EPIC WIN FOR ANONYMOUS (7 page)

I spoke with a 4chan user who goes by Jkid, who recently created a wiki site called Yotsuba Society (Yotsuba is Japanese for
4channel
), which he envisions as a database of information about chan culture, managed by a team of die-hard “chanthropologists.” Yotsuba Society, according to Jkid, is made for people who are deeply into imageboard culture, not just lulz. I asked Jkid about his /b/ folder.

There are many rare pictures that you can’t find on Google search. What you see on 4chan, even on the slow boards, you may not see for a long time, if ever. That’s why I archive every thread I click on.

Jkid calls this impulse the “prime
imageboard
directive.” He sees himself as a historical archivist, having collected over 87 gigabytes of material from 4chan alone. He also collects information from other chan boards. Eventually he hopes to document the history of chan culture, from the perspective of the moderators behind the scenes. He manages a volunteer staff of nine, all who hope to create value for the community by documenting their corner of the web.

Another way /b/tards preserve 4chan culture is by submitting particularly epic threads to http://www.4chanarchive.org, a site that accepts user submissions and allows the community to vote on a given thread’s worthiness for inclusion in the archive. It basically serves as a “best-of-4chan” collection, and browsing the site can in some ways be a much more fulfilling experience than slogging through 4chan. I often feel that one must trudge through miles of garbage on /b/ to find the occasional gem—though perusing old threads at 4chanarchive lacks the suspense of seeing stuff go down in real time. 4chanarchive not only saves the page, but all of the images hosted on the page as well. According to the FAQ, the site receives between six thousand and eight thousand daily unique visitors. The top viewed thread on /b/ right now at 4chanarchive is “Men laughing alone with fruitsalad.” /b/tards have collected dozens of stock photo images featuring men laughing while eating fruit salad. I can’t not laugh as I scroll down the page, seeing these cornball shots with the same bizarre theme.

The MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and University of Southampton researchers recently performed a comprehensive analysis of 4chan’s anonymity and ephemerality called
“4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community.”
They collected data for two weeks, compiling 576,096 posts in 482,559 threads. Their findings confirm how different the 4chan experience can be for everyone involved. Researchers discovered that the median life of a thread is just under four minutes. The most ephemeral threads last less than thirty seconds, often due to being posted at a high-volume time of day and inciting no replies. Furthermore, the median thread spends just five seconds on the first page over its lifetime. Only posts that are able to grab the attention of the group have any chance of staying on the front page for any length of time. They also found that /b/ hosts thirty-five thousand threads and four hundred thousand posts
every day.
Most shocking, 43 percent of posts get no replies at all—nearly half of everything posted to /b/ is summarily ignored.

The study also examined the subject matter of the threads, broken down this way.

• 27% Themed—“ITT, we post pictures of ex-girlfriends.”
  
• 19% Sharing—“Check out this lizard that was on my front porch this morning.”
  
• 10% Questions—“I just got a $300 Christmas bonus and I want to spend it all on Amazon. What should I buy?”
  
• 9% Personal Info Sharing—“This is my new motorcycle. Does /b/ like?”
  
• 8% Discussion—“What does /b/ think about the new
  World of Warcraft
  expansion?”
  
• 8% Request for Item—“Does anyone have any high-res
  Green Lantern
  screenshots?”
  
• 7% Request for Action—“This is the phone number of the jerk who stole my girl. Make me proud, /b/.”
  
• 5% Meta—“/b/ sucks these days. Full of newfags.”
  
• 6% Other.
  

Back to /b/. I refresh the page again, and I’m presented with a dozen new threads. The one on top features a beautiful feline in repose and reads:

My cat tiga died today /b/. She was 15. A mean mother fucker but I still loved her. Can it be cat teim?

The thread already has over 150 responses. People post condolences along with photos of cute cats.

