“Kill All Normies” is a useful if ghoulish documentation of the Alt-Right movement in contemporary America. It covers the travails of Milo Yianopolous and other sordid commentators.

It also covers some of the worst misogynist and racist rant in 4chan and its cousin 8chan online bulletin boards.

I don’t recommend this book for pleasant summer reading but it is nevertheless useful to know what is going on outside the bounds of civil public debate.

What the book lacks and so many quasi-academic journalistic accounts do these days is context. It seems that these vicious verbal attacks — primarily against women — spring out of nowhere. It’s as though they were creatures solely of the invention of these online forums.

Some of it is plain evil and evil has been with us a long, long time and to this day remains difficult to stop or even properly define.

I am not a particularly religious person, but I must admit to the mysterious nature of such behaviour.

Nagle also recounts for us the terrible saga of Gamergate where a female game programmer is pilloried in the forums for the sin of dumping her boyfriend. Bullies abound in this book.

I also felt the book could have been improved with simpler sentences and better explanations of the time frames: when you’re talking about trends or the evolution of ideas it’s useful to hold the reader’s hand a little more often. These things are not so obvious to all but those deeply immersed in the subject.

Which, in the end, made me question whether I was the targeted reader for this book.

NOTE: I was writing this essay in the aftermath of the senseless killing of two young woman and the wounding of many others mere steps from one of my businesses in downtown Toronto. The events frightened us all, and we were even involved in the cleaning up afterward. I cannot stress enough that we must be extra vigilant when women are singled out for terror and revenge. The fabric of our neighbourhoods is at stake. ( )

Much more nuanced analysis of the right than the left. It's hard to see Tumblr as so politically powerful - or as monolithic - as Nagle claims. I did like the discussion of the evolution of men's movements, and I'd consider using it in classes if only there were some citations or attributions. That seems to be an issue with Zero Books generally in the last few years. ( )

i read this as a pirated pdf and i still feel like i should get some kind of refund ( )

A pretty comprehensive account. There was a lot of new (to me) information and the stuff that I knew already was placed in context. I usually read about the online right either right from the source or through a critical left framing, so it was clarifying to follow Nagle's more neutral explanations. ( )

I really ought to give this book one or two stars for its two worst sins: (1) the author does not cite ANY sources, not one citation in the book’s 120 journalistic/nonfiction pages, and (2) the book badly needed a more thorough editor for grammar consistency and quality (in one case the author writes “Aids” instead of “AIDS”). But at the time of writing this review I have decided to not be strict about formal stuff and rate it more based on the topics explored in the book.

This book reads more like a longform blog post than an actual published work of nonfiction - lots of presumed knowledge of slang and subculture, an easiness of tone, (NO CITATIONS), etc. But as far as blog posts go it’s pretty dang good.

The central topics covered are those of 4chan culture: alt-rightism, misogyny, racism, trolling. It also touches on the quote-unquote SJW culture of Tumblr. There is a lot of journalistic tracing of the histories of these ideas and cultures and what academic theories they purportedly come from. That stuff is not very interesting to me except as gossip. Many internet figures that get mentioned—who were probably very prominent at the time of writing—have since faded into irrelevance and memory, if that.

But, in spite of the majority of the book’s content being just okay (and sometimes just unnecessary), it did have one very interesting hypothesis running through it… The aesthetic qualities of transgression, subversion, and counterculture were once deployed by leftwing political activists (using that term loosely), defining their side in the US culture wars of the 60s and 90s. However, recent years have revealed that these qualities are not in themselves symbolic or definitional of leftwing politics, and in fact are more like tools that can be wielded by whatever group is most convincingly able to use them at a given historical moment. Right now, in the 2010s and maybe through the early 2020s, that happens to be rightwingers—notably, white supremecist, misogynistic, transphobic, pro-inequality internet users. This historical revelation must make us then reevaluate how we use transgression, subversion, and counterculture, make us reconsider whether they actually do have value in and of themselves, and be more cautious in our evaluations of movements that seem to channel them.

Lastly, kind of a side note, there really needed to be at least SOME discussion of how racist 4chan is. Yes it’s shocking/outrageous, yes it’s misogynistic, yes it delights in misery, that’s all true and worth talking about when discussing 4chan. But it’s also one of the most seriously, violently racist cultures I’ve ever seen, and that surely merits another one of these 10-15 page chapters. Backseat writing but whatever.

