WTF with Marc Maron Podcast - Episode 1050 - Dale Beran

Episode Date: September 2, 2019

Unlike Marc, Dale Beran was immersed in internet culture for most of his life. He considered himself an artistic, creative person with aspirations to become a writer. But what Dale discovered in the online communities he frequented was a disconnected, nihilistic disposition that evolved from meme creation to activism to alt-right and white supremacist ideologies. Dale thoroughly documents the online worlds that created a culture of toxic trolling in his book It Came From Something Awful, which provides a major piece of the puzzle to understand what happened in the 2016 election and what is happening to youth culture in America. This episode is sponsored by The Comedy Central Roast of Alec Baldwin, Squarespace, and Bombas. Sign up here for WTF+ to get the full show archives and weekly bonus material! https://plus.acast.com/s/wtf-with-marc-maron-podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Lock the gates! Alright, let's do this. How are you, what the fuckers? What the fuck buddies? What the fucksters? What's happening? Mark Maron here. This is my show, WTF.

Welcome to it. I hope everything's okay. I don't know, man. Dee, what do you think? What do you think happened this last week? If you've been keeping up, if you've been listening and you knew where I was at because I pre-recorded last week and what I had presented was that I would, you know, if everything went as planned and I was ready to sort of move through it, that I would get off the nicotine lozenges and uh i'm here to report that i have i am now eight days eight days off today which will be monday i'm recording this seven days off

and um i'm i'm a little less out of my mind some of you've been through this with me maybe once or twice before but uh wow pretty exciting Pretty fucking exciting just to throw yourself into some sort of craving-induced mania that disables your ability to filter your emotions properly and just makes you fucking nuts in a very exciting way. It's been very exciting in the sense that if I'm going to stay like this we're we're all up for quite a ride if i'm gonna stay like this i don't know if that's gonna be what's

gonna happen okay so let's do some business let's do some business i'll be at the vogue theater in vancouver this friday i believe it's sold out you can try uh that's september 6th i will be at the more theater in seattle, September 7th. I don't think that's sold out. I think there's still a few tickets to that. So come to that one. Okay? Yeah, come down from Vancouver.

You heard me right. Come from Vancouver. And coming up, these are important. They're as important as it would be if you want to see me perform. I'm at JFL 42 in Toronto on September 19th, the Vic theater in Chicago on September 20th. That's sold out. Actually.

Why did I say that? Uh, the Toronto one needs, yeah, that needs support. As they say in the business, the Masonic temple in Detroit needs a little help on September 21st and the Pantages theater in Minneapolis on September 22nd.

My old alma mater. In a way, I've taped a special there. Go to WTFpod.com slash tour for ticket info and all my tour dates for the rest of the year. All right? So here's what goes on. So I get off. I decide to get off the nicotine.

I told you I was going to, which I did. But man, my brain just spread wide open, buddy. Who's the buddy, pal? Spread wide open. I'd forgotten what it was like because I was eating a lot of them. I don't know if you guys knew how many I was eating, but I was eating a lot of them, man. My tolerance was way up. It was taking a lot to fix.

And, you know, it wasn't getting any easier. All day long, sometimes I'd go. I'd nicotine myself into nauseousness sometimes, sweaty, eye-crossing queasiness. And then sometimes I go to bed with them in my mouth. And when I woke up and realized they were in my bed, I'd stick them under the pillow next to me. Yeah. So they get all stuck under the pillow like a sad tooth from when you were a kid. I was strung out on the shit is what I'm saying.

But when I pulled the plug on it, I just didn't realize how like my brain's just scrambling for dopamine. The receptors are going nuts. They're starving. My metabolism slowed down. So I like put on like eight pounds overnight. And I've just been crazy. You know, I'm afraid to talk to people. I've done a lot of watching of television and cooking during this time and just getting through it, exercising, hiking, sweating it out.

Like yesterday, I went and ran four miles and then went and sweated out. But it's hard with people on stage. Did two comedy sets. Loopy as fuck. Full-on improv. Nicotine withdrawal improvisation. Spectacular. So satisfying and weird i i don't know i how do i make my life this this um this mode i'd like to stay in this mode a bit without the craving like i'm amped a little bit it's probably annoying for you i apologize i

apologize it'll pass but i did a couple sets that was good i was also in that ongoing um this weird battle on twitter where all the marvel comics universe people were mad at me which is a fine oh and then they released a trailer for the joker and i made it in man i'm at the very end me and de niro in the doorway looking at joaquin very exciting it's gonna be a dark cool movie very happy to be part of it does not change my feeling anyways got a great show today speaking of um i think i can say nerd culture without people getting upset i know some people think i'm a nerd they call me a nerd because of my record thing or whatever but i usually tap out man you know i'm only as nerdy as the amount of shit will fit in my house or where i get tired out man you know i'm only as nerdy as the the amount

of shit will fit in my house or where i get tired of looking at it i get past a certain point it's sort of like it reality breaks in and says what do you need all this shit for is this really your life and i pull back so you know what that makes me not a nerd because they go all in not judging just is what it is but But maybe judging a little bit depends on what the nerd obsession is. But this guy that I talked to today, Dale Buran, he wrote that book, man.

He wrote that book that blew my fucking mind. There's been a couple of books that have blown my mind. It's called It Came From Something Awful. And it really is, the reason it coincides with this sort of weird pile on by the mcu guys and women and men and whoever's involved with that they're just their knee-jerk reaction to uh any sort of sort of name calling or criticism

about their weird corporate addiction to fantasy uh it was very educational and i fucking i dug i dug the interaction because after i read this book uh it came from something awful it taught me about the whole world of 2chan 4chan reddit subreddit tumblr it taught me about the sort of all that's been going out there on out there in those platforms, in those chat rooms, in that world of disconnected, disassociated, primarily men on the chans, and how that evolved out of a kind of nihilistic disposition into meme culture into insult culture online and then how it ultimately manifested into mainstream culture through conspiracy theories and through propaganda stuff because some of them were turned out by the alt-right and by old school nazis but a lot of them were just

out there to fuck shit up it also talks about how it kind of uh sprouted off into the two versions of anonymous the politically active into the two versions of anonymous the politically active anonymous and then the hacking anonymous and how you know tumblr was sort of a an antithesis to what was going on in these kind of more toxic it was it's just look if you're my age maybe you're proficient maybe you know what's going on but you know i am i just used a computer i don't live in it and i don't know how to live in it and i don't know about all this stuff but it all fucking adds up you know it's a major piece in the puzzle of what happened in 2016 and also what happened to youth culture

and it all started with fantasy it all started with anime on one side the whole thing was an education to me and it really sort of shows where and who was driving culture not unlike the pushback i'm getting from the collective the mcu collective which is you know i i get it that you know that they're now empowered but they're certainly not the underdog in terms of you know the effect on culture and whether or not monoculture really disney run monoculture when it comes to films the idea is like yeah okay great they're they're well made something but uh and it's like you can tout that's kind of like well that director is a genius or this actor is great or whatever and they're doing these movies the payday is one thing but you've got to figure out how to bend your talent into this very limited world

that appeals to this fan base. And they're virulent. And there's no question about that. And if they don't believe they are, they can just look at their reaction to any sort of criticism or it wasn't even, I guess, sure, it was name-calling,

but it wasn't off. But anyway, you know know to each their own i think that was the primary theme is like why do you got to make fun of things that people like that people love and i'm like well when that thing is a a sort of monoculture sort of you know juggernaut of uh of a very select context of entertainment that just plows through everything else and is oddly relatively limited, even if it is a universe, it's worthy of criticism,

even if people love it so much that they're willing to do Disney's bidding because they're so grateful that never again will they ever willing to do Disney's bidding because they're so grateful that never again will they ever have to be ashamed of liking their comic books. So Dale Buran, the guy who wrote this, it came from something awful. It's one of the most, look, I've done a few interviews like this in my career here on this show. Okay. look i've done a few interviews like this in my career here on this show okay i interviewed sam

canonez for uh his book called dreamland about the opium epidemic which was fucking mind-blowing because it was so engaging to me and revealed so much about the toxicity and the culture that created the epidemic and the drug companies and the American Medical Association. It was one of those books that explained so much and gave me a context. Fantasyland recently with Kurt Anderson. That was another one. That was really about the history of magical thinking

in America that gave what we're going through a context. And this is the same type of book. It came from something awful it gave me a context to understand those worlds of online worlds that created toxic trolling and then you know later influenced culture and also you know generated the army of unfuckable hate nerds which is uh you know what i call them uh and there's a little pushback on that too but i don't know the army of unfuckable hate nerds have done a lot of damage and they continue to some of them are russian but it just gave me context understanding because there was no way i could have understood it there was no way and and now i do And that was because of Dale's book.

