EPIC WIN FOR ANONYMOUS (21 page)

Operation Birthday Boy

4chan may be well known for causing turmoil on and off the web, but deep down it has a heart. As much as /b/tards love to bring down the arrogant, they take pride in standing up for the little guy. Consider the story of William Lashua, a 90-year-old WWII vet from Massachusetts.

Birth: Look At This Poor Guy :(

In August 2010, someone posted an image to 4chan featuring a photo of a flyer found at a grocery store. The flyer featured an elderly man with kind eyes and a grumpy frown. It read, “Wanted: People for Birthday Party,” and provided the time and location for the event.

Discovery: D’awww!

4chan’s heart melted. They assumed that this poor guy was so lonely and friendless that he had to make signs advertising his own birthday party. Within hours, they decided to give him a birthday surprise. They tracked down his military record and contacted the VFW where the party was set to be held, not so they could harass him but to throw him the best party ever.

Aggregation: Reddit Starts Its Charity Engine

When someone posted the plan to the social news site Reddit, the thing exploded. As it turned out, William Lashua’s grandson is a Reddit user. When he posted the following message to Reddit, it only fueled the effort to make Lashua’s birthday special.

Kind folks of reddit, My family and I appreciate the outpouring of love and generosity. There has been a large misunderstanding. The poster which I’m told was found at the Gardner Stop & Shop was more a local notice for people that know him. It was in no way to indicate that he is alone. He has 7 children, many grandchildren, and even great grandchildren. In his younger years he was a foster parent to dozens of foster children. He is well liked in the community, and will be fully supported on his 90th birthday

Thank you again for all the love and well wishes, we certainly never expected this.

Word of Mouth: “Check out this adorable old geezer.”

The story spread to personal blogs and Twitter accounts. People posted photos of gifts and cards they planned to send. One guy who worked at a beef jerky company uploaded photos of his planned gift to the obviously toothless Lashua: a full case of dried meat. A Facebook group, which peaked at nearly seven thousand members, was created for people to share birthday wishes and collaborate on gift ideas. Lashua’s image was Photoshopped and mashed up with dozens of other memes and meme templates.

Blog Pickup: The Daily What and Urlesque pick up the story

The heartwarming tale was an opportunity for small media outlets to feature the kinder side of the web’s underbelly.

Mainstream Exposure: Internet Wishes Area Man Happy 90th Birthday

A local news station interviewed the Lashua family and the story ran on a few prominent news websites.

Death: 4chan Pats Itself on the Back

Reddit took images from the birthday party and 4chan users and subsequently shared with the community. According to one anonymous poster who contacted the American Legion, Lashua received fifty bouquets of flowers, twenty cakes, and five UPS trucks bearing cards.

Bottoms Up

Whether 4chan is an Internet Hate Machine or a place where people can collaborate on positive projects, no matter how misdirected, the exciting thing here is the way that information is now being discovered, disseminated, and consumed online. Creatives and tastemakers are no longer trying to shoehorn the web into their existing media channels, but are embracing it as a new source—
the
new source—of popular culture. People are creating their own fun, their own characters. They are engaged in a vibrant participatory culture with no rules or boundaries.

We’ve all heard statistics about how people are spending less time watching TV, listening to the radio, and going to the movies, and how that time is now spent on the Internet. This is why.

In the time it took you to read this chapter, thousands of new threads were started on 4chan. Hundreds of new posts went up on Reddit, Tumblr, and Twitter. Dozens of stories were picked up by culture blogs, and a few made it all the way to global news sites or even TV. A single photo, song, video, or story has gone viral, exposed to millions. Marketing agencies who understand this process are among the few pioneers who recognize that they no longer possess the tools to drive culture—culture which no longer trickles down from above, but grows up and spreads laterally from below. This is why Stephen Colbert and Old Spice reach out directly to Reddit and even 4chan, respectively.

Welcome to the Memesphere

Once cultural artifacts go viral, they are subsumed into the lexicon to serve as the foundation for comedic callbacks, mashups, Photoshops, etc. The culture becomes so self-referential as to become virtually incomprehensible to those who do not live inside it. Think about your grandparents, and how your daily conversation about SMS texting and email wouldn’t make much sense to them. That gap between those who are “in” and those who are “out” widens at a staggering acceleration, to the point where I might come back to the web from a short vacation and have trouble understanding what’s going on. As the memesphere grows, it demands more of your attention.

