While much of 4chan’s content is pure wankery, there’s something special at work there. 4chan allows its users to be jerks, but more importantly it provides a platform of social networking that focuses on what one is saying rather than who is saying it. For all you know, the guy who started a thread about particle physics on /b/ is Stephen Hawking. It’s meritocracy in its purest form. The smartest, funniest, fastest, strongest content wins, regardless of how popular, good-looking, or renowned the post’s author is. Anonymous neither accepts nor grants acclaim.
There are essentially twin themes that make 4chan what it is: the participatory creative culture and the spontaneous social activism. They can be seen as two manifestations of a process that social media researcher danah boyd calls “hacking the attention economy.” Whether through creativity or creative destruction, 4chan’s /b/tards (or lowercase a anonymous) and the politically oriented trolls (or capital A Anonymous) are exceptionally skilled at getting people to take notice, without spending a single dollar to promote their work. Neither of these capabilities could exist on Facebook at the same scale because they are only made possible by 4chan’s emphasis on anonymity and ephemerality.
Many have speculated that if Christopher Poole had played his cards right, he could have made bank with a community as big and as dynamic as 4chan. I’m skeptical. The moment one tries to monetize something like 4chan is the moment it stops being 4chan. Poole would have had to place content restrictions in place in order to draw advertisers and sponsors. And without restrictions, no company in its right mind (aside from the lowest level of pornographers) would want to advertise on 4chan as is. Furthermore, turning 4chan into a profitable business would likely agitate the userbase to the point where it would revolt against 4chan. 4chan users have turned against the site in the past, and I’m sure that any attempt to make much more revenue than what’s required to pay server bills would result in not just a mass exodus, but raids and trolls of epic proportions.
Poole recognized that. He rode the 4chan wave, gradually building a personal brand in order to generate interest from investors so he could finance Canvas. Many people in his place would have attempted to cash in a lot earlier, only to be met with failure. moot played it cool, managing the fringe elements of 4chan as best he could, learning through trial and error how online community works. I believe he was only able to pull it off because, like many start-uppers of his generation, he doesn’t seem to be in it for the money. He wears the same plain hoodie and t-shirt at parties that he wears when speaking in front of thousands. He’s a true nerd who was able to feed his passions through web community as a teen, and now he wants to give that experience to as many others as possible.
In its infancy, 4chan acted like a swirling tornado, traversing the geography of the Internet, picking up properties of the different web communities that came before it: the collaborative creativity of the Something Awful goons, the penchant for gross-out content from Rotten, the anonymity of the Far East boards, the gleeful trolling of Usenet, and so on. 4chan collected all those characteristics and mashed them up into a unique slurry of content and community.
Throughout the past eight years, 4chan has grown large enough to get attention, and other communities have formed in its wake. Know Your Meme was created to analyze memes, Buzzfeed to report them, the Cheezburger Network to monetize them. Reddit was born, which built small fences around content creation and communication that corralled the creative culture of 4chan, with fantastic results.
But as 4chan has scattered pieces of itself throughout the web, it approaches mainstream. Does this mean the golden age of 4chan is over? Will it cease to be what it once was, when millions of people buy this book and learn all of its secrets?
“I’m not ready to say that 4chan’s over,” says Know Your Meme’s Kenyatta Cheese. “If anything, 4chan will just go back to being the place it was a few years ago.”
I’m with Cheese. As those twin themes of 4chan become increasingly embedded in the mainstream, 4chan will go back to what it was before it started getting write-ups in The New York Times: a place for bored teens to shoot the breeze. When I asked danah boyd if she thought 4chan had jumped the shark, she pointed out that a lot of 4chan users who were there from the beginning have become literal oldfags. If you were 15 when 4chan started, you’re now 23, and most likely looking for something very different in your browsing experience. When I first discovered 4chan, I was captivated, but it’s certainly not part of my daily routine. I have to imagine that the turnover rate for /b/tards, at least (the enthusiast boards probably hold onto people’s attention for much longer) is very high, in the same way that hanging out down by the railroad tracks is only interesting for a summer or two. But aren’t those summers still supremely formative, even if it’s just killing time? Even if 4chan has handed off its twin characteristics to the broader web, it still contains something inimitable that is now a part of the psyche of an entire generation, and, I predict, of generations to come. Pretty epic.
* * *
Epilogue
“Keep your money we do it for the lulz.”
IN THE WEEKS since I finished writing this book, Anonymous has become a household name. The media still doesn’t quite know what to make of it, and straight society is trying to figure out what it’s all about. Are these individuals really a bunch of leaderless teenage geniuses? A cabal of trained anti-American terrorists? Do they represent the future of civil disobedience, or are we experiencing a brief burst of web-based pranksterism that will come to an end as soon as the rest of the Internet is able to adapt to their methods?
