The Lost Boys of the Online Right

"How could this have happened? How did we go from anime otaku [Japanese cartoons] to the anime Nazis of 2016 and onward? … To put a finer point on it: How did a pornographic anime website transform into a post-cultural garbage heap upon which the great events of our age stood?"

- Dale Beran, It Came From Something Awful

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At resistance rallies, I have been getting asked a question for which, up until now, I have had no answer:

"How do we pull this young generation of boys out of the darkness of the internet?"

The question is usually posed by teachers.

At one rally, a teacher said she was terrified at contemplating the future as she watched the steady drift of her young male students to nihilism, cynicism and far-right extremism.

The question is the harder edge of a lesser but equally disquieting question — where are the young people in these rallies of folks with greying hair?

There has been a lot of polling done on the growing gap between young women and young men in terms of their placement on the political spectrum. We are told that right-wing politicians like Trump and Poilievre are "winning the young male vote."

But that isn't the whole story.

The drift to extremism has been bubbling up in teenage online forums for years. Some adults who should have known better noticed what was happening in these dark corners and decided to exploit it.

And so it was that right-wing extremists like Steve Bannon and Milo Yiannopoulos channelled this anarchic energy and used it to upend the global political landscape.

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It Came From 4chan

I recently came across a book that puts this whole transformation in context.

Dale Beran's It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidently Memed Donald Trump into Office is a must-read. I read a lot of books on culture, politics and history, but this book shook me up.

In 2003, a bored teenager, Christopher Poole, created a site where oddball kids could post silly and slightly pornographic images of anime girls and weird cartoon animals. He called it 4chan.org and it quickly became a popular haunt for jokes, counter jokes, and teenage boy gross-outs.

Beran writes, "4chan.org became the number one psychic garbage dump into which young people discarded their misery and creativity into a pile of old art, cartoons, ads, video games, movies, TV shows, comic books, and toys."

4chan had no rules. No moderation. No accountability.

It was a world without parents.

In a milieu that promoted gross-out and shock value, the conversation was quickly taken over by rising levels of misogyny, racism and cruelty.

It was the online version of Lord of the Flies.

Beran places this phenomenon within a larger history of youth counter-culture movements. 4chan emerged as globalization and increasing economic precarity put enormous pressure on young people. In a world with seemingly diminishing prospects, they migrated to a screen world of fantasy and depression, cynicism and rage.

Following the economic collapse of 2008, the politics of 4chan became more extreme.

Like other youth subcultures before, it wasn't long before their cultural impacts spilled into the real world. And thus, our political landscape became impacted by memes, trolls and incels.

The ultimate symbol of the transition from kid games to darker threats was the cartoon image of Pepe the Frog.

Pepe, "the sad frog meme," was created by artist Matt Furie as a harmless outsider who lived with roommates, smoked weed and played video games.

But as 4chan went more extreme, so did Pepe.

Pepe was reimagined as a mass shooter, a racist with a Klan hood and a Nazi. Alex Jones attempted to co-opt Pepe. As did the January 6th insurrectionists.

The transformative moment came when Donald Trump reposted an image of himself as Pepe. But regular political pundits didn't understand the significance of Trump's actions.

The fact was that Steve Bannon and the alt-right had been tapping into the online fights among gamers and hackers to drive a new kind of politics. Bannon mined 4chan to refashion extremist politics that fed off memes, insults and cruelty.

Bannon's world was just like 4chan but for adults.

In the lead-up to the 2016 election, the juvenile online squabbles between 4chan and the more progressive Tumblr (where the term "check your privilege" was part of the etiquette of debate) spilled into vicious adult culture wars.

The Conservatives in Canada attempted to tap into a cohort of alienated young males who were forming around deeply misogynist incel sites. Poilievre's team used the hashtag #MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) on their videos to reach into online forums for raging young men.

These sites promoted and rated mass killers who had been nurtured in online circles.

