Angela Nagle

An interesting read, although a hard read at times. I found the author’s analysis of the alt-right and its origins illuminating, especially her thesis that transgression is at the core of so much of it and that many on the left have come to value transgression for transgression’s sake as well. However, I disagree with her final analysis that the left is somehow to blame for the alt-right. She states that contemporary cultural progressivism has “found itself completely unable to deal show more with the challenge coming from the right.” She implies that over-sensitive Tumblr-style progressivism has made rational debates against the alt-right impossible. I see this as a kind of broad victim-blaming and more than a little blind to the responsibility of anyone in a civil society to actively combat white supremacy and outright Nazism. Not that the left is above criticism and shouldn’t be criticized, but so many voices on the left seem to fall into a kind of “brother’s keeper” attitude in response to their confusion over the Trump election. Progressives are too eager to take on guilt. show less

Sooo good. I have not read a piece of cultural analysis that has diagnosed the problem of the rise of extreme internet communities this well. While sometimes a bit pretentious (connecting meme-culture to de Sade and Bataille), Nagle has a serious and well-reasoned line of thought going for her argument. As others have pointed out, citations would have made it even tighter, but it's still an important (arguably a must-read in the second Trump presidency) for those of us wishing for a saner show more world, and to understand how we got someone like Elon Musk in the White House. Contrary to some reviewers, this has aged exceedingly and uncomfortably well.

For the sake of our very existence, we all need to log off and be normal people again show less

Just so there’s no mucking about, let me say up front that it is a rare and fleeting pleasure to read Angela Nagle. She is delightfully well read, distills the nonsense of the world calmly and directly, never loses her dispassionate center, and doesn’t descend into pop culture citations. She is effortlessly authoritative. Would there were more like her.

In Kill All Normies, things online have gone unaccountably negative. The internet was supposed to be a giant uplifting community party. show more Instead, it is a morass of trolls, alt-right, and out and out hatred, from racists to neonazis to feminazis. Even the arts have turned negative, and to criticize them as such just makes you outmoded – and subject to vicious threats. “The whole online sensibility is more in the spirit of foul-mouthed comment-thread trolls than it is of bible study, more Fight Club than family values, more in line with the Marquis de Sade than Edmund Burke. “

Her criticism of her own generation stings. They “come from an utterly intellectual shut-down world of Tumblr and trigger warnings, and the purging of dissent in which they have only learned to recite jargon.” They couldn’t even debate the hollow showman Milo Yiannopoulos; they could only prevent him speaking.

We are approaching anarchy. The right is at least as fractured and disorganized as the left. There is no longer any typical or classical right; every individual colors it their own way. So despite Republicans’ control of all the levels of government, they continue to fight amongst themselves and make no headway in their agenda. Because they can’t even agree on the agenda. Nagle takes an entire chapter to deconstruct the character Milo Yiannopoulos, who embodies all the contradictions in one neat package. The feeling you’re left with is that barriers to entry need to at least exist. Today, the internet offers equal time and space to every flavor of hate and ignorance going.

Nagle doesn’t go far enough. Unsaid is that all of her characters have one thing in common: a tiny bit of power. It is easier to wield negative power than positive power, so they armchair jockey hatred, and laugh at their own cruelty. It is ignorant and outrageous, and that is the whole point. It is a deadly combination of too much time and too little future. The other thing unsaid is that it is infinitesimal. Almost none of the characters has real fame, much less popularity or value. They are their own audience, insignificant in the scheme of things. The occasional Milo is a shooting star than soon fades to black.

I look forward to Nagle leveraging her talents into a deeper examination of a heavier issue. This is a terrific intro.

David Wineberg show less

I really like this author and learned a lot from her. She sheds important light on online trollers that grew out of 4chan and ended up aligned with the alt-right. She has a few central arguments: 1) that transgression is the foremost value of channers and they picked this up from modernist critics (who were usually on the left); 2) that the virulent anti-feminism of channers grew as a reaction to something called "Tumblr feminism," which started on line and then jumped to university show more campuses; and 3) that 4channers are "beta" males who feel sexually insecure in a post-sexual liberation world where the rewards have gone disproportionately to the top "alpha" males. She also opens with a broadside against the digital utopians who might persist in believing that online "crowds" are a force for the good -- that, she says, is so 2010.

But this book is a quickie book, rushed out so quickly that no one bothered to proofread it. The author doesn't even take the time to tell you the name of books that she quotes from at length. This quick-and-dirty approach might be a wise publishing decision, given how quickly online trends come and go. But this is a book after all and it's not unfair to bring to it greater expectations than one would to a magazine or an online post.

So, on the positive side, I like the author because she was a strong point of view. She advises progressives to abandon "transgression," which is simply a-moralism; she implies feminism needs to get over the trigger warning/safe space BS; and she believes that a progressive politics needs to put less emphasis on identity and identitarian politics. I don't agree with her in all respects but I appreciate her willingness to take stands.

From the fairly casual style and lack of any footnotes or bibliography -- and, indeed, from her willingness to take stands -- I took her to be a journalist or freelance critic. So I was surprised to learn that she's an academic. Learning that made me wish she'd displayed some of the virtues of academic writing. For instance, she doesn't tell us anything about the research on which she bases her observations. One assumes she spent a lot of time on social media, Tumblr, and perhaps IRC channels, in reddit forums, or whatever. But she doesn't bother to share that with us. I think it matters. For instance, what do we actually know about these guys (including the assumptions that they are all guys)? Who are they and where are they? The author is Irish but an awful lot of this book is about the US. Why not address the limitations (and potentials) of this sort of limited online research?

A yet bigger problem for me is that, despite her interest in the alt-right, she really drops the ball on the issue of race. She focuses instead on the gender side of this problem because that's what she knows best. I suspect this is because she feels much more confident around gender issues. She clearly finds it easier to criticize Tumblr feminism and the influence of Judith Butler than she does the other much maligned "social justice warriors" concerned with mass incarceration, extrajudicial killing of black people, intractable racial disparities, institutional violence, etc. But haven't they played a big part in campus "anti-free speech" politics on university campuses today? And haven't they too raised the hackles of the newly emboldened on (and off) line racists? And why are young women attracted to these alt-right groups?

Finally, geography and culture matter. The author makes little of the fact that she is Irish and writing in Ireland. It's as if in writing about online groups, history and specificity disappear. But, as someone reading in the US, I've got to say: history matters. Is Tumblr feminism universal? Did the alt-right play a part in Ireland's recent elections? Does "free speech" mean the same thing on an Irish campus as it does in the US?

But it's really the race issue that rubs me the wrong way. Nagle can't expect anyone to think she's come to terms with the alt-right based predominantly on her interest in its anti-feminism.

In the end, I find Nagle strong, intelligent and nervy, but her interpretations in the end don't address the marriage of 4chan and the alt-right in the past few years in a way that satisfies me. For that, she needs to go deeper, wider -- and to wander offline. And she needs to admit what she can and cannot know using the methods she employs. show less