EPIC WIN FOR ANONYMOUS (10 page)

Calvinball

I have used the word
game
to describe the experience of /b/, and more broadly, 4chan and the Anonymous movement. I believe people are drawn to /b/ because it’s a ludic playground, where the rules are perpetually being redefined.

Play can be defined as any activity that is done for personal enjoyment. In its barest definition, a game is structured play. (Unstructured play being something like daydreaming, blowing bubbles, or frolicking in a field.) A game must have an achievable goal, with walls erected between the player and the goal that make it a challenge to reach. These walls are rules that define the game. One could say that 4chan is a game in which the rules are in a constant state of flux.

It reminds me of Calvinball, from the comic strip
Calvin and Hobbes
. In the first Calvinball-related strip, creator Bill Watterson defined the only permanent rule of Calvinball: You can’t play it the same way twice. So Calvin and his imaginary tiger pal Hobbes are constantly reinventing the game, bickering over the rules every step of the way. The strip lampooned the childhood tendency for groups of kids to make up their rules as they went along, when tempers, politicking, cheating, and boredom make strict rules difficult to uphold.

There are very specific games happening within each individual thread of 4chan, and one can observe 4chan as an ongoing global metagame like Calvinball. Sometimes the goal is to piss people off. Sometimes it’s to make some specific person’s life miserable . . . or wonderful. Other times the object of the game is to confuse outsiders or wreck others’ idea of what the game is about.

Mine is a generation raised by video games, which teach children to test the boundaries of their rule sets, mess with their environments, and memorize entire tiny universes until they’re able to spot and exploit holes and glitches. Computer hackers identify with this impulse to a large degree. For them, systems are made to be mastered, broken, and messed with. When playing a game the way it’s supposed to be played gets boring, they seek out cheat codes and other ways of essentially “breaking” the game. It’s one thing to beat or win a game, but can you say you’ve truly mastered a game until you’ve broken it?

This kind of metagaming is not limited to video games. Think of all the various ways people find to enjoy professional football, for instance. They place bets on teams, they play fantasy football, they engage in playful taunting with the fans of opposing teams. The football happening on the field is just a small part of the game experience.

You Just Lost The Game

In April 2009,
Time
magazine held its annual TIME 100 poll, part of which was dedicated to the most influential people on the planet. Candidates included the likes of Tina Fey, Hu Jintao, Gamal Mubarak, and other luminaries of art, science, business, government, and philanthropy.
Time
opened up the list to online voting, and the 4chan hivemind set to work putting moot at the top of the list. When they accomplished that, they decided it wasn’t fun enough. They eventually gamed the whole list, ensuring that the top twenty names would spell out a coded message to fellow /b/tards that they had indeed accomplished an epic win.

It all started when 4chan discovered that moot had been included as one of the many candidates in the TIME 100 poll. 4chan hackers (and this is low-level hacking to be sure) found that they could game the poll with a series of custom autovoter URLs associated with each candidate. The /b/tards spammed the URLs far and wide, including a limit for each, so the candidates would appear in the proper order.
Time
spotted the shenanigans, reset the poll, and changed the URL protocol in order to authenticate votes.

Now the challenge was really on. The hackers set up an IRC channel to discuss the hack, eventually figuring out how to bypass the authentication process (Internet Relay Chat, or IRC, is an early form of real-time chat favored by Anonymous because it’s easy to hide one’s IP address). Some autovoters were created that could vote one hundred times per minute. Others created apps that would cycle through IP addresses so the
Time
site wouldn’t be able to detect that the spam votes were coming from a single computer. Eventually the hackers were able to craft scripts that would easily manipulate the poll’s order. Their final list began:

1. moot

2. Anwar Ibrahim

3. Rick Warren

4. Baitulla Mehsud

5. Larry Brilliant

And so on, with the first letter of each name spelling out MARBLECAKEALSOTHEGAME.

Marblecake is a probably fictional scatological sex act defined (if you are prepared to brave it) at urbandictionary.com. But what about The Game? This is a popular 4chan meme that presages the site. The point is to make the victim think of something or notice something very specific, with the moment of realization delivering a sense of having been had. The object of the game is to avoid thinking about The Game.

According to http://www.losethegame.net, The Game was invented in 1977 by members of the Cambridge University Science Fiction Society (CUSFS) as a variant of the White Bear Game, in which participants try to think of anything other than a white bear, which the human mind makes difficult in a mental phenomenon called ironic processing.

So it becomes a competition to make people recognize The Game in clever ways. On /b/, people will craft sprawling posts culminating in the anticlimax, “Oh, btw, you just lost the game.” They write “You Lost The Game” on currency and spray paint it on walls.

I first lost The Game when someone on /b/ urged me, “Check the TV Guide for 6:00pm on Thursday you won’t believe it!” I played along, and sure enough the broadcast description for that slot was a mere two words: The Game, a 1997 thriller starring Michael Douglas.

4chan’s gaming of the TIME 100 poll has gone down in history as one of the most epic Game-related wins, since they were able to make millions of people cognizant of The Game. Furthermore, they arguably established Anonymous as the true winner of the TIME 100 most influential poll.

Chapter 4

Tracing 4chan Ancestry

L
IKE EVERY OTHER web community, 4chan didn’t simply materialize fully formed out of the ether. In order to understand the motivations and interests of 4chan users, it’s helpful to know where 4chan came from. The history of the web isn’t so much a story about technology as it is a story about people, and how the ways they interact with one another change when new technology allows them to try new things.

Phone Phreaks: Pre-Internet Hackers

One might argue that the roots of 4chan go all the way back to the ’50s, when a bunch of kids figured out how to get free long-distance phone calls by whistling a specific pitch into the receiver. These kids called themselves phone phreaks. Many of the phreaks were blind, with increased sensitivity to sound that enabled them to quickly learn the right pitch to mimic the phone companies’ control tones. Many were also social misfits, drawn together from across the US by their shared interest in technology, and more importantly, in breaking the technology.

In the late 1960s, one phreaker, John Draper—known by the nickname “Captain Crunch” after he discovered that a plastic toy whistle distributed in boxes of Captain Crunch cereal perfectly produced the right tone to hack into the phone network—helped to spread the hobby, which eventually permeated the MIT tech community, where the practice of hacking into communication systems continued, along with the rise of . . .

The Wild West: Usenet & BBSes

A lot of 4chan users laud their platform for hearkening back to the early days of the Internet. “Back then it was like the Wild West. There weren’t these structures in place to make sure that people stayed in line,” one anon told me. Another said, “And forget about the thirty-page terms of service documents.” If you stepped out of line, either you got banned or your transgression became the new law of the land.

Dating the birth of the Internet depends on your criteria. It’s difficult to pinpoint where a bunch of nerds playing around with modems stopped and “the Internet” began. Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) started appearing in the late ’70s. These were mostly local communities, since dialing into a BBS outside of your local calling area would have brought hefty long distance charges. I’ve talked to a few dozen people about those early days, from community managers to hackers to system operators, and they all agree on two things: the Internet in that era was expensive and slow.

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.