Without seeing the video, I assume it goes "SA -> FYAD-> 4chan -> /b/ -> /pol/ -> alt-right". A tired and naive theory by now. pol did not create the alt-right, the alt-right already existed and was just drawn to pol because it was less filtered than many existing forums. You can find alt-right talking points from years and years before pol was ever a thing.
I just watched the video and I don't think that is an accurate description of the connection that's being made. It wasn't FYAD that led to 4chan and they're more making the claim that without the initial exodus from SA to 4chan there may not have been a landing place for the alt-righters when they all showed up. Also Peter Thiel plays a pretty prominent role in the whole thing.
I think the point of the parent comment is that yeah, they landed at 4chan but if 4chan hadn't existed they would've landed somewhere else, or created something to land on. 4chan happened to exist and be the place, but it didn't have to be, and we'd still probably be where we are without 4chan, or without them getting pushed out of SA. I mean, to that point, if they hadn't gotten pushed out of SA that would've just been the place instead of 4chan
Fair enough, I'd just say that this video is attempting to trace the threads of what actually happened, I don't think it's really making the claim that it was all inevitable. The title of this post is not the title of the video, or I think even a claim that the video is making.
I mean... People can make the case "eugenics and ultra-nationalism were in the air; if Germany hadn't allowed Hitler to seize power, a similar story would have played out elsewhere."
I won't speak for the other commenters but my point wasn't to excuse 4chan. They should be held accountable, and we should learn from the situation but my wider point is actually the opposite from excusing it. We should be aware that it was more than just that specific circumstance and we should be vigilant at working against that extremism wherever we see it
Robert Evans's The War on Everyone does a really good job describing the way fascist movements made the jump from gun shows and edgy literature to surviving and thriving on the early internet well before Something Awful and 4chan.
Yeah, I've been around online since 93 myself. I've seen it happen in real time. By the mid 90s a lot of the modern tactics had been adopted by the far right, such as the original 'fake news' which was having sites with legitimate sounding domains and updated web frontages that made them look like a genuine site, which was then hosting 'stories' that were complete fabrications. The intention was more to see these stories linked by legitimate sites who didn't check properly than for them to be something people sought out. This was as early as 97 in my experience. Then later fake news became "any lie on the internet" before becoming "anything I disagree with" and the term lost all meaning.
I don't disagree that pointing to one single example of how the far right populated a site and used that platform to spread, normalize and indoctrinate their views can be said to be "the cause" though. None of this happens in isolation and it is fairer to say that such examples are contributing factors.
Not really, I'd actually been tooling around with computers and various aspects since the 8 bit/BBS days in one form or another, and was an occasional usenet user before the web took off so I was more the kind to bemoan. 93 was the point that I had a decent modem at home, rather than having relied on public access via education and the web was blowing up.
Prior to that it was a 14.4k hardware modem and having to move my heavy ass early 90s pc close enough to the phone socket, so not really an every day thing. I was into povray back then, so largely I'd be sharing my stuff/gathering resources in rare online sessions back when we used to point gophers at things.
I'll admit, I find it deeply hilarious when he's taking in depth about Andrew Tate, then goes off on a purely personal tangent about his machetes. He is deeply personally insulted by Tates low quality Machetes and how they aren't good enough for Evans. He basically views Tates lack of quality control of machetes as really a symbol of how empty his entire worldview is.
He had a similar reaction when attending the young Republicans Cigar event. He was viscerally insulted.
Ah Republicans. "We're manly men! We shoot (expensive) guns (badly), we drink (cheap, shitty) beer, we eat (cheap, poorly prepared) meat, we smoke (cheap, shitty) cigars, we worship Jesus (while ignoring every last one of His teachings)! I drive a truck! (With the interior of a luxury minivan)."
I was good friends with him in high-school. He actually bought me my SA account so I could join him on there. So yeah, I can attest that he was VERY much a Something Awful user.
Camp of the Angels comes off like a massive turd polishing exercise, this is written by a person who wants his audience to eat his excretions.
Reading the book was an exercise in holding one breath, for someone to talk about feces that often tells you how much time the author/$ spent rolling in it.....unless that guy worked in the sewage industry it's kinda weird to be that intimate with feces and feel the need to publish text about it in that much detail.
I wonder how people will react to their secret president Miller being someone who routinely consumes the literary equivalent of defecations as "culture" and uses it for policy development.
He's been crowd sourcing from others who live and breathe this as their "lore" for his policy decisions, trash the source materials enough it messes with what little cohesion they have.
Yes, and most likely some other website would have taken 4chans place eventually, but the little things that domino into what happened today are interesting to look at.
Eh, there has to be a more substantial connection I feel like. Otherwise you can argue that anything form the past led directly to things now. SomethingAwful still has a big lingering shadow over much of the content and culture we see on the internet to this day, but that doesn't mean we should credit Smiling Friends or Internet Historians youtube channel to Lowtax. Even if one may or may not have happened without the other.
