It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office

by Dale Beran

As society structured itself around its prodigious ability to produce factory-made products, human beings began to regard themselves as inherently acquisitive beings whose very nature was bent toward nihilistic accumulation. As businessmen ascended to the top of society, more people imagined themselves as prospective robber barons and regarded their fellow human beings as rivals. And by the early twentieth century, this self-image, what Arendt refers to as “Hobbesian” (in short, nasty and brutish), was growing more prevalent, particularly among the de-classed.

People no longer felt like members of a cooperative association for betterment, as Enlightenment thinkers had envisioned the nation-state, but rather “degraded into a cog in a power-accumulating machine, free to console himself with sublime thoughts about the ultimate destiny of the machine, which itself is constructed in such a way that it can devour the globe simply by following its own inherent law.”

Trump’s obsession with humiliation (his own and others’), his angry insistence on sorting the world into winners and losers, spoke to all of this. When Trump promised Americans that they would “win so much, you’ll get sick of winning,” who else was that message directed to but the losers?

Furthering 4chan’s resentment was the fact that in Tumblr’s hierarchy of privilege it was white cisgender (as opposed to transgender) males who were the most privileged. Therefore, Tumblr’s logic went, their share of cultural power needed to be diluted and redistributed. 4chan was a community of largely cis white males who did not feel privileged at all. Victimized by capitalism like everyone else, they imagined themselves competing against other groups who also felt they were on the bottom, because, well, capitalism had placed an unprecedented number of people on the bottom. And so Tumblr’s dissolution of the concept of male identity read as an attack against their own identitarian subgroup, yet another attempt to erode their already shrinking share of power.

The tech prophets of the 80s and 90s had successfully predicted the internet would function as a free-speech zone of infinite debate and exchange of ideas. But they had not imagined it appearing in this America, where large institutions only consolidated more power while vast groups of disenfranchised people were being told, contrary to their experience, that their lives were improving.