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The Current Transcript for March 7, 2017

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

It’s coming from somebody whose face I’ll never see. They’ll never see mine. If they did, I don't think it would be so easy for them to put people like me out.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: She's being evicted by a landlord who wants to hike the rent in a city where the rents register as the highest in the nation. She's in San Francisco—a city that has benefited for years from the tech brains and the tech boom in nearby Silicon Valley. But the very people who brought prosperity to California's fabled city with their wildly disruptive and lucrative businesses are threatening the city's celebrated diversity and Bohemian character. In half an hour, The Current’s Peter Mitton on the change that many fear has gone too far. Also today, it really did start with a guy in his mother's basement. But by the time the US election was underway, 4chan was the voice of the disenfranchised and the dissatisfied and an influential cultural force that has redefined politics.

SOUNDCLIP

When Donald Trump speaks about winners, about we're going to win again and he's obsessed with losers and losing, that is 4chan language. They invented these terms “win” and “fail”. Those are 4chan terms.

AMT: Dale Beran says 4chan’s influence is cultural, right wing and potent and the left dismisses it at its peril. Hear him in an hour. And its multiple missile launch has North Korea crowing.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Rocket launch]

[Sound: North Korean news anchor]

AMT: While at the same time the US is deploying, we are looking at Kim Jong-un's nuclear ambitions and the efforts to curb them. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

North Korean threat enters new phase following missile tests

Guests: Bill Broad, Melissa Hanham

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: December 2012.

VOICE 2: We’ve got some breaking news now out of North Korea. Yes, another ballistic missile has been fired.

VOICE 1: August 2016.

VOICE 3: North Korea's leader says the US mainland and its “operational theatre” in the Pacific are now within striking range.

VOICE 1: September 2016.

VOICE 4: Pyongyang confirmed in a broadcast that it had tested a nuclear device.

VOICE 1: February 2017.

VOICE 5: North Korea has reportedly launched a missile, sending it hundreds of miles before it crashed into the sea.

VOICE 6: [Through translator] This launch has clearly indicated that North Korea poses a new level of threat.

AMT: Well, a chronology of North Korea's brazen missile tests over the past few years. For the US, its allies and the rest of the world, the question is what comes next? This week's launch of four missiles into the Sea of Japan appeared to be a show of force in reaction to US military exercises with South Korea. But the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is said to be growing closer to his ultimate goal—a nuclear armed missile that could strike US soil. As the stakes grow unspeakably high, effective solutions to the problem of what to do about North Korea are in short supply. A New York Times investigation published over the weekend provided some insight into these imperfect options the US has to consider. Bill Broad is one of the authors of that story. He's a senior writer with the Times and we have reached him in New York City. Hello.

BILL BROAD: Hi. Good morning.

AMT: We have seen North Korea flex its muscle before with missile tests. What's different about this multiple test?

BILL BROAD: Well, generally the missiles are getting better and better which means the ranges are getting longer and longer. Right? They're reaching from hundreds of miles approaching to thousands of miles, right? That's the goal. This multiple launch just recently is worrisome because if you throw a whole bunch of missiles out at once, it makes shooting them down much more difficult. It's like a math problem with many variables. Right now the United States and South Korea are scrambling to deploy anti-missile defenses in South Korea. You can overwhelm those defenses if you fire a lot of missiles and a lot of warheads simultaneously and that's clearly what North Korea was flexing its muscle about just recently.

AMT: So the US is now deploying its THAAD missile defense system to South Korea. How capable is that system?

BILL BROAD: You know it's better than the long range ones we have in the United States here, which also—thank you—helps defend Canada. We've deployed long range interceptors in California and Alaska but long range warheads move really, really, really fast. They’re clipping along at about more than four miles a second. Shorter-range warheads don't move so fast and they are easier to shoot down. So the THAAD system which they're deploying in South Korea has overall a better record of missile intercepts or warhead intercepts than the long range interceptors do. It's an easier problem.

AMT: Now what is North Korea trying to do?

BILL BROAD: Their dream is to be able to threaten the United States with a nuclear warhead. And it would be funny right, if it weren't so serious. But they have propaganda videos showing mushroom clouds rising above the Washington Monument, right? They'd love to pulverize Washington or really more realistically to be able to threaten to do that. The way to do that is with an ICBM—an intercontinental ballistic missile. It goes up. It releases its warheads into space and the warheads come zipping down courtesy of gravity and then land on the target thousands of miles away. They want to be able to threaten the United States with the ultimate weapon. Why? My colleague David Sanger in Washington who does a lot of the political reporting on this and the geopolitics on it, says it probably doesn't have to do so much with actually initiating a war but being able to threaten to do it, right, so that it can throw its weight around in East Asia and take steps that it wouldn't be confident of taking otherwise—all kinds of aggressive actions. Because we'd be worried right, if they're going to be able to threaten to annihilate San Francisco or Washington or God forbid, Toronto, then we might pay a little more attention and be a little more nervous about striking back.

AMT: And of course as they move toward trying to get a missile with that reach, these latest ones again have gone farther, right? You're watching the advance of their own technology.

BILL BROAD: Well, these ones were not that big, the ones that they just sent. They’re more medium range. They were launched out of western North Korea and landed in the Sea of Japan. So you're talking hundreds of miles. And the news in our article that appeared over the weekend is that the United States has been waging a clandestine war to try to keep it that way. We seriously don't want these people to be able to get those super long range rockets that can threaten really any big city on the globe. So you know it remains to be seen whether or not they're going to be able to perfect this technology. It's hard. Rocket science is really hard and there's so many things that can go wrong—hundreds and thousands of subsystems and systems all shaking violently—and whether they can pull off this feat remains to be seen. But the worrisome thing is they're clearly making progress.

AMT: And the attempt to stop that rocket science has gone into cyber attacks. Tell us what you know.

BILL BROAD: Well, we know that they've been around for a while. They were accelerated during the Obama administration starting about a little more than three years ago. And they've had some effectiveness. You know it's like the Internet of things, right? We're all wired. There are more and more objects that are getting hooked into the Internet. Our cars are doing it. And hackers are having a field day. Right? They can hack into your car. They can hack into your thermometer. They can raise or lower the temperature of your cabin. And the United States in its wisdom decided to try some of that with the North Korean missile systems which rely on computers like everything else. And they had some success. What we learned in our reporting was that there's a debate in Washington about just how successful those attempts—very secret clandestine attempts—have been. It's a hard problem. In philosophy, they'd call it an epistemological problem. How much can you really know about what's going on? A very difficult call when rocket science is hard. Rockets are going to vibrate apart about 10 per cent of the time no matter what you do. And trying to figure out whether or not you really succeeded in knocking that mother out of the sky is very difficult when the mother falls into the sea and all the evidence that you'd usually have in a forensic examination is hidden from you. So it's a hard call. Nevertheless, analysts generally believe that the United States has succeeded in slowing the North Korean long range missile program on the order of years.

AMT: How advanced are North Korea's own cyber warfare capabilities?

