Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right

by Angela Nagle

The culture that produced both Operation Birthday Boy and elaborate RIP page trolling became what you might call the unwanted gift, a twist on Mauss’s The Gift that early Internet theorists used as a central metaphor for the non-instrumental culture of sharing that it nurtured. In The Revolution of Everyday Life by the Situationist thinker Raoul Vaneigem, Mauss’s principle of the gift, originally used to describe reciprocal giftgiving systems in pre-modern societies, was celebrated on the grounds that only the purity of motiveless destruction or ruinous generosity can transcend instrumentalism. The Situationists’ critique of ‘the poverty of every day life’, like Baudelaire’s An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom, articulated a common sentiment found from the Romantics through to contemporary online cultures of transgression, that ennui, boredom and inertia requires a counterforce of extreme transgression. And yet these ideas often transcended the abstract. But while the Situationists had a better world in their hearts, the nihilistic application of the transgressive style already took shape in the 60s counterculture. ‘The Manson murders’, Reynolds and Press argued, ‘were the logical culmination of throwing off the shackles of conscience and consciousness, the grim flowering of the id’s voodoo energies.’