EPIC WIN FOR ANONYMOUS (18 page)

The shirt became a meme, parodied by CollegeHumor and covered by several major papers. This is the sort of phenomenon that the ROFLCon folks love to pick apart, analyze and commemorate.

Hwang’s fascination with meme-dom began with early memes like Hamster Dance, Zombocom, and other single-destination sites. He recalls that Hamster Dance, like many sites of the day, had a stats ticker at the bottom of the page, so you could watch how big the thing was getting, and how quickly. He first recognized that Internet culture had bled into the mainstream when he saw Rick Astley perform “Never Gonna Give You Up” at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2008.

Hwang first encountered 4chan in middle school. He claims that at the time, a big part of the attraction to the Internet was finding nasty things to send to his friends. At the time he and his buddies were passing around a lot of Rotten and Stile Project links. At some point, this gave way to 4chan content.

As an informal meme historian, Hwang recognizes the cultural import of 4chan.

The content 4chan produces is so powerful. We are increasingly moving away from the Internet as it existed in the mid-90s. There was no one trying to commercialize or police it. We are also moving towards non-anonymization. On 4chan, you have to shape who you are by what you’re doing. It also brings it back demographically to the way things were when I was first discovering the web.

According to Hwang, 4chan matters for two reasons. First, its users are “white blood cells” of the Internet, because they perform vigilante justice—against people who harm animals, for instance. He points to the increasing role that 4chan users have in geopolitics, as they have successfully brought down the sites of massive multinational corporations. Second, Hwang claims that although 4chan exists as this “other” state outside of the rest of life online, it is an important part of the web’s cultural production.

Hwang laughs at the raw visual power of the Xzibit meme, which 4chan kick-started in 2007. You may know Xzibit as a rapper and host of the MTV show
Pimp My Ride
. But on the Internet, he’s become so closely linked with his meme that the usual words used to caption image macros are no longer necessary; his smiling face says it all.

Pimp My Ride
featured Xzibit and his gearhead crew retrofitting jalopies with outlandish accoutrements like flat-screen TVs or fish tanks. Xzibit would often say something along the lines of, “Yo/Sup dawg, I heard you like Xbox so we put an Xbox in your car so you can play Xbox on the road.” A clever Photoshopper recognized this recurring line and made an image macro featuring a grimacing Xzibit captioned with, “Yo dawg, I herd u like cars so we put a car in yo car so you can drive while u drive.”

The meme was a massive hit straight out of the gate. It’s gotten to the point where just the picture of Xzibit’s smiling face sans caption suggests recursion. The meme culminated two years later with a fuming Twitter response from an understandably frustrated Xzibit (I mean, the guy was a respected gangsta rapper at one point):

Everybody with the “sup dawg” shit can find the highest place in your house and jump on something sharp to kill yourselves.it’s fucking old.

No matter how trivial memes like this may seem, millions of people participate in them every day. Tim Hwang’s trying to figure out why. This kind of humor is just a sliver in the wider world of meme culture that he hopes to explore through ROFLCon and the Web Ecology Project. Naysayers look at something like the Xzibit meme and see a corny joke at best, but folks like Hwang see nothing less than tiny revolutions in entertainment, media, and human social interaction. Even moot showed up at the last ROFLCon after giving a TED Talk.

In his book
Cognitive Surplus
, Clay Shirky argues that the web is making us smarter, collectively. Humanity is working together like never before, each individual contributing something so minute as a single correction to an obscure Wikipedia entry or a photograph uploaded to Flickr. Even our Google queries help the search giant perfect its algorithms. Whether we realize it or not, we are behaving as a hive mind, and those tiny trivial inputs add up to monumental social change.

Reddit

4chan’s influence in the memesphere isn’t going anywhere soon, but Reddit is definitely catching up. Reddit is currently the biggest social content aggregator, recently taking the reins from Digg after that site’s troubled redesign. Reddit users post pieces of content and “upvote” ones they like or “downvote” ones they don’t. Even comments can be upvoted or downvoted, which makes browsing comment threads sorted by vote count half the fun.

For our purposes, the Condé Nast–owned but still very nerdy Reddit is interesting for three reasons. First, it acts as a gateway between 4chan and the rest of the Internet. Second, it’s a place where the mainstream media has recently gone to routinely scrape through content for news. Third, it facilitates meme creation that rewards users in a way that 4chan doesn’t.

Reddit is a good gatekeeper for 4chan because its users are immersed in a meme-saturated environment—but it’s not anonymous and everything is archived, so its users don’t act like sociopaths. There’s also an incentive to be nice, or at least comprehensible, since everything that’s said can be rated by fellow Redditors.

What truly sets Reddit apart is subreddits, which are tiny communities for infinitely granular subject areas. Where most sites would create tags for topics like “Tech,” “Gaming,” “News,” and “Sports,” Reddit allows its users to create their own tags, which quickly turn into tiny little communities that in many ways have replaced special interest blogs. For instance, I’m not into video games so much anymore, but I still play Starcraft, so I follow the Starcraft subreddit. It’s very specific Starcraft news, all the time. I follow several dozen other subreddits, each pulling content from hundreds of blogs across the web, each sorted for the most interesting and funny content, and each appended with scintillating conversation. It’s a fantastic platform that combines a high-level overview of the web with magnified looks at only the things I find interesting. I typically check Reddit every few hours to see what’s going on in my world.