Oh you’re so good at predicting people’s behavior! You must be a psychic! Or maybe it is that you are constantly acting like an asshole so everyone around you PREDICTABLY reacts to your asshole behavior? Couldn’t be…
You really should quit posting things and delete Reddit. Go read a book (or have someone read it to you, if reading is an issue for you…). Just go away. No one wants you around.
All blue hair or some blue hairstyles? I used it loosely for dramatic because it seems to trigger a side as much as calling anyone right of far left a pedo. The mass downvotes definitely appear to reflect that.
I would agree with this. The video is associating the apparent inciting incidents with cause. IE: when someone lights a match and triggers an explosion, is the match the cause of the explosion, or the buildup of combustible air and fuel? In the thumbnail itself, the setup of the tiles is primarily responsible for the knock-on effects of one little tile falling and knocking over the huge tile.
In this video, the videographer tracks a series of matches being struck, leading to sequential explosions. There is a certain amount of social cycles reinforcing themselves being noted here, like 4chan culture, which I'd consider required for the hypothesis. But not at all enough evidence given that they existed aside from the other alt-right sites and culture growing.
IMO, a lot of radicalization is the acceleration of the information age combined with a decline in social accountability. We have not yet evolved sufficient collective social skills to defeat the confirmation bias reinforcement available in internet niches.
Yeah, what actually happened was that /pol/ was created to separate out political discussion from other boards, specifically /news/, and it immediately became a shitpost for people to mock politics and troll anyone being serious.
However this invited idiots who thought they were in good company.
Stormfront, who went from people barely able to spell, to being organized and well funded (hmmmm) decided to start "redpilling" 4chan and pushing all their crazy shit.
Then they devised the alt right movement as a means to trick moderates and center left young men to join with the idea that it was a more compassionate version of conservative politics and as an antithesis to neoconservatives. In reality they lured people in then started "redpilling" them and grew their numbers.
The reality is simpler, dumb, and honestly 2014 onward was well funded and organized movements that lured disaffected young men in. Men who initially held no hate in their hearts. Then brainwashed them.
The theory that any of this was organic is bullshit.
Qanon started as a troll to see how far you could push right wingers into crazy down. Turned out there was no depth you could go. Then someone else (likely russia) hijacked that movement.
The recent twitter fiasco proved that this push for conservatism is a literal global conspiracy and foreign states are responsible, or at least, people in those countries are being paid by wealthy interests to do so.
The reality is simpler, dumb, and honestly 2014 onward was well funded and organized movements that lured disaffected young men in. Men who initially held no hate in their hearts. Then brainwashed them.
That's definitely what happened. You could track it live at the time. But I sometimes wonder what the other side could have done differently. These kinds of people were originally allies of the liberal internet movement. It's clear that they were specifically targeted by the thought leaders of the alt-right, but it also means the liberal side kinda just let it happen by not showing enough interest.
There were very early warnings that the chosen direction of the liberal side was massively pushing away a large part of this voter base where even 5 years before (around 2008-2011) wouldn't even be a question what side of the political spectrum they were on.
The gamergate leaders were a bunch of asshats, but I wonder if a different kind of reaction to the grievances of the at the time less radicalized mass behind them would have defused the whole culture war thing we're in now.
One way or another the liberal side HAS to win back some of these people. I think there still are options (though probably much fewer than there would have been 10 years ago). The hard right guys are lost, but the libertarian wing of the alt-right still has enough overlap with many liberal values.
The reality is simpler, dumb, and honestly 2014 onward was well funded and organized movements that lured disaffected young men in. Men who initially held no hate in their hearts. Then brainwashed them.
The theory that any of this was organic is bullshit.
I disagree with you on this. Early alt-right was very much a grassroots movement of people when it started, before anyone even called it alt-right. It was not well funded. You can go back and all the big names were youtuber and streamers with shitty webcams, few viewers and 10-hour long streams. That's what first got popular on 4chan and, let's be honest, reddit. As well as several other online communities.
It didn't feel organic to outsider because by the time they started getting noticed by the wider media and society they had grown substantially already. It was fueled by insiders, not external financiers. But if you were opposed to the movement back then you never saw any of that. So the first time people really saw them they had some means, which made it look financed and that it sprung up from nowhere. Which, by the way, is why they always seem to think every grassroots leftist protest/movment/event is sponsored by shadowy George Soros or whatever. Outsiders never see the early part of these things, they just see the end product.
Don't think I'm saying there aren't any grifters or anything now btw. Today the alt-right seems almost entirely made up by grifters and their well-funded backers. As well as angry, stupid young men. I'm not saying anything nice about them, just that it didn't start up that way.