Cats, Camgirls, and Comics

Speaking of cute cats, I should probably mention here that they are one of 4chan’s defining obsessions. If I come across someone who’s never heard of Internet memes, the first thing I usually say is, “Have you ever seen lolcats?” That’s because it’s not only the biggest thing to come out of 4chan, it’s the undisputed biggest Internet meme.

Here’s the idea: A humorous photo of a cat accompanied by a caption written in a pidgin English derived from rushed IM speak. The stupidly funny broken English coupled with the inherent cuteness of the cat images made for a viral phenomenon. lolcats were dumb, catchy, and approachable enough that anyone could pick up on the humor after seeing a few.

lolcats first showed up on 4chan in 2005 as a cute joke contrasting with the site’s usual stream of gross-out content, but they did not achieve cultural ubiquity until 2007, when Ben Huh bought http://www.icanhazcheezburger.com and formed the site around lolcats. Now there are millions of lolcat images all over the web, generating millions of dollars. And it all came from /b/’s “Caturday” tradition of posting cute captioned cats each Saturday.

Ah, here’s a big 4chan obsession: a camgirl thread. The words
camgirl
or
camwhore
describe a girl on the Internet who attracts the attention of men by using her beauty for fun or profit.

Girls on 4chan will post photos of themselves on /b/, usually holding up a piece of paper (or sometimes drawing directly on their bodies with a Sharpie) that reads something along the lines of “APRIL 5TH, 4:47PM Sup /b/” in order to prove the authenticity of the photo. Without this accompanying message, people will immediately claim that it’s just some guy posing as a girl with a random photo he found on the web. But with a time stamp indicating that it’s happening right now, they start bleating “TITS or GTFO [get the fuck out].” This practice is considered proof of authenticity, and girls need it more than anyone, since the 4chan adage “There are no girls on the Internet” suggests that anyone claiming to be a woman is actually a man either trolling or getting a sexual thrill out of posting as a woman.

After proving her identity as a female, the girl will generally tease the boys for a while, removing one article of clothing at a time, or responding to various requests. The thread eventually expires when there’s nothing left to show, and the boys move on to the next camgirl to come along. Of course, these girls don’t always disrobe. Sometimes they just show up for the attention and leave after posting a few innocent pics.

Some camgirls become famous. Some of them are known for being drop-dead gorgeous while others gain attention by being quirky and weird. Whatever the reason, these camgirls often become 4chan microcelebrities. They are given nicknames and love to show up once in a while, presumably for a self-esteem boost.

4chan’s relationship with women is weird and sad. Some use the word
cumdumpster
as a synonym for
female
. Girls even refer to themselves this way. When women appear on 4chan, the men bombard them with commands to disrobe or perform sex acts, but the moment they deliver the goods, they are booed off stage. (Then again, so are men who have nothing interesting to offer.)

I asked Lisa Nakamura what she thinks about the term.

Part of trying to blend into a transgressive social group is trying to prove that you’re more transgressive than them. This is a technique of countering sexism by applying it to yourself first. I don’t think it’s a harmless practice. I think it’s a form of self-abasement that’s pretty similar to what women often have to do in the military, which is a heavily masculine environment. The only way to show that you deserve to belong in a masculine environment is to insult yourself so other people can’t do it. It’s kind of a preemptive sexism. You protect yourself, but it’s the same thing; you’ve just been co-opted into doing it first.

In early 2009 a teen girl calling herself BoxxyBabee (real name: Catherine Wayne) uploaded a series of videos on YouTube that featured her face against a black background, yapping for five minutes about virtually nothing. Her spastic delivery and cutesy demeanor resembled a hyperactive anime girl, and she was quickly declared by many to be The Queen of /b/. This distinction brought not loyalty, but hostility, stalking, and threatening phone calls. The response on 4chan was so strong that Boxxy did something few in her position are able to do: she left the Internet. For a few years, anyway.

