While gender non-conformism is nothing new … this is part of the creation of an online quasi-political culture that has had a huge and unexpected level of influence. A guy who was chanting ‘build a wall’ and ‘lock her up’ is so appealing to them and so shocking to the rest of society,” she says. Nagel roughly describes the landscape of this kind of online culture — though it would be hard to imagine any description being more than rough, given the broad scope and nearly limitless iterations present in wider online political spheres — covering sites like 4chan, Reddit, and Tumblr and exploring how they became what they are today.

We’ve inherited this avant-garde sensibility where we value shock and transgression but when those aesthetic sensibilities are at their peak with fascists, at that point you have to say, ‘Hasn’t this outlasted its usefulness? As Trump marched into the White House, terrified liberals scrambled to learn about a demonic new political force known as the alt-right.To explain how we got here, Nagle takes us back to that optimistic moment in the early 2010s, when it seemed like a ‘leaderless digital revolution’ would enable the masses to rise up via social media and overthrow oppressors. Nagle’s commentary on these phenomena is vapid, sensationalist, and even uncomfortably close to centrist ‘ horseshoe theory’ ideas, but I will try to focus here on Nagle’s analysis of neo-fascism in itself. Why persist with an ‘utterly empty and fraudulent’ ideal that ‘can characterise misogyny just as easily as it can sexual liberation’? In Nagle’s telling, we are living through the third phase of the culture wars, following those of the 1990s and the 1960s in which conservative forces tried – and signally failed – to impede the moral, sexual, and feminist revolutions led by liberals. Many liberals continue to echo the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs’ praise of social media as an engine of progressivist social change, but today it is Donald Trump rather than any egalitarian revolution that we readily associate with Twitter.

To imagine that all previous fascist movements have been stodgily conservative, and have styled themselves as such, betrays a peculiar ignorance of the history of fascism.The feminist side of the online culture wars has its equally geeky subcultures right through to its mainstream expression.