt, and honestly not my favourite part of the book (I get the idea after the third weird sexual identity carved out by people who have invested their lives in cyberspace, yes), but from what I remember from what people were posting in 2011-2013 it's probably pretty legit.
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Jul 17, 2017 18:12
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R. Guyovich posted:i'd rather not give angela "nazis are the left's fault" nagle money but will be interested to look at the excerpts posted here huh, tell me more on that
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Jul 17, 2017 19:32
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the alt right is new GBS' fault
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Jul 17, 2017 19:41
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Weeping Wound posted:huh, tell me more on that This is a good overview. She overstates the connection and to do so she takes the alt-right at face value which is like, lol. She doesn't straight up say "this is all tumblr's fault" but the argument she makes isn't very good.
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Jul 17, 2017 19:43
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Fallen Hamprince posted:the alt right is new GBS' fault Everything bad online is SA's fault
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Jul 17, 2017 19:44
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Fallen Hamprince posted:the alt right is new GBS' fault loving ralp
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Jul 17, 2017 19:46
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Im the person on the bus reading a book that has an extremely large KILL ALL NORMIES
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Jul 17, 2017 19:46
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an actual dog posted:This is a good overview. She overstates the connection and to do so she takes the alt-right at face value which is like, lol. oh my god lmbo the Marquis de Sade
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Jul 17, 2017 19:50
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I might be speaking too soon but I'm pretty sure everything in Kill All Normies is already out of date. Bretbart is dying, Milo is dead, Verizon is gonna shut down Tumblr and Trump was always a normal republican but even more so now.
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Jul 17, 2017 20:00
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now we need a book on europa identity and baked alaska, can't wait!!!!!
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Jul 17, 2017 20:06
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an actual dog posted:I might be speaking too soon but I'm pretty sure everything in Kill All Normies is already out of date. Bretbart is dying, Milo is dead, Verizon is gonna shut down Tumblr and Trump was always a normal republican but even more so now. That's the danger of analyzing internet culture in general. I think that flaw could have been avoided somewhat by tying internet political movements to the "real world" political movements of today, instead of looking back to the feminist movements of the past. The internet is real life, and it has always been. One positive thing I will say about the book is that it does discuss points of division decently well.
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Jul 17, 2017 20:25
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an actual dog posted:Everything bad online is SA's fault its ironic that SA was founded on making fun of the bad parts of the internet but went on to incubate the worst parts of the internet when u look into the abyss etc
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Jul 17, 2017 20:38
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Dreylad posted:Also, she points out that the alt-right is doomed to the same problems that plague the left that the alt-right draws inspiration from: infighting and an inability to summon any political strategy once they achieve power.
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Jul 17, 2017 20:40
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an actual dog posted:I might be speaking too soon but I'm pretty sure everything in Kill All Normies is already out of date. Bretbart is dying, Milo is dead, Verizon is gonna shut down Tumblr and Trump was always a normal republican but even more so now. Why would tumblr be shut down
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Jul 17, 2017 20:42
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Uncle Wemus posted:Why would tumblr be shut down dont make no money
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Jul 17, 2017 20:44
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Whatever you can say about Nagle's book she isn't exactly offering up Horse Shoe theory, but I think part of the books widespread appeal is that a casual reader could easily interpret her book in that way. R. Guyovich posted:i'd rather not give angela "nazis are the left's fault" nagle money but will be interested to look at the excerpts posted here Her target isn't the "left" per se, it's post modernism of the Judith Butler variety as it has filtered down into internet discourse and been manifested on sites like UpWorthy or everyday feminism. One of her principle criticisms of the "Tumblr-liberal" blogosphere in the early 2010s is that she thinks these sites were intentionally used to undercut calls for greater economic equality. That blog Dreylad linked to earlier actually summarizes her position as "an old leftist’s idea of what a young leftist should be—a sworn enemy of identity politics, a dedicated partisan of class struggle. " Dreylad posted:
I imagine that Nagle was under a lot of pressure to get her book to the presses quickly. The alt-right is a hot commodity right now so I'm sure her publisher wanted something to be released as soon as possible to capitalize on the buzz. Also, as others have pointed out, this topic evolves so quickly that it doesn't lend itself to studied reflection - at least half the groups and personalities she discusses will be forgotten in five years. I do think her book would benefit from at least one chapter that actually moves beyond taxonimizing the alt-right and discussing the substance of some of its claims. I think the first moment that I really started to question the books narrative was after she uncritically accepted the MRA derived idea of the modern dating and hookup scene as a "steep sexual hierarchy" in which growing numbers of men are forced into celibacy. But we'll get to that later. Overall I think this is a book worth reading or at least discussing. Even if its flawed it's the first actual attempt by the left to make any sense of what the alt-right.
