I’ve been on 4chan for about 10 years.
I used to like 4chan. Everyone on it is reduced to one level: Anonymous (or “anon”). Any individual betraying any interest, feeling, or earnest belief is reduced to a “fag”: a reader is a bookfag, a weightlifter is a gymfag, someone who replies to their own posts is a samefag, a straight person is a straightfag, a homosexual is a gayfag. There were Rules of the Internet; facetious sure, but they created a common frame of reference fostering board culture. “You don’t talk about 4chan” (clever Fight Club reference); Rule 34 (if it exists, there’s porn of it); there are no girls on the internet (“tits or gtfo”); etc. It was a space where everyone was reduced to a non-entity, where the base assumptions were public and stupid, and thus people could state whatever the hell they wanted without feeling threatened or out of place. Anonymity, a low profile, and a low barrier to conversational entry encouraged a type of discussion once only possible in fringe salons and private musings to appear in public. Sure, more credulous newcomers were sometimes harmed (induced to “make crystals” by mixing bleach and ammonia, or delete system32), but one cannot stop the stupid from self-harm. I thought this collateral damage to be a remote possibility, perhaps deserved, not reflective of the situation of the site or the internet as a whole.
The internet was not serious business. 4chan was a remote sandbox and a forum for nonsense, to be treated as nonsense, reacted to as nonsense, in which I could find real pleasure, great conversation, weird subcultures, genuine freaks and geniuses, bizarre ideology, and, of course, strange new porn. This either changed without my knowing, or was never the case. I’m pretty sure the latter is most true, given the concerted private interests that seem to dominate every element of American society. Yet in this early anarchy, 4chan matriculated a whole generation in sub-lucid eddies of juvenile absurdism, helping them drink deep of a primordial kool-aid made of millions of decontextualized symbols, free to link up in any number of memetic structures before dissolving again into something else.
Due to the inherent ahierarchic and contextless nature, this simmering pool is perfect for introducing any number of concepts and normalizing thoughts about them. Tides in the pool can foster any ideological string by building a vocabulary of dissociated symbols and slowly knitting desired associations between them through purposeful recombination and loud, autistic broadcasting. This is done on any number of boards on 4chan or other websites (like 8chan, 420chan, lainchan, Facebook, and Reddit, as well as on an infinite number of other mainstream chat sites, like gaming forums and the banal comment sections of Youtube and news sites). The racism seemed strings of obvious jokes while the genuinely dangerous reactionary/radical ideologues seemed remote objects of scorn or curiosity. Their inimical influence, however, is more subtle than it once looked, and today’s technology is far better adapted to amplifying the voices of the remote and insane than I’d come to terms with - until recently.
It turns out that no matter how skeptical people are or how deep their faith in humanity, they build thought, habit, and ideology from whatever information bits are available to them, and the most common sites on the internet broadcast every possible combination of random thought bits available in every conceivable media format: Podcasts, YouTube, Reddit threads, imageboards, clickbait trash masquerading as news. As public schools prove unable to cope with the impending failure of the optimistically-begun American commonwealth (predicted left and right as the inescapable eschaton resulting of their nemeses’ unbridled sway), as organized religion falls to dereliction, and as traditional social structures crumble under neoliberal notions of freedom pushed onto the general population without adequate public institutions to complete a peaceful transfer of organization, we see people search for answers using whatever means are within their reach. As ever, when people reach out, a benevolent god isn’t waiting. Thinktank appendages, absurdists, corporate horror shows, extremists, trolls, children and adults all masquerading as each other mix with screaming commercial static to blast every available neuron. Viral information binds free radical-style to any loose dendrite through an unexpected ignorance, an unknown etymology, an exotic people, a genuine historical mystery, a feeling of hate or disenfranchisement or lust.
It is now obvious that the internet is serious business.
Children are at play in Baudrillard’s schizophrenic hyperdreams.
The end of my romance with the idea of an unfettered social pressure cooker came as recently as the mosque shootings in Christchurch on March 15, 2019. I’d had severe doubts prior, of course, starting with the posts of that idiot who shot up the mall after posting on /b/:
Then there was the bastard who strangled his girlfriend to death, posted the pictures on /b/, and then attempted (and failed [of course he failed]) suicide by cop.
