4chan

Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web

by Cole Stryker  · 14 Jun 2011  · 226pp  · 71,540 words

Chapter 9: The Anti-Social Network EPILOGUE Acknowledgments Bibliography Introduction THIS IS THE story of the most interesting place on the Internet: an imageboard called 4chan, where you’re as likely to find a hundred photos of adorable kittens as a gallery of gruesome autopsy photos. It’s a seedy, unpredictable

…

your head around a specific concept, online resources like Google, Wikipedia and Know Your Meme will help fill in the blanks. A final warning: Because 4chan thrives on its lack of rules, it hosts content that ranges from harmless to downright terrifying. Violent fetish pornography, racist/sexist rants, and gory photography

…

viewers to share, participate, augment, parody, and otherwise own it. Today we call these bits of cultural currency memes. In order to understand why 4chan matters, we first have to understand memes. Of course, memes were not born on the Internet. They’ve been driving the human sociocultural experience since

…

Anonymous (again, capital A Anonymous). This is the loosely organized hacker collective responsible for a variety of unrelated pranks, hacks, and protests beginning in 2007. 4chan’s the sort of place where unseemly characters congregate to plan pseudopolitically motivated mischief. We’ll get to them later. But what’s it actually

…

—but also because certain strains of anime lean towards the transgressive, and transgression loves company. /adv/ Advice One of the more recent social experiments on 4chan, the /adv/ board is a crowd-sourced advice column. Sometimes responses are genuine, even heartfelt. Sometimes they’re snarky and mean, but in a

…

moment, however i understand getting shitfaced is VERY bad . . . But . . . . . . . . is it still possible reduce bodyfat while drinking every other weekend? /g/ Technology Of course 4chan has a gadget and tech board. The conversation here isn’t much different than what you’d find in the comments section of an average

…

that are dedicated to arguing about specific aspects of gun control. /lit/ Literature Despite being populated by Randroids (Ayn Rand devotees) and sci-fi geeks, 4chan’s literature board is another that continually surprises with clever content. A common game is “Honest Covers,” wherein players post Photoshopped images of novels with

…

/v/ is often plagued by the most banal discourse. This board is also incidentally famous for launching the Rickrolling meme. After lolcats, the most recognizable 4chan meme is undoubtedly Rickrolling. It was a happy accident. moot instituted a wordfilter which changed the word egg to duck, so when someone typed the

…

,” 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

…

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

…

entering an Internet community changed. Usenet always had a large ratio of experienced posters to newbies. Frank insists that the relationship between the trolling on 4chan and the trolling on Usenet can be explained as nothing more than an etymological coincidence. The trolling of his day was bitingly clever, with relatively

…

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

…

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

…

of the community, sometimes get surprisingly informed answers. This kind of querying would influence sites like Yahoo Answers, Quora, Reddit, and, to an extent, even 4chan. According to Haughey, MetaFilter also developed its own memespeak pretty early on. Probably in the first year, 2000 or so, I noticed people shouting “double

…

to Haughey it worked wonders in keeping out trolls and casual passersby who would contribute nothing of value to the conversation. Haughey is fascinated by 4chan, especially how it produces interesting memes “from a place of total fuck-off anonymity.” Like most online communities, MetaFilter asks its users to post

…

online culture, almost immediately after getting online in the late ’90s. Its community of “goons” thrived, providing perhaps the most direct Western antecedent to 4chan, which was eventually spawned from its anime forum. Launched in 1999, the site charged a one-time $9.95 fee for forum access, which thousands

…

earth’s molten core. Other features on Something Awful include “Photoshop Phriday,” a weekly image gallery that lampoons any old thing using image editing tools. 4chan users have turned this practice into something approaching an Olympic sport. “Your Band Sucks,” a recurring column, offers hilariously provocative essays taking down highly regarded

…

web culture that makes up the memescape. The non sequiturs and obsession with human eccentricity were two powerful themes that defined Something Awful, and later 4chan and Internet pop culture as a whole. The Birth of the Chans: Ayashii World, Amezou, and 2channel Meanwhile, an enterprising Japanese slacker named Hiroyuki

