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Evening. Thank you to everyone for being here and we get to get started, which is always wonderful moment. Im the owner of the bookshop and a partner at bird in hand and its always id like to welcome folks to the space, especially on a hot summer night we all get to gather together threat by carefully curated books. If it your first time at bird in hand, it is a a book cafe. With delicious local foods, delicious drinks and get a careful selection that surround you. We invite people in. We have a lot of regulars. Some of our regulars write books. Sometimes we get to celebrate those books the day after the launched in the world and today were incredibly excited of course to welcome dale beran here to bird in hand for it came from something awful how a toxic troll army accidentally memed donald trump into office. This week it feels the special, special to welcome them to speak about this topic in the city of baltimore and the space we often like to say yes with coffee, yes with food, yes, we books. There are these transaction outlets but were really here to build community and celibate culture in place with thats incredibly important. I think im speaking to a roomful of people who know and love baltimore at the think that the search is only real answer to a week like this week where may be a certain try to culture and reduction of nuanced truths have come to the fore and i think possible well to discuss that tonight. As dale whos who is a writer, cartoons, professor at Morgan State University will leaders. We are proud here to note he wrote at least a portion of the book here, aided and abetted by reese does the newest drink order by heart. [laughing] hes a low cost more with exceptional good taste. You should observe of a counterculture that can no longer be written off or pushed aside that some of us might feel sort of chairman issa certain element of our culture. The trolls have arrived. They are depicted on the cover of this excellent book. His piece on medium fortune, e skeleton key to the rights of trump ties the toxic slums of the Public Discourse to the rise of the all but from the far and in the metaphor of opium satire to the rise of our president donald trump. He expanded that i say to sears instead of a culture that is incredibly unserious, trolls who do it for the locals, fortune users and as a dozen extents do this because you you are a decent human being. [laughing] you go to the right places online, the right places in life but theyll is here to tell us about it to bring light to a dark topic but a series topic. Its often post an unserious way and something i think we need to grapple with in the world and effects it has on a broader culture and ability to talk to one another and future in which i think we hope for a healthier version of that. Dale, take it away. [applause] hi, everyone. Thank you. That was a great introduction. Thats more than even i have to say on trolls. Yes, thank you for being here tonight of all nights when we are braving a great plague of rodents, rats, and other trump inspired manifestations come into our city. Yeah, its a nice when trump insults baltimore job written the book that deeply insults him and then to resend it in baltimore, i guess thats convenient timing. I can tell you a little bit about this book, how it came to be. I had written a piece on mediums so no one would publish it. I had written it just partly for my own edification but also because at the time theyre sort of a local baltimore think that was happening where the show space of the great Arts Community were being intimidated by 4chan trolls. The book is essentially about a set of horrible, horrible online spaces, something awful is one any gets worse from there. 4chan and 8chan, hes a Message Boards where people have congregated for ten, 15, 20 years and have only gotten more and more unhappy to the extent where now the other and they are angry and murderous. So two of the last shootings, the one in poway california and also the one in new zealand, those were 8chan shooting sicking wealth of one of these websites and this population a lot of them have become fascist so they become so deeply disenchanted with the existence that they decided that they want to destroy civilization and instead sort of rebuilt as a fascist fantasy. Thats the subject matter of the book, and when i first started researching if i was an internet cartoonist. My last gig was making cartoons for cartoon network. I started writing about this in 2016 because, yeah, the 4chan 4n trolls were intimidating local baltimore artists and attempting to close down some show spaces and doing that across the u. S. Because this was at the end of 2016 right after trump got elected so they felt very emboldened. I found myself around christmas, at a Christmas Party trying to explain to a friend of mine who these people were because she organized a list of all of the events that would go up each week, the gallery openings and the musical shows. 