EPIC WIN FOR ANONYMOUS (3 page)

It’s important to remember that the cost that memes bear is almost nil compared to most other media. Who has the time for this stuff? Actually, quite a lot of people. Internet memes are bite-sized, and as more of us become handcuffed to computers throughout the day, these tiny diversions become almost necessary.

A recurring theme in Shirky’s work is the idea that some human social behaviors have always existed but are latent until triggered by some new technology that allows humans to express those behaviors like never before. In many cases, cultural critics shake their heads, claiming that human society is somehow getting dumber or lazier or more debauched. Clay argues that human behavior is mostly constant, and what changes is the technology.

This explains why we didn’t see a group like capital-
A
Anonymous, the pseudopolitical activist group spawned from 4chan, ten years ago. Clay Shirky mentions the area code hookup threads that pop up on /b/ from time to time.

The scale at which Anonymous operates would not have been available ten years ago. When you look at area code hookup threads, the unspoken there is that obviously there’s enough people here in any given area code that might be on the board. That density wasn’t around ten years ago. People getting comfortable with this medium takes a lot longer than just rolling the tools out.

Clay draws my attention to Six Degrees, an early social network that had basically the same functionality as the more popular Friendster, but years earlier. In 1996, there simply weren’t enough people online to support Six Degrees, and those who were online were not sufficiently acclimated to the Internet to be comfortable with the sort of commitment to a virtual identity that profile-based social networks such as Facebook and MySpace demand. Today, a generation has grown up with the Internet, considering it as much of a given as telephone networks. This generation has pioneered social networking because a lot of younger people already feel like they are living their lives online.

The Meme Factory

So what does all this have to do with 4chan?

For eight years now, 4chan has been a powerful (if not
the
powerful) wellspring from which memes emanate, a no-rules, boundary-less forum where the funniest and most interesting content not only rises to the top, but is copied, remixed, and mashed up ad infinitum until it becomes an indelible piece of this ever-shifting new culture. On 4chan, entertainment is no longer passive. It is an interactive, living organism. 4chan behaves like the Internet, but harder, better, faster, stronger—a whirling microcosm of creativity. A fetid, bubbling meme pool.

To understand what makes 4chan tick, one must understand the language of Internet memes. 4chan didn’t invent this, and is hardly the only place on the web where memes are born. Many of the memes featured in this book became viral completely independent from 4chan. But for a period of time that continues at least up to this writing, 4chan reigns as the web’s primary meme factory.

Chapter 2

Discovering 4chan

G
ROWING UP IN rural Pennsylvania I had little exposure to the outside world, culturally speaking, except for the piddly local library. My grandparents bought my sister and I our first family computer, a Compaq Presario with a blindingly fast Pentium II processor, when I was fourteen. My ninety-year-old grandfather insisted that familiarity with a computer would define a person’s ability to compete in the marketplace of tomorrow, but I had one thing on my mind: How do I get this thing to play video games?

Up until then, I had owned a few Nintendo consoles. Pop in a game cartridge and you’re off. There was no installation of software, no downloading patches. Everything just
worked
. Not so with this unfamiliar contraption that miraculously landed in my room (a decision my parents apparently made without considering the implications of putting what was essentially a free porn machine in an adolescent boy’s bedroom). Of course, I was terrified at the prospect of divine retribution and celestial shame, and I limited my racy searches on that computer to victorias secret.com, which still brought unimaginable guilt.

Successfully running an average game on a PC in those days often required hours of detective work. I trawled tech support pages and dug deeply into hobbyist forums, slowly loading page after page until I had gathered enough information to get back into the game.

I familiarized myself with dozens of software packages, but I was most fortunate to grow up along with simple hypertext, the nonlinear, nonhierarchical structure of ideas all connected across millions of blue sentence fragments. My search for knowledge and entertainment on the web felt like untangling a giant knot; at times screen-smashingly frustrating and at other times deeply satisfying. I would follow certain paths across twenty pages, come to a dead end, and then start over from the beginning, following a different path. Over time I became more adept at finding the fastest routes to the information I wanted, whether that meant googling various search strings, posting a question on a forum, or browsing massive downloadable user manuals.