Summary: this purportedly nonfiction book has no citations, is filled with grammatical inconsistencies and errors, catalogs the culture wars of 4chan and Tumblr, and has an interesting hypothesis about the inherent valuelessness of transgression/subversion/counterculture. 3/5 but a more serious reviewer would penalize the author more harshly for the citations and grammar problems. ( )

This book has already not aged well. On the bright side, Nagle does survey a wide swath of Alt-Right origin stories. But there are two principle problems with the book:

1. It's more prose than research. There isn't really a lot of depth here. If you're already familiar with Cernovich, Jones et al, there's not much more here than what you already know. Moreover, most of Nagle's points about each sub-group contributing to the Alt-Right really doesn't go much further than noting a trend in being transgressive and provocative in same vein as earlier left-wing counterculture. It's a good point and you can see the commonality but there's a void in analysis here that becomes even more problematic later.

2. Nagle's focus on transgressive rhetoric misses much of what's the single most notable characteristic about the Alt-Right, they like to punch down. There's actually a fairly bizarre conclusion to the book where she seems to conclude that Tumblr identity politics has led to a left that's fundamentally unprepared for Alt-Right tactics and argument. It makes no sense. It's like comparing the irritation of a pedant to the gun carrier who just used happily took advantage of the "stand your ground" law. It's actually a really troubling aspect of Nagle's narrative when you consider in defining the Alt-Right as using the Left's old punk skills for attention, she's actually lost the plot in terms of where the power is. A safe spacer, SJW caricature is still not the one advocating for [misogyny, racism, homophobia, etc.] as their cassus belli for actual harm. While she points out the double standard in the Alt-Right generally amounting to whining about how their station in life should be greater, Nagle really doesn't spend any time on how these tactics are not just difficult for the Left but have actually moved the needle on institutional responses to their causes.

To put it plainly, the Alt-Right's mainstreaming is not something this book provides any research or commentary about beyond comparing it to the flaccid rhetoric of the Left. ( )

A autora aconselha revermos os valores modernistas transgressivos contra-culturais em busca de uma nova sobriedade sócio-cultural, talvez mais blindada contra a perversão radical da direita alternativa, a promover misoginia, racismo, xenofobia e preconceito, em ações inicialmente ligadas à foruns de internet mas que rapidamente espirram para o social como um todo e elevam o bullying a atitudes alarmantes. O conselho é realizado após uma exposição de inúmeras vertentes e ações, da formação do 4chan a justamente a eleição de trump, também passando pela versão de esquerda, de um identitarismo do ressentimento, também ocupado em estabelecer nichos e bolhas ao invés de costurar e negociar vivências. O livro, entretanto, é mais preocupado em exibir os casos para denunciá-los, e por isso é mais interessante como um descortinar (ou um listar) de bizarrices infelizmente reais. ( )

i read this as a pirated pdf and i still feel like i should get some kind of refund ( )

This book was an ok but not great introduction to both right and left wing Internet subcultures by an academic/leftist. I learned a lot more about the fringe left (tumblr/SJW/etc) than about the alt right, although only the last few chapters really included much info about the left. The right wing descriptions were pretty superficial, never going into the intellectual or cultural depths (in positive and negative meaning) of the various movements. It isn’t horrible, but I’d prefer either a more clear framework for the different groups, or more detail about each one and how it is unique. ( )

I really like this author and learned a lot from her. She sheds important light on online trollers that grew out of 4chan and ended up aligned with the alt-right. She has a few central arguments: 1) that transgression is the foremost value of channers and they picked this up from modernist critics (who were usually on the left); 2) that the virulent anti-feminism of channers grew as a reaction to something called "Tumblr feminism," which started on line and then jumped to university campuses; and 3) that 4channers are "beta" males who feel sexually insecure in a post-sexual liberation world where the rewards have gone disproportionately to the top "alpha" males. She also opens with a broadside against the digital utopians who might persist in believing that online "crowds" are a force for the good -- that, she says, is so 2010.

But this book is a quickie book, rushed out so quickly that no one bothered to proofread it. The author doesn't even take the time to tell you the name of books that she quotes from at length. This quick-and-dirty approach might be a wise publishing decision, given how quickly online trends come and go. But this is a book after all and it's not unfair to bring to it greater expectations than one would to a magazine or an online post.

So, on the positive side, I like the author because she was a strong point of view. She advises progressives to abandon "transgression," which is simply a-moralism; she implies feminism needs to get over the trigger warning/safe space BS; and she believes that a progressive politics needs to put less emphasis on identity and identitarian politics. I don't agree with her in all respects but I appreciate her willingness to take stands.

