Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
That's about it for the usefulness of the book, and to get to it you have to power through her complaints about trigger warnings and gender identity sprinkled throughout these chapters. Nagle clearly knows more about 4chan and the alt-right than Tumblr and internet left subcultures, since she really drops the ball when talking about the left. She lumps the left into one big tent, and obviously misunderstands the various factions and arguments being made. Among the few distinctions she makes among the left, she hilariously claims that the ‘real left’ consists of members such as The Young Turks, Owen Jones, Jacobin, and Chapo Trap House. You don’t hear about Marxists, Anarchists, ‘Anti-Imperialists’, and others, Nagles idea of politics left of ‘Tumblr’ stop at Chapo Trap House or Jacobin. She also scolds the left for ‘crying wolf’ when some called Trudeau a white supremacist and defended Hillary Clinton by calling those who disagree with her sexist, to her the Alt-Right is the real wolf. Aside from the ridiculous implication that the Prime Minister of a settler-colonial state like Canada can’t be a white supremacist and it’s just ‘crying wolf’, I’d be very surprised if there is any large group of people who would call Trudeau a white supremacist but also say not supporting Hillary is misogynist. There are NGO-careerists and bourgeois liberals who appropriate social justice theory to support people like Clinton and say that not being pro-Clinton is sexism. These are not the same ideologies that consider Trudeau a white supremacist, which includes marxists, anarchists, and whoever else. Nagle lumps anything she doesn’t like on the left into one big basket labelled ‘Tumblr-Liberalism’, she doesn’t bother making ideological divisions among the left, beyond Tumblr and the ‘real left’ mentioned above, despite doing so for the Alt-Right. a b Gais, Hannah (6 July 2017). "What the Alt-Right Learned from the Left". The New Republic. Archived from the original on 9 July 2021 . Retrieved 14 March 2018. 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.). 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. “Kony 2012” videos among others comes to mind in this rush to collect “virtue points” in this scarcity of virtue market on the Web. Also, the intra-left purge and exclusion of the critics of this self-pleasing activities is another example (Nagle gives the example of Mark Fisher who sadly committed suicide this year). I believe this book has the highest standard deviation of review scores of any book I’ve read on Goodreads, which for movies is a good indicator of a cult classic.
Tumblr leftism is juvenile and bad (I think this is the weakest part of her thesis, but then again I'm a dirty Tumblr leftist) The first few chapters go over some of the history of what would influence or become the Alt-Right. NRx, Dark Enlightenment, the 'Alt-Light', GamerGate, Richard Spencer, 4chan, Milo, weev, MGTOW, The Rebel, Pat Buchanan, Breitbart, Alex Jones, and Mike Cernovich are just some of the names mentioned. A few are examined further, Nagle is hard to follow as she jumps from point to point, never constructing a good timeline for all this information she throws at you. She writes about some ideological splits between them, and gives many examples of disgusting ideas and actions carried out by some of these people/communities, particularity 4chan and Milo. While I was already aware of most of this, I can see how someone who is unfamiliar with all of this, and doesn’t know where to start, would find this valuable. I really wanted to like this book. I really, really did. It blends all the right topics--politics, sociology, Internet culture--and I spent a significant portion of my adolescence on both Tumblr and 4chan, so the subject material is both familiar and fascinating to me. I sat down to read it with true eagerness...and emerged horribly, horribly disappointed. Three main points: 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. Did Nagle use Schwartz's article as a source of information in this part of the book? Is this plagiarism? