It Came from Something Awful

How 4chan and 8chan fuel white nationalism, inspire violence, and infect politics.

The internet has transformed the ways we think and act, and by consequence, our politics. The most impactful recent political movements on the far left and right started with massive online collectives of teenagers. Strangely, both movements began on the same website: an anime imageboard called 4chan.org. 

It Came from Something Awful is the fascinating and bizarre story of sites like 4chan and 8chan and their profound effect on youth counterculture.

Dale Beran has observed the anonymous messageboard community's shifting activities and interests since the beginning. Sites like 4chan and 8chan are microcosms of the internet itself—simultaneously at the vanguard of contemporary culture, politics, comedy and language, and a new low for all of the above. They were the original meme machines, mostly frequented by socially awkward and disenfranchised young men in search of...