The alt-right and the death of counterculture (original) (raw)

Angela Nagle has written an indispensable book that allows both the extremely online- and meme-illiterate to grasp the IRL implications of the online culture wars. From the rise of Trump as a lulzy agent of base enjoyment and unrestrained conspiracy, to the collapse of meaning in these perilously ridiculous times, all are products of an ascendant online culture which privileges affect and transgression. Nagle navigates a sea of anime Nazis, gamers, white nationalists, masturbation abstainers and violent misogynists in mapping the contours of online reaction and fascism. What is essential and most controversial in her thesis is the symbiosis between what we can call the ‘Tumblr liberal-left’ and the alt-right. Both are products of an online cultural vanguardism that has been lauded by techno-utopians, nominally leftist academics and journalists alike. Nagle wields a forceful critique of the online left’s aestheticised resistance as both self-satisfied and lacking the dynamism to undercut the alt-right’s discourse of modern alienation, however nonsensical. This book is not an attempt at righteously slam dunking on the basement dwelling nerds of the alt-right or rehashing the excesses of campus identitarians. Instead it takes on the ideological deadlocks of the left that have been masked by the tech-fetishism of late capitalism.