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯Nagle does a good job of laying out and explaining many of the alt-right's pet tropes and running jokes, but her analysis is really disappointing and ultimately buys into the right's same errant argument that "politics is downstream of culture". For a lot of the '90s and '00s, that assertion seemed to be true, as neoliberal aims took over both parties and so much of the material basis of politics went off-limits. When culture war is the entire game, of course it's going to seem like the most important thing and what ultimately decides elections. To be honest, without the fact of children I would not even be thaaaaat worried about these reactionary fringe groups, because they are so fringe by nature and the celebs have mostly imploded. She argues that these alternative forms of media have superseded mainstream media, but that is a sign of someone who spends all their life online and doesn't see how the vast majority of people still watch the news. If anything, the Trump presidency is the best thing to ever happen to mainstream media because they can position themselves as the #resistance and can benefit from outrage at whatever spectacle Trump has created. I really have only two complaints, one major, one minor. The major complaint is that, for an avowed materialist, there is very little materialism here - almost all the cultural phenomena are understood in terms of continuations of and/or reactions to other cultural phenomena. Of course, providing an adequate materialist explanation would be a fully separate research project; but Nagle's ontological commitments, and some of the subjects she touches upon (for instance, her discussions of Thomas Frank and "populism,") call out for more nods in this direction, even when her immediate topic (the online culture wars) and thesis (that the valorization of transgression for its own sake is inherently self-defeating and vacuous, and that as a positive political project the left was always stupid to embrace it) are essentially cultural. I’m not an extremely on-line politics person, so I found this to be an really concise and useful guide to the roots of the on-line right and how it all ties in to today’s broader political climate. This is what cultural criticism should be: it draws on academic theory while remaining readable, is capable of impassioned polemic and clear partisanship while remaining relentlessly fair regarding matters of fact, and in general, it knows its stuff. (Like Nagle, I am perhaps overly familiar with the forms of online discourse she describes; and that she was able to do so so accurately makes me trust her on everything else - for instance, on the fascinating history of how representations of "the mainstream" have been gendered.)
Davis, Charles (20 May 2018). "Sloppy Sourcing Plagues 'Kill All Normies' Alt-Right Book". The Daily Beast . Retrieved 28 November 2018. a b MacDougald, Park (13 July 2017). "The Unflattering Familiarity of the Alt-Right in Angela Nagle's Kill All Normies". New York. Archived from the original on 9 July 2021 . Retrieved 28 November 2018. I originally didn't want to read this book, only having read a few excerpts whining about Tumblr (more specifically, trigger warnings and gender identity) that made me not want to touch it. The book kept popping up on my newsfeed, and so I decided to read it to see if it fulfills its hype (Spoiler alert: it doesn't). The on-line left, as in Tumblr, SJW, performative wokeness, and the other kind of identitarianism is briefly covered as well. Nagle draws a line through history from the 'culture wars' of the 1960s to those of today, arguing that the transgressive, countercultural spirit historically embodied by the anti-establishment left has been sublimated much more effectively by the modern right. She also undertakes an in-depth (though concise) review of the many, many factions of what is often sweepingly referred to as the alt-right, from 'chan culture' to the alternately pathetic and terrifying 'manosphere'. Not only is this pretty fascinating in itself, it also brings to light the serious theoretical and academic roots of certain strands of this movement – something often ignored by liberal pundits who concentrate instead on clutching their pearls at the outrageous antics of high-profile figures like Milo and Alex Jones. The idea of a handful of demagogues and professional trolls riling up people who essentially don't understand politics has been a common theme (deployed with varying levels of sensitivity) in analysis of the Trump and Brexit victories; Nagle's study shows this to be dangerously reductive.It's an argument that's been done to death and I'm not going to rehash it here because Nagle didn't bother either. There's an interesting but undercooked theory about how the Tumblr-Left try to create "outrage scarcity", treating their oppression as a value commodity. I also recommend these two podcasts where Ms. Nagle (and Ms. Frost in the 2nd one) discuss the book and related themes in the context of socialism. Then things gather misogynistic momentum with #gamergate (the Middle Eastern conflict of the Internet) and /b/. Add some white nationalism and identitarianism and you get /pol/ and The_Donald.
