Read it with a critical eye, and it's something of a tragi-comic masterpiece for people who have wallowed too much amongst the internet meme-factories but still retained a flicker of hope.

He actually talked to people involved, not just founder figures like “Lowtax” Kyanka, “Moot” Poole, and Fredrick Brennan, but everyday, anonymous users of the boards. When Hefner abandoned his own domestic, wage-earning existence and created the image of the single playboy, he fashioned an alternative masculine role. Hell, if you want to blame the internet for the many weaknesses of today’s left, tumblr wouldn’t be where I’d look- I’d look at Twitter, which Beran does little with, mostly treats as a neutral medium. It’s probably also valuable if you’re trying to understand the mentality of the people who have been radicalized towards the alt right and how and why that movement felt natural or appealing in the sorts of online cultures where it began to flourish. But some commentators who I take reasonably seriously took this seriously, and for a while I was trying to keep up with altright-explainers, so I figured I’d give this late entry a try.

Further, his writing seems often dismissive of the concerns raised by activists whose beliefs he assigns to Tumblr culture. I absolutely recommend reading this book if the above doesn't put you off, and ideally with a group to really parse out its content. For example, Beran only spends a couple paragraphs discussing the Anonymous raid on right-wing message board Stormfront, which literally brought the Nazis to 4Chan. But Beran goes back, back to the early days of the internet, and before then to the idealism and radicalism of the 60s. We’re franker about the state of the world now, and 4chan’s “lol nothing matters” spoofing is partly responsible.

this book really traces the pathway from the emergency of image boards in Japan to Q, although it doesn't quite get to 2021 Q (for obviously reasons aka publishing date). Beran is erudite in his approach though, and the content is four stars—perhaps it could have been more in-depth, and it's not always clear how intimately tied to the subject are the theorists and pieces of media referenced by the author, as with Jean-Paul Sartre's fundamental concept that "existence precedes essence" in relation to Tumblr. The Beats were dismissed as insubstantial “Beatniks,” vibing out on nothing, just as the Beats accused the conformist “squares” of doing.I stayed to confirm my suspicions that there was something off about the way the world reacted to me—the old 4chan slogan, “tits or GTFO,” directed at any female person on the platform, cleared things up fast. One of the themes that has been recurring in all of my reading is the power of social media in spreading ideology and misinformation, and the role of 4chan in all of this cannot be underestimated.