However this invited idiots who thought they were in good company.
if anyone wants any more evidence that this can result in a big community of people who genuinely believe the satire it began as:
think prequelmemes, think bronies. both started as people taking the piss, then some percentage of new people didn't realise they were the joke, continued in the communities until the original people move on.
suddenly you have this self fuelling community of people who seem to think that the terrible fucking show they watched was actually super deep and meaningful and they're a counterculture who can see above a bunch of other people who see it for trash.
like literally, that's how they both started.
fwiw, it's not as serious as it used to be, eventually those sort of communities petered off as it was more about an old show with no real new content and is just memes about memes and at some point seems to die off that way.
Yep, the far right deliberately targeted 4chan to take it over.
Uber racists had been talking years about getting their views mainstream, I seem to recall Louis Theroux doc where he stayed with some extremely racist people and they talked about wanting to go mainstream.
"Gave rise to" is the claim being made, not "invented". These spaces were consistent incubators for the advancement of the modern incarnation of right wing thinking. I think the video succeeds in making that connection
Also, I think it's kind of fascinating to explore the exact form this took.
Like what that dude is suggesting is that the rise of the alt-right was always going to happen in online forums that were sequestered due to their objectionable content, but it's crazy how the impetus for those forums wasn't racism or bigotry and hate initially, but the fact that a gigantic portion of the internet really wants lewd videos of underage anime girls and the more "civil" forums don't really want that.
Many of those right wing talking points have been floating around America subcultures for generations. The Minutemen were sending each other zines complaining about hippies and the John Birch society was doing Q anon books about Eisenhower
But we already know how community and platforming works. You're describing a scenario that would undoubtedly grow and create the wider alt-right movement, right?
It's a really dumb argument. Young angry, lonely, angry men have been drawn to the alt-right for years and years. American History X was entirely about this. 4Chan gave them a new place to gather. But the internets always been rife with them. Stormfront is one of the earliest websites.
I’m not watching the video now because I was around for some of this. Adtrw on sa had a file sharing thing back in the day(direct connect?) and a couple of associated irc channels(raspberryheaven was the main one) and moot hung out there before making 4chan. There was no alt righty stuff back then, and the general feel of the sa forms political board was lefty with a lot of people thinking ag ag should step down over the whole wmd falsification stuff)
4 chan became a home for alt right weirdos because it’s fully anonymous and has loose to no moderation. Something awful did have moderation. adtrw was pretty bad at points with intentional shock posting of the most vile stuff people could find. This was in line with general sa culture… think goatse and tubgirl. I don’t think many people got off on it so much as they were trying to out edgy one another, which is probably a culture that some of the 4chan image boards retained, though I doubt many of the people on 4chan ever visited sa.
Of course that kind of shit still attracts people that enjoy the stuff.
But tldr I think that something like 4chan is an inevitable outcome of less moderated places getting more moderated. If 4chan gets moderated something else will come up.
The internet is a weird place in that it’s really hard to fully moderate(which is both good and bad. It protects speech but can also protect abjectly criminal and antisocial behavior). Reflecting upon it now I do wish I’d never spent the time I did on sa because I think it gave me a much more cynical and negative worldview I’ve been trying to rid myself of since, and I’d also not recommend people to use 4chan but it is what it is…
this video is so confused, first he said the assassination of Ferdinand ''led to'' ww1 and describes the events like the domino meme he uses as a metaphor, but then he says war was likely inevitable, which is true, but then he says ''here's another example'' but this one is arguably way more of a ''single cause'', which makes sense, because it's actually the complete opposite of the domino meme, cause it's a big event and a small outcome...
I think it's like a Chinese whispers sort of thing.
People get a vague idea about what happened a quarter century ago, based on memes that people made based on memes other people made.
Then you watch a few of your theory crafting predecessors of varying validity, use some imagination, and there you go. Long form internet documentary content with a click bait title, and enough vague context that you can claim validity without looking completely mad.
I keep running into zoomers and gen alpha people who "know" what happened on some site in 2005 or 2008.. when they were still in diapers or in kindergarten and will tell someone who was present and aware of what was going on back then they just dont know what it was like back then.
I have people telling me even in this thread how things *really* were and I have doubts they were ever there and even dismissing what I personally bore witness to, and lost friends to as being an outsider who only learned about it once it was mainstream.
I was there, I watched my generation get divided politically in the matter of 2-3 years after one of the largest protests in history against the wealthy. Suddenly the fringe political scene became more prominent and aggressive, and systemic internet censorship became the norm overnight. far left and far right movements split social media down the middle.
Millennials were once referred to as the most politically apathetic generation. Which was true. It was actually considered a BIG problem for politicians because it was harder to fear monger.
Suddenly around 2012-2014, what used to be fringe politics were injected in all online discourse and social media, and by 2015/2016 had become mainstream.
The same people who helped spread that shit once mainstream were present at the recent presidential inauguration too.
Yeah no shit. The irony is that SA had more to do with the other side than the alt right. They had more influence on left wing, early social justice movements, and early 2010s third wave feminism being aggressively pushed into online spaces..
WHICH ironically helped fuel the alt-right by giving them bogeymen to bounce off of.