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Jul 17, 2017 20:46
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an actual dog posted:I might be speaking too soon but I'm pretty sure everything in Kill All Normies is already out of date. Bretbart is dying, Milo is dead, Verizon is gonna shut down Tumblr and Trump was always a normal republican but even more so now. The defining nature of internet politics is how fluid/mercurial it is. Macron has gone from Literally Satan to #Basedmacron among the alt right because he's racist.
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Jul 17, 2017 20:47
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Uncle Wemus posted:Why would tumblr be shut down Net neutrality going away. The exact thing that also going to kill 4/chan and Reddit
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Jul 17, 2017 20:49
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So, for those who are interested in a real overview of the book I'm going to try and walk through it chapter by chapter, starting with her introduction. Introduction: From Hope to Harambe Nagle's book opens with a discussion of the contrasts between the celebratory atmosphere surrounding Obama's first candidacy in 2008 - with people "ecstatic to be part of what felt like a positive mass-cultural moment" - and the wide-spread mockery of Hilary's appearance on the Ellen DeGeneres Show eight years later. Clinton "became a source of comedy and ridicule among large online audiences from right across the political spectrum". Nagle writes: quote:"How did we get from those earnest hopeful days broadcast across the media mainstream to where we are now? This book covers this period from the perspective of Internet-culture and subcultures, tracing the online culture wars that have raged on below the line and below the radar of mainstream media throughout the period over feminism, sexuality, gender identity, racism, free speech and political correctness. This was unlike the culture wars of the 60s or 90s, in which a typically older age cohort of moral and cultural conservatives fought against a tide of cultural secularization and liberalism among the young. This online backlash was able to mobilize a strange vanguard of teenage gamers, pseudonymous swastika-posting anime lovers, ironic South Park conservatives, anti-feminist pranksters, nerdish harassers and meme-making trolls whose dark humor and love of transgression for its own sake made it hard to know what political views were genuinely held and what were merely, as they used to say, for the lulz. What seemed to hold them together in their obscurity was a love of mocking the earnestness and moral self-flattery of what felt like a tired liberal intellectual conformity running right through from establishment liberal politics to the more militant enforcers of new sensitivities from the wackiest corners of Tumblr to campus politics. Nagle writes that the Obama period saw "the death of what remained of a mass culture sensibility, in which there was still a mainstream media arena and a mainstream sense of culture and the public." Trump's victory was also a victory against the mainstream media, which is widely held in contempt across the political spectrum. This is reflected by the chaotic nature of modern social media: Nagle compares the iconic blue-and-red pencil portrait of Obama - an official symbol commissioned by the campaign and then spread in a top down fashion to social media devotees - with the anarchic and uncoordinated nature of r/TheDonald or Bernie's Dank Meme Stash on facebook. "The year 2016 may be remembered as the year the media mainstream's hold over formal politics died", writes Nagle. She then catalogs several examples of how viral content spread online and the cycles of activist enthusiasm and deep cynicism that was provoked. Nagle uses the Kony2012 campaign and the emergence of the Harambe memes to demonstrate the chaotic and often contradictory pathway that memes take, as well as to illustrate how a kind of knowing cynicism became the default poise of the internet: "By 2016, after countless repeats of the Kony 2012 cycle form virtue to disgrace, a spirit of deep nihilistic cynicism and reactive irony bubbled up to the surface of mainstream Internet-culture and an absurd in-jokey forum humor became dominant." For Nagle, this is crucial to understanding the emergence of the alt-right: quote:"It was amid this ironical in-jokey maze of meaning that the online culture wars played out, that Trump got elected and that what we now call the alt-right came to prominence. Every bizarre event, new identity and strange subcultural behavior that baffles general audiences when they eventually make the mainstream media, from otherkin to far right Pepe memes, can be understood as a response to a response to a response, each one responding angrily to the existence of the other. Trumpian meme-makers ramped up their taboo-breaking anti-PC style in response to genderbending Tumblr users, who themselves then became more sensitive, more convinced of the racism, misogyny and hetero-normative oppression of the world outside of their online subcultures. At the same time, the 'deplorables', from the Trumpian trolls to the alt-right, view the Hilary loyalists - the entrenched identity politics of Tumblr and the intersectional anti-free speech campus left - as evidence of their - equally bleak view of a rapidly declining Western civilization, as both sides have become increasingly unmoored to any cultural mainstream, which scarcely resembles either bleak vision. So this is how Nagle frames her book. One good point she makes which hasn't been addressed yet is the huge transition the internet made from a fundamentally anonymous place to the modern "panoptic" world of social media in which your entire history and identity become both commoditized and subject to intense scrutiny.
