As Angela Nagle notes in her influential (though controversial) work on this scenario, the unifying thread here us “an anti-PC impulse and a common aesthetic sensibility” that has developed into an elaborate and recognisable “anti-PC cultural politics” (Nagle 2017: 21). Traditionalism, nationalism, threatened (or toxic) masculinity, and racism (whether colour-blind or explicitly white supremacist) are themes that characterise this first belligerent, but it is also possible to identify a more straightforward and less extreme form of hostility that holds the alliance together through a common enemy. Key players include the alt-right (and ‘alt-light’ celebrities), the ‘trad wives’, ‘Proud Boys’, and ‘incel’ movements, as well as mythological collectives animated by conspiracy theories (such as QAnon). On the one hand, we have a right-wing populist alliance that somehow holds together despite consisting of disparate forces with seemingly contrasting priorities. Though necessarily reductive, it is possible to identify two main belligerents in the culture wars, which are fought both in plain sight (through mainstream news outlets, television programmes, Twitter feuds) and in less visible or relatively closed online spaces (subreddits, Discord servers, Facebook groups, and so on).
It is in tandem with this that the so-called ‘online culture wars’ have risen – these being a key backdrop to the use of subcultural theory in internet studies (a literature which was considered in the previous post). Retrospectively, the early-to-mid-2000s looks like the era of peak neoliberal ‘Third Way’ politics, with the financial crash of 2008 the crest of the wave that eventually gave rise to left and right populisms – the Occupy movement, Brexit, Trump. Subcultural theory fell out of fashion in different political circumstances to those of today. However, I want to suggest that we also need to think about a horizontal axis if we are to bring our present situation into focus and think about alternative ways in which the concept of subculture can be redeployed. Her analysis portrays mainstream media and pop culture as the constitutive Other of deviant internet subcultures – a mainstream which comes to seem like the surface-level reservoir from which these quasi-subterranean, ‘underground’ trolling practices draw their resources and victims.
Although she acknowledges that ‘culture’ is not a unified, singular entity, Phillips contends that 4chan and similar online phenomena are defined by a dialectical relationship with a holistic cultural ‘mainstream’ nonetheless. Having surveyed and ruminated on the critiques of the term from the early-to-mid-2000s, Phillips (2015) decides to use it anyway in her study of androcentric shitposting and target trolling. Towards the end of the previous post, I highlighted the way in which Whitney Phillips recuperates the concept of subculture despite all its flaws and baggage. My email address is e dot c dot k dot spencer at bham dot ac dot uk. Contact Info: I would love to hear from you if you have questions & comments or would like to draw upon & cite material from this post.