BILL BROAD: Big. Right? They're not as big as China and Russia but they're world players and they're also world players in electronic warfare. Right now, there’s US military exercises going on in South Korea and repeatedly over the years, the North Koreans have done electronic warfare on the exercises, trying to knock missiles out of the sky and and wreck the guidance on smart bombs and that kind of stuff. They also attacked Sony Entertainment Pictures in 2014 and knocked out something like 70 per cent of the company's computers because of this hilarious strange movie that Sony had made called The Interview which lampooned the dear leader of North Korea and made him look like a Goomba. And it tells you just how serious they all are that they decide to attack Sony because of that. But they can do a lot of damage and they do so around the world. So their own cyber and electronic capabilities are pretty advanced. They're not cutting edge world class but they're getting there.

AMT: And as the United States tries to maneuver around how to stop them, how likely is it that it would be a cyber-attack, cyber warfare versus someone going into try to disable it physically?

BILL BROAD: I don't know and I doubt that even you know the highest echelons of the Trump administration know right now. They're still working out their North Korea policy. But there's a whole laundry list of options that these people have, right, including all the standard war games. I mean South Korea and the United States right now are you know engaged in joint military exercises. Those are practice war games. And trust me, the Pentagon has a long list of options that it's developed over the decades and is going through right now, dusting off some, probably writing up some new ones. There's all kinds of things that they could possibly do, from introducing new nuclear weapons into South Korea as a warning to the north to trying to do physical strikes on missile sites to more cyber stuff to who knows what. These are very, very smart people with a lot of money who are working hard to try to protect the civilized world from this isolated crazy regime which is extremely unpredictable in its behaviour and dangerous.

AMT: Bill Broad, thanks for your insights.

BILL BROAD: My pleasure.

AMT: Bill Broad, senior writer with the New York Times. He joined us from New York City. Well, for long-time North Korea watchers, that cluster of tests was just the latest worrisome sign. Canadian Melissa Hanham is a senior research associate in the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute for International Studies. She's in Monterey, California. Hello.

MELISSA HANHAM: Hi. Thank you for having me on, Anna Maria.

AMT: Well, I'm just wondering from your perspective, that the US does have a broad range of options but what is North Korea trying to accomplish?

MELISSA HANHAM: Well, the way we think about North Korea's missile program has evolved rapidly, largely because their own program has evolved. When we looked at the missile programs of the United States, Russia, China, they took a more staid approach, where North Korea seems to be trying many different things at once. So we're seeing them test road mobile missiles before they've perfected launching from gantry towers. We're seeing them try out solid fuel even while still testing liquid fuel. And we're seeing them use submarine launched ballistic missiles now as well. So they seem to be trying a wide variety of different things all at once and seeing what works best.

AMT: And you look at satellite imagery. What are you learning or what would you hope to learn from these latest launches?

MELISSA HANHAM: Well, one of the things that North Korea does to increase the survivability of their missile force is continually keep it moving on road mobile trucks. So they get these enormous trucks that have very strong chassis and can move around. And we use satellite imagery to try to understand where these trucks can go or not go. So as you can imagine, some of these trucks are up to eight axles long and they have a wide turning radius. They you know struggle under certain grades of road. So we look at all the places that these trucks could move and try to follow what is essentially a shell game by North Korea.

AMT: So we have this hermit kingdom where so many people are impoverished, where they're spending this huge amount of money on this military infrastructure, trying to develop these systems. What's your perspective on where the United States needs to go to try to stop this with its allies?

MELISSA HANHAM: Yeah. This is the toughest question of all. And nothing has worked so far. Over decades, we’ve been predicting the collapse of North Korea. You know there are people in camps who say that diplomacy should be used first—and I am one of them—for both pragmatic and peaceful reasons. And increasingly, there are those who are calling for a military strike in North Korea. Neither of those options is palatable. No one wants to naively enter an arrangement with North Korea when we know that in the past they've been a spoiler. They have walked out on agreements. They’ve cheated on agreements. And no one wants to be best friends with them in a diplomatic way when they have abominable human rights for example, and are destabilizing the whole region. But that being said, the military option is so extreme, is so severe that I worry that you know either if the US decided that it could 100 per cent with confidence rely on its ballistic missile defense system, that they may find they are surprised in an actual war situation, and I also worry about a pre-emptive strike on North Korean soil. By really any definition, that is the beginning of a war. So you have to be committed. And I should say that North Korean War—you know the Korean War never ended—were just an armistice. But you know that would be commencing what could be World War III all over again. North Korea's got borders with Russia, South Korea, China and Japan is just a short ways away. So they're in a geopolitical location which is really hot for a number of reasons.

AMT: And to what extent is it just a matter of time before North Korea develops an intercontinental ballistic missile?

MELISSA HANHAM: I think that probably we'll see a test this year. They've shown us all the subcomponents of an intercontinental ballistic missile already. They've shown us that they are probably getting ready to do a test. Kim Jong-un has made it known amongst the sort of high officials that this is something he wants to be done in 2017. I don't think that the initial test will be successful. It's very complicated to launch an ICBM, but this type of testing is also very, very dangerous. It's really challenging to know what is a test and what is the start of a war? So this is a time when more than ever we need increased communication and unfortunately that's just not the case.

AMT: And I'm wondering what China's role in all of this is. I see there are protests in China today over the US deployment of the THAAD system. We also know China put a ban on coal imports from North Korea. What's China doing?

MELISSA HANHAM: So there's actually two forces that are pressing on China right now. On the one hand, historically China has been North Korea's really only ally of late. But the relationship has gotten worse and worse and at this point, it's actually frankly terrible. You know China is a status quo state. They don't want the balance of power or their “peaceful rise” to be disrupted by North Korea's antics. They, even more than a nuclear North Korea, do not want a collapsed North Korea. They don't want the refugees coming over their border and so on. With that, however, China is putting intense economic pressure on South Korea because they feel that the radar systems associated with the THAAD system are so powerful that they are actually allowing South Korea and the US to see deep into its own territory and in that way is sort of causing China to feel that they are exposed more than ever before. So politically, they've been pressing back. Whether that pressure is warranted is another question. There are radar systems all over Asia, some which can see very deeply into China and I have to admit, I kind of feel that their pressure on South Korea is somewhat misplaced because I mean Taiwan’s hosting its own enormous radar system. But that being said, China has really put its reputation on the line with that.

AMT: Well, Melissa Hanham, we have to leave it there. But thank you for your insights on all of this.

MELISSA HANHAM: Thank you very much for having me on.

AMT: Melissa Hanham, senior research associate in the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute for International Studies. She joined us from Monterey, California. Well, you're listening to The Current on CBC Radio One and on Sirius XM. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti.

SOUNDCLIP

Donald Trump, you're asking Americans to trust you with their future. Let me ask you: have you even read the United States’ Constitution?

