What did leftypol think of this book? I thought it was pretty good

What did leftypol think of this book? I thought it was pretty good.

Only people that have actually read the book may reply to this thread.

careful, you'll trigger all the incel posters that think even a vague mention of them is racist against inceldom

Angela
Angla
Anglo

I thought it was great, probably the single best dissection of our generation's biggest culture war and all the factors that have created our current online political landscape, which simultaneously accounts for a lot more and a lot less then what you'd expect. It's a good critique of idpol in general, both Left and Right, and she does a good job of pointing out that the factors that lead many to become alt-right aren't complete bullshit without capitulating to them like one of those alt-lite faggots, or Laci Green or something. She's a true Leftist, and we honestly need more people like her right now.

It was ok. My criticisms are mostly general rather than specific. The biggest is that it reads like a forum post or rather like a handful of wall of text forum posts one after the other where OP has a bunch of RESERVED posts immediately after opening a thread. I'm not sure if it was a deliberate stylistic decision given the subject or if Nagle is so Extremely Online that that's just how she writes. Either way, it needed a bit more love from an editor.

As far as the analysis goes it's reasonable. Her accounts of events and how they flowed from one to the other, how the political character changed with each step, the role of post-ironic edginess and the way some media commentary careers (among ie. the "alt-lite") were built by pandering to certain segments of the subculture and bringing them closer to the conservative right mainstream was very sharp.

Something else that stood out for me when reading - and even moreso listening later on when she was doing the podcast circuit - was how shallow her understanding of the emotional motivations and grievances of her subjects is though, especially when it comes to "anti-feminism". It's inevitable really since, despite whatever time she spent in the online spaces she describes it was clearly as a partisan observer with a particular point of view and political agenda rather than as somebody who was organically part of them going on to write a retrospective. And that's fine as far as it goes, but it's not a coincidence that gaps were filled with what amounts to online left folklore and that her take turns out to be extremely flattering to her own social layer of woke, networked, middle class media leftists/left-libs even as she's criticising behaviour from other factions inside that layer.

That accompanying criticism of the left is valuable though and even though there was nothing particularly new in it (it even included the obligatory Mark Fisher references IIRC), the more it gets said and the more contexts it gets said in increase it's chances of getting better cultural penetration in the mainline lib/left which is still very "Tumblr" and could do with a whole lot more reflection on it's own part in this shit.

It really cries out for a companion piece to fill in the areas where this book is weakest. Something that would really dive into what motivates these guys, what their criticisms of the way things are actually are and where they come from and why they ended up on the right by somebody who "gets it" in a way that (call me a sexist), a middle class woman with a media career doesn't and probably can't.

I have been on the chans for a decade. Does this book say anything I wouldn't already know?

PDF for poorfags who can't buy

Based af. Really glad that Nagle seems to be repopularising Fisher's Escaping the Vampire's Castle. I feel like we're actually starting to see a lot more backlash against SJW nonsense from the left, because leftists are actually starting to realise how much damage its doing to us, and how it's actively fueling the far-right.

Ah, there was something that was bothering me about the Nagle shilling on this board and elsewhere, I think this is it, you just put it into words for me. Nagle and her lib-left social circle see people on chans as "inferior" somehow. As leftists, that's not how we should act towards each other.
I think equality is something most of us here agree with, and when I read that review Connor Kilpatrick wrote on Amazon, where he talks about Nagle "braving the dark grottos of the internet" or whatever, it strikes me as so snobby. What was it that makes them better than anyone, again? Blue Twitter checkmarks?

You think? Honestly, reading her book I felt like she had a deep understanding of chan culture, and probably grew up on 4chan in her teenage years like so many of us. She seemed really intimately familiar with the culture.

Having not read the book I'm going to make a cross-hypothesis anyway.

It's not just whether or not she's familiar with "our" culture, but also if she shares our lack of familiarity with "their" culture. If one gets the impression that they are familiar with outside, antithetical cultures then this becomes a greater obstacle than any hypothetical gaps in their knowledge of "our" culture. (Along, for the lines, the example of being a crossboarder or also using Reddit. "If you were really one of us, you wouldn't know/do that.")

a-are you h-her? *blushes*

To be fair, there is also some degree of condescension present in the chans as well, with anons saying that they're smarter than the rest of the general population or smarter than everybody else and whatnot.

She shilled on this board? Fucking weird shed even come here.

Well "we" have embraced that characterisation to some extent so it's hard to get too mad about it. But it does still baffle me how imageboards and shit are talked about by these guys like they're some mysterious alternate dimension you can have to be initiated into some secret society to access. They're just fucking web forums essentially. Like, I get that they're pretty different from social media like fedbook/instragram/twitter/reddit and some people find anonymity intimidating for some reason but they're aren't THAT hard to use. Anybody familiar with late 90s/early 00s phpBB and similar shouldn't have the kind problems that people claim to have when they're justifying their ignorance by saying they're too hard and scary.

