the hard ideological edge and the toxic parts of the 'culture wars' surface from 4chan and reddit. /pol/ especially.
the repurposing/deviation of 4chan's /pol/ sub-board into a furnace of neo-reactionary thought and a factory of fascist imagery was basically what took the skeleton of the tea party - doddering, conspiratorial, too fruity even for the john birch types - and galvanised it into QAnon. the entire qanon thing was a 4chan phenomenon. all those metal gear solid style green text missives and communiqués were posted .. on 4chan.
this stuff escaped its pound and went on to melt the brains of normies on facebook, who had no pre-prepared cognitive filter for this specific form of ultra-ironic/not-ironic-at-all 4chan memery (cf. the bullet engravings of the zoomer who killed charlie kirk, "if ur reading this ur gay lolol" and so on). it started out as disaffected nerds doing 'pepe le frog' nazi jokes and drawing donald trump as the emperor from warhammer 40k. that's very very 'online'.
believe it or not, this sort of in-joke was where the revival in fascist aesthetics in large part began. a games workshop franchise. all the young people hopped up on militaristic blackshirt bunkum are basically carrying over an energy they first felt playing tabletop fantasy games or crusader kings strategy games or whatever. all this 'clash of civilizations' rhetoric and 'preserving the white race' stuff, the broad racial generalisations and comparison of IQ stats - it's less samuel p. huntingdon (too cold war, too neocon), and more 'new europa universalis DLC just dropped'.
half these people are still playing an extended paradox interactive games campaign in their minds. real life has become a skyrim mod. the far-right is a LARP.
steve bannon made his fortune selling fake gold currency in world of warcraft. his involvement with the games industry was what led him to realise there was an enormous well of untapped political potential in disaffected, cynical gamer nerd types, who were already adept at self-organising from MMO guilds and had their own well-arranged channels of communication with discord (IRC) channels, etc. then he went onto breitbart and soon swiftly into the inner sanctum of the white house.
gamergate was a crucial moment in the culture at large when the backlash against 'woke libcucks' began in earnest. it was pretty much the 9/11 of the internet in modern terms, when the great vibe shift kicked off.
i could go on. it's angry nerds all the way down. we're living in your world, of sheisty fin-tech fraudsters and stanford STEM high-achievers, not the world of the WASPy, snobbish humanities elites.
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remember - before gamergate and the changes to 4chan, the iconic image of an 'online' 1337 gam0r type was the vaguely anarchic-libertarian guy fawkes mask guy from V from Vendetta. remember when 4chan's Anon group used to troll the church of scientology, and were notionally about holding the rich and powerful to account with hacktivism and mass-scale DDoS attacks? it all seems so quaint.
Last edited by uziq (2026-02-03 04:44:28)
