Before Trump made the infamous comparison between the far-right protestor in Charlottesville who murdered a counter-protestor, with the “alt-left”; centrists were already denouncing this group for about a year. Yet, despite the latter’s recent internet prominence, especially with the sometimes favorable coverage of the podcast Chapo Trap House, little has been written about its origins and imprint on political culture.

Enter Angela Nagle’s book, Kill All Normies. Nagle sets out to capture the culture wars of mid-2000s to early 2010s internet, and how it led to the dichotomy we face today: a reactionary “alt-right” and ineffectual SJW movement; the former enabled by the endless transgression of anonymous imageboards like 4chan while the latter grew out of the identitarian call-out culture of Tumblr.

Nagel’s history of these two trends is accurate and well written, especially her chapter on how Tumblr functioned like a social currency system where, in order not to lose credit, users needed to publicly shame each other to keep up their own currency. Likewise, she doesn’t make the mistake that a lot of publications did when tracing the alt-right to the 1980s French far-right; Nagel correctly begins with the early 2000s “manosphere” that began with anti-feminist loathing, led to anti-Muslim sexual paranoia and eventually linked up with the European far-right. People were even writing about this in its early stages from 2012–2014.

I will say though, that her polemics can sound oddly conservative when criticizing both groups. At one point Nagle calls Vice “a degenerate combination of vacuous hipster aesthetics and pornified transgression.” It was to criticize it for hypocritically attacking “bernie bros” — fair enough —an online magazine that literally published Milo Yiannopoulos doesn’t have the highroad here. But honestly you can tell much of that venom comes from a place of Anglo properness that pops up throughout the book.

Ultimately, she argues that these two contradictory trends are symptomatic of neoliberal capitalism, and the social networks that thrive from it. None of these internet trends presents a solution to our current predicament.

Or do they?

The anonymous left

While Nagel presents a seductive dichotomy between anonymous right-wing and public left-wing, it is insufficient when talking about the internet culture wars that bleed over into real politics. The alt-right is gaining ever more publicity (and as Nagle recently wrote, probably declining), while the SJW left has seemingly burned out of relevance, now struggling to uphold the gains it made under the Obama years.

The new force that emerged into the media spotlight (and arguably has been important for years) has variously been called the “dirtbag left” or “alt-left” but for sake of simplicity, I will call it the anonymous left.

Like the name suggests, this is the left that grew out of anonymous imageboards and semi-anonymous forums in the mid-to-late 2000s, especially the Something Awful subforum Laissez’s Faire (LF) before migrating to over to Twitter to become Weird/Left Twitter. At the fringes are also the leftists who went to 8chan.

The lineage is apparent from some of the most famous users: Felix Beiderman of Chapo Trap House directly quoted Something Awful posts on the show while others borrowed their memes on Twitter.

If there are some attributes that makes up this left, they are: an absurdist humor with tempered transgression, a desire to focus on material issues (for all people) and an animosity towards the neoliberal center. But perhaps most of all, they have an overriding belief that posting online is not real politics. Which is why they often do activism as part of DSA or are adjacent to it.

Nagel does quickly mention Chapo Trap House as “a knowing product of contemporary irony-satured online culture.” But this makes it sound like its “knowling[ly]” aping off of the zeitgeist that the alt-right started, not a product of its own culture that developed alongside the reactionary one.

Maybe there was something about being anonymous that allowed people to express leftist opinions without negative consequences (see Matt Bruening getting fired for calling Neera Tanden a “scumbag” on twitter) maybe anonymity/publicity has little relationship to politics — who knows. But what is clear is that the political legacy of this left needs to be addressed to get a true understanding of how the internet shaped politics.