4chan trolls were intimidating her and i was trying to say no, they are nerds, idiots. Im sure explain this long history of what it come from. It turns out probably by coincidence that i remembered them, the use to meet, 4chan when it first came around about 2003 2003 it would make one place in the world which was baltimores odor, convention. I remembered them back then, is so strange after 1520 how do we get the new fascist counterculture out of the messageboard. Put that into peace and i felt like to of people would read but millions of people that it and now i was cursed to forever write about the subgroup after that happened. I was like, i asked my agent, can write another book . No, you have to write this book. It was like after i took the assignment i was like, the sign was essentially like drink all this poison and tell us how it tastes. It tasted terrible. So i spent the next few years researching them, seeking out people on the site, seeking people who had spent ten, 15 years on the site sort of like offsets of the subcommittee to figure out whats going on. Everyone around me who was helping create the book were very cheerful about humanity in the sense that might be irrelevant by the time the book comes out but in fortune for everyone and i guess fortune for the book but not really for me its still, it keeps going on and on. Thats what the book is about. I would like to read a passage. Im going to read the introduction. The introduction at first was very short and thin my editor said, you need to tell people more about yourself. I said no. But eventually convinced me so now the introduction is probably for the better i think now the introduction is about my experience first encountering this group in 2005 or sixish. And then there would be a question series after, since most of this group are my friends and because of the subject matter the format of the questions can be just like what the hell . [laughing] ill even accept like why . Anything like that is also fine. Okay, thats what we will do. Now when the book is a post here i will wait. Ill do this. This is very cool. Introduction. The garbage fire eternal. On a warm summer day some 13 years ago i found myself in the frigid air of baltimores Convention Center attending otakon, a gathering of super fans of japanese media namely i didnt particularly like it and and i felt i was a little too old for the event. Id attended a few times when i was in high school in the late 90s. Back then itd been held in ina set of Photo Conference rooms, obscure animation tv. But it receives the crowd to configure to require the cities largest in you. The events had evolved into an elaborate festival or otherwise isolated suburban kids came to bond over their favorite tv shows. The convention was held next to the cities famous inner harbor and after Shopping Mall with a call clipper ship drifting in the blackwater beside restaurants. The meeting all like a mall was brutalist and modern made of hard right angles, truncated geometric shapes and whirling structural triangles. Which means employed as a sciencefiction backdrop for the costume photo shoots. I was her with an Old High School friend. We both graduated college and wanted to be professional artists. I was particularly interested in becoming a writer though i had no idea how to do it. Which started making a short online, mostly about ourselves called a lesson is learned that the damage is irreversible. To our surprise most people reading it and weve gone down to otakon to hand out flyers to promote it. Besides the web comic it had not been all that great of the year. Just after graduated my father had died suddenly of a heart attack. Ive spent the previous months winding up the Competition Affairs of his finances and psychiatry practice, badly. When the dust settled there wasnt really an inheritance when split among my siblings. More tax problems. As a child i had willfully shut myself up an abstract realm of books. The transition out of childhood into an adult realm i didnt quite understand, full of stultifying tasks and bureaucratic forms, was painful. It mingled with the absence of my father put them 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 commit with a comforting kids fantasy on the set of the screen felt slightly unsettling to me, though i couldnt put my finger on why. At a certain point, one drink the triangle shaped holes lined with wooden ships trapped in bottles and he can apply for my web comic to teens dressed as rubber monsters, things started to get weird. Not for me, then. I hardly knew what i was seeing thin, but for all of us, now. Years later i realized i 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 that was a 15yearold boy with a sharp chin, golden locks and a baseball cap going to a Powerpoint Presentation that was an action of website statistics and lewd jokes mocking varies types of cartoon pornography. These included many andron images of the boy himself depicted as a curvaceous pink cat girl wearing white panties. And the increase of silly photoshop drawings and as they slip by, the raucous crowd shouted words of encouragement, gearing up for the latenight 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 50 disguise his eyes, and he led 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 founder, christopher poole. In october 2003 quote board and in need of, yet programmed 4chan on a whim to create pictures of and the negroes 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 aubrey document in history books in allamerica all america dave nazi worshiping of right quote began with 4chan with quote people talking on fine about japanese anime. Few of these books including his offer an expedition from this could possibly happened. How we got from anime to the nazis of 2016 and onward. How all of this resulted in internet weirdos marching with tiki torches and fantasy themed costumes in sharpsville in 2017. Of course the kids in the room were not nazis. Far from it. The last thing they wanted was to discuss was politics. And at that moment i didnt feel as though i was present for some great turning point in history. Back it seemed like i was confronting yet another moment of antihistory antihistory at landscape of the american suburban nowhere land was imported into the Convention Center, a place that, in its expanses of smooth, clean carpeting, model ships and big tumbling to metric shapes, felt like an infinite kids rec room. The teens were not 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 trenchcoat mafia kid to see which to ask the curly headed later question, the teens monsters kept debating and joking the things called memes control. In may 2000 these terms were meaningless to anyone outside that room. But later they out of it and