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aristarchus [soylentnews.org] writes:

Long Read at The Guardian [theguardian.com]

In 2012, a small group of young men, former supporters of the libertarian Republican congressman Ron Paul, started a blog called The Right Stuff. They soon began calling themselves “post-libertarians,” although they weren’t yet sure what would come next. By 2014, they’d started to self-identify as “alt-right”. They developed a countercultural tone – arch, antic, floridly offensive – that appealed to a growing cohort of disaffected young men, searching for meaning and addicted to the internet. These young men often referred to The Right Stuff, approvingly, as a key part of a “libertarian-to-far-right pipeline”, a path by which “normies” could advance, through a series of epiphanies, toward “full radicalisation”. As with everything the alt-right said, it was hard to tell whether they were joking, half-joking or not joking at all.

The Right Stuff ’s founders came up with talking points – narratives, they called them – that their followers then disseminated through various social networks. On Facebook, they posted Photoshopped images, or parody songs, or “countersignal memes” – sardonic line drawings designed to spark just enough cognitive dissonance to shock normies out of their complacency. On Twitter, the alt-right trolled and harassed mainstream journalists, hoping to work the referees of the national discourse while capturing the attention of the wider public. On Reddit and 4chan and 8chan, where the content moderation was so lax as to be almost non-existent, the memes were more overtly vile. Many alt-right trolls started calling themselves “fashy”, or “fash-ist”. They referred to all liberals and traditional conservatives as communists, or “degenerates”; they posted pro-Pinochet propaganda; they baited normies into arguments by insisting that “Hitler did nothing wrong”.

Ha, ha! Funny, in a kind of "70-85 million dead people" [wikipedia.org] kind of way.

“The left won by seizing control of media and academia,” a blogger on The Right Stuff, using the pseudonym Meow Blitz, wrote in 2015. “With the internet, they lost control of the narrative.” By “the left”, he meant the whole standard range of American culture and politics – everyone who preferred democracy to autocracy, everyone who resisted the alt-right’s vision of a white American ethnostate.

For decades, Meow Blitz argued, this pluralistic worldview – the mainstream worldview – had gone effectively unchallenged, but now, by promoting their agenda on social media, he and his fellow propagandists could push the US in a more fascist-friendly direction. “Isis became the most powerful terrorist group in the world because of flashy internet videos,” he wrote. “If you’re alive in the year 2015 and you don’t understand the power of the interwebz you’re an idiot.”

To the post’s intended audience, this was supposed to be invigorating. To me, it was more like a faint whiff of sulphur that may or may not turn out to be a gas leak. The post was called “Right Wing Trolls Can Win”. Would the neofascists win? I had a hard time imagining it. Could they win? That was a different question. “The culture war is being fought daily from your smartphone,” the post continued. On this one point, at least, I had to agree with Meow Blitz. To change how we talk is to change who we are.

Amazing what two or three people can do with the megaphone of the internets.

A conference dinner table conversation with memewright Emerson Spartz:

Still, he was happy to offer advice. Glancing down at my laminated badge for the first time, Spartz noticed that I worked at the New Yorker. “For instance, here’s how I would improve your product,” he said. “Way more images. That’s number one. Who has ever looked at a big long block of text and gone, ‘Ooh, exciting?’ I tell my employees all the time: Every paragraph they write should be super-short, no more than three sentences. And I mean short sentences. Periods are better than commas. Boredom is the enemy.”

I couldn’t deny that this sounded like an effective recipe for a certain kind of success. And yet, I sputtered, if maximising clicks was the only goal, why would any magazine or newspaper need to employ fact-checkers – or reporters, for that matter? Why not simply recycle press releases, rewriting the boring quotes to make them snappier? Why not replace all Syria coverage with Kardashian coverage? Why not forget about words altogether and go into something more remunerative, like video, or mobile gaming, or strip mining?

Spartz cocked his head and waited for me to finish my rant. Clearly, in his eyes, I was revealing myself to be a luddite. “It’s always possible to make a slippery-slope argument,” he said. “Those arguments don’t interest me. I’m interested in impact.” Art without an audience was mere solipsism, he said. “The ultimate barometer of quality is: if it gets shared, it’s quality. If someone wants to toil in obscurity, if that makes them happy, that’s fine. Not everybody has to change the world.”

In other news, some Boomer has equated "OK, Boomer" with the "N" word. [soylentnews.org]

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