discoursedrome:

The Lowtax thing has a bunch of people coming out of the woodwork to talk about Something Awful, so I’m thinking about that now. I never used SA because I didn’t much approve of it, so take anything I have to say with a grain of salt, but I was surrounded by people who used it, and we’re all surrounded by the products of its existence, so it’s, I guess, relevant.

There’s a take people enjoy that’s like “SA got Trump elected by creating 4chan”, and that’s been trotted out for the occasion, and to be clear, this is a stupid take. There’s a real sense in which SA is responsible for 4chan, not just by kicking out the community that would go on to create it but also by defining the culture they took with them, a variant of the broader SA culture. But the chain of causality breaks down rapidly after that, and, like, the thing is: there are very few things about the modern world that SA can specifically be said to have caused. But almost the entire English-speaking Internet is downstream of SA. The influence was diffuse and indirect, but all-encompassing.

Anyway, my take on SA is basically: people who liked the site always advocated for it by saying that the heavy moderation lead to a higher quality of users and discussion – the argument was basically that it was the Singapore of the internet. The problem with this approach is that, in practice, SA was more like if Singapore was run by Trey Parker, Matt Stone, and the Kiwifarms people – it had a kind of “droog culture” that prefigured 4chan and was actually stronger in the staff than in the wider userbase, and while it prided itself on being more refined and tasteful than the rest of the Internet, in practice this boiled down to being the coolest and playing high school clique politics the best, which was IMO not a great fit for the level of authoritarianism involved. There was also just the fact that “banning people a lot leads to higher-quality discussion” was, while to some extent a real phenomenon, largely a happy accident – SA routinely banned people for really stupid reasons, and that’s because maximizing the number of people banned was central to their business model. That’s the opposite of what you want if you’re trying to run a site with strong norms, and all their other revenue sources were actively damaging to the site culture as well, so, like, it wasn’t great.

The weird combination of lumpen vandalism, haughty tastemaker shit, and posturing via competitive humour are really what I think define SA as a site, and they’re its gift to the larger internet culture – sure, you see something related from the alt-right, but you also see it from Harvard bluechecks; it’s everywhere so trying to trace specific “lineages” isn’t that interesting. If you want to talk about the site’s cultural influence in a deeper way than “look at all these seminal things that came from SA”, I really think it has to be about that sort of vague stylistic bequest.