Most of that was incidental, though. Members of the forum he owned, either current or former, did things but he personally mostly just ran his mouth over nothing and banned things he personally got sick of seeing.
Exactly. He had exactly zero intuition on how to properly respond to the desires of his users and was a shitty mod at every turn, and in making so many mistakes, he drove the culture of the internet into what it is today.
Mangosteen fruit, Goldbelly pies, hentai bans, pairing with Shmorky… stuff that the most obnoxious mods today just wouldn’t be able to intertwine with their online activities. Even if they tried, they would just be standing in the shadows of what was.
Sure, but what would an expose look like? Lowtax just repeatedly shrugging through every decision he had to make? It would just turn into a story about SA.
Even if they focus on him as a person it would just be the story of the world's most pathetic man who loses his website because he beat his wife and then shot himself.
It was deeper than that, there was a big fight over image hosting and the host wanting to be thanked in every post that used it. As I recall, moot was wrapped up in all of that too.
By a similar association you could say that the invention of peanut butter lead to the collapse of the soviet union. A fun thought project, but not really realistic.
Any extreme ideology group is predominantly made up of the gullible and/or ignorant and a selection of psychopaths and the criminally insane. Reasonable, rational minds see the group for what they are and distance themselves once they realize who they're stuck with.
All that's happened is these people have been given easy access to congregate together globally.
'Lolicon' is a term used online to refer to fictional depictions of underage individuals in sexual positions or the individuals who consume that material.
I remember when I first encountered that term decades ago. Mi naive innocent ass thought it meant a smiley face of some kind (i.e. a "lol icon"). Oh how wrong I was...
Don’t whitewash history. Reddit had more than its share of alt right communities. They’re gone today but this website used to be a political spectrum with real conversation. Now it’s just far left LLM slop.
If the content you see on Reddit isn't generally left-leaning, it's because you made your feed that way. Otherwise, the most mainstream communities on Reddit are largely left leaning.
I'd say it's more that they're specifically left leaning - in American politics. Just like the right's identity is currently based on Trump, the left identity on here is expressed mostly as anti-trump. It's rarely a policy discussion, it's usually just name-calling and poo-flinging.
As this thread ages, and your comment score becomes visible, we will see that it will follow the trend of anyone speaking about how "left" Reddit is gets down-voted into the negatives.
Every default sub has heavily left slanted comment sections. I made a point to remove many default subs and by and large the skew moves neutral. r/videos used to not allow political aligned videos and once they loosened the rules it became near entirely political videos.
It's a malignancy to open discussion and Redditors drive hard to "align" any sub that has reasonable visibility and rules that permit political posts. My region-based sub-reddits reflect this strongly in those that allow political posts versus those that do not.
Lol no I hate Trump because Trump bad but I have no idea what he does but whatever it is it's always evil because I have Trump Derangement Syndrome. /s
Without seeing the video, I assume it goes "SA -> FYAD-> 4chan -> /b/ -> /pol/ -> alt-right". A tired and naive theory by now. pol did not create the alt-right, the alt-right already existed and was just drawn to pol because it was less filtered than many existing forums. You can find alt-right talking points from years and years before pol was ever a thing.
I just watched the video and I don't think that is an accurate description of the connection that's being made. It wasn't FYAD that led to 4chan and they're more making the claim that without the initial exodus from SA to 4chan there may not have been a landing place for the alt-righters when they all showed up. Also Peter Thiel plays a pretty prominent role in the whole thing.
I think the point of the parent comment is that yeah, they landed at 4chan but if 4chan hadn't existed they would've landed somewhere else, or created something to land on. 4chan happened to exist and be the place, but it didn't have to be, and we'd still probably be where we are without 4chan, or without them getting pushed out of SA. I mean, to that point, if they hadn't gotten pushed out of SA that would've just been the place instead of 4chan
Fair enough, I'd just say that this video is attempting to trace the threads of what actually happened, I don't think it's really making the claim that it was all inevitable. The title of this post is not the title of the video, or I think even a claim that the video is making.
I mean... People can make the case "eugenics and ultra-nationalism were in the air; if Germany hadn't allowed Hitler to seize power, a similar story would have played out elsewhere."
... but who doesn't make that case is Germany.
I won't speak for the other commenters but my point wasn't to excuse 4chan. They should be held accountable, and we should learn from the situation but my wider point is actually the opposite from excusing it. We should be aware that it was more than just that specific circumstance and we should be vigilant at working against that extremism wherever we see it
Yep, 4chan came from American weebs aping 2ch
Robert Evans's The War on Everyone does a really good job describing the way fascist movements made the jump from gun shows and edgy literature to surviving and thriving on the early internet well before Something Awful and 4chan.
