I wrote about the trollish move Pompeo just pulled in this essay about 4chan and American politics

[soothsayer]

I guess we can wave goodbye to the era of State Department officials dispensing pious lectures to leaders in other countries about respecting democratic norms.

Link to tweet

?s=21

Hari Kunzru
@harikunzru
·
Nov 10, 2020
Replying to @harikunzru
It’s amazing to me that the style of ‘joking not joking’ rhetoric that internet trolls use to give themselves cover is now acceptable for holders of high office.

Hari Kunzru
@harikunzru
I wrote about the trollish move Pompeo just pulled in this essay about 4chan and American politics

For the Lulz
nybooks.com

https://t.co/X7t592fuqD?amp=1

Snip

The descent down the golden escalator of the orange-hued candidate whom /pol/ dubbed “God Emperor” was the catalyst for the underemployed proto-fascist Gamergate army to form itself into an effective political force. As Beran writes, to the cynics and self-identified losers of 4chan, Trump “embodied their beliefs in how the world worked—as a series of flickering, promotional lies.” He was a loser’s bitter caricature of a winner, a boorish, brash serial liar, a holder of grudges, proof that you could run for the most powerful political office in the world and still be a small man. He was, in effect, a human shitpost, calculated to stir up trouble among the normies. His opponent was symbolically (and literally) a mom. Electing Trump would annoy Mom and bring on race war. So Trump became the candidate of the chans.

The story of 4chan is often treated as a sort of grotesque sideshow to the growing populism of recent politics, but Beran’s book shows how central it was to the changes that have taken place as Internet natives reshape political discourse. Stephen Miller, the thirty-four-year-old white nationalist who runs US immigration policy, is clearly a product of the chan culture. The recent chaos at the Iowa Democratic caucus was exacerbated by eager Anons responding to a 4chan call to “clog the phone lines,” making it difficult for precincts to report results. The origin of Pizzagate, the conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton and John Podesta were running a child sex ring out of the basement of a pizzeria in Washington, D.C., betrays 4chan’s longstanding compulsion to make jokes out of child pornography (or “cp”). “Denizens of /pol/,” Beran writes, “saw references to cheese pizza in Podesta’s email…and noted the initials of Comet Ping Pong, the rest of the tale wrote itself.”

During the 2016 election campaign, the raiding party of hyperactive anons found it all too easy to sow panic among a demographic new to the Internet, older people who lacked the skills or discernment to assess the sources of the “news” they were consuming. Research has suggested that older Internet users are more likely to get trapped in “filter bubbles”—chains of websites that prevent them from seeing opposing views—and this tendency made them perfect targets for disinformation.

The question of causality preoccupies anons, many of whom believe they were instrumental to Trump’s victory. /pol/ promoted Trump relentlessly, never missing an opportunity to go on the offensive against his enemies. On October 13, 2015, Trump acknowledged his far-right fans by tweeting a picture of himself as their cartoon alter-ego Pepe the Frog, a louche figure who’d been appropriated from a comic by Matt Furie, and had been through a complicated life as a meme, ending up as a vehicle for jokes about gas ovens and SJWs being thrown out of helicopters. Now Pepe was going to be president, and the scent of lulz was in the air.

[Mike 03]

1. Long but worthwhile.

Thanks for posting.

[AnnaLee]

2. I think Pompeo fancies himself Presidental material. ntp