Angry Planet - Online Culture Is the Whole Culture

Episode Date: January 30, 2026

There was a time, just before the pandemic, when folks would say “Twitter isn’t real life” as a means of dismissing the horrors of social media. This was a cope, a way to ignore the worst political and cultural actors who now dominate our psychic landscape. Now those people are in charge and they’ve manifested Twitter into real life in a way previously thought impossible.The White House is posting Stardew Valley memes about whole milk. A Customs and Border Patrol official is asking people if they’re triggered when they respond with empathy to the murder of a woman. Laura Loomer, one of the most online gargoyles to ever live, is a serious policy player in administration. The Secretary of War has a video game tattoo.How did we get here? Michael Senters, a PhD candidate at Virginia Tech, is here to explain how online culture became the culture.It’s all for the postsA YouTuber comes to townWhat, exactly, does it mean to be terminally online?The right goes all in on identity politicsThe pandemic drove us all crazyTurns out the post-modernists were correctPosting yourself into a different form or realitySurvival tips for the extremely onlineDepraved art and Hearts of Iron IVDeus Vult?Video games as propagandaWe should have been harder on the online NazisJohn Romero will make you his bitchA brief history of Something AwfulFighting the performance regimeHow Fraud Swamped Minnesota’s Social Services System on Tim Walz’s WatchSix Prosecutors Quit Over Push to Investigate ICE Shooting Victim’s WidowDo you have stairs in your house?Fuck You And Die: An Oral History of Something AwfulSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Hello and welcome back to the first conversation about conflict on Angry Planet in 2026, the first fresh one anyway. I'm here with a returning guest. Sir, can you introduce yourself? Hi, I'm Michael Senters.

I am a PhD candidate at Virginia Tech. studying the translation of online culture into American politics. How does it feel to be the guy I'm now calling when there's an extrajudicial killing in America? It's not great. I never wanted it to get to this point, right? It's really, really not fun to be that guy. I guess it's a form of job security in a way, but it's a really bleak form of job security. And, you know, the fact that just this morning on Twitter, Bonvino was responding to somebody calling out, like, ICE for literally murdering somebody, right?

And he had a one word response and it was just triggered question mark. And I was just like, I'm pretty sure I screamed when I saw that. Like, I think, like, I screamed a little here at my apartment because it's just like, yep, that is, that is something someone would post on a phone. on a 4chan thread back in 2014, right? So it's just like, here we are. It's the posting regime, right? That's kind of what's happening. That's why you're getting called.

Exactly. It is, it is the regime of doing everything for content, right? And that's sort of how I framed it recently is like, you know, people, you know, have looked at what they're doing in Greenland or, or, you know, you know, the rhetoric about Greenland and the fact that, um, and the fact that, uh, you know, when they released that video of the footage of the shooting in Minneapolis from like the ICE officer's perspective, right?

When they released that footage, you know, people were like, how can they think this is exonerating? Like, there was real confusion because it's not, right? He, he, it's very clear he's not in danger. he shoots her three times and he calls her a fucking bitch at the very end, right? It's very clearly not exonerating. But if you understand that they're putting it out there for content, right, for their base on Twitter or act,

then it all makes sense, right? It's all content. It's all performative. It's all, yeah, look what we can get away with doing now, right? Like ICE officers can just go out and shoot, you know, queer women in the face and get away with it, right? Because at the moment, it very much seems like this guy is not going to be punished in any real meaningful way. There are like two different go fundies out there that have raised a couple hundred thousand dollars for his legal defense, right? So it's like it's a performance and it's content.

And so, you know, the posting regime, the content regime, whatever you want to call it, you know, the fact of the matter is it's all about generating content for online, right? the attachment to material of reality is extremely strained if not severed at this point for a lot of people in the administration. And I think that's really bad. Yeah, I mean, you saw this, we were talking a little bit before we started recording about how the first couple days of the year were peaceful and then it really just kind of kicked off immediately. And I'm thinking about they're, they're shoddily thrown together skiff when they, Kidnet Maduro. And in the background of the images, in the, in the background, they have Twitter up on a giant TV screen behind them with Ocent Defender pulled up.

For people who don't know, Ocent Defender is this account on X that is a blue check. And it kind of just spreads bullshit misinformation about conflicts around the world. I remember one of the bad ones like a couple years ago that I wrote a whole thing on, he was kind of, I don't know if it's a he actually, the account was talking about some explosions and how they could have possibly been like nuclear explosions. Like that's extremely bizarre and dangerous. And for them, for the administration to have that account specifically pulled up behind them real big when they are pulling the president of Venezuela out of the country is,

and be monitoring that site specifically is very bizarre but that's where we are it's that is where we are right it's it's the fact that they want to show their people right and it's it's all a performance for you know their base right

I've seen people sort of like ponder like you know why are they doing this if they're trying to like keep independence or keep people you know who aren't in their like firmly in their camp voting with them. It's like, it's because they're not trying to do that, right? It's because this is

straight red meat for the most extreme, most fanatic supporters of manga, right? That's who it's for. And again, when you understand that, their actions make a lot more sense, right? It's like, well, why is Ocent defender up on the screen

in the middle of this, you know, quote unquote military rate? It's because they want to signal to all the wannabe OSINT people on Twitter that, like, yeah, that's our guy. right. Like, we follow the same people you do. And so it's like, yeah, it's not great. It is, it is absolutely not great. So the thing that kind of precipitated this conversation, obviously is the killing of Renee Good by a nice agent in Minneapolis and kind of the collective scream that followed it. But it was really something you said to me that you sent me a DM. And it's something I had already been kind of thinking about. in something a couple of my friends and I have been talking about a lot lately,

which is that it is completely pointless at this point to say that the online world, that Twitter is not real life, that the online world is not real life. We live in a place now where the real world is completely polluted by online life. And I think that the whole reason they're in Minneapolis in the first place is because of like bizarre online bullshit, right? Can you walk us through that? Yeah. So, I mean, the thing that, you know, a number of commentators that pointed out that I agree with is the fact that the reason DHS ended up in Indianapolis is the first place

is because there was this MAGA YouTuber, right? Because Lord knows, like, the whole history of right-wing culture warriors on YouTube goes back a very long time, and I'm sure we'll get into that a little bit. But, you know, he is the one who sort of goes out and makes the first video, the first post about, oh, yeah, these daycares in Minneapolis, they're not real. It's all just one big scam, right? And that gets picked up by right-wing pundits. That gets amplified within that media sphere. And then the administration latches onto it, right? And it's like, oh, yeah, there's fraud. There's massive billion-dollar fraud going on here within the Somalian community, of course. So that links back to the sort of racism of the regime. But, you know, that all gets generated online, right? It gets generated within the sort of right-wing online ecosystem, YouTube, Twitter, you know, telegram servers, disforward, you know, various platforms where sort of right-wing pundits and right-wing media figures have, you know, audiences. it gets picked up and generated there first, and then the administration grabs onto it,

because they're in tune with all these media, in this media ecosystem, right? They're watching these pundits looking for things that they can go after. So in a very real way, right, sort of online discourse dictated how material reality would play out, right? The fact that the administration caught on to this talking point online and ran with it,

You know, there's a direct cause and effect line you can trace out from that first video going up to Renee Good ending up dead in her car in Minneapolis, right? Because you still might get ICE agents in Minneapolis eventually, right? They had been going after the Somalian community there for a while. but that sort of allegation of fraud generated by that YouTuber gave them a very readily, uh, accessible excuse to send ICE into those communities, sort of early, right?

