I've watched the so-called alt-right develop online over the past 2-3 decades. Usenet, Live Journal, Encyclopedia Dramatica, the chans, etc. At least at the start, it was mostly about trolling and lulz. The anger of TFWNG.
But somehow it's been captured by the actual right wing. That's frightening. There's a lotta young male angst out there.
See this is exactly the problem the article talks about. A young man got so heavily invested in a community because they weren't dismissive of him. Maybe a lot of young men feel people are treating them dismissively and that a lot narratives other people espouse don't resonate with their personal experience.
Maybe we should consider why this anger is so much more common in young men. The narrative of "equality looks like aggression when you've always been the one on top" doesn't really apply to kids who are only 13, because no matter who was on top it wasn't kids.
I'm not arguing that young men's anger is unjustified. But I am arguing that it's being dismissed by some, and exploited by others. And actually taken seriously by hardly anyone.
It's kinda odd, because nothing you say in this line is dismissive at all. But because of the everyday association with 'young male angst' that many encounter, merely mentioning it like this is enough to lead some to conclude you are being dismissive. Almost as if the concept has been put down so much that merely mentioning it has become a form of dismissive slang.
Ah, my apologies. I see a lot of people reading articles like this and then talking about how young men's anger is being exploited without ever really asking about why young men are angry and I guess I extrapolated a meaning from your comment that I shouldn't have
Tbh, it's this sort of thing that fuels the alt right. I'm a young male and I have some political concerns. I don't consider myself alt-right. But, when you dismiss my concerns as "angst" - I'm far more likely to continue talking to them than to you.
I apologize. I didn't mean to dismiss or criticize your concerns. So perhaps I ought to have used less loaded language. Something like being angry about how screwed up things are. Or however you might describe your political concerns.
Indeed, it worries me how much such concerns are being dismissed and suppressed.
Also, one of my favorite lines is "Still angry." And my favorite fantasy hero is Stover's Caine, who says that a lot.
I see people trot it out in online arguments as an excuse, or in think-pieces as a justification. But if white male identity politics is very important to someone, important enough to find common cause with literal neo-nazis, I think their conversion already happened.
This is a bit tangential, but you sharing your experience with the term before it became widely-known reminds me of something interesting about the way we group and label ideologies.
I still remember 5+ years ago having periodic exposure to the term alt-right and having it more or less exclusively refer to relatively languid writings like Mencius Moldbug and NRx[1], in sharp contrast to the rowdier, meme-ier aesthetic it has today (eg /r/The_donald, from what little I've seen of it). I didn't see it come to refer to white-supremacy and other more well-known forms of the far-right until Hillary Clinton made the term a household name. After that point of course, it was a self-fulfilling Schelling point that coalesced around what she said it was: white supremacists et al flocked to it, and everyone not willing to be associated with them had to stop associating with the term, now that "everyone knew" what it referred to. Fascinating dynamic.
(Not that I'm suggesting that she created the movement, but rather that from my skewed sample, it seems that she made the _term_ well-defined, by bringing it into the limelight).
OTOH, this may have been a consequence of the fact that I had little exposure to chan or white supremacist subcultures et al and lots of exposure to often-iconoclastic longform blogs talking about every random topic, including politics. It's entirely possible that my sample of encounters with the term describes my filter more than it does the term.
It's a fascinating window into language, to see a term become widely-known, and by doing so, change its meaning. It's particularly interesting that it's difficult to know how close to how far off you were in your role as one of the proverbial blind men touching the elephant. Thanks for sharing your data point!
[1] I'm referring to the aesthetic and energy here, not the content, which wasn't quite "languid..".
Just to be clear, it didn't call itself the "alt-right" back then. GamerGate was a turning point, I think. And yeah, it hit mainstream in the 2016 US presidential cycle. But until maybe 2015, I really had no clue that this was a political thing.
Somewhat off-topic but I appreciated the combination of your analysis, mirimir's response, and your admittance that the initial analysis was not altogether correct. Especially online, it's rare to see people admit that they're wrong especially in the face of a (presumably) factually based reply.
I think you're spot on here.
I always saw a lot of one-upsmanship in terms of harassment and being offensive, but eventually it got real.
A friend of mine jokes that "weev won the election" and I'm not sure how wrong he is.
I can't quite tell if I simply grew out of racial humour or it's genuinely taken on this propagandist, explicitly political subtext it didn't have before. Whichever, I don't really appreciate it nowadays.
Raiding is underselling it. It's significantly coordinated and thoroughly planned, long running campaigns to further radicalize the younger people who thought they were just getting "Edgy memes" on 4chan and haven't learned/realized yet that maybe, just maybe, making jokes about hanging black people because they are black isn't cool.
Maybe so. I don't recall seeing his name, back in the day, but Wikipedia tells me that he's done lots that I would have agreed with. Biosphere2, for example, SF fan that I am. And that movie about Ronald Reagan. But the rest of it is batshit insane, like something out of Hunter Thompson. A right-wing Wavy Gravy.
But somehow it's been captured by the actual right wing. That's frightening. There's a lotta young male angst out there.