Along the way, I learned basic computer skills. More importantly, I learned how to navigate the Internet, a skill that would come to define my career. Due to the way information is structured on the web, one can follow endless rabbit holes of information. This was the dawn of the search engine and Wikipedia, which together opened my mind to an infinite world of new questions and answers. At some point gaming became a secondary concern, and I started using the Internet for the Internet’s sake.

Though my mother put strict limits on the amount of time I could spend on the Internet, I had an hour each day to chat with friends on AOL Instant Messenger, read video game news, and look at funny photos at places like Fark and Something Awful. I’d boot up the computer, dial up a connection, and open twenty windows. Then I’d putz around the house, waiting for everything to load (usually about ten minutes). Then, and only then, would I start the egg timer that my mom used to mark our Computer Time. The twenty windows would generally keep me occupied for the hour.

Over the next few years I discovered Napster, which opened my ears to indie rock. I became obsessed with punk music and its associated aesthetic. During those years I read probably thousands of music reviews and participated in countless forum arguments over the authenticity of certain bands. I got turned onto indie game development and the software piracy scene. I engaged in conversations about the nature of art, pop culture, and the web itself. I felt as though I was a part of something to which literally no one I knew in real life was privy. At home, amid miles of cornfields, I had one neighbor (a middle-aged couple), but online I was a part of a cadre of critics and tastemakers on the bleeding edge of culture. (Looking back, I was probably pretty insufferable in those days.)

And then college happened. I went to a tiny liberal arts school a few miles from my hometown. Culturally speaking, it didn’t have much more to offer, but I fell in with a small group of indie rock geeks. We were
aesthetes
, silently projecting an aura of cultural superiority over the normals, who likely never noticed.

One of my friends shared my enthusiasm for the web, though his knowledge of its emerging trends dwarfed mine. He was the sort of guy who wore a fedora, started a satirical newspaper, and had dreams of developing a gossip site that would act as sort of a hyperlocal Gawker for our rinky-dink campus. Perhaps more than our shared love of the web, we had in common a basic desire to be a part of a world bigger than the one in which our bodies were trapped. We’d talk about New York business moguls and Silicon Valley upstarts, referring to industry personalities by first names though we were miles away (geographically and experientially) from either of those scenes.

This friend and I developed a habit for sending each other, via instant messenger, links to funny or interesting web content. It became a challenge to beat each other to the latest story, and since we were pretty much the only people we knew who spent most of their waking hours in front of a computer, this practice continued after college. To this day, we still IM each other stuff.

Sometime in 2006, this guy sent me a link to 4chan—to a gross-out photo of an anime (Japanese animation) character doing something unspeakable involving at least three bodily fluids. For us, the Internet was a magical ladder reaching to new heights of the human imagination, but it was also a hilarious cesspool of depravity.

“Dude, WTF,” was probably my response, incredulity giving way to laughter at the existence of the kind of mind who would create such an atrocity. “Where did you find this?”

“4chan.org. It’s a gold mine.”

And so began my relationship with 4chan. My friend went on to write, in a blog post for Gawker, one of the first mainstream reports of 4chan as a growing phenomenon.

4chan users would likely call me a newfag (read on, offended readers) and a lurker. I’ve rarely ever posted anything on the site, and I came to the scene relatively late. But what I found on 4chan was a distillation of what made the web so special. It’s wild and weird—a level playing field where physicists and fathers rub shoulders with horny teenagers and senior citizens who compulsively collect their belly button lint in mason jars, with photographic proof. To be honest, I often find the place generally repulsive, but sometimes repulsive things have massive influence.

On 4chan, you never quite know whom or what you’re going to run into. 4chan is like that burnout teenager who asked you and your childhood friends if y’all wanted to see a dead body down by the train tracks. 4chan is that kid in your class with Asperger’s who sketched out a hundred-page graphic novel based on the entire recorded output of the prog-metal band Rush. It’s the lightheartedly sadistic next-door bully named Sid from Pixar’s
Toy Story
. It’s Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden from
Fight Club
. It’s Willy Wonka and Boo Radley and Johnny Knoxville all rolled into one throbbing, sweating, oozing gob of id.

