HOW THE INTERNET HAS CREATED A SWAMP OF VERY LOUD SHEEP

by Ann Sterzinger

If you’re a digital native, you probably have no idea what genuine loneliness is. Before you get off my lawn, let me finesse that: back during the analog age, if you were a freak or a weirdo, you were a freak or a weirdo. Period.

THE ALT-RIGHT AND THE DIALECTIC OF "HYPERREALITY"

by Alex Fontana

There have been a slew of articles lately that have been fumbling around trying to get a hold on this thing we call the “Alt-Right.” Good luck with that! Many of these have been reactionary pieces for mainstream ed-ops. The most notable was by the part-Jewish homosexual Milo Yiannopoulos, who has taken it upon himself to wear the mantle of Alt-Right pundit.

WHITE SURVIV(IRL) OR AUSCHWITZ OF THE INTERNET?

Image courtesy of the Daily Stormer.

by Colin Liddell

This is going to be a serious article about The Daily Stormer and much more important related issues. No, really! It is. Of course, any article about what is in fact just a troll site is going to have to struggle to be serious, but I have steeled my heart and girded my loins for that struggle.

First off, let’s deal with my previous article, as it managed to trick most people. It was—in case you hadn't realized—a deferential tribute to the actual style of The Daily Stormer. Imagine my surprise and trollish joy when not only the low-tier supporters of the Stormer, the famous troll army, but the Anglins and the chief Anglin himself reacted with the same kind of buttchappery that they try to inflict on their own targets.

HOW GOOGLE DESTROYED THE INTERNET

by Brett Stevens

The internet was created to resolve a simple problem: in communications networks, any central node through which all messages passed was vulnerable to attack or takeover. To counter this, engineers designed a network where any node would pass messages to other nodes, routing around any damage.

Then came commerce and the democratization of the internet.

Under this model, frightened sheep flock to certain central sites that provide the services they need, and avoid everything else, lest it be politically incorrect or upsetting.

SOCIAL MEDIA: FREAKSHOW FOR THE ANTISOCIAL

by Colin Liddell

The internet has revolutionized the media of the West, and – because "the medium is the message" – it has also radically skewed our culture in new and unexpected directions. Before its advent the media was much more centralized. As a result, it tended to favour a corporatist approach along with small ‘c’ conservative values.

But now things have changed. Social media has become the driving engine of the "new media" and a major determinant of the news and opinion agenda. Those sites and publications that have adjusted themselves to this new clickbait reality are burgeoning. The rest are withering.

But has anyone besides Facebook (!) stopped to think about this in a systemic way? The old, centralized media naturally favoured the message of its paymasters and tended to project their values, but how about the new decentralized media with its powerful social media component? How does that work?

EMOPOLITIKAL DOMINANCE AND THE GEOPOLITICIZATION OF THE INTERNET

Some smart phones protesting with their human carriers.

by Colin Liddell

Back in February, around the time of the Sochi Winter Olympic Games, I wrote an article Let the Internet Clone Wars Begin.

The point of the article was that America, either as a conscious entity or as an unfocused manifestation of its evil essence, exerts an undue amount of its power through its internet hegemony; and that any nation, civilization, or ideology determined to stand up to this, needs to construct its own alternative systems.

CLICKBAIT COUNTRY

by Jack Donovan

You may or may not be old enough to remember when the Internet was a new thing, but for a long time, web pages were not considered “credible” sources. If you were a serious person trying to make a serious point, you cited books, academic journals, established magazines and venerable old newspapers.

NO HATE SPEECH!

                                                         

(Of course, THIS isn't "hate speech"...)

 

by Jack Grant

How would you like to fight the new secret war, taking on the enemies of the new multicultural, borderless Britain one social media website at a time?

Here's your chance to join the Britain's most well-funded secret army as a professional left-wing troller!

Such is the message – effectively – in this job advert for a Clapham based NGO called International Alert which styles itself as an "international peace building" outfit and apparently spends most of its time interfering in the Third World. But now it has sniffed out an another source of money available from the European Union for "combating hate speech".

LET THE INTERNET CLONE WARS BEGIN

by Colin Liddell

Back in the dark old days of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was challenging America's unearned global supremacy, there was nothing that the Soviets wouldn't do to win. As an admittedly more backward country, this involved copying and, in fact, stealing a lot of ideas from the West. A wide range of Soviet products were simply clones of Western ones.

The Makarov 9mm Pistol was a rip-off of the German Walther 9mm Ultra, the Soviet Gaz Mini Truck was a Ford AA truck without the Ford logo, the Tupolev TU-4 bomber was simply a steal of the Boeing B-29, and the Vyatka moped, was an all too humble tribute to the mighty Vespa. The list is endless.

THE GREAT WORDFLATION

Words before they escaped from the monastery.

by Colin Liddell

If I could write this article without words I would, because, by employing more of the squiggly little things, I am being complicit in “The Great Wordflation,” that great clogging of the mental arteries, or that stimulus to ignorance that you encounter when you see another yet another 10000-word-plus essay on the internet, written by someone with a pen name detailing their personal path to enlightenment.

Matching the great inflation of the money/credit/debt supply and the great outpouring of cheap, mass produced consumerism that has characterized our era, we have also seen The Great Wordflation. It seems only fair to assume that they are somehow all marching in lock step towards some mutually agreed cataclysmic point.