I think the distinction is that those people are either in relative positions of power (i.e. buzzfeed listicle writers) or at the very least semi socially successful. Despite perhaps hovering around the weirdish hipsterish sort of area, they're not the kind of social pariahs that you find on imageboards, alternating between being completely ignored by society and being completely misinterpreted.

I'm coming around very close to a sort of "prejudice + power" articulation of insult as of late, albeit with a focus on a mixture of class and social status rather than race.
At the same time there is perhaps more nuance warranted. The idea of imageboards as this sort of purely nerd outcast thing is becoming an increasingly bizarre falsehood. While certainly more outcast than average and certainly containing a greater proportion of outcasts, most 4chan users at the least would by my own estimation probably now fall into normal-person territory as opposed to the preferred stereotype of the NEET. (It's too clunky to actually assemble, but I have an analogy about fascist support from petit-bourgs and "middle classes" here, and how they like to now present the Nazis as primarily appealing to the working class to disavow this sort of element of themselves. I think the same is perhaps true of the socially normal but not exceptional, trying to disavow their own behaviour again onto the socially outright stunted.)

Thinking of reading this. Should I expect a section where it gets it 100% factually wrong on the events of Gamergate?

If you still care about gamergate you should read The Peaceful Pill instead.

It was definitely a watershed moment in mass media disinformation.

there's one or two offhand mentions but she doesn't really dwell on it or go into any kind of detail. it's a pretty short book so you're not losing much time/energy to give a read regardless. The main problem you might have is that if you've even been on periphery of all this shit then you probably know most of what's in there (and probably know it better than the author)

Been meming on image boards for over a decade and somehow I've still never seen that Kony 2012 video she references in the introduction. I only now understand that "jackin it in San Francisco" reference in a South Park episode. 2normie4me?

Kony2012 was sort of like… I dunno, Chanology for Facebook? I guess? It wasn't really a thing in the "the dark grottos of the internet" AFAIK, but lots of people think it was important as a very visible failure of clicktivism that lead to a lot of the post-ironic cynicism that came after (she points to Harambe as a kind of ultimate expression of this)

I'm not sure I approve of the way she throws around the word "misogyny" so wantonly but I don't know the details of her examples so far tightly enough to say her usage is wrong.

...

chanology for facebook is a perfect description of kony 2012

Still inclined to disagree with this for the reasons outlined (quite poorly) in
It may be remembered as the moment because Historians are often lazy hacks who repeat what others say (hey, journalists!), but a microcosm of the whole thing would basically just be Scottish Politics, and even more specifically Scottish [political] Twitter and press circa 2012-15. (Fuck me, talk about small reference pools.)
Increasingly the case would appear to be it's just media disinformation for the modern age. (One perhaps wonders if OWS got the same treatment but was so rife with internal problems and handing over so much ammunition willingly that it was impossible to tell at the time. I mean, it's a cliché to say the Scots invented everything…)

Should really get around to reading that book on the election and subsequent election campaign by a reporter working alongside the Pro-UK campaign (PDF related if anyone else is a bored bibliophile) to see if it can provide a better broad-based analysis on the sort of outline of media relations in the modern world. (Mostly I think it focuses on how incompetent the pro-UK campaign was, which is entertaining but not a go-to PDF to diminish gamergate.)

Yep, finally got to the gamergate section. Very one-sided and half-assed analysis that completely glosses over the censorship, the sustained media attack on its own readership after being called out, the collusion, the myriad payola scandals in the game coverage industry leading up to it, etc. No mention whatsoever of the central point of contention that the game coverage industry has because so incestuous that people can quite literally be in bed together for good coverage–just that Zoe Quinn made a shitty game and grumpy woman hateric gamers really didn't like that. She talks about the poor women being harassed for a bit and then proclaims it's impossible to get to the facts of everything so we had better just stop here.

If this is the level of journalistic laziness I can expect from the rest of the book then I'm not sure this is worth my time.

I mean I really have to press on this: Did people on Holla Forums really read Kotaku to begin with, other than to find things to get angry about? Does anyone except the blue tick brigade and the ex-post-facto purchase justifying consumer actually read gaming news sites in the era of YouTube let's plays and Imageboard/Reddit eviscerations?

Furthermore thinking on my feet some observations on GG more widely:
#1 The blue-tick meme phrase "lived experience" comes in quite handy here. One can assume pure laziness, for example - but considering the imageboard oriented nature of GG and the sheer shitflood of tweets and other data, "good journalism" on the topic would be impossible even for a computer. The reason a one sided approach is essentially inevitable (and this includes my own one-sided contempt for all other sides.) isn't down to any attempt to mislead, but the sheer scale of the non-event. Like a war where nobody died and lots of people were literally shaking.

#2 The whole thing really was ridiculously bourgeoisie-liberalish with hindsight. Is the problem the systematic economic forces that give off the impression of direct collusion between publisher and reviewer where none exist (for example, the tacit knowledge that bad reviews mean less review copies get sent to you mean less readership - without any explicit threats.) - nah, it's the possibility that some corrupt individuals are doing bad things, and that if we just replace those corrupt individuals with good journalists and based companies then the industry will be saved! - and they call political determinism idealistic…

Pure unadulterated bullshit. The actual logs are publicly available and always have been. And people think this person is somehow a regular imageboard poster?