How about an email? No subject. Dear Mark, despite your many warnings that Steely Dan would eat my brain, I gave Can't Buy Me a Thrill a listen on Spotify and let the album play through in its entirety while I did housework. How bad could it be? Fast forward to my Monday morning Los Angeles commute where suddenly my Spotify is recommending Alan Parsons project. Doobie Brothers.

Suffice to say that Dan ate my algorithm. Keep up the good work. I love your podcast with all my heart. That Dan ate her algorithm. I'm sorry. I am so sorry, Julie. I didn't mean for that to happen. But, you know, it is kind of deep, right?

Jesus. No subject. Again, dear Mark Maron, thank you for helping me fall asleep when I have felt the burden of anxiety, sadness, loneliness, and resentment. Your words filled with anger and cynicism have made me feel a little more lighthearted at night. I wish you the best. have made me feel a little more lighthearted at night. I wish you the best, Mark. I like when people use me to go to sleep too. Isn't that crazy? It's like a Ritalin effect. I love you people.

So Dale Buran fucking schooled me, educated me, wrote this great book about the shift from fantasy into toxic mainstream culture that helped crumble our political system and make everybody feel like garbage. He got to the source. And it all started in fantasy. It all started in fantasy. It all started in fantasy.

They just like anime. They just like anime. They just like Marvel. They just like making stuff up that hurts people. They just like doing it to each other. And now it's leaked. It's leaked. The lizard portal is open. This is me talking to Dale Buran about his book. It came from Something Awful, which I think is required reading. Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly, host of Under the Influence. Recently, we created an episode on cannabis marketing. With cannabis legalization, it's a brand new challenging marketing category. And I want to let you know we've produced a special bonus podcast episode where I talk to an actual cannabis producer. I wanted to know how a producer becomes licensed, how a cannabis

company competes with big corporations, how a cannabis company markets its products in such a highly regulated category, and what the term dignified consumption actually means. I think you'll find the answers interesting and surprising. Hear it now on Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly. This bonus episode is brought to you by the Ontario Cannabis Store and ACAS Creative. This episode is brought to you by the Ontario Cannabis Store and ACAS Creative. It's a night for the whole family. Be a part of Kids Night when the Toronto Rock take on the Colorado Mammoth at a special 5 p.m. start time on Saturday, March 9th at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton.

The first 5,000 fans in attendance will get a Dan Dawson bobblehead courtesy of Backley Construction. Punch your ticket to Kids Night on Saturday, March 9th at 5pm in Rock City at TorontoRock.com So you pronounced your last name Baron? I say Buran. Buran?

Yeah. Like French? Like Buran? Yeah, it was Baron when my dad came here. Where'd he come from? The Czech Republic or Czechoslovakia at the time. Oh, really? Did he come here in the 70s?

In the 60s. So he escaped. Did he have family there still? Oh, yeah. All the way through it? escaped. Did he have family there still? Oh, yeah. All the way through it? Yeah, his mother was still there. He was very sad when his mother died. Like, it was...

Because he couldn't go back? Yeah, it was exactly like that, where he was really furious. He was, like, really angry. For, like, your entire childhood? Yeah, I mean, essentially. Like, he had good humor about him, but he was really mad at the communists. He was really mad at the Nazis. He remembered the Nazis.

Those are two fine people. Yeah. Those are good villains. Yeah, exactly. So when he went back, he went back in like 91. I was too young. He didn't take me with him, but he just said that like he went back and everyone was like, oh, that's a ghost.

Like some people got scared because when he came back. Yeah. Like some people would jump because they're like, you're that's a ghost like some people got scared like because when he came back yeah they like some people would jump because they're like you disappeared wow and when people did that they just never talked about them again so it's like they thought that he just got killed oh so they thought oh i get it yeah because it was that repressive and your mom was from there too uh no my mom was from here she's uh uh on that side, like Ukrainian and Polish, so still Slavic on that side as well. But their generation came one generation before, like in the kind of old Baltimore folks

who came in the beginning of the 19th century. Baltimore, you grew up in Baltimore. Yeah. So you've been, now this, I first read your stuff when you wrote the piece about 4chan, I don't know where you wrote that, but it got around. Right. Right?

Yeah. And it was sort of an eye-opener for me. But you've been out here in L.A. before. You weren't essentially a journalist. No, not at all. I mean, I considered myself an artist and a writer first. What was your focus? You wanted to, you're sort of computer compelled.

Right, yeah. So I really wanted to be a writer. I was writing novels that weren't getting sold. And really early on in my career, right after I got out of college, I had made comics with a really talented friend of mine. Who's that? David Hellman. He's a visual artist and he made a video game that everyone loves called Braid.

Yeah. And before that, we were making comics. And really, I think on account of him, but I guess both of us, the comics were relatively successful. So then I started making comics for a while, but it was really like, oh, well, this is the sugar and the medicine where I can write if I draw. So I was making comics, and then we were doing cartoons. But I really wanted to write the whole time.

And so through that time, I was writing little essays that were kind of like Zizekian, like a little bit like that, where I thought, oh, well, Zizek kind of reminded me of my dad. It was sort of the same intellectual tradition. And I was into those concepts. So I was writing these essays on Tumblr and kids were into them, though. It was very weird.

I felt like I was kind of ruining my career by being angry and writing about socialism and like inequality and stuff and pop culture. And so the fortune essay came out of that. It was just in that tradition where we, our cartoon for Cartoon Network, we had done a pitch and they had paid us money to develop it. And that collapsed. And I was like, oh, well, I'll just write another essay. Because I didn't expect, you know, I didn't get paid. I pitched it to a few places and they said no. And then I just self-published it. And it gothuh. Yeah.

So that's. And it got around. Yeah. That's where it came from. Yeah. But the thing is, like, I think the thing that blew my mind and some of the stuff I want to move through with this, with talking to you is that, like, you know, I'm 55. All right.

So all this stuff to me, it was like, oh my God, this is the, the machinations. Like, you know, when I, I guess the point is like when, when news would break, like the ultimate end game of, of this momentum that started with 2chan and moved through anime into, into meme culture, into, you know, kind of morally bankrupt millennials to being co-opted by the alt-right is that and the sort of evolution of their you know engagement reality being sort of non-reality until it hits reality so by the time I saw you know news that or news cycles move around some of the information uh you know that came with the beginning of Trump and just before trump there was definitely a moment of like where is this fucking coming from there's a whole world out there that i think was rooted in fantasy but then sort of found its way into the mainstream right

and i yeah i'll tell you honestly where it first dawned on me that something was fucked up you know what the way you i think it's the way you opened the book. It's been a month or so since I read it and I read it, you know, I was into it, was that I started to see these, you know, these, this footage of these protests that would happen between, you know, alt-right or white nationalists and Antifa. Is that how you say it, Antifa? Yeah, that's how I say it. And when I looked at the people in the pictures, I'm like, this is not an organized thing. These people don't look like they know each other.

They're dressed kind of oddly. They don't look like they get outside much. It looks like cosplay. Right, exactly right, yeah. And then after I read your book, I was like, oh, it kind of was. Yeah. But the news media, you know, they exploit it. And I'm sure that the Trump administration knows to do that, that it's sort of like this is really happening.

Look at these social forces when really they're just sort of, you know, mobilized by a miracle, you know, computer nerds. Right. by a miracle, you know, computer nerds. Right. Who are out there living this, you know, they've made an impact on reality and they're going to journey into it in these characters. Right. I call them the army of unfuckable hate nerds.

That's a very good name. My editors were like, we should have said that, we should have named it that. Why did we? Oh, you heard that one? Yeah. But I know in reading this stuff that, you stuff that this was your community to some degree. How old are you?

I am 38. All right. So let's go back to when this start. Because I'm not computer proficient. I don't live. I'm not a fantasy fan. I don't know about these worlds of, what is it, Minecraft? You're so lucky.

And what's the other war one? World of Warcraft. Yeah, World of Warcraft. I don't know about gamer culture. I missed it. I'm 55. I missed it. But you grew up in it.

Sure, more or less, yeah. Because you talk about going to these conventions. Right. Because you talk about going to these conventions when the Chan community was sort of this esoteric Japanese obsessive community. Yeah, that's exactly right. So what was it like then? I mean, who were the people? Who were the characters?

