Whether it calls itself the Right or the Left , the real content of all online politics is the internet itself, and the arc of online politics always bends towards a bunch of strangers who spend their entire lives on the computer demanding that you publicly denounce your friends.

There’s power in signaling insider knowledge to outsiders, so naturally we see the memetic propagation of idiomatic lore artifacts beyond the bounds of where they actually convey meaning. But as time goes on, their density and alienation from more universal lexicons makes it hard for even the ‘in-group’ to keep track of this internal meaning. It’s ... See more