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The particular incarnations of the online left and right that exist today are undoubtedly a product of this strange period of ultra puritanism.”
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. Sade’s writings emerged at a similar time as the emotive public spectacle. Emotional performativity coinciding periodically with sexual sadism is perhaps indicative of a greater relation. It is significant here too that, despite the constant accusations of ‘Cultural Marxism’ by the Trumpian online right, the countercultural aesthetics of anti-conformism in the US were later cultivated by the US government as part of a culture war against communism.” This book was so weirdly organized that I really could not figure out who her audience was. I assumed it was someone like me who is addicted to the internet and already knows who all these people are, because she was dropping names with no explanations. This was fine as I said, but then she did explain them later so I was like ??? The book was not aimed at converting anyone and I think it would honestly just offend both 4channers and Tumblr users. And there was no class/material analysis so that turns off a bunch of the left. Anyone who is a "normie" would probably not be interested in the topics at hand especially since as I said they are talked about with the assumption that the reader already knows. The only thing I can think of is maybe Red Scare types who think that culture is the only force worth looking at. Culture is very important and I think the topics in this book are really important to talk about, but I can't say it enough: this was going too shallow on too many angles. Anyway 3/10 bc I suppose I don't have vehement disagreements on the surface but the argument is so shallow and messy that I was not entirely sure what to take away in the end, and I think she was overly sympathetic to the AltRight without extending the same nuance to the denizens of Tumblr. Todd Gitlin, a key figure in the Berkeley New Left movement, emerged as an internal critic of the left over that round of campus wars, arguing that the left ‘marched on the English department while the right took the White House.”
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.).
The ease with which this broader alt-right and alt-light milieu can use transgressive styles today shows how superficial and historically accidental it was that it ended up being in any way associated with the socialist left.” https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/upshot/measuring-donald-trumps-mammoth-advantage-in-free-media.html Nagle’s explanation for their omission is that she ‘just didn’t think they were that important’ — surely representing the worst imaginable scenarios for alt-right membership.It seems to me that the book could have been an important and momentous document of the internet „wars“ of recent times, but that it got rushed and a little hamfistedly thrown into publication before reaching a decent level of finishedness. Can't recommend this one highly enough. And to everyone. Essential to understanding how the death spiral of our national discourse *can only be understood dialectically.* Nagle makes the compelling case that the success of the alt-right and what she calls the alt-light (not really overtly Nazi, more capitalizing on the newfound glamour of fascist thought) in their endeavor to shift American culture toward a misogynistic, overtly racist direction is rooted in the so-called left's reliance on the "politics" of transgression (think the Piss Christ).
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