The Anti-Social Network: A Review

Leftist 4chan

By the time I was a teenager, 4chan was already a user-friendly, social network for gamers rather than an “anime website”. Most of the, not necessarily tech-literate, nerdy kids in my school used it; I didn’t, I was a snob, I cared about Books. I have no memories of “the golden summer of /b/“ and despite being a shut-in loser of good standing, I am not qualified to talk about what Mr. Lobe would call “chan culture” beyond a specific time period of 2014-17. 

2016 was my generation’s “golden age”. I can remember how, for a brief few months, the Steam profiles of even my most apolitical friends from school changed to an anti-Semitic reference or picture. If you were even slightly ‘online’, I’m talking like ‘played video games recreationally’, and male, you were influenced in some way by what happened in 2016. It was not an ‘incel thing’, or a ‘hikki thing’, I’ve spoken to friends with lively sex lives and well-paid jobs who, by virtue of using the computer for more than an hour per day, were still affected by what I describe. It was Woodstock, combined with the 1848 revolutions, combined with World War One. 

Absolutely nothing in the manufactured pop culture could predict, or explain, what was happening: why were millions of white teenagers around the world rushing to the aesthetics of National Socialism? It was a point for point refutation of not only the political, but the cultural consensus of 1968: the idea that pop music, glossy magazines, celebrities and mass sports had a sovereign claim over what was ‘relevant’ to the people; and that this in turn could provide both an apolitical standard of moral legitimacy, and the content of sociological ‘critical theory’. Instead, the most deliberately fringe and anti-social aesthetics possible were driving the news cycle and defining trends. Democratic culture was being sabotaged simultaneous with Trump’s attack on the ‘institutions’ of Democracy. The tastes of the masses no longer had any political relevance, there was nothing anyone could do about this: John Stewart could scream on T.V for hours and get laughed at, a thousand emperors suddenly discovered their own nudity.

After such a cataclysmic event, there was a huge revisionist effort by the defeated forces of evil. The ‘internet historian’ became a professional endeavour at this point, represented by people like Taylor Lorenz, Angela Nagle (deceased by COVID-19) and default_friend; not all of these people are necessarily aiming at a revisionist history or malevolent. It became important for leftists to argue that sites like 4chan had, originally, been left-wing before getting ‘co-opted’ by Nazis. ‘The Antisocial Network’ is the most ambitious attempt to cement this History yet.