Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right

Like the real world, the internet contains places just too unpleasant to visit oneself. So I am grateful to intrepid online explorer Angela Nagle for letting me sit in my armchair and be queasily fascinated by her travels through some of its weirder and nastier byways. A sharp cultural critic who traces the sensibilities of these virtual social spaces back through 60's radicals and the Beats to the Romantics and de Sade, Nagle also shows how statistically tiny subcultures—which could have been contained in their own toxic cul de sacs—ended up spilling over, becoming tributaries from both the Left and the Right into the mainstream. Most welcome of all, she is rigorously even-handed even while clearly avowing her own political position. And that's really her point: the outer fringes of both sides of the culture wars are less concerned with coherent policies or plans of action than with merely striking a pose.