saturate every inch of the world and stranger still, from 2016 onward, memes control the game concepts that obsessed political commentators. Almost overnight the terms invaded the domain of World Leaders and redefine the content 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 id encountered 4chan at otakon, the site constantly popped up in my web comics referral logs, the data that shows what people come from when they visit your site. When 4chan began it wasnt 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 didnt 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. But this hardly explained why it ballooned so rapidly. Why, almost as soon as it appeared, people begin gathering to celebrate it. Each year the fortune meeting at otakon doubled the number a dell finally the hordes flowed out of the room and 4chan stockholding beatings. By 2010, 4chan was one of the most popular websites ever. How did all of this mutate into the altright . Into donald trump and trolls and memes . To borrow a phrase, what happened not just to the election at the politics can 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, the eternal . To put a finer point on it, how did it pornographic anime website transfer my garbage sheep into the postcultural garbage sheep upon which the great event 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, trumps defense of their cause, and the 2017 street battles between the altright in and file all way in the future antifa all still late in the future. The mystical realm of fake news and trolls were not yet ascended. The Washington Post about write articles for fortune posted the New York Times would not get putting out calls on its tip line for plot of 4chan to disrupt elections. Though, to be fair, trumpet already adopted 4chan mean, every the frog, as a similar during the campaign. And Richard Spencer, the infamous neonazi, i just been soft drink trumps the inauguration as he pointed to his pepe pin. And all of was not for chance first entree into politics. Many 4chan conspiracy theories have turned into political causes, gamer gate in 2014 and pizzagate in 2016. 2016. Just a few years prior to that, 4chan spot and International Far left activist collective known as anonymous which is 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, hows that going to fit . Since trumpcare events were so preposterous, the joke was of course they wouldnt fit into my scheme or any others. They were by definition totally random designed to attack reason itself and their ability to make sense of the world. Strangers with gas when i explain that the subject of my book was the altright. Very timely, they would reply but then never thought would occur to them. How . And must be so difficult it would add sympathetically, and the wiki changes. What they meant by this was that media reports, trump, fake news, latenight tv, a talking head pendants on 24 hour cable news, all think into people social media, with a font of confusion, the great source of chaos. What they were saying to me was, how can you even understand the font of confusion . Its where confusion comes from. 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. When the 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 a political air of aqua 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 is filming. Meaning, and even the message itself, gets lost in infinite replication. This work aspires to drop far enough back we can look at how the system wired up in the first place, to provide clarity by widening the historical frame. The key to understanding what happened with the 4chan itself. And, indeed, this book details how trumps what he 16 campaign was intimately wrapped up with the site user base. And why this occurred as 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 were counterculture catastrophically split into left and right camps in 2017. The first section of this book traces the history of counterculture is prior to 4cha 4chan. It describes how all counterculture from the 60s onward suffered a similar fate. They get eaten by the screen. Its a sad but now familiar tale. As late 60s counterculture struggled with the burden of infinite choice and 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 transition from selling products as practical necessities to products as gateways into deals, aspirations and joys. Counterculture was employed as appetizers most powerful tool. What followed from the 70s to the 90s with the game of predator and prey in which new counterculture is with emerge to combat the forces of materialism and marketing, only to be swallowed whole by Marketing Campaigns that endured transcendent and rebellion. By the 80s counterculture defeated counterculture which used to bludgeon and skin next seasons counterculture, the hippie label so fine food, antiglamour punks sold to the glamour, et cetera. As a result, counterculture is hoping to resist in the 90s, employed nihilism as a survival strategy. They became about nothing, about having no value system, leaving the house of the mind, morals and desires empty so there was nothing to steal. And this indifference, omitted and difference to politics. A response to the socalled in the history. In the wake of the collapse of the soviet union, that the neoconservative levitical philosopher Francis Fukuyama defined the pervading political idea of the period. Press the leftist utopian projects of other eras would never emerge and wed already reached the quoteunquote indepth historical progress. In other words, americans style capitalism would endure for all eternity. No reconfiguring needed. This seemed to be the natural terminus of counterculture but by flick i did the advent of the web had reduced new dissidents in the void. Gen xers became ironically half ironically or genuinely by this point it hardly mattered, younger generations are migrating out of reallife and into the screen. Still contemptuous, they now celebrated escapism but even as they embraced his this lifesty, something even wonkier happen. He squeezed it so hard they broke it. And 90s contest to outpace by diving into nihilism degenerate 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 one. 