Wooooo, doggie! This one's a doozy! The books title is accurate, it did come from something awful, figuratively and literally as this is the name of an early shit-post site. This is a phenomenal overview of the worst the internet has to offer, at least on whole-sale markets (it's not the most deranged stuff out there but it's the worst a normal person would encounter). I cannot recommend this book enough for everyone except the tech literate people who were involved in this from the beginning. I'm of the age that I heard about or saw a lot of this happen, but I didn't quite know how they all strung together. This book connects the dots for you and the picture it draws is both amazing and frightening.
I'll use one example to illustrate: Pizza Gate. I'm sure most everyone has heard of it but . . . WHY??! How did this become a thing? Why are the easily influenced convinced there are democrats sexually abusing and/or eating children in the basement of a pizza parlor?! Where did this insane idea come from and why does anyone think it's real? This book spends a good time on the details and you should read it for them, but it boils down to crass people on the internet getting around auto-flagging of banned topics, like child porn, by abbreviating it to CP. Then making unappealing jokes about other things that could have the same abbreviation, like cheese pizza. Hillary Clinton's hacked/leaked emails discuss ordering cheese pizza (literal pizza) and the scuzzy internet trolls joke about her ordering CP. Some sad sap that doesn't understand trolling, sarcasm, or shit posting sees the reference and believes this is a legitimate conspiracy instead of (mostly) horrible people making a really untasteful joke. Sad Sap spreads the word and suddenly a whole cohort of people who grew up without the critical judgement skills necessary to evaluate the legitimacy of what they read on the internet are frothing at the mouth to stop the sexual assault of hundreds or thousand of children in the non-existent basement of a pizza restaurant. (The peak irony is that many of these people are the same ones who monetarily support the Catholic church, which DOES have a history of sexually assaulting children.) Spoiler alert: someone actually stormed this restaurant loaded down with a lot of firepower to "save the children" only to discover there is no basement/backroom.
And this situation happens over and over again, until we get to the point of actually influencing elections! Fascinating. Sad. Bizarre. Fluid. This book really should be read by everyone for basic on education on the sociology of internet culture.
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