BBSes were simple text-based precursors to message boards, where people could post messages to everyone else who happened to dial in. The boards often dealt with local interests and specific hobbies like fishing or philosophy. There were also boards dedicated to computing and hacking. It was in these that the first instances of what would come to be known as leetspeak bubbled to the surface. This pidgin English was used by hackers to get around wordfilters and, eventually, to avoid the prying eyes of search engines. Hackers became h4x0rz, for example. This argot is very common on 4chan, though it has been co-opted by people with no hacking ability and is now either used ironically or by noobs attempting to emulate the hackers of yore. Anyone who says things like, “ph34r my 1337 h4x0rz ski11z” isn’t going to bring down Bank of America any time soon.
In 1979, three grad students developed Usenet, a file-transferring network that ran on the Unix operating system. Users gathered in “newsgroups” with threaded discussions much like the message boards of today. Usenet differed from previous BBSes because it lacked a central server and system administrator. Apart from leetspeak, Usenet is known for being an early breeding ground for memes, though at the time they were limited to in-jokes and slang such as sockpuppet, cleanfeed, flaming, trolling, and sporgery. Despite the rise of more technologically advanced forms of online community, Usenet has experienced significant growth year to year.
Brad Templeton is a software architect and the creator of Usenet’s “Emily Postnews” (Postnews is a double pun referring to etiquette expert Emily Post and to postnews, a piece of Usenet software), a character he created in order to establish basic Usenet etiquette, or netiquette. Some of the principles he laid down came from as far back as the ’70s and pre-Internet mailing lists. He explained to me that with so many people struggling to figure out how to best use the Internet, it took time to recognize how easy it was to offend with text.
Today, we take antisocial behavior on the Internet as a given. We routinely read and say things that we’d never say in real life. When someone lets loose with a string of expletives in a comments section I roll my eyes and keep scrolling. But if someone said those things to me on the street my heart would stop. During the early days on the Internet, there were no agreed-upon standards of etiquette. Templeton helped to define the way people would behave for decades to come.
The Virtual Community: The Well
In 1985 Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant founded the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, or WELL. The WELL was made up of a new breed of techno-utopian ex-hippies who’d been experimenting with communal living and other alternative lifestyles. These baby boomers had grown up a bit, and where their ’60s brethren had failed, they believed they’d succeed, with the power of network technology. It was all very back-to-the-earth, but with a focus on the power of computing. Words like cybernetic and transhumanism were thrown around. Many of the community’s first users were subscribers to Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, a magazine devoted to topics like alternative shelter, nomadics, and telecommunications. These subscribers were already on the forefront of technology, and very smart. This early user base would come to have a tremendous influence on the quality of discourse.
In 1995, a decade into the WELL’s history, Wired magazine called the WELL the world’s most influential online community. It was a hyperintellectual environment that bore significant structural barriers to entry. It was slow. It was complicated. And perhaps most importantly, it was expensive. Between the monthly fee ($8), the hourly fee ($2), and any additional fees exacted by telephone companies (to say nothing of the cost of a computer and modem in those days), it wasn’t uncommon for power users to burn through $300+ per month.
The WELL provided free access to reporters, which not only rewarded the WELL with plenty of press, but also infused the community with a sense of journalistic integrity.
I talked with former WELL Director Cliff Figallo, who can be considered one of the first community managers. Today the field is one of the tech industry’s hottest careers and a necessary component of nearly all consumer-facing companies’ online strategies. Back then it wasn’t so glamorous, and Cliff doesn’t have a whole lot of nostalgia for those days. He’s quick to point out how much a pain in the neck running the WELL could be. And he quickly dispels any image of the pre-AOL Internet as an anarchic proto-4chan.
I only had to ban one person in ten years at the Well. It was too expensive and difficult to dial in; the people who were there had a good reason to be there. We were very friendly, but very hands off.
I asked Stewart Brand, cofounder of the WELL and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, about the nature of anonymity in an effort to draw parallels between 4chan and the infancy of the Internet. Unlike other Internet communities of the day, the WELL forced identity on its users. Stewart attributes the success of the community to “continuity of community and absence of anonymity”—what he calls “the main preventatives of destructive flaming.” The people on the WELL were mostly friends who knew each other well. He says, “There was a fair amount of raucous name-calling still, but there was also enough community shaming of name-callers to keep it tolerable.”
I made the no-anonymity rule specifically to avoid online vileness. After a while we did experiment with one anonymous conference, and it was so immediately destructive it was shut down within the week by popular demand.
Where Usenet had newsgroups, the WELL had “conferences,” subject areas devoted to computing, religion, politics, whatever. The community was like the Wild West in the sense that it was writing the rules as it went along. This new territory didn’t have any mores. One defining maxim that Stewart Brand coined for the WELL was, “You own your own words,” which reinforced personal responsibility.