They didn't need to sort of generate any, any other talking points about it. It's like, well, there's the fraud. We're going to go in to tackle the fraud, right? And that's how we ended up where we are. Um, so yeah, in a lot of ways, like, posting got a person. killed in a very sort of bleak way, right?

All this sort of content generated online, the administration grabbed and acted on, right? And as far as we can tell, like, all those allegations of fraud haven't, you know, borne out, right? Like, we haven't really seen any actual real cases of fraud as far as I now. And had been investigated pretty extensively by the state and by local papers. And I think there was one actually that was fraudulent, but we knew like two years ago. Hey there, Angry Planet listeners. Matthew here. Just want a fact check myself in real time because I knew this wasn't quite right. It's a bigger story, but there's quite a bit of fraud in Minnesota's social services system.

New York Times is reported on it. But as I did say, a lot of it had been reported out two years ago, mostly by local newspapers. A lot of it had been already investigated and kind of adjudicated before the YouTuber showed up in Minnesota and kind of started stirring the pot and bringing it back to the four. It was very much already a unknown and handled problem. It was more than one case, though. All right, back to the episode. Yeah. And so, so what?

one daycare out of the hundreds that exist in Minneapolis. So it's like, oh, yeah, very clearly, it's, you know, very clearly there's rampant fraud going on. But, I mean, that's sort of what we've seen. That's been the sort of right-wing tactic online for a long time, right? Sort of take something that exists in a vacuum, right? And then it spanned it out to be this all-encompassing society-destroying threat that the administration can then act on, right? The biggest change that we've sort of seen

is the fact that, you know, when Trump won, they didn't really take a lot of this online stuff seriously until at the very end of the administration, right? He sort of began, you know, hinting that he was following QAnon post towards the end of his administration, and then obviously January 6th sort of emerged from the Q&ON movement,

but, like, that was all sort of bookended at the very end of his administration, right? You know, he was doing terrible things the first three years of his administration for, you know, different reasons, but him being a terminally sort of online president didn't really start occurring until the end of his fourth year, until the end of his, you know, first term at the,

during his fourth year. And even then, it was, it was sort of a strange, right, until January 6th. It was, you know, oh, I'm going to throw out a Q&ON quote here. I'm going to sort of throw out a little dog whistle here. Now it's, it's become very clear that this is a regime of terminally online people, right? J.D. Vance is out there being a poster. You know, Bonvino, you know, did the, oh, are you triggered lit thing this morning?

And just like, obviously the DHS account, which I've posted about extensively. And, like, every time the DHS account posts a new meme, I just die a little inside. because whoever is running that account really is just terminally online and has had their brains fried and they're a bad person. And so it's been interesting to see that shift, right, the fact that just out the gate immediately in his second term, it's he basically picked off where he left off in terms of embracing the more terminally online side of his base.

but like at an accelerated rate, right? So things are sort of even worse than I imagined with how things would be at the moment. Define what it means to be terminally online. Ah, that's fun. So like to be terminally online to me, right, is to sort of base your perception of the world more on content that you see online rather than, you know, the actual material reality. that exist out there, right?

And so that means having your opinions, your politics, your ideology, shaped by who you're engaging with online and the language you're using online, right? So the idea that, you know, a terminally online maga poster, for instance, would look at that video from of Renee Good being shot by the ICE officer,

from the ICE officer's perspective, and would argue that, Like, yes, this does exonerate him. And he would go into a very long, elaborate argument about how, yeah, you can sort of see the car move and she should have just stepped out of the car and all this sort of stuff. When, like, the very blunt reality in front of you from that video, right, is just like, he shot her in cold blood, right? Like, that is what that video sort of, like, presents as a gut reaction, as, like, a, if you believe what you're seeing, like, that is, that is the reality. to be terminally online means to subject, means to sort of suppress that reaction in order for the world, the reality that you've built up through posting, through the language that you've developed through posting, right? through the various sort of references and sort of jokes and memes that you've taken in through various online platforms.

Like that becomes your reality, right? And then you sort of subject, you know, evidence from material reality to that online reality you've created. And it's like, oh, well, you know, this video exonerates this shooter because, That's why Z, right? So that's sort of what it means to me. It's you exist within this sort of curated reality that comes about through consuming content and posting content, right? And specifically, when you're doing that online, you develop a sort of language and vocabulary that really begins to jut up against like the material reality as it exists, right? And that's how you end up getting people talking about how, like, what ICE is doing in Minneapolis is actually, you know, lawful.

And it's, you know, it's actually protecting the freedom and liberties of real Americans, right? Because, you know, the people who are being harassed and taken away by ICE aren't real Americans, right? They're immigrants. They're liberals. They're, you know, they're woke agitated. right and so that sort of identification of fellow citizens right as being sort of the enemy right that's also part of what it means to be sort of terminally online right you end up sort of dictating who's in your camp and who isn't again based on sort of the content that you can assume in the language

that you use so that was long-winded it sounds like what you're describing as a identity politics. In a lot of ways, yes. It is identity politics in a lot of ways. It's just the identity that is being pushed specifically by, you know, sort of the MAGA right is an identity of, you know, sort of white supremacy of Christian nationalism. It's a very narrow identity, right? But I would say it is identity politics in a lot of ways, despite the fact that like, you know, they often decry identity politics, right? But in so many ways, right, if you sort of look at, you know, how these people talk and the way they post,

they will often end up, you know, taking elements of things that they claim they hate and sort of using them for themselves or adopting aspects of it for themselves. I think of this really great quote by Hofstadter in the paranoid style. that he wrote, you know, this was back in the 60s or 70s. So he's talking about the John Birch Society, right?

And like the Barry Goldwaters from back then. And he sort of says that like, yeah, man, like, you know, the John Birchers will decry, you know, the communists, but they end up adopting, like, a cell-like structure themselves. They decry, you know, they might decry, you know, intellectual you know, academics, but then they like write out long thesis, you know, theses, you know, thesis about conspiracy theories, right? So in a lot of ways, you know, the reason I think a lot of the right decries

identity politics is because the exact thing they're doing is identity politics, right? And it's just they've realized how potent of a tool that can be. Yeah, it's been kind of fascinated to be old enough to remember previous cycles and previous people's previous stances. One of the really strike, I guess just because I've been, as a Texan, been like, paying attention either against my will or for entertainment to Alex Jones for my entire life. And like this, the thing that's happening now is the exact same thing, you know, in the early 2000s and in the 90s that he was like, this is coming. and we should all be afraid of it. Like, militarized police, jackbooted thugs,

going through the street, pulling people out of their cars. Like, this is what you described. Right. And now it's happening. Buddy, you were in a movie where you're a guy ranting on the street and you get black bagged and pulled into a car. And like, we're seeing images not dissimilar to that. And your response to that is to get big into HGH

and give yourself a Hitler mustache. And it's just, it's a bizarre world that we're living in now. Yeah. And, you know, I think a part of that comes from the fact that it goes back to that identifying who's your friend and who's your enemy, right? So the sort of Schmidtian dichotomy. And for those who don't know, Carl Schmidt, actual Nazi, you know, sort of legal Nazi theorist, that J.D. Vance and others currently in this region,

Gene really like, but I do think it's important to understand that that sort of friend-fou dynamic he describes because, like, that is the worldview that so many of them have adopted, right? It's, you know, for their friends, right, the people who fit into their worldview, who talk the same way they talk, you post the same way they post, who are in the group chats, right? They're protected. They can do whatever they want.

