It Came from Something Awful Quotes

“When the intricately duplicative art of mass media nests in the soul like a cuckoo, replacing real experience with simulation, it is not so much a flaw as a feature. The manufactured impostor not only thrives on what once fed the real need, but attempts to murder its rivals by extinguishing desires for genuine experience.”
― Dale Beran, It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office

“Gamergate was a “consumer revolt” agitating for a fundamental right to be deceived by corporations in the ways that most pleased them. And Trump, too, as the prince of puffery, was an invocation of the same right—to choose the liar, the fantasy, the troll.”
― Dale Beran, It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office

“Were the future leaders of the United States who had won coveted tickets to the highest echelons of the neoliberal meritocracy — the ones who were supposed to take over the newspapers, high political offices, and corporations — really demonstrating in the quads not about the military-industrial complex, wealth inequality, or America's endless foreign wars, but cosplay?”
― Dale Beran, It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office

“This was, of course, the function of art, to reveal the nuances of imagination hidden under shame. But it was also art sans art, as 4chan negated everything, even itself. Art born from some insistent, frantic need mixed up with the Lost Boys nonsense of a generation of children who raised themselves online, sometimes Never Never Land, sometimes the carnival island in 'Pinocchio' where wayward children, indulging in every excess, slowly metamorphosed into braying asses.”
― Dale Beran, It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office

“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, Karl Marx wrote, correcting Hegel. But what's next? There's no word for a farce of a farce.”
― Dale Beran, It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office

“For this reason, entering into the cool, safe bubble of Otakon, where adolescents attempted to commune with the comforting kids' fantasy on the other side of the screen felt slightly unsettling to me, though I couldn't put my finger on why.”
― Dale Beran, It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office

“Arendt described how, in the 1930s, groups of dispossessed people from the lower, middle, and upper classes all began to aspire to the cruel-minded values of a certain type of businessman who, like Trump today, was “flattered at being called a power-thirsty animal.”11”
― Dale Beran, It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office

“And so, the goal of politics for the masses was not to establish a new Marxist-style horizontal order of equality, but to exert leverage and scrabble to the top of the dogpile.”
― Dale Beran, It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office

“Whoever is not prepared to talk about capitalism should also remain silent about fascism.”
― Dale Beran, It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office