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Bezig met laden... Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan And Tumblr To Trump And The Alt-Rightdoor Angela Nagle
Books Read in 2020 (1,608) Bezig met laden...
Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. Much more nuanced analysis of the right than the left. It's hard to see Tumblr as so politically powerful - or as monolithic - as Nagle claims. I did like the discussion of the evolution of men's movements, and I'd consider using it in classes if only there were some citations or attributions. That seems to be an issue with Zero Books generally in the last few years. A pretty comprehensive account. There was a lot of new (to me) information and the stuff that I knew already was placed in context. I usually read about the online right either right from the source or through a critical left framing, so it was clarifying to follow Nagle's more neutral explanations. I really ought to give this book one or two stars for its two worst sins: (1) the author does not cite ANY sources, not one citation in the book’s 120 journalistic/nonfiction pages, and (2) the book badly needed a more thorough editor for grammar consistency and quality (in one case the author writes “Aids” instead of “AIDS”). But at the time of writing this review I have decided to not be strict about formal stuff and rate it more based on the topics explored in the book. This book reads more like a longform blog post than an actual published work of nonfiction - lots of presumed knowledge of slang and subculture, an easiness of tone, (NO CITATIONS), etc. But as far as blog posts go it’s pretty dang good. The central topics covered are those of 4chan culture: alt-rightism, misogyny, racism, trolling. It also touches on the quote-unquote SJW culture of Tumblr. There is a lot of journalistic tracing of the histories of these ideas and cultures and what academic theories they purportedly come from. That stuff is not very interesting to me except as gossip. Many internet figures that get mentioned—who were probably very prominent at the time of writing—have since faded into irrelevance and memory, if that. But, in spite of the majority of the book’s content being just okay (and sometimes just unnecessary), it did have one very interesting hypothesis running through it… The aesthetic qualities of transgression, subversion, and counterculture were once deployed by leftwing political activists (using that term loosely), defining their side in the US culture wars of the 60s and 90s. However, recent years have revealed that these qualities are not in themselves symbolic or definitional of leftwing politics, and in fact are more like tools that can be wielded by whatever group is most convincingly able to use them at a given historical moment. Right now, in the 2010s and maybe through the early 2020s, that happens to be rightwingers—notably, white supremecist, misogynistic, transphobic, pro-inequality internet users. This historical revelation must make us then reevaluate how we use transgression, subversion, and counterculture, make us reconsider whether they actually do have value in and of themselves, and be more cautious in our evaluations of movements that seem to channel them. Lastly, kind of a side note, there really needed to be at least SOME discussion of how racist 4chan is. Yes it’s shocking/outrageous, yes it’s misogynistic, yes it delights in misery, that’s all true and worth talking about when discussing 4chan. But it’s also one of the most seriously, violently racist cultures I’ve ever seen, and that surely merits another one of these 10-15 page chapters. Backseat writing but whatever. Summary: this purportedly nonfiction book has no citations, is filled with grammatical inconsistencies and errors, catalogs the culture wars of 4chan and Tumblr, and has an interesting hypothesis about the inherent valuelessness of transgression/subversion/counterculture. 3/5 but a more serious reviewer would penalize the author more harshly for the citations and grammar problems.
Nagle does not invite us to share a thrilling sense of horror and disgust at the cruelty of alt-right and alt-light meme culture; instead, she implicates left strategies in particular and contemporary internet culture in general in participating in the creation of a world in which the alt-right could rise. In some ways, Nagle’s book explains Hillary Clinton’s dramatic failure to damage Donald Trump’s campaign when she fingered him as a champion of the alt-right. Clinton’s great reveal was greeted by alt-right champion Richard Spencer as great publicity, and Trump voters did not move to the middle. To Nagle, Clinton’s shaming strategies reveal her ignorance of the actual political dynamics of the electorate. Nagle continues, ‘those who claim that the new right-wing sensibility online today is just more of the same old right, undeserving of attention or differentiation, are wrong’. What marks out this new right, drawing together misogynists, white supremacists, anti-Semites and sundry other hate groups, is that it is situated squarely within a postmodern landscape. Nagle describes how the alt-right directly draws upon the ideas and methods of postmodern counterculture, especially its tactic of transgression, and its mocking and dismissal of everything normal, normative, hegemonic or produced by and for the masses – in short, anything that has a whiff of universality about it. Just as hipsters mock those outside of their archly ironic inner circle, by appropriating the look and style of white trash while drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, the new alt-right online culture mocks the ‘normies’ – that is, those who don’t ‘get’ the nihilistic, self-ironic nature of alt-right internet boards. OnderscheidingenErelijsten
"Recent years have seen a revival of the heated culture wars of the 1990s, but this time its battle ground is the internet. On one side the alt right ranges from the once obscure neo-reactionary and white separatist movements, to geeky subcultures like 4chan, to more mainstream manifestations such as the Trump-supporting gay libertarian Milo Yiannopolous. On the other side, a culture of struggle sessions and virtue signalling lurks behind a therapeutic language of trigger warnings and safe spaces. The feminist side of the online culture wars has its equally geeky subcultures right through to its mainstream expression. Kill All Normies explores some of the cultural genealogies and past parallels of these styles and subcultures, drawing from transgressive styles of 60s libertinism and conservative movements, to make the case for a rejection of the perpetual cultural turn"--back cover. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)303.48Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Social Processes Social change Causes of changeLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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It also covers some of the worst misogynist and racist rant in 4chan and its cousin 8chan online bulletin boards.
I don’t recommend this book for pleasant summer reading but it is nevertheless useful to know what is going on outside the bounds of civil public debate.
What the book lacks and so many quasi-academic journalistic accounts do these days is context. It seems that these vicious verbal attacks — primarily against women — spring out of nowhere. It’s as though they were creatures solely of the invention of these online forums.
Some of it is plain evil and evil has been with us a long, long time and to this day remains difficult to stop or even properly define.
I am not a particularly religious person, but I must admit to the mysterious nature of such behaviour.
Nagle also recounts for us the terrible saga of Gamergate where a female game programmer is pilloried in the forums for the sin of dumping her boyfriend. Bullies abound in this book.
I also felt the book could have been improved with simpler sentences and better explanations of the time frames: when you’re talking about trends or the evolution of ideas it’s useful to hold the reader’s hand a little more often. These things are not so obvious to all but those deeply immersed in the subject.
Which, in the end, made me question whether I was the targeted reader for this book.
NOTE: I was writing this essay in the aftermath of the senseless killing of two young woman and the wounding of many others mere steps from one of my businesses in downtown Toronto. The events frightened us all, and we were even involved in the cleaning up afterward. I cannot stress enough that we must be extra vigilant when women are singled out for terror and revenge. The fabric of our neighbourhoods is at stake. ( )