This is largely because information isn’t arranged linearly online. It’s more like a complex network of rabbit holes which may or may not yield the information you’re looking for. If you’re looking for information, you do a Google search. But maybe you don’t know what exactly to search for. So you try Wikipedia with a few different search terms.

You find that in order to gain a basic understanding of X, you must first learn about Y and Z. But then, in order to understand Z, you’ll need to watch a YouTube video, check out a forum thread, and visit someone’s Twitter account. You must probe many pathways, bouncing from one resource to the next and back, hunting for puzzle pieces. It’s a skill that only today’s younger generation is equipped to grasp, because we’ve grown up with the acceleration of consumer technology. It’s an active, participatory quest for understanding. It’s becoming second nature.

Today, this is the way humans learn, laugh, build, argue, discover, share, and live.

Surviving and Thriving in the Memesphere

One question I get more than almost any other in my line of work is, “How do you make something popular online?” The wording of this question belies a fundamental misunderstanding of how the web works, especially considering that it’s usually asked by people who spend a lot of time online.

What made Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” go viral, two decades after its release? This question is impossible to answer, because the song’s viral success was based on several serendipitous events. Advertisers in particular want to be able to buy this kind of success, but there’s no way a social media marketer would be able to mastermind a coup like this. It could only have happened by chance. Sometimes it just comes down to blind luck: slow news day, bad weather, a randomly placed 4chan thread.

Like pop songs, memes that behave like empty vessels are often the most successful. I’ve seen some memes plastered with several different languages. But sometimes the most obscure, unapproachable memes win out in the end because of increased enthusiasm from a small group of fans.

If there’s anything 4chan users hate (along with the rest of the Internet), it’s a forced meme, which someone, whether a wannabe Photoshop artiste or a grassroots marketing consultant, is desperately trying to make viral. While some companies have managed to pull off viral success, forced memes are most often met with yawns, if not outright contempt.

A Meme is Born: The Story of Keyboard Cat

Imagine creating some bit of entertainment and putting it up on YouTube for your friends, only to watch it become a massive global sensation. That’s what happened to Brad O’Farrell when he posted footage of a cat playing a keyboard.

O’Farrell has spent time on Internet forums for years, originally going online so he could talk about video games. This was way before people “just got online to make social media profiles.” O’Farrell says that his early Internet experiences gave him thick skin. But he still gives anonymous a wide berth:

I’m actually kind of terrified of the Internet because of my tragic past on message boards, I’m always afraid doing an interview about keyboard cat will make me sound like a douche and make me a target of 4chan.

O’Farrell had a group of online pals that all followed each other’s YouTube channels. The
vloggers
would make jokey little videos, but O’Farrell didn’t seem to find his voice on camera, so he began using his channel to make mashups and other meme-ish creations.

At that time, O’Farrell’s network of vlogger friends were making parody videos, sometimes of popular YouTube or Hollywood stars, or of one another. O’Farrell wanted to create content that would give his buddies something to parody, but he had no intention of creating a meme.

O’Farrell stumbled on a 30-year-old video of a cat “playing” a short tune on a keyboard (the cat was being manipulated by its owner, Charlie Schmidt). He thought it was funny in itself, but he came up with the idea of pasting the video at the end of fail videos, e.g., videos of people falling down or messing up or otherwise making an ass of themselves. He titled it, “Play Him Off, Keyboard Cat,” referring to the vaudevillian practice of a musician starting to play to cue a flailing performer that it was time to exit the stage.

The original title, “Play Him Off, Keyboard Cat” is sort of like mad libs. I renamed the cat “Keyboard Cat” (it was originally “Cool Cat”) because it was more specific and evoked a character like “Pedobear,” whereas Cool Cat could be referring to any cat. The “Him” part is an easily changeable template, for whoever the subject is of the parody. I was intending to make more follow up videos myself, so I was mostly just setting up a naming convention for a series of videos, but other people made them before I got around to it.

First he noticed that people were using his template to “play off” other videos. Then he noticed they were being posted on various forums, and realized that YouTube commenters were referencing other memes. That’s when he knew that the sort of people who spend time playing around with memes were beginning to appreciate the video. At the time, O’Farrell was working for a web video company, who tasked him with promoting their content on YouTube. He often pitched YouTube directly at [email protected]. This time he sent in Keyboard Cat with his usual suggestions, and the video was granted feature placement. From there it took off, spreading to 4chan and other meme-oriented sites.

