Dylann Roof, 4chan, and the New Online Racism

"A reactionary, defiantly anti-social politics has been emerging for the last decade. It was well known under the auspices of “trolling” and well hidden by its pretense of trickstersism. It was actually juvenile fascism and vitriolic racism but, because it grinned and operated in cyberspace, it was a sensation when it first appeared less than a decade ago."

For only the last decade? Only in "trolling culture?" Where has this author been?

It's pretty common for the highly intelligent and sensitive to embrace reactionary ideology after becoming disillusioned in turn with pop culture, counterculture, and academic liberalism. Maybe this is it, they think, finally a movement that's intelligent! Neo-fascists and reactionaries know how to play to this with the whole 'red pill' nonsense. Eventually people move on when they realize that this, too, is dumb.

You'll never find an intelligent movement because there is no such thing.

For something to become a movement, it must be reduced to communicable meme-sized sound bites. Then a low-fidelity game of telephone is played with those, further bleaching out any depth. That process inherently erodes any subtilely or grace that the original may have once possessed. Then demagogues rise up and 'ride' the movement, hoping to gain money, power, sex, or just attention. These people tend to be sociopaths and narcissists, and they proceed to shit copiously upon whatever scraps of intelligence and value might remain.

There are deep, interesting, and thoughtful authors of nearly every political persuasion, from right and reactionary to libertarian to Marxist, liberal, progressive, feminist, you name it, but none of that intelligence can or will ever translate into the popular representation of any of those things. They are all worth reading, but that takes time.

The Internet is new, and we're still assimilating it. One thing we're finally (I think/hope) coming to grips with is that it's actually a great vehicle for the rapid spread of stupid, shallow ideas. Social media is biased toward sound-bites and click bait. Those are the things that spread. Ideas that take too long to consider and assimilate have a low viral coefficient.

As I've grown up with the net, one of the things I've learned is the value of being selective as to what channels I pay attention to. There's a lot of high-quality stuff on the net but you have to be picky to find it. Popular areas of sites like Reddit and noise-boxes like 4chan are the gutter and are to be avoided, as is the perpetual borgsong of the Facebook feed. Smaller and topical sub-reddits and smaller sites like Hacker News are somewhat better, and are at least decent starting points.