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, as