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 throats that they were born talent in who and how to be. With the advent of the web, all the discarded pieces of popculture, entertainment fiction, advertising and video games that manufactures had sold to youth to tell them who and how did he began to rise as a spout of sliced up digitized chunks, and once ejected it could be refashioned, snippet by stepping into a homemade culture of jokes, memes. The new Youth Culture was greeted 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 computer games, movies, tv shows, comic books and toys. And as it turns 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 for end quote nonfiction as well. In 2008, 4chan saw its creations out into the world and take root. Its fun hacker trolling collectives that propagated joke narratives in Mainstream Media to parity efforts to manufacture consent. And this surprise anyone was started as a joke transfer into something unseen since the 1960s, a sincere countercultural political movement. Im certainly, 4chan alter nihilistic and ultra apathetic culture of post\90{l1}s{l0}\90{l1}s{l0} indifference went to a black hole and emerge on the other side as a genuine political force. For a brief few years between 20082011, 4chan dennis since no longer lead a work trapped behind their screens. They felt it could affect great change to their screens. Anonymous, the user base of trolls metamorphose into anonymous and anticorporate antipower structure prodemocracy hacker collective which went on to play a key role in international protests and revolutions. By 2012 the building had collapsed. Its principal members arrested by the fbi. The last part of this book details how, in the wake of this collapse, 4chan spun the altright. With the dissolution of 4chan newfound agency, its user base and counterculture thanked to dash sank to new lows. New generation of young people somehow even more immersed in screen was then the last floated on the site what older gen xer users and the prospects in life diminishing after the 2008 crash. Scores scores of young people, young men in particular, were treated from work in the world and never returned. It was in this environment that the altright formed. These new groups coalesced around the resurgent lifestyle celebrate on the channel seconds 2005 except this new this new version was even sadder than the last. 4chan was pocketed by a group of d class individuals set so far apart from society and so wholly lacking in Identity Theft to begin to obsess over it. They clung to race as a means as selfdefinition. These diff ashes movements emerged much as the first and second out of deacon sexualized people thrust in society by the material throes of economics. Degraded and superfluous, convinced life was nothing but a cruel power struggle because theyre constantly losing it. They fashion their own context out of absurd medieval power fantasies. By 2014, many of 4chan new and old have converted to this ideology. In 2015 baking up with steve bannon and Milo Yiannopoulos to back donald trump are promised americas losers it would make them when so much they would get sick of winning. Meanwhile, the youth counterculture that had remained on the left orbit of another popular image website, 4chan bible, tumblr. Com. On tumblr youth were so deeply steeped in screen worlds, memes and fantasies created a new counterculture to match, identity politics in which the old countercultural obsession with self definitions come seamlessly mingled with fantasy products and entertainment fiction. As the two political fashions merge, they precipitated partly by design but mostly accident, a cautious lowballed into street illustrations, then brawls and finally the violence of charlottesville. The result was at in the wake of trumps rise to power, something wrote in Youth Culture and politics in general. At first it appeared as though we were finally lost for good and the mirror maze of the screen, helpless watching events transpire behind glass. But on another level of clear pattern was emerging. Politics, long constrained in a new band a between liberal capitalism and slightly more liberal capitalism begin sorting itself into youth battles come into youth battles that were a century or two old, between socialism and fascism, democracy and depression, broader themes from the 19th and 20th centuries emerge as the cracks and americanstyle capitalism grew larger. By 2018, even the New York Times was running ipads such as american capitalism isnt working. And the author of the individually at the last man Francis Fukuyama whose big idea was that american capitalism might last for ever suggested breast socialism quote should come back because quote at this juncture seems to me certain things, said are turning out to be true, unquote. Where exactly does that leave us . After i encountered 4chan in the flesh in the mid2000s, i started to read and document the site. This was partly because i needed something to write about but its also because 4chan attractive people like me, idle young men. The first ten years of my adult life were not all that different from the second. I spent most of it unemployed or unemployable drifting in the service economy, quitting jobs that somehow paid less than sitting at home selling items on internet. Even now i am almost nothing outside my school debt. Its hard to tell tell a much s came from as never quite successful artist friend of mine put it, quote, ruining your life by becoming an artist. I think i was luckier than most. I had the benefit of an education. As i