I started this as a review of the book "It came from Something Awful" by Dale Beran, as part of my quest to understand online harassment in the context of Gamergate and the rise of alt-right. It turns out this topic overlaps with other points of interest right now, for instance the age-verification moral panic, and the TERF talking points of J.K. Rowling. This lead me to the question, what is this term "identity" we use so broadly, in such politically volatile phrases like "gender identity" and "identity politics".
The book describes the trajectory from 4chan to the first Trump administration. The author was also the executive consultant for the documentary "The antisocial network". Reading the book I was initially more interested in the early days of 4chan, rather than Beran's exercises with interpretations based on Herbert Marcuse and Hannah Arendt. I admit I skipped pages and pages of those, because I was bored to death, and his cursory semantic simplifications painfully sucked my mind void.
However on the second part I started disliking his work more and more. At some point he introduces the idea that Tumblr was 4chan's "evil sister". Beran although he is validating transgender people's identities seems to be squarely right wing and he discreetly shows his allegiance to the alt-right. So perhaps his simplistic semantics on consumerism and identity were not simply innocent exercises in critical theory, but could have the potential of being weaponized. If not the author himself then others certainly have done so. The modern fascist narrative has it that young people spend an excessive amount of time online, in echo-chambers that make them think they are cats and dogs, or "another gender than they really are", and there is an "epidemic" and a "social contagion", by the same people who don't believe neither in "germs" nor "such a thing as a society".
And it all boils down to that multifaceted word "Identity". It can be as specific as a government issue identifying document, or as vague as the contents of a troubled teen's diary (or online musing for that matter). As passing as a pop culture fad, or as stable a glorified national identity. Yet very few people have seriously tried to even define what it is.
Why does the right avoid the definition of identity?
The basis of the 4chan-Tumblr comparison was all about identity: the genetic pariah identity on one side, the one who has accepted and endorsed the narratives of masculine identity as a law of nature; on the other, the silly women who have endorsed what corporate marketing department had brainswashed them into: embracing different identities, exploring different identitites, wear and then toss different identities as decorative tags.
But what is identity? Is it a T-shirt with punk-band logo that we can one day just forget and put on the corporate uniform of "business casual"? A set of descriptive labels one ascribes to oneself? Or is it a deep sense of self-hood?
The right has investments in their own identities too. What about the masculine identity, often willing to kill if it is threatened, or national identity, that is ready to commit atrocities for matters of pride? Let's stay with national identity for a second. It requires nationalist schooling and a police state to inculcate. Enforcing a different national identity on anyone is broadly understood an act of cruel oppression. But the right is bound to eliminate everything "psychological", thus it needs to reduce national identity to a spontaneous expression of one's genes. This requires romantic narratives that reinforce the illusion of genetic continuity, and well defined racial groups as natural kinds. In the current climate of the anti-transgender moral panic we tend to forget that one of the greatest grievances of the right has been the abandonment of racial theories by anthropologists and historians alike. And in order to get back to their patriotic narratives they have no choice but to undo all science.
From debunked race science to MAGA political strategy
Debunked race science was quite popular on 4chan a decade ago, and now it is part of the fascist US Government's agenda. Beran hardly mentions the racism involved in the phenomena he discusses (for good measure, compare with the book "The Cruelty is the Point" by Adam Serwer, which makes the case that racism is the best explanation of the rise of Trump, and it is also written around Trump's first term). What is now hot in 4chan? Last week's special in '/sci/' was whether phrenology and physiognomy were "fine" sciences that were tossed away due to "political correctness". Many comments agree. This is typical. Psychology and psychiatry are painted as the greatest hoaxes and enemies, resounding the Nazi notions of "Jewish disciplines". Many people thought this to be unremarkable, sharing themselves the debunked premises of naive empiricism, until they were shattered too by the anti-science Trump administration, regardless of their status as disciplines of astrophysics, meteorology, climate change science, etc.
