The Beats styled themselves wandering “dharma bums” who slept with women and men as they pleased, and they were as contemptuous of settling down as they were of acquiring material possessions. He actually talked to people involved, not just founder figures like “Lowtax” Kyanka, “Moot” Poole, and Fredrick Brennan, but everyday, anonymous users of the boards. However, what I would suggest is reading Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland first, since It Came From Something Awful takes a high-powered microscope to the Petri dish of 4chan/8chan, which is only a small part of how the culture of the United States went completely bonkers, to the event horizon of irredeemability—but it is an incredibly important part, because the denizens of these sites are the true underbelly of society at large—in Japan, probably everywhere, but most destructive here in the US.

By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions.Patrick Wyman wrote a nice piece for Mother Jones, that “liberal rag” of defending the oppressed, with his article titled “How Do You Know You’re Living Through the Death of an Empire? is a microcosm of the internet itself--simultaneously at the vanguard of contemporary culture, politics, comedy and language, and a new low for all of the above.

It starts as an introduction to how a subset of Internet trolls became an outsized influence in American culture and politics, and ends being a big-picture view of how two generations of young-to-middle-aged adults were essentially destroyed by cultural cynicism and a punishing economic system. I'm certain that there is a great book waiting to be publishing on the history fringe politics on the internet, but this isn't it. This interpretation of the "economic left" - itself a bizarre conflation of liberalism and populism from which Marxism is absent - would be news to Africa, South America, and Asia. Turns out it’s way harder to strangle someone to death than it looks in the movies,” that man said, alongside images of the woman’s dead body. But it’s not so wrong as to be unusable, and also probably represents something like the historical common sense of a lot of the people who helped make the forum culture, and at least part of the story as understood by many participants in it today (including, mutatis mutandis, the Fisher cult).Give it a gander and decide for yourselves, educated bibliophiles, then fall back into your palantir screens and veg out at the futility of it all.