…

it was an extension of Usenet, its subject matter was deeply nerdy, focusing on hacking, pirating, porn, and other black market information. Ayashii World, like 4chan, was unique for two reasons: anonymous posting and meme creation. Ayashii World even had an equivalent to /b/, called the “scum board,” which was

…

boasted about their plans before committing crimes hours later. Interestingly, many notable documented events resulting from or announced on 2channel has a Western analogue on 4chan. The cultures are so different, but the technology influences human behavior on a deeply similar level. 2channel also has a heartwarming side. Consider Trainman,

…

and collaborating. 2channel behaves not only as an alternative media source, but as an ombudsman that is continuously keeping the Japanese mainstream media in check. 4chan Godfather: Futaba Channel Futaba Channel, or 2ch, is an image board that was launched in 2001. The community is more focused on otaku culture than

…

’ve just described is part of the gradual progression in the evolution of the online community that created the mother of all Internet in-groups, 4chan. Of course, online community branched forward in different directions, mutating into mainstream social networks like Facebook and Twitter too—but if you look closely,

…

overtly trollish /b/tards left for 7chan en masse because this new site gave them more freedom to engage in illegal activity. In other cases, 4chan users were drawn to alternative chan boards because they had other boards discussing topics like law, philosophy, politics, and history. Encyclopedia Dramatica casts the

…

birth of 7chan, one of the biggest alternatives to 4chan, in biblical proportions: Anonymous toiled under Moot’s harsh rule for over 9000 years, building great pyramids unto him on many hectares of land. Anonymous

…

furries. (People who like to dress up in cartoonish animal costumes called fursuits. Furries’ attraction to animals is often sexual, but many furries insist otherwise. 4chan is especially antagonistic to furries, though every Friday /b/tards post massive furry porn threads, calling it Furry Friday.) They attacked pro-anorexia message boards

…

January 2008 called “Mutilated Furries, Flying Phalluses: Put the Blame on Griefers, the Sociopaths of the Virtual World.” This article, written by Julian Dibbell, mentioned 4chan and finally provided noobs with a reasoned analysis of troll culture. Meanwhile at Gawker, my friend Nick Douglas (the college buddy who turned me on

…

threaded commenting structure, making it easy for people to keep discussion threads going for years. Which is of course the exact opposite of how 4chan works. 4chan feels more like a fire hose of unrelated content hitting you all at once and then disappearing down a storm drain. Speaking of which,

…

so fucking metal” (Steely Dan being the example that comes to mind). The group’s appreciation for schlocky heavy metal music is not dissimilar from 4chan’s obsession with cute cats. SoM is actively antagonistic to outsiders, telling any confused onlookers to “delete your Tumblr.” It relies heavily on an impenetrable

…

was the same as saying “please trust me”. Well I won’t. But most respondents were OK with it. Of course, this was Reddit, not 4chan. 4chan uses basically the same software that it did when it started out, which itself was antiquated by the standards of the day. moot’s vision

…

a dozen Redditors specifically offered work in the Cleveland area. This outpouring of generosity is par for the course on Reddit, a mirror image of 4chan’s collaborative destruction. Within a day, Williams started getting coverage and interviews at every major news outlet. One particular story caught my eye. Indianapolis’

…

get mass media attention by understanding what people are intrinsically interested in, something advertisers are sometimes not very good at. Ikeler defines five properties of 4chan that she thinks advertisers can learn from. First, “Bump.” This refers to how communities self-select what kind of information is important to them,

…

also disrupt community managers from dealing with legitimate concerns by drawing their attention toward triviality. Fifth, “Not your personal army.” This is a common 4chan response to any call to action deemed unworthy of anons’ attention. Ikeler interprets this as a warning not to expect too much of audiences. They

…

one anonymous poster who contacted the American Legion, Lashua received fifty bouquets of flowers, twenty cakes, and five UPS trucks bearing cards. Bottoms Up Whether 4chan is an Internet Hate Machine or a place where people can collaborate on positive projects, no matter how misdirected, the exciting thing here is the

…

from above, but grows up and spreads laterally from below. This is why Stephen Colbert and Old Spice reach out directly to Reddit and even 4chan, respectively. Welcome to the Memesphere Once cultural artifacts go viral, they are subsumed into the lexicon to serve as the foundation for comedic callbacks,