And I wasn't totally convinced by the idea that 4Chan and other such forums are just taking transgression, as celebrated in art, to its logical conclusion. It's not just another twist in the culture wars. It's not as though critics and artists haven't historically differentiated between types of transgressive art and what individual works are saying. I don't think transgression for transgression's sake has ever really existed or been 'successful' in art? I don't know enough to say. I was expecting to be interested in this, but I didn't expect to be so impressed by it. Angela Nagle writes so even-handedly and with such a fair critical eye about recent iterations of disruptive political groupings on both the right and left. On the right is the now-notorious alt-right, divided between the 'alt-light', typified by meme-making/gleefully antagonistic trolling/use of 4chan-derived argot, and the more genuinely fascistic tendencies often masked by the headline-grabbing behaviour of alt-light figures such as Milo Yiannopoulos. On the left is what Nagle sometimes refers to as 'Tumblr-liberalism', the extremely performative culture of calling-out, victimhood and competitive identity politics that seems driven by (and here I will quote Nagle quoting the late Mark Fisher, as it couldn't be paraphrased any more perfectly) 'a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd'. Some reservations toward this book. It seems mostly just as if it's unfinished; typos abound, strangely wrong quips about PTSD, unclear and sporadic theses, repeatedly bafflingly caricaturistic presentations of Friedrich Nietzsche, etc. It felt like the book was in dire need of a good editor most of the time.
I don't really know who Nagle is, but my guess is that she falls into the same dirtbag left camp as like Anna Kachiyan and Aimee Terese etc. I guessed this because she name drops the same people like Lasch and Paglia and the like, who I haven't read but I barely even gained any insight into here because it seemed like more of a name drop as an in-group signifier rather than any real engagement. But anyway, I'm guessing since it's published by zero books and she talks about Mark Fisher a bunch that she's a leftist but there is no class analysis or discussion of material conditions anywhere in this book. Online is important and online and real life impact eachother, but you would never know that from reading this. While you could treat Trump's victory as the big win, she didn't spend too much time analyzing the ways in which the Alt Right aided his election and I think stuff like Charlottesville might not have happened at this point. Nagle discusses the ongoing (or lost?) cultural war between Tumblr liberalism vs. 4-chan inspired alt-right while both of the terms comprises of highly heterogenous elements. Internet, once lauded as the free, “horizontal” space of a new kind of anarchical democracy (not long ago but around 2013 many of the liberal left still saw and hailed the new “democratic” terrain of the Internet) today has been dominated by the misogynistic, Nazi-sympathizing Man’s Rights activists. 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.
Angela, Nagle (November 2015). "An investigation into contemporary online anti-feminist movements". doras.dcu.ie. Archived from the original on 9 March 2018 . Retrieved 14 March 2018. 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.One other aspect of the failures of the left in my opinion is how the Left overlooked the realm of Desire that is almost necessarily not satisfied in our contemporary societies. Nagle discusses the frustrated sexuality of the regular young male today and it is a legitimate discussion insofar that it makes up a portion of the frustrated young male who is not politicized until he is pushed towards the misogynistic underbelly of the Web which is again, not necessarily Nazi, but a couple of steps away from it at best. Desire, in this case, is also a desire for the commodity, of course, which also necessarily dissatisfies. When you have the means to buy a given commodity, it fails to restore a sense of satisfaction but rather perpetuates it even further. When you are not able to buy it, well, in an intuitive fashion, you are dissatisfied in a world of instant satisfaction, pornographic images and incessant advertisements. The left’s complete immersion and self-satisfaction with identity politics (LGBT and the alphabet goes on as Zizek was lambasted by critics from the Left when he criticized some of the aspects of the politics of gender in a recent article debate, you can Google it) leaves the room for this new brand of extreme right to tap into the frustration and insecurities of the young male. First of all: Holy shit. This is a book that I have been waiting to read for quiet some time now, but the level of insight and highly comprehensive discussion of what is going on in the cultural wars on the Web by Nagle exceeded my expectations. It reminded me of early works by Naomi Klein which combined the journalistic approach to the material at hand with detailed, but still accessible discussion of the theoretical aspect of the subject. Nagle proposes an interesting idea about the concept of the radical outsider who rejects mainstream morality and instead seeks his own identity, an idea that can be traced from De Sade through to Nietzche until you get to the counter-culture of the 60s. Liu, Catherine (30 July 2017). "Dialectic of Dark Enlightenments: The Alt-Right's Place in the Culture Industry". Los Angeles Review of Books. Archived from the original on 31 July 2017 . Retrieved 14 March 2018.
Great Deal 
New Comment