My Week In Alt-Tech
SCROLL WITH ME HERE. Somebody named Beatles Baby makes “a very badass chicken curry.” Look, there’s a nice sepia-tinted pencil drawing of Ned Stark from Game of Thrones. Apparently, “Walking is the new smoking #Health #Fitness,” and some guy’s wife loves her treadmill desk. Read this: A Marine gives his beloved bomb-sniffing dog a hero’s farewell.
You could find these posts anywhere, on Facebook or Instagram or some homey subreddit. But that’s not how they ended up on my screen. I saw them on Gab, a Twitter-like social media platform catering to the so-called alt-right, the Web-incubated white nationalist movement that shot to prominence during the last election and made international headlines for its violent rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, earlier this year. I was on Gab because, not long ago, I spent a week of my online life exclusively in the altright’s domain, a network of copycat sites collectively known as Alt-Tech.
On Gab, when people aren’t chatting about exercise equipment, they swap jokes, revel in the camaraderie of the expanding #GabFam, and complain about the “normies” on other social media sites. I spot Alex Jones, host of the far-right radio show Infowars, using his (active, verified) account to sell merchandise and plug his website. Media commentator Mike Cernovich is there too, pushing his YouTube channel, Medium articles, and T-shirts. Gabbers love promotion. If they’re not elevating themselves, they’re supporting the cause, buying stuff and sending followers to Fox News and Breitbart—but also to places I don’t recognize, like Voat and Infogalactic and WeSearchr.
This story is from the October 2017 edition of WIRED.
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This story is from the October 2017 edition of WIRED.
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