Hard to say which was my personal highlight in Extreme and Online, the first of Louis Theroux’s new documentaries exploring the underbelly of internet subcultures. Was it the young man who had been able to set up a sold-out conference event unimpeded, from which he declared “white people are DONE being bullied!”? Was it the guy who threw Louis out of his house, while wearing a Louis Theroux t-shirt, because Theroux asked him about the time he was filmed doing what appeared to be a Nazi salute? Or was it the sheer Black Mirror-esque surrealism of watching a man who calls himself ‘Baked Alaska’ being paid by an invisible online audience to run around saying offensive things to strangers? One thing I can say for sure is that these young men – and they are basically all men – sure know how to deliver the content.
But although their shenanigans were jaw-dropping, the film-making is masterly and subtle. I hooted with laughter more than once, but by the end I was very scared. Theroux’s sleight of hand is to show that assuming these are just loser trolls belies how truly dangerous they may indeed be. The internet and social media has allowed them to build platforms in ways they would never previously have been able to, and their extreme rhetoric can and does infect the mainstream. We saw it ourselves just this month, with the Prime Minister’s explosive and discredited attempts to link Keir Starmer to the failure to prosecute Jimmy Savile - a claim which originated as an internet conspiracy theory.