Reddit has become nearly as adept at creating memes as 4chan. Consider the Inglip mythos. Inglip is a RageToon-based series of comics built on the random pairings of words spit out by reCAPTCHA, a Google-owned user authentication service that forces users to type out squiggly words in order to let web pages know that they’re not SPAM robots. It all started when one Redditor found the words “inglip summoned” in a reCAPTCHA. He made a comic alluding to an ancient Lovecraftian deity (“Inglip has been summoned. It has begun”). Then another user followed up with the reCAPTCHA result “called gropagas,” which he preceded with a question:

I hope our dedication to your lordship has been satisfactory. Tell me, oh great Inglip, what should your followers call themselves?

“called gropagas”

“As you wish, my lord. We are the gropagas and united, we will take the world in your name!”

Hundreds of responses followed, fleshing out the Inglip mythos. And it’s all based on randomly generated words. A few years ago, this sort of collaborative metahumor would have been found only on 4chan (or maybe Something Awful), but the rest of the Internet, with Reddit leading the charge, has caught up.

Reddit has also reappropriated 4chan’s Ask Me Anything, or AMA threads, which have attracted some major celebrities in addition to nerd icons like moot.

The all-time top verified AMA threads include those of 74-time
Jeopardy!
champion Ken Jennings, actor Bruce Campbell, Columbine shooting survivor Brooks Brown, and a former Marine One crew chief. Unverified AMA threads, which are often even more interesting, include a military whistleblower, a girl who spent 16 months as a full-time BDSM slave, a person who was caught and tortured during recent rioting in Egypt, a man who only answers questions using MS Paint, a brain cancer victim with 2–6 months to live, and a four-year-old girl (with help from her dad). After a few controversies in which AMA posters were revealed to be trolls, Reddit has taken steps to integrate a verification process.

Canvas

When moot gave an AMA on Reddit on March 29th, 2011, most of the questions about Canvas, his new startup, dealt with his team’s decision to integrate Facebook Connect into the site’s private beta-testing period. Basically, if you wanted to be a part of Canvas, you had to reveal your identity. 4chan diehards felt betrayed. Their patron saint of anonymity had given up the good fight in order to cash in.

The top comment, which received over thirteen hundred votes, read, “How do you justify rallying against the lack of anonymity that Facebook provides and then requiring it for your next project?”

moot replied:

I think it’s important to understand the difference between advocating for anonymous contribution, and a pro-anonymity-is-the-only-way!!!!! zealot. (I’m the former!)

I want the public to understand the importance of having the option to contribute anonymously. At SXSW, I focused on anonymous authenticity, and the creativity that anonymity allows for. The ability to fail quietly without having that failure associated with your name/identity allows for more experimentation and limit pushing. People also contribute in a totally raw, unfiltered way, that I’d argue is more authentic than real-ID [An ID authentication measure taken by game developer Blizzard to link players’ in-game and forum identities with their real names].

He went on to outline some times when identity is preferable, such as places that experience lots of low-quality comments, like YouTube and TechCrunch. One detractor replied:

His worldview is balanced, if that’s what you mean, but he answered nothing at all. Nothing proves to me that he won’t use information from my account, just as nothing proves to me that Facebook itself won’t. And we know they do. So his answer was the same as saying “please trust me”. Well I won’t.

But most respondents were OK with it. Of course, this was Reddit, not 4chan.

4chan uses basically the same software that it did when it started out, which itself was antiquated by the standards of the day. moot’s vision for Canvas is a web community that takes advantage of faster browsing capability as well as the lessons he’s learned from eight years of running 4chan. To fill that community with users who are going to push the platform forward, he’s going to have to weed out trolls. The Facebook Connect integration is probably a good start. Canvas isn’t 4chan 2.0.

It’s basically a user-friendly, browser-based image-editing tool connected to an imageboard with light social networking features. It’s simple for people who don’t have editing ability or don’t have a copy of Photoshop, and because it’s hosted online you don’t have to upload and download and reformat and resize in order to move content from your computer to the web. Ninety-nine percent of the people remixing images on Facebook (or 4chan, for that matter) don’t need tools as robust as Photoshop because they’re mostly only adding text or slapping a layer over an existing image. Canvas’s remixing tool allows users to do these things. What’s more, it’s all archived, so users can post an image and watch their friends create genuinely clever remixes over time, without having to worry that it’s going to fall off the edge in a few hours. Everything is shareable on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter. Surely they’re working on integration with Reddit.

I’m looking at Canvas as I write, in May 2011. Someone has posted a blank page with the words “What is Canvas?” written on it. It was posted five days ago in the #drawing thread, so it’s encouraging other users to draw response images. The first reply has written “a website” in the blank space and earned 9 stickers. The stickers represent basic emotional responses (happy face, sad face, heart, question mark, etc.). This response has earned some of each, but it looks like the smarty face, represented by a smiley with a distinguished mustache and monocle, is winning out.

Another has written a small essay within the image.

I begin by scrolling around, learning my way navigating throughout the site. It is interesting to see the amount of stuff I have already seen, and very quickly I realize, this is SFW. I get excited. I continue to look around and discover the ‘remix’ button. So I try it out and post a relatively funny picture (in my opinion). Nothing happens. I go to bed, thinking I am very unfunny.

I wake up in the morning with a cookie and two lol stickers and it’s such a relief. I mean, I hardly got to sleep last night. So I find another popular thread, and post another idea I have. It immediately gets a #1 and a smiley and I get very excited and tell my friend. Then I go to bed.

I wake up the next morning to find that I have received over 50 #1 stickers. I am ecstatic and I go through the rest of my day overjoyed. I continue to read and post and come up with funny pictures, and even show my girlfriend the webpage because of how excited I am. Then my picture appears on the ‘best’ tab and I’m like FUCK YEA.

What is canv.as you ask me?

The greatest thing ever.