It Came from Something Awful Read online

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Thank you for buying this

  St. Martin’s Press ebook.

  To receive special offers, bonus content,

  and info on new releases and other great reads,

  sign up for our newsletters.

  Or visit us online at

  us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

  For email updates on the author, click here.

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

  —Hamlet, act II, scene ii

  To those

  who remain

  crescent fresh

  Introduction: The Garbage Fire Eternal

  On a warm summer day some thirteen years ago, I found myself in the frigid air of Baltimore’s convention center attending Otakon, a gathering of “otaku,” super-fans of Japanese media, namely anime and manga.

  I didn’t particularly like anime. And I felt I was a little too old for the event. I had attended a few times when I was in high school in the late 90s. Back then it had been held in a set of hotel conference rooms darkened to play obscure animation taped off Japanese TV. But in recent years, the crowds had grown big enough to require the city’s largest venue. And the event had evolved too into an elaborate festival where otherwise isolated suburban kids came to bond over their favorite TV shows.

  The convention was held next to the city’s famous Inner Harbor, an outdoor shopping mall with a tall clipper ship drifting in the black water beside a dreary set of chain restaurants. And the meeting hall, like the mall, was brutalist and modern, made of hard right angles, truncated geometric shapes, and whirling, structural triangles, which teens employed as a science-fiction backdrop for their costumed photo shoots.

  I was there with an old high school friend. We had both just graduated from college and wanted to be professional artists. I was particularly interested in becoming a writer, though I had no idea how to do it. So we had started making a short online comic, mostly about ourselves, called A Lesson Is Learned But the Damage Is Irreversible. To our surprise, people were reading it. And we had gone down to Otakon to hand out flyers to promote it.

  Besides the webcomic, it hadn’t been all that great of a year. Just after I graduated, my father had died suddenly of a heart attack. I had spent the previous months winding up the complicated affairs of his finances and psychiatry practice, badly. When the dust settled, there wasn’t really an inheritance when split among my siblings, more of a series of minor tax problems. As a child, I had willfully shut myself up in the abstract realm of books. And so the transition out of childhood, into an adult realm I didn’t quite understand, full of stultifying tasks and bureaucratic forms, was painful. It mingled with the absence of my father, who had been both a source of whimsy in my life and, somewhat contradictorily, intellectual rigor.

  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.

  And at a certain point, wandering the triangle-shaped halls lined with wooden ships trapped in bottles handing out flyers for my webcomic to teens dressed as rubber monsters, things started to get weird.

  Not for me, then—I hardly knew what I was seeing then. But for all of us, now.

  Years later, I realized I had become an indifferent witness to a turning point in history, a vast secret hinge upon which world events would swing.

  What did I see? Well, more of the same: kids in costumes. At the front of one room, there was a fifteen-year-old boy with a sharp chin, golden locks, and a baseball cap, going through a PowerPoint presentation that was a mixture of website statistics and lewd jokes mocking various types of cartoon pornography.

  These included many fan-drawn images of the boy himself depicted as a curvaceous pink cartoon cat-girl wearing white panties. As the increasingly silly Photoshopped drawings slid by, the raucous crowd shouted words of encouragement, gearing up for the late-night techno dance party that would follow.

  Despite all the adulation, the boy seemed slightly ill at ease. The cap was slung a little too low, as if to disguise his eyes. And he let his friends at the table do most of the talking.

  This was one of the first meetings of a now-infamous online message board, 4chan.org. The boy in the cap was the site’s founder, Christopher “moot” Poole. In October 2003, “bored and in need of porno,” he had programmed 4chan on a whim to trade pictures of anime girls with his friends, but soon discovered thousands, and eventually millions, of other people wanted to use it.

  It seems ridiculous to say the site was important. But even more ridiculously, its importance is already documented in the history books. In Alt-America, David Neiwert wrote that the Nazi-worshipping alt-right “began” with 4chan, “with people talking online about Japanese anime.”1

  Few of these books, including Neiwert’s, offer an explanation for how this could have possibly happened. How we got from anime otaku to the anime Nazis of 2016 and onward. How all of this resulted in internet weirdos marching with tiki torches and similar fantasy-themed costumes in Charlottesville in 2017.

  Of course, the kids in that room weren’t Nazis. Far from it. The last thing they wanted to discuss was politics. And at that moment, I certainly didn’t feel as though I was present for some great turning point in history. In fact, it seemed like I was confronting yet another moment of anti-history as the vast landscape of the American suburban nowhereland was imported into the convention center, a place that, in its expanses of smooth, clean carpeting, model ships, and big tumbling geometric shapes, felt a little like an infinite kids’ rec room. 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.

  However, looking back, it all reads like some crazy premonition.

