“Have you ever seen the movie Office Space?” she went on. She reminded me of a scene in the film where a white office drone blasts gangsta rap music from his sensible car’s stereo while stuck in traffic on his way to work. He raps along to the violent lyrics, caught up in the dynamic beat, when he spots a black guy selling flowers, walking towards his vehicle along the median. He panics, locking the door and turning down the music until the harmless guy passes out of earshot.
“That’s 4chan,” laughs Nakamura.
A lot of people are happy to consume the media products and enjoy the spectacle of “blackness” or kung fu movies. But the reality of people of color is not often something people want to confront at all. A lot of disenfranchised, disaffected white people feel like they’re also fighting the man, they’re also on the edges, but in some really important way they’re not.
I’ve personally observed that homosexuality seems to be much more accepted on 4chan than non-whiteness. You can’t last ten minutes on /b/ without coming across a thread devoted to gay porn or cute boys or even friendly, accommodating discussion about the homosexual lifestyle. Whereas, the US seems to have gotten over its fear of racial minorities to a much larger degree than its fear of gays.
I believe, along with writer and NYU professor Clay Shirky, that this is because gays are members of every community. There is no explicit gay-straight segregation, at least not in the Western world, yet there are still miles and miles of geography that contain people of only one race. When the people from these areas come face to face with people of other races on places like 4chan, it can get ugly. Secondly, minorities are so infrequently open about their race on 4chan that any time they prove their identity with a time-stamped photo, the thread inevitably veers to responses like, “Whoa, a black guy on 4chan?!” There’s no guarantee of tolerance on /b/.
And yet, I keep coming across minorities there, and at many Anonymous-organized protests. I spoke about 4chan hate speech with author and journalist Julian Dibbell, whose pioneering coverage of troll culture has appeared in Wired, The New York Times, and elsewhere. He agrees with Nakamura that the reception of racist content is more important than the intent of the “fake racist.” But he feels that once people enter the world of 4chan, the perspective of the receiver adjusts along with the trollish intent of those who would post racist content.
The racist stuff would not keep coming up if it didn’t have a charge to it. But once you enter into the world of 4chan and you’re able to recognize what the intent is, you’re able to recognize that it’s different. I used to wonder why the minorities that I’ve spoken with hang out on /b/ and are a part of Anonymous. And you look on the board and you start to realize the kind of game that’s going on.
That’s a key word, game.
Blink And You Miss It
Moving on, we see a weed hookup thread, in which people post their location and contact info in order to score or sell pot. Another thread reads, “Ask a German Anything,” wherein people inquire, “Why must your country be so awesome but your language sound so angry and phlegmy?”
“Ask Me Anything” posts are popular on 4chan. I’ve seen police officers, soldiers in Iraq, transvestites, prostitutes, midgets, scientists, ex-cons, porn actors, people who have attempted suicide, and roadies for popular bands post AMAs. It’s a fun way to peek inside someone’s life, though you can never be completely sure of the authenticity. People ask very specific questions in order to prove the veracity of AMA claims. In a few hours, I’m going to post my first AMA: “Ask a Guy Who Is Writing a Book About 4chan Anything.” Should be fun!
Upon refreshing the page, I see an adult diaper fetish thread, an “America > Europe” thread, and an argument about gay marriage. There has been a running joke on the web since the advent of social networking that by the time you’ve caught up on your Facebook news feed, RSS reader, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, and whatever else, your Facebook news feed is already full of fresh content again. You could spend your entire day (your entire life!) reading updates on content aggregators and social networks.
One of the most striking things about 4chan, especially on its /b/ board, is that you can refresh the page a few seconds after it loads and be presented with an entirely new page of content. Unpopular posts are deleted in just a few minutes.
When a person adds to a discussion thread, it “bumps” the thread to the top of the board. The 4chan FAQ reads:
All threads have a set bump limit (varies board to board). When this limit is reached, a thread will no longer “bump” to the top of the board, causing the thread to descend through the pages until it is marked for deletion and pruned. This method of post-limiting, while sometimes inconvenient, assures that content is kept fresh on the boards.
If no one is bumping the thread up to the top, it will descend to the bottom of the board, soon to be deleted. 4chan keeps no archives, so if you miss something, you miss it forever, unless someone’s saved it on their hard drive or posted it somewhere else online.
Picture 4chan like a moving stream with kids placing boats made out of newspaper (these are the discussion threads) in the water. When someone posts something uninteresting, the thread behaves like a boat that’s left to float down the stream until it eventually drops off a waterfall, never to be seen again. When someone bumps a thread by posting, it’s as if a kid picks up the boat and places it back at the mouth of the stream. If enough people post in a thread, the boat can live on that stream for as long as a few hours—but will eventually, inevitably, be left to reach the edge of the waterfall.
Even the most popular posts are deleted, creating a perpetual churn of new information. Trying to capture it all would be missing the point. You just jump in somewhere and climb out when you get bored. There is no hierarchy of content to help you find the best bits. You can’t search or filter the content in any way. The site flies in the face of every user experience trend and rule that’s ever been codified. It’s just a massive, unorganized jumble of unrelated information. Your experience with 4chan at any given moment will be completely different from someone else’s, even if you’re on the same board.
4chan users deal with the ephemerality of content by maintaining “/b/ folders,” which are collections of previously posted favorite images, GIFs, and copypasta that they keep on their hard drives. In the years before the rest of the web started documenting meme culture (in Know Your Meme, Memegenerator, etc.), having a stockpile of /b/-worthy images on hand was essential. Sometimes /b/tards play a game where someone will write, “Post the fourth image in your /b/ folder,” or “Post the scariest image you have in your /b/ folder.”
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.
EPIC WIN FOR ANONYMOUS Page 6