[Sound: Crowd cheering]

AMT: You might remember Khizr Khan, father of a slain US soldier speaking at last summer's Democratic National Convention—shaming then Republican candidate Donald Trump for his proposed ban on Muslims entering the US. Mr. Khan was slated to join us in our Toronto studio this morning. Yesterday we were informed by his trip’s organizer he would not be traveling to Toronto because “his travel privileges are being reviewed.” In a statement to The Current, Mr. Khan says, “This turn of events is not just of deep concern to me, but to all my fellow Americans who cherish our freedom to travel abroad. I have not been given any reasons why.” We have renewed our request to have Mr. Khan on this program from wherever he is. We hope to have that interview with him in the near future and we will let you know. Stay with us. The news is next. And then we have the documentary Disruptions City by The Current’s Peter Mitton. It explores how big money from big tech is changing the face of San Francisco. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

[Music: Sting]

'Capitalism on steroids': How big tech is gentrifying the Golden City

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come, we venture into one of the darker corners of the Internet—the message board 4chan—because its denizens are having an outsized impact on the culture at large. They're free-for-all online culture may just be key to understanding the rise of US President Donald Trump. That theory in half an hour. But first, the widening gulf in the city by the bay.

[Music: The Disruptors theme]

AMT: Well, the city of San Francisco in Northern California was just a small settlement of about 1,000 people before prospectors discovered gold in the nearby hills. That triggered the gold rush of 1849—an onslaught of people and money that forever changed sleepy little San Francisco and put it on the map. In the century and a half that has followed, San Francisco has grown into a unique city in America—a Bohemian beacon, a haven for the tastemakers who are a little too far out for the rest of the USA. But a new digital gold rush in San Francisco and the nearby cities of Silicon Valley is threatening to disrupt things once again. The Current’s producer Peter Mitton traveled to San Francisco as part of our season-long project, The Disruptors. Here is his documentary, Disruption City.

ATHENA PIERCE: Not being sure where you're going to live, especially when you're a mother, a single mother, is the scariest thing in the world.

PETER MITTON: This is Athena Pierce. She's one of the dozen or so people who showed up on a recent Monday morning at the Eviction Defence Collaborative in San Francisco. She was there with her son, Roman.

SOUNDCLIP

PETER MITTON: How old’s Roman?

ATHENA PIERCE: How old are you?

ROMAN: Eight.

ATHENA PIERCE: I’m trying to figure it out. I want to gauge what's going on. This is not my forte. This is not what I do. I don’t get evicted on a regular basis. [laughs]

PETER MITTON: This is a place where people can come for help with the confusing heart-wrenching process of getting evicted. It's something that's happening a lot in this city right now. Rents are the highest in the nation here after skyrocketing in recent years—$3,000 today for a one bedroom, $4,000 for two bedrooms. And everyone at the eviction centre says that landlords are looking for any reason to evict so that they can bring in new tenants at those sky high rents. Right now, Athena pays $1045 for her small studio apartment.

ATHENA PIERCE: I’ve been late here and there on rent and it wasn’t a problem for like, I’ve been living in the place for five years. When a new owner bought the building, everything changed, from our laundry doubling to different policies. We feel the pressure of kind of being pushed out because they know they can double our rent.

PETER MITTON: Double or even triple, in Athena's case. She just doesn't have that kind of money and there just aren't apartments left in the city that she can afford.

ATHENA PIERCE: I've come from a really challenging background and this is the first apartment that I've ever had on my own and I don't deserve to be picked off for the next—nobody deserves to have their home—if you don't have a home, you're homeless. That's very scary and they want to say San Francisco is the greatest place to be homeless. That's not true, let me tell you. I have an eight-year-old child who is an extremely intelligent, very wise, kind person and that would change everything, for his stability to be rocked like that. Even if he's at his dad's house and he'll be fine, not knowing where I am every night— that affects people in families.

CHRISTOPHER GAUNT: To be honest, it feels like you don't matter unless you're making $250,000 a year. That's the reality. You don't matter.

PETER MITTON: Christopher Gaunt is also facing eviction. He says he was out of town on business on the first of the month. When he went to pay his rent online a few days later, his account was blocked. Paying a few days late hadn't been a problem in the past, but now his landlord won't take his money and he's been given an eviction notice.

CHRISTOPHER GAUNT: I wish that they would take the money. I have it and I want to pay it. Of course he's trying to get me out so he can raise the rent. I mean there's no way that that's not true.

PETER MITTON: Christopher's turning 30 next week. He just started a new job. Things had been going pretty well. But now those gains he made will probably be wiped out by the new rent he'll have to pay.

CHRISTOPHER GAUNT: I feel like the city's being taken away from me in a lot of ways. And to see that the city isn't attracting the same type of energy anymore, the same type of creative, collaborative force, it feels really predatory.

PETER MITTON: This office is full of people with stories like theirs. In fact, the office even has a story of its own—it had to change location a couple years ago after it faced eviction. Yes, the Eviction Defence Collaborative of San Francisco was facing eviction. Their landlord was being offered a lot more money in rent by a tech startup.

[Music]

[Sound: Waves crashing]

PETER MITTON: Of course, San Francisco isn't the only North American city with an affordability crisis. But as the tech money rolls in, there's something really special at stake here. This has always been a city that's welcomed outsiders, dreamers, artists. The Beats. The hippies. Even the original Silicon Valley tinkerers building computers in their garages. But its future isn't certain. Here at the tip of Golden Gate Park where the ocean meets the city, it's easy to see why so many people feel drawn here.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: I surf regularly. It's what I moved out here for—great waves. Cold with sharks but exciting.

VOICE 2: We have this. It's a great place to live. But it's getting crowded and expensive and if I didn't already live here, I probably wouldn't move here.

VOICE 3: I live six blocks from the ocean so I mean you can't beat that. I've only lived here for about three and a half years. I'm actually from Michigan. When we moved here, we kind of moved here at the right time because a lot of apartments were still going for about $1,700 for like a one bedroom. Now you can't get anything for like $3,000 or plus. Especially with some of the tech people who have come in, I think it's kind of disrupted—it has kind of disrupted—some of the older residents that used to live in the city.

[Sound: Bus calling out the stop]

PETER MITTON: Of course, “disruption” is the mission statement of all the start-ups and software giants that call the San Francisco Bay Area home.

[Sound: Bus calling out the stop in Spanish]

PETER MITTON: But ride the bus downtown from Golden Gate Park and you'll witness another precious resource of this city that's in danger of being disrupted.

[Sound: Bus calling out the stop in Mandarin]

PETER MITTON: Its diversity.

[Sound: Bus announcement in different languages]

PETER MITTON: This has always been a place where different cultures and different social classes have mixed. And of course, it’s always a place where people can truly be themselves.

SOUNDCLIP

PETER MITTON: Hi.

TOMMI AVICOLLI MECCA: Tommi.

PETER MITTON: Very nice to meet you. How’s it going?

PETER MITTON: I met Tommi Avicolli Mecca in the Castro, San Francisco’s legendary gay neighbourhood. He’s an activist, just like a lot of San Franciscans and just like one of San Francisco’s famous citizens—the first openly gay politician elected to office in California—Harvey Milk.

SOUNDCLIP

TOMMI AVICOLLI MECCA: So his camera store is just up the street.

PETER MITTON: Can we have a walk there?