…

used as shorthand to say, “Dude, you’re a pedophile.” The cuddly representation of such repugnant behavior encapsulates the cutesy and sinister dichotomy present on 4chan. Although meant to characterize pedophilia, Pedobear is also a mockery of pedophilia, which many Anons have successfully fought against in the real world. But why

…

in Google Bombing techniques. A Google Bomb occurs when Google search results are successfully manipulated by spamming the search engine with specific keywords. For example, 4chan once bombarded Google with the key phrase “Justin Bieber syphilis.” Within hours, Gawker and even the San Francisco Chronicle had run stories about the pop

…

anonymous during real-life protests, and also grant them a perceived heroic flair. By the summer of 2008, Anonymous had grown beyond the confines of 4chan. Gabriella Coleman, an anthropologist and leading scholar specializing in the documentation of hacker culture, emphasizes the diversity of the group. She tells me that although

…

peppered with criticisms from those who would decry moralfaggotry. Despite the naysayers, this crowd-sourced detective work is one of the most exhilarating things about 4chan. They are able to accomplish much in the aggregate that they wouldn’t alone. As philospher Pierre Lévy says, “No one knows everything. Everyone

…

to his alleged poor customer service. He paid the SA membership fee in order to dispute the claims, and eventually started threatening lawsuits (or as 4chan calls frivolous legal action, “lolsuits”). That’s when Anonymous’s wrath descended on poor Goldstein. They brought down his website, figured out where he

…

channels, message boards, and open-source alternative social networks like Diaspora to interact with friends, especially when engaging in activities of questionable legality. Not surprisingly, 4chan is one of these places. The site’s radical approach to online community (relative to other communities of its day) has shaped the tenor of

…

billions of dollars, brought generations of people online and furthermore made them active. Facebook has redefined how humans communicate. Speaking purely in terms of scale, 4chan is a tiny playground for bored geeks in comparison. In David Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg famously declared: The days of

…

actions elsewhere on the net—our browsing and our likes—and making that public, too, through Facebook, disturbed people even more. Where does it end? 4chan offers a place where people are completely in control of their identity, allowing for expressions of opinions without repercussions. In a 2010 TED Talk, Christopher

…

you like is powerful. Doing whatever you like is now crossing the line, but I think it’s important to have a place [like 4chan]. Poole outlined 4chan’s core competencies and further explained his devotion to privacy in a spring 2011 South by Southwest keynote speech. He described a “loss of

…

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

…

, and Uncle Bob, who surrounded me with love and books and a healthy appreciation for the peculiar. Bibliography 4chan. “FAQ.” http://www.4chan.org/faq. 4chan. “Rules.” http://www.4chan.org/rules. Aditham, Kiran. “SXSW Keynote: 4chan’s Chris Poole Discusses Canvas, ‘Fluid Identity.’” Mediabistro.com. Last modified March 13, 2011. http://www.mediabistro.

…

2010. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11371315. Bernstein, Michael S., and Andrès Monroy-Hernández, Drew Harry, Paul Andrè, Katrina Panovich, and Greg Vargas. “4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community.” Massachusetts Institute of Technology & University of Southampton, 2011. boyd, danah. “‘for the

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right

by Angela Nagle  · 6 Jun 2017  · 122pp  · 38,022 words

common imagery was of Pepe the Frog. The name given by the press to this mix of rightist online phenomena including everything from Milo to 4chan to neo-Nazi sites was the ‘alt-right’. In its strictest definition though, as an army of Internet pedants quickly pointed out, the alt

…

only came in the form of lengthy treatises on obscure blogs. It was the image- and humor-based culture of the irreverent meme factory of 4chan and later 8chan that gave the alt-right its youthful energy, with its transgression and hacker tactics. The Guy Fawkes mask used in the

…

protests in 2011 was a reference to Anonymous, which took its name, leaderless anticelebrity ethic and networked style from the chaotic anonymous style of 4chan. V for Vendetta, which the Guy Fawkes mask is taken from, and the ‘dark age of comic books’ influenced the aesthetic sensibilities of this

