FT Alphachat · Financial Times

Angela Nagle on the online culture wars

June 28, 2019·37 min·2 clips

Nagle warns that if liberal taboo culture is never reformed, the far right becomes the only group offering people permission to speak freely.

The opening is grave. Brendan Greeley connects the Christchurch mosque attacks to a white-supremacist manifesto packed with conspiracy theory and far-right forum in-jokes. The media, in this telling, was part of the target. The episode treats 4chan and 8chan as places where online culture-war codes can stop being just online. Angela Nagle comes in through that mess. Her book, Kill All Normies, is used as a guide to culture wars running from 4chan and Tumblr toward Trump and the alt-right. Jemima Kelly pushes on scale. Maybe the internet's ugliest rooms feel powerful partly because public life keeps treating them as powerful. Nagle partly agrees. People inside those communities can talk as if their fights are life and death, while outsiders hear something ridiculous. Rural Ireland gives her a useful reality check. When she visits her parents, she finds a world barely touched by the dramas that dominate media and online politics. Still, distance only goes so far. Younger people spend huge amounts of time online, and Nagle argues that those spaces shape the ideas and behavior they later bring with them. The episode does not offer easy comfort. Taking the internet less seriously might help, but pretending it does not form people misses the point. Even the bit about online fabrications and a festival that was not there lands as part of the same problem: performance and reality are getting harder to pull apart. Jemima Kelly ends before the conversation sinks further into gloom, so the episode closes with a little air, not a neat answer.

As heard by us

A sober look at how online culture wars moved from forum in-jokes into politics, media and real-world harm.

Angela Nagle's conversation with Jemima Kelly looks at the point where online culture war stops being niche internet behavior and starts shaping politics, media coverage and real violence.

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Why you'd press play

If you want to understand how online culture wars spilled into politics, start here.

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