Yeah, I've been around online since 93 myself. I've seen it happen in real time. By the mid 90s a lot of the modern tactics had been adopted by the far right, such as the original 'fake news' which was having sites with legitimate sounding domains and updated web frontages that made them look like a genuine site, which was then hosting 'stories' that were complete fabrications. The intention was more to see these stories linked by legitimate sites who didn't check properly than for them to be something people sought out. This was as early as 97 in my experience. Then later fake news became "any lie on the internet" before becoming "anything I disagree with" and the term lost all meaning.
I don't disagree that pointing to one single example of how the far right populated a site and used that platform to spread, normalize and indoctrinate their views can be said to be "the cause" though. None of this happens in isolation and it is fairer to say that such examples are contributing factors.
I have to ask…from the Eternal September of 1993?
Not really, I'd actually been tooling around with computers and various aspects since the 8 bit/BBS days in one form or another, and was an occasional usenet user before the web took off so I was more the kind to bemoan. 93 was the point that I had a decent modem at home, rather than having relied on public access via education and the web was blowing up.
Prior to that it was a 14.4k hardware modem and having to move my heavy ass early 90s pc close enough to the phone socket, so not really an every day thing. I was into povray back then, so largely I'd be sharing my stuff/gathering resources in rare online sessions back when we used to point gophers at things.
Evans himself is a Something Awful kid, iirc
Yep, he talks a lot about being brought up very conservative too. Of course, now he is a committed leftist with a bit of an anarchist streak.
"a bit"... in the same way he has "a bit" of a knife collection
More of a machete collection.
I'll admit, I find it deeply hilarious when he's taking in depth about Andrew Tate, then goes off on a purely personal tangent about his machetes. He is deeply personally insulted by Tates low quality Machetes and how they aren't good enough for Evans. He basically views Tates lack of quality control of machetes as really a symbol of how empty his entire worldview is.
He had a similar reaction when attending the young Republicans Cigar event. He was viscerally insulted.
Ah Republicans. "We're manly men! We shoot (expensive) guns (badly), we drink (cheap, shitty) beer, we eat (cheap, poorly prepared) meat, we smoke (cheap, shitty) cigars, we worship Jesus (while ignoring every last one of His teachings)! I drive a truck! (With the interior of a luxury minivan)."
All the better to play bagel tennis with.
I was good friends with him in high-school. He actually bought me my SA account so I could join him on there. So yeah, I can attest that he was VERY much a Something Awful user.
Ohh neat, been listening to BtB but I hadn't thought to check out other stuff he might have done.
Yeah, right? It’s all I’ve known him for. lol shoulda known.
soundcloud is a snitch app, enable your favorite VPN and read the information like a proper lefty anarchist here:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/robert-evans-the-war-on-everyone
alternate method
yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWrZulIbIFA
Camp of the Angels comes off like a massive turd polishing exercise, this is written by a person who wants his audience to eat his excretions.
Reading the book was an exercise in holding one breath, for someone to talk about feces that often tells you how much time the author/$ spent rolling in it.....unless that guy worked in the sewage industry it's kinda weird to be that intimate with feces and feel the need to publish text about it in that much detail.
I wonder how people will react to their secret president Miller being someone who routinely consumes the literary equivalent of defecations as "culture" and uses it for policy development.
He's been crowd sourcing from others who live and breathe this as their "lore" for his policy decisions, trash the source materials enough it messes with what little cohesion they have.
A job for Mr. Hanky the Christmas 💩, no?
Yes, and most likely some other website would have taken 4chans place eventually, but the little things that domino into what happened today are interesting to look at.
Eh, there has to be a more substantial connection I feel like. Otherwise you can argue that anything form the past led directly to things now. SomethingAwful still has a big lingering shadow over much of the content and culture we see on the internet to this day, but that doesn't mean we should credit Smiling Friends or Internet Historians youtube channel to Lowtax. Even if one may or may not have happened without the other.
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Methinks the certainly-not-a-fascist-pedo doth protest too much.
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Oh you’re so good at predicting people’s behavior! You must be a psychic! Or maybe it is that you are constantly acting like an asshole so everyone around you PREDICTABLY reacts to your asshole behavior? Couldn’t be…
You really should quit posting things and delete Reddit. Go read a book (or have someone read it to you, if reading is an issue for you…). Just go away. No one wants you around.
Whats wrong with blue hair? I think it looks pretty
All blue hair or some blue hairstyles? I used it loosely for dramatic because it seems to trigger a side as much as calling anyone right of far left a pedo. The mass downvotes definitely appear to reflect that.
This guy protects pedos! Weird!!!
I would agree with this. The video is associating the apparent inciting incidents with cause. IE: when someone lights a match and triggers an explosion, is the match the cause of the explosion, or the buildup of combustible air and fuel? In the thumbnail itself, the setup of the tiles is primarily responsible for the knock-on effects of one little tile falling and knocking over the huge tile.
In this video, the videographer tracks a series of matches being struck, leading to sequential explosions. There is a certain amount of social cycles reinforcing themselves being noted here, like 4chan culture, which I'd consider required for the hypothesis. But not at all enough evidence given that they existed aside from the other alt-right sites and culture growing.
