I feel like slowly built up and came to an ugly head there and on the more “transgressive” spots on the internet.
& just as a conspiracy-themed sidebar here…
if you want to ever have a total “oh that makes sense in retrospect” moment: Encyclopedia Dramatica was founded by a National Nuclear Security Administration agent.
I should clarify that I’m posting from within my little tiny American bubble here, but yeah.
i think if you look back enough you can probably trace all of the biggest impacts on internet culture with real-life consequences in the 2000s/2010s they can all be traced back on a long enough timeline to SA, which is a really weird thing to think about.
QAnon (at least in its current form) doesn’t happen without 8ch which doesn’t happen without 4chan which doesn’t happen without 15-yr old moot getting mad at SA mods in 2003 and creating the original site by putting 2chan’s source code through a Japanese-to-English translator. So many big originators of “weird twitter” like Jon Hendren and @dril were just FYAD users. One of the guys killed in Benghazi, inexplicably, was a goon.
in 2020 i don’t really know what the site is about anymore or who it’s for, but I think a big (negative) influence on the internet was the adoption of that too-cool-to-care culture of calling anything or everything cringe, which isn’t necessarily endemic 2 just SA but certainly something I feel like slowly built up and came to an ugly head there and on the more “transgressive” spots on the internet.
i think bernie would have done exponentially better at the debates but i also think the right would make the current “he’s a radical leftist” redbaiting tactic they’re using on perc biden look like gentle critique
like a handful of trump ads conflating succdems with “radical marxist antifa extremists” and h would be looking at brainwashed 63 year old ex-fbi neocon posted outside bernie’s house with the heart attack gun. the fact that they’re getting any mileage with this “radical left” angle on oatmeal brained centrist biden is a testament to how fucked the overton window is at this point