Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
Even a few very simple editorial changes, like offering embedded links in the eBook edition or a glossary of some of the otherwise inscrutable terms, could have made this a better book.
As old media dies, gatekeepers of cultural sensibilities and etiquette have been overthrown, notions of popular taste maintained by a small creative class are now perpetually outpaced by viral online content from obscure sources, and culture industry consumers have been replaced by constantly online, instant content producers. Compare the first election won by Obama, in which social media devotees reproduced the iconic but official blue-and-red stylized stencil portrait of the new president with HOPE printed across the bottom, a portrait created by artist Shepard Fairey and approved by the official Obama campaign, to the bursting forth of irreverent mainstream-baffling meme culture during the last race, in which the Bernie’s Dank Meme Stash Facebook page and The Donald subreddit defined the tone of the race for a young and newly politicized generation, with the mainstream media desperately trying to catch up with a subcultural in-joke style to suit two emergent anti-establishment waves of the right and left. Did the Vietnam War shape the ideologies and views of the left and right during the 60-70s that Nagle talks about?Other times the term is used to describe the socially well adjusted rarely-online person being observed by the very online shut-in. Nagle sets the stage by comparing the Obama's 2008 presidential campaign with Clinton's 2016 campaign, wondering why Clinton's campaign was met with widespread internet mockery and memes - despite employing the same tricks as the Obama. The process may take a few minutes but once it finishes a file will be downloadable from your browser. Nagle argues that the pain, suffering and victimhood-affirming culture of Tumblr-liberalism is one of these reasons for the failure and I think she is right. She doesn’t explain why we should oppose No-Platforming aside from relying on the supposed ridiculousness or ‘hysteria’ of the No-Platformers, and saying that the people being No-Platformed are people of importance.
The connection between Trump and the alt-right, a major selling point of the book, is barely elaborated on. Chapter 5 starts with a bold, unsubstantiated claim: that the internet left caused the right to react and move more right, partly due to “making increasingly anti-male, anti-white, anti-straight, anti-cis rhetoric normal on the cultural left” brought on from identity politics (which she doesn’t bother defining). Nagle, who locates herelf in the left spectrum, prophesies: "If the left wants to move forward, it is time to put away the aesthetic values of this counterculture - and to invent something new". There are no citations, no interviews, no statistics, nothing (Maybe I'm unfamiliar with how books of this genre are written, but you'd think she'd cite something)!In the past, I spent 2 years on 4chan (on /b/) and 2+ years on Tumblr (following liberals and then marxists). In a section about the histories 4chan, Anonymous, and hacking, Nagle blockquotes this 2013 article by Sanjiv Bhattacharya for Esquire on pages 29-30.
If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats. Indeed, Nagle argues that the Alt-Right has co-opted liberalism’s transgressive rhetoric and aesthetic. However, in addition to inexcusably sloppy editing and bad writing (Please, someone ask Angela Nagle about "Barak" Obama or Peter "Theil," or why she's apparently on a first name basis with Milo Yiannopoulos despite consistently referring to others by their surnames), the book lacks any kind of affection for any of these subcultures. Nagle focusing on the act of No-Platforming (‘free speech’) rather than the individuals being No-Platformed is telling.
She claims that Pepe Memes and Otherkin are examples of a feedback loop of transgressiveness between the Alt-Right and Tumblr left. Nagle has a great talent for conveying the nature of the forums and vlogs without having to visit them, but also it is quite clear that she does not take these opinions seriously.
Great Deal 
New Comment