EPIC WIN FOR ANONYMOUS (6 page)

Along with that thrill of the unknown comes the feeling that only you and a handful of others are experiencing something as it’s happening. It’s a visceral sensation that solidifies the social bond (i.e., I was there, man). On /b/, you’re thinking, “We are seeing something no one else has ever seen in human history! This is actually happening!” Of course it’s not always exciting, but it happens often enough to keep people interested.

This sensation isn’t limited to content of a sexual nature. By sheer luck, I once stumbled onto a thread in which a guy claimed to have just robbed a jewelry store. He provided images of the automatic rifle he used to hold the place up along with his loot—hundreds of rings.

SUP /b/!

I just robbed a jewelry store with an M4 assault rifle. Feeling excited but kind of scared.

wat [should I] do now?

The thread was ablaze in minutes. People called him out as a fraud, but no one could firmly dispute his claims. The gun was real. He even took it apart, performing a fieldstrip to show the bolt carrier, firing pin, and extractor to confirm the gun’s authenticity. He posted close-up shots of the rings to prove they were real. Someone found a link to a news story about a jewelry store that had in fact been robbed. We’ll never know for sure, but it seemed legit. Imagine the thrill this moment brought to thousands of bored teens across the globe. It’s like reality television, but unscripted, uncensored, and interactive.

/b/ has become a place for interesting, offbeat things like this that lack an institutionalized venue that’s willing and able to display them.

When there isn’t anything exciting happening, people make their own fun. Right now there is a thread titled “Give yourself from 10 years ago advice.” Responses range from hilarious to heartbreaking.

“Video games will all be the same repetitive shit in ten years so just stop now.”

“FUCKING INVEST IN APPLE.”

“Don’t marry that asshole. Oh, and tell Dad that Mom is going to shoot him and make it look like a suicide.”

We move on. Here’s an invitation to participate in “Operation Holy Shit.” It’s an image of a Quran accompanied by the following message:

“Do you see this piece of shit right here? Yep, that’s a motherfucking quran. It’s the guide radical muslims use when they want to learn how to be even more hateful. It incites violence against peoples of all religions. If we ever want peace in this world we must let the extremist muslims know that we will not put up with their bullshit.

Your mission is to burn a copy of the quran, videotape the burning and post it on youtube. The results will be intense. Qurans are easy to acquire. Go to your local muslim student association and ask for a free copy and ask for one at your local mosque.

APRIL 16TH. THE DAY /b/ FOUGHT AGAINST RADICAL ISLAM.”

This sort of call to action appears now and then on /b/, and is generally what leads the press to believe that 4chan fosters hatred. Los Angeles Fox affiliate KTTV did an investigative report in 2007 about the burgeoning Anonymous hacker movement, referring to 4chan as an “Internet hate machine.” 4chan of course found this hysterical and now many use the moniker as a badge of honor—as well as “hackers on steroids,” another term used in the report. Most posts like this fizzle out before they pick up any momentum, but this thread has over two hundred replies in two hours. Sure enough, a few are linking to videos of Quran burnings. But not everyone is on board. Here, there be
moralfags
.

“If you carry through with this, inoccent people will die! last time someone did this, 2 sweedish UN workers got decapitaded.”

One poster suggests that /b/tards sully the holy books of all religions in various ways. Why stop at burning the Quran when you can defecate on the Torah? The suggestion ends in frustration, with the poster unable to come up with a way to offend Buddhists. It becomes a game to see who can be the most offensive. I’d bet that 95 percent of these people have no specific beef with Islam, they’re just doing it for the lulz. These calls to action can be as far-reaching as “Let’s bring down Islam” and as personal as “Let’s all post nasty messages on the Facebook page of this girl who rejected me.” Anyone can put together one of these posters.

This effort, as almost all calls to action on 4chan do, went nowhere. There was no media coverage. The operation was dead in the water. When a particular cause fails to garner support on /b/, people will respond, “/b/ is not your personal army.” This usually results when people try to harness the trolling power of /b/ so they can terrorize someone who called them fat. /b/tards need motivation to attack, and some random guy’s personal agenda usually doesn’t cut it.

N*gg*rf*gg*ts, One and All

4chan users often call each other names with the suffix
-fag
. Christians are called
Christfags
. New 4chan users are called
newfags
. Let’s examine the term
moralfag
, used to disparage people who express reservations about the antisocial behavior outside of 4chan. They are often called enemies of the lulz for claiming that /b/ has gone “too far.”

The idea is that these people love morality so much that they are “gay for it.” The reference is sophomoric, but in most cases it’s not meant as a direct slur against homosexuals—/b/tards will often refer to themselves as being
oldfags
(veteran users) but the implicit meaning is there nonetheless. Another term bandied about quite frequently is
nigger
, which is used to describe just about anything. Some enterprising linguists have combined the two most offensive words in the English language together to form the repugnant moniker
niggerfaggot
, a term so succinctly offensive that I can almost appreciate its elegance. Almost.

I talked to Lisa Nakamura, the director of the Asian American Studies Program and professor in the Institute of Communication Research and Media and Cinema Studies Department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She’s written at length about racial identity on the web in several books. We talked about the rampant use of racial and homophobic slurs on 4chan.

They want the benefit of the shock value or the ability to anger people but they don’t want to be responsible for what they actually said, which is not fair. The line between someone who is a racist and someone who behaves like a racist is pretty thin, especially in online discourse, where pretty much what you write is what you are.

“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.”