But it is also funny to read this book, which was written to explain Trump's first presidency, under the light of the recent revelations about 4chan's /pol/ origin and function. There is now evidence that Steve Bannon as a right wing strategist saw the potential of mass manipulation and contacted Jeffrey Epstein to introduce him to Christopher Poole. Poole very soon after that conceded to allow '/pol/', the neo-nazi, racist-science board that is now said that paved the way to the second term of Donald Trump. In fact some say that he was re-elected by the generation who were at one time the troubled, sexless teens finding their identity on 4chan. The author accounts for Steve Bannon's sponsoring of Milo Yiannopoulos as an early alt-right agitator, but he is unaware of how well connected Bannon was, and what was in fact generating the phenomena he describes.
Fascist strategists who want to manipulate teens into being recruited as their stormtroopers don't want them to read psychology. They don't want them to even think about identity exploration. They want them to think about a great past that was clean-cut and uncomplicated. They instill fear for the novel and the unknown. They cultivate the worship of a leading personality (The_Donald) as an expression of their own self. The author attributes the endorsement of Trump by the nihilistic youth on 4chan to his promise of "winning", that resonated well with those convinced they are losers. Heck, you don't want any of these sheeple going to fucking therapy, do you? (Some analysis suggests that No Nut November was also a fascist psy-op. Good authoritarians know that it is important to control sex in order to manipulate people.)
We should not forget we are talking about teens here. The author describles 4chan and Tumblr as opposites in the following way: The former, a counterculture suspicious of the assimilation of every other counterculture by corporate marketing departments. So suspicious that it denied all values (1990s nihilism leading to the aughts "layers of irony"). The latter (Tumblr goes to college), privileged customer on route for the next reshuffle of the middle class, Karening the fuck out of their universities to cater to their self-serving values, just like customers asking for fancy tops on their expensive fair-trade coffee, rejecting the expensive commodity if it is not exactly to their liking.
Theories of Identity
There is no real treatment of the notion of identity, and it is no accident that there is a fair amount of psychological theory on identity. For instance older theories have it that (self) identity crisis is a developmental stage, emerging in adolescence, and resolution of said crisis can take different forms: among which foreclosure - endorsing a given identity; moratorium - extended exploration of identities and difficulty committing to one; and other states of identity, but I cite as most relevant the ones the author implies by his descripton of 4chan versus Tumblr. So, for example, Lily Alexandre recently revisited her 2021 video about the "millions of dead genders" of Tumblr. The extended vocabulary of genders is a matter of what fits best, and what grows on each person. (For instance "trans girl" has no real semantic difference from "transgender woman", it is just preferred by some people and not by others, as a self-descriptor). We have also seen the understanding of identity as a "set of self-descriptor labels" in another essay: The one on Hans Georg Moeller, who also hinted to the same problematic notion of "social contagion due to being extremely online" and over-obsessing with labels. As Alexandre points out, being trans and/or gay, and/or autistic, comes with doubt, denial, and other coping mechanisms, and young people coming to terms with their body and their gender might have given rise to this extended vocabulary. And that's OK. We need those safe spaces for people to figure themselves out.
The case for assertively protective third places
Gender diverse youth (but also youth in the spectrum, youth going through trauma and mental health issues, youth in high risk homes, and others) can go through exploration, and internet communities will provide a safe space for exploration, for which there is a healthy amount and a less healthy amount. Support networks both on- and off- line are critical determinants of what this amount is. Discussing Tumblr, the author makes the void argument that the "radical acceptance of all identities" is as bad as 4chan's toxicity.
Radical acceptance is a prerequisite for both safety and growth. And his argument, typically a last resort of teacher's pets in philosophy lectures, takes the form of the self-referential paradox: "Boohoohoo. They don't accept those who are not radically accepting every identity". Some journalist wrote a couple years ago stated that GenZ is the most accepting of LGBT. "But they are intolerant of those who are not as acccepting, and this is a paradox they are unwilling to acknowledge. Curious. We are very intelligent". Well, all these people missed a critical lesson in logic: self-referential propositions are prohibited (Russel & Whitehead). And a lesson in history: If you let the intolerant in, you will have a nazi bar (Karl Popper, paraphrased by me).