  As the microphone was passed from rubber dinosaur to trench-coat mafia kid to sea witch to ask their curly-headed leader questions, the teens/monsters kept debating and joking about things called “memes” and “trolls.”

  In the mid-2000s, these terms were meaningless to anyone outside that room. But later they broke out of it and saturated every inch of the world.

  And stranger still, from 2016 onward memes and trolls became central concepts that obsessed political commentators. Almost overnight, the terms invaded the domain of world leaders and redefined the contests between them. Now there are Russian trolls, Facebook trolls, and of course, the original 4chan trolls all jiggling through the ether.

  Back then, I was surprised to find that I knew what these terms meant. Before I had encountered 4chan at Otakon, the site constantly popped up in my webcomic’s referral logs (the data that shows where people came from when they visit your site).

  When 4chan began it wasn’t all that different from other online message boards; it was a place to post content and talk to people on the internet. At the time, it imported a few innovations from Japanese sites, which accounted for some of its popularity. It was easy to post images. And following a Japanese custom, it didn’t require the user to sign up for an account. Anyone could post under a default name, which eventually became the name of all 4chan users, “Anonymous.” br />
  But this hardly explained why it ballooned so rapidly. Why, almost as soon as it appeared, people began gathering to celebrate it. Each year, the 4chan meeting at Otakon doubled in number, until finally, the hordes flowed out of the room and 4chan stopped holding meetings. By 2010, 4chan was one of the most popular websites ever.

  How did all of this mutate into the alt-right? Into Donald Trump and trolls and memes? To borrow a phrase, what happened, not just to the election, but to politics, culture, and counterculture as it was heaped into the “garbage fire” that was 2016 and onward, as old ideas and norms burned away into a bleak, odd future? The garbage fire, as we now understand it, Eternal?

  To put a finer point on it: How did a pornographic anime website transform from a postcultural garbage heap into the postcultural garbage heap upon which the great events of our age stood?

  That story is the story of this book.

  Strangely, when I began to write it, many of the disasters in it had not yet occurred. The manifestation of internet Nazis in Charlottesville, Trump’s defense of their cause, and the 2017 street battles between the alt-right and antifa all still lay in the future.

  The mystical realm of fake news and trolls was not yet ascendant. The Washington Post did not yet run articles reporting on 4chan posts. The New York Times was not yet putting out calls on its tip line for plots on 4chan to disrupt elections. Though, to be fair, Trump had already adopted 4chan’s meme, Pepe the Frog, as his symbol during the campaign. And Richard Spencer, the infamous neo-Nazi, had just been socked during Trump’s inauguration as he pointed to his Pepe pin. And all of this was not 4chan’s first entrée into politics. Many fake 4chan conspiracy theories had turned into political causes: gamergate in 2014 and pizzagate in 2016. And just a few years prior to that, 4chan had spawned an international far-left hacktivist collective called Anonymous, which had played a role in Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring.

  As the Trump presidency progressed, my friends delighted in forwarding me the increasingly bizarre stories that appeared on the front pages of major publications, as if to say, “How’s that going to fit?” Since Trump-era events were so preposterous, the joke was, of course, they wouldn’t fit into my scheme or any others. They were, by definition, totally random, designed to attack reason itself and our ability to make sense of the world.

  Strangers would gasp when I explained that the subject of my book was the alt-right. “Very timely,” they would reply. But then another thought would occur to them: “How? It must be so difficult,” they would add sympathetically. “Every week it changes.”

  What they meant by this was that media reports, Trump, fake news, late-night TV, and talking-head pundits on twenty-four-hour cable news, all tangled into the heap of social media, were the font of confusion, the great source of chaos. What they were saying to me was, “How can you ever understand the font of confusion? It’s where confusion comes from!”

  Well, this book attempts to provide an answer. 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. One that seems to have terminated with the manifestation of a once-unimaginable entity—a reality-TV president.

  New language has been invented to describe all this uncanny mirroring. We are in the political era of “echo chambers” as messages bounce in and out of social media through TV personalities who were once politicians and vice versa. Close up, contemporary events appear like that dim recursive haze that manifests when you point a video camera back at the monitor displaying what it’s filming. Meaning, and even the message itself, gets lost in infinite replication. This work aspires to draw far enough back we can look at how the system was wired up in the first place, to provide clarity by widening the historical frame.

  The key to understanding what happened will be 4chan itself. And indeed, this book details how Trump’s 2016 campaign was intimately wrapped up with the site’s userbase. But why this occurred is part of a larger narrative, that of youth counterculture. 4chan was ultimately so influential on mainstream culture because it was the center of a counterculture. And stranger still, the site became the place where counterculture catastrophically split into left and right camps in 2017.

  The first section of this book traces the history of countercultures prior to 4chan. It describes how all countercultures from the 60s onward suffered a similar fate—they got eaten by the screen.