From the fairly casual style and lack of any footnotes or bibliography -- and, indeed, from her willingness to take stands -- I took her to be a journalist or freelance critic. So I was surprised to learn that she's an academic. Learning that made me wish she'd displayed some of the virtues of academic writing. For instance, she doesn't tell us anything about the research on which she bases her observations. One assumes she spent a lot of time on social media, Tumblr, and perhaps IRC channels, in reddit forums, or whatever. But she doesn't bother to share that with us. I think it matters. For instance, what do we actually know about these guys (including the assumptions that they are all guys)? Who are they and where are they? The author is Irish but an awful lot of this book is about the US. Why not address the limitations (and potentials) of this sort of limited online research?

A yet bigger problem for me is that, despite her interest in the alt-right, she really drops the ball on the issue of race. She focuses instead on the gender side of this problem because that's what she knows best. I suspect this is because she feels much more confident around gender issues. She clearly finds it easier to criticize Tumblr feminism and the influence of Judith Butler than she does the other much maligned "social justice warriors" concerned with mass incarceration, extrajudicial killing of black people, intractable racial disparities, institutional violence, etc. But haven't they played a big part in campus "anti-free speech" politics on university campuses today? And haven't they too raised the hackles of the newly emboldened on (and off) line racists? And why are young women attracted to these alt-right groups?

Finally, geography and culture matter. The author makes little of the fact that she is Irish and writing in Ireland. It's as if in writing about online groups, history and specificity disappear. But, as someone reading in the US, I've got to say: history matters. Is Tumblr feminism universal? Did the alt-right play a part in Ireland's recent elections? Does "free speech" mean the same thing on an Irish campus as it does in the US?

But it's really the race issue that rubs me the wrong way. Nagle can't expect anyone to think she's come to terms with the alt-right based predominantly on her interest in its anti-feminism.

In the end, I find Nagle strong, intelligent and nervy, but her interpretations in the end don't address the marriage of 4chan and the alt-right in the past few years in a way that satisfies me. For that, she needs to go deeper, wider -- and to wander offline. And she needs to admit what she can and cannot know using the methods she employs. ( )

Mental masturbation. The author clearly thinks this is an important topic, rather than a soon to be inconsequential curiosity. Beyond that it's factually incorrect, pretentious, badly edited and keeps mentioning Milo Yiannopoulos's "spectacularly" imploding career. Sounds personal. ( )

Really disappointed by this. I'm fascinated by internet subcultures and the seedy underbelly of the web. I'm deeply interested in politics. This book seemed like a slam-dunk.

Its a joke. For the sake of brevity I'm just going to make a list:
-There is a laughable lack of editing. Numerous names and terms are mis-spelled, including President Barack Obama's name. On the first page. In the first paragraph. On the first line.

-There is a lack of organization. It jumps around from topic to topic, time to time, person to person, sometimes within the same paragraph or sentence. Arguments are brought up, suddenly dropped in a tangent, and then picked back up.

-There is a lack of clarity on how words are used. Let me explain - Nagle will throw out terms that either 1) have multiple meanings/uses, and she should identify how she uses the word and use it consistently, or terms that 2) she can't/shouldn't expect the audience to be familiar with in this sort of medium and should define when using it. This is a really basic writing skill. This is the bare minimum for anything meant to document/disseminate an event or present an argument. She also uses several terms - largely from the left - incorrectly throughout the text.

-There is a lack of citations. By which I mean, there are absolutely no citations, references, footnotes, or links on any sources for this book. There are some parts that seem largely informed by word-of-mouth than any direct observation or scholarship, and some parts that, if I did the same thing, would get me kicked out of school for plagiarism. When you are claiming to "map the online culture wars that formed the political sensibilities of a generation, to understand and to keep an account of the online battles that may otherwise be forgotten but have nevertheless shaped culture and ideas in a profound way from tiny obscure subcultural beginnings to mainstream public and political life in recent years." that kind of sourcing and documentation is important, otherwise all you really provide is a random, biased, half-assed anecdote.

-There is a lack of objectivity. Again, if you want to provide a map, a historical account, an analysis, you should have at least a little. Except Nagle can't resist stopping the narrative to throw shade now and then. A reader can't expect you to present information completely or accurately if you say a game you've never played is shit, seemingly because you hate how you assume the game works based on a biased view of a person involved in making the game.

