That bit on chan culture is fascinating, but I think is a bit incomplete. He’s totally right about how the structure facilitates groupthink consensus, but that doesn’t fully explain why the channer consensus is so insanely right wing and anti feminist. For example, 8chan had a straw poll, and their hypothetical legislature is 30% percent literal nazis. That’s almost twice the combined take (17%) of all the choices that could be considered left wing.
That channers are almost certainly mostly straight white men explains why the consensus, facilitated by the structure, ended up where it did. This is not to say if you put a bunch of us straight white dudes in a room together that we’ll all emerge as nazis, but that a monoculture can only breed a limited number of outcomes. The libertarianish mindset that delights in transgressing social taboos combined with unexamined privilege also helps steer the consensus to even narrower options. It is unsurprising that those who used racism/sexism/etc to troll for the lulz eventually swallowed that shit.
If one thinks transgressing taboos for free speech is an inherent good, being repeatedly banned because nobody wants to debate the merits of the Holocaust, becomes seeming evidence that these views might be right. That certain views that are widely held in contempt is not because they are objectively terrible ideas, but that these views have actual merit. Free speech absolutism tends to regard any sort of censorship (legislative, social, corporate, etc) as stemming from a hatred of free speech, not because some views are suppressed because they are literally dangerous to an open society. And the fact that these views prioritize straight white men, and are repeatedly banned for offensiveness makes them more attractive to the channer demographic. That they are being censored for who they are.
