However, this Hefnerian vision of manhood was still tied to economic achievement. Like the breadwinner version of manhood, it encouraged conformity and merely changed the system of rewards. I was surprised to learn this was the work of one of the creators of the fantastic webcomic "A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible".

As my parents’ generation replaced forest and farmland with pavement and a multitude of stores selling ever more elaborate and specific items, I wondered, naively, what would come next: What would replace these things that were built to disappear? Would my generation drastically alter the landscape of America as the previous one had? The answer, of course, was no. What would replace these stores was more stores, piled on top of one another in a mad jumble. Odder still, many people seemed unhappy with this development. The vast parking lots, for example, were friendly to shopping but inimical to human beings. And this is to say nothing of what economists label the “externalities,” all the hidden costs that go into production, like the pollution in the air and the destruction of the environment—once a mere tragedy, now an existential threat in the form of global warming. The book spends an inordinate amount of time on explaining the economic situation of the generations it encompasses and the genRevisiting Gamergate was a maddening experience, making me feel crazy all over again for not grok-ing why my co-workers were so mad about ‘ethics in games journalism’ and how that tied to right wing politics. The section on how Depression Quest actually mirrored the very people who sought to destroy those surrounding the game was simply brilliant. Beran is at his best here.

Beran recounts 4chan.net's history as a social media platform for disaffected, socially awkward, deliberately offensive white man-boys steeped in nihilistic trolling and jokey memes like the now-infamous Pepe the Frog. 4chan’s mutating ethos, he contends, married the victim culture of its self-labeled low-status 'beta males' to the alt-right’s prescription of white nationalism, patriarchy, and fascist power politics as a salve for the grievances of dispossessed men, culminating in a half-sincere, half-cynical embrace of Donald Trump." ― Publishers Weekly Or, to take an example from the news, what are we to make of social media? Examining this topic in a narrow but interesting way, Dale Beran has penned It Came From Something Awful, an expansion of a 2017 essay in which he claimed that the peculiar 4chan discussion board provides "the skeleton key" for understanding "the rise of Trump." there was a teeming mass of people out there who knew with fatalistic certainty that there was no way out.” Even the Associated Press, which is generally slow to get with the times, recommends using a deadname “only if relevant to the story.” So how is Chelsea’s transition relevant to her whistleblowing, and its influence on Anonymous? It isn’t. Her transition isn’t relevant at all, six years after it happened. Everyone knows who she is at this point. The American countercultural revolution, the spirit of ’68 that started with the baby boomers then swept the globe, intended to remake the world into a more equitable and human-centered place. But whatever it did manage to do, it wasn’t quite that.

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Beran recounts 4chan.net's history as a social media platform for disaffected, socially awkward, deliberately offensive white man-boys steeped in nihilistic trolling and jokey memes like the now-infamous Pepe the Frog. 4chan's mutating ethos, he contends, married the victim culture of its self-labeled low-status 'beta males' to the alt-right's prescription of white nationalism, patriarchy, and fascist power politics as a salve for the grievances of dispossessed men, culminating in a half-sincere, half-cynical embrace of Donald Trump." -- Publishers Weekly Other books that have attempted to understand the psychology of trolls get to one or two aspects of the lifestyle and mindset: the LULZ, the libertarianism, the boredom. Very rarely, however, do they dive deep into the sadness and self-loathing, and the extreme darkness that leads to the anger and, inevitably, violence of young alt-righters. I think this book should be read by people who have kids and don't understand how easily these organizations are trying to get your son to become a kind of foot soldier for 21st century white supremacy and misogyny. The teenage nihilism of the 1990s "endured well into the 2000s, longer than most youth cultures," Beran argues. But "like wine turned into vinegar, it could decay no further." It started as trolling, saying bizarre and awful things for the comedy of saying the bizarre and awful. Eventually, according to Beran, the people doing the trolling came to believe their own messages, saying bizarre and awful things because they thought the bizarre and awful were true. Thus the alt-right was born. And thereby was Trump elected. I’ve got some serious issues with his arguments I’ll get into below, but it’s here that more and more obvious (to me anyway) factual errors start to creep in. This might be because I know some of the topics better.