I thought maybe it would be a blip on the radar, one of those things like “hey look someone made the Mona Lisa out of Legos and it was on Boing Boing for a day”, but the fact keyboard cat became elevated into the ‘meme canon’ surprised me. Even though a keyboard cat video alone isn’t enough to make it onto big blogs these days, the character of Keyboard Cat itself is sort of permanently in the Internet consciousness. It’s like how a satellite is launched into space with a rocket and then it detaches and is self-sustaining, the “Play him off” part was the rocket that got the “Keyboard Cat” character into the zeitgeist.

At this point, the video was getting enough attention that O’Farrell decided to attach ads. But he was worried that Charlie Schmidt might come out of the woodwork and want a piece of the pie or throw a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown notice at him. So O’Farrell tracked down Schmidt and explained the benefit of keeping the parodies online. Schmidt agreed, and now he’s selling T-shirts, an iPhone app, and even a collection of Keyboard Cat’s Greatest Hits—not to mention the TV commercials (Wonderful Pistachios used Keyboard Cat alongside Snooki, Chad Ocho Cinco, Rod Blagojevich, and characters from
Peanuts
, among other pop-culture heavyweights). Currently, more than four thousand different YouTube videos feature Keyboard Cat.

O’Farrell agrees there’s no way to guarantee that something will go viral, but there are ways to help it along, like putting it in a familiar format; making it easy to parody with basic software; and pitching well to editors and bloggers—but only if the content has legs and clear legal rights.

So this is 4chan’s lighter side that has bled out into the rest of the web. Participatory culture, meme creation, viral media: whatever you want to call it, we’re experiencing something new and exciting, and 4chan is at its forefront.

And yet 4chan is not just creativity. It’s also creative destruction. We’ve already seen how anonymous trolls tried to ruin Jessi Slaughter’s life. What would happen if they went after global corporations or political candidates of the highest order?

What happens when a toddler gets bored building sandcastles? He totters over to the next kid’s creation and obliterates it with one unexpected kick.

Chapter 8

Merry Pranksters, Freedom Fighters, or Sadistic Bullies?

I
N 2008 I was living in England, writing for a travel company. I remember returning from a trip to Spain, exhausted and dirty after a weekend of no sleep and near-missed departures. I transferred from the Eurostar train as the sun rose over London when I spotted a portly fellow in a Guy Fawkes mask wobbling toward me. We ended up sitting together on the train.

“Kind of early for a raid, don’t you think?” I asked.

He pulled up the mask and grinned. “Never too early for lulz,” he chortled. “You coming?”

“No. I had no idea there was something happening today.”

I explained I’d never participated in any raids, but was generally aware of Anonymous’s activity.

“Ah. A lurker then?”

“You might say that.”

He flashed another grin, slouched into his seat, and started fiddling with a Nintendo DS.

This interaction freaked me out. It was the first time I’d witnessed someone acknowledge Anonymous in the “real” world. It was almost as if Indiana Jones or some other cinematic character had boarded my train. To me, Anonymous was part of the Internet, and this was real life. A bemasked Anon seemed as out of place on my train as Darth Vader.

It was a jarring moment. The lines between the Internet and real life weren’t just blurry. They weren’t even there anymore. Facebook brought everyone and their mom (literally) onto the Internet, and everyday people were living out their lives on the web like it was no big deal. And now, even the antisocial denizens of the web’s pale, pulsating underbelly were drinking coffee on my train at five o’clock in the morning.

Troll Community

The trolling of the Usenet era can largely be seen as lighthearted, almost gentlemanly fun that actually had some social value in that it inoculated noobs to online life and encouraged them to absorb the social mores of the online community.

Journalist Julian Dibbell became aware of trolls when researching online gaming for an essay called “A Rape in Cyberspace” that he wrote for the
Village Voice
in 1993. The story chronicled a lone troll named Mr. Bungle who “raped” fellow players’ avatars, forcing them to commit bizarre sex acts on each other via a “voodoo doll,” a bit of code that allowed Bungle to take control of others’ characters. The spectacle drove at least one victim to tears.

Back then, this kind of malicious trolling was mostly a solitary proposition. According to Dibbell, the attitude of the man behind Mr. Bungle was, “This is all just make believe, so let’s just play around and see what happens when you poke this community with a stick.” But for the victims it wasn’t just a game. They felt violated. The essay was an early glimpse into the ways that online life and real life would bleed together in the coming decades.

Dibbell continued to track trollish behavior in online games, writing another landmark article about
griefers
(trolls who terrorize others within online games) for
Wired
in 2008. During that time, technology made it easier for people with trollish inclinations to find one another and engage in collective mischief. Trolls would set up sites and create FAQs dedicated to griefing tips. They congregated in anonymous IRC channels to plan coordinated attacks. Trolling became a more explicitly subcultural, even communal, behavior, as they realized they could cause a lot more damage—and generate a lot more lulz—working together.

