The Movement's New Vanguard Is Teenage “Shitlords*.” The World Is Their Message Board Now.

For most of last year, it was hard to avoid the sensation that something had broken somewhere and the internet was leaking into real life.

- Max Read

The world seemed to have taken on the punchy, disorderly, darkly playful quality of a message-board fight, in part because the president-to-be insisted on communicating mainly in tweets assembled from detritus found in a Breitbart-comments scrapyard. The subcultures and folkways of the internet had become powerful enough that the entire election apparatus was obligated to attend to and dissect them. In January, the Republican consultant Rick Wilson dismissed a portion of Trump supporters as “childless single men who masturbate to anime”; by September, the Clinton campaign was concerned enough with the threat of meme warfare that it released an explainer denouncing the cartoon frog Pepe under the title “Donald Trump, Pepe the frog, and white supremacists: an explainer.” When Election Night rolled around, it was hard to begrudge the exuberant 4chan poster, thrilling in his candidate’s surprise victory, who bragged that “we actually elected a meme as president.”

It was a shocking turn, and not just because Donald Trump had become president. Somehow the self-proclaimed losers and freaks of 4chan and its ilk had come to great political prominence. The gleaming new real-name internet of Facebook—not to mention the media companies and political machines relying on it—that was supposed to tame the wild territory of the Reddit-style web had instead been infected by it. It was almost a thrilling underdog story—the weirdos and outcasts had stood up for something and won—except that the thing they were standing up for was anti-Enlightenment, anti-democratic, anti-equality politics.