Kill All Normies – with Angela Nagle
16 November 2017 | LIBRARY London, London, UK
Virtual Futures presents Angela Nagle in conversation on her new book, Kill All Normies: Online culture wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the alt-right.
Angela Nagle untangles the new culture wars raging on the internet: on the one side the “alt right”, which ranges from white separatist movements, to geeky subcultures like 4chan, to more mainstream manifestations such as the Trump-supporting gay libertarian Milo Yiannopolous. On the other side, so-called ‘social justice warriors’, whose progressive, identity politics fuelled campaigns are often seen as little more than virtue signalling and also associated with closing down debate by claiming offence, using the therapeutic language of trigger warnings and safe spaces.
She will join us to explore the cultural genealogies and past parallels of these styles and subcultures, drawing from transgressive styles of 60s libertinism and conservative movements, to make the case for a rejection of the perpetual cultural turn.
Angela Nagle’s work has appeared in the Baffler, Jacobin, Current Affairs, the Irish Times and many other journals. She has been interviewed on Channel 4, on the Chapo Trap House podcast and a host of US and international radio shows. Her book Kill All Normies: the online culture wars from 4chan and tumblr to Trump and the alt-right has earned her the title “an old leftist’s idea of what a young leftist should be” by her detractors and “one of the brightest lights in a new generation of left writers who have declared independence from intellectual conformity’ by her champions.
In conversation with Luke Robert Mason (Director, Virtual Futures).