On June 12, the group attacked the websites of the Spanish Police in solidarity with three people who’d been arrested for their involvement with Anonymous (authorities have also arrested Anons in Britain, Australia, Spain and Turkey over the last few weeks). Three days later Anonymous attacked ninety-one Malaysian government sites in retaliation to their web censorship. The following week, Anon brought down several local government websites in Florida in response to the arrests of several members of a nonprofit who’d been feeding homeless people against Orlando city ordinance. Meanwhile, Anonymous dug up contact info for 2,500 employees of biotech giant Monsanto due to the company’s business practices that, according to Anonymous, are marked by environmental unfriendliness.
The latest attack was widely reported on July 11. Anonymous leaked 90,000 emails taken from the servers of military intelligence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. These sensitive documents contained correspondence between the company and members of various military branches, the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department, and others. Anonymous laid out their charges against Booz Allen Hamilton in a press release:
Anonymous has been investigating them for some time, and has uncovered all sorts of other shady practices by the company, including potentially illegal surveillance systems, corruption between company and government officials, warrantless wiretapping, and several other questionable surveillance projects.
Furthermore, Anonymous has fractured into conflicting subgroups. The most important splinter group claims no affiliation with Anonymous: Lulz Security, or LulzSec, has snottily targeted several major corporations, claiming ownership of attacks and pranks on Fox, PBS, Sony, the CIA, and the FBI. Their motto: “The world’s leaders in high-quality entertainment at your expense.”
Throughout May and June of 2011, LulzSec alerted the public to a new high-profile hack every few days via the LulzSec Twitter account, which has amassed over 283,000 followers as of this writing. Rather than operating within the vast, anarchic Anonymous, LulzSec carved out a niche—a small cadre of hilarious trolls who all clearly know their stuff. They didn’t recruit, but their ideology was similarly populist in nature. The group initially distanced themselves from the Anons, but banded with them during Operation Anti-Security, or AntiSec, an ongoing effort marked by vague anti-government sentiment. LulzSec released a maritime-themed press release calling all “lulz lizards” to action:
<
br /> We encourage any vessel, large or small, to open fire on any government or agency that crosses their path. We fully endorse the flaunting of the word “AntiSec” on any government website defacement or physical graffiti art . . . To increase efforts, we are now teaming up with the Anonymous collective and all affiliated battleships . . . Top priority is to steal and leak any classified government information, including email spools and documentation . . . If they try to censor our progress, we will obliterate the censor with cannonfire anointed with lizard blood.
In early June, cybersecurity firm Black & Berg issued a challenge, “Change this website’s homepage picture and win $10K and a position working with Senior Cybersecurity Advisor, Joe Black.” LulzSec hacked into the site, emblazoning the homepage image with their mascot, a monocled, wine-swilling stick figure, and to add insult to injury wrote “DONE, THAT WAS EASY. KEEP YOUR MONEY WE DO IT FOR THE LULZ” across the page. It wasn’t even close to being LulzSec’s biggest attack, but it so perfectly crystallized their mentality and exemplified their ethos of trolling for trolling’s sake, with any political outcome perceived as a pleasant side benefit.
Rival factions with names like Team Poison, The A-Team, Web Ninjas, and a guy calling himself th3 j35t3r (leetspeak for “the jester”) leaked the usernames of LulzSec’s core members. After fifty days of mayhem, LulzSec abruptly called it quits, though it’s likely many of the group’s major players will continue to act under the banner of Anonymous or rebrand completely. Large organizations are likely scrambling to improve security measures, but they can only do so much to out-think a sprawling mass of devious computer geeks with anarchic inclinations. It’s likely that Anonymous will exist for a long time, in one form or another, as long as there are a few people ready to exploit the missteps of the powerful, the corrupt, and the laughable.
Throughout my account of this curiously influential site, I traced the motivations that drive Anonymous, from the freedom-fighting proclivities of early hackers to the group’s paradoxical obsessions with the revolting and the adorable. Closely linked with the rise of Anonymous is the story of “little-A anonymous,” a phraseterm I’ve used to describe the broader movement of anonymous social interaction and content creation. There’s no question that Anonymous has outgrown 4chan. Few pieces of media coverage even mention the site from which Anonymous spawned anymore. But I’m confident that when their hacktivism ceases to be a novelty, future historians will look back and recognize that the story of little-A anonymous is just as meaningful.
Acknowledgments
MANY THANKS TO everyone, from entrepreneurs and university professors all the way down to anonymous hackers, who took time away from more gainful pursuits to contribute interviews. To my wonderful agent Chelsea Lindman, for her faith in the project. To my editor Stephanie Gorton, for her insight and discernment, and to everyone at Overlook. To the team at Urlesque, for giving me a platform to expose the darker bits of the web. To Kelly Noonan, for her constant encouragement, to Chris Menning, for lending me his encyclopedic knowledge of memes, and to Nick Douglas, who contributed not only a keen understanding of web culture, but five years of unflagging enthusiasm for my creative work. Finally, to my parents, Clay and Glenda, and Uncle Bob, who surrounded me with love and books and a healthy appreciation for the peculiar.
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