TOMMI AVICOLLI MECCA: Yeah. Why don’t we walk toward that? They put in this stupid rainbow crosswalk thing. I personally think it's pretty revolting myself. That's not what I've been struggling for 45 years for—is to have a rainbow walkway, you know? That's not what it's about.

PETER MITTON: Even if you saw the movie that won Sean Penn an Oscar, you wouldn't know that Harvey Milk wasn't just fighting for gay rights, but for affordable housing in the city too. And that Harvey Milk was evicted.

SOUNDCLIP

TOMMI AVICOLLI MECCA: This is Harvey’s old camera store. They put up that picture up there of him. He used to live above it. So his camera store was here and he lived above it. He got evicted from here in the year before he died, before he was murdered. His rent went from $400 a month to $1,200 a month.

PETER MITTON: Obviously high rents and gentrification aren’t a new problem for San Francisco. This is a small city with water on three sides of it and for complicated reasons—from a desire to preserve its old Victorian architecture to outright NIMBY-ism—the city simply hasn't built enough new housing. Not in decades. I asked Tommi what this neighbourhood was like when he first arrived here, in the early nineties.

TOMMI AVICOLLI MECCA: It was just unbelievable. My first Halloween here, I ended up marching with a bunch of radical faeries and we ended up stripping down. At the corner here at 19^th and Castro, we stripped all our clothes off and we marched down the street completely nude, got to 18th and Castro. There were all these people cheering us. There were these cops and they were just like glaring but they knew they couldn't touch us because the crowd would have killed them. And then we proceeded to start painting each other’s bodies with body paint and the crowd just cheered us. That was my first Halloween here and I realized I'm in paradise.

PETER MITTON: But that was then. It's changed a lot now, he says.

TOMMI AVICOLLI MECCA: My building is mostly straight now. In the morning when I leave—I live in the Castro—when I leave for work, I'll see there are people pushing baby carts and straight couples, not that I have anything against straight couples but straight couples holding hands. There’s more of a presence of non-queer people.

PETER MITTON: And according to Tommi, it might just be more important now than ever to protect what's left of gay San Francisco.

TOMMI AVICOLLI MECCA: The reality is I feel safest here. In fact, the day after Trump's election, my brother called me from Philly and said, “I'm worried about you.” And I said, “No, I'm in the safest place I could be in this country, believe me. I am safe here. I won’t be safe anywhere else.” The fact that we're losing this, it’s epic proportions of tragedy and especially because we're not losing it because of a natural evolution, because everything's cool now and we can live in Iowa and Kansas and all those other horrible places that I would never live. But it’s not that. We're losing it because there's greedy—I want to curse but I won't—there are greedy people out there who see this as a place you come to to just buy buildings, drive out the long-term tenants so they can flip it and make lots of money. It's really capitalism on steroids. Our neighbourhood is going to become this upscale neighbourhood for tech folks. I can't begin to tell you how angry that makes me, that we're losing this because of greed.

[Music: Bridge]

GREG GOPMAN: I mean every single city around the world tries to build their version of Silicon Valley. They want to have what we have here. And it's so funny that here, internally, people hate on this industry. I mean it's kind of mind boggling, really.

PETER MITTON: This is Greg Gopman. He's the founder of a virtual reality tech company. And yes, he lives in the Castro.

GREG GOPMAN: I’ve had a couple different businesses that have done millions of dollars in revenue. I'm a millionaire on paper.

PETER MITTON: Greg says he definitely senses a divide in the city today.

GREG GOPMAN: “Techies” is like a derogatory term, which is like pretty weird. You know it’s like you go to study your whole life in school, you get the best grades, you go to Harvard, you get maybe an MBA, a PhD from the most exclusive universities and you think you've worked your whole life to do something great and you move out here and you're vilified. It's kind of crazy.

PETER MITTON: And at one point, Greg was probably the most vilified techie in all of San Francisco. What happened was he went on a rant on Facebook about the city's homeless population and that rant went viral.

GREG GOPMAN: I was coming back from travel. I was in my zone of building my business and I made a very insensitive comment on Facebook and it became national or international news, which was crazy because I wasn’t a famous person and it was a post on Facebook. But that happened.

PETER MITTON: What Greg wrote on Facebook post seemed to confirm what a lot of people's suspicions about tech workers and what they were really thinking. And I guess it’s no surprise that Greg didn’t really want to rehash exactly what he said.

GREG GOPMAN: I can't even put it into words now because it’s not the same way that I interact on things.

PETER MITTON: But I found someone who would read out a bit of his post.

SOUNDCLIP

MONTY Q: Here’s what he said. His name’s Greg.

PETER MITTON: This is Monty Q. He’s homeless and he was on Market Street.

SOUNDCLIP

MONTY Q: “Just got back to San Francisco. I've travelled around the world and I gotta say there is nothing more grotesque than walking down Market Street in San Francisco. The heart of our city has to be overran by crazy, homeless drug dealers, drop outs and trash. Each time I pass it, my love affair with San Francisco dies a little. The degenerates gather like hyenas—spit, urinate, taunt, chew, sell drugs, get rowdy. They act like they own the centre of the city, like it’s their place of leisure.

PETER MITTON: Now to Greg’s credit, he has apologized for his remarks and he’s actually done a lot of work on the homeless problem since that rant went viral. But as to Monty Q's reaction to what he was reading?

SOUNDCLIP

MONTY Q: He ain't walked a day in these, so you know. If that's what get him through the day, peace and love. I gotta do me. But that's one of the reasons this is one of the wealthiest cities in America. It don't just take one kind of person. The one thing San Francisco promised and guaranteed to everybody—you can be anyone you choose to be.

[Sound: Police sirens]

[Sound: Car GPS]

PETER MITTON: Heading south on the highway that connects the city with Silicon Valley, it's easy to see why so many of the Bay Area's most disruptive exports—like Uber and self-driving cars—are connected with transportation. The traffic never lets up. And sailing through the sea of cars are the Google Buses. These are big white coaches with blacked out windows, AC, WiFi. They're a sort of parallel public transportation system, but for tech workers only. The buses move the workers from their San Francisco apartments to their Silicon Valley desks and back every day. When the private buses first showed up a few years ago, there were protests against them. Now, they're just part of San Francisco's new normal, but there's still plenty of unease. A city supervisor had recently complained to the press that these billion-dollar corporations should do more to “ameliorate the impact they're having on the city.” That’s what I'm hoping to ask about as I arrive at the headquarters of, arguably the biggest player of them all here in Silicon Valley.

[Sound: Car GPS saying “Turn left onto Facebook Way, then you will arrive at your destination”]

PETER MITTON: First surprise at Facebook—it’s massive.

SOUNDCLIP

I never would have guessed that trying to park at Facebook is harder than trying to find a spot at a shopping mall at Christmas. I am desperately looking for Building 20, lobby two.

