EPIC WIN FOR ANONYMOUS:
HOW 4CHAN’S ARMY CONQUERED THE WEB
COLE STRYKER
THE OVERLOOK PRESS
New York, NY
This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2011 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
www.overlookpress.com
For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected]
Copyright © 2011 by Cole Stryker
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset by Jackson Typesetting Co.
ISBN 978-1-590-20738-3
For Charles and Janet Stryker, who once told me, “You’re not going to get very far in this world without knowing how to work a computer,” and then gave me one.
Contents
INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1: Memes: Shared Nuggets of Cultural Currency
Chapter 2: Discovering 4chan
Chapter 3: 4chan in a Day
Chapter 4: Tracing 4chan Ancestry
Chapter 5: The Rise of 4chan
Chapter 6: The Meme Industry
Chapter 7: The Meme Life Cycle
Chapter 8: Merry Pranksters, Freedom Fighters, or Sadistic Bullies?
Chapter 9: The Anti-Social Network
EPILOGUE
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Introduction
THIS IS THE story of the most interesting place on the Internet: an imageboard called 4chan, where you’re as likely to find a hundred photos of adorable kittens as a gallery of gruesome autopsy photos.
It’s a seedy, unpredictable place, where people have complete freedom to experiment; to try on new ideas, alternate identities. 4chan allows its users to say and do almost whatever they can think of without fear of shame or retribution.
There are many individual boards that make up 4chan, and the strangest one is called /b/, or Random. This is the “hivemind” of the site, where nearly anything the human mind is capable of conceiving is on display, for better or for worse. Some have called it the Asshole of the Internet, but a few million call it home.
/b/ is particularly special because the board has almost no rules. However, its nameless users, who call themselves /b/tards, have created a semiserious list of metarules, the first and second of which are cribbed directly from Chuck Palahniuk’s book Fight Club:
Rule 1: You do not talk about /b/.
Rule 2: You DO NOT talk about /b/.
The stated intent of these rules is to keep outsiders out. Longtime /b/tards detest new users more than anything, referring to them as “cancer” and go to great lengths to make their dialogue and community culture as unapproachable as possible. In writing this book, I’ve committed the most egregious violation of these rules in the short history of /b/, opening myself up to everything from prank calls to death threats. I’m no longer just another member of “anonymous”—the vast group of 4chan users.
When I first started telling friends about the project, they’d universally respond:
“You’re writing a book about 4chan? Ha! Good luck with that!”
OK, so we’ve established that 4chan is, to borrow a phrase from a well-known Jedi, a hive of scum and villainy. It’s a playground for weirdos, but why does it matter? I’ve talked to everyone from academics and advertisers to hackers in order to find out. I got my hands dirty talking with the /b/tards themselves, along with the people they love and those they love to hate. I approached 4chan not just as an observer, but as a participant, an antagonist, and an ombudsman.
I discovered that 4chan is a mysterious, misunderstood imageboard defined by anonymity and anarchy that influences the way you behave on the web, whether you realize it or not.
It stands in contrast to a web that seems to be moving inexorably toward personal responsibility and a constant identity across all platforms that define the browsing experience. I can’t read a movie review online anymore without seeing my friends’ Facebook commentary alongside it. And somehow Google knows that I’m really attracted to Nicki Minaj. On proprietary platforms like Facebook, one’s every move is documented. Some argue that this social accountability keeps us responsible. Others say it’s another way to sell products. Either way, it’s becoming more like real-life.
But didn’t the Internet promise us an escape from real life? Wasn’t that one of the reasons so many of us were drawn to it in the first place? 4chan is one of the few places that encourages the anarchy found in the early days of the web.
And while 4chan is known for hosting everything from innocuous cat photos to child pornography, it’s also a place where would-be activists can gather to express social dissent. It’s a forum where a lonely nerd can ask for help meeting girls. And where a closeted homosexual can vent about his abusive, homophobic parents.
The fear-mongering mainstream media tends to portray 4chan as a breeding ground for sociopathic superhackers and cyberterrorists. This is the case, yes, but it’s a small part of the story. I wrote this book because I wanted to set the record straight. Namelessness matters. Freedom matters. And 4chan embodies those two ideals more concretely than anyplace else on the Internet.
If you’ve ever wondered, while browsing the web, “Why is this weird thing popular? Who cares about this stuff? How does this thing have so many views? Why do people waste their time with this? Where did it come from and where is it all going?” then read on.