If they want to go out and commit crimes, if they want to go out, and, you know, do some corruption, I say, okay, right? Versus when you fall into the enemy camp, right? And for the enemy, for them, sort of like we were talking about, it's all identity-based, right? So if you're a woman, if you're queer, if you're a minority, if you're an immigrant, if you're a liberal or a leftist, right? If you're any form, you know, if you identify ideologically with anything that is not, you know, sort of the far right politically, then you're the enemy, right? And then at that point,

Alex Jones doesn't really care if you get sort of like black bagged and thrown into the back of a van, right? Because you deserve it, right? Because you're not actually an American. And I think, you know, people, sort of like what you were saying, it's weird to see that shift,

and a lot of people often want to call them out for being hypocrites about that. But I think that's the wrong way to look at it, right? Because when you understand that, like, yeah, they're fine with anything bad happening to somebody they deem to be their enemy, who they sort of deem to be an existential threat to their way of life, which they do.

Like, they inherently believe that these people are an existential threat to their way of life. Then, like, of course it's fine for them to be shot. Of course it's fine for them to be hauled off to a camp somewhere. Right. And, like, I don't think that's hyperbolic. I don't think that's an exaggeration. Like, once you're in that category of being an enemy,

then anything that happens to you is A-OK to them. right, because you deserve it. You're not a person anymore. Yeah, you're, you know, one of the things that I think it was Japisobic sort of coined a couple years ago was like being unhuman, right? Because you can't come out and just say subhuman because that sort of gets tacked on to actual Nazi rhetoric and that's very easy to call out. So they had to coin a different term.

I think it was Pasobic that came up with the unhuman terminology. So again, you're not. human anymore, you're an unhuman, you're the opposite of a human. Therefore, you need to be sort of combated, right? And so that's the problem. And so, like, that sort of Schminian dynamic is very easy to exist in a society that is, like, extremely anti-social and dominated by sort of, like, cynicism and nihilism, right? Which I also think sort of, like, emerged in part because of posting online, right, to sort of go into the, to sort of start going into the deeper sort of history of where this all came from. Yeah, is this is this kind of growing out of us being

atomized and like suburbs and pandemic? Do you think that's kind of what tossed a match onto all of this? Yeah, so I think I think you know, we do see a sort of surge in this sort of behavior, this rhetoric, this way of thinking after the pandemic, right? The fact that during the pandemic, you know, we're all made to stay inside. A lot of people are sort of forced to socialize online, you know, much more than they ever had before. And like, once you're in that sphere, it's very sort of hard to get out of it in a lot of ways.

And I do think sort of being atomized in that sense, like you said, like, it becomes easier for somebody to sell you a cynical, nihilistic, antisocial worldview, right, when you're sort of trapped alone in your, you know, in your, you know, living room, in your bedroom, you know, for days on end because there's a pandemic raging outside. And specifically, right, right, the idea of quarantining for the sake of the health of the rest of society, right, that's a good thing, right? That is a very pro-social thing. You're sort of giving up, you know, your own freedom to go out and do things you want to do for the sake of not just yourself, but the rest of your community, right?

It's a very pro-social thing. And people hated that, right? People hated being locked up inside. They hated being stuck in their house. And, like, because they hate that, because they hated something that was so pro-social, it becomes very easy to sort of, like, reach into their, lives and say, hey, this whole pro-social, like, helping your neighbor and community stuff is all bullshit, right? Well, it was, it's interesting because it was pro-social and an antisocial way, too.

It cut, it did physically cut everyone off from each other. Yeah. In a way that exacerbated everything. Mm-hmm. So it was, I agree that it was like, it was a greater good type of thing, but it was pro-social in a way that, like, you had to, that paid off later in a long-term way. Mm-hmm. and cut you off from your community around you in the immediate.

Yeah, I agree. And it's that part, right, where you're getting cut off from your community in the immediate sense that allowed, you know, so many people to start going down these radicalization rabbit holes. Because it's like, oh, well, I can't go out to my book club. I can't go do my, you know, vocal league sport. I can't go meet with the book club.

I can't, you know, go to the knitting club. right? Like I used to work at the local bookstore here where there was a cafe and like there was after the pandemic, there was a group that came in every Wednesday night to do knitting, right? Those things still exist. But yeah,

you sort of get immediately cut off from those things and in those spaces you start seeing videos about how like, hey, all this quarantining stuff, this is illegal, this is tyranny, right? And what it does is

the part where you are cut off from your community it leaves such a void that it becomes easy to plant within a person the idea that doing what you're doing

for the greater good is bad, right? Because you should be there with your community being able to do what you want. And so it's that sort of pushing of an anti-social narrative that I think did a whole lot of harm

sort of immediately after the pandemic because it becomes, well, I should be able to do what I want to do because, like, I'm, like, I'm the only thing that matters, right? That sort of idea gets pushed in a lot of way, in a lot of very unhealthy ways. There's, we've been talking a lot about material conditions. Mm-hmm. Do they ever, is I think I had been banking on, um, material conditions deteriorating enough,

uh, that people got real upset with this regime. And that does not seem to be, I mean, other than like if you live in a blue city and like your neighbors are getting shot and taken away in front of you. But for the, for the, I would say for the majority of people that are posting and generating content, material conditions are just fine. Mm-hmm. Why? Yeah, that's an interesting question. I do think part of that comes from the fact that. especially for people who are posting the content, right?

You're sort of able to present both to yourself and to those within your sort of posting here, a sort of idea of reality that maybe isn't necessarily attached to those material conditions in like a legitimate way, right? So like the fact that like, oh yeah, like I've seen people posting about the price of gas, right? And how like, oh yeah, like gas is like super, super cheap right now. and like we're sort of conditioned, right, as the sort of American populace as a whole to sort of think, oh yeah, gas prices sort of dictate how well the economy is doing, right?

So if gas prices are low, that means things are good, right? And it's the same with the stock market, right? A lot of Americans are trained to look at the stock market and sort of say, oh, start market is going up, things are good, right? And so the fact that those sort of things are signaling that, like, yes, the economy is not too bad, you know, I think that allows a lot of people to sort of make content that's that allows them to make an argument. You know, it's a facetious argument, but it allows them to make an argument that says, yeah, like material reality actually isn't so bad.