IMO, a lot of radicalization is the acceleration of the information age combined with a decline in social accountability. We have not yet evolved sufficient collective social skills to defeat the confirmation bias reinforcement available in internet niches.
Yeah, what actually happened was that /pol/ was created to separate out political discussion from other boards, specifically /news/, and it immediately became a shitpost for people to mock politics and troll anyone being serious.
However this invited idiots who thought they were in good company.
Stormfront, who went from people barely able to spell, to being organized and well funded (hmmmm) decided to start "redpilling" 4chan and pushing all their crazy shit.
Then they devised the alt right movement as a means to trick moderates and center left young men to join with the idea that it was a more compassionate version of conservative politics and as an antithesis to neoconservatives. In reality they lured people in then started "redpilling" them and grew their numbers.
The reality is simpler, dumb, and honestly 2014 onward was well funded and organized movements that lured disaffected young men in. Men who initially held no hate in their hearts. Then brainwashed them.
The theory that any of this was organic is bullshit.
Qanon started as a troll to see how far you could push right wingers into crazy down. Turned out there was no depth you could go. Then someone else (likely russia) hijacked that movement.
The recent twitter fiasco proved that this push for conservatism is a literal global conspiracy and foreign states are responsible, or at least, people in those countries are being paid by wealthy interests to do so.
That's definitely what happened. You could track it live at the time. But I sometimes wonder what the other side could have done differently. These kinds of people were originally allies of the liberal internet movement. It's clear that they were specifically targeted by the thought leaders of the alt-right, but it also means the liberal side kinda just let it happen by not showing enough interest.
There were very early warnings that the chosen direction of the liberal side was massively pushing away a large part of this voter base where even 5 years before (around 2008-2011) wouldn't even be a question what side of the political spectrum they were on.
The gamergate leaders were a bunch of asshats, but I wonder if a different kind of reaction to the grievances of the at the time less radicalized mass behind them would have defused the whole culture war thing we're in now.
One way or another the liberal side HAS to win back some of these people. I think there still are options (though probably much fewer than there would have been 10 years ago). The hard right guys are lost, but the libertarian wing of the alt-right still has enough overlap with many liberal values.
I disagree with you on this. Early alt-right was very much a grassroots movement of people when it started, before anyone even called it alt-right. It was not well funded. You can go back and all the big names were youtuber and streamers with shitty webcams, few viewers and 10-hour long streams. That's what first got popular on 4chan and, let's be honest, reddit. As well as several other online communities.
It didn't feel organic to outsider because by the time they started getting noticed by the wider media and society they had grown substantially already. It was fueled by insiders, not external financiers. But if you were opposed to the movement back then you never saw any of that. So the first time people really saw them they had some means, which made it look financed and that it sprung up from nowhere. Which, by the way, is why they always seem to think every grassroots leftist protest/movment/event is sponsored by shadowy George Soros or whatever. Outsiders never see the early part of these things, they just see the end product.
Don't think I'm saying there aren't any grifters or anything now btw. Today the alt-right seems almost entirely made up by grifters and their well-funded backers. As well as angry, stupid young men. I'm not saying anything nice about them, just that it didn't start up that way.
if anyone wants any more evidence that this can result in a big community of people who genuinely believe the satire it began as:
think prequelmemes, think bronies. both started as people taking the piss, then some percentage of new people didn't realise they were the joke, continued in the communities until the original people move on.
suddenly you have this self fuelling community of people who seem to think that the terrible fucking show they watched was actually super deep and meaningful and they're a counterculture who can see above a bunch of other people who see it for trash.
like literally, that's how they both started.
fwiw, it's not as serious as it used to be, eventually those sort of communities petered off as it was more about an old show with no real new content and is just memes about memes and at some point seems to die off that way.
Yep, the far right deliberately targeted 4chan to take it over.
Uber racists had been talking years about getting their views mainstream, I seem to recall Louis Theroux doc where he stayed with some extremely racist people and they talked about wanting to go mainstream.
4chan was an opportunity and they took it.
I remember a John Oliver segment about white supemacists who’d watch Tucker Carlsons Fox show twice: once to enjoy and again to take notes on.
Yep. I was there when it happened and here when they tried to hijack reddit too.
"Gave rise to" is the claim being made, not "invented". These spaces were consistent incubators for the advancement of the modern incarnation of right wing thinking. I think the video succeeds in making that connection
Also, I think it's kind of fascinating to explore the exact form this took.
Like what that dude is suggesting is that the rise of the alt-right was always going to happen in online forums that were sequestered due to their objectionable content, but it's crazy how the impetus for those forums wasn't racism or bigotry and hate initially, but the fact that a gigantic portion of the internet really wants lewd videos of underage anime girls and the more "civil" forums don't really want that.