Who were this tribe of people? Yeah. Yeah, so strangely enough, yeah, like I kind of saw them at the very beginning when they first coalesced in the late 90s and then the early 2000s. Who were they? So a lot of nerds on the internet. Yeah, okay. And a lot of people who had really dropped out. So Something Awful, which came before 4chan and stuff. Something Awful, it came from Something Awful.

It's not just a name. Something Awful is a board. Right. Would you call it that? Is that what it's called? Yeah, it was a popular message board. And it was really devoted to self-hating nerds was how they called themselves, where they had dropped out of life. They were very nihilistic.

And youth culture had gotten very nihilistic about dropping out, this sort of slacker 90s thing. But could you see it? I mean, were these your friends? I felt, to me, it was my youth culture, yeah, that I just didn't know why it was happening. It took me years to kind of figure out. So what were you doing in it? What was your sort of focus? What was your thing, your nerd thing? Well, yeah, I mean, I certainly with my friends was sort of very steeped in pop culture, and we would be kind of quoting pop culture, and we would kind of be into very dark violent films and sort of transgressive on the boards um yeah so the boards i barely

posted on something awful but i remember joining it like in high school or like early college or something and kind of being into like oh looking at weird stuff and looking at um dark stuff and then also comics so where does it all start sorry of lay it out like you're talking to your father. Sure, right. So I can break it down in a nutshell. So the overview is that by 2003, something awful spawns 4chan, which is this site which combines the sort of-

What is 2chan? So 2chan was a Japanese site that was devoted to otaku ism and uh this idea that first started in japan that got imported to united states where young people really drop out of life and instead of climbing the hierarchy and like competing in school and jobs they say well i'm just going to drop out of life and i'm going to consume stuff and i'm going to consume fantasy products and live inside that fantasy world. So this was a philosophical manifesto of 2chan is that, you know, we're screwed. The hierarchy is bullshit. You know, there is no opportunity.

It's nihilistic in its nature. And we're going to sort of live alone and engage with each other on this platform. Yeah, it was a sociological problem in Japan. And what was the focus? It was anime, right? Yeah, it was anime. So it was about, so really the forces that created it were life was very hyper competitive and you had to do a lot to kind of climb up out of your parents' basement.

And then fantasy products and entertainment products were just expanding vastly. People love it. People will hear there's fetishized Japanese fantasy and animation products were just expanding vastly. People love it. People will hear there's fetishized Japanese fantasy and animation products. Yeah, that's exactly right. So those dynamics, the same thing then happened in the US. Now what was the, like, now let's just like search, let me just explain to me the sexual component of 2chan.

Or did that not happen? There was an element of people fantasizing sexually about cartoon characters oh yeah definitely yeah there was sort of a romantic attachment to uh these men they didn't get out much it was mostly men and they're young men yeah young men and they uh they lived their sexual fantasy life in uh cartoons and video games and uh and anime and things like that so that was really part of it, that those products, it's really about selling power to powerless people. So that's the violent action part.

Right. And then selling sexual fantasies. So they're like, well, I'm not going to do that in real life. I'm going to do the much more unsatisfying thing of just getting all my gratification and pleasure through those commodities. And like, you know, just at the core of it, I think what becomes interesting through the evolution of what you write about is that, you know, what this is doing to any sort of genuine perception of reality, what that might be, whatever that might be, is that, you know, when you, you know you commit to engaging with people

sort of anonymously or people you know by their screen name and you have these communities around these different things, is that there is no genuine sort of physical social interaction. And it sort of tends to, it seems that it breaks down your ability to function in the real world to a degree, when your entire social life and moral universe is built around this engagement, around this specific thing and sort of onanism, that you're kind of retarding yourself somehow. Yeah, it's deeply unhealthy. And it got unhealthier as it went along. So at first, you know... So when 2chan gets here, it becomes 4chan?

Yeah, that's exactly right. So the American import is 4chan, and it was started by a Something Awful user, a 15-year-old kid who was sort of an anime... 15-year-old kid. Yeah, a 15-year-old kid who was living in New York. So Something Awful was already existing. Yeah, Something Awful existed, I think, in 1998 or 1999.

So this was the one that you sort of looked at. This was a site that was primarily about offending people in the community and sharing violent memes. It was sort of the beginning of meme culture, correct? Yeah, Something Awful, unfortunately, more or less invented the internet meme. memes it it was sort of the beginning of meme culture correct yeah uh something awful in 4chan more or less invented the internet meme uh so it was banned on something awful because they thought it wasn't funny enough to sort of repeat a joke and change it they felt like oh you have to be more original right uh and then 4chan really popularized it so um that idea the meme idea right the idea of like replicating a joke over and over and kind of polishing it that way and

and yeah it really came off of Fortune. And in these people, the ones who were pulling clips and pulling pieces from movies, the way you garbage which was the internet which was all this marketing culture and they had all of these different products and video games anime like all tugging on their value system and americans were a little more wary of it than the japanese so that they already knew from counterculture and slacker culture that it sucked so they're like oh well it sucks and really there's nothing to do so we're just going to play with it we're going to to gain some autonomy over it by kind of reversing the flow and letting instead of the screen sort of dictating what's on it, you get to like take all that stuff and make your own jokes out of it. Right. So you deconstruct it and turn it on itself.

And then, you know, you you share it. You know, you share it. And a lot of times, what I thought was interesting about the beginning of this, and maybe you were living it, but it seems that there's, you know, the generational difference between, you know, young people who are completely computer proficient and their parents is profound. and their parents is profound. So whatever values were happening in the dining room or in the house, really it seemed that what you're documenting is that the complete disconnect between old school American values

or things that parents can even teach their kids in any practical way or even school was now like, I don't know what my kid's doing. He's down the hall on the computer, you know, turning his brain into nihilistic, immoral garbage. Sure. And there's nothing that they can do about it. Like there's a, there's like, I don't even know that they would know. That was the one thing that struck me is that, you know, there's this value system that they're, that the kids are essentially fighting against. Right. consumer culture and just mainstream

values, that they're not even existing in the same world as their parents in the living room. Right. Yeah. And so what happened really is that that gap that you're describing got wider and wider. So my generation, we kind of saw this labyrinth of addictive internet and all the interesting things about the internet sort of grew up around us. But then the next generations were born into it, really. How old are they now, that generation? They're like 1920, right? And they inherited from sort of the culture that ours built on the internet.

But back then it was, yeah, it was about a counterculture. It was sort of about getting agency over it. was yeah it was about a counterculture it was sort of about getting agency over it um and then it kind of slowly reversed itself so that as you spent more time the next generations as they just spent all their time on the internet and the internet got more addictive got more fascinating the games got more expansive better uh it was really just it was sort of hyper otakuism when that stuff in the 90s were dropping out it was really like you could live your whole life there more than ever. In the 90s. That's like now in the 2000s.

Right. So, yeah. So 4chan, what happened is that they created memes, which was really sort of rebellious kind of fun counterculture. And they felt very powerful. They felt like, oh, they were affecting society. And they also created trolling collectives, which were- Well, let's talk about that. So when they were affecting society, when do you sort of mark?

So what are you doing at this point? When do you start to realize personally that this shit is going bad? I would say they had a very, between 2008 and 2011, they had a very successful sort of far left libertarian hacktivist collective, which I liked. I was a fan of. It was a really rebellious sort of interesting way. So it's sort of punk, the extension of punk rock. Yeah, they had reversed their otakuism where it totally flipped. And they said, oh, we're very powerful. We're going to fight corporations. We're going to fight with anonymous governments. Right. Yeah, that's anonymous. Yeah. And it's pro-democracy. And then that collapsed. Those people got arrested. And by 2014 or 2015, I'm realizing that they switched back to this really deep, worse otakuism, which is sort of- Otakuism? I guess that's my own term for it.

They have their own terms. Otakuism referring back to the 2chan. Yeah, right, exactly. How do you define it? Dropping out and nihilistically living through the computer screen. Well, I think what's interesting, though, in the jump from that Japanese model

where the cultural expectations sociologically are much more intense. You know, there is a hierarchy there in expectations where the way it translates to America, which I thought you documented very well, is, you know, that sort of heightened understanding of consumer culture and realizing that, you know, the future that is presented to you and the possibilities that are presented to you in the American capitalistic model are mostly bullshit for most people. Right. And that you claim in the book that a lot of these younger people were hip to that, that they were fucked out of the gate. That's exactly right. Yeah. They kind of knew that life didn't really offer them fulfilling work. That's sort of an old philosophical complaint that goes back a while, right? That you're like, oh, well, it's really hard to be an artist.

