This is a phenomenon that was greatly described in Mark Fisher’s essay “ Exiting the Vampire Castle“, and Nagle sides with Fisher’s views that online communities have become problematic in their own right. Though I've been guilty of it myself in the past, I would now caution that these issues should be considered before diving straight into the psycho-sexual interpretations. These trends’ self-importance and intolerance of dissent led to a good deal of disillusionment of youth on the left and the right. As Nagle observes, if the left is to proceed, “it may be time to lay the very recent and very modern aesthetic values of counterculture to rest, and create something new. Let me explain - Nagle will throw out terms that either 1) have multiple meanings/uses, and she should identify how she uses the word and use it consistently, or terms that 2) she can't/shouldn't expect the audience to be familiar with in this sort of medium and should define when using it.

A reader can't expect you to present information completely or accurately if you say a game you've never played is shit, seemingly because you hate how you assume the game works based on a biased view of a person involved in making the game.But the key part of Nagle's argument is that the Tumblr-left and the alt-right are locked in a feedback loop where each group reacts to each other's perceived ridiculousness and become more entrenched in their own ideologies. We have been getting our arses kicked online, and people like Richard Spencer, Milo, and Steve Bannon have understood the power of populist narratives. Did the Vietnam War shape the ideologies and views of the left and right during the 60-70s that Nagle talks about? I think there are economic solutions to some of it but it also requires a major shift in the culture at this point.

An episode of the Fusion Networks' TV series Trumpland directed by Leighton Woodhouse was based on the book. Most important, she shows that psychological and economic analysis are complimentary rather than at odds. This online backlash was able to mobilize a strange vanguard of teenage gamers, pseudonymous swastika-posting anime lovers, ironic South Park conservatives, anti-feminist pranksters, nerdish harassers and meme-making trolls whose dark humour and love of transgression for its own sake made it hard to know what political views were genuinely held and what were merely, as they used to say, for the lulz. These obscure online political beginnings became formative for a whole generation, and impacted mainstream sensibilities and even language.

Thus there are hundreds of genders, Marxist universalism is misogynist, and effacement of agency requires reparations through any number of micro-payment platforms. At least since the disclosure book "Fire and Fury" by Michael Wolff about the conditions in the White House in this country waves high , we know how chaotic and haphazard the current president of the superpower USA leads his government. Think of any progressive intellectual of any significance from the last century and try to imagine them surviving today. Like Nagle, I am perhaps overly familiar with the forms of online discourse she describes; and that she was able to do so so accurately makes me trust her on everything else - for instance, on the fascinating history of how representations of "the mainstream" have been gendered.