PETER MITTON: I'd reached out to the normally media-shy company on a lark to talk about a project of theirs they call "building empathy". It's about making sure Facebook users in India and Africa have a good experience. I'm hoping there will be a chance to talk about building empathy with people in their own backyard too. Inside, I'm met by a couple very smiley and chipper 20-something Facebookers. They’re wearing backpacks and take me on a tour through the campus. Then they deposit me in a boardroom where I meet not just the manager I'd arranged to speak with, but a couple of other corporate minders as well.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Do you mind if I just jump right in? Great. How big of a problem is what I've seen described as an empathy gap?

VOICE 2: Well, I think that that's a part of the problem. I think that one thing that we're trying to do is make sure that we get out to India, to Africa, and understand the context and the situations—

[Fades out]

PETER MITTON: It became pretty clear, pretty fast, that I wasn't going to be able to shift this conversation from empathy with Facebook users in India, to empathy with the people of San Francisco being disrupted by companies like Facebook. Even my questions about an outreach program of Facebook’s in India were being shut down.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: What’s next for Facebook in India, do you think?

VOICE 2: Unfortunately I don’t work on the Internet dot org team so I’m not the best person to speak to that. But Claire can follow up later.

VOICE 3: I can ping someone now. I'm not sure they'd be available. I thought you only wanted to talk about like building empathy.

VOICE 1: Well, yeah. I want to talk about building empathy for sure.

VOICE 3: Yeah. I can ping someone.

VOICE 1: Okay, sure.

VOICE 3: I’ll let you know.

PETER MITTON: And so the three of us sat in an awkward silence while Claire "pinged" other people to see if there was someone else to talk to. But no one was available. The interview was over.

[Sound: Exchanging goodbyes]

[Music]

PETER MITTON: I did find one former Facebook manager who was up for talking to me about the Silicon Valley mindset and the kind of impact it’s having on San Francisco. His name is Antonio Garcia Marquez and you’re almost certainly familiar with his claim to fame—even if you might not like it.

ANTONIO GARCIA MARQUEZ: If you know, for your listeners, if you go browse the Internet right. And then you see products like that or things like that inside your Facebook experience, I created that. I created the first versions of that. That’s what I created at Facebook.

PETER MITTON: Yes, when an ad follows you across the Internet and into your Facebook feed, that's Antonio's baby. And he did well in Silicon Valley. Today he lives on a 40-foot yacht he plans to sail around the world in. I met him in a marina on the Oakland side of the bay. I asked Antonio why—when there are all these smart, wealthy people here who say their mission is to "change the world"—there can still be so many serious problems here in their own backyard.

ANTONIO GARCIA MARQUEZ: They do want to change the world. That's one of those Delphic portents of old, right, that it can be read more than one way. “Change the world”, that presupposes that change is always good. Right? Or that change is always progressive in the sense of you know the present is better than the past and the future will be better than today. That's not necessarily true. I am a sort of a pessimist by nature. I do think that they really believe they are changing the world, but perhaps not in the feel good sort of altruistic way that that term typically implies, I think.

PETER MITTON: And does he think that tech—the industry he made his fortune in—has disrupted San Francisco for good or for ill?

ANTONIO GARCIA MARQUEZ: I can see both sides of that argument. You know on the one hand, the San Francisco nostalgists, right, who think oh, SF was so much better before the techies got here are kind of kind of ridiculous because those same laments were being said in 1850 a year after the gold rush. And when people were claiming that San Francisco, to the extent it even existed then was getting ruined by all these opportunists, San Francisco has always been a gold rush town. It always has, right? I came here in ’99, before when most people who are bitching about it even came. The Mission was a pit, right, which now is like this trendy hipster neighbourhood. Like it wasn't that great back then. On the other hand, it is true that by and large—look, I mean isn't it William Gibson who has a famous quote that says like the future's already here, it's just unevenly distributed. Right? The reality is San Francisco basically lives in the future. And what does that world look like, right? Well, you have an urban landscape that's basically the playground for the wealthy and you know fantastically expensive real estate for rent or purchase, right. And you have two classes of people, those who work in tech and then you have basically the service class that services them, right. And so yeah. I think San Francisco has fundamentally changed in many ways and I think a lot of US cities are going to start looking like this.

[Sound: Phone ringing]

SOUNDCLIP

ROMAN: Hello?

PETER MITTON: Was that Roman?

ROMAN: Yeah. Who is this?

PETER MITTON: It’s Peter from CBC Radio.

ROMAN: Ohhhh. Yeah, I remember you. Yeah, now. Yeah, I’ll be right down. Okay?

PETER MITTON: Okay, thanks.

ROMAN: Bye.

PETER MITTON: Bye.

PETER MITTON: Back downtown, I went to visit Athena and Roman, who I'd met at the Eviction Defence Centre.

SOUNDCLIP

ROMAN: Oh, she’s changing.

PETER MITTON: Okay.

ROMAN: Do you mind waiting out here for a second?

PETER MITTON: Nope. No problem.

ROMAN: I’ll wait out here with you.

PETER MITTON: Okay.

PETER MITTON: I wanted to see the place that they might be losing.

SOUNDCLIP

ROMAN: Can I come in now?

ATHENA PIERCE: Yeah.

[Sound: Dog barking]

ATHENA PIERCE: Okay. So this is my home. This is 406. It's kind of small but it definitely was a blessing when I got it.

PETER MITTON: It’s just a studio apartment for Athena and Roman, and two cats and a little dog. But it's well cared for and cozy.

ATHENA PIERCE: I've got a lot of family, kind of hand-me-down heirloom things. This was my foster mom, Ann Saunders. They fostered over 125 kids over 30 years or something. So like I said, the windows go directly into someone else's window. But I'm totally rearranging. I'm putting the TV sideways. I’m going to put the book—yeah. It’s all going. It’s all going. But I think we're going to stay in the closet as far as sleeping. It locks out the light, not a lot of noise. You gotta get really creative with space.

PETER MITTON: You're rearranging but you might not be here for too much longer.

ATHENA PIERCE: That’s the thing. I don't know how to deal with that, so I'm going to act as if this is my home until it's not. I'm not going to prepare to lose. I'm not going to lose. It's not right what they're doing. Like honestly, I feel that from my heart. [To Roman] You okay?

ROMAN: Uh-huh.

ATHENA PIERCE: How do you feel about all this, Roman?

ROMAN: What?

ATHENA PIERCE: The move and, I didn't even ask you.

ROMAN: About all of the stuff going on right now?

ATHENA PIERCE: Well, what happens if we have to leave in two weeks, three weeks, after the court?

ROMAN: If we lose?

ATHENA PIERCE: Mhm. He's talking about it like it's not even possible. But yeah, what if we lose, baby?

ROMAN: I don’t know.

ATHENA PIERCE: Like, I’m not really sure what I'm going to be doing long term. You're going to have to go to your dad's.

ROMAN: What about you? Where are you going to go?

ATHENA PIERCE: I’m not really sure. You can't really just like, find another apartment in this city. Sometimes I've brought people over here and they've been like wow, how does it feel to have your own apartment in the city? It’s great.

ROMAN: Maybe you could ask Jasmine if you could chill over there?