It took me years of dropping out to be an artist. But even these guys with these basic computer skills, the best thing we were going to hope for is some sort of elevated cubicle job that might get them a good salary, but would drain them of their life force and the expectations would be limited. Right, yeah. Like the complaints in the 90s were like, oh, even if we do this, yeah,

we're just going to get shuffled into a cubicle. And then now, right, it just got worse and worse, right? The options that you take on more student debt, you get less money. There's not even those jobs left. So this is what American otakuism? Sure. Okay, so do you say it? Otaku, yeah. Otakuism? Sure.

Okay, so that's how that kind of, that's why it stuck. So it took a sort of an intellectual jump and a cultural assessment that was a little broader than the Japanese trip. Right. To really take in the American kind of existential predicament for younger people. Right. Now, when you say a 15-year-old started something awful, that was pre-4chan? Yeah. Most of the book is about 4chan.

And something awful, the founder was in his 20s. So 4chan was founded by the 15-year-old. Now, when you say in his 20s, so this guy, you know, what does he set out? Because you talk a lot about how the site is managed and what will pass and what won't pass. There's a sort of autonomous kind of like collective vibe to it where there are no rules, but eventually something bad happens and then there are a few rules. Right, yeah. So the first one, something awful is relatively well moderated. So there are rules there.

And then 4chan- What were the rules? Just rules against harassment, rules against illegal content. Right. And then the enforcement was fairly good and it got better over the years. But 4chan, because it took over that mantle of something awful because it had much worse moderation. There were less rules. How did that sort of happen?

How did 4chan, we'll get back to Anonymous, but how did, you know, what was the movement that said, well, fuck something awful. You know, we're doing this now. Who was that guy? So, yeah, that was a 15-year-old kid and his friends who said they were on something awful. And they said, well, we're getting banned or we want something even sillier and stupider. And the way that 4chan worked, it was a little more fun and easier to post on. So they created their own separate site, which was 4chan, which is sort of a different style of message board, which is a little more fun, easier to post images. easy to post images. And over there, also that culture they inherited of really cynicism and dark jokes, and really lack and then much more lax moderation. There was sort of this in that

culture, there was this race to the bottom of like, who can be the something awful. Founder put it to me like, there was a competition to see who could be the most fucked up piece of shit possible. And they were all winning all of them referring to the 4chan guys, right? So this idea that like, you're going to make, you're going to do the worst shit there. And it's really just going to be this chaotic free for all. At 4chan. Yeah. So between 2003 when it was founded and 2008 when they really started their hacktivist movement

and the culture flipped for a little while, it was really about competitive transgression, about just posting weird garbage and jokes. And the worst sort of racist, sexist, completely morally bankrupt images, violence, bordering on illegal. And so what struck me about that was that this is a large community. You're talking about thousands of mostly young men who are basically voluntarily, through anonymous names, destroying any possibility of them having a moral compass

in the real world. Yeah, that's exactly right, that it really screwed them up, that you can't absorb that. And that was the beginning of troll culture, was that they would do it to each other and get a big kick out of it. Like, oh, you got me, that annihilated my entire sense of self. I feel like I'm bathing in that, but now I'm going to get you. And that was the nature of what became troll culture

in the mainstream. But initially, it was just a bunch of nihilistic, cynical, frustrated young men trying to out-disgust and destroy each other through memes and sayings. Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah, and they were powerless, like young teenagers, young men, out-discussed and destroy each other through memes and sayings. Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah, and they were powerless, like young teenagers, young men, trying to out-compete each other and humiliate each other.

And they were all behind the screen, so they knew there weren't really any consequences. And simultaneously, most of these people were involved with role-playing games? Yeah, it definitely clicked into that culture the nerd culture hanging out in video games but there was this idea that like they were self-hating so the idea that you would leap into escapist worlds and fantasy worlds and live that way yeah um the troll culture was about destroying those fantasy worlds and saying so they were against them too yeah so they're saying well we live on the internet we spend all our time on the internet we've dropped out and we're nihilists who are just going to spend waste, throw away our lives, boil away our lives on the internet. And if someone else is like in a fantasy world doing that, I'm going to go over and destroy their experience.

That was the troll culture. Oh, right. So the original target was the fantasy nerds. Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah. So this was like these were the armies of online armies of young men mostly. This was the battle. It's like, you know, the nihilist versus the fantasy nerds.

Yeah, that's exactly right. So if they were like, you know, they were middle-aged women who were going on Second Life, which was like a place where you could have a different fantasy world online and like live a totally different life through the computer. Yeah. online and like live a totally different life through the computer yeah um and they would go on there and they would uh just destroy the you know like drop memes everywhere and make gross jokes and like put racial slurs in there and the same thing with little kids who were like there on like a fantasy lego style place that was run that like some corporation was collecting money from the kids to like then they would raid it and destroy it that was what they delighted into they hacked into it they hacked

into it uh yeah you have to hack into it you just do it through the comment boards uh yeah they would uh find some way to exploit it they would hack it so that they would figure out okay well if we do this we can actually create 7 000 new avatars characters then and you know totally overwhelm the people that are in there or whatever uh that sort of thing garbage yeah which has garbage jokes and and memes and they succeeded in ruining a lot of people's fun yeah that's exactly right now they've ruined the world's fun the evolution yeah uh that's and then they but they realized that wasn't they were actually had a lot of power online so they started doing it to neo-nazis around 2007 yeah well let's go back so let's. The next the next turn was that, you know, what what do you see happen with troll culture to where, you know, was there a leader that said, you know, why don't we apply this to anti-corporate, you know, more progressive methodology? difference between the two anonymous is the original anonymous which was a hacker culture of

of progressive uh activists right and that's where you know you were like well now this seems to be going somewhere right as a creative person yeah now but but when you're talking about this troll culture i mean we're talking about tens if not hundreds of thousands of people involved in this, correct? Yes. Yeah, 4chan, by 2010, it was the second most popular message board by some counts online, so one of the most successful sites. So 4chan, by 2010. Now, I'm a grown-ass man, and that's like nine years ago, so I'm in my 40s, and I don't even know what that is and and meanwhile what's percolating there right is this sort of undoing of of of culture in a way yeah that's exactly right so all of this culture that's influencing everyone memes and so forth it's coming out of there okay so what what changes

you know for that crew for that army of monsters uh to monsters to where enough of them decide to do something proactive? Yeah, they realize they have a lot of power. Okay. They started pranking neo-Nazis, a neo-Nazi named Hal Turner, and they essentially hacked him so thoroughly that they revealed that he was an FBI informant. And so by 2008, they realized, okay, well, we're this collective of millions of kids or tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of kids. We have some skilled hackers in our group. And we have a set of values and we can enforce those values.

And that came out of, weirdly enough, Tom Cruise. There was a video of him talking, sort of ranting about Scientology. And the Church of Scientology got it removed. And 4chan was very angry. They said, oh, we love funny stuff on the internet. We love internet freedom. We all agree on that value. Yeah.

So they went to war with the Church of Scientology, sort of linking up with older groups that had been doing that for a long time. And they were relatively successful. So I went out to their first protest. That was the first anonymous protest where around the world they said, OK, Scientology, on a certain day, we, they pretend it. They're like, we are this powerful international group of hackers. And on a certain day, we're going to come out and protest. You're going to see thousands of us in front around the world, all your churches, all your temples. But that was like, they didn't know. They were just talking shit, right?

That's what they promised, and it happened. Indeed, they decided that it would be so funny. It was partly like, it was a real life raid. So what they had been doing in virtual spaces, in kids' games and stuff, they said, well, let's just do that in real life raid. So what they had been doing in virtual spaces and kids games and stuff, they said, well, let's just do that in real life. Let's all go out on a certain day.

Let's wear a mask. And they chose the Guy Fawkes mask, the anonymous mask. And they said, we'll pretend like we're this horrible or with this incredible

powerful group of international hackers, which in a sense they were in a sense they weren't. They were pretending. They didn't exist in the real world. Yeah.

Like in the world world like in the in in the world of visceral reality yeah like they they didn't go outside so this is like a big day yeah it was a huge yeah like everyone i did not think they would show up right i was like this is unprecedented where they did meet at anime conventions at my old anime convention in baltimore but this idea that they would suddenly become the opposite of nihilists they would be like we're politically engaged, we have a value system, and we're going to fight for it, right? The total opposite.

But you remember these kids from anime conventions kind of slinking around and looking at tables of toys and whatnot. Yeah, that's exactly right. And me to the anime convention, they would all sing the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme song in the round. But there was an innocence to it. Yeah, they were goofy kids,

goofing off. They were in costumes, right? Right. So when they go out for the protests, they're the same thing. They dress up as the same avatars that they had raided the virtual spaces in. It's very goofy.