  It’s a sad but now familiar tale: as late-60s counterculture struggled with the burden of infinite choice in postwar plenty, manufacturers were struggling with the same problem: If all the basic needs of human beings were met, yet the factories were still running, how would they get people to buy their products? The solution they came up with was to manufacture need. As American capitalism transitioned from selling products as practical necessities to products as gateways into ideals, aspirations, and joys, counterculture was employed as the advertisers’ most powerful tool.

  What followed, from the 70s to the 90s, was a game of predator and prey, in which new countercultures would emerge to combat the forces of materialism and marketing only to be swallowed whole by marketing campaigns that adored selling transcendence and rebellion. By the 80s, counterculture after defeated counterculture were used to bludgeon and skin next season’s counterculture. (The hippie label sold fine food, anti-glamour punks sold filthy glamour, etc.) As a result, countercultures hoping to resist co-optation in the 90s employed nihilism as a survival strategy. They became about nothing, about having no value system, leaving the house of their mind, morals, and desires empty so there was nothing to steal. And this numb indifference complemented a numb indifference to politics, a response to the so-called end of history. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the then neoconservative political philosopher Francis Fukuyama defined the pervading political idea of the period: perhaps the leftist utopian projects of other eras would never emerge and we had already reached the “end” of historical progress. In other words, American-style capitalism would endure for all eternity, no radical reconfiguring needed.

  This seemed, then, to be the natural terminus of counterculture. But by the late 90s, the advent of the web had produced new dissonance in the void beyond: Gen Xers became otaku. Ironically, half-ironically, or genuinely—by this point it hardly mattered—younger generations were migrating out of real life and into the screen. Still contemptuous, they now celebrated escapism. But even as they embraced this lifestyle, something even wonkier happened: they squeezed it so hard they broke it.

  The 90s contest to outpace co-optation by diving into nihilism degenerated into a race to the bottom to see who could be more screwed up, offensive, and grotesque.

  The second part of this book details how 4chan won. It became the place where people achieved new lows. Prior to the internet, screen worlds had flowed one way: from manufacturer to subject. Computers reversed that process, allowing new generations to vomit up all the colorful garbage shoved down their gullets since they were born, telling them who and how to be. With the advent of the web, all the discarded pieces of pop culture, entertainment fiction, advertising, and video games that manufacturers had sold to youth to tell them who and how to be began to rise in their gorge as a spout of sliced-up, digitized chunks. And once ejected, they could be refashioned, snippet by snippet, into a homemade culture of jokes—memes. The new youth culture was created based on this gag reflex.

  4chan.org became a hub world for this existence, the number-one psychic garbage dump into which young people discarded their misery and creativity into a pile of old art, cartoons, ads, video games, movies, TV shows, comic books, and toys.

  And, as it turned out, everyone needed what 4chan had created—everyone needed memes to feel a sense of agency over the stream of nonsense gushing from the screen, not only for fiction, but “nonfiction” as well.

  In 2008, 4chan saw its creations drift out into the world and take root. It spawned hacker/trol
ling collectives that propagated joke narratives in mainstream media to parody efforts to manufacture consent. And to the surprise of everyone, what started as a joke transformed into something unseen since the 1960s: a sincere countercultural political movement.

  Absurdly, 4chan’s ultra-nihilistic, ultra-apathetic culture of post-90s indifference went through a black hole and emerged on the other side as a genuine political force. For a brief few years between 2008 and 2011, 4chan denizens no longer believed they were powerlessly trapped behind their screens. They felt that they could effect great change through their screens.

  During this period, Anonymous, 4chan’s anarchic userbase of trolls, metamorphosed into Anonymous, an anti-corporate, anti–power structure, pro-democracy hacker collective, which went on to play a key role in international protests and revolutions. However, by 2012, the movement had collapsed, its principal members arrested by the FBI.

  The last part of this book details how, in the wake of this collapse, 4chan spawned the alt-right.

  With the dissolution of 4chan’s newfound agency, its userbase and counterculture sank to previously undreamed-of lows. A new generation of young people, somehow even more immersed in screen worlds than the last, flooded onto the site, while older Gen-X users found their prospects in life diminishing after the 2008 economic crash. Scores of young people, young men in particular, retreated from work and the world and never returned.

  It was in this environment that the alt-right formed. These new groups coalesced around a resurgent otaku lifestyle celebrated on the chans like it was 2005, except this new version was even sadder than the last.

  4chan was populated by a group of declassed individuals set so far apart from society and so wholly lacking in identity that they began to obsess over it. They clung to race as a means of self-definition. These new fascist movements emerged much as the first ones had, out of de-contextualized people thrust from society by the mercurial throes of modern economics. Degraded and superfluous, convinced life was nothing but a cruel power struggle (because they were constantly losing it), they fashioned their own context out of absurd medieval power fantasies.