[A compelling account of how far-right firestarters helped ‘the
world’s most gifted media troll’ to become the US president.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

ANTISOCIAL   [[link removed]]

 

Dorian Lynskey
February 20, 2020
The Guardian
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_ A compelling account of how far-right firestarters helped ‘the
world’s most gifted media troll’ to become the US president. _

, Penguin Random House

 

_Antisocial
Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American
Conversation_
Andrew Marantz
Viking
ISBN: 9780525522263

_Antisocial_ is, among other things, a tale of two Mikes. Mike
Cernovich was a law student, nutrition blogger, self-help author and
generic Twitter troll before hitting the jackpot as a tireless online
booster for the man he had previously called “Donald Chump”. The
similarly directionless Mike Peinovich, AKA Mike Enoch, took an even
uglier path: he ended up calling for a white ethnostate and making
Holocaust jokes on his podcast the Daily Shoah. One is effectively a
neo-Nazi, the other just an agile hustler. Whether that distinction
matters when you consider the damage both have done to political
discourse is one of the urgent questions of this compelling book.

There are many ways to tell the story of Donald Trump’s rise to
power. Andrew Marantz, who patrols the darker precincts of the
internet for the New Yorker, sees the president as a “ready-made
viral meme” and “the world’s most gifted media troll”. Despite
being a technologically ignorant sexagenarian who had spent his entire
life among wealthy elites, candidate Trump spoke the same language as
Reddit shitposters and YouTube provocateurs and was similarly adept at
bamboozling the “normies” who held fast to such old-fashioned
concepts as telling the truth and having coherent beliefs. In
Marantz’s diagnosis, Trump operates like a clickbait website, AB
testing new material and running with whatever gets the strongest
reaction. The road to hell is paved with likes.

_Antisocial_ scrutinises the online firestarters who see Trump as
their avatar. Even if you don’t know their names, members of the
“alt-right” (far right) and the less overtly racist
“alt-light” have influenced media narratives, popularised abusive
buzzwords, confected news stories and helped create the cultural
context for the Trump presidency. If you remember rumours about
Hillary Clinton’s health during the 2016 election, then Cernovich
got to you. If you’ve seen triple brackets around a Jewish
journalist’s name, that originated on Enoch’s blog the Right
Stuff. To write about politics in this era is to write about the media
and the internet. A minor figure in _Antisocial_ sums up the election
as “the article versus the comments section”.

Representing the article in this equation is not just Clinton but
Marantz’s employer. He portrays his New Yorker colleagues as
principled but naive gatekeepers who suddenly found themselves
wondering if they’d been paying attention to the wrong things. Yet
to his interviewees, who tend to underestimate his wit and rigour, he
is the smug, clueless old media incarnate. A former contrarian
himself, Marantz resents them for making him feel “like an
establishment shill”, while they self-identify as the insurgent
counterculture. Trump cheerleader Cassandra Fairbanks was formerly a
punk roadie, animal rights activist and Bernie Sanders supporter.
Gavin McInnes
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founder of the violent, far-right Proud Boys, boasts: “I was an
anarchist punk … I think in some ways I still am.” The revelation
that the New Yorker employs 18 full-time fact-checkers inspires
hilarity in the men behind Trump-mad website the Gateway Pundit, who
consider facts an archaic distraction. Their mission is, in former
Trump strategist Steve Bannon
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phrase, to “flood the zone with shit”.

Marantz is knee-deep in the stuff. Obviously these people are awful
but he takes pains to explain exactly what kind of awful, and why –
like the Linnaeus of internet villainy. Rather him than me. He
describes glumly waking his wife at midnight to tell her that their
newborn baby is asleep and he has to go and “have a burger with some
Deplorables”. That attempt to turn Hillary Clinton’s “basket of
deplorables” into a badge of pride has fallen out of fashion but it
remains a useful catch-all term for a diffuse and fractious group. The
fragile coalition that Marantz describes in a bravura opening section
covering the “DeploraBall” in January 2017 splintered seven months
later, after the protester Heather Heyer was murdered at a Unite the
Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The alt-light draw the line
at unabashed white nationalism, or at least rely on plausible
deniability. After Charlottesville, Cernovich dismissed the alt-right
as “a toxic brand”, although that sounds more like a marketing
critique than a moral position.
What these not-quite-fascists stand for is unclear. Some of them joke
about converting (or “red-pilling”) Marantz, but convert him to
what, exactly? Too cynical and self-serving to commit to a coherent
ideology, most just want to watch the world burn, with Trump their
arsonist-in-chief. As needy and insubstantial as Instagram
microcelebrities, they affect a callous swagger but are easily
wounded; prate about rational debate but thrive on obnoxious memes.
“I do believe most of what I say,” ventures Gateway Pundit’s
Lucian Wintrich. “About 70%.” I’m reminded of a dark joke from
_The Big Lebowski_
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“Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, dude, at
least it’s an ethos.”

The danger is not (yet) regiments of Sieg Heiling fascists but the
irreversible corruption of discourse on the internet, and therefore
everywhere else. The aim is to scuff the lines between online and
offline, irony and sincerity, the trivial and the significant, a bored
young man triggering the “woke” for kicks and a genuine neo-Nazi
trying to desensitise and radicalise that bored young man. The idea,
for example, that the OK hand gesture was code for white power began
as a hoax on the 4chan message board until the media fell for it and
the gesture was adopted by actual white nationalists. As John Updike
said of celebrity, trolling is a mask that eats into the face.

Reading _Antisocial_ is likely to either make you glad you’re not on
social media, or wish you weren’t. But the old advice – “Don’t
feed the trolls; ignore them and they’ll go away” – now seems
like recklessly wishful thinking. When a dismissive colleague asks
Marantz “Is anyone surprised that there’s awful stuff on the
internet?”, he replies: “Everything is the internet now, and the
awful stuff might be winning.” Running like a mantra through the
book is an aphorism inspired by the philosopher Richard Rorty
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“To change how we talk is to change who we are.”
Who changed the way we talk? _Antisocial_ charts the death of the
Silicon Valley dream of better living through communication. Committed
to free speech (and to avoiding the cost of policing content), tech
companies have been slow to accept responsibility for what appears on
their platforms. Although Charlottesville shocked Twitter and Reddit
into evicting some of the worst offenders, Facebook groups and
YouTube’s recommendation algorithms continue to take users to some
very dark places. It’s not just a social media problem. The white
nationalist Richard Spencer coined the phrase “alternative right”
while working for the online magazine of Spectator columnist Taki
Theodoracopulos in 2008. Mainstream outlets have since given the likes
of Spencer credulous exposure, founded on the misconception that a
white supremacist with a crisp haircut and basic social skills is
newsworthy.

Marantz doesn’t make that mistake. Though curious and humane (his
immersive account of a young woman who fell in and out of love with
the far right reads like a Jonathan Franzen novel), he is firmly
sceptical and increasingly demoralised by his subjects’ company.
While repurposing material from his New Yorker profiles, he uses
digressions and footnotes to craft a metanarrative about the role of
journalism in general and his own reporting in particular. Is he
giving these narcissists and nihilists too much attention or not
enough? He errs on the side of “know your enemy” but understands
that he cannot win. Trolls set “an ingenious trap”, he writes.
“By responding to their provocations, you amplify their message. And
yet, if no one ever rebuked the trolls, they would run the internet,
and perhaps the world.”

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