We're all doing relatively fine, right? even if there are a lot of people out there who are struggling to find a job who are getting underpaid and struggling to make rent or who can't afford their bills every month, right? Grocery prices going up and all that jazz. And that again goes back to the fact that being so online, right,

you see all these people posting about how gas is low, how the stock market's up. right, that creates, if you're in that sort of echo chamber, right, that creates a sense of reality that like, oh, yeah, groceries might be sort of high where I am, but I guess that's not the case everywhere else, right? It allows you to sort of absorb the sense of reality that, okay, well, things might be sort of bad where I am, but I guess things are okay everywhere else, right? It creates a skewed perspective of reality. And, you know, it's hard to break out of that sort of thing when you're in that echo train. chamber, right? It's funny. It's like, it's as if the postmodernists and the chaos magicians were right. And you can just meme yourself into a different reality. Into a different reality.

It just so happens to be the fact that, you know, a lot, it's actually the people that the postmodernist really hate you, right? And the people who hated the postmodernist, right, that are doing it, right? It's the people sort of who are very conservative, very reactionary who are posting themselves into a different form of reality, right? Which is interesting to think about. And it's, I think a lot of them, especially sort of at the higher echelons, you are, you know, the pundits, the influencers, like they're doing it purposefully, right? They know what they're doing. They are actively sort of preening this other reality, right, that all their followers sort of exist with. in, right?

And, like, I don't, I don't know if any of them have actually read any of the postmodernness that they all claim to really hate and think, are, we're out to, yeah, we're out to destroy America, but boy, howdy, they, it's like, they sort of, if they did, they looked at it and went, hey, I can, I can use that, right? So, again, it goes back to that whole, you know, reactionaries often see things useful in, and people and institutions that they hate. right. So this is,

this is maybe part of why Jordan Peterson has fallen out of favor, right? He's not really around anymore. I know there's health problems there, but he was kind of, he was touting a line that, uh, they decided to become the villains in his story. Uh-huh.

And, you know, and use the, use the dragon of chaos to, uh, to, to manifest their will, uh,

so to speak. Um, can we talk, can we switch to a more, how are you, how are you going to survive mentally, do you think, all of this? Right. So, I mean, part of it has to be that you just have to detach from it at some point, right? And so for me, if we exist in regime that is terminally online, like the best way to sort of oppose it is to not be online, right? So, like, my job and my research, sadly, requires me to be online a certain amount of time during the day, right? But for me, you know, what I'm going to try and do and be better about is just like, okay, like, I've done what I needed to do.

I've gone on X for the day. I've scraped the DHS posts. You know, I've consumed the content. I'm going to turn on focus mode on my phone so I don't get notifications. I'm going to close the laptop for the day, and I'm going to go take a walk, right? Listen to an audio book while I take a walk, right? Or I'm going to go on campus and just, you know,

not have my phone on, not have my laptop around, and just exist, right? You know, having things that you can do that exist outside that online sphere, I think is really important because it allows you to sort of engage with, you know, the actual material reality of the world, which is, I think, is important when you have a regime that's sort of pushing this sort of online alternative reality.

It's important to do that. And it also lets me sort of like socialize with people and like an actual physical way. Like, don't give me long. Like, I have friends online who I mostly chat with online. But like, I do think there's something to actually like physically being around other people and interacting with them and sort of understanding that like, oh yeah. like this is how we socialize before the internet existed, right? Go to a bar, go watch, you know, the game at your local sports bar, for example, and just sort of be a part of the crowd, right?

I think that's one way to do it. Because again, I think by doing that, you allow yourself to sort of get out of the confines of the reality that's being built, you know, even within my own sort of sphere. online, right? I see, you know, it's very easy to get on the Duma train, right? Because a lot of people sort of within our, you know, social media sort of like networks, you know, there's a lot of reason to be stressed and be anxious and be worried. And it's very easy to sort of go

down that Dumerant track if you're not careful, right? And so, being able to step away from all of it for a couple hours a day, you know, a couple days a week is very, very important, right? So I just got done, you know, I just got that from being with family in Kentucky for one of a break. And I definitely needed that, right? Because there were times, especially during last week, where like, I felt like I could have been on my phone on my computer all day, just watching news updates about either Venezuela or about Minneapolis. But, you know, at some point, you know, my mom hollers from downstairs, hey, we're going to go get lunch. I'm just like, okay, close the laptop, turn off the phone,

we're going to go get lunch, and I'm just not going to think about it for the next hour and a half, two hours. And that really helps, right? You know, go touch grass, you know, sort of like, you know, that's a bit of a joke at this point, but also, like, I do think it is actually, like, serious, right? You do need to disconnect for a little bit. And, you know, go do other things that aren't online.

I do think that is very important. That's how I'm going to survive, is by doing that. Do you know if you're teaching intro to American politics yet? I am not, but I am, I got my assignment this afternoon right before I came on, actually. And I think it's just as interesting a class to be TA for the Cynastic. It is, it is an introduction to the world. order, right? So it's supposed to be sort of understanding how the modern international system works. And like, I'm meeting with the professor on Wednesday. And like, I don't think

it's as bad as like trying to talk about American politics at the moment. But part of me wants to be like, hey, we're seeing the collapse of the post-Westphalian system here. Maybe we should just let the students watch movies, right? You know, I think there's a bit less of an argument to be made there because there are sort of like competing ideas about what the international order should be but boy howdy is the current

international order as we know it rapidly degrading well you also use collapse to teach about the history of it right like you're living if you live through a moment of great change it's a great opportunity to talk about what's being lost

and what's being restructured yeah that that is absolutely true So it's just, it'll be an interesting class to sort of like talk about and to see how the students like react to current events as we're going three week class. It'll be something, that's for sure. So another thread I wanted to pull out with you is something that's been kind of attention in my life. It's like being kind of an 80s and 90s kids. kind of having this absolutist free speech thought and this idea that art in general is good and transcendent and kind of budding up against this this reality as I age that like if art can be transcendent,

it can also be depraved and terrible. And so with that, let's talk about hearts of iron four. Oh, great. Yes, let's talk about boy four. I love foy four. I have over a thousand hours on that at the moment. Okay, so you're like a, you're like a hearts-aired guy then. Yeah, so I mean, like out of all the Paradox games, right?

So I'm sure we'll get into how harsh firing relates to other Paradox games. Like out of all the Paradox games, like my tier list is probably Hoyfour, Crusader King, Stellaris, and then Victorian sort of like Europa Universalist sort of like joints sit at the bottom

like I play all of them but like I enjoy Hoy 4 I enjoy the modding scene for Horace 4 despite the fact that it's also the most cursed sort of modding scene out there

it's one of those like well you take the good with the bad even if the bad is really really bad and it's just it's the system I've most engaged with so it's like yeah I'm a Hohy 4 guy. I've played many multiplayer sessions with friends on Hoi 4.

So I like the game and I like a lot of the mods that have come out for it. But I also really, really hate some of the mods that have come out for it. So I've teased this on the show or mentioned it on the show a few times. but the reason we're even talking about hearts of iron four and crusader kings to a certain extent is because our secretary of war Pete Hegsseth has a tattoo on his body, Dave's Volt, that I think the uninitiated, the uninformed would say like, oh, it's this Latin phrase from the Crusades. when it is in fact not. It is a meme that came out of these video games

and then kind of got malappropriated into being a, oh, it's a crusader meme from, uh, from, from the middle ages. So why, how, what, what, what, what is, okay, what the very, very basically for the unannitiated, what the hell is hearts of iron for? Right. So Hearts of Iron 4 is a Grand Strategy game for the PC.