struggled i suspected there was a mask unless people out there who knew there was no way out. Others my age and younger shuffled in cash registers and into cubicles, sought even less on the horizon. Not just economically but for lack of a better word, spiritually, on whatever plane, art and hope were made. So instead of they prefer to live their life through the screen. Ridiculously, as soon as i entered adult society, it attempted to convince me to never join it. To instead root for its rotten collapse. How else does one interpret negative assets, only less than nothing, compounding and replicating, somehow into even more leftist . Is it any surprise my peers were even more convinced . Why wasnt i among them in costume at otakon, locking myself in the class or a fantasy as a team, or even, or even sadder gray cubicle as agenda told. And later why wasnt i on the street drawing blood . Why did i choose to stalk sad nerds and watch them from a great distance, slowly transformed into nazis . It took me years to realize this but the reason my fathers affairs with such a mess when he died, partly the reason why he died, was totalitarianism. When my father was in his early 20s he escaped from behind the iron curtain. He hid underneath camping gear in the back seat. When he reached the freedom of the west without having to fire his skin from his first act as a westerner was to dismantle the gun into the pieces into a lake. He always ended the tale that way, probably concluding that the pieces are probably still there resting away at the bottom of the lake. He never told me who helped him cross the border into the west he had a companion next to him. I never learn to that was either. In my childhood imagination, the pieces of the can seem to embody this mystery. What my father said about them, that they were still there line inaccessible at the bottom of an unnamed lake resonated with the unfathomable. And after he died and was reduced to nothing but a memory, strangely enough that was one of the memories he became. Not as anything but as it used to imagine them in the story, 22 years old hiding underneath sleeping bags next to this unknown companion with the lugar press up against his chest. I knew how he felt then he goes he expressed the same emotions about the rest of his life, anger and resentment. He remained furious that you can place in such an absurd position, that he might even forced to use the nazi gun to shoot his way to freedom. That he almost had to employ the tactics of idiots and bullies and evil men to escape another set of them. That was what the pieces at the bottom of the lake meant to him, that happily was not forced to use the gun, that he could abandon it all for life in the United States. Accept those pieces did not quite abandon him. They were still dissolving in the story, never dissolved. He did tell me how we got the gun. It started when thousands of nazi soldiers surround surrouns and what was then czechoslovakia some 17 years earlier in 1945 when he was five years old. They find the tanks up on a rich and told the town to if i quit because the next morning there were going to shell it into oblivion. But the next morning came and the town was still there and so were the tanks. Only the men had disappeared. Instead of leveling his village, they had shed the burden of of e ordinance, hundreds of tons of it, and walked away with nothing but their coats and hats hoping to surrender to the americans before the soviets got to them. He never forgot how ridiculous it all seems, have substance of ideas can compel millions of men to madness before dissolving in the blink of an eye. How come in an instant the nightmares dream of an income the war simply ended. The war appeared to him then. The world appeared to him then and he always insisted it was a joke, a thin sheet of rationality covering an ocean of human stupidity. He used the same language to describe the world order and the Little Corner of the United States, i dreamed that could world away in an instant. He had seen it happen. It could happen here, he would say, americans dont know catastrophe. It seems unthinkable to them but it could happen anywhere. He kept our passports up to date. He stored canned food and bought many new guns to replace the one rusting and the like. Guns in the house, in the car, guns with emergency camping gear. I wasnt supposed to tell these stories. I i wasnt supposed to tell thee stories. The nazis, the communists, stalin spies, the as is, the men had all died but they were not dead. Only sleeping. The factions would come again and angry had bested them, take revenge for old grievances. When he returned to his village in the early 90s after the fall of the iron curtain, people flinched he said. They thought they were seeing a ghost when a person mysteriously vanished during communism. It generally met the regime had made them disappear. He laughed when he said this, and for a while i really thought it was a joke. The way he talked about it with nations simply melting away and all youre going bad was in a lighthearted sort of way as a grand farce. Was part of the Czech National style. Just before hitler rose to power, the czech author wrote a sciencefiction novel in which czechoslovakia is absentmindedly destroyed when the world decides to go to war with a subhuman species. That, too, took me years to realize, in my stupidity, that i received the childs version, the fable where no one got hurt or killed. When i was younger we lived an ordinary upper middleclass life. My father adored the comfortable existence of traumatized postwar american creed freedom and sub, the barnes noble in the starbucks picky delighted and how americans consciously crafted and meaningless, empty experience totally bereft of culture. The same comfortable emptiness that was imported into the halls of otakon. Culture, after all, have been the Sticking Point that