It Came from Something Awful

Overall, great capture of the creation of internet culture, the pathway to radicalization and just the way that society is failing great swaths of people across the board. The only whacky bits are the "divisions of Antifa" and "members of Antifa" shouts that I kept seeing when those aren't even really groups (more on that in "Culture Warlords" by Talia Lavin). That's such a small sticking point that I can't really give too much heat to the overall book however. Great content, fun read, worth the while.

As US politics makes a pronounced rightward shift, many writers have investigated. Dark Money explores the funding from the Koch empire (slpl.bibliocommons.com/item/show/1338262116). It Came from Something Awful is a philosophical exploration of the ideas and actions of young, lonely men who became the ideological drivers of the alt-right and alt-lite.

Dale Beran starts with Japanese Otaku or men (generally) who become engrossed in Anime and video games and fail to create traditional relationships and follows that culture to America in the Something Awful forum website, 4chan, and 8chan. Beran extracts the metastasized tumors from these anonymous image boards to preform an autopsy on pickup artists, incels, Pepe the frog, the 2016 election, and Charlottesville. Beran’s investigation is a philosophically dense but enlightening dive into America’s contemporary attraction to fascism: slpl.bibliocommons.com/item/show/1454544116