I think there's like a console edition that no one ever plays. But it's a grand strategy game for the PC. How would you play that on a console? That's a whole, I can't imagine playing that with a controller anyway. Me neither. But so Grand Strategy game for the PC made by Swedish game developer

Paradox. An interactive, published by Paradox. So, you know, sort of in-house developer, in-house publisher, where you pick any country that existed in 1936, and you play out World War II, right? And you sort of, like, operate at the grand strategic level. So you sort of control both your industry and your military

and your technological research and sort of control sort of, like, how your country developed through something known as a focus tree. And so that's sort of what it is. You take control of a country at a very sort of like, you know, macro level, right? And you sort of guide it through World War II. And why, how do we end up with a secretary of war that has a tattoo that is inspired by these paradox games? Right.

So that has to do with sort of how that has to do with the fact that the sort of culture surrounding these games, or a lot of the culture surrounding these games, especially sort of Hearts of Iron Four and Crusader Kings sort of runs in the current of quote unquote gaming culture, right? And a lot of that was sort of very racist, very bigoted, very misogynistic back in the day, right? not just back of the day and still is and still is but um you know I'm specifically thinking about uh you know obviously Gamergate because that's sort of right my focus is

but you know we sort of get this because you know I can remember deus vault means on 4chan and on um you know not so much Hoy Ford boards but on uh you know

for Shudder Kings on EU 5, on EU4, excuse me, on EU4 post, because one of the most popular things to do in EU4 during the sort of earlier days. Yeah. Europa universalists. Yeah. Europa universalist war. And that's where you sort of clay in a country that existed and sort of like the early, like the early modern period. And you take them through sort of like the post, you know, French Revolution period. For people that are listening that aren't gamers, imagine like a very complicated version of risk.

That's basically like what all of these games are. And there's variations between them, but to boil them down to a very simple, very, very simplified version, it's that. Yes, yes. And then the only thing that really changes is the time period. Right? So EU4. In the perspective, I think, but without getting in the weeds. Yes.

So EU4 is early modern. and one of the very popular sort of campaigns to do back in the day was you would play as the Knights of Malta. So Knights of Malta, Holy Order established by the Catholic Church. They existed on the island of Malta. You know, they were sort of like, you know, forced there after the crusading states collapsed. And like one of the very, a campaign that people loved to do, right,

was to take the Knights of Malta and they would go out and they would reclaims. claim the holy land and they would defeat the Ottoman Turks, right? And you would see a lot of sort of deus vault being sort of around that idea of like, yeah, you know, because you're a really small country, right? Very, very small. And so going out and beating these very large superpowers in Egypt and the Ottomans was hard to do, like legitimately very hard to do. There's a reason the Knights of Malta did not actually do it in reality. but, you know, to go out and do that, for a lot of people, you know,

made them feel a sense of accomplishment. It just also happens to be that was very easy to sneak in Christian nationalist rhetoric, right? Of like, oh, yeah, Deiast Holt, go drive the infidels out of the Holy Land. Go drive the infidels out of Anatolia. You know, we're going to go beat back these Muslims whole cords, right? And I don't think it helps that EU4 specifically, I'm looking up its release date.

Yeah, so like EU 4 came out in 2013, right? So we're well into, you know, God, I can't believe it's that old. We're sort of well into the global war on terror at that point

and like the sort of anti-Islamic, anti-Muslim sort of like mentality and milieu had been developed within the United States for a while at that point, right? So, like, yeah, joking about going out and slaughtering Saracens, like, no, but deal, right? Because, you know, that's just sort of the culture. And so, you know, sort of like you said, that sort of meme gets associated with a Naita Malta campaign gets associated sort of with, you know, beating back Muslim hordes in these video games.

And then it gets really bad, right? it gets really, really bad for after the Christchurch shooting, right, over in New Zealand, which took place, um, 2018, 2019, I believe. It's a look. Yes, so that was back in, huh? Is 2019? Yeah, 2019, yeah, 2019. So that took place back in 2019, as a lot of other sort of, sort of,

bad rhetoric's going on. But specifically, you know, the Christchurch shooter, you know, he goes and shoots this mosque in New Zealand. He's from Australia, but he goes over to New Zealand and shoots up this mosque.

And his weapons are all engraved and written on and they have numerous memes on them from various different communities. His bayonet is etched with de asphalt. he makes a meme about subscribe to PewDiePie Pie while he's shooting up the Moss.

That's its own, that's separate from like paradox culture, but that just shows how sort of terminally online he was. Is this the first shitpost mass killing? I would say so, yes, probably. It's definitely what sort of inspired me to sort of get into this research field because like I had existed within this sort of like gamer milieu for a long time, right? I sort of drifted away from 4chan after GamerGate, but, you know, as someone who's still played a lot of video games, like I still engaged for that culture online,

and still watched YouTube videos and all that stuff. And so for me, you know, when I saw Christchurch, and when I sort of saw, when I sort of saw some of the memes that were etched on his weapons and some of the memes that he sort of said online, like a part of me was like, why do I know that? I'm like, I shouldn't know these, like, I shouldn't understand these references that this terrorist is using to go out and, you know, he's citing and quoting and writing on his guns to go out and kill innocent people, right? Like, why do I know that? Like, for me, you know, the longest time, I think terrorist expert, I think people who have, like, gone to, you know, Georgetown and, you know, they've done very deep dives into, like, you know, very esoteric things. And then there's the fact that, you know, there's the fact that. that this terrorist is going out and doing these things with memes,

and I understand them. Just because I'm immersed within these sort of, like, gaming culture, there was that sort of moment that made me realize that, like, oh, all of that shit that was, like, happening on these forums and, you know, on these threads and in these videos,

you know, maybe we should take it a little more seriously. Right. Well, a thing that's happening is that, that the American white nationalists and American Nazis have been early technological adopters. Because their movements

were not allowed to be that they were, there was, it was a social fauxpah to be those things in the real world for a long time. And it drove a lot of them onto the internet and it drove a lot of them to adopt a lot of these online spaces. And I think one of the things that was going on

was you would have real Nazis and real white nationalists trolling online spaces and waiting for people to say and do things like Deus Vault and talk about the Knights of Malta and these things that were memed and then they would go into these game forums and they would say like

oh that's interesting that you're playing this in this game would you like to know about the reality of it and start to like seed pieces of their movement in these spaces and like if you're not careful and you weren't paying attention you look around one day and all these people you thought were just enjoying a video game

are serious. Yep. And sort of like you said, you know, the far right being adopters of online technology are really like stormfront, right? Sort of emerged on, you know, use that, right?