europe had almost choked and died on. But as he got older the trauma came bubbling back up along with the paranoia. As we cruised in the largest catlike could possibly by from bobs big boy to walmart to super fresh, more american to him and the skyscrapers and the cadillacs or the superstores picky began to pile on top of the apocalypse guns, food and camping supplies a heap of other items. Furniture, computers, exercise equipment, sporting goods, cars, vcrs, entertainment centers. All the consumers baby boomer nonsense of the previous decades. Inch by inch i was slowly learning what was happening. He was suffering and dying from the clean break. They can resting at the bottom of the lake. As a coaster towards the end of history, postcommunism, post fascism towards the products of america forever, the socalled end of history. In other words, and mirage. When he died the house was filled to the brim with purchases. We lived in several american households layered on top of one another. In an absurd parody of overproduction. When i visited otakon i was in the process of throwing it all away. The nazis would return one day, he insisted, even in america, not dead, only sleeping. I never believed him. In 2015, a resurgent nazi themed Youth Movement and the United States seemed unthinkable, let alone one a line with a sitting u. S. President. In 2016, it was a reality. And more absurdly, it was was largely composed of young men my age, in their 30s and 40s, on the fringes of a society they hated dearly. If only my father had lived to see it, have movement arose, of all places, from that ridiculous room in otakon with little kids and sad adults dressed as cartoons. He wouldve laughed so hard. History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, marx wrote, correcting hagel. But whats next . Theres no word for a farce of a farce. Well, reader, here you are, time to pick up the pieces. The story of anime, reality tv to reality, america to trump. I hope you laugh, too. [applause] thanks, guys. I will now take questions on any subject from the audience. Doesnt matter, physics, biology. [inaudible] how you asked any fortune people [inaudible] it does, thats very true. Great question. I get that a lot. The short answer is really no. It only come if only they would Pay Attention to me. [laughing] its like so many other people now and again i get some crazy emails, which i love, and ive gotten some embittered people write me and so forth. But for the most part there has really been a lot of scary stuff happening to me. I think as i gone along, i have gotten, theyve grown more ridiculous and less scary to me. So i end up, like now i just go to the rallies and stuff and i dont care, like, i went to the last, i covered the last altright rally three weeks ago and its just full of crazy all right people. I interviewed gavin begins in front of his street gang of crowd voice. He wanted to fight with. He offered to fight me three times. He was funny. I laughed. He called my laughter fake. It was genuine laughter. I mean, to me its not too big of an issue i guess right now. I think that it is a problem, i think, youre right, if i were a woman or a a different race, it might be a much bigger issue. But right now i dipped my toes into the news and ive yet to die. So the left wing people convert to the right wing, or did they kind of [inaudible] thats a good question. There was a lot of dropping out that happened. One writer put it that when the far left hactivist movant collapse is a quoteunquote moral vacuum. Or that was how 4chan described itself at the time. A lot of those people left to do activism or the got arrested or they went in hiding. So the people that remained on the site were sort of the ones that were not into that come that were devoted to that. Theres also sort of the people that maybe were into it or little bit into it, incremental into, they remained. So really i describe it as generally men under 40. Its sort of men my age that event online for 20 or whatever, their lives were not going anywhere so they recruit the younger ones. It with the ones that were left on the site that did move on with allies. You cant do that for 20 years. You have to, you cant live in that thank you for so long. Sort of the far right thinking was a desperate attempt to fix their situation, and a sense, a naive one. Yes . Im curious about the introduction. Theres a distinction that story was given. [inaudible] a great deal of energy trying to downplay the seriousness during the election. [inaudible] thats a good point, that theres a strong distinction between the russian trolls and the 4chan trolls, though this is a question i can often. It makes sense to confuse those two. What youre referencing is his idea of like a russian troll farm, the russian intelligence creating them influencing foreign elections. Which i agree with the reporting, another tech reporters who covered fortune. His conclusion was its real. Reporters have been to these places but the effects on the election was minimal or at least it does not explain trump in and of itself. It used to say if trump cheated as his way into office, thats the best way i can make sense of it. I agree with this take away there. Though there is some connection and in my book i describe the connection, which is that during the hactivist collective years in 20082012, the hactivists sort of accidentally ran into programs by the u. S. Government or by u. S. Government contractors in particular palantir and other large contractors that were doing similar things in the u. S. And abroad, generally in the u. S. They were trying to, hack the u. S. Chamber of commerce in 2011, thats what they discovered. So those reporters, one of those guys became a reporter. He sort of started with anonymous and you still coming the game which analytical story. So when the russian troll farms broke and i spoke to them for