Dude, who even knows.
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Just recently came across this from a-man-in-black, connecting hashtag gamergate to “norms of chan culture”, and I think he makes a some interesting, true points! It’s worth reading. He’s an anti-, and anti-anythings usually have understandings of their nemeses more worth reading than the anythings do of themselves.
I’m not totally in love with it - it rhetorically asks “Who do [journalists] talk to? …they can’t collectively interact with anyone”, immediately after very clearly laying out the norms and procedures for talking to a collective ‘chan style. That’s part of a general weakness whereby it accounts for norms of anonymity or variable opaque pseudonymity by reference to acculturation but takes norms of “true name” or persistent thin pseudonymity as a priori defaults, and seems to breezily assume the latter as the “real” norms and culture of twitter or even “life in general” when the very existence of ‘gaters and anons, and viability of #gg and ‘chans would seem to call that into question.
But still. And then I checked some of his other storify pieces (Seriously, though, at the point where you’re using a 3rd party site to render your longform twittering even minimally readable, maybe consider not doing your longform on twitter?) and I can tell he’s onto something in this, “The Redpill Right”, because he’s agreeing with things I’ve said.
Him:
essential to the Redpiller POV is the idea that everything is a game and the people who win played better.
(Ahem.)
They share a viewpoint, but they don’t yet share a common identity. …But that identity is forming. And they’re finding each other.
…It’s 4chan, it’s Reddit, it’s Uber. It’s the manosphere and it’s the atheist community. It’s bitcoin and libertarians and gamers.
If you believe what they believe, toe the line, reify their mythology of gaming, and so on, you *belong* in their nomos, a meaningful order.
…[a “nomos”] syntheseises meanings into a coherent system of beliefs that provides people in a given society with a common schema with which to approach the world.
(Sounds kind of like a thede, but probably sounds kind of like a lot of things. It’s probably worthwhile for intellectuals to reinvent wheels every now and then, helps escape the cruft and politics of established fields.)
[They are creating] a “fictive ethnicity.”… Culture, history, lore, philosophy, even a primitive form of religion, all predominate here… making an identity out of reactionary politics…
And then me, back in May:
I will say what intrigues me more, and what could really be a prime mover in that sector, is the construction of a modern, international, English-speaking Australian-American-Polish-British-Scandanavian-Serbian-etc. white volk around a core of internet-native right-masculo-populism on the chans’ “waifus, warhammer, and white nationalism” model
things like Polandball’s (and SatW’s) western-centric resurrection of the concept of national personification, heavy metal culture and the associated Vikingism, feelsguy’s translinguistic sense of selfhood, /pol/’s kebab removal… well, just /pol/’s /pol/ness, really
Now this sounds ridiculous. I know this sounds ridiculous. This is me pointing to cultural trends particularly prominent in the dork niche circles I notice and ascribing to them world-shifting importance. I know it is.
Sure, heavy metal is not the actual historic musical tradition of any people. Sure, Norse neopaganism is not the actual historic religious tradition of any people. Sure, Tolkien-by-way-of-D&D aesthetics are not the actual historic mythology of any people.
Unless, of course, you count “2008” as being a part of history, or those then alive as counting as a people. Or, say, 1978. Or, you know, the 19th century, and the conscious, successful Wagnerian construction of Germanic identity from which these are all lineally descended.To Golda Meir is attributed the line that there is no such thing as a Palestinian, by which was meant that the identity didn’t predate the establishment of the state of Israel. True, true. Neither was there such a thing as an Israeli. But then the state of Israel was established.