…

engaged in the kind of pervert-exposing vigilantism that blue-collar tabloid readers have long been mocked for. To understand the seemingly contradictory politics of 4chan, Anonymous and its relationship to the alt-right, it is important to remember that the gradual right-wing turn in chan culture centered around the

…

in the image boards that the rightist side of the culture was able to fill with their expert style of anti-PC shock humor memes. 4chan began with users sharing Japanese anime, created by a teenage Chris Poole (aka moot) and based on the anime-sharing site 2chan. Poole’s

…

incestuous thoughts, racism and misogyny were characteristic of the environment created by this strange virtual experiment, but it was mostly funny memes. Poole has called 4chan a ‘meme factory’ and it undoubtedly created countless memes that made their way into mainstream Internet-culture. The most famous early examples of these were

…

a link to seemingly serious content that sends its user to a video of Rick Astley singing Never Gonna Give You Up. The users of 4chan/b/ acted collectively on things like making Chris Poole person of the year in Time magazine’s online poll in 2008 and the collective

…

his upset daughter, in which he threatened to call the ‘cyberpolice’ – in their emotionally underdeveloped way, lack of Internet-culture knowledge is always license on 4chan for any level of cruelty. They also acted collectively on less sinister pranks like Operation Birthday Boy, when an elderly man posted an online ad

…

no posts and all comments filled with slang that you are too old to understand. A common reference on the alt-right ‘kek’ started on 4chan and translated to ‘lol’ in comment boards on the multiplayer videogame World of Warcraft, while Pepe the Frog, originating in Matt Furie’s Web

…

like Mike Cernovich, who wrote the male assertiveness guide Gorilla Mindset, former Vice editor Gavin McInnes, and a host of Pepe meme-making gamers and 4chan-style shitposters, who had little in the way of a coherent commitment to conservative thought or politics but shared an anti-PC impulse and a

…

under the banner of a bursting forth of anti-PC cultural politics through the culture wars of recent years. The irreverent trolling style associated with 4chan grew in popularity in response to the expanding identity politics of more feminine spaces like Tumblr. This, itself, spilled over eventually into ‘real life’

…

head on a stick’, ‘It would be funny if five guys raped her right now’, ‘I violently masturbate to your face’ and the old 4chan standard ‘Tits or get the fuck out’. Her Wikipedia page was vandalized with pornographic images and hateful messages. There was also a campaign to mass

…

an issue in the ‘gaming community’. Tactics such as DDoS and doxxing (exposing the person’s personal details to enable their mass harassment) used by 4chan and originating in Usenet culture became central to attacks by the anti-feminist gamers. Games marketed to the anti-feminist gamergate audience were more likely

…

leave the site, and the gamergaters moved to the more lawless 8chan. Quinn found and recorded some of the conversations that took place on a 4chan IRC called ‘burgersandfries’, in which users conspired to destroy her career using the most extreme misogynist language and motivations. In this chat, they express

…

They also expressed fantasies about her being raped and killed. They hoped all the harassment would drive her to suicide and only the thought of 4chan getting bad publicity in response convinced some of them that this isn’t something they should hope for. They distributed falsified nude pictures of her

…

stakes, but this was the galvanizing issue that drew up the battle lines of the culture wars for a younger online generation. The culture of 4chan, Anonymous etc., in the pre-gamergate days of Occupy and Anonymous could have gone another way. Long before this ‘geeks vs feminists’ battle, the

…

and defenders of an Internet free of state intervention, capitalist control and monopolizing of the online world. In a similar style to the rhetoric of 4chan and Anonymous (‘we are legion’), it warned: Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the

…

characterized by a particularly dark preoccupation with thwarted or failed white Western masculinity as a grand metaphor, which has had some ‘real-life’ manifestations. On 4chan a post, dated October 1, 2015, read: The first of our kind has struck fear into the hearts of America… This is only the beginning

…

killed nine classmates and injured nine others before shooting himself at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon. The night before the shooting, a post on 4chan’s /r9k/ board warned fellow commenters from the Northwestern United States to steer clear of school that day. The first responder in the thread asked

…

finally going down?’ while others encouraged the anonymous poster and gave him tips on how to conduct a mass shooting. In 2014, an anonymous 4chan user submitted several photos of what appeared to be a woman’s naked and strangled corpse, along with a confession: Turns out it’s way

