Read Max Read’s sharp précis of what happened to the internet over the last few years: the slow drifting of message-boards to the right as their inhabitants grew from sad kids to angry adults, then the sudden explosion of that pattern across social networks run by corporations with only an ambivalent interest in stopping it.
This was the core value of message-board political consciousness: sovereignty, a concept similarly important to the politics of the far right. Posters and trolls wanted to reserve for themselves on the internet the power and freedom they couldn’t find off it. And as the online and offline spheres slowly merged over the course of the 2010s, that sovereignty expressed itself as an abject refusal to resocialize — the reservation of a sacred right to be cruel. The puckish left-libertarianism that had characterized the early message-board political activity of groups like Anonymous transformed into a revanchism, seemingly intended to protect “Kekistan” — the joking name, from the LOL-like word Kek, for the safe spaces of the frustrated men of the internet.
This was the sensibility galvanized in 2014 by — what else? — a depressed and frustrated man’s rambling, 9,000-word post falsely accusing his game-developer ex-girlfriend Zoë Quinn of exchanging sex for video-game reviews
Tim O’Brien’s painting of Pepe is fantastic: a poisoned meme made creepily, grossly real.
One of the interesting oddities about the Alt Right is a “geek fallacies” thing: loyalty to parasitic luminaries, even though they’re crudely exploitative, too weird to be on television, and all seem to hate one another. As with Trump himself, the Nazi comparisons are (frankly) strained. But they’re stuck on their proverbial Drexlers and Eckarts and you wonder not what comes next but who.