Angela Nagle’s new book, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right, was an interesting and surprising read. I’m not familiar with Nagle’s previous work, and to be honest I get a little lost when it comes to book-sized writing on what I assume is more political than philosophical. And, truthfully, the words “4chan” and “Alt-Right” in the subtitle made my skin crawl as I had flashbacks to the few, naive occasions that I’ve convinced myself to leave the shallow end of the internet swimming pool and almost immediately drown is the deep end of depravity. Seriously, 4chan is gnarly.

Megan, my fiance, picked the book up for herself and told me that I might enjoy its curious contents, though she hadn’t read it yet. So, despite my apprehensions I gave it a read. I enjoyed the book very much as it dealt with online subculture history and critical theory than act as a political treatise. I assume that focus on the culture aspects and moments of critical theory is also why it has drawn some negative feedback for making loosely academic, rather than political, arguments and conclusions. Additionally, those who have suffered injury from the words of Milo Yiannopoulos may find the continuous focus on him tiring.

Regardless of your own alignment, and thoughts about the characters and platforms within, Nagle presents enough inspection and exposition to take the ideas presented with serious consideration as we approach (or already exist in) a new age of cultural and political wars.

While the book contains a number of concepts that I found insightful to consider, in addition to an open-ended musing for conclusion, there are three main themes that I found to be most compelling to my own perspective and understanding. I also included a tangent of thought I had on the simplification of our political alignments. These are included below and represent my own interpretation of the themes and ideas behind them. If you want to have a more comprehensive look, take a read of the book itself.

As Nagle establishes early, there was once (and still is in some places) a core belief that the “leaderless digital revolution” would break down “traditional powers” to bring a new era of equality through collaboration and transparency. However, this actually also gave way to the “leaderless digital counter-revolution,” a term one could loosely wrap around the Alt-Right and related sub-cultures.

One of the big insights for me was the acknowledgement of the Alt-Right and Alt-Light as players in a cultural war rather than specifically in politics. While the Alt-Right appears active in the political realm, more strictly speaking, parts of the Alt-Right and the whole of the Alt-Light use their narratives and platforms as cultural weapons.

Though this may have been obvious to some, I would walk back to a political understanding of people like Richard Spencer, Milo Yiannopoulos and even Donald Trump. Whereas the real philosophical threat they pose is as cultural warriors. Trump, and others can absolutely do political and institutional damage, but the kernel of their power is culturally driven, and it is positioned against the left’s progressive wins of the last few decades and the canonization of these values. Nagle deems them “Gramscians” as Antonio Gramsci thought that political change followed cultural change.

This speaks directly to how the left must approach the problems they face today. It often feels as though we platform from a political views to solve cultural needs, while we should be asking how to best drive a cultural change that can unify our political needs.

Nagle spends considerable time and thought on the ideas of conformity and transgression. Both as modes of the current cultural movements and those of the past. She makes some pretty provocative comparisons of some parts of the left during the civil rights movements of the 60s to 4chan and other subculture online communities of today. This comparison is not on content or morality, but in the scope of transgression. 4chan, for instance, being an extreme and upsetting forum of transgression from both the prudence of the conservative right and the identity politics of the left.

I found this thought very intriguing and began to assemble my own orienting ideas around conformity, transgression, progressivism and traditionalism. These 4 poles are not specifically talked about in ‘Kill All Normies,’ however this framework adds a layer of dimension to the popular simplification of the left and the right.

Below is how our cultural tends to talk about the figures we see in the Alt-Right, Alt-Light and even within the ranks of the different subcultures of the left. We place all ideas and acts on a scale of a single line from one oversimplified concept to what we see as it’s “opposing idea.” We are often left confused by this or frustrated, mainly because politics is not this simple and cultural is even less simple, with many dimensions of comparison and opposition.

As I said above, Nagle never directly identifies an axis, and perhaps doesn’t agree with the representation below at all, but this was a thought I had in trying to understand and represent the cultural dimensionality of the Alt-Right, the “Tumblr left,” Twitter activism, Trump, and so many others. The significant difference here, I believe is understanding that this is more about cultural values than political position. There is also another important aspect, which is that the axis’s center-point would actually shift on any specific issue based on the context and the surrounding culture. This is because all four poles are actually relative to how they are applied. What is progressivism now, will be traditionalism later; what is conformist tomorrow may be transgressive today.

I’m unsure if this visual consideration and axis actually help me do a good job in considering current cultural wars and ideologies, but it seems to provide a more powerful way to prioritize my own perspectives and figure out what is in direct conflict and potentially aligned conflict with my contemporaries.

Once again, this axis is my own tangent and not specifically part of the book.

There is a lot of intriguing and informative thought throughout the book, mixed with historical aspects of online subcultures and opinions by the author. I felt like the text contained valid and necessary arguments that juxtapose the left’s own values against the transgressive ends of the Alt-Light and Alt-Right while maintaining that those groups are still morally corrupt and depraved. In a way, this criticism is not to say “the left is also just as bad” as much as it is to enable and understanding of this movement and equip us for this ongoing cultural war.

It’s very easy to dismiss the comparisons and criticisms in Nagle’s book if you believe that the moral high ground is yours. But the reality is that the moral high ground will soon be under water if it isn’t already.