the book he said right, ive been covering this for years. We knew that the russians do it in the American Government does it and they have names for it. For years their time to figure out how to make one fake Facebook User 20 fake Facebook Users and shoot information into social media that way. They get mixed up with and, of course, then Cambridge Analytica, when they were recruiting the 4chan trolls, hes also working with Cambridge Analytica to do a similar work to the russian troll farms. Those are the strange connections in those stories. I assume you spent a lot of time on 4chan. Theres a lot of bile posts on there. I was wondering how you, like, you would read emails and not have poison your thought . I probably dealt with it very poorly. It wasnt fun to sort of like get the assignment again ride written a story and like now have to live with it for two years. Theres a lot of other talented people that cover this and a complaint about the same thing. Reading the site, and some of it i think you get numb, like you grow the blister over it but then when the blister pops you are like oh, no, i dont want to look at this ever again. But i mean, some of it is ridiculous, some of it is silly and having a a sense of humor about it. The subject matter of both trump and the altright is terrifying in a way and scary and sort of like, but the, trump is inherently a community, ridiculous. Theres the other half to which is however seriously you take it you also have to take it with a grain of salt and not seriously at all any weird contradictory way, i guess. I know a lot of this is kind of perfect storm of influences and people being that we have had before. Do you have a sense of whats the next iteration or what possible are out there . Thats a good question. I do have predictions for what will happen next. I think the state of the movement now, the book when i submitted the manuscript six, eight months ago, maybe even longer, theres been a migration. People were not sure what would happen after charlottesville. The ideas that the surface manifestation of the altright broke, but the Underlying Forces really essentially the economic and spiritual crisis of all this group of young people is still exist. Yet you they retreated back online and have been some good stories about how a lot came to youtube and it been in discord, ichat app, congregating in all my spaces and sort of reforming but are scared to go outside. So the last i was surprised Milo Yiannopoulos spoke three reseal in d. C. And thats what he went to see and cover the story. It was full of like literally crazy people, like people who are like prince this committee can with me to tell you that Robin Williams hates everyone because of the illuminati conspiracy. I was writing this got my reporters notebook. It was like 300 300 people, bue people that were like dedicated 4chan with happy mask, they were frightened of me. Everyone was frightened of being humiliated and being filmed being humiliated, even mcginnis and self surround himself with the bodyguard of proud boys and it felt like he was a little fearful and a sense of that meeting because charlottesville was so embarrassing and sort of disaster for the period the idea that its not going to go away unless the sort of Underlying Forces are addressed in systemic way, which of course to me the left has better answers. If you get like, the movement was great because society has done a worse job of giving these people like meaningful education, meaningful job, some hope and their lies. Real genuine needs but it creates false needs like i will play video games all day or tv or anime, stuff that society doesnt provide. It could happen if the left does well that it could dissolve, i think. Half of the Trump Supporters on 4chan midportion of in support andrew yang, the libertarian socialist was to give them 1000 because this like young people, they are like 19. They are like, always changing her mind. They dont know. They got like sucked into this dumb ideology and the like i guess 1000 is better than fascism. [laughing] okay. So there is, they are not irredeemable, a lot of them. It could change, but right now it will probably manifest again in some way. Based on the last answer what you think of the idea of being, radicalization online where lets it starts as you dont go to church with your family, your atheist and you start reading [inaudible] and then move on, read [inaudible] is that like like a real pipele people go through . Right. Once you were on that fence, is that a real pipeline what you think people, [inaudible]. So its an inadequate vessel. You cant really understand the world of politics through youtube but they dont read much so thats how theyre doing it so they get easily convinced. But, and there are parts aboutthis far right philosophy that are appealing to people who are marginalized. You dont have a good sense of identity, they feel like theyre outside society and have this identity crisis. The idea that your identity is your whiteness and all your friends are white not only that but you can pull yourself up by your crap and have this off the rack set of values conservatism gives you. If someone is lost in this consumerist nihilism watching all day playing pornography and video games, they like that very rigid set of values so thats philosophy, socialist philosophy appeal to them but the Underlying Forces are there situation in society when you name these figures where there convinced by youtube, theres a lot of these men on youtube who make money off their youtube ad clicks who are sort of ersatz father figures where they go in and they saythis is what you should do with your life, this is what you should believe. This is why you should be proud of yourself so for kids raising them full selves online you get this Cottage Industry of men doing this which are the intellectual dark web, men like Jordan Peterson, their