Cliff told me a story about cantaloupes and how this early community dealt with unsubstantiated claims.
Just after I was named Director of the WELL in August 1986, one of the WELL’s earliest members openly discussed her idea of starting an online news service using USENET (not the WELL) as her platform. This was more than five years before the Internet connected existing networks into a privately run commercial system. There had just been a big story in the news about watermelons grown in California containing pesticides. The aspiring reporter posted on the WELL that she’d received “unsubstantiated” reports of the same pesticides being found in cantaloupe.
The reactions of pretty much everyone on the WELL could be summed up as, “That’s interesting. Maybe I’ll stop eating cantaloupe, at least until the story is proven false.” But one founding member of the WELL felt that we had opened the door to the spread of evil net rumors, and that we at the WELL were obligated to nip this unethical behavioral trend in the bud. A weeklong argument ensued among interested WELLers, most of whom questioned what amount of damage could possibly be done by sharing secondhand knowledge with a virtual audience in a private online community. The court of popular opinion decided in favor of the aspiring reporter and eventually the plaintiff quit the WELL.
To me, “the tainted cantaloupe incident” was one of the most important formative social discoveries we made in the WELL’s early experimental phase. As Director of the WELL I spent considerable time trying to understand how ad hoc groups worked things out in cyberspace, and how people attempted to achieve their purposes through monitors and keyboards.
There is still no bright line separating casual from professional conversation on the Web. The answer to the question, “Who IS a journalist?” only gets hazier every day. Every day millions of false rumors are intentionally planted on the web. Tools are being invented to help support the social web’s ability to self-correct.
Given that the WELL was founded by optimistic hippies, I assumed these geeks on the forefront of technology would have high hopes for their hobby, but I was surprised to find the opposite.
“I had no idea the Internet would expand to the scale it is today. Absolutely no idea,” says Figallo.
The Eternal September
; Throughout the late ’80s and early ’90s, universities granted their students access to Usenet and other BBSes. Every September these online communities would be flooded with new users who hadn’t learned the lingo or the etiquette. The veterans would naturally look down on these noobs with disdain, and dreaded the coming of September. In many cases, trolling was an effective remedy.
In 1993, America Online began offering its customers Usenet access, which brought the community thousands, and eventually millions, of new users. These users were often the children of net-savvy parents who were relatively less equipped than university students to provide value to the Usenet communities. And the influx didn’t stop. The AOL users just kept coming. Waves upon waves of noobs. Trolling isn’t as effective a form of social engineering when the noobs outnumber the old war horses.
On January 26, 1994, Dave Fischer posted a message to the alt.folklore.computers newsgroup: “September 1993 will go down in net.history as the September that never ended.”
And thus the phrase eternal September was born. It’s something that every successful Internet community experiences, but this represented a massive shift in demographics for the web.
The Internet was no longer an exclusive haven for geeks; and a bit of magic was lost forever along with the countercultural exclusivity of the web. Rather than accept the mainstreamification, some geeks burrowed deeper into weirder territory.
Rotten, Stile Project and . . . Gaping Holes
Enter Rotten.com. I was first introduced to this portal to hell when my meth head coworker at a fast food restaurant told me about this site that “has, like, dead bodies and shit.” The site’s current header includes a pretty clear disclaimer:
The soft white underbelly of the net, eviscerated for all to see: Rotten dot com collects images and information from many sources to present the viewer with a truly unpleasant experience. Pure evil since 1996.
In 1999, the site added a regular column called “The Daily Rotten,” a news feed dedicated to macabre stories of terrorism, abuse, disfigurement, and perversion. A photo of a Chinese man supposedly eating a fried human fetus was one particularly scandalous photo. An image that still haunts my memory depicted a man who’d been nearly consumed from the inside out by parasitic worms. The site is full of tumors, birth defects, rashes, cysts, and other bodily terrors. Rotten was disgusting, but the Internet was captivated. In the early ’00s, the site received two hundred thousand rubbernecking visitors every day.
Tim Hwang, who went on to found the meme-centric ROFLCon convention, admits Rotten’s peculiar appeal:
In middle school, we were spending a lot of time online. And a big part of the attraction of the Internet is finding really nasty things to send to your friends. So, at the time we were passing around a lot of Rotten links.
For a wide swath of my generation, Rotten was a gateway drug that would eventually introduce users to places like 4chan. More importantly, Rotten served as an early whipping boy for censorship crusaders. In 1997, the Rotten staff unleashed a manifesto that would shape the way people approached censorship on the web:
The definition of obscenity, according to the Supreme Court and known informally as the Miller test, is:
must appeal to the prurient interest of the average person,
must describe sexual conduct in a way that is “patently offensive” to community standards, and
when taken as a whole, it “must lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”
Certain people (including parents and schoolteachers) have complained to us and stated that rotten.com should not be “allowed” on the net, since children can view images on our site.