4chan is the most fascinating place on the Internet.

But What Is It?

4chan is an imageboard: a simple message board that allows users to post images in addition to text. Users can post anonymously, without setting up an account. It’s hosted at http://www.4chan.org, and was launched in 2003 by a 15-year-old kid who wanted to provide his online buddies with a place to share anime.

That’s it.

But somehow, 4chan has evolved into the web’s foremost wellspring of pop-culture output over the last decade, spawning globally recognized iconography and serving as a base for people who conduct clandestine operations ranging from stalking cute girls to organizing global efforts of pseudopolitical “hacktivism.”

As of this writing, 4chan receives 12 million hits monthly, making it one of the largest communities on the web. No small feat for a site with no marketing budget, no stated mission, no searchable index, no archives, a userbase that’s famously antagonistic to outsiders, a decade-old user interface, and almost zero static content. There’s something special about 4chan that keeps people coming back, in dramatically greater numbers year after year.

“Like it or hate it, 4chan is an important cultural force . . . It is a huge site, and so many Internet memes are formed there, it’s hard to ignore it,” said June Cohen, executive producer of TED Media, the organization that invited 4chan’s founder to speak alongside impressively credentialed academics, inventors, and entrepreneurs in 2010.

I could go on telling you about it, but I’d rather show you.

Chapter 3

4chan in a Day

M
OST OF THE media coverage that 4chan has received over the last year has focused on Anonymous (again, capital
A
Anonymous). This is the loosely organized hacker collective responsible for a variety of unrelated pranks, hacks, and protests beginning in 2007. 4chan’s the sort of place where unseemly characters congregate to plan pseudopolitically motivated mischief. We’ll get to them later. But what’s it actually like to be there?

I spent twelve straight hours on the site, documenting my experiences in real time. Everything you’re about to read actually happened as I’ve presented below. I haven’t added a thing to make it interesting. I don’t need to.

Take my hand. Call me Virgil.

The Enthusiast Boards

As of this writing, there are 49 boards that make up 4chan.org. When you read about 4chan in the news, you are most likely reading about /b/, 4chan’s Random board. And for good reason. /b/’s traffic makes up more of the activity on 4chan than the other boards combined. /b/ is a no-rules board that fosters all kinds of nasty behavior. I discuss it later in this chapter. But first, some descriptions of the enthusiast boards found on 4chan that focus on specific areas of interest.

Note: All posts quoted from 4chan and elsewhere are reproduced exactly as posted.

/a/ Anime & Manga

4chan was originally conceived as a place for anime and manga (comic book) fans to talk about their hobby and share images from their favorite anime franchises. There are strict rules in place to ban those who spoil storylines. Not much to see here if you’re not an anime buff.

As someone who has little personal interest in anime, I haven’t spent much time on this board. But anime has had an important influence on the rest of 4chan, and on Internet culture at large. Anime fandom in the West exploded with the advent of the Internet. Before the web, fans acquired VHS tapes from pen pals in Japan and drove for days to get to annual anime conventions. Today’s anime geek has millions of hours of content at his fingertips, all dubbed, subtitled, and readily available. What’s more, he has a deeply informed network of superfans he can consult 24/7. And if he can’t find some obscure piece of content, he can inquire at /a/ and likely receive an answer within seconds. Still, the hobby demands a deep devotion, and this is a favorite place for fans to geek out.

Japanese culture is deeply embedded in underground Internet communities like 4chan, partially because the initial scarcity of anime in the West drove anime nerds to the web to find information about their hobby—but also because certain strains of anime lean towards the transgressive, and transgression loves company.

/adv/ Advice

One of the more recent social experiments on 4chan, the /adv/ board is a crowd-sourced advice column. Sometimes responses are genuine, even heartfelt. Sometimes they’re snarky and mean, but in a lighthearted, creative way. A lot of the questions deal with nerds asking help for dealing with girls.