They sort of network-bear computers together and there are a number of far-right militias that sort of did the same thing back in the, 80s and 90s before the internet was like really big but you could like you know network your all your computers together and so you know to just give some concrete examples there but yeah one of the things that I found really interesting sort of like as I'm writing my dissertation and as I'm writing the parts on Gamergate specifically is there's this really interesting moment when Bioshock Infinite comes out right so for those who don't know Bioshock Infinite third game and

the Bioshock video game series. It's a first-person shooter, a very stylist, and, you know, takes place in sort of, like, alternate history versions of America. And Bioshock Infinite came out in 2013, yeah, so 2013. And there were a number of video game recorders. He sort of mentioned that, like, oh, like,

storm, people on Stormfront are talking about Bioshock Infinite, right? Because, part of the setting of BioShawk is you have this big city in the clouds of Columbia where like African Americans

are still basically enslaved right? And so, and you know, there's commentary about that. But like, you know, the way people on Stormprint

were talking about it was like, oh, hey, like we can use Columbia. Like, Columbia is actually a great example of like, what an idealistic

white supremac society would be like, right? And so, and then, you know, it just so happens that, you know, not long after that, people on 4chan's video game board start sort of parroting those arguments, right? And so, you know, I think, you know, you're right in saying that not only are, were they waiting for people to talk about these things that end up getting mean, but there were active discussions about how can we, you know, insert ourselves into these conversations

where we think we can have an edge, right? And like, oh, yeah, Columbia is actually really great. Oh, yeah, Knights of Malta, aren't they cool? Let's talk about the Templars. Let's talk about why the Saracens are bad, right? And so, you know, for me, one of the things I always sort of like to emphasize whenever I talk about video games specifically

is like, I'm not trying to generate another, like video games bad video games cause it streamism scare right we need a bad video games well you've got a thousand hours in hearts of iron four so i would hope not yeah so i mean like you know my brain's fried you know just in a very different way from how other people's brains are fried but um but you know that's sort of i don't want to make that argument the argument i always try to make is it's not the video games themselves that are problematic it's the sort of social networks that can sort of exist within and around them that are extremely problematic, right? It's what, you know, publishers and developers, you know, tolerate, you know, what they used

to tolerate on their forms. Basically, every publisher and developer has, like, a freaking Discord these days. So it's like, what are they tolerating on their forms? What are they tolerating, you know, in their Discord servers, you know, which content creators are they sponsoring, right? You know, which content creators on YouTube are they pushing versus, you know, not pushing, right? And so because by putting your weight on the scales like that as a publisher,

by saying we tolerate this sort of talk versus not tolerating this sort of talk, it sort of dictates the environment that that fandom is going to develop going forward. Right. I saw a really good post. I think it was last week where someone mentioned it like, oh, yeah, you know, I've been an online moderator for various Discord surveys and I helped moderate like a hobby shop. And like the thing that this person said was like, yeah,

if you want a healthy community, the thing that you have to do that seems counterproductive is you need to kick out a lot more people, right? Like you can't like you can't sort of tolerate bigotry or sexism or racism at any level, you know, not even sort of like jokingly, right? And you sort of have to understand that, like, yeah, like, the First Amendment only applies to the government, right? Like, it's just the government that, you know, can't dictate what you can and can't say. But, like, if you're running a card shop, if you're running a hobby store, like, that's a private business, right? The thing that we Americans supposedly love, you know, we love our small business owners.

You, like, as a small, as the owner of that shop, you dictate the speech that's tolerated. and not tolerated within that space, right? And, you know, one of the sort of, like, bad arguments that I see, right, is that, like, oh, like, we need to tolerate these people, you know, white supremacist, neo-Nazos, all that, existing within these spaces, because if we don't, you know, they're just going to go congregate, you know, by themselves.

But, like, no, actually, that's what we want them to do. We want them to congregate by themselves. we want to make it as difficult for them to recruit other people as it can be. And it turns out by limiting the scope of their reach, that's one of the best ways to do it, right? Like, the fact that Twitter slash X is now just like a cesspool because any form of moderation has basically been curtailed, I think is like the prime example of that, right?

For as bad as old Twitter moderation used to be, there were at least rules, right? There were some things that were not tolerated. And that helped. I have a hard time imagining that the pre-Musk Twitter would have released a machine that makes nudes of underage girls. Yes. Like for as bad as they were, I don't think they do that. Right.

And so there is this sort of like, for me, the thing that you need to understand is the culture of various social networks that surround these games. And, you know, for a long time, Paradox sort of struggled with moderating their forums. They sort of allowed, very toxic, very antisocial, very racist, bigoted sort of threads to just exist. They didn't really engage with content creators online too terribly much, sort of in the early years. They're pretty good about, like, making sure they only sponsor you sort of, like, decent people these days. But, like, you know, back when Wayfar first came out, back when E4 was just starting the idea

of, you know, a publisher or a developer interacting with sponsoring a content creator was still relatively new, right, back in, like, 2012, 2013. And so, again, that sort of allowed content to be generated

you know, on these platforms, or using these video games that pushed a bad message, right, that then made it to where, oh, yeah, if you were on a parodotot's forum, circa, you know, 2018, 2019, like, you would understand the means that this terrorist over in New Zealand

at Stuy's guns, right? And so that, for me, is the problem, is a lot of developers, a lot of platforms, like they don't want to kick people off, right? They don't want to do the necessary legwork to develop a healthy culture. And that allows people to sort of post whatever they want, right, to generate whatever content they want and to sort of create, you know, very toxic cultures that surround these sort of, you know,

fandom spaces, which I think is really bad. In gaming culture, had a pretty anything goes mindset for a long time. For a long, long time, I mean, you know, the gaming culture specifically, right? You know, I think back to it made Custer's revenge, right? Which was a game for, I think it was the Atari. It was an Atari 2,600. It was one of the first indie ones, indie ones made, right? Yeah, where it's like, oh, yeah, you play as Custard and you go and essentially assault a tied-up Native American woman.

that's bad. Like, you know, the fact that that even existed, you know, especially so early on within sort of like video games as an industry's life cycle, I think is pretty telling. So, I mean, there was that, there's the fact that, you know, for a long time, sort of like, especially on the American side, right? And I should caveat that and say, like, I think all this conversation specifically talks about American gaming culture specifically

Japan sort of had its own thing going on with its own issues so I'm specifically talking about American gaming culture here there was this idea of like gung ho like you know macho man mavericks as like head developers right so you had like John Carmine you had

you had Parmon you had Romero and you had like the sort of bid developers of like Quake and Dune right and I'm sort of thinking of of Ramero's infamous ad for... This September John Romero will make you his bitch? Yes, yes. John Romero is going to make you his bitch, right?

And so, I mean, like, that is, you know, pretty inherently, like, misogynistic and bad. And, you know, he did... And that was a spread that was in a magazine. Yeah. And, you know, he did eventually apologize for that. And he sort of realized that, like, oh, yeah, that was actually in bad. taste not great, but like it still happened, right? And it still got associated with like one of the big sort of founders of like

American video game culture. Um, you know, and like everyone like even though Dai Katana was slightly before my time, uh, like, I knew of it, right? Like it existed within the gaming mill you and like people knew it and talked about it. So like I, you know, came to know it through that. I think of like E3, right? Back when E3 was still thing, specifically, like, during the early days of E3 and as it became more prominent,

there was the idea of like booth babes, right? Where it's like, oh, yeah, like, who are we appealing to? Oh, yeah, like, you know, teenage boys and young adults, males, right? So it's like, oh, yeah, let's have scantily clad women besides our, beside our video game displays to, you know, be eye candy for the various dudes walking around, right? you know, that fell out of practice, thankfully, towards E3's, you know, in the later years of E3, but that was a very prominent thing that existed. And, like, E3, right, was, like, the sort of, like, it was sort of, like, the big cultural event for gaming culture every year, right?