You see the results: radical acceptance leads to places like Blahaj. Safe no matter what. If you want to be safe you can go there. Live and let live, or get the fuck out. 4chan, on the other hand, chased out furries and other weird subcultures, ostracized Anonymous as too leftist, to end up being manipulated into being a literal nazi bar celebrating the suicides of trans people. And serving as a breeding ground for the global rise of fascism. Yet the author presents perceived safety as a matter of "feelings", devoid of the scientific "reason" that is needed in academic departments. "This is unsafe because we say we feel unsafe", he says.
Milo Yiannopoulos and the manufactured free speech crisis in academia
The author is somewhat lenient to the academic educators, but he thinks should use their authority to reprimand the rowdy students. Their hesitation, Beran says, is understandable because they regularly debate fine points and often have to shift their previously held beliefs under the light of new arguments and/or evidence. However this isn't by accident. Rather it is the exact series of paradigm shifts that have cause academia to "have a liberal bias". This is the very process fascists want to undo, and the real reason they are not simply anti-democracy but inherently anti-science. It goes back to first principles. Nevertheless not all cognitive shifts are created equal, but as soon as they happen in the realm of the social or the psychological, the fascist crowd will find a strong advocate in these very same departments: the privileged, male-dominated, and aggressively gatekeeped "hard" sciences, echoing the sexist "reason/feelings" antithesis.
Many forget that before the manufactured "free speech crisis" around Yiannopoulos or TERFs at campuses, we had agitators like UCSB's Tooby and Cosmides and neoliberal talking head Daniel Dennet fighting "Science Wars", way before "Culture Wars", brandishing a hardcore flavor of rape-enabling genetic determinism and social darwinism, targeting social studies and humanities, and attacking population genetics for challenging the notion of race. As early as the Reagan era, the right has been targeting universities, considered as breeding grounds for Democratic voters, legislators and judges, in their strive to achieve total deregulation and corporate unaccountability.
Your critique of identity politics can be either radical or just concern trolling
But the author takes a "vantage centrist" position. Let's forget all this relevant background. Let's not go deep into what cognitive shifts in science are. Let's not go too deep into all this. Let's stay on online youth subcultures, 4chan and Tumblr. It was the latter, according to him, that "went to college". But he poses as a serious journalist, who has outgrown 4chan, and had a brief passage through Tumblr, before getting himself a college education. He distances himself from the toxic cesspool. He uses extravagant and outlandish specimen of college identity politics as straw-men ("are babies dressed up as Mulan racist?"), saying that there are serious problems of social injustice that are neglected. "Identity politics" is painted as simply performative despite the fact that he is literally writing about the Black Lives Matter era, and the discussion around systemic injustice was everywhere. Most notably it was the subject of critical race theory, a future target of another right wing moral panic, which served as a preliminary stage of Trump's second term.
On that account, he is not different from this pick me girl, who says to her primarily young white male audience: "Anyone remembers cultural appropriation? What was that about? No one talks about it now" and "you put the real issues under the table" by whitewashing your speech. And they are right to an extent: Identity politics is not even left-wing, and it is whitewashing inequality. Media representation and vocabulary can only go so far.
But people like these make a misleading argument that can appeal to feelings of social injustice in anyone: There are real problems and we are just covering them up. Then are you folks ...radicals? You want to tackle on systemic racism and sexism on the institutional level, and you think political correctness is hypocrisy? So are you organizing a general strike? Are you following the leadership of black trans women in organizing said general strike? (No, you think these are just made-up labels, save the racial supremacy).
What do you do about those "Real issues" then? Are you urban guerillas? Probably just whining about political correctness ruining comedy, appropriating the term free-speech to justify bullying and other oppressive speech and non-speech acts.
This concern trolling by the alt-right is a very insidious stance to take, and one I could never see without the weight carried by the dismissive and expansive use of the term "political correctness" that you can now find everywhere. In the end of the day, these tirades conclude that the "problems", never named as systemic racism and sexism are to big or too embedded to tackle with. It is like they're saying "At best we should go-slow about them, for the time being do-nothing, not even using verbal assurances that we acknowledge these disparities are really there. This makes us free thinkers."
Wait. Where do these methods come from?