This isn’t so much a book about how technology is changing society as it is the story of how technology expanded the scale of human creativity and social interaction that already existed and was just waiting for the right platform. When that platform came along, creative participatory culture went global—and just like that things were never the same. This isn’t just a book about 4chan. It’s a book about you.
4chan is a multimedia experience, and there’s only so much information that can be conveyed on the printed page. I highly encourage the reader to read this book near a computer so you can look up pertinent information as you go. If you’re having trouble wrapping your head around a specific concept, online resources like Google, Wikipedia and Know Your Meme will help fill in the blanks.
A final warning:
Because 4chan thrives on its lack of rules, it hosts content that ranges from harmless to downright terrifying. Violent fetish pornography, racist/sexist rants, and gory photography are just a few of the more unsettling items that litter the pages of /b/.
Dear reader, under no circumstances should you see this book as an invitation to hop onto 4chan to see what all the fuss is about. If you must, at least prepare by reading my third chapter so you’ll know exactly what you’re getting into. There are ways to browse 4chan while avoiding most of the nasty bits, and you should be aware of them.
Seriously. There are some things you can’t unsee.
Chapter 1
* * *
Memes: Shared Nuggets of Cultural Currency
“DUDE, YOU’VE GOTTA see this.”
The sound of machine gun fire filled my freshman dorm. Walking down the hallway, I’d hear the explosion of grenades and machine gun spray muffling anguished shrieks of the dying. This went on literally all day and night. It was 2002, and th
e bros on my hall were taking full advantage of our campus’s T1 Internet connection by playing a run-and-gun PC shooter game called Counter-Strike till dawn.
For many of us, it was our first exposure to high-speed Internet. Previously we had to share 56k connections with siblings. It would take minutes to download a basic webpage. I remember setting up a string of downloads before bed each night and letting my computer run till morning. If AOL deigned to not kick me off the connection, I’d have four or five new songs in the morning. In college, I could accomplish the same in minutes. Webpages with streaming video loaded instantaneously. For the first time, the Internet moved as fast as my imagination. The guys on my hall spent most of their days taking advantage of this garden of earthly delights in hundreds of ways, some more illicit than others.
I vividly remember some gawky kid running into my room, doubled over in laughter.
“Dude, you’ve gotta see this.”
“What?”
“I can’t explain. Just google ‘gonads and strife.’”
I heard the pinging of instant messages being sent back and forth throughout the hall. Laughter bubbled up all around me. And the sound of a chipmunk-like voice filled the air.
“Gonads and Strife” was a crude Flash animation that featured a monkey in a suit, a hyperactive squirrel, Stephen Hawking, R2-D2, and a spinning anatomic figure of a penis soaring through a lightning-filled sky. It was profane, catchy, and defied explanation. It spread through campus like wildfire. Like a virus, actually.
I can’t explain why Gonads and Strife is funny. You pretty much had to have been male college freshman to appreciate it. For a moment there, before YouTube and the rise of user-driven content aggregators like Digg and Reddit, intensely creative folks uploaded their work to the web, and finding it felt like being in on something special. Gonads and Strife was far from the first meme I experienced, but it was the first time I’d seen anything “go viral,” although my friends didn’t have a name for it yet.
I can think of a dozen more flash animations that eventually surpassed it in popularity, but in my little world, Gonads and Strife was genius. We scratched our heads, “How did someone even conceive of this? I’ve never seen anything like it.” It wasn’t long before I was running into someone else’s room, saying, “Dude, you’ve gotta see this.”
A History of Memes
In the decade since, barely a day has gone by that I haven’t gleefully shared something from the Internet with a friend. The Internet is home to gigs upon gigs of content that compel viewers to share, participate, augment, parody, and otherwise own it. Today we call these bits of cultural currency memes. In order to understand why 4chan matters, we first have to understand memes.
Of course, memes were not born on the Internet. They’ve been driving the human sociocultural experience since before we scribbled on cave walls. Memes seek to replicate themselves laterally—the ideological or cultural equivalent of a gene, naturally arising from human interaction.
Ask evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins what a meme is and he’ll tell you this:
Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.
This is an excerpt from Dawkins’s groundbreaking book, The Selfish Gene, published in 1976. Dawkins didn’t originally come up with the idea of a meme, but he was the first one to use the word, and thus to inadvertently kick-start a new branch of anthropology called memetics, a catchall term for the study of human social evolution as opposed to biological evolution (i.e., genetics).