Here’s the top question right now, verbatim:

Ok, so here’s my problem. Next fall, I got into my last year of college. I’ve havent declared a major, but I can finish either English or Psychology in two semesters. If I go into english, I will go to law school. If I go into psych, I’m in the long haul for a PHD. I enjoy psych alot, but I want the best for my future family and I’m concerned about money.

Advice is requested with the understanding that many of the responses will be trollish in nature. But half the fun is seeing what kind of creatively terrible advice anon (i.e., lowercase-a anonymous, the anonymous crowd on 4chan, not to be confused with Anonymous, described above) is able to come up with.

/an/ Animals & Nature

This board is for photos of plants and animals only, with frequent discussion on how to care for pets and plants.

The top post:

So I found a baby cat on the streets yesterday, me and a friend brought him home, tried to feed him some tuna, she didn’t want any of it, but she had some milk. Now I’m keeping her at my house, and, well, I’d like some advice on what to do now, for getting to shit and pee in one place and food she could eat that doesn’t go to waste after two hours, and if I should bathe her. She’s got no wounds or anything, but she was pretty scared yesterday night, crying and getting into my bed and in my sheet, and now she’s sleeping in a box on my dad’s lap.

D’aww.

/c/ Anime/Cute

Here is a place for lonely anime nerds to post cute, as opposed to erotic, anime pictures. Bookish girls with sexy librarian glasses and big eyes dominate the board.

One poster describes his crush with an enthusiasm that perfectly encapsulates the vibe:

For me, attraction is mainly her physical appearance. She looks like a doll or a lollipop with a curl of ice cream or something on her head. It’s very appealing visually. Also she is good at doing/saying really cute things, especially things boys like.

But it’s not just about looks. I stumble on one poster who insists that his infatuation with a particular anime character from a series called
Magical DoReMi
is based on the strength of her character as depicted in the show:

A lot of it has to do with her selflessness and personal sacrifice for others. This is best showcased in the beginning of Sharp when she’s taking care of Hana at night, while still juggling school and her idol work. I can barely keep up with just school on its own. Her straightforwardness can come in handy sometimes too.

I’m no psychologist, but it seems the attraction to cute, childlike anime girls is driven by a fear of real women. These cartoons don’t talk back, they don’t judge, and they’re innocent and trusting. Best of all, they’re often depicted as being into nerdy guys. The producers of these series’ know their audience.

People throw the word
love
around quite a bit on this board, and they mean it. To the extent that a human being can love a cartoon character, these guys (and a few girls too!) do. It’s not just a sexual thrill. One guy says that such and such a character is so beautiful he could cry, and I believe him.

/cgl/ Cosplay & EGL

This discussion board is for people who dress up like anime, video game, or other fictional characters for fun. It’s called
cosplay
(costume-play). If you’ve ever been to a comic book or video game convention, you’ve probably seen these folks—though there are also many conferences dedicated solely to cosplay culture. Hard-core cosplayers spend thousands of dollars on everything from exotic fabrics to wigs to comically massive foam swords. There are lots of women hanging around /cgl/. EGL stands for Elegant Gothic Lolita, a Japanese fashion that looks like modest, frilly Victorian garb, but is very dark and influenced by punk/goth subcultures.

It might seem at first glance as though there’s something wrong with adults who dress up like comic book characters. I’m tempted to think from time to time that there’s something unhealthy about cosplay fans, who obsessively ponder the history of their favorite fantasy characters, who devote most of their free time absorbing ephemera relating to their hobby, who spend a decent chunk of their disposable incomes building their identities around their hobby . . . and then I go to a football game.

/ck/ Food & Cooking

A sample:

Alright, /ck/. I’m on a mission and I’m not quitting until I succeed. I don’t like eggplant or zucchini. I’ll eat them if I absolutely must, since I’m not a 5-year old, but I do not like them and have never cooked anything with either of them.

But, there MUST be a way to prepare eggplant or zucchini that I will enjoy. Not tolerate, but actually enjoy. I want to be able to say, “Fuck yes, I want to eat more of this shit!” So I come to /ck/ for suggestions on delicious ways to prepare eggplant or zucchini. I will NOT give up and you WILL hear from me again, either asking for more suggestions or to confirm that I’ve succeeded in my quest to enjoy these two vegetables.