philosophy doesnt makea lot of sense. Its essentially this vapid social darwinism but their appeal, why they have millions of followers is theres this group of disenfranchised, marginalized young men who need a rigid set of rules to make their life better and thats whathe sells, he sells these rules for life so thats the explanation for where those groups come from. I guess similar in the sense that theyre selling a life philosophy and therelike give me money. As a followup to that im curious how race plays into the foundation of this movement. You said traces in some way back to a white phenomenon thats been closed off to a lot of the black resistance that have tried to enter it on curious and moved to that into what seems to be a white Online Community in 4chan or as is the risk that the reality of this forum is the most physical manifestation is white people where were at now . Thats a good question. Its a little more mixed than that but youre right that i suppose. This is like a debate in the alright circles and theyre like one of the asian people . Theres this set of cranks that say i think theyre even smarter is one of those idiot philosophers that hang out with Richard Spencer or whatever and in the groups they would donate because they love asian culture because the taco comes out of consuming all these japanese products. And i also found that there are a few of my service africanamerican men, one was a libertarian socialist, one was a communist that they were in this world, they had been hanging out for 4chan for years and were sympathetic to thosemovements. One of those was a friends with a lot of men and alright. So its true that for the most part that its strange that theres that disconnect where they like asian culture and it moves from asian culture to white pride but to me the explanation is really the idea that there was a crisis. A sort of spiritual self crisis when youre spending 10, 15 years at your computer watching anime and playing video games you cant do that forever. You cant live in that boy forever and thats where i for conservatism comes in and they go to Jordan Peterson or someone online say i need a new value system thats going to get me out of this nihilism where theres nothing to grab onto so its almost like a clean break where they describe it that way. Theres ideology you heard of the red pill. Believing in the radical far right philosophy, theres a black pill where a lot of the men on these sites are like black pill means im going to keep hanging out in my moms face and watch nmi and live my entire life that way. Im going to stick to nihilism and theres a debate but to me its the crisis of that then creates the racism and fascism andideology. [inaudible] youve been talking about a political will on linux and breaking this country, theres another phenomenonwhich , a social phenomenon that the staff suicide rate in drug overdoses. [inaudible] i wonder what youre thinkingis about the relationship is between the two social phenomenons . Thats a great question. Im doing writing on this now because of court the way the movement has evolved is it evil and we see it manifest after charlottesville and Mass Shootings and their sort of an argument which is a Mass Shootings are like a suicide and for the most part , that the suicide comes first and the shooting comes second and away. Its about that despair in a way but this on the chans are full of suicides. When youve been there for 10 or 15 years and you dont know a way out , the chans for years encouraged suicide and they had a fun term, their term was to become unhero and that was 2004, 2005. They were always naming this idea of going out and having a massacre, because they would see it in the media. They would see it in anime and its a power fantasy in action films and the matrix. All the action films they consume, its a male fantasy of power though they say thats cool. It would mean and joke about the idea of going crazy and shooting everyone but they would also worship suicides. Then i write in the book that it was jumps at first but then around 2011 2012 it starts to get real where people kill themselves online, live stream their suicides and it picks up and start rolling and then people go out and end the shootings. So all of the jokes and become this despairing reality and thats what weve seen in the past month. Three or four months that the new zealand shooter posted to 8chan and he referenced means , like a whole tradition. Im going to live stream the entire thing like this guiding into thousand 11 and i want to thank you guys. To thank you guys im going to kill myself and do this and thats what people started doing in 2009 on 4chan and he did it. And everyone on those sites were thrilled for the most part. They were like this is what we want. This is thecelebration of that nihilism. So it became its own incredibly despairing culture. But i mean, i guess the underlying point is that as you say, if these things are increasing in the United States, the idea that inequality is at record high ,only reached in the 1930s that there are people who feel like their lives are hopeless, they feel like those statistics would be comorbid i guess was the term. It would correlate with this other group. Thats a cheery note. Go ahead. [inaudible]. [inaudible] in an instant. Someonewrites me the check. I love that, i actually i am going to cover the alien Immigration Crisis at the border which is of course mean about aliens in area 51 is the other half of all that anxiety where they are our concentration camps so im going to do the other one but i guess i should stop by area 51. So the answer is that yes, im ready to cover any and all alien stories if there is a producer listening. Please. Any time. The citys tour is exploring the american story as we take the tv into American History tv on the road

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