One US schoolteacher wrote us a very angry email that complained some of her students had bookmarked images on this site, that our site shouldn’t be on the net, and other claptrap.
This is our response. The net is not a babysitter! Children should not be roaming the Internet unsupervised any more than they should be roaming the streets of New York City unsupervised.
We cannot dumb the Internet down to the level of playground. Rotten dot com serves as a beacon to demonstrate that censorship of the Internet is impractical, unethical, and wrong. To censor this site, it is necessary to censor medical texts, history texts, evidence rooms, courtrooms, art museums, libraries, and other sources of information vital to functioning of free society.
Nearly all of the images which we have online are not even prurient, and would thus not fall under any definition of obscenity. Any images which we have of a sexual nature are in a context which render them far from obscene, in any United States jurisdiction. Some of the images may be offensive, but that has never been a crime. Life is sometimes offensive. You have to expect that.
The images we find most obscene are those of book burnings.
In 2001 the Rotten staff launched The Gaping Maw, which offered biting cultural commentary and satire, like a bizarre, adults-only Mad magazine. Because The Gaping Maw was hosted on Rotten, a site that was routinely threatened with lawsuits, its writers could get away with just about anything, providing some of the freshest commentary on the web.
A similarly rude site called Stile Project was founded in 1998 by a teenager named Jonathan Biderman. In 2001, it gained notoriety for hosting a video of a kitten being killed and prepared for a meal. PETA naturally flipped out and attempted to shut down the site. Strangely enough, Stile Project had been nominated for a Webby award the year before. Stile warned, “This is quite possible [sic] the single most offensive thing I have ever seen” in the video’s description; however, he felt the video exposed people’s hypocrisy toward their food.
To us it seems like the ultimate taboo. How could those Godless Asians do such a thing to such a beautiful creature? Well, I’m sure Indians wonder the same thing about us, but you don’t see North Americans shedding a tear every time a cow is slaughtered. . . . When’s the last time you cried over a Big Mac?
I do not condone animal abuse, and I view the video more as an educational tool than one of shock value. For us to say it is wrong, it would just make us all hypocrites since most of us eat meat. I never get hate mail when posting images of dead people . . .
Rotten and Stile represent two sites that were built upon a larger web trend of gross-out content. When I was a freshman in college, I remember someone telling me to visit lemonparty.org (Don’t do it). The URL of course leads to another shock site, this time a photo of three elderly gentlemen tangled in bed. (And in the last US presidential election, 4chan trolls posted signs on telephone poles reading, “Politics left you bitter? lemonparty.org.” Another sign read, “Sick of gas prices? www.lemonparty.org.”)
For many, the experience of Internet shock sites began with goatse, a notoriously repulsive image that is considered the king of shock sites. It features a hirsute gentleman bending over and stretching his anus wider than you’d think was humanly possible. The image was originally hosted at goatse.cx (as in goat sex). The link to goatse.cx was passed around by giggling teen boys, mostly, and used to troll unsuspecting browsers.
In 2010, a group of trollish hackers associated with Encyclopedia Dramatica, a wiki site focusing on 4chan culture, exposed a flaw in AT&T’s security, revealing the email addresses of iPad users. They called themselves Goatse Security (themselves an offshoot of the Gay Nigger Association of America troll collective). Their logo was a cartoonish parody of the goatse shock image, and their motto was “Gaping Holes Exposed.”
Nerd News: Slashdot & Metafilter
Slashdot founder Rob Malda, aka “Commander Taco,” says that he created Slashdot because he missed the high-minded technical community he enjoyed in the BBS era that discussed the sort of “news for nerds, stuff that matters” that interested him.
In 1997, Slashdot offered something new: user-submitted stories. Each story became its own discussion thread. The site became so popular that when a story was linked by Slashdot, the site’s host would often buckle under the weight of all the t
raffic. This phenomenon became known as the Slashdot Effect. This phenomenon is not unique to Slashdot, but Slashdot was one of the first to be routinely recognized as a server killer. Other sites can be farked, for example, or undergo the Digg Effect, demonstrating the power that content aggregators wield.
Malda says that Slashdot developed its own unique memetic culture almost instantly. He remembers lots of gross-out memes popping up in addition to stuff from the Star Wars prequels, which were hugely popular during Slashdot’s early years. I asked him if there was a specific moment when he realized that memes were a thing. He replied, “Long before I heard the word, that’s for sure.” Many of Slashdot’s memes deal with ultra geeky science and computing puns.
Malda claims that since he started Slashdot, the corporations have taken over, our rights are on the decline, and our privacy is gone. Back in the early days it was chaotic, but free. He recognizes the value in anonymity, and feels that there’s something special about 4chan’s community.
I love that they interact anonymously. Slashdot was similarly completely anonymous for the first year of our existence, and still today we allow anyone to post without any identifying information whatsoever.
EPIC WIN FOR ANONYMOUS Page 9