4chan’s cooking board allows users to share recipes, kitchenware deals, and cooking tips. It’s all very macho, as though the boys are attempting to compensate for their interest in a traditionally domestic hobby.

/cm/ Cute/Male

Another anime board. This one’s full of photos of male anime characters—a gay-male and hetero-female counterpart to /c/.

/co/ Comics & Cartoons

A home for images and discussion regarding Western comics. This includes everything from superhero fare to graphic novels to Spongebob Squarepants. The current top thread began with someone writing “Meanwhile at Taco Bell.” Hundreds of responses follow, each taking on the persona of a comic book character, writing what, say, Spider-Man would say if he was chilling at Taco Bell.

/d/ Hentai/Alternative

This is where things start to get
really
weird. Hentai is hard-core pornographic animation. The “alternative” part means tentacle rape (a slippery fetish that goes back centuries in Japanese art) and a host of other deviant sexual fantasies played out in ink. Here you will find sexualized depictions of women who are half-arachnid; cannibalism; and massive, intricately drawn monsters covered in genitalia from head to toe like some kind of Lovecraftian nightmare creature. The psychology behind these fetishes runs far deeper than the scope of this book.

/e/ Ecchi

Ecchi is the soft-core alternative to /d/. So if you’d rather see a Sailor Moon nip-slip than tentacle rape, welcome. The current top thread is a “pillow” gallery. These are anime girls who are embracing, and sometimes humping, pillows.

/fa/ Fashion

4chan’s fashion board blows my mind. It’s populated by super-stylish people asking each other questions about $300 dress shoes. I guess not all 4chan users are dragon shirt-wearing neckbeards. A popular meme on this board is to post a photo of oneself trying on outfits. It’s like having a room full of stylists telling you what to wear each morning. Right now someone is giving a hilarious tutorial on how to fold clothes (“Don’t use Japanese folding techniques? You don’t know shit about clothes”).

/fit/ Fitness

Physical fitness tips and photos of weight loss progress are just a few of the discussion topics you’ll find on 4chan’s fitness board. Some are more serious than others.

The current top thread:

Okay so every other weekend i get shitfaced. I’m trying to reduce bodyfat at the moment, however i understand getting shitfaced is VERY bad . . . But . . . . . . . . is it still possible reduce bodyfat while drinking every other weekend?

/g/ Technology

Of course 4chan has a gadget and tech board. The conversation here isn’t much different than what you’d find in the comments section of an average tech blog. Users often post photos of their “battle stations” (i.e., home computer setups featuring massive screens and gaming peripherals).

/gif/ Animated GIF

A place to share animated GIFs; the board is generally flooded with porn. GIFs are small animated image files that are used on 4chan either to isolate a tiny portion of a video clip or to string together several images to form a slideshow.

GIFs are found all over 4chan, and increasingly on the web at large, as many blog-commenting platforms and message boards allow users to submit animated GIFs as comments. Sites like GIF Soup allow people to easily convert YouTube footage into GIFs so they can share them with friends on blogs and social networking pages.

Over the last few years I’ve noticed people using GIFs in lieu of text to convey an emotional reaction to someone else’s content. A GIF of
Sesame Street
’s Bert looking nonplussed is a more concise, clever way to express one’s reaction than saying, “Wow, I don’t know what to say.” On 4chan, people will post a GIF image with the caption, “MFW [My Face When] ____.” It becomes a game to find, or make, new GIF images to represent emotions.

/h/ Hentai

Yet another board for sharing hard-core cartoon porn, though this one’s more about Princess Mononoke having sex with a fellow human being as opposed to a sea monster.

Positioning myself as a reporter, I asked the board what they get out of cartoon sex and these are some of the responses I got.

we don’t have to explain shit to you. GTFO. [Get The Fuck Out]

It’s kind of like how you look at :) and you see a smiling face. Just because it’s less detailed doesn’t mean it’s not attractive to us. Why don’t you go talk to people who read erotic fiction.

With hentai, you’re getting an artists representation. the models are cute and flawless. so much better than real porn.