In academia, the ‘cultural turn’ saw a radical shift in scholarship whereby universities made culture the focus of contemporary debates. It also meant a shift in emphasis toward meaning and away from a positivist epistemology of discerning objective truth. I don't really know who Nagle is, but my guess is that she falls into the same dirtbag left camp as like Anna Kachiyan and Aimee Terese etc. I guessed this because she name drops the same people like Lasch and Paglia and the like, who I haven't read but I barely even gained any insight into here because it seemed like more of a name drop as an in-group signifier rather than any real engagement. But anyway, I'm guessing since it's published by zero books and she talks about Mark Fisher a bunch that she's a leftist but there is no class analysis or discussion of material conditions anywhere in this book. Online is important and online and real life impact eachother, but you would never know that from reading this. While you could treat Trump's victory as the big win, she didn't spend too much time analyzing the ways in which the Alt Right aided his election and I think stuff like Charlottesville might not have happened at this point. The first few chapters go over some of the history of what would influence or become the Alt-Right. NRx, Dark Enlightenment, the 'Alt-Light', GamerGate, Richard Spencer, 4chan, Milo, weev, MGTOW, The Rebel, Pat Buchanan, Breitbart, Alex Jones, and Mike Cernovich are just some of the names mentioned. A few are examined further, Nagle is hard to follow as she jumps from point to point, never constructing a good timeline for all this information she throws at you. She writes about some ideological splits between them, and gives many examples of disgusting ideas and actions carried out by some of these people/communities, particularity 4chan and Milo. While I was already aware of most of this, I can see how someone who is unfamiliar with all of this, and doesn’t know where to start, would find this valuable. Really disappointed by this. I'm fascinated by internet subcultures and the seedy underbelly of the web. I'm deeply interested in politics. This book seemed like a slam-dunk. I also recommend these two podcasts where Ms. Nagle (and Ms. Frost in the 2nd one) discuss the book and related themes in the context of socialism.

I originally didn't want to read this book, only having read a few excerpts whining about Tumblr (more specifically, trigger warnings and gender identity) that made me not want to touch it. The book kept popping up on my newsfeed, and so I decided to read it to see if it fulfills its hype (Spoiler alert: it doesn't). a b Gais, Hannah (6 July 2017). "What the Alt-Right Learned from the Left". The New Republic. Archived from the original on 9 July 2021 . Retrieved 14 March 2018. If you know nothing about the alt-right, its allies, predecessors, etc., you may get some value out of this book. You’ll have to get through a lot of sloppy writing and jabs at transgender people to get to it. The history of the Alt-Right and how the left can fight it is a topic that should be looked into, but it deserves to be written about by a better author than Nagle. Clarification (12/1): the bias I mentioned above is (surprisingly) directed toward what Nagle calls “Tumblr liberalism,” which she excoriates as if it is the “Social Justice Warriors” who irritated the alt-right into existence. There are multiple reasons why this is a horribly ignorant argument, but the first has to be the fact that the alt-right is not just a bunch of shitposters and trolls who only recently got off their asses and started publicly doing something.Did Nagle use Schwartz's article as a source of information in this part of the book? Is this plagiarism? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Related: a lot of things the Left thought were inherently left (anarchism, transgressive art, focusing on culture wars rather than elections) can be used effectively by the Right. I also liked that she shows how there is just as much infighting on the right. I see lots of calls for left unity online with the reasoning is that the Right is so united, but that is not the case at all. She highlights the differences in belief of different groups and explains why they hate each other just as much as they hate the mainstream. First of all: Holy shit. This is a book that I have been waiting to read for quiet some time now, but the level of insight and highly comprehensive discussion of what is going on in the cultural wars on the Web by Nagle exceeded my expectations. It reminded me of early works by Naomi Klein which combined the journalistic approach to the material at hand with detailed, but still accessible discussion of the theoretical aspect of the subject. Liu, Catherine (30 July 2017). "Dialectic of Dark Enlightenments: The Alt-Right's Place in the Culture Industry". Los Angeles Review of Books. Archived from the original on 31 July 2017 . Retrieved 14 March 2018.

I wanted to read this ever since it came out. I was on tumblr in the year of our lord 2014 and attended Oberlin College at that time, which is basically used as punching bag in the same way as tumblr is. In fairness, it sometimes was like being on a tumblr dash but in real life at all times. Being a freshman I basically absorbed all of this uncritically and had the same tumblr identity politics as everyone around me, but I was also OBSESSED with lurking on incel forums and even turned in essays analyzing Return of Kings for school. I absolutely read Elliot Rodger's manifesto in full. I considered myself immune from any ideology on those forums because I am basically the exact type of stacy girl that incels hate. All of this is to say, I have been paying attention to both of the worlds in this book for several years and was very excited to read something that would synthesize all that knowledge and draw some useful conclusions.It could have been longer, for example, and could have touched upon many things that I felt should deserve more detail (e.g. the growing sphere of nu-atheistic pseudo-rationalism; the whole of neoreaction; accelerationism as it appears online, etc.). That's about it for the usefulness of the book, and to get to it you have to power through her complaints about trigger warnings and gender identity sprinkled throughout these chapters. Nagle clearly knows more about 4chan and the alt-right than Tumblr and internet left subcultures, since she really drops the ball when talking about the left. She lumps the left into one big tent, and obviously misunderstands the various factions and arguments being made. Among the few distinctions she makes among the left, she hilariously claims that the ‘real left’ consists of members such as The Young Turks, Owen Jones, Jacobin, and Chapo Trap House. You don’t hear about Marxists, Anarchists, ‘Anti-Imperialists’, and others, Nagles idea of politics left of ‘Tumblr’ stop at Chapo Trap House or Jacobin. She also scolds the left for ‘crying wolf’ when some called Trudeau a white supremacist and defended Hillary Clinton by calling those who disagree with her sexist, to her the Alt-Right is the real wolf. Aside from the ridiculous implication that the Prime Minister of a settler-colonial state like Canada can’t be a white supremacist and it’s just ‘crying wolf’, I’d be very surprised if there is any large group of people who would call Trudeau a white supremacist but also say not supporting Hillary is misogynist. There are NGO-careerists and bourgeois liberals who appropriate social justice theory to support people like Clinton and say that not being pro-Clinton is sexism. These are not the same ideologies that consider Trudeau a white supremacist, which includes marxists, anarchists, and whoever else. Nagle lumps anything she doesn’t like on the left into one big basket labelled ‘Tumblr-Liberalism’, she doesn’t bother making ideological divisions among the left, beyond Tumblr and the ‘real left’ mentioned above, despite doing so for the Alt-Right.