I’m really surprised no reporters have traced the alt-right back to it’s original source. The Gamefaqs.com “Life, The Universe, and Everything” board.
CJayC quarantined them, and people moved on… a large chunk (basically, anyone with access to a credit card) went to SomethingAwful.
A group of weeaboos who were literally too fucked up for the SomethingAwful anime board then formed their own community, called 4chan, and later moved onto 8chan after 4chan banned invasions.
I don’t have a solution to offer, but what I see is a group of people who, like myself, escaped into video games because their lives had some sort of bad things going on. They kept drifting from community to community, their numbers winnowed as people got jobs and girlfriends and went off to college or simply got some therapy.
And the end result? They settled in places where there were no normal voices, fed off each other, and… well we’re seeing the result.
I’m not condoning their views at all. And I don’t have a good solution to the very real problem of abusive behavior. (I’m not going to distinguish between offline and online - life is life)
But I look back and wonder sometimes - if I hadn’t had some of the opportunities I had - access to mental health care, parents who helped with college… would I be sitting here on Boing Boing penning a missive about an obscure internet forum? Or would I be over on /pol/ whinging about cucks?
It’s a scary feeling, knowing you took a turn at some point, and if you hadn’t life could have gone differently.
Or maybe it wouldn’t have, and that’s the takeaway - you have to decide to be a better person, and once you do (and put in the work), you will be…
