My 2003-era writeup of Something Awful, which started as an undergrad paper in… anthropology? Sociology?

Never cared much. Had a friend in late ‘90s high school who posted as “Chaucer”, with a Cardcaptor Sakura sig, so I got some secondhand forum drama at lunch. Enjoyed the frontpage bits tho.

(That nostalgic accounts of the frontpage/forum era grant such prominence to the vidyanostalgia Seanbaby and X-Entertainment and none to the more gore/porn Stile Project… selective memory.)

Now, I don’t think our modern radical leftisms/rightisms actually originate with LF or /pol/, but it might be those memetic crucibles in which they were rendered generally intelligible enough to be viable.

All of which is pretext to say: if, when I wrote that node, you had told me a decade plus on that it would be an actual factor in American politics that the Something Awful/4chan rivalry had progressed to the point where they revived communism and fascism and were racing to overthrow the government, my responses would be

1. What? Get the fuck out.
and
2. Obviously

and I can’t guarantee they would run that order.

(Related: the view from the other side.)