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

by Dale Beran

The teens weren’t trying to make a mark on the world; they were trying to escape from it by pantomiming discarded scraps of fiction.

The idea is to trace the way culture and counterculture, the internet and reality, and politics and entertainment came to reflect one another in a sort of hall of mirrors.

the site became the place where counterculture catastrophically split into left and right camps in 2017.

the industrialized economies of wealthy nations like the United States, having fulfilled the basic needs of their citizens, have now turned from manufacturing things they didn’t need to, in effect, manufacturing need.5

Screens function as mechanisms of control to maintain the status quo as virtual worlds undermine a sense of reality.

“For most of last year, it was hard to avoid the sensation that something had broken somewhere and the internet was leaking into real life.”2 Indeed, the

Baudrillard condemned the film, saying, “The Matrix is the sort of movie the Matrix would make.”

Mike Cernovich was in his late thirties when gamergate began. He wasn’t nerdy enough to play video games, let alone frequent 4chan. He was an unemployed lawyer living in Southern California and looked every bit the part, a disheveled jock who tended to squint and spoke with a lisp.

The self-help book is based on a popular post Peterson made on Quora, a Reddit-style site infamous for being a place where literal-minded computer programmers go for basic life advice. And indeed, the book offers just that, explicit instructions for how to exist, accompanied by a /pol/-style, loopy, cruel-minded philosophy.