4chan, the skeleton key to the rise of Trump

RandomThrowaway410 · 2019-09-06T14:46:14+00:00

This was a good article, until I made it to this sentence:

Like (by comparison the tame and sophisticated precursor) “Something Awful” board that spawned it, 4chan defined itself by being insensitive to suffering in that way only people who have never really suffered can — that is to say, young people, mostly young men, protected by a cloak of anonymity.

Young men just don't know what real suffering is!

...give me a fucking break, holy shit.

Blauwpetje · 2019-09-06T14:45:53+00:00

The strong part is that the author admits the left failed the 4chan boys. However, I get the impression that, like so many lefties, his conclusion is also that their antifeminism is a misunderstanding at best and a conscious delusion from extreme rightwing elements at worst. Still assuming that he won't get far.

romulusnr · 2019-09-06T22:16:49+00:00

the left should regard Anon/the deplorables as a failure on its part, a terrific mangling of the left’s own arguments that has resulted in alienating the very group of people who could be the most helped by their ideas, if not the most convinced.

Been saying this for years. Guys who ended up becoming incels could easily have been allies, if the dominant narrative hadn't been to vilify, fault, scapegoat, and hate them, and ultimately discard them. You don't get people to follow you by telling them they're awful.

romulusnr · 2019-09-06T22:27:12+00:00

I do think that the emphasis on 4chan as a pool of hate and destruction is misguided. When you don't have a valve for pressure, things blow up. 4chan is/was that valve for many people. A place where the id can play, where offensive jokes aren't going to get you fired or hated, where you discover that the dark thoughts in your head don't make you a freak. A place where bad taste can thrive; like a public access channel or a bathroom wall or backstage at a punk venue.

Going through an adolescent nihilistic phase is a normal part of human existence. Like all phases, not everyone leaves it. 4chan isn't alone as a culture of apathetic "fuck it." Back in the day you had kids who would start fights at concerts just because. We didn't plaster other epithets onto them like "can't get laid" or "live in parent's basement" or what not. Before that, you had punks, greasers, and so on (the author briefly mentions beatniks). As famously said, "some men just want to watch the world burn." 4chan's Trumpery -- assuming you can even make such a massive generalization of everyone that ever comments on a given website with multiple corners of interest -- is basically that. The world is fucked anyway, so might as well have some fun with it.

I firmly believe in a theory that almost all of pop culture originates in a cesspool of society. The author points out that 4chan is almost entirely responsible for meme culture. There's plenty of things that come from the seedy underbelly of society. They are born in that primordial soup and eventually get cleaned up and polished enough for mass consumption. You'd be hard pressed, I think, to point out any piece of popular culture that doesn't have a lineage back to a back alley or an abandoned building or a fetid swamp or an illegal speakeasy or something else. 4chan was that place for our modern era for many years. If we try to pave over all those potholes, I fear, we risk stagnating our own culture. Prohibition never works.

Melthengylf · 2019-09-06T13:29:14+00:00

This is a text from 2016, it touches many masculinity issues, and it could be said that it was the text that helped me awake that us men were not having a wonderful time. When I was a teenager, back in 2010 I had been a 4chan user.

highmrk · 2019-09-08T22:57:21+00:00

I think this article is very very good... before you get breadpilled. Still amazing analysis, but the context is stupid. Almost as if widespread economic anxiety, alientation, loneliness epidemic, lack of good jobs, and people wasting time on smartphones have nothing to do with Trump getting elected

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