The Habbo Hotel Raids & The Patriotic Nigras

Habbo is a global social networking site for teenagers that allows users to create cartoonish avatars that interact with each other in a Lego-like environment. The hub of the Habbo universe is the Habbo Hotel. It’s where users access chat rooms and games. It gets 18 million unique visitors each month.

Because Habbo is populated mostly by kids, it became an easy target for trolls. First they came from Something Awful. The goons created a fake cult of nonconfrontational characters who wore gray hoods. They would chant mystical babble like “the path is gray” in an effort to convert other players, whom they called prismatics because of the colors in their costumes. They didn’t disrupt the other players, but mostly just aimed to confuse. At one point they staged an “ascension,” where the goons reenacted the Jonestown Massacre, complete with gray Kool-Aid. The prank climaxed when the goons disconnected simultaneously, vanishing into the ether after having consumed their gray beverage. Other goons posing as concerned friends and family went into hysterics, and those who weren’t in on the joke were spooked.

4chan users, many of whom had also migrated from Something Awful, saw delicious opportunity in July 2006. In what came to be known as The Great Habbo Raid, hundreds of /b/tards joined Habbo, creating black, suit-wearing avatars with giant Afros. The avatars disrupted conversations, flooded chat rooms with racist spam, and generally annoyed people. In particular, they blocked access to the hotel’s swimming pools, repeating, “Pool’s closed due to AIDS.” When moderators banned the trolls, the /b/tards accused them of racism.

Meanwhile, over in Second Life, a game world that attracts tens of thousands of players at any given moment, a group of /b/tards calling themselves the Patriotic Nigras spent their days messing with some of the community’s denizens, especially the furries. Furries have long been a favorite target of 4chan for many reasons, but mostly because they take themselves so seriously. The furries flock to Second Life, where they are able to live out their “fursonas” in peace and mutual appreciation.

So the Nigras created Tacowood, a parody of the Furry utopia Luskwood, but instead of a beautiful forest populated by cuddly anthropomorphic critters, Tacowood comprised a “defurrested” wasteland strewn with the corpses of dead furries.

For my money, the best thing the Patriotic Nigras ever pulled off was their griefing of an in-game CNET interview with Second Life virtual real estate magnate Anshe Chung’s avatar. The interview was interrupted when the Nigras conjured a parade of giant pink penises out of thin air, which danced across the stage, horrifying everyone involved.

In Julian Dibbell’s aforementioned write-up of troll culture, one Something Awful goon who was part of a troll group within the game EVE Online said, “The way that you win in EVE is you basically make life so miserable for someone else that they actually quit the game and don’t come back.”

The Nigras and goons aren’t really playing Habbo Hotel, Second Life, or EVE. They’re playing the 4chan metagame. These kinds of trolls were purely “for the lulz,” and they defined Anonymous’s behavior in its early days. It was relatively mischievous fun at someone else’s expense, and it didn’t cross the line into the real world.

Mitchell Henderson Memorial Raid

On a spring afternoon in 2006, a seventh grader named Mitchell Henderson fatally shot himself in the head. His friends created a virtual memorial page on MySpace, leaving condolences for family members, prayers, and cherished memories.

One mourner’s MySpace comment became a meme.

He was such an hero, to take it all away. We miss him so, That you should know, And we honor him this day. He was an hero, to take that shot, to leave us all behind. God do we wish we could take it back, And now he’s on our minds. Mitchell was an hero, to leave us feeling like this, Our minds are rubber, our joints don’t work, Our tears fall into abyss. He was an hero, to take that shot, In life it wasn’t his task, He shouldn’t have had to go that way, before an decade’d past.

The phrase
an
hero
struck /b/tards as hilarious. On its face, the garbled grammar brought the lulz, but more importantly it was the idea that killing oneself is inherently heroic. On 4chan, an hero is now synonymous with suicide. When someone asks for advice on the /adv/ board, some smartass will inevitably suggest, “an hero?”

The way /b/ saw it, some emo wimp killed himself over a toy, and a bunch of whiners were turning the spoiled little shit into a hero. Something had to be done. In the midst of the tragedy, the page caught the attention of /b/, who spammed the page mercilessly with insensitive messages. They eventually found out his parents’ home address and began prank-calling them, saying “Hi, this is Mitchell. I’m at the cemetery,” or “Hi, I’ve got Mitchell Henderson’s iPod.” (For reasons I’m unable to determine, /b/ became convinced that Mitchell killed himself over a lost iPod, which probably contributed to their sense of the situation’s lulziness.)

