It’s like, at first, it was relatively apolitical except maybe the New Atheists who got popular by criticizing the mostly right-wing religious nutjobs.
But then, I think around the mid-2010s, it started to get super political. Suddenly, everybody started to talk about how the evil wacky feminazi SJWs were trying to destroy gaming and our culture?
At this point, it seems like many people have snapped out of it and are making fun of these “anti-woke” crazies, but what materially caused this phenomenon to happen in the first place and why does it still persist to an extent?
I wouldn’t say that it has? At least not unilaterally.
I’d lay the blame squarely on capital’s doorstep. Capital runs most major internet forums, and capital decides which views are platformed and which are muted. Fascism and capital go hand in hand. Rage gets more clicks, which means more ad revenue.
We’re both on sites loaded with nerds who are comrades. Nerds are not at all inherently fascist. The terminally online are not inherently fascist. However, “Internet/Nerd culture” was doomed to become fascist when it became a packaged commodity. The most successful “nerds” were also the most ruthlessly capitalist. Wozniak vs Jobs and all that.
Inceldom also has a part to play in this, but, again, this is largely a product of capital. They’re useful idiots. Like LBJ put it, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” Lonely men are convinced women are to blame, that women are garbage, and they become clients and, frankly, weapons. There are a lot of lonely nerds out there thanks to the isolation that capitalism encourages.
You say this change happened in the mid-2010s; putting that in context, social media as we know it really only started taking off in the late oughts. Reddit and Facebook were like 2005-ish, and didn’t hit their strides for a few years. Facebook’s IPO was 2012. Capital.
And, finally, nobody’s immune to propaganda. It’s not just “nerd culture” that’s taken this turn, it’s a society-wide poison.
Honestly though, the direct direct direct answer to your question as phrased, “what caused internet/nerd culture to go full-on fascist [in the mid-2010s]?” is just GamerGate. That’s it. That was kinda the moment that all the right-leaning nerds who hated women that wouldn’t date them realized there were other right-leaning nerds that also hated women, and they very publicly organized around it, formed forums about it, and basically created the modern alt-right.
Before that, like, the loudest nerd voices on the internet were like Wil Wheaton whose core tenet was “Don’t be a dick”, and the loudly anti-copyright Cory Doctorow. They got drowned out by the forces of reaction.
Yep, gamergate, Steve Bannon and algorithms starting to trend towards the inflammatory.
Also the SJWs, hot off their cultural kill streak, finally extended too far with demanding pronouns. It’s ivory tower level privilege to demand the world bend around you, and then do it again, for every single person who identifies as whatever they feel like. The “I identify as an attack helicopter” really summed up the zeitgeist and capped the cultural narrative. That was the moment where the right crystalized into a mirror to point out the pronoun lunacy - and it absolutely is, if you think otherwise, get over yourself. Nowhere in anywhere, ever, do we see people just make ridiculous demands on people like that and it EVER work. Like, is every meet and greet, business networking party just gonna start with 2 hours of writing down everyone’s him/hers/zlers/swishes/a12x2 whatever nonsense? No. Never. Sorry. In a perfect world, maybe, but we got a lot of work to do before even that level of perfection can be reached, I’m not thrilled about it either.
>lemm.ee
>‘ivory tower level privilege’ (to request proper acknowledgement; when I know you’d throw a father-fucking fit if someone questioned your identity and where you deem yourself to fit within the social hierarchy)
>‘the right had a point’ (about it being ‘lunacy’ to request proper acknowledgement from crackers dead set on disrespecting those with alternate pronouns) (isn’t respect supposed to be a core tenet of fascist ideologies, you prick?)
>helicopter memes (yup, you’re just a fascist)
ok settler, go back to /pol/. Everyone who uses Outlook in my workplace has their pronouns at the bottom of their signature block, you’re just DELIBERATELY being a shithead.