I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind.
The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene.’ I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to ‘memory,’ or to the French word ‘même.’ It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream.’
So, for Dawkins, religion is a meme. Art is a meme. Every form of human social expression is memetic. We are surrounded by memes, ranging from every family tradition we hold dear to the comics in today’s funny papers. Some memes are widespread, like progressivism. Others are specific and intimate, like the unique baby talk between mother and child.
Everything we do and say is an imitation, to some degree, of the things we’ve seen those around us do. In a matter of speaking, memes seek to replicate themselves. Of course, neither Dawkins nor I would argue that memes are sentient beings capable of “seeking” anything. Memes are simply mental expressions that behave like genes. But memes have several things in common with biological life-forms. That’s why we often refer to memes as “going viral.” They spread from person to person the way a virus does. Most of the time, we don’t even realize we are spreading them, the same way a beast plays host to an intestinal parasite.
Memes can be ideologies, trends, fads, gossip, jokes, music, fashion, or adages—any concept that can be shared from one person to another. They’re distinct and repeatable, and they live and die by natural selection in the same way that biological entities do. If a meme fails to spread, it’s dead.
In the notes in Dawkins’s 1989 reprint of The Selfish Gene, he admits that the word meme had become something of a strong meme in itself. In fact, his brief discussion of memes was only meant to serve a larger purpose: to establish that complex ecological systems arise from entities that seek to replicate.
I believe that, given the right conditions, replicators automatically band together to create systems, or machines, that carry them around and work to favour their continued replication. The first ten chapters of The Selfish Gene had concentrated exclusively on one kind of replicator, the gene. In discussing memes in the final chapter I was trying to make the case for replicators in general, and to show that genes were not the only members of that important class.
Although Dawkins had no intention of creating a grand unified theory for human culture (he eventually distanced himself from the term), a slew of memeticists picked up where he left off, attempting to use memes to explain all human behavior. Countless heady discussions followed, influencing fields like cultural anthropology, sociology, and psychology, all dedicated to expanding Dawkins’s theory of self-replicating units of cultural transmission.
Internet Memes
So how did we get from a broad, classical definition of a meme to an animated GIF of a dancing baby (or flying gonads)? Why has the term meme become so closely associated with web-borne viral content over the last ten years? Why, when we hear the word, do we think of something like the dancing baby rather than, say, Buddhism?
The Internet allows memes to spread more rapidly than any previous medium in human history. We now live in a world where any idea can be expressed instantly to nearly anyone on the globe, and millions of people take advantage of this capability every day, unconsciously spreading memes with every link shared, every video uploaded, every blog post written. Never before has the ratio of senders of memes to receivers of memes been so high.
Millions of memes are constantly fighting for your attention, for a chance to replicate. Meme populations grow and shrink in the “meme pool,” as public awareness expands and contracts. The structure of the web has been built around ensuring that the strongest memes made up of the most compelling, “sticky” content rise to the top. We see this principle in action in conten
t aggregators like Reddit and Digg, which often collectively scrape content from, you guessed it, 4chan. This process is a part of a phenomenon I call the Meme Life Cycle, which I’ll explain later.
Since the Internet has made it so easy for memes to spread, it’s become inextricably linked with how most people understand memes. Ask a fifteen-year-old what a meme is and he or she will probably say something along the lines of, “Have you ever seen lolcats? What about Antoine Dodson? Double Rainbow?” They’ll rattle off Internet ephemera until you recognize something.
That’s because today the word meme is shorthand for “A piece of content (e.g., a video, story, song, website, prank, trend, etc.) that achieved popularity primarily through word of mouth on the web.”
When Internet phenomena such as viral videos, email-forwarded hoaxes, and web microcelebrities began to appear, journalists co-opted the term. As early as 1998, the word has been used to refer to bits of popular culture that are considered to be “from the Internet.” But what does that mean, exactly? It’s difficult to say, especially since the world of the web and the rest of popular culture are becoming increasingly intertwined.
It’s difficult to pinpoint a precise time when the word meme started to refer to bits of Internet-borne cultural iconography, like lolcats. I’d guess that Richard Dawkins would scoff at the bastardization of his term, especially since he distanced himself from it before the Internet ever co-opted it. We know that memes are propagated through social networks. This form of transmission is distinctly different from that of genes. You can’t share your genes with your pals. Because the Internet so tangibly manifests those social networks, the word meme became a convenient term to describe specific bits of information that are shared on those networks.
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