They're cracking jokes. They're saying memes. But at the same time, no one knows what's happening. I interview the Scientology guy across the street, and he's like, these are terrorists. They're coming to destroy us. They hate our religious freedoms. And they were intimidated. The press picked it up and they're like, wow, this international hacktivist group, that's very powerful. They were pretending to be an international society of secret hacktivists. But what they were really was the same uh anonymous groups of trolls that hung out on 4chan and they were named anonymous when they were just a trolling group in 2006 and 2007 they called themselves anonymous so they

when they were monsters yeah when they were just goofy monsters destroying people's experience online they called themselves anonymous with a capital. And then after the Scientology thing, they're like, well, now we mean something. Yeah, and we've convinced the press that we exist, that it's real. And so that mask became the face. They were like, that's who we are. We've convinced people that that's who we are. Yeah. And it really just took off.

So we'll be that. Yeah, there was a little bit of a lull. But by 2010 and 2011, when the Julian Assange WikiLeaks stuff happened, they got re-engaged and they said, we will fight for Julian Assange. We're going to take down PayPal and MasterCard, who took his funds. We're going to attack them online, take down the sites. And they did? Yeah, they did. It was sort of semi-successful, but really successful for coalescing the group back together. And there was some really skilled, powerful hackers

who then went on to sort of fly this flag of internet freedom and pro-democracy. They interfered or helped the revolution in Tunisia and the Arab Spring. Right. That was part of what they did. And they still exist to some extent. But the FBI got very interested, very involved, and really crushed them,

really arrested all of the principal members. Those guys went to jail. A lot of them were in England, and they are now out of jail. But Jeremy Hammond, one of the anonymous members who got arrested then, in the U.S., he's still in jail. out of jail, but Jeremy Hammond, one of the anonymous members who got arrested then, he, in the US, he's still in jail. So yeah, that was sort of broke the back of the movement. Right. So this, like, yeah, when reality, the laws of reality, whether you agree with them or not, there was real consequences. So the jail wasn't your self-designed jail in the one-bedroom apartment or you're in your parents' house.

Right. It was now that you've ventured out into the real world who had, you know, sort of cynically were just outdoing themselves with disgusting things online, you know, now, you know, took really the sort of gamer approach to start. Now the game is the actual world. And, you know, we've shown this show of force. We all, as a goof, we all went out. We had our masks on. Now we've made an impact. And now we've made, you know, now, you know, some time goes by and we've made an impact again. And there is some progressive change going on because of what we're doing.

Yet, I imagine there's still a large faction of them are still monsters. Yeah, that's exactly right. There was a big split. Oh, so there's a split in Anonymous. Yeah. I mean, to me, the Hacktivist Collective was collective was very inspiring i well yeah i think everybody thought it was kind of amazing and i think people of my generation were like what is this yeah and you sort of explain it so okay so what happened so this is about where you become disillusioned

yeah well at at this point i was kind of felt like I felt in the 90s the same way where I felt kind of powerless and dropped out. And so I thought it was really amazing that they had used the screen as a way and the Internet as a way to sort of express autonomy to be powerful in a sense. But there was a split online. So half of them still felt like that old otaku nihilistic way where they said this idea that you're going to go out and pretend to make an effect is an illusion and in fact we we're still about trolling we're still about dropping out of life um and after they got anonymous got arrested around 2012 what happened was the 4chan there was a moral vacuum as one person described it um that all of those people had left.

They had gone to other sites or they had been arrested. So what was left were people who were more into otaku culture than ever, more into dropping out, deeper nihilists. And then the new kids joining these places, they had even less opportunity to move out of their parents for fulfilling work or fulfilling lives. So it's a new younger generation. Yeah. These are 12 to 15, 16-year-olds. Yeah. So they're coming into some sort of well-defined,

deep-bottom, dark, cynical attack culture, online attack culture. Yeah, it's all well-defined by the generation before them and by the guys who now 10 years have passed. like you're spending 10 years on 4chan, right? Like, okay, it's funny in 1999 when you're on something awful funny in 2004. You're like, haha, I spent all my time on the computer. Life sucks. Then like, okay, six, seven years pass.

You're still doing it, right? It just gets darker, right? That they're like, oh, this is my- Well, yeah, because now they're grown up with grown up needs and and like now it's like you know the world of pedophilia enters the fucking yeah right when they're when they're 15 it's not a big deal but if they're doing the same thing for seven or eight years yeah then it's like oh this is my life nothing has compounded loserness yeah exactly right but like i thought what was also interesting in terms of the cultural power of the righteous anonymous was that, you know, in response, I guess at the same time, if I'm remembering correctly, that once anonymous became empowered politically, that Tumblr sort of, you know, surfaced as a, you know, almost feminist reaction to it. Is that what happened?

Yeah, more or less. That Tumblr was another site where memes were popular and you could share memes and it was image-based so you could share a lot of images. And it turned into the female version, in a sense, where... It was also built on, you know, the feminine fantasy world, right? So the girl nerds and their desires, which kind of had to happen on its own because the other place was a cynical dark man's club, but there was another thing going on there. Right, yeah.

There was sort of like this supportive community where everyone said, you know, if this is your thing, if this is what you're into, then we're going to support you. No matter what. Right. So it became this very sort of delicate crystal tower of. Gender fluid, progressive feminist values and a type of fantasy that wasn't malignant. Yeah. So. Right.

And longer posting possibilities and ways to explore ideas. And, you know, the way people could interact was to evolve a conversation around ideas. Right. Yeah. So it was a little more it was very gentle and it was sort of about celebrating art and celebrating counterculture. All of that was incorporated into it. And a lot of it was really great. A lot of it was really creative and interesting.

Well, I think what was interesting about it, and I don't know if you really put it this way in your book, but in the same way that the trolls were making Hedway, you know, instigating chaos, but also, you know, with political activism, is that it seems to me that the intellectual conversations around gender and sexuality that were happening on Tumblr were also surfacing in the mainstream. Yeah.

That there was a cultural change that happened with my generation. You know, how do we source this? And it seems like a lot of the conversations around gender fluidity, new feminism and sexuality were really on Tumblr before they entered into mainstream cultural conversation. Yeah, that's exactly right. Those were the issues that they were very interested in. Since it was young women, they said, you know, my life outside is sort of deeply dissatisfying and they were getting together to talk about it.

They said, well, can we use this feminist critique to understand what's happening? use this feminist critique to understand what's happening. How, if I want to sort of escape the prison of being labeled of gender and all of the difficulties that come with being a woman, can I do that? Is there a critical theory that allows me to do that? I think a lot of the Tumblr ideas and culture are really great. But the critique of it I have in the book is that it too was really wrapped up in fantasy. So then it became, well, I'm going to express my freedom to choose and self-define through this cartoon. Or sort of like if I see it happening in this film, or then me living in the fantasy world, just like the otaku were living in the fantasy world, sort of buying all these commodities will then set me free when in fact it too was a little bit of a prison or sort of distorted by that same process well i had this kind of mind-blowing reality experience where i would happen to be in madison wisconsin uh at the same time that this big fantasy convention was there i forget what it's called do you know what it's called uh i'm not sure about the one in Madison, but God, they're everywhere now. But I think it was primarily a feminist fantasy. Oh, okay.

And it was sort of dug in, but they were at my hotel. And I was reading your book and I'm like, I'm seeing this. This is a manifestation of this world, which was very sweet in a lot of ways. It seemed to be encouraging a lot of personal expression through whatever you choose in terms of sexuality or gender representation. And I could see it. Yeah. But there was this sort of idea that this feeling I had was like, these people, this is their once a year thing. Right. Yeah. Where they can go do this and be around each other.

I'm sure there's smaller meetings and whatever. You know, it seemed like the Petri dish was at home and online, and this was the outing. Right, sure, yeah, that certainly happens. Yeah, and they're bonding through products or whatever, right? And so, you know, the critique that I offer in the book is that if you're really, really interested in cobbling together this mosaic of identity and self-defining and saying, you know, this is sort of what

defines me and this too and this too, well, maybe that's just inherently how human beings act. But in fact, a lot of these kids were trained through social media and through their experience on the computer to do that because that's what made money to the social media sites. Tumblr was a for-profit site. So that sort of youth culture grew out of the framework of self-obsession that social media was sort of teaching these kids how to do. Right.