There are some serious questions on demographics here. Are all our problems really down to a couple million NEETs? Then there are the methodological issues. This idea of identity crisis as a manifestation of capitalist consumerism flows around in sociology.
The argument goes, in the medieval times you had less identity crisis, then you have post-WW2 fears of nuclear annihilation, and many more roles you can choose from due to the technology advancements. Then you also have counterculture and you can choose an identity that is utterly adversarial to the mainstream society you grow up in, although there is a lot of interest in these fields to show that after all the home culture is inescapable and all foreign or opposing elements are assimilated by it.
These methods claim they focus on the systemic instead of reducing macro phenomena to the individual. But what they really do is analyzing the society as if it was an individual in-therapy, or taking an idealized individual and interpreting its meaning-making, or even taking oneself as the specimen, a product of their own culture, and presenting their own meaning making as a general one. I am not trained in sociology, but these are the options I have seen in practice in similar studies.
As far as his academic endeavor is concerned, I think his treatment of counterculture is incomplete unless he outlines the definition and characteristics of "identity". Caelan Conrad dissects a segment in Rowling's manifesto that leads many people to claim that she is a trans man in denial, and gay shows that the excerpt in question is masterfully crafted to frame the very definition of being trans as a manifestation of teenage angst, and therefore forming a circular argument. Rowling's obvious sleight of hand is that it leaves out gender identity and gender dysphoria, therefore comparing apples and oranges: trans teenagers are not anxious cis teenagers. A hint at trans men being women trying to escape patriarchy and taking the bait of "transgenderism". Central in Rowlings argument, and by extension all transphobes, and it is a denial of identity, a denial that trans people exist, and this has several vile consequences in itself: that trans people should be eliminated and those pushing the idea of gender identity are enemies of the state. Scary stuff!
Conrad points out that if identity is something deeply engendered with the self, and it is very important to correctly develop and protect, or it is a superficial optics and style endeavor that you can turn on and off. If identity is profound and permanent, no cis person can ever be tricked into being trans. The infamous Money experiments, often weaponized by the right, can in fact be read as evidence of the permanence and inevitability of some innate gender identity. And vice versa. If identity is not permanent and escape-able, then cherished religious and national identities can also be trivial and temporary. This is an endgame for the whole philosophical outlook of right-wingers. But there is a timing parameter to it as well. Young adolescents will explore their identities and gender diverse or gay and queer youth will exist, and if they don't have safe third places for it you will just have a medieval and/or fascist society.
What does this mean for self identity
Identity exploration by gender diverse young people has lead to a new moral panic that is bleeding through to legislation for age verification and mass censorship. As they did with the bathroom moral panic, advocates dismiss this panic with the (correct but understated) fact that exploration does not make kids queer, it just provides more broad and appropriate vocabulary to get know oneself. Yes, but this goes over the heads of the legislators and PTAs. There is a moral panic that will lead to censorship of places like the Fediverse, criminalization or de facto elimination of safe spaces. We now see the first steps of using the detransitioner playbook for autistic people, targeting another demographic whose lives are supported by these spaces.
Foreclosure, the fascist brand of approved adolescence identity, is going to be force-fed to us, as a route to the romanticized 1950s. There is an army of Brownshirts out there called ICE, and soon diverse identity and expression of any kind will be targeted, shoving all normalized people into non-pseudonymous, corporate platforms where each and everyone of their beliefs and attitudes will be algorithmically surveyed and manipulated. This is why it is important to scrutinize and read between the lines of similar white male authors pushing the ideas supporting and refining the premises of right-wing media circuses and moral panics, by diluting nuances and popularizing strawmen.
Their work is silently influencing a number of oblivious centrists and inoculates them to more nuanced analyses provided by activists and advocate organizations, thus establishing a silent majority that will stand on the fence in such critical legislations as trans youth health care and age-verification. Behind the petite-burgeois annoyance of multiple gender labels on niche social platforms, there is a similar reactance to multiple music genre labels. "This is too much information for me, I miss the simpler times when there was only rock, pop, disco, and jazz". The only difference being, if you apply your simplistic attitude to identity normalization you have a rotten, prescriptive society that crushes people for being different. Which is what the MAGA right wants.