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Jul 17, 2017 20:53
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deadgoon posted:dont make no money neither does sa but that hasnt stopped it
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Jul 17, 2017 21:00
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Helsing posted:So, for those who are interested in a real overview of the book I'm going to try and walk through it chapter by chapter, starting with her introduction. sure, I'm down with this
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Jul 17, 2017 21:09
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Can't take her seriously when she practically attributes the rise of the alt-right to tumblr liberals. The real surge in the alt-right came after Trayvon/all the other police murdering black men incidents as well as the refugee crisis/immigration. The number one topic being discussed in these alt-right shitholes is always, without fail, race. Racism against non-whites and the degrees of how racist they are has always been the #1 uniting /dividing force for these people. It is completely loving absurd to infantilize these parasites by saying they're just sexually frustrated nerds/outcasts who got bullied by liberals.
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Jul 17, 2017 23:40
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Scent of Worf posted:Can't take her seriously when she practically attributes the rise of the alt-right to tumblr liberals. The real surge in the alt-right came after Trayvon/all the other police murdering black men incidents as well as the refugee crisis/immigration. The number one topic being discussed in these alt-right shitholes is always, without fail, race. Racism against non-whites and the degrees of how racist they are has always been the #1 uniting /dividing force for these people. It is completely loving absurd to infantilize these parasites by saying they're just sexually frustrated nerds/outcasts who got bullied by liberals. It's also worth noting that the main narrative that got picked up was about campus sjws because that ties in with mainstream conservative thought about liberal brainwashing. There isn't (well, wasn't...) going to be that mainstream acceptance of spewing racial slurs constantly or saying that all women deserve rape. That doesn't make Tumblr special, or more of a tipping point, than any of these other causes. The internet is real life. You really can't separate the two.
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Jul 17, 2017 23:45
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Well I'm interested in how she ties Upworthy into it. It was started by a former MoveOn.org guy, and had for awhile colonized Facebook by manipulating the psychology of Facebookers' sharing behavior until the FB engineers tweaked the algorithm. The content itself was very woke but also painfully inoffensive. But it came across as insidious and manipulative.
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Jul 17, 2017 23:50
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You can say that X is a reaction to Y without blaming Y or excusing X.
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Jul 18, 2017 01:47
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Yeah, I'm not sure why people are saying that Nagle blames Tumblr for the creation of the alt-right. She simply points out that some of the discourse on Tumblr typifies a certain type of identitarian discourse, often toxic in nature, which has bled over into the mainstream from online subcultures, and that to some extent the alt-right can be seen as a reaction to it. It's certainly not the only thing she discusses and it doesn't even take up a large portion of the book.
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Jul 18, 2017 06:46
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the trump tutelage posted:You can say that X is a reaction to Y without blaming Y or excusing X. "Would there be an alt-right without the tumblr left?" is the big question though, and Nagle doesn't have a compelling answer.
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Jul 18, 2017 07:04
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Is that actually the purpose of the book though? Whether or not the alt-right would exist in some alternate universe without tumblr, is a fundamentally unanswereable and therefore uninteresting question. Whether the alt-right has gained an outsized prominence is very answerable, and the history of that deserves examination - that's inevitably going to mean examining the forces that preceeded it, including that it conceptualizes itself as directly opposing, warts and all. If doing that upsets you, because you either identify with tumblr or think that tumblr is worth defending in some sense, you're not ready to talk maturely about this issue. It is part of the context, and whether it is to blame (a moralistic argument, or more generously a functionalist argument) isn't as important as to whether it's relevant (a historical argument). rudatron has issued a correction as of 07:58 on Jul 18, 2017 |
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Jul 18, 2017 07:51
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Scent of Worf posted:Can't take her seriously when she practically attributes the rise of the alt-right to tumblr liberals. The real surge in the alt-right came after Trayvon/all the other police murdering black men incidents as well as the refugee crisis/immigration. The number one topic being discussed in these alt-right shitholes is always, without fail, race. Racism against non-whites and the degrees of how racist they are has always been the #1 uniting /dividing force for these people. It is completely loving absurd to infantilize these parasites by saying they're just sexually frustrated nerds/outcasts who got bullied by liberals. These are people who are mad they can't use the n word on XBOX live anymore so checks out
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Jul 18, 2017 11:46
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R. Guyovich posted:i'd rather not give angela "nazis are the left's fault" nagle money but will be interested to look at the excerpts posted here The nutty tumblr people aren't "the left" any more than the alt-right is "the right." They're small movements that make a lot of noise. In fact the neoliberal center seems a lot more enamored by their message of always putting idpol first because it's an easy way to dismiss any leftist economic argument. Rather than act all defensive why not just try to disassociate the actual left from these people? MaxxBot has issued a correction as of 12:48 on Jul 18, 2017 |
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Jul 18, 2017 12:19
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