Justin Smith-Ruiu at The Hinternet:
Throughout Donald Trump’s first term, none but the most stubborn could deny that the leading cultural institutions in the United States remained under the dominance of the self-styled progressive left. Circa 2019, prominent progressive scholars such as Corey Robin could be found imploring their peers to wake up and to take stock of just how much ground the left had gained. At the same time, astute readers of online discourse were warning of subterranean rumblings from the manosphere — which in fact began much earlier and for some years seemed to be contained within the same virtual space as what was then a gestating proto-wokeism. I can remember as early as 2014 or so, the most perspicacious of my friends telling me I should really be paying attention to Gamergate if I wanted to understand the future of US politics. I did check in briefly, saw that it was all just a bunch of kids fighting over kids’ stuff, and checked right back out again.
Well, those kids aren’t kids anymore. It was only during the Biden presidency that the various pathological specimens of online adolescent masculinity grew just old enough to transfer their alienated thymos from the screen into actual politics. In effect, however our tight-focused presidential historians chronologize things, what we have seen over the past decade is a Tumblr regime (c. 2015 – c. 2022) followed by a 4chan regime (c. 2022 – present). The noise of global politics today is really just the much-deepened echo in a great canyon of the squeaking of rambunctious tweeners in the narrow channels of 2010s social media.
More here.
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