ATHENA PIERCE: But it's not really my home anymore, is it? You know? And I've come too far for that. I think, you know for your home to be literally ripped out from underneath you, you have to have done something wrong. I’m still looking for the paperwork to actually come up with numbers, when I was late. For at one point, why is that at one point, why is it acceptable for me to be late every now and then and then it’s not when a new owner owns? Because I know my manager is just following his orders. He does his job actually really well. But I know it’s not coming from him. It’s coming from somebody whose face I’ll never see. They’ll never see mine. If they did, I don’t think it would be so easy for them to put people like me out. Us, like I’m not the first. I won’t be the last.

[Music: Guitar]

AMT: We've been listening to Disruption City produced by The Current’s Peter Mitton. Josh Bloch is The Current’s documentary editor. Athena Pierce lost her fight just over a month ago. She told us her son Roman would be living with his dad. We've been unable to get in touch with Athena since she lost that apartment. Stay with us. In our next half hour, we're checking out the website 4chan so you don’t have to. How a website synonymous with gruesome content and roguish behavior may be the key to understanding the world today and the rise of Donald Trump. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

How 4chan and troll culture helped elect Trump: comic artist

Guests: Dale Beran

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

[Music: The Disruptors theme]

AMT: Yes, we're back to disruption. From pop culture to politics, there is hardly an aspect of life today that is not increasingly shaped by the Internet or online culture. But one of the most pervasive and influential corners of the web is a site called 4chan, known for its anonymous anything goes forums where there are no limits on what you can say or what you can share. Its regulars have become notorious for hacking, trolling, spreading gruesome and disturbing images, as well as their links to the hacking group Anonymous and the so-called alt-right. 4chan is an incubator of often disturbing memes and behaviour that infiltrate mainstream culture more than you may realize. And for that, 4chan is a major disruptor. Dale Beran has been watching 4chan's evolution for years. He's an adjunct professor in the screenwriting and animation department at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland. He's also a writer and comic maker. He says understanding the mentality of the 4chan community may be key to understanding the rise of US President Donald Trump. Dale Beran in Baltimore. Hello.

DALE BERAN: Hi.

AMT: If I go to the 4chan site, what will I find?

DALE BERAN: Oh my. All sorts of strange things. Lots of offensive content, lots of strange political views and now lots of alt-right and fascist views. So all sorts of things. And then anime as well. So a strange mixture.

AMT: Do they write in code?

DALE BERAN: No. Not code per se, but it is a culture and it's a culture that is very rich and complex. The bulletin board software itself is a little counterintuitive, hard to understand at first so there's sort of a barrier to entry. Since it's based on anonymity rather than the normal bulletin board system where you have an identity that you use to gain credit, how you get credit is by speaking in sort of the code to say oh, I've been here for a long time. I know how it works.

AMT: So who are the people who use 4chan?

DALE BERAN: I argue that they are predominantly male and young, under 40 down to their teen years, though it's anonymous so this is of course based on guesswork and sort of what they post there. And it's sort of folks from all walks of life. But I would maintain that it's folks who are sort of economically on the outs and that they have retreated to virtual worlds like anime and TV and now the ever growing networks of the Internet that only get more and more interesting, video games only get more and more interesting. As they fail in real life, they have an ever more rich world of retreat into these virtual places.

AMT: How did 4chan start?

DALE BERAN: It's very interesting. So before we have aggregators like Twitter and Reddit and other places to find content, well, you sort of only had the search engine. And if people remember back in the day, bulletin boards were the place where you found links to other interesting content and 4chan was a different sort of bulletin board. It started in Japan. It had a peculiar format and what was really appealing was the anonymity which was later capitalized on by things like Snapchat. And later on, business realized oh, it's nice to be anonymous on the Internet. But 4chan was one of the first groups or first software things to do that. And the other thing about it was that it was an image board so it was easy to post images. So this way of behaving that we behave on the Internet all the time, where we intersperse gifs and images together, that was really spearheaded on 4chan. That was the first software that was easy to do that on. So it started around 2003, 2004 as sort of like a very deep Internet thing, sort of where people who were really into the Internet would go and congregate to find strange and interesting things.

AMT: How did you find out about it?

DALE BERAN: I made a web comic which was an early web comic, so there wasn't a lot of content on the web back then. There weren’t a lot of comics. People were looking for a way not to do something like like learn but distract themselves at work. And I had a comic that was relatively successful so I could see the backlogs, the referral logs to who was coming to my site, who was linking to it. And I found 4chan kept appearing there along with many other sort of nerd-themed bulletin boards and the like.

AMT: They are kind of known as the uber trolls of our society, are they not?

DALE BERAN: Oh my, yes. Right. So the earliest—so they would start to appear in the press in 2008. Wired would mention them and it would really only be in articles about trolls and what a troll is. So people first learning the word troll, which is a bulletin board word and that's when the first mentions of them appeared. So it really sort of exemplifies this idea of the troll—someone who is there to disrupt communications. They live literally underneath the normal passages of communication, underneath the bridge, right. And they're there in that strange dank environment underneath and they're only going to come out to disrupt, to indeed mess with other people and then they're going to retreat back in there. That's exactly what they did.

AMT: And the founder of 4chan was actually somebody really young.

DALE BERAN: Yes. So he, perhaps in some ways, could embody the user of 4chan. So he was, I believe 14 when he started the site. Sort of ran it himself, maintaining the servers himself with his group of friends. Fourteen years old, living literally in his mother's basement which was a meme on 4chan and a joke where they would always say we're living in our mom's basements. He was literally doing so. So this site explodes. Of course it's one of the most popular, successful websites of all time—millions upon millions of posts, users—and a teenager is running it out of his mom's basement. And indeed even after the success of the site, he still lives in his mom's basement for many years. And he eventually fell out with the user base as it drifted to the right. His name is Chris Poole. He is a prominent figure. He was hired by Google. I believe he still works for Google and his name on 4chan was “moot”, which is another brilliant sort of like, also exemplifies sort of their behaviour where it's a negation. The head of the site has this name that means negation.

AMT: Hmm. Clever. So he falls out over Gamergate and 4chan got a lot of mainstream attention for Gamergate. Remind us what that was.

DALE BERAN: Right. So in 2014, a person who claims to be a game developer posts an angry blog post saying that he was wronged by his ex, who also happens to be a game developer. And it's sort of a very embarrassing post and everyone in the game industry that I'm working in, they’re like oh man, his career is over. But it takes off among groups of 4chan and other folks sort of in that culture and they say well no, what indeed is happening is she is taking advantage of being female and the favouritism and sort of the idea that you need to lift women up because of liberal ideals, that sort of thing. She's taking advantage of that and that idea of social justice is trying to invade video games and video games are our sacred space, our safe space. So as I argue that well, all of these 4chan users, all they have is video games. That's the only place they feel effective. It's not real life. If they're unsuccessful romantically, they go into the video game and they can indulge in these misogynistic fantasies. So it became huge. Millions upon millions of gamers said no, we're not going to take it. So to them, to proponents of Gamergate, they said we are trying to get social justice warriors out of video games. We're pushing back against this agenda.

AMT: And they really trolled the woman in question too, right? Did they not? The original.