And then once it gets onto Twitter or into Facebook and into my generation, we don't know where to source it, but we feel that there's a cultural momentum, both progressive and anti-progressive happening. But for me, it was sort of mind-blowing that it'd been percolating for a long time. So now what we have, just to be broad, is we have what's happening with Tumblr, we have what's happening with Anonymous in the progressive way, and then the small a anonymous in the horrible, malignant way. And, you know, these forces are all sort of around and making impact in mainstream culture and on the news and in the real world informationally. So how does it go bad? Because when, well, I mean, it was already bad in some levels, but you know, how does it become politicized, become politicized you know into a a an army of people with with a sort of uh n cell or or a hard right uh white supremacist agenda like when i first started seeing pepe during the campaign

and seeing it everywhere and i didn't even know what what hashtag maga meant you know at the initially and i just knew that the frog was there. And I'm like, what's this frog? Is this funny? You know, there's a frog avatar, you know, saying shitty things to me. What, you know, what's with the sort of consistency of why there are so many frogs around? Like, so what happens to this world? Who turns these kids out?

Who pimps them out? Are they older Nazis? How does it coagulate? Sure, yeah. Am I jumping too many steps? No, no. We're right on time. We're right.

It's around 2012. That's exactly what's happening. So, yeah, as I described, there were the old 4chaners who were left over, who were getting sadder, and then the new kids flowing in. Guys in their, who were getting sadder, and then the new kids guys in their 20s. Right, yeah.

And then the new kids flowing in who felt affected by the same dynamics. American autocracy. Right, yeah. Okay. Who were just dropped out of life.

They were not, right? Down the hall from their parents. I don't know what he's doing online. Sure, exactly, right. And they, the culture just got worse and worse. Somehow, every time it got worse, no one expected it. That now, with these older guys who are now aligning themselves with other types of monsters who definitely have an agenda, old school white supremacists who are

now becoming savvy, Spencer and his crew, Richard Spencer and his crew are tech savvy, they come out of this world. And so now you've got these kind of completely morally shattered you know two generations of them through jokes and and shitty behavior and in and then then yeah Gamergate in 2014 really lifts the rock on it where they didn't know they were a political coalition till then so Gamergate was this harassment campaign that started on 4chan and then later moved to 4chan. Can you explain exactly what happened in Gamergate? Yes. So there was a video game developer that 4chan was obsessed over, a female developer named Zoe Quinn, who they were harassing already a little bit. And then an ex posted a really angry

screed against her. And they decided just like in the old trolling days, they would target her, everyone would harass her. And it was really the biggest one yet. And instead of the lighthearted, kind of silly trolling of 2006 and 2007, it was really virulent, more so than, I mean, that happened in the past. Violently sexist. Violently sexist.

And they seemed genuine, which was the other thing about it. That was their new issue, right? It wasn't irony, it wasn't cruel nihilism it's like fuck her yeah they were really really mad and so the question was like well well why who are these people and it turns out that yeah they had dropped out of life so much that um they felt they they described it just said oh we don't like that she's bringing feminism to video games. And the idea was that they felt that was their last line of retreat. That they, oh, I don't have a real life, but at least I have misogynistic video games to live. Made by men.

Yeah, right. To live a fantasy of seducing women there. And that was their threat. That's the threat they panicked over. And at the same time, they just really hated women. It turns out that men who are in that environment they just get more and more toxic and the idea that like it's sour grapes the idea that like oh i can't get women i'm not going to go outside and and uh have romantic relationships

well then that becomes like i hate women very easily it's weird because it strikes me that that you know many of them and i'm and i, you know, have unresolved sexual identity problems. They have, they're not socialized in any way with women or really other, you know, normal men. And so, you know, this misogyny is born out of, you know, a, like a virulent type of repression that, you know, this weird sort of thing of like they think that they have all the freedom in the world to to express their horrible views online and do whatever they want. And they may. But but their their sort of self-isolation has led to a type of repression of both, you know, identity and sexuality that that, of course, is going to cause a kind of eruption of fucking self-hate that is manifested through misogyny and homophobia. Yeah, that's exactly right.

This is sort of the new part that there was what's called a groupthink where if unhealthy people get online together, they encourage the bad behavior, whether that's- Well, you can find these niche communities for anything. Yeah. Yeah, right. Like Thinspo was a Tumblr thing where women were being encouraged to be really thin and anorexic or whatever. So these new communities of young men were convincing themselves that they were on's this whole world but it's just this really cramped tiny claustrophobic way of thinking and but they're also they're breaking like the the thing that sort of becomes a an issue for me and and something that seems real is that you know the brain is fragile and you know once you start

fucking with those wires those neural pathways that distinguish, you know, once you start fucking with those wires, those neural pathways that distinguish between, you know, fact and fiction and reality and fantasy and, you know, and sexuality and violence, you know, that it's sort of irreparable, you know, without a lot of work. And they're just doing it almost passively because they're so engaged. Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah. They're really doing harm to themselves. They're really distorting themselves and just drinking poison, essentially. And they know it, right?

There's always posts on the board where they're like, I got to get out of here. My therapist says I got to go. Oh, really? Yeah, like they know that it sucks at the same time. And then at the same time they say, oh, well, I'm here forever. I'm doomed to live this way.

Okay, so now you have this cauldron of misogyny. And and but when does where does the racism and anti-Semitism fold into that after Gamergate? So what happens with Gamergate? It gets big news. And what is the resolution of that? So the takeaway, which no one really realized, is that all of these groups of young men, marginalized young men, realized they were a political coalition that they had a lot in common that they were anti-feminist they were anti-tumblr culture so all of that stuff that the left said you know uh anti-gender politics right and and that a lot is anti-politically correct right anti yeah right and a lot of that uh they they saw is like that's about bringing everyone else, all the other groups up to the status of cis white men, straight white men.

And they said, oh, well, we're straight white men and we're on the bottom. Right. So they really deeply resented that, even though there was a lot of valid arguments on Tumblr for doing that, obviously. So, yeah, they this 2014 by 2015, Trump comes along. Gamergate peters out. And Moot, Christopher Poole, the founder of 4chan, is now in his 20s. He leaves 4chan. He says, oh, it's for different reasons.

But essentially, the Gamergate made 4chan turn on him. So there's a leadership vacuum. Yeah. And what happens is a lot of sort of fake dads and older men who are sort of from the first generation get on YouTube and say, we're going to lead you. We're going to be the people who are going to tell you what your value system is. Who are these guys? So Milo Yiannopoulos, Mike Cernovich.

There's others I won't name, right? But those are the more prominent that became sort of... Where does Spencer fit in? Spencer was part of... He was a part of this other weird tradition of fake intellectuals who were said, who were really, he was such a hardcore Republican that he became a fascist. Right. And he really just jumped on this rising tide. Like the other, like Cernovich and Yiannopoulos. But he wasn't really a 4chan guy.

He just realized, oh, well, this is the answer for these men, and that's already what I'm doing. So he was really an opportunist in that sense. Okay, but Cernovich was a provocateur. Yeah, Yiannopoulos and Cernovich made their name through Gamergate. They were Gamergaters. They were people who— They filled the leadership vacuum in the misogynistic sort of white guy getting fucked area. Yeah. And they're like, I'll tell these kids how to live. I'll tell these kids how to be men.

That's what Cernovich did. And so Yiannopoulos said, he's like, what you're doing is great. You're dropping out, living this nihilistic lifestyle. Don't go get a girlfriend. Just wait for virtual reality to get better. That was Yiannopoulos's message and cernovich was how to be a man i'll tell you how to be a man i'll tell you how to pick up women i'll tell you how to be an alpha male because i know you guys are quote but he's not really even an alpha he's not really like what is that guy i mean so it's like the it's like the tall risking the collapse of my twitter feed right now it's like the tallest of the dwarves, right? Right?

That's exactly right. He's like, I am the most alpha loser there is. But I saw this weird, like this was another revealing moment for me because I didn't know about the backstory. But I saw a video of Milo, you know, coming out of a place where there were a bunch of these guys waiting for him. Right. And, you know, he's very flamboyant. He's very out. He's clearly, you know, a showman of sorts he was on to himself right uh you know he you know he was uh perfectly opportunistic but you know he was out you know which can be sort of couched in some

sort of progressive mode but it's not right because the people he's talking to they all wish they could be out but they're not but i just heard the mumblings and the teetering laughter, the tittering of these guys, whoever was holding the camera. And I'm like, these are ill-defined people. And they don't go out much. And they're just excited to be around this guy's sexuality and his anger and his self-definition because they don't have any. Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah, they're kind of filling in as those. Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah. They're kind of filling in as those guys are filling in as father figures.