These two posts, while portraits of a nihilistic solipsism, are simply novel expressions of already-extant trends: sensationalist murder out of boredom, sadism, alienation, etc. Murder and mutilation have always been cornerstones of the 4chan/shock-site communities (eg: Ogrish, YNC, liveleak, and Somethingawful); the only addition this type of exhibitionism provided to what already occupied /b/ was an entre of [anon-murderers] into pop-relevance. It provided a kind of grotesque voyeurism in which I indulged with a mix of curiosity and creeping discomfort.
But /b/ isn’t the only board on 4chan. Anyone marginally versed in chan culture knows the /pol/ boards are hives of Nazi scum, crazies, conspiracy theorists, and extremely relevant information, some accurate and some completely fabricated. I knew whenever there was a terrorist attack of any significance to check 4chan.org/pol first for raw videos and quick information on whatever the hell was going on, while the media scrambled around wondering what to censor and how to frame what actually occurred. When the Charlie Hebdo shooting happened, they had .webm clips of the shootings on day one. When the shooting at that Eagles of Death Metal concert blasted into the news, /pol/ had the raw video. 4chan.org/pol and 8ch.net/pol plastered themselves with fresh ISIS videos, weird Russian and North Korean propaganda that you couldn’t find anywhere else, and were the freshest source of whatever conspiracy theories were going to be blasted from station to station. The /pol/ boards are hives of schemers and propagandists, and are historically an excellent way to keep a finger on the pulse of whatever extremism is happening globally. This, too, made me uncomfortable, but it’s better that these people are speaking in public, right? Where one can keep tabs on them, right? Where I can keep tabs on them, and they can provide me with intel, right?
The longer the /pol/ boards exist, however, the more extreme the other boards get. Lately, the literature boards have become swamped with antisemitic posts that shit up any thread. There happen to be a great many Jewish writers and academics, and most any time any one of them is mentioned, several anons throw up a (((Harold Bloom))) or “I wonder (((who))) is behind this post,” (triple parentheses being a super-clever secret club handshake way of saying “Kike”). Often it’s not so subtle as that, with people spewing blatant vitriol about how this person’s only legitimacy comes from the Jewish media or the Jewish academia, the Jewish elites in the Jewish conspiracy thrown up with shoddy infographics and questionable quotes proving Jews’ culpability in the destruction of the West. The degeneration of the /lit/ (literature) board started with constant pro-fascist posts appended to Catholic, traditionalist, and primitivist threads on Thomas Aquinas, C.S. Lewis, and “Uncle Ted” Kaczynski. There are now constant posts about Julius Evola and Mein Kampf, etc. All of this, however, was still bearable. Fascism is an interesting, important viewpoint to consider, and the related literature makes a good investigation. But things took a hard turn into disconcerting with the recent Christchurch shooting.
The Christchurch shooting was a bizarre post-modern occurrence, packed with memes, symbols, dog-whistles, and hashtag material, broadcast live via Facebook. Brenton Tarrant, a regular 8chan poster, reached out and touched his audience directly, providing the community of rapacious nazi fucks and atomized nihilists with the raw material of a terrorist attack, one fully vested in and integrated into internet culture and the chan milieu by proper use of technology and parlance. Tarrant made his terrorist event accessible through widely known memetic hooks, broadcast it through one of the largest media platforms ever produced, and appended a great many names and researchable terms to his actions through writing on his weapons. Photographs of his inscribed equipment pre-shooting along with his manifesto were posted to the board. His actions were executed in a way designed for maximum conversation and social impact. Hell, his post-arrest photograph showed him flashing the OK symbol that /pol/tards have appropriated out of irony to make fun of the media, the initial joke being that they’d report anything as Nazi propaganda if they bandied it around as such. The reality being that the ironic appropriation lead to a real association with a tacit “everyone else is fucking dumb” message:
His GoPro attack video was immediately spread and turned into meme fodder, with clever edits churned out in a matter of hours: one with a DOOM-style interface complete with the video game’s music, RPG-style interfaces, highlight reels put to posters’ favorite songs; all of this appearing within the first hours post-shooting. He’d alerted his savvy audience beforehand and planted a post-modern propagandistic gift right in their paws. The fuckers even canonized him:
Further, Tarrant’s attack highlighted the failure of mainstream society to cope with manifesto-publishing and guerilla propaganda ops. Targeted terrorism is a method of ideological advertisement with an extremely convincing cost-to-reach ratio. Everyone hears about a terrorist attack taking place, but the present trend is to hide who perpetrated it and why behind walls of denunciation, rhetoric, press self-censorship, and martyr worship. Western populations lose power to cope with extremists because they are only exposed to terroristic rhetoric through decontextualized snippets in the thoroughly processed, narrative-pushing, fundamentally untrustworthy pop press, or through the mouths of extremists framed as the terrorists wish to present it. In the days after the attack, I read articles about how the “coded language” and jokes in the manifesto made the thing puerile and flippant, but also dangerous. After reading it, I found Tarrant used a specialized, memey vocabulary well-suited to expressing points to his intended audience, while glossing over or disguising flaws in his argument. Some weeks later, I rooted around to find a copy of the John Earnest (the California Synagogue shooter) manifesto, which I had initially read the day his attack occurred. While it was immediately posted to the front page of The Drudge Report, I failed to find it some two weeks post-attack, even on 8chan. Without access to his rhetoric for personal judgment, we’re left with two options in the popular consciousness: “Racist, hateful antisemite John Earnest arrested due to crazed racist murder frenzy cultivated by 8chan” in the mainstream media, or “Aryan Warrior John T. Earnest successfully struck at the heart of the Jewish Parasite, inciting fear in the enemy and heroism in True Europeans’ Hearts” on The Daily Stormer or /pol/. There is no longer any faith placed in the general population. As such, the general population is forced to choose between a few prepackaged narratives, unequipped with the proper information to understand the situations and form personal opinions.
In short, events happen. People are going to find out. Give them the information and context to make their own decisions. Beating people over the head with narratives that obviously do not explain away the scope of an issue is a perfect way to ensure people are misinformed nihilists with no meaningful way to understand or interact with the world. The Internet is serious business because interacting with the Internet is increasingly how we interact with the world, and how we shape ourselves.
Yet the propaganda machines of innumerable organizations and interests (of infinite variety) are running at full power, blasting their smog into the overloaded information pipelines we allot for the public spaces of the 21st century. Information cannot be trusted. Even the information behind paywalls feels like propaganda when the Wall Street Journal is owned by Murdoch and the Washington Post is Bezos’s bullhorn, and every rich family in America seems to own some great share of a major media outlet. On the chans, there’s a thorough skepticism of all media, all information, and a wealth of unsourced, unverifiable information on any topic, with infographics and demonstrative images and video clips, which are more often than not complete or partial fabrications. The information is all presented on equal terms on 4chan under the famous header: “The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact.” Yet the average person is left to parse information from all sources in a free-for-all environment where no information has verifiable or concrete sourcing, where scholastic information is presented in an incomprehensible format or as rehashed clickbait, while source texts languish behind paywalls.
The internet is serious business because it has taken over our personal lives, and our coffee shops, our bars, our forums, and our marketplaces. It mediates an increasing number of our economic and social transactions. Even in public meatspace, we sit around on our phones flying to the digital realm, eliminating any geographic or proximal context to our lives and the information we take in. Life is delocalized. Society is atomized. Language is decontextualized. We swim in alphabet soup with no teacher to help us sound out the ABCs.
So the crazy trash talk, sarcasm, and loaded rhetoric used to seem the simple fun of kids at play; everything felt like a competition to publish the worst thing possible with the tools at my disposal: a keyboard, a microphone, photoshop, alcohol, and prescription amphetamine. But it’s become increasingly clear that the internet is serious business. Whatever I say ends up making ripples in the pool of the collective consciousness. Hell, it’s still fun. That’s the problem: I still want to play the game when only a handful of players seem to realize there’s a game on. There are adults running around with AR-15s among children with airsoft weapons, and because everyone’s anonymous, we are forced to assume they’re equal.
So, the Internet is serious business. People are capitalizing on this, for political reasons, for raw reasons of money and power. I’m awake now. I still have faith in anonymous communication, as well as the specific image board format. I am more aware than ever, though, of the concerted efforts to influence the general English-speaking population through superpowered shitposting in the public consciousness by amateurs, botnets, corporations, governmental agents, extremists, and trolls, as well as by the classic morons, idealists, and ironists that drew me in to begin with.
Be careful out there. Even those wearing faces online aren’t quite human…
- 05.14.2019