DALE BERAN: Yes. Zoe Quinn, the developer, she made a game called Depression Quest and they went after her and several other prominent women who were writing about these issues, talking about these issues. And indeed, it used the playbook of 4chan. They would meet on 4chan and they’d say we're going to mess with them in this way and that is indeed how moot, how Christopher Poole fell out with the site and sold it. He banned all discussion of Gamergate on 4chan and the user base who had worshipped him literally like a god, right, in some sense. They really adored him. They would make memes about him. He, as a 14-year-old boy, was the leader of millions upon millions of people in some sense. And here, strangely there was this break where they turned upon him, hated him. So at that point, he said no, I'm going to leave and he sold the site. And a lot of them, as 4chan goes, it breaks fragments into sort of a panoply of various other sites and other chan. You can put any number in front. The software itself is open source. So it goes everywhere. So they go to other sites that are similar and stay on 4chan, which then sort of remains with a different owner.

AMT: So this is really important, this break. You've used some key words here to help us understand who remains. You talk about they’re really against a social justice movement. They are misogynistic. How does that affect how they have influence?

DALE BERAN: So I think this is very important. There is, for the first time in the United States, a counterculture anti-establishment movement on the right. So previously, the invention of counterculture really in the United States started in the 1950s with the Beats and so forth. It was always on the left, always to break the establishment, to say no, as a teen, we don't like this system. We want to disrupt it. Right, that sort of thing. That was always on the left. Now there are two channels you can fall into and the right one really is invented by 4chan. And when teens go and see this sort of adolescent chan culture that is incredibly in your face, incredibly irrelevant, incredibly silly and sometimes incredibly clever, they will easily fall into that category as much as the left. And so the Internet sort of split where now you have a teen culture on the right which says well, I'm a guy in the middle of the country. I work at a Pizza Hut and my life kind of sucks. I know I'm not ever really going to get out of my circumstances. I never had the opportunity. Maybe I'll just be in debt my whole life. And why not just retreat in the Internet? Why not become a troll? And this movement, this way of throwing everything in the face of the elites, spitting in the face of the bourgeoisie on the right really speaks to me. So it's something that the left has to address. I say that the left has better ways to address those problems. Doing it from the right is a way of giving up, a way of saying well, I'm just going to be a failure. I'm going to celebrate my failure. I'm going to efface everything including myself.

AMT: What is the role then, of 4chan and the rise of Donald Trump?

DALE BERAN: I maintain that 4chan, its cultural movement really sort of represents who Trump is. And Trump sort of embodies that duality of Trump being both sort of a successful businessman but also an outsider, someone who sort of looks ridiculous because he’s always interested in who is paying attention to him. And of course that means that ultimately he is concerned about his ego. Deep down inside, he’s not confident that people like him, that he is someone that's worthwhile paying attention to. So he sort of looks ridiculous because his nose is always pressed up against the glass. So that sort of idea that he is powerful, strong and he's going to exert power, and he's also an outsider and sort of silly and ridiculous—that speaks to the youth culture, the 4chan culture. That's exactly what they want to hear. They feel like they're outsiders, they're losers and they want to make fun of the establishment. And so part of it is saying well, you can put anyone up there. You can put an idiot up there. You can put someone totally ridiculous up there. That's how much it matters to me. But the other part, the other part that's serious is that Donald Trump projects power. He projects this idea of the exact thing that they don't have. When Donald Trump speaks about winners, about we're going to win again and he's obsessed with losers and losing, that is 4chan language. They invented these terms, “win” and “fail”. Those are 4chan terms. So the idea of masculine competition and winning and losing that, they've lost their entire life. So when Donald Trump says hey, you're going to win again, who is that message to but losers, right? That's who he's speaking. The only people who say well, I'm really interested in winning. Man, I haven't won in a long time—that's someone who's been losing for a long time.

AMT: Okay. There’s a lot to unpack there. So what you're saying is that they like the disruptive force, that Trump comes in and says I'm going to drain the swamp. We're going to get rid of the corruption. He's going to challenge government. They like that because they also want to disrupt.

DALE BERAN: Yes, that's exactly true. And they sort of want to disrupt in the very heart of what that term means, to tear apart. They don't care. They are so desperate that if Donald Trump is outrageously incompetent and variable and doesn't fulfill any of his promises, well, that's fine. They are hopeless already. They don't think anything's going to help them. And if he does, well, sure that's fine too. That sort of idea that the left keeps pointing out how ridiculous Trump is, how silly he is, how he's not going to fulfill his promises and I say well, that's why this 4chan culture, the younger people like him. That's not going to help all of these people come to our side.

AMT: Did they actually vote for him?

DALE BERAN: So this is an interesting question. Of course I have no way of knowing how many of these people left and voted. Of course there is a huge group on 4chan and all these other sites who are international, right, and there is a rise of fascism in Europe as well. I would say that they are a huge cultural vanguard force. That on the right, they are sort of the tip of the spear of cultural influence. So that is their impact. So no matter how many people went out and actually voted for him that posted on the site, they influence the conversation. They push the conversation. They invented the ideas and they influenced a ton of people and brought a ton of people over to that side. Their real impact is cultural as it always has been. 4chan is LOLcats, memes—the idea of Internet memes—that came from 4chan. It's everywhere. We use it. Everyone probably listening to the show has been influenced by 4chan’s culture.

AMT: Well, let's just talk about Pepe the Frog. A cartoon frog often used by supporters of Donald Trump was declared a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League. It started in 4chan. How did Pepe the Frog even come to be?

DALE BERAN: Pepe started as a meme on 4chan on the random board. And like many things, 4chan doesn't own memes. You know memes come from all sorts of places, snipped up pieces of culture from elsewhere. It came from a web comic creator in a web comic by Matt Furie. And in the original panel, Pepe the Frog is the sad-looking cartoon frog. He's kind of a loser guy in his twenties living with roommates. And in the comic, his roommate catches him peeing with his pants pulled down, with his butt hanging out. The roommate kind of tries to make fun of him for it and Pepe owns it. He says, “Feels good, man.” And he's smiling. So the original meme kind of meant like oh, it's okay to embrace your loserdom. It's okay. Own it, man. Like you can be a loser, that's who we are. That's what 4chan is. And then as the meme progresses over the years, the happy frog gets sad and the next meme is “Feels bad, man” and Pepe is frowning. And then Pepe is furious. He's angry. He's holding a gun. You see the Pepe memes today and he's raging red and he's a gif that's shaking with rage. So what happens is as 4chan drifts from sort of like oh, we're all losers meeting together to—man, life, it’s been 10 years—life is not working out for me. He gets angrier and angrier and angrier and then he of course transforms consciously—4 chan consciously transforms him—into a racist and sexist symbol. And their idea here, they did this on purpose, part as a prank and of course part genuinely because 4chan, as I talked about, all of those memes were then taken and marketed and brought out to everyone else. What they call the normies, right? They're saying we're going to take him back from the normies. We're going to make him so offensive that he's going to just become a 4chan thing again. And that was their idea and also of course like the idea was to prank everyone and indeed, they pranked Hillary Clinton. Clinton really released an explainer saying that's what he was.