Right. Yeah. So that's the first thing that happened is that these men sort of took over the leadership of this huge group of marginalized men, young men. And where it clicked into Nazi ideology and farright ideology was, well, first of all, they, in their crisis, they needed a lifeline of how to be, and it turns out conservatism was... Their existential crisis as adolescents and young adults. Yeah, and conservatism kind of gave this off-the-rack suit of values

that said, oh, well, you just behave like you behaved in the past, right? Or this is how to be a man, raise a family, sort of the breadwinner set was they needed- What they fought against, what they initially- Exactly, right. The values that they initially realized were bullshit. Right, yeah. It came full circle, right? From nihilism to fascism.

Right. So now they're like, we're on the margins and what we're now dreaming of, especially the new ones, is being at the center of society. How do you become a normal breadwinner, middle class guy? That's what I desperately want. But you have no money. You're in your mom's basement. Yeah.

So that conservative. Now the mom's basement thing becomes a working metaphor for any sort of self-isolation. Yeah, that's exactly right. Right. Okay. Yeah. So that appealed to them. And then that often pushed into,

so if you look at what fascism is, I use Hannah Arendt who dissected it in the 30s, and it's really, she describes their- Totalitarianism. Right, the origins of totalitarianism. She says, well, that one factor is that capitalism had displaced a huge group of people to make them superfluous,

sort of the throes of economics had pushed all these people to the sides and they they had no definition right which was what was happening again with these these men yeah um and then the other thing that happens is there's sort of this cruel-minded value system which is sort of if you're not really thinking that much you're not reading that's the value value system you inherit which is sort of this social darwinist determinism, which is. Yeah. And if you have people who are confident and they package intellectual ideas in a tight way that gives you satisfaction emotionally and closure intellectually, you just glom onto it.

Right. Yeah. So these people were selling this idea that they say, oh, well, life is this cruel social Darwinist hierarchy. And there's alpha males and beta males and you have to be cruel and claw your way to the top and you should admire people like Trump who are also sort of flattered at being this sort of cruel-minded business guy

who perceives everyone as a competitor. And they said, oh, that makes so much sense to me. I'm on the bottom. It explains why I'm on the bottom. And so then it quickly became, oh, well, the way to get to the top is to displace these other people in this control yeah right yeah like um it's it's very dark right um the idea is like uh you know life isn't a zero-sum game right people it it

when people work together they they pull everyone up but they perceived it as like oh it's a power hierarchy and the people on the top of the hierarchy well they they cheated their way there that's the minorities or whatever you focus on and if i displace them i'll get to the top so so shamelessly shameless corruption shameless cheating anything uh by any means necessary right you you you do you destroy your your competitors right and they're so angry that they're on the bottom they're like like, what's the explanation? Why am I here? But all this stuff, they're still living online. Yeah, that's exactly right. So they're absorbing it as an answer to their situation online.

And so now we're like, I understand this part of it. So tell me where anti-Semitism, racism, and Pepe the Frog sort of take hold. Sure. So the racism really grows out of that idea that, oh, we're on the bottom. Oh, the white people. Right, right. Got that.

Same with anti-Semitism? Yeah. That the Jews run everything. Right, exactly. It's sort of like, oh. They're the puppet masters. Right, exactly. So the blacks and the Latinos and the women are taking our jobs

and the Jews are deciding who gets what. Yeah, that's what they think. And then the other part is that they're people without identity, people without context. And so they say, oh, well, I'll use the last desperate attempt to say, oh, my whiteness provides my identity. Who are my friends? All the white people, right?

So they find sort of like solidarity because they're so out, so alienated. Now, how does Bannon step in? Bannon manages Milos because Milos is at Breitbart and Bannon seems some sort of, he sees some sort of rising star because of his odd sort of demeanor given his sexuality. And Bannon having some weird psychological intuition sees him as somebody who is going to do the footwork

for the new Trump army. Yeah, that's exactly right. So Bannon, Milo's working for Bannon. At Breitbart. Right, and they realize Gamergate, this Gamergate coalition is there, that it loves Trump because Trump also sort of says

to these men, I'll be, I'm a winner, but I'm also sort of this beta loser and I'm working for losers. I'm the sort of this beta loser. And I'll, I'm working for losers. I'm the big outsider. Yeah. Who's going to make you win again. And they like the word winning.

Yeah, exactly. Right. Because like, who is that message to? But losers, right? Yeah. So this somewhat grassroots campaign is then, then exploited by Bannon and Yiannopoulos. And Bannon gives Yiannopoulos a million dollars to go on a bus tour called the Dangerous Faggot Tour. And says, you know, go bring this to life.

Go bring these guys out. Go campaign for Trump. And that happens. And he's such a troll as he culls all this stuff from the chans that it's just a violent disaster. Yeah. So what occurs is that he goes to these colleges on the West Coast first and there's shootings, there's stabbings,

people attack him and that turns into the riots at Berkeley, the so-called Battles of Berkeley. And a lot of the acting agents in that are what's left

of the politically active Anonymous that is somehow tied to Antifa as well? There are loose associations. Right. One of the Anonymous members was Antifa way back in the day.

And certainly, as now this split has occurred, it's strange. Yeah, the remaining anonymous members have fought very virulently against the fascist elements. And what Trump has been able to do post-election and even a little pre was that, so once this stuff sort of enters the real world through these protests which is not you know it's not like the 60s where there's a coalescing

of of uh righteous activism it's it's strange fantasy theater a lot of it i mean it has real consequences but he's able to and the power structure is able to play it off as you know actual either terrorist threats or threats to democracy when when they all seem to be quite theatrical obviously there are real consequences but even in charlottesville that ragtag assembly of you know old school white nationalists and kkk people with these young white shirt wearing spencerites who didn't again like not unlike the the scientology protest didn't really look like they were socialized or gotten out much. And they were having real consequences and killing people in real life.

Right, yeah. I mean, you saw the disparity there between what they expected sitting behind their screens and then their gap of reality testing when they actually got there. And they looked ridiculous with the tiki torches and murderous. Yeah, and they were performing. They realized that, oh, well, how successful our event will be was how much it's covered in the press,

what happens behind the screen, what happens online afterwards. And the monster in charge, he played right into him. He knew, see, Trump is intuitively political and about survival, so his instincts are to play on the side of the losers who he's going to make win yeah that's exactly right it was really disgusting how he just

refused to disown them just because they supported him but in in electing them though the Russian troll event is something that is outside the parameters of the book but that is happening at the same time yeah there's some slight connections where there are Russian trolls at the same time hacking Hillary's email and stuff like that. And the hacked emails are used to create, Cernovich uses them to create fake conspiracy theories around Hillary and to spread misinformation and troll that way. Because he realizes that the trolling collectives and all these men online will believe anything. So, yeah, there's some vague connection there's some some connections there but there there's a there may not be an intentional unity but everyone was operating in the same momentum right and it's deep

as you said it's deeply confusing right it felt like reality the internet was leaking into reality right that woman well for my generation it was you know i don't know that we necessarily a lot of us are older that they made the connection to the internet they it was just sort of like what is happening right they look what's on the news there's a problem right uh these kids are protesting and this is their nazis and there's these other elements and like certainly fox news is not giving any backstory to where this they want to deny the goddamn Russian troll operation, the false information propaganda, you know, intrusion on our on our election. So they're not getting any backstory there. CNN is not giving any in-depth backstory like your book is. I mean, for me in terms of and I'm not a dumb guy. Your book was, you know, the thing that, you know, made me understand it.

I mean, yeah. Well, I mean, you researched it well. You lived it to a certain degree when you were younger. This is your world. But how is anybody going to cover what we just covered in two minutes? There are ways to get present. I mean, that's, I guess, my burden now when I go on other shows and they don't give me a nice expansive time.

Like, you know, like, all all right encapsulate it in two minutes um yeah because it but it's like when you lay it out like you do in the book I mean you can see you know that this is a a cultural political you know um psychological issue about our system and about you know people you know younger people and about, you know, people, you know, younger people and about the, the, uh, the nature of ideas and the brain and, you know, online and reality. I mean, like it's, it didn't happen out of nowhere. Right. Right. So I, I use the, put it in a nutshell. I just use those underlying dynamics that created the whole thing, which is, uh, there's a lot of kids out there who have no access to fulfilling housing, all the real needs, right, that society is supposed to provide. Yeah.

Fulfilling housing, fulfilling work, education, health. Like, we don't, our generation doesn't have any of those. But, like, all of the fake needs, all the garbage that you don't need, society is great at providing you with that, right? You can play video games and drop out all day.

