Today's required reading; Joe Bernstein did not have to tell them his last name to get in.
…my time in WPWW convinced me that our picture of the white supremacist internet is strikingly outdated, incomplete. For all the press it has received in recent weeks, Stormfront (and its ilk) is old and ugly technology, a web forum (with flat membership) and a complementary talk radio show run and hosted by a 61-year-old former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan whom some posters on WPWW deride as an old crank. The 'Youth' subforum receives a few posts a day, if that.
On the other hand, the Kik group is optimized, instantaneous, integrated. Some days see hundreds of posts. This is white supremacism that looks like today's social internet — comprising many forms of media and users from around the world, weirdly irreverent, continuous. As one poster, who said he is an 18-year-old living in Stockholm, told me, "We use it because we are able to communicate across borders and timezones, instantly without the delay of a forum or website."
It's the kind of place where someone will say "we're all biracial genderfluid furries here, can't we get along?", but be too dumb to know when they're quoting black rappers.
Another poster wrote longingly about his desire to look more Aryan, and he showed the group the blue colored contacts he bought to that end. To say the group has homoerotic undertones would be an understatement. … At times WPWW simply struck me as a way for lonely, bored, and confused teenagers to blow off steam and to try on new identities — political, sexual, and otherwise. I would later find out that WPWW had splintered from a more extreme Kik group three months earlier, after "skinheads" in the former group objected to the part-Jewish ancestry of a frequent poster. A lot of the chat in the group had absolutely nothing to do with white supremacy
The message is a shape-shifting parasitical meme-toilet that everyone thinks they can sort or control or reduce to something simpler—but never quite do—and needy kids are its medium.
