Ten years ago I would not have predicted that geek culture would plunge the world into political chaos.

So much of the alt-right grew out of online geek culture (GG is a good example). Which I guess makes sense b/c it’s a group of ppl who feel like outsiders but are in fact quite privileged (white, male, str8). And we all know what happens when you make white str8 men feel even slightly disenfranchised.

A layer the media has not picked up on is the gamification of the alt-right. It is a game played for nihilistic pleasure. Every woman, POC, queer, trans person intimidated – every social justice space ‘infiltrated’ – scores points for the nerd nazis. Geek culture was perfect breeding ground for this. Like geeks intensely nostalgize the media culture of their youths, so too the altright. It became easy to like a nostalgia for media culture to a nostalgia for nationalist culture. Both are reactions to a rapidly changing world.

Geek culture is also an intensely male-centric space (despite or perhaps bc of it’s slightly effeminate stature in the wider culture). The Hussy once quipped that the only gender binary that mattered anyone was Tumblr vs. Reddit. Which is so real and relevant to this. Reddit and the chans, w/their male-centric and game-ified trolling cultures, gave birth to the bastard child that is the alt-right.

That nazi-who-gets-punched actually hit on something when he said that neonazis don’t like him. We’re dealing with a v diff demographic. The geek alt-right stuff is not coming from the uneducated rural working class whites – it is coming from educated white nerds. These are guys who work in STEM. At least, this was who originally started it (GG, etc.). Now it’s snowballed up all kinds of other opportunistic white nationalists. We have a bunch of identifiable groups who previously wouldn’t have spoken to each other forming a coalition of awful. I think that maybe be separating out each group we can find strategies best suited to countering their particular brand of terrible.

It’s fascinating in a way bc so much of the geek culture is about resisting fascism. But these men’s nostalgia for their uncritical childhood takes (“cool explosions! space travel!”) blinds them to this. Don’t “not ALL gamers!” at me.  Of course it is not all individual geeks. But this subculture is what gave birth to the alt-right. The sneering way the left dismisses the alt-right as uneducated is simply not the case, which I guess is one of the points I’m making here.

The Gaters are really the direct antecedents of the current alt-right. The Gate is how they learned to organize, gameify harassment, etc. GGate was where this generation of white right-wingers became radicalized. I’m not even sure they’re accurately described as rightwing. Many are essentially apolitical but find it fun to relax into racist tendencies. And I think that’s why we have particular difficulty reaching them: we’re trying to convince them of politics but they are apolitical. They don’t actually care about politics: they’re using it as a game and as a tool for lashing out about their feelings of disenfranchisement. A lot of this is classic trauma behaviour also: many of them were bullied as kids and now are getting “revenge of the nerds” via same tactic. But instead of lashing out at the power structures that created their trauma, they’re lashing out at the ppl they think threaten their power.

Sarah Schulman’s Conflict is Not Abuse is basically a roadmap for how this type of thinking works, if you’re interested in learning more.