It's really easy to do that. Yeah. It's really easy to live in these expansive screen worlds. So when those two elements combine, you get this. You get people who are really angry at the status quo, young people who are really dropped out, really nihilistic, entrenched in fantasy. Lots of them. Yeah, just hordes of them.

Well, I mean, I think that's what you're seeing now that Trump is president. It's just that when you have these defined people who define themselves as incels or sort of, because these guys, some of these guys who are going out and shooting people in the name of immigration, you know, anti-immigration, anti-Jewish, anti-black, whatever it is, some of them are those 19 and 20 year old kids again who have collapsed their ability to see, you know, consequences see consequences. They're like involuntary Manchurian candidates that get activated and that the line between fantasy and reality

doesn't exist and they go out with their fucking guns. It seems like they're willing to face the consequences or see themselves as martyrs or see themselves as heroes online. So I think that the age that this has evolved into once they put their man in charge, which is Trump, is that now, you know, there is an encouragement in an American authoritarian situation. You're not going to need thought police. You're not going to need a broader sort of armed enforcement of ideas when you have these guys ready to pop at any cost. And if one of them pops, it gets publicized. People get afraid.

People rethink what they're going to say and what they're going to do and where they're going to go. And then the same end is met by one of these fucking guys who just gets lit up and radicalized by these ideas. Yeah, that's right. That's the new phase we're in now, post Charlottesville, after they got really ashamed to be on the streets. They really became an alt-right terror epidemic. And that had to stretch back for years on the chans. But now, as you say, some of them are 19 or 20 years old. So it was being encouraged by older white supremacists for years. Yeah. They were trying to radicalize these kids. Yeah, that's right.

So, you know, part of the story is that, indeed, older white supremacists are like this always contingent of poor white Southerners and sort of people that have always been on the margins, and they've largely been online for a long time. They came to 4chan around 2012 and radicalized a lot of the otaku. But I really think it's a new thing

that we're experiencing now that the new alt-right really started 2013 is very different. It's its own movement. What has occurred is that their 19, 20-year-old kids, they're going on 4chan and 4chan's worst predecessor, 8chan.

And Reddit? A little bit Reddit. Reddit has been much better at cleaning that stuff up, but it's still pretty bad in places. So largely it fell to 8chan. And what's happened is like, you know, they were there for a year and a half and they get just brainwashed

because it's all of this garbage is now so distilled and the culture is just so built up. And now they have their martyrs yeah that's exactly right and so it becomes this tradition like that's a meme like going out and killing those people and being a murderer is like a set of memes and they just inherit the memes and of course teenagers do this like copycat suicide thing anyway that's sort of like a psychological problem that happens yeah idolizing suicide is essentially what they've been doing for years and then on top of that idolizingizing action films, the power fantasies that are being

sold in movies and anime. So why not take a suicidal action that will have real world impact in the larger cause of winning for white people? That's exactly right. And it steps them through the screen, right? So they become the thing on the screen, right? They become the other side of the action film. Wow. Yeah. So. All right. So let's end a little lighter in that. We didn't talk about the evolution of Pepe because I know you're being followed by a documentary crew who was put together by the creator of Pepe the Frog, who is trying to get his frog back. Yeah, he's trying to get... It's coming back. Pepe, the merry comedy and redemption of Pepe the Frog.

Well, what is the history of Pepe? How did he become turned out? How did he become the representation of nihilism and then white supremacy? Yeah, so he really started as like an indie comic guy, and the comic was about being a gross dude living with roommates. And it's sort of from my realm of web comics.

And then Matt Fury, the creator, he's on the left. Nice guy. But 4chan 2006, 2007 adopts Pepe because he's just such a great cartoon that he looks like a loser. He looks like the symbol of being a loser dropping out. Yeah. And that's what he means for many years. Yeah. But then when the loserdom gets so intense by 2012, 13, and the alt-right happens, then he becomes the symbol of that.

Yeah. And they- Richard Spencer's wearing a Pepe. Yeah. And then there's this weird moment that no one understands when during Trump's inauguration, Spencer's pointing at his Pepe the frog pen. He's like, oh, let's explain Pepe. Pepe, my symbol. And then he gets socked.

Oh, this punch the Nazi in the face guy. Right, so, and then Hillary releases an explainer, and she's like, Pepe is a far right symbol. And Breitbart and Yiannopoulos, they love it. They're delighted that Hillary is behind the curve, that she doesn't really understand what's happening. And so by this point, Pepe, youth culture knows what Pepe means.

And so 2015, they're like, we're all Pepe. We're all this loser on the bottom. That's how we all feel. And they're mad that the alt-right, that subsection stole it. And so Hillary looks a little ridiculous that it's sort of like thrown into the media mix. And this is where Pepe has remained,

but just this week. So he returned a little bit where he's kind of returned to his original position of just I'm just a loser guy. Yeah. That's what he means now a little bit. But just this week, the the protesters in Hong Kong have been using him. That just this morning, The New York Times ran an article that Pepe is now a symbol of democracy in Hong Kong and all the youth. And it's the same. It's because that's how the kids in Hong Kong, they didn't know. They didn't even know about the All Right.

They said, we saw that frog. That's just how we felt. That's just like, right? Wow, so what's the name of the guy who created it? Matt Fury. Was he going to come today? No, he moved a little north of here in California. It's his buddy, his animator friend who animates with him.

So what happened, yeah, they were going to do a Pepe the Frog animation, but then it got co-opted by the alt-right at the exact same time. And now they're like, well, now we have to do a documentary that's animated about what the hell happened to Pepe. Yeah. And they wanted... Was there copyright

issues? I guess there's no way to deal with copyrights when you have meme culture. Actually, that became its own crazy thing where no, there is, right? Like I told them, like when I first talked to them years, like when it was first happening, the Pepe people, I was like, Matt, why isn't Matt enforcing his copyright?

Like I know as an artist, like you make it, you own it. Yeah. And then he started doing that. Maybe he had his own ideas doing it. I don't know how much I was at fault for that. But he sued Alex Jones who was selling Pepe merchandise He got a nice lawyer volunteer to sue all the alt-right people who were using Pepe to sort of reclaim Pepe as the as As his yeah, how'd that go?

It went okay that he got ten fifteen thousand dollars from Alex Jones, which was small, I think, but it was something. And at least like they stopped using it. There was a guy that made a Pepe and Pede children's book. Pede is another meme that's like Donald Trump supporter. And it was a really cruel, stupid children's book. And they got that, you know, like they got... Cease and desist. Yeah, and they got money from them that they then donated to good causes

that fight against that. And Fury himself is like, he makes like love Pepes now and like hippie Pepes because hippie, you know, Pepe was like this cool, chilled out hippie guy.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, like the big Lebowski Pepe. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thanks for going through this.

Oh, yeah, my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on. No, I love the book and it was very helpful to me. And I think, you know, certainly I think that people, you know, above 40, you know, who are not, you know, computer literate in the world of chans and platforms and subreddits and whatever, it's important to sort of get this perspective on what happened happened. Yeah. Well, I'm glad that it's helpful because it was not particularly fun to drink poison for two years, but now I'm a male failure expert. And what are you doing with your failure?

What's the next thing for you? I want to go back to making creative work, whether that's novels or comics or something like that. That's hopefully something that's a little lighter than this. Oh, good. Well, thank you for getting obsessively

engaged with this stuff. Oh, no problem. Yeah, thanks so much for talking to me about it. Okay, that's it. Enjoy that book. Go read it. It came from something awful. I found it completely engaging.

I appreciate Dale coming. It was educational for me. Nice fella. Go to WTFpod.com slash tour for all my tour dates. I need you, Detroit, Toronto. Come on. Come on. It's okay if it's my last tour, but let's make it a big one.

I'm not committing to that, but, you know, I don't know. We'll see. Now I'm going to play my Stratocaster, which I got out. It's a Stratocaster with flat wounds. And if you know what that means, you know what that means. Here we go. Thank you. Boomer lives! Stratocasters! legalization. It's a brand new challenging marketing category. And I want to let you know we've produced a special bonus podcast episode where I talk to an actual cannabis producer.

I wanted to know how a producer becomes licensed, how a cannabis company competes with big corporations, how a cannabis company markets its products in such a highly regulated category and what the term dignified consumption actually means. I think you'll find the answers interesting and surprising. Hear it now on Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly. This bonus episode is brought to you by the Ontario Cannabis Store and ACAS Creative. Cannabis Store and ACAS Creative. It's a night for the whole family. Be a part of Kids Night when the Toronto Rock take on the Colorado Mammoth at a special 5 p.m. start time on Saturday, March 9th

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