That's when new games got announced. That's when console releases got announced. And a lot of, like, big moments in gaming history sort of happened at E3, right? and so the fact that like such an openly sort of misogynistic you know thing was going on at that show for so many years again sort of plays into like the culture that gets that was getting developed right within um within the sort of gaming sphere early on right and i think that's why when gamergate happens right the issue that it sort of centers on is is the idea of feminist taking over into video games, right? Because for the longest time, the sort of cultural

perception of what video games were, who they're supposed to appeal to you, who the target audiences, who they are made for, right? Is men, right? Specifically, like, young men. And so the idea that the women are coming to take away your toys,

right? Like, Gamergate became so potent and was so easily at exploitable because the culture of American gaming primed it to be so successful, right? Because it had pushed that narrative of

games or for boys for so long. To bring it back around. It's interesting you're kind of talking about these like rock star developers. John Carmack, who's John Romero's partner, one of the

developers of Doom, legendary dev, on January 7th is on Twitter. This is amidst the CSAM stuff blowing up, like the non-consensual porn being created. And as of this recording, still being created, Carmack goes on to Twitter and says, you know, it would be nice if some of the Twitter diaspora returned. So many creatives, but also many developers that generally enrich the experience are no longer active. Those that performatively left and those with a seething hathes. of Elon probably will be back soon, but a lot of people just disengaged on vague cultural grounds that can be re-evaluated.

Reach out to lapsed friends. It's just like that is just not like we, you know, we are, we're living in different realities. Yeah. Yeah, we absolutely are. And I mean, like, from my understanding, like, I think Romero has sort of gotten better in the years, but like, Carmack sort of never, never really changed from my understanding He's sort of always been the way he is.

You know, asking him to change at this point. It's just impossible. But I think that goes to sort of show that, like, yeah, like, we live in different realities because he was a part, he was a key figure and a key part of that sort of, like, idea of what it was to be in the gaming culture. Right. Like, he was a key figure of that back in the day. And, like, he's readily associated with it. And I think he still exists within that idea.

idea, right, of like, oh, yeah, it's still just this really cool niche subcultural thing, right? Like, no, video games had very much moved beyond that, John, right? And so, you know, in a lot of ways, I feel like he's a dinosaur living in the past, and I think, you know, that post in a lot of ways shows that. So, yeah, it's just, and that all sort of ties in. obviously I was talking about GamerGate that sort of ties in with the sort of

anti-social tendencies that got developed in sort of like early online culture right you know and I talked about And it has now bled into real life yeah that has now bled into real life right and for me that's the most important

aspect of sort of like studying this stuff researching this stuff talking about these stuff is this idea of like yeah one of the problems we have the problem we have, right, is that so many people now are much more antisocial than they used to be, right? They're only really looking out

for themselves, they're only, maybe not just themselves, right? I should say themselves and their immediate kin, right, is probably the best way to describe it for the most part. But like, the idea of, like, helping your community, right? Has sort of, like,

fallen by the wayside for a lot of people, right? It's very much I have to look out for number one in my immediate sort of like family, which isn't good for a society at any level, right? Because we can normally sort of exist through buildings sort of like dynamic social bonds and all that. So the fact that we are so antisocial, you know,

is a problem. And I think a lot of that sort of dates back to the antisocial norms in culture that was developed, you know, in early online culture. So, you know, uh, you know, 4chan,

you know, is what I talk about a lot, but, you know, 4chan was, you know, a combination of two channel, which is where the sort of

anonymous side of things comes from in Japan and something awful, right? Which is like, that something awful for me is like the nexus of where a lot of that sort of like anti-social posting, anti-social culture really sort of starts to develop, right? I think 4chan sort of takes it and runs with it, right?

In a way, but like we don't get 4chan if we don't get something awful first, right? I think you can't understand 4chan without understanding something awful. And the whole culture it generated. And the something awful culture, in part 4chan develops because something awful does decide like, you know what? we need we did not have some of these people. We're going to regulate them to the FYID forum.

We're going to start cracking down on this stuff. If you get kicked out, you need, you know, you need to pay me another $10 to get back in. And a lot of the worst stuff then kind of migrates over to 4chan. Yeah, so I mean, go ahead. No, but just the, but I think you're right, like that

attitude that kind of like post-anything goes. attitude really does bubble up and percolate on something awful. Yeah, so I mean like the fact that, you know, the most famous thread, you know, the most famous board on something awful is the fuck you and die form, like the FYAD form. Like, I think that sort of says something, right? The fact that a form sort of a sort of board existed where the only thing that like you were sort of meant to do on it was to go on it and be,

just as vehemently anti-social as you could be, right? And, like, they all did it for fun. And, like, I think one of, I think something that ends up happening there, right, is they end up sort of, like, doing antisocial, they sort of end up doing anti-social stuff performatively, right?

They're all doing it on fuck you and die, on FYAD, as a sort of performance as, like, they're trying to one-up each other in a lot of ways, right? of, oh, I can be more antisocial, right? I think the problem is when you do that, right? When you perform that, right? I think to a certain extent, like, you as a poster, as someone who's generating that content,

like, you start to sort of adopt those antisocial tendencies in reality, you know, whether or not you... You fake it till you make it, and if you're not careful, the mask, like, becomes who you really are. Exactly. you end up faking it until you make it. But not only that, even if you didn't post on FYAD

on something awful back in the day of life, it's the most popular, it's the most popular board on the site, right? So everyone's consuming it. Everyone's consuming the post. Everyone's consuming that mentality. And there's this idea of, oh, if I want to be popular on this site,

I need to act like that, right? And the fact that people were getting popular, like on SA, from doing antisocial stuff like that sort of generates this idea of if I become antisocial and I become cynical and become nihilistic I can make friends too

right? It's this very weird I need to be anti-social in order to get friends in order to create a social network right? It's very counter it seems very counterproductive that's sort of like what ends up happening right and like it was all performance again right you were performing as a member of the community so the community would accept you, which is the same thing that's happening now.

Yeah. And it just so happens to be that the performance from like an ice agent is like shooting someone in the face, sadly. And yeah, so I mean, like, for me, that, that's sort of the key, that's sort of the key to understanding all of this is the fact that so much of that anti-social culture has bled out into the wider culture of RAR's. has especially been adopted heavily by, like, the Republican Party, right? And, you know, I think there's a direct line from, like, FYAD being sort of created and promulgated on something awful and becoming the most popular board to, you know, the fact that, you know, an agent of the state is, you know, replying to somebody saying they have concerns about, you know, ICE agents shooting people in the face and killing.

them is replying with the word triggered question mark right I think there is a causal chain there um and you know it's it's just interesting to see how that's all played out over time because again so much of it is

performative right you're you're performing you know on something awful you were performing for the other members right and so many injotes get created uh so many references get created, right, that I was talking to sort of like another researcher, you know, about, like, the future of like a trunist research and all that sort of stuff. And, you know, he sort of joke that like, yeah, you know, for the application process, if you're looking to, like, join, like, any sort of federal, like, counter-extrinist counter-radicalization group, like, there should just be one question. And the one question should be, do you have stairs in your house, right?

