Kill all normies by Angela Nagle***
Reading dates: 5 September – 25 November 2017
I chose this for my Dialectical Materialism book group and the discussion was vivacious, when not debauched. This is a book I am glad I have read but, at the same time, I wish I had not. It explains a lot about how the current world operates and why it does the way it does. It shows how the right has managed to congregate and form relatively coherently online through 4chan + but it shows the despair and the hatred of the alt-right, as well as the vacuity of the left and its ‘sour-faced identitarians’ of Tumblr. Few on the left seem to be thinking about society as whole, about the ever growing economic inequality, about the systemic issues we face. Reading the chapters on misogyny and gamergate was very hard, and those about Men Going Their Own Way and the involuntary celibates, frankly quite sad.
Nagle’s analysis is not deep but it is deep enough to explain the now without any hindsight. She links the right to Nietzsche and the left to Judith Butler and explains the problems of both sides. No solutions are given and the most despairing read was the conclusion, which opens with the death of Mark Fisher, whom I much admired and invited to speak in Glasgow. I agree with Nagle that Fisher was one of the most lucid voices of the left, maybe the person who might have been able to offer ways out of this current scary pickle, but he is not in this world anymore. No one has come to occupy his place.