Many of those right wing talking points have been floating around America subcultures for generations. The Minutemen were sending each other zines complaining about hippies and the John Birch society was doing Q anon books about Eisenhower
"pol didn't create the alt-right, it just gave them shelter, community, and a voice" isn't exactly a glowing review of pol.
Case in point, &TOTSE
But we already know how community and platforming works. You're describing a scenario that would undoubtedly grow and create the wider alt-right movement, right?
It's a really dumb argument. Young angry, lonely, angry men have been drawn to the alt-right for years and years. American History X was entirely about this. 4Chan gave them a new place to gather. But the internets always been rife with them. Stormfront is one of the earliest websites.
Fyad was never alt right or even adjacent to it. The exodus was from the pedophiles in the anime forum.
You forgot ytmnd
fyad definitely wasn't what led to 4chan
I’m not watching the video now because I was around for some of this. Adtrw on sa had a file sharing thing back in the day(direct connect?) and a couple of associated irc channels(raspberryheaven was the main one) and moot hung out there before making 4chan. There was no alt righty stuff back then, and the general feel of the sa forms political board was lefty with a lot of people thinking ag ag should step down over the whole wmd falsification stuff)
4 chan became a home for alt right weirdos because it’s fully anonymous and has loose to no moderation. Something awful did have moderation. adtrw was pretty bad at points with intentional shock posting of the most vile stuff people could find. This was in line with general sa culture… think goatse and tubgirl. I don’t think many people got off on it so much as they were trying to out edgy one another, which is probably a culture that some of the 4chan image boards retained, though I doubt many of the people on 4chan ever visited sa.
Of course that kind of shit still attracts people that enjoy the stuff.
But tldr I think that something like 4chan is an inevitable outcome of less moderated places getting more moderated. If 4chan gets moderated something else will come up.
The internet is a weird place in that it’s really hard to fully moderate(which is both good and bad. It protects speech but can also protect abjectly criminal and antisocial behavior). Reflecting upon it now I do wish I’d never spent the time I did on sa because I think it gave me a much more cynical and negative worldview I’ve been trying to rid myself of since, and I’d also not recommend people to use 4chan but it is what it is…
They'd have a more compelling argument if they said it was Tim /Pool/
I would also argue that Gamergate played a big roll in the domino effect. YouTubers discovered they can make a lot of money from angry loners
Gamergate is midway through the SomethingAwful pipeline - from 4chan to 8kun.
You misspelled losers.
Both apply in this case
Theres guaranteed to be one winner in a group of gamers. Relatively speaking..
They could all be terrible at balatro
Steve Bannon ain’t clearing black deck, no way
Yes, that point is made in the video
this video is so confused, first he said the assassination of Ferdinand ''led to'' ww1 and describes the events like the domino meme he uses as a metaphor, but then he says war was likely inevitable, which is true, but then he says ''here's another example'' but this one is arguably way more of a ''single cause'', which makes sense, because it's actually the complete opposite of the domino meme, cause it's a big event and a small outcome...
How could you write that sentence and not realize that you answered your own question
How did you read that comment and reply without realizing there was no question in it?
Doubts would have been a better expression, yeah. The point still stands lol
I have no idea what you're talking about, what doubts?
you understand I called the video confused, not confusing?
A lot of people seem hell bent on rewriting the early internet's history, I see this stuff a lot lately.
I think it's like a Chinese whispers sort of thing.
People get a vague idea about what happened a quarter century ago, based on memes that people made based on memes other people made.
Then you watch a few of your theory crafting predecessors of varying validity, use some imagination, and there you go. Long form internet documentary content with a click bait title, and enough vague context that you can claim validity without looking completely mad.
I keep running into zoomers and gen alpha people who "know" what happened on some site in 2005 or 2008.. when they were still in diapers or in kindergarten and will tell someone who was present and aware of what was going on back then they just dont know what it was like back then.
I have people telling me even in this thread how things *really* were and I have doubts they were ever there and even dismissing what I personally bore witness to, and lost friends to as being an outsider who only learned about it once it was mainstream.
I was there, I watched my generation get divided politically in the matter of 2-3 years after one of the largest protests in history against the wealthy. Suddenly the fringe political scene became more prominent and aggressive, and systemic internet censorship became the norm overnight. far left and far right movements split social media down the middle.
Millennials were once referred to as the most politically apathetic generation. Which was true. It was actually considered a BIG problem for politicians because it was harder to fear monger.
Suddenly around 2012-2014, what used to be fringe politics were injected in all online discourse and social media, and by 2015/2016 had become mainstream.
The same people who helped spread that shit once mainstream were present at the recent presidential inauguration too.
Yeah no shit. The irony is that SA had more to do with the other side than the alt right. They had more influence on left wing, early social justice movements, and early 2010s third wave feminism being aggressively pushed into online spaces..
WHICH ironically helped fuel the alt-right by giving them bogeymen to bounce off of.
