by
Angela Nagle
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[...] You may question the motivations of the right's fixation on these relative niche subcultures, but the liberal fixation on relatively niche sections of the new online right that emerged from small online subcultures is similar in scale--that is, the influence of Tumblr on shaping strange new political sensibilities is probably equally important to what emerged from rightist chan culture.
A frustrating contradiction and hypocrisy you find in many of these online spaces and subcultures is that they want the benefits of tradition without its necessary restraints and duties. They simultaneously want the best of the sexual revolution (sexual success with pornified women, perpetually dolled up, waxed and willing to do anything) without the attendant insecurities of a society in which women have sexual choice and freedom. [...]
on the manosphere
[...] The online expression 'there are no girls on the Internet' appeared early on in 4chan's 'Rules of the Internet'. This is intended to be read not literally but as an assertion that the areas of the Internet in which there are few or no women constitutes 'the Internet', meaning the authentic Internet. Women are discussed in a way that presumes their absence, and users seemed to treat the anonymous space as a place where grievances could be aired against women to a sympathetic implicitly male audience.
don't remind me
[...] when everyone from the President's fanboys to McDonalds are flogging the dead horse of 'edginess', it may be time to lay the very recent and very modern aesthetic values of counterculture and the entire paradigm to rest and create something new.
But as Adorno put it, “In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.” This aesthetic aversion to ambitious technologies and Promethean modernity communicates precisely the wrong message about what must be done to address new environmental dangers and improve people’s lives.
The relatively harmless tweeting of today certainly leaves fewer human casualties behind. But it is still based on a common impulse – the expression of total contempt for one’s own society expressed through progressive language. In this internal psychodrama the oppressed appear as purely symbolic, rather than as real people for whom one is trying to generate real material gains. It is difficult to think of any positive political movement past or present that has changed the lives of human beings for the better based on misanthropy and radical performances of self-hatred.
Even the cruelest alt-right critics tend to regard extreme forms of liberal social media self-hatred as simply pathetic, a sign of a lack of self-respect. But in my own more ungenerous moments I wonder if it is something worse. Rather than merely being of benefit to no one, it could be of quite a significant benefit to just one person – the self-flagellator themselves. Publicly declaring your sins makes you appear a better person than those who have not declared them. It is not really a put-down of oneself, but a put-down of others, who are less morally worthy for having been less forthcoming in their confessions.
The cultural critic Fredric Jameson argued that conspiracy theories are used as an improvised guide to our overwhelmingly complex social landscape. It is often easier to imagine sinister cabals and physically impossible phenomena than it is to accept the open and known injustices of the world. Who needs the Illuminati when almost the entire British government went to the same schools? One only has to read Yanis Varoufakis’ accounts of the internal workings of international financial bodies or look at the dynasties and tiny elites that run the world of government and capital to wonder if the paranoid person is just, as William Burroughs put it “a person in possession of all the facts.” The paranoid impulse is not so much wrong as too often misdirected and it is often not a particularly distant leap from the truth to the fiction. People are right in their intuition that there are dark forces arrayed against them but they’re more likely to find the information they seek in the dull finance section of any newspaper than on chemtrails forums that weave more compelling narratives.
In fact, chemtrail believers have a paradoxical mixture of rationalist skepticism and dogmatic faith. They spend their time carefully parsing documents with a scrupulousness worthy of the IRS. Like committed scientists, they quest after “truth,” they want to know what’s “really” going on. They see unexplained horrors in the world around them, and they are persistent askers of “Why?”
Yet they are fundamentally religious in their outlook, insofar as they believe on faith in something that others cannot see. [...]
she goes into the redpill phenomenon later. good way of thinking about the difference between conspiracy theories (relying on faith & concealed evidence that is maybe impossible to get by design) and proper theories that are based on evidence that is out there in the open (but connecting the dots in a way that makes sense)?
think about this more (esp in relation to my matrix essay)