You're laughing so you know it, right? And so like, you know, like, and like, I know the answer to that question. Like, I know the proper response. I'm not going to say it just because, like, I want to keep that ace in my, I want to keep that ace in my sleeve. But, um, but like. The internet does make you stupid, doesn't it? It does. But like, you know, you understood that reference.

I understand that reference. And it's like, you know, it creates a community. It creates a culture. right? And like, you know, something awful, I think, you know, it produced a lot of what makes the internet what it is today, both for the good, both for bad and for good. I think meme culture doesn't really exist as it is without something awful. And I generally like memes. I generally like that style of posting. You know, I think like edgy posting has, you know, a place in like a proper world, right? But like, it also promulgated like, promulgated this very anti-social mentality that I still think a lot of people, you know, that a lot of people, it might have been performative to them, but they adopted it. And then when you adopt that sort of mentality, it becomes very easy to go down sort of reactionary radicals, right? Because reactionary sort of exists within these antisocial views very easily.

I have this horrifying vision of J.D. Vance on stage at a debate in the coming years, getting up on the microphone and asking if his opponent has stairs in his house. I don't know if he's that terminally on the line, but I just, I hope to God, we never come to that. But if we do, I will bring you back on the show. Sounds good What are you working on? What's next? So I'm just sort of attempting to get my dissertation done. So, you know, dissertation is all about sort of how, you know, the culture that started in something awful sort of developed

unfortunate king to be the culture of the Republican Party. So working on that, you know, trying to write chapters whenever I have the time. Um, you know, also sort of like, I want to probably write a separate paper because I can't work it into my dissertation. But I want sort of write about the performance, right? The performance of this anti-social culture in a lot of ways. The fact that it, like, for a lot of like these people, right, for JD Vance, for Miller, probably even for the dude to, uh, shot Renee. good in Minnesota, this is all a game, right?

Yeah. It's all a game and it's all sort of a game with an elaborate rule set that's been developed online over a decade at this point where like the primary goal, right? The primary like thing that you're striving towards is to make liberals and progressives and leftists, woke Marxists, whatever you want to call them,

as upset as possible. Right. Like that's the goal. That's the end game. It's who can do the most of that. And, you know, we're seeing, we're seeing that performance played out in so many different ways. We're seeing that game played in so many different ways. And like, these people are actively competing against each other to try to be the dude who makes the woke people the most upset. Right. And so, like, I kind of want to talk about, like, that sort of. performance that sort of like way it is

a game right to them and specifically how the fact that it is a game ends up again sort of creating this alternative reality where they're able to sort of deny facts

you know, deny material reality in order to propagate the sort of game that they're playing right so I'm wanting to write a paper about that eventually so we'll see if I can't squeeze that in there, squeeze that in there why I'm writing the dissertation, because I feel like that's very relevant to like what's going on right now.

No, it absolutely is. Because it is all, the aesthetic is the most important thing. Like so many other fascist movements before. Yeah, and the aesthetic is, I mean, the aesthetic has sort of always been shit for these movements, but it's really, really shit this time. Yeah, good God.

So, I mean, sort of vaporwave-ass video gamey, like, freaking, you know, AI-generated anime nonsense, right? It's just every time, every time I see a post by either DHS or the White House that, like, uses AI-generated content that tries to capture an aesthetic, I'm just like, to me not, please, like, I'm tired. I'm specifically thinking of this happened sometime like the middle of summer last year while ICE deportation flights were going on the White House posted like an AI generated image of like an ice agent

arresting an immigrant and it was like in the jibbley anime style right so I think Hal's speaking tassel thing my name or total are very cute very innocent and it's the scene of this immigrant lady crying as an ICE agent arrest her right and it's like and they post that and they think it's funny, right?

And it's like... Because again, it's the performance and it's the... It's upsetting you. That's why Bovina... That's why he said triggered, right? Because he wants to upset you. They want to desecrate things you love. Exactly.

That is exactly it. And, you know, it kind of sucks because part of it is like... They know what they're doing. They're trying to go to reaction out of you. you, so in a lot of ways, you don't want to give them a reaction, right? Because that just sort of, it feeds the troll, as they say in a lot of ways. But, like, also, the things they are doing are so legitimately upsetting that, like, you do sort of need to react to them, right?

And again, I think this, you know, I think part of this goes back to, like, well, how do we deal with this? You know, I think part of it is, and I need to be probably slightly better about this myself. is have those reactions, right? Have those reactions, but like, maybe don't post about it on main. Maybe go and talk about it in a Discord server in a group chat where it's not so public facing. And, like, if I can use this moment to push for, like, anything,

it would be like, hey, blue sky, like, please hurry up and give us group chats, right? Like, the fact that that's still not a thing, you know, group DMs, right? The fact that that's still not a thing after a number, of years at this point is kind of wild. But like I think that would honestly help, right? Because, you know, sure, a lot of these dudes don't have accounts on blue sky, right?

But that doesn't mean they're not watching, right? Doesn't mean they're not, you know, eyeballing how we're reacting or they're still not following, you know, they're following the people who are still on Twitter and X and they're reacting to them, right? So just because like, you know, DHS and others don't have active accounts all on blue sky, it doesn't mean they aren't seeing how we react to things and then being like, aha, we triggered their lives. Let's go do more of that. Yep.

So, you know, I think we could all do with a little, like, you know, posting gut reactions on Maine a little less. I mean, I'll be the first shipment. I'm very guilty of doing that. But I'm, you know, part of that is because I don't have a group chat to do on, on Blue Sky currently, where I did on Twitter before, right? So it's like, I think at the very least the health of Blue Sky in general would be much better once group chats are implemented. So I guess that's my, if I have to make a policy pitch for anything, that would be it, right? Please give us group chats.

Blue Sky shouldn't have taken this long. Post your visceral reactions to the group chat and not on main. Exactly. Is a good first step to fighting the performance regime? It is. It absolutely is because you all can collectively work through the trauma together while not giving their performance

regime more fodder, right? Well, yep. Michael, thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and talking through this with me. It's been very cathartic, actually. I think it's helped me out a little as well. Thank you for having me. Happy to come back whenever.

You know, I'm very much one of those people. who is like, I hope I don't have to come back ever. But, you know. I'm sure there'll be another horrifying shitpost assassination in the near term, and you'll be back on. We'll see. I hope not. I want a couple months apiece so I can just get this dissertation done.

But thanks for having me. Absolutely. That is all for this week, Angry Planet listeners. As always, Angry Planet is me. Matthew Galt and Kevin O'Dell, was created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, Angry PlanetPod.com, get those early commercial-free episodes and some bonus content. We will be back again soon with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. We're going to talk about Empire coming home again.

We're going to talk about Greenland. We're going to get into Iran. We're going to get into all of the things that are making you anxious this year. Stay safe out there.