What a journey
RIP Barnacle Jim
His face was long, his hole was damaged
Jim facts: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3942972&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=3
There needs to be a deep dive by some YouTuber on Lowtax.
No other single person managed to be such a massive influence on popular culture primarily through being a shithead forum moderator.
Most of that was incidental, though. Members of the forum he owned, either current or former, did things but he personally mostly just ran his mouth over nothing and banned things he personally got sick of seeing.
Exactly. He had exactly zero intuition on how to properly respond to the desires of his users and was a shitty mod at every turn, and in making so many mistakes, he drove the culture of the internet into what it is today.
Mangosteen fruit, Goldbelly pies, hentai bans, pairing with Shmorky… stuff that the most obnoxious mods today just wouldn’t be able to intertwine with their online activities. Even if they tried, they would just be standing in the shadows of what was.
Sure, but what would an expose look like? Lowtax just repeatedly shrugging through every decision he had to make? It would just turn into a story about SA.
Even if they focus on him as a person it would just be the story of the world's most pathetic man who loses his website because he beat his wife and then shot himself.
People will watch a train wreck.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ei-5VRe3xao
More about him as a person and his downfall, but also covers his forum. It's quite interesting. Pretty much a podcast listen though.
Alt-right folks sure do wave a lot of red flags, despite their hate for communism.
Even the term alt-right is in itself an online invention designed to rehabilitate far right views into the mainstream.
GOONSWARM.
Stairs?
Thanks for the abysmal level understanding of anything longer than a sentence guys.
General subs comments are always good to explain to people why "redditor" is used as an insult even by people that use reddit.
I blame Moot for all of this bullshit
Not sure if srs. Quite an awful, far-fetched take even without giving in to clickbait.
Considering these people were brewed on 4chan/b, I find the notion legit.
wait I thought 4chan's /pol board led to the alt right... now its SA?
Why are all these aging webforums trying to claim Trump?
4chan basically was founded because SA started moderating its hentai board
It was deeper than that, there was a big fight over image hosting and the host wanting to be thanked in every post that used it. As I recall, moot was wrapped up in all of that too.
Didn't you watch the video?
Come on, man. What if they don't have eyes? Don't be so insensitive. /s
People commenting without watching/reading? That's just the internet.
Of course they didn't, this is r/videos. The top comment on this very post is about how they didn't watch the video
Could be this subreddit's motto
No, absolutely not.
RIP Lowtax.
Blew up his family, his forum, and his [redacted] in that order.
What a WHOOPSIE!
By a similar association you could say that the invention of peanut butter lead to the collapse of the soviet union. A fun thought project, but not really realistic.
Any extreme ideology group is predominantly made up of the gullible and/or ignorant and a selection of psychopaths and the criminally insane. Reasonable, rational minds see the group for what they are and distance themselves once they realize who they're stuck with.
All that's happened is these people have been given easy access to congregate together globally.
1980 American humiliaton starts with reagan. Hopefully it isnt a century.
Also want to add there is a bunch of prior stuff america shoud have never done, like intervention in Iran
Oh grow the fuck up, no it did not.
Or how hentai and "lolicon" led to the rise of alt-right.
'Lolicon' is a term used online to refer to fictional depictions of underage individuals in sexual positions or the individuals who consume that material.
I remember when I first encountered that term decades ago. Mi naive innocent ass thought it meant a smiley face of some kind (i.e. a "lol icon"). Oh how wrong I was...
Don’t whitewash history. Reddit had more than its share of alt right communities. They’re gone today but this website used to be a political spectrum with real conversation. Now it’s just far left LLM slop.
Its always funny to find people in the wild who thinks reddit in general is in anyway "left"...
If the content you see on Reddit isn't generally left-leaning, it's because you made your feed that way. Otherwise, the most mainstream communities on Reddit are largely left leaning.
By American standards. Not necessarily western world standards.
I'd say it's more that they're specifically left leaning - in American politics. Just like the right's identity is currently based on Trump, the left identity on here is expressed mostly as anti-trump. It's rarely a policy discussion, it's usually just name-calling and poo-flinging.
It’s always funny to find people that can’t read
Far left is when ummm woke gay healthcare?!?
As this thread ages, and your comment score becomes visible, we will see that it will follow the trend of anyone speaking about how "left" Reddit is gets down-voted into the negatives.
Every default sub has heavily left slanted comment sections. I made a point to remove many default subs and by and large the skew moves neutral. r/videos used to not allow political aligned videos and once they loosened the rules it became near entirely political videos.
It's a malignancy to open discussion and Redditors drive hard to "align" any sub that has reasonable visibility and rules that permit political posts. My region-based sub-reddits reflect this strongly in those that allow political posts versus those that do not.
You're adorable.
🥰
Let's test it: I think President Trump has done some good things for this country.
Lol no I hate Trump because Trump bad but I have no idea what he does but whatever it is it's always evil because I have Trump Derangement Syndrome. /s
95% of the internet doesn't know what sa is or even used forums