Boxxy resurfaced in November 2010 on an anonymous imageboard called Unichan in order to promote an eBay auction. She was selling a bag and wanted to drum up some buzz. She posted a photo of her holding a placard reading “[email protected]” (presumably so 4chan users could send her cash directly through Paypal) and the message “i’m sorry i’ve been so scared. I LOVE YOU! <3” along with the date and time stamp to prove her authenticity. Touched by her return, some anons launched “Operation Give to Boxxy Till it Hurts,” urging 4chan users to send Boxxy cash. /b/tards bid the bag up to tens of thousands of dollars, eBay naturally canceled the auction, and Boxxy disappeared once again.

Boxxy’s place in 4chan mythology is solidified among a long line of young women who have caught the attention of /b/ for being both supercute and superannoying. More recently, the teen pop sensation Rebecca Black was targeted by 4chan trolls. Black achieved instant global celebrity, partially on the strength of hatred coming from 4chan, since the mainstream media was able to position the story as a young girl’s triumph over cyberbullying.

Black’s mother paid a few thousand bucks to a vanity record label called Ark Music Factory, which specializes in recording saccharine pop songs sung by precocious tweens. In exchange, Ark wrote, produced, and recorded a pop song for Rebecca along with an accompanying video. The result was “Friday,” a teen ode to good clean weekend fun. Within a few days, Rebecca went from suburban anonymity to YouTube oddity to global pop sensation. And it annoyed anons to no end. They launched Operation Black Friday, encouraging /b/tards to fax bestiality porn to Rebecca’s school under her name, attack Ark Music Factory’s website, flood her YouTube channel with antisocial comments, and find out where she lived. Nothing noteworthy came of these efforts.

The minimal press coverage of 4chan that I’ve seen over the last few years focuses primarily on the idea of 4chan as a racist and homophobic hate group. The words
faggot
and
nigger
are used so frequently, and in situations so far removed from a hateful context, that at times it’s almost difficult to see them as slurs. People open conversations with “Greetings, faggots . . .” or “Have any of you niggers heard the new Metallica album?” The use is so indiscriminate that regular users might see them as terms of endearment. It’s as if they’re saying, “We’re all faggots and niggers here.”

I’m reminded of punk poet Patti Smith’s “Rock and Roll Nigger,” which defiantly declared, “Outside of society, that’s where I want to be,” going on to declare that Jesus Christ, Jackson Pollock, and even Grandma were niggers too. Remember, most 4chan users are computer nerds. The language operates as a way for 4chan users to bond over their shared status as social misfits, friendly monikers for those who see themselves as marginalized.

Lisa Nakamura is skeptical.

Comedians like Richard Pryor and Paul Mooney have done pretty high-profile interviews about why they’ve chosen to stop using the word
nigger
, even though they have pretty rich comedic histories of using them. People who make the argument that the words are harmless are often white people. I tend to take this argument a little more seriously when it’s coming from minorities.

I refresh /b/ again and find:

Lets make a thread where you go wikipedia and select random article, whatever comes upp, that will be the new name of your dick. ill start: Château Grand-Puy-Ducasse . . .

Further down the page I spot a RageToon thread. These are four-panel comics that highlight subtle things that enrage everyone. They showed up on 4chan in late 2008 and have become one of the most recognizable Internet memes, expanding to places like Tumblr and Reddit.

The comics start with three blank panels and a fourth featuring a crudely drawn, screaming face with the caption, “FFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUU-” The artist fills in the first three panels with something that is typically enraging, like when you accidentally rip into a page of notebook paper while removing the perforated edge. They’re simple, catchy, and infinitely shareable because they touch on commonly held but seldom-discussed frustrations. Because they’re so easy to create, their stick-figure template has spawned dozens of variations, including:

• Stoner Comics—Hilarious stories about pie-eyed misadventures.
  
• Troll Physics—Pseudoscientific explanations for impossible physical phenomena.
  
• Everything Went Better Than Expected—The opposite of RageToons.
  
• Forever Alone—A guy in humorous denial of his loneliness.