-There is a lack of understanding of the actual topic. Nagle is certainly familiar with the Alt-right (I presume from being in the thick of it), but has absolutely no understanding of the left. Nagle seems either willfully ignorant or intellectually lazy of the different forms of feminism (which, given her thesis topic, is astonishing to see here - my guess is on laziness), of the different sub-cultures of Tumblr, etc. She deliberately cherry-picks extreme examples of the left (my God, does she actually think people honestly use demon-gender?) while doing the opposite for the Alt-Right. She rails at censorship via No-platform without knowing how the first amendment works. (No, you don't get to force private entities that don't want you there to let you speak, let alone pay you to speak.) She whines incessantly about trigger warnings without knowing anything about PTSD. She speaks authoritatively about the scientific stance on sex and gender...except she gets that wrong, too. There's SO MUCH to critique and point out about the left - and rather than look at that from an honest and informed perspective and raise valid and insightful criticisms, Nagle seems to regurgitate alt-right hyperbole and get the majority of her information from a game of Telephone.

-There is a lack of material. This book is incredibly short - there's so much that wasn't covered, or wasn't covered adequately. This could have been an actual book. Buuuuut the brevity of the text and the profound lack of sources and editing point to this being a rushed work meant to generate a small bump of income.

I'm so happy I didn't pay money for this. ( )

Excellent study of the alarming rise of the 'alt-right' movement treating the subject with the scholarly care and attention that it (unfortunately) deserves in respect to its influence on the current political climate. Very readable and sobering, especially in respect to the complete failure of the left to respond to the challenges raised in any meaningful way. ( )

What cesspool bred the alt-right, and how? What constellations aligned to make it possible?

I'd like to give this book 5-out-of-6 stars. Taking one off because the writing could be a little better... the book is only 117 pages and it would have been nice to have a little more context and explanation of what Nagle is talking about. The reader is expected to have some knowledge on the subject already, especially of Internet culture and leftist theories of change. Also, while she makes researched points, there is an occasional lack of scope that makes me unsure if all the conclusions are solid ones.

BUT, what makes this book brilliant, and why you MUST put it on your to-read list ASAP, is that there is more than just history here. The author raises major questions that anyone involved in politics right now should be thinking about. Why does trolling get the reaction it does? While the alt-right's views should largely be ignored as nonsense, where are they based in reality? What led so many young people down a dark, distorted path towards eventual fascism? ( )

An interesting read, although a hard read at times. I found the author’s analysis of the alt-right and its origins illuminating, especially her thesis that transgression is at the core of so much of it and that many on the left have come to value transgression for transgression’s sake as well. However, I disagree with her final analysis that the left is somehow to blame for the alt-right. She states that contemporary cultural progressivism has “found itself completely unable to deal with the challenge coming from the right.” She implies that over-sensitive Tumblr-style progressivism has made rational debates against the alt-right impossible. I see this as a kind of broad victim-blaming and more than a little blind to the responsibility of anyone in a civil society to actively combat white supremacy and outright Nazism. Not that the left is above criticism and shouldn’t be criticized, but so many voices on the left seem to fall into a kind of “brother’s keeper” attitude in response to their confusion over the Trump election. Progressives are too eager to take on guilt. ( )

Difficilmente abbandono la lettura di un libro. L'ho fatto con questo dopo di avere letto una intervista dell'autrice a "La Lettura" nella quale si deduce che il suo libro, scritto e uscito due anni fa in Inghilterra, è già obsoleto. Lo stesso titolo che ha dato il giornale all'intervista testimonia il suo "nonsense": "Paradossi dell'odio social: fissato con regole, ignora le buone maniere". Sia l'intervista che le pagine del libro che sono riuscito a leggere in versione Kindle mi hanno costretto ad abbandonare e rimpiangere i pochi euro pagati. Solo bla bla bla politichese digitale ...

i read this as a pirated pdf and i still feel like i should get some kind of refund ( )

Plus points for addressing the way the internet utopia s accidentally spawned vicious alt-right subcultures. But feel like this didn’t dig in enough, and was a bit... blurry. Needed better editing too - if I’m noticing typos etc it’s bad. ( )

Phew - this was a mission to get through but I'm so glad I did.

