weird: a brief online history

plus the "nunya business" standard

Like many millennials, I spent most of my early internet life on the Something Awful forums. I was never an active poster, but I was a solid lurker for a while, especially during that aimless period of time after I graduated college and realized that, despite my supposedly excellent education, I had no actual prospects beyond low-level office and retail work. I’m sure there were fun and cool things on the Something Awful forums, but mainly I just remember how much of the site was devoted to making fun of weirdos. These weirdos ranged from furries—a very popular target—to shoe fetishists, diaper fetishists, fat people, poor people, people who wore weird clothes to Walmart, and anyone else deemed sufficiently deviant and pathetic.¹ I laughed at these jokes, and sometimes joined in. I did this because it felt good: a release of tension, a sort of superior and self-annihilating joy. But one day when someone was making fun of furries for the thousandth time, posting pictures of suited-up bunnies and foxes sniffing each other at a furry conference, I realized that while furries might be considered unusual—in the sense of not being typical—they weren’t weird: or at least, they weren’t nearly as weird as the supposedly normal people who were spending enormous amount of time stalking them all over the internet. And not only was it weird to spy on harmless sexual fetishists for the purpose of screencapping images of them to post in a public forum, I was weird, for participating on any level. I logged off the site and pretty much never went back.

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“ The modern GOP's problem,” Barry Petchesky writes for Defector, “is that it's unsettlingly online.” There are multiple reasons why the right is so online, not the least of which is that the groyper conservatives—the extremely online and mostly younger set once called “alt right” or “new right”—largely got their start on particular message boards. 4chan, 8chan, Kiwi Farms, and other sites were essentially runoff from Something Awful: it’s where posters ended up when they finally crossed a line (usually slurs) and got banned. New cultures developed on these sites, even more devoted to viciousness and one-upmanship, rewarding whoever could do the best job making fun of social “deviants” in the nastiest imaginable language. And yet the 4channers/8channers/groypers etc. have often successfully disguised themselves as rebels and subversives. They are opposed to the “normies”: i.e., the happy mindless slaves of mainstream culture. But the groypers are really always oriented toward normality, not against it. They want to control and regulate everyone: they want the authority to decide what can be written off as deviant or praised as normal. They’re mad at the normies mostly for not being the right kind of normies: for not embodying an impossible fascistic ideal of family-centric, patriotic, cynical, violent, suburban/rural traditionalists, an ideal which of course the groypers rarely embody themselves.

Conservatism has always been to some extent about policing the unusual, pruning back the deviants (and deviance) of history. What I think we have with the relationship between groyper culture and the internet is a kind of feedback loop rather than some kind of a direct internet-to-conservative or conservative-to-internet pipeline.² Right-leaning people are already predisposed to act as the Normality Police; they thrive on the kinds of platforms that are designed to encourage the policing of normality. The right can’t actually “meme” (I don’t think I’ve ever seen a funny conservative meme) but they kind of are meme, in the sense that they rely on a crude mimetic understanding of other people and their position in a social hierarchy of approved behavior. They feed on memetic images and ideas, imagining that they’re growing stronger and more convincing to the normies with each new inside joke.

When the online right exposes themselves in front of actual normies, however, it really doesn’t work out, because the groypers are so fucking weird. They are so invested in policing normality that they can no longer tolerate slight deviations in perfectly ordinary behaviors like “laughing” and “having pets.” I know there’s some debate over whether the Harris campaign’s deployment of “weird” stigmatizes people who belong to “weird” subcultures, but I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of who and what actually qualifies as weird. People who are into non-standard cultural practices may sometimes be called weird, but they are usually not that weird. The groypers are fucking freaks. They are weird because they are obsessed with normality: they take no ownership of their own human strangeness at the same time as they try to police everyone else’s. I make a somewhat distantly related point in my upcoming book about how the far right is never actually angry that pop culture movies contain “political” messages: they’re mad that these movies don’t push conservative political messages. They want full control of the culture so that the normies can be propagandized to in exactly the right way, until all deviance is stamped out.

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One of my hopes for the Harris campaign—besides the obvious goal of winning and saving the republic from these groyper freaks—is that by shifting the definition of weird back into its proper context, it might also make online life a little more bearable. Conservatives thrive online (and have been devoured by it) because they’re a natural fit for the suburban I’m-just-trying-to-save-your-soul spying that defines so much online interaction,³ but they’re hardly the only ones who engage in it. Normies—which is to say, everybody—also spend an undue amount of time getting all up in each other’s business. Lots of people, online and IRL, spend a huge amount of time being weirdly obsessed with behavior that may be strange or non-normative, but is often not actually harming them or anybody else.

I would like to propose a “nunya business” standard, by which if you see something online (or IRL) that strikes you as deviant, you ask yourself, “is this any of my business?” Furries or other sexual fetishists—or, to pick more contemporary recipients of supposedly left-leaning approprobation, astrology girls and Disney adults—are probably not your business unless they are causing harm to themselves or someone else. If an astrology girl is carving alchemical symbols into her skin with a rusty knife, or a Disney adult is forcing her kid to wear a Goofy costume 12 hours a day, then okay, maybe it’s worth making a loud fuss about them online. But if they are not doing these things, then maybe it’s nunya business, and expressing “concern” (or more often, mockery) is actually much weirder than the subcultural weirdness itself.

There’s a fear, I think, that if you “let” people engage in unusual subcultural behaviors, especially the sorts of things that you find personally abhorrent,⁴ then they might eventually do themselves spiritual harm, and therefore it’s important to shame them before it’s too late. This—sorry to my Christian readers—is pretty obviously Christian Nonsense(TM),⁵ and as a non-Christian, it’s all blessedly nunmy business. The whole world (online and IRL) isn’t—and doesn’t have to be—a conservative Christian suburb.

1. I don’t actually remember if Something Awful was especially homophobic or transphobic—but this is likely a fault of my memory, I’m sure it was.

2. Yeah, I know, I bring up feedback loops a lot. If I have one lasting effect on the “discourse” (ew) I hope it’s to encourage people to think of cultural phenomena as more typically the result of feedback loops rather than simple cause and effect.

3. For Barbara’s eyes only: this is so “But Daddy I Love Him” coded.

4. You are of course allowed to be personally annoyed or grossed out by anything, and to say so to friends, but not everything needs to be a public statement of This Disgusts Me. Nunya business!!!

5. Last week I only criticized Protestant Nonsense(TM); the trademark is expanding.