9 words in
Yeah I'm guessing this wasn't the most stringently edited

Who, the author? She was almost certainly on Twitter by that time. Anti-gamergate (a real faction) is not able to accept that they made "strategic" mistakes. Protecting Quinn from all accusations of interpersonal violence was the first one.

But like, yeah GG was a disaster; yeah, it's partly their fault. But so what? Do we need them to admit this? It's fighting the last battle.

Gamergate isn't just a lesson in what anonymous culture can vomit up, it should rightly be a lesson in whose arms anarchistic libertarian techies can be pushed into (the Right's) when idpol-obssessed liberals acquiesce to a propaganda campaign and throw them under the bus to virtue signal.

I'm going to take the unpopular route and argue that for the most part those people would've gone right anyway because a substantial motivation remains the controversy as opposed to coherent political belief. Even going full Tankie wouldn't really work because it's not quite a cultural byword for senseless evil like naziism is. (Instead being neutralised with "Oh you mean well, you'll grow out of it…")

There's some post-Irony and other insanity involved too, but it's been more than 24 hours without sleep again so screw trying to tie all that in. Suffice to say that it's an increasingly tempting outlook to just write the internet off as a mistake, given that the rot set in much before it was apparent what was happening. (For example while it's common enough to say "it all went wrong in 2007", the forces building up to 2007 warrant rants of their own.) This appears to be a tangent but is actually highly related.

no gods, no editors

My problem is I feel so disconnected from facts and reality these days that I can't take anything seriously that has these sorts of flaws. I'm suffering badly from the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.


Except I find myself incapable of forgetting anymore. I demand absolute accuracy to take my sources seriously because I'm terrified of being taken for a ride.

Do I sense a fellow Scot here?
I honestly think even things like Brexit should be viewed as following on from 2012-2014 in Scotland. The lies that were told by BT/Project Fear were noted by those down South and potentially led to them not trusting in the fear tactic + empty economic promise shit used by the remain side.

Journos are talentless hacks, it's why they have a job writing for porky.

Talk to real people comrade.

I mean, I can only advocate further detachment from reality ("not caring") - or a transition to a sort of politicised fact-taking. ("Well I'll just disavow that whole chapter, but the one before it was okay despite the two being interlinked") The sort of rationalist obsession with facts is very ideological. (I mean, there's a reason "evidence based policy" is slathered all over /r/neoliberal. It's partially ironic, of course - but it's also how they like to see themselves) - reality is present (sorry crazy postmoderny type people who apparently exist and are probably French), but in many cases it's simply impractical to take onboard all the relevant facts, or the facts may simply get in the way of doing the correct thing, or indeed (As I'd push on GG) the facts don't really matter to begin with.

What's really relevant here isn't the facts of GG but what the outlook of the author signifies more widely about where she stands, etc. Perhaps most drawing on point #1 - the total aggregate of facts will never be known, only individual experiences - all lies and poor memory. Or in turn, all books on the topic will be unreadable to most people with investment - which may not be such a bad thing.


Indeed.
One has to wonder to what extent the leave campaign studied the Yes campaign. The dynamics were quite different (substantial print support for Brexit despite impressions otherwise probably being the main one, not to mention different cultural dynamics.) but the co-occurrence is interesting. Perhaps even bigger would be the failure of the Remain campaign to learn from Scotland and adopt the lead-pissing-away strategy.

I'd say some degree of looking north was a thing, you could probably look up some quotes/books they've written since. UKIP as a party certainly took some direct lessons from the SNP (Farage is arguably the English interpretation of Salmond's leadership style).
Ah well, the remain faction thought that they won 2014 when in fact they simply failed to lose in time. Dropping from a 70% No to a 55% No or whatever the exact numbers were is a major failure but they still saw that as a win for No and why learn lessons from a victory?
The one 'lesson' they learned is that negativity isn't as popular as possibilities but their attempted solution was to claim 'yes' for staying in the EU and 'no' for leaving as if it was possible to boil down the successful Yes campaign up here to a simple choice of words (you can look this up, they admitted to 'learning' it from Scotland). When that was denied they tried the same trick with Remain and Leave as if that would help…

Not that user but it wasn't only Kotaku, it was more mainstream sites like Rock Paper Shotgun, by the way look up the relation between RPS and Wings, makes for fun reading as a Scot PC Gamer and Escapist sites which are/were read on occasion for general news.
Holla Forums does and did not use let's plays. The silent majority did, in fact, occasionally visit a mainstream site just for basic news.

Needed copyediting but she's the first person to publish a book admitting the alt-right's recruitment pool comes from the incels that the sexual revolution created. A lot of pundits just calls them virgins but she actually digs a little bit to explain how a lot of them actually ended up being losers