From the start it's obvious that this is the culmination of years of study of alt-right online culture. Nagle speaks with authority and gives many examples of the origins and development of this self-proclaimed "counter-culture" movement. One thing I will note at this point however is that there didn't appear to be any footnotes or end notes but I'm not sure whether this is because I read this on a Kindle or not.

Be warned - this book is highly academic and not for the faint of heart, either in fortitude or in content Nagle does not hesitate to demonstrate the language and actions that the alt-right and alt-light often use to intimidate their intellectual opponents. There are excerpts from many threats that contain explicit threats of racism, sexual harassment and graphic violence.

This book is packed full of analysis of cultural and philosophical thought as well as historical context, both in an online environment and a physical one - I'm definitely going to give this another read at some point to tease out all the finer points ( )

When I picked this book up I expected it to be a read similar to [a: Jon Ronson|1218|Jon Ronson|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1428023511p2/1218.jpg]'s [b: So You've Been Publicly Shamed|22571552|So You've Been Publicly Shamed|Jon Ronson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1413749614s/22571552.jpg|43062778] which I absolutely adored. Instead of looking primarily at individual cases, this book took a broad view of the evolution of internet culture through a political lens - what allowed anti-intellectualism and downright adversarial culture to triumph, and how it now is taking the public stage.

It's a bit of a rough read.

The writing is a bit dry, as this is a primarily philosophical/political text, but the contents are fairly fascinating. While this isn't a book I would really outright recommend to many, it is a fairly important work and one that makes it easier to understand just how divisive and polarized our culture has become - and at least slightly why. It's a worrying book, but a pretty necessary one. Just wasn't quite the light/informative read I expected it to be. ( )

I'm ambivalent about Kill All Normies. The subject is important, and Nagle provides a reasonable history and framework for understanding the online cultures of both the right and the left. Nagle, herself a leftist, offers cogent critiques of the left in particular.

But there is a paucity to the book's substance: The prose is hurried, which, given its publication in 2017 on the heels of the 2016 election and Trump's inauguration, should be unsurprising. Still, one doesn't expect to see Peter Thiel's name misspelled, and a number of similar spelling and grammar faux-pas undermine the text's gravitas, and the pleasure of reading it. Further, there are no notes or reference lists, which would be of interest to the curious reader.

There is the germ of a greater book in Kill All Normies, but it didn't quite achieve it. ( )

Just so there’s no mucking about, let me say up front that it is a rare and fleeting pleasure to read Angela Nagle. She is delightfully well read, distills the nonsense of the world calmly and directly, never loses her dispassionate center, and doesn’t descend into pop culture citations. She is effortlessly authoritative. Would there were more like her.

In Kill All Normies, things online have gone unaccountably negative. The internet was supposed to be a giant uplifting community party. Instead, it is a morass of trolls, alt-right, and out and out hatred, from racists to neonazis to feminazis. Even the arts have turned negative, and to criticize them as such just makes you outmoded – and subject to vicious threats. “The whole online sensibility is more in the spirit of foul-mouthed comment-thread trolls than it is of bible study, more Fight Club than family values, more in line with the Marquis de Sade than Edmund Burke. “

Her criticism of her own generation stings. They “come from an utterly intellectual shut-down world of Tumblr and trigger warnings, and the purging of dissent in which they have only learned to recite jargon.” They couldn’t even debate the hollow showman Milo Yiannopoulos; they could only prevent him speaking.

We are approaching anarchy. The right is at least as fractured and disorganized as the left. There is no longer any typical or classical right; every individual colors it their own way. So despite Republicans’ control of all the levels of government, they continue to fight amongst themselves and make no headway in their agenda. Because they can’t even agree on the agenda. Nagle takes an entire chapter to deconstruct the character Milo Yiannopoulos, who embodies all the contradictions in one neat package. The feeling you’re left with is that barriers to entry need to at least exist. Today, the internet offers equal time and space to every flavor of hate and ignorance going.

Nagle doesn’t go far enough. Unsaid is that all of her characters have one thing in common: a tiny bit of power. It is easier to wield negative power than positive power, so they armchair jockey hatred, and laugh at their own cruelty. It is ignorant and outrageous, and that is the whole point. It is a deadly combination of too much time and too little future. The other thing unsaid is that it is infinitesimal. Almost none of the characters has real fame, much less popularity or value. They are their own audience, insignificant in the scheme of things. The occasional Milo is a shooting star than soon fades to black.

I look forward to Nagle leveraging her talents into a deeper examination of a heavier issue. This is a terrific intro.

David Wineberg ( )