There is a cartoon of a 4chan troll euphorically licking the tears from the cheek of his victim. This harassment represents a nastier bent to Anonymous’s trolling.

Tom Green LIVE! Raids

Remember Tom Green, the gonzo comedian who, like Andy Kaufman, made a career out of confusing and enraging NORPs? Green’s cable access show was picked up by MTV in 1999, and for a few years he was among the most well-known comedians. After a few box office flops, he launched
Tom Green LIVE!
, a web show that continued in the spirit of his earlier show, which had featured unscreened prank callers.

In August of 2006, /b/tards flooded his phone lines with prank calls blurting out as many obscure 4chan memes as possible before Tom cut them off. There are videos on YouTube of an increasingly frustrated and unhinged Green putting up with abuse from /b/tards. Here was a man who was used to be in control of the situation. But the troller had become the trolled. Green eventually got wise and began to address 4chan directly, but this was perceived by Anonymous as further desperation. This represents the first time Anonymous went after a specific person on a large scale.

Hal Turner Raid

The trolling of white supremacist radio host Hal Turner represents a meaningful shift in Anonymous’s behavior. It wasn’t just for the lulz; it was, in chan-speak, “for great justice” (a line from the aforementioned
Zero Wing
)
.
In their eyes, this guy was a villain who needed to be taken down. In lulzy fashion, of course.

In December 2006, Anonymous members flooded Turner’s show with prank calls and brought down his website, provoking him to post all the prank callers’ phone numbers, encouraging his true fans to retaliate.

In response, Anonymous dug up Hal Turner’s criminal record along with his current residence and contact information. Hundreds of prank calls ensued. In the following months, Hal threatened 4chan and Anonymous, and they continued to prank his show and website. This conflict culminated with Turner filing a lawsuit against 4chan and several other sites for copyright infringement. The suit was dismissed.

Hal was convinced that he would be able to get the jerks that caused him so much pain, but he, like many others who wander into Anonymous’s crosshairs, didn’t recognize the collective’s knack for asymmetrical warfare.

During the American Revolution, colonial forces were able to take out huge swathes of enemy combatants because, technically, they didn’t play by the rules. They hid in the woods, sniped from a distance, and behaved in otherwise dishonorable fashion. The British forces were still operating under the old rules, and in some cases they got slaughtered. Those dishonorable tactics would become the strategies of future conflict. In today’s War on Terror, insurgents use similar methods. They hide among civilians and employ other kinds of trickery. Military strategists call it asymmetrical warfare. It’s why the US’s magnificently powerful armed forces are still fighting a war after a decade of conflict. Hal Turner tried to fight 4chan with legal means and lost. Like the clumsy British forces, he was playing by old rules.

In a weary post, Turner eventually admitted defeat.

I am not certain where to go from here. My entire existence—short of my physical presence on this planet—has been utterly wrecked, by people I never met from places I’ve never been.

Anonymous: 1

Evil: 0

Anon Gets Cocky

In October 2006, Jake Brahm posted bomb threats to 4chan, and was subsequently investigated by the FBI, sentenced to six months in prison and six months under house arrest, and ordered to pay $26,750 in fines.

The following year, a teenager in Pflugerville, Texas, posted photos depicting pipe bombs (they were fake), threatening to blow up his school. A few other Anons tracked him down using Exif data (data that is embedded into photographs by digital cameras that details the geographic location of the photo, the make and model of the phone, the time the photo was taken, and more) and reported him to the police. He was arrested.

Several similar cases have followed in the years since. Anonymous loves to mess with people, but they seem to draw the line at indiscriminate killing. They are adept at finding and punishing Anons who step out of line.

Pedobaiting

We’ve all seen pedobaiting, though you may not recognize it as such. From 2004 to 2007, Dateline NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” segment glamorized the police’s use of undercover sting operations that were used to catch real-world child predators. The show follows a general format. The tech-savvy volunteers at Perverted Justice, an organization devoted to the prevention of child abuse, pose as children in chat rooms until they get the attention of a potential predator. They then entice the target to meet with the hypothetical child. They hire a child actor, put him in a house, and wait for the target to show up, at which point he’s confronted by host Chris Hansen (whose oft-repeated line “Why don’t you have a seat over there,” is repeated constantly on 4chan) and eventually jumped by the cops.