One of their heroes was a young man in Oregon who posted an image of Pepe with a message to his online incel friends not to go to school the next day. He followed through with a killing rampage that left 9 dead and injured 8 others. This inspired Canadian mass killer Alek Minassian who was also active on the incel boards.

Conservative strategists seemed to think these forums were a good place to spread videos by Pierre Poilievre.

As for Pepe, by 2016, he had become a full-on Neo-Nazi, QAnon symbol.

Beran explains:

"4chan was populated by a group of declassed individuals so set apart from society and so wholly lacking in identity that they began to obsess over it. They clung to race as a means of self-definition. These new fascist movements emerged much as the first ones had, out of decontextualized people thrust from society by the mercurial throes of modern economics…

"In 2015, a resurgent Nazi-themed youth movement in the United States seemed unthinkable, let alone aligned with a sitting president. In 2016, it was a reality."

If you aren't part of the world of 4chan, many of the actions of Trump and MAGA may seem bizarre and idiotic, like his promotion of fake Donald Trump image coins.

The idea of selling online gifs as if they had value began as a sarcastic game of youth selling fake Pepe digital art online. It was an ironic statement of dispossessed young digital artists who knew their work had no real financial value.

They were totally upended by Trump when he began driving his own $TRUMP meme coin, which he sold online, raising $148 million.

The reality was that 25 buyers spent $111 million on these fake coins. This gave them access to a private VIP reception with Trump. The four largest investors received a limited edition Trump Tourbillon watch that sold for $100,000.

Toxic kleptocrats had usurped the cynical jokes of teenage loners to obtain insider access to a presidential candidate.

And consider the massive damage caused by DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) across the entire US federal government. The 4chan crew would be able to tell you that the original DOGE was once a 4chan symbol for a cute dog.

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Where Do We Go From Here?

We can't expect young men to disengage from the toxicity of online life when adults have fully immersed themselves in it. If we want young people to change, we must be willing to rewire our own brains. Spending less time in online squabbles. Less time doomscrolling. Less time spent sharing online memes and rage trolling.

We can't expect young people to step up to deal with the massive issues of our age when these are problems that were generated on our watch. As adults, we have a responsibility to carry the weight so that young people might actually feel that they have the possibility of a better future.

We have an obligation to address the economic, political, and environmental dispossession that has left young people with little hope or opportunity.

Maybe if they had a reason to believe there was a future, they would emerge from the safety of their screens.

We need to invest in young people.

I talk to teachers with few resources and classes with many students with special needs. Following the isolation of the COVID years, a generation of young people is falling through the cracks.

In Ontario, however, Premier Doug Ford has focused his attention on making sure that people can pick up a six-pack of Bud Light at the corner store while he cuts funding for education.

How are we going to pull boys out of the dark holes without the support of education systems that have the teachers, education counsellors, and educational assistants that other generations took for granted?

It comes down to our willingness to take time to mentor and encourage.

I admit that I as an adult I live in a whole different world than the young people living in the disorienting universe of AI and online disinformation. But when I was in Grade 9-10, I was a very angry and alienated young lad.

I remember the day my homeroom teacher, Barb Winter, took me aside.

"Would you teach me to play chess?" she asked.

I was flabbergasted. I hadn't played chess since grade five. But I agreed. Over the next year, we met once a week to play. Mostly, she got me to talk. To become engaged.

At the end of the year, Ms. Winter and some other teachers came to me and told me I needed to leave the high school that I hated and go to an alternative school. I was suspicious. Cynical. But I agreed.

I ended up going to ASE (Alternative Scarborough Education) — a small experimental school. It was where bright kids falling through the cracks were given a chance to chart their own direction.

I met young artists, poets, and kids who challenged me to read authors I had never heard of. My anger and alienation were quickly overtaken by a fascination with a larger world around me.

Would I be the same person today without these interventions? I doubt it.

We can't blame young boys for living in their screens. We must give them a reason to engage in the world around them.

As for the politicians, who would exploit their anger and fear? You saw what happened when they took power in Washington. In countries that are still free, we must do everything we can to keep these cynical players at bay.

We have to keep kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.

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