AMT: So you're saying when they were called out on it by Hillary Clinton, that was their goal. Their goal was to be called out as offensive as they were.

DALE BERAN: So this is the real disrupting part. Not only being called out on it, but being misinterpreted, right? So Hillary got it wrong. She said oh well, he is a symbol of the alt-right and of course he had been a symbol of the alt-right for 48 hours at that point, right, or something like that where he was just a meme that high school kids would pass around at that point, of course originating in 4chan. But her explainer was in many senses very inaccurate. So she told one small fragment of the story. So to anyone under 40, it was a hilarious sort of another—it was showing how Hillary was once again behind the curve.

AMT: I want to ask you about Milo Yiannopoulos.

DALE BERAN: Sure.

AMT: The alt-right poster boy was disgraced after a video surfaced where he appeared to condone pedophilia. You say that he took over when Poole stepped away. He became the guy that they looked up to?

DALE BERAN: Well, sort of. He rose to prominence on Gamergate. So Gamergate brought him into the limelight. And before that, the portions of 4chan that really dislike him, they document how he had all these other weird messages that were totally contradictory to the message that he has now before this one. And this is the one that finally caught on and that he could ride to fame and his message was the Gamergate message. He sort of had this “critique of feminism”, which was not really a critique. All it said was you were doing great when you stay in your mom's basement and play video games, that you don't need women. I'm an openly gay man. That's what Yiannopoulos said. I'm an openly gay man. And what you are doing where you're retreating into video games or fantasy or the Internet, that's great. You don't need women anymore. That's his anti-feminist argument. And this was so popular among this group of people that he really wrote it out to prominence. Now not everyone on 4chan thinks that he is the leader and all of that. He just sort of has a contingent and he indeed tried to buy 4chan, I believe over the summer and failed. He wants to be the leader.

AMT: You accord a lot of influence to 4chan. Is it possible you're overstating that influence?

DALE BERAN: Oh, certainly. I mean I'm fallible. But I do indeed believe it. So when I speak about 4chan, I'm not speaking about the website itself anymore, in some sense. I'm speaking about the cultural movement, the chan movement, all of these other sites, this whole sort of constellation of sites and cultural influence that they have. But I believe that is incredibly strong. I think that it needs to be stated. I think I'm not overstating it in that sense.

AMT: And if we look at the people who voted for Donald Trump, a lot of them would be offended that you link them to 4chan. But what are you saying about the culture?

DALE BERAN: Well, I sort of divide the Trump coalition into three different sections and I say indeed there are older folks people—over 40, baby boomers and so forth—who kind of remember the 1950s, remember when capitalism worked in a sense and got them a middle class job and sort of all the possessions they wanted and that sort of thing. And those people indeed sort of naively believe that Trump will bring back the 1950s again, will make America great again through empowering corporations and all that. And then there's the one per cent who write like the deregulation and then I divide it into the people under 40 and they don't believe that. They've never known a capitalism like that. They just sort of know the idea of consuming something for sort of a brief amount of pleasure, like a video game and they know it's a fantasy then they discard it and that's sort of what Trump is to them. So they just support him for a different reason, where they think oh okay, well I know that's never coming back. I know we're not getting that. But at least I can prank everyone. At least I can show my contempt for the people who do have nice lives.

AMT: You do make the point that the left has a role and even a responsibility here.

DALE BERAN: I think that once the left knows about these people right, that they don't have jobs, that they feel unfulfilled in their life. As someone in my twenties, I didn't have a job. I was one of these people. I had nothing but college debt. And I know that I am luckier than most of these people, so I know there's this huge mass of people in their twenties, in their teens or a little older who are like I don't like the life that I have and I can't see a way out. You need to give them a sense of purpose about their lives and good jobs and fulfilling existences. That's why they're there. Because the Internet is more fulfilling than anything else in their experience. And I’m sort of speaking from personal experience here, right? Like I had a lot of jobs where I was standing by the counter flipping burgers or whatever it was and the Internet was the most interesting thing. And if people don't get that, they'll keep doing this. If they feel they're unhappy, they will act out in a way that is unhappy and try and spread their misery everywhere else. And that's what 4chan is.

AMT: Dale Beran, it’s ineresting to hear your ideas. Thank you for your insights.

DALE BERAN: Oh, thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it.

AMT: Dale Beran, adjunct professor in the screenwriting and animation department at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland, as well as a writer and comic maker. We have a minute to let you know about a guest coming up tomorrow on The Current. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a writer, a feminist, even the face of a cosmetic line. She's also very much a disruptor. She's going to join me tomorrow to talk about how her experiences growing up in Nigeria and living in the US inspired her to write an essay on how to raise a feminist.

SOUNDCLIP

For me, I think about the women in my ancestral hometown, strong women, and I often see that I learned a lot from just watching the market women in Nsukka and Abba, the small towns that I knew in Nigeria. I learned a lot about feminism from them, much more than I did from reading any sort of Western feminist texts. So these are women who are holding the families together. They’re strong. They push back at the constraints that the society puts on them. And every Sunday, they want nothing more than to dress up in their shiniest of dresses and in their heels. For me, when we started to make these arguments that often in theory, I suppose can sound elegant, but when you really apply it to the real world, what is the harm in a woman making a choice for herself, that this is a thing that makes her happy?

AMT: You can hear my full conversation with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie tomorrow on The Current. That's our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for q. Carolyn Taylor from the CBC sketch comedy show Baroness van Sketch is Tom Power’s guest. Finally today, one more voice and a bit of music from San Francisco. This is an outtake from our producer Peter Mitton’s documentary, Disruption City, which we heard earlier today. San Francisco may be becoming a more and more difficult place to live. But here's an artist named Kalin Freeman who's keeping the dream of living in that city alive.

I’m Anna Maria Tremonti. Thank you for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

PETER MITTON: Downtown on Powell Street where tourists ride the cable car up the hill, a young man with a saxophone was busking at night.

KALIN FREEMAN: Peter, Kalin.

PETER MITTON: Kalin, nice to meet you.

KALIN FREEMAN: Nice to meet you.

PETER MITTON: I’m from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

KALIN FREEMAN: Canadian?

PETER MITTON: National radio in Canada.

KALIN FREEMAN: Oh really? Oh snap. Dang.

PETER MITTON: Kalin Freeman is 22. He lives across the bay with his family but comes into the city to perform.

KALIN FREEMAN: I’m an artist, sax artist. I just play around the Bay Area and everything. I have my own band and everything. I’m just trying to get out there and make it. I want to live in San Francisco. I want to live in one of these hotels and stuff. That’s the dream. That’s the big dream. I love the city life. But it’s a dream. But it’s not impossible because if you keep thinking like that, you’ll eventually get there, you know?

PETER MITTON: San Francisco may be a city disrupted by this digital gold rush, but it seems no matter how hard it becomes to make it here—people will find a way—whether they're millionaires or just young artists and dreamers, like Kalin.

[Sound: Kalin Freeman playing a saxophone cover of Drake’s “Hotline Bling”]

March 7, 2017 full episode transcript

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