…

David Michael Kalac, was arrested after a brief police chase and charged with murder. If further proof that the anti-PC taboo-breaking culture of 4chan is not just ‘for the lulz’ is needed, after the November 2015 shooting of five Black Lives Matter protesters in Minneapolis, a video emerged of

…

transcend the morality of the lesser masses when he killed a ‘worthless’ old woman. Echoed in the style of contemporary transgressive anti-moral cultures like 4chan that later fused with the alt-right, was French writer Maurice Blanchot’s dictum that ‘the greatest suffering of others always counts for less than

…

rebellion. The surreal became a pre-rational creative expression. The throwing off of the id that characterized this transgressive countercultural traditional also characterized sites like 4chan, and its culture of trolling and taboo-breaking anti-moral humor, which is often described as insane or unhinged to baffled outsiders. This view of

…

psychopathy and rejection of imposed morality runs through the ethos and aesthetic of the rightist trolling culture. In one early self-description, a 4chan/b/ enthusiast wrote: /b/ is the guy who tells the cripple ahead of him in line to hurry up. /b/ is first to get

…

read that Mitchell was ‘an hero to take the shot, to leave us all behind. God do we wish we could take it back.’ 4chan found this hilarious because of the mixture of the earnest emotional vulnerability and the grammatical error. There was also a reference on his memorial page

…

so elaborate that Henderson’s MySpace page was hacked, while another placed an iPod on Henderson’s grave, took a picture and posted it to 4chan. His face was pasted onto spinning iPods and hard-core porn scenes, and a re-enactment of Henderson’s death soon appeared on YouTube,

…

murdered, the Facebook pages devoted to finding her turned into memorial pages to mourn her and then trolling of these pages began, sometimes orchestrated on 4chan. Prank pages such as ‘I bet this Pickle can get more fans than Chelsea King’ were set up. Thus began a whole genre of

…

trolling, generally referred to at the time as ‘RIP trolling’ emanating from 4chan’s culture. The forum’s preoccupation with suicide, which became used as a verb to ‘an hero’, often takes the form of painful expressions of

…

war is for the soul of America.’ The right-wing style that Yiannopoulos embodied represents a marriage of the ironic, irreverent, taboo-busting culture of 4chan with the politics of the right; although, as his hard alt-right detractors often liked to point out, once you remove the ‘trolling’, many

…

of his views amount to little more than classical liberalism. Despite calling himself a conservative he, Trump, rightist 4chan and the alt-right all represent a pretty dramatic departure from the kind of churchgoing, upstanding, button-down, family-values conservatism that we usually associate

…

the nihilism that the left was once accused of by the right actually characterized the movement to which Milo belonged. The rise of Milo’s 4chan-influenced right is no more evidence of a resurgence of conservatism than the rise of Tumblr-style identity politics constitutes a resurgence of the socialist

…

away from a positivist epistemology of discerning objective truth. Despite attempts to use the anti-postmodern language of real conservatives at times, Milo and his 4chan troll fans are in many ways the perfect postmodern offspring, where every statement is wrapped in layers of faux-irony, playfulness and multiple cultural nods

…

In response to criticisms of his intentionally cruel bullying attacks on others, he simply shrugged them off as examples of fabulous catty gay male behavior. 4chan is also more of a product of the sexual revolution than of conservatism. From the start it was teeming with weird hardcore pornographic images and

…

platforms for the emergence of a whole political and aesthetic sensibility, developing its own vocabulary and style – very much the reverse mirror image of rightist 4chan in this way. It was here that what Walter Benn Michaels criticized as a liberal preference for ‘recognition of diversity over economic inequality’ reached its

…

seems to run through them. So it is worth saying first that my descriptions here are, like my descriptions of the worst of Tumblr-liberalism, 4chan and others, not representative of what you might call ‘the men’s movement’ in general but of the darker online underbelly that has flourished

…

alt-right when it comes to women. The most important space for the production of alt-right and alt-light aesthetics for years has been 4chan, which is full of pornography that is so disturbing and so intentionally dehumanizing that anyone other than a moral and emotional derelict would be repulsed

…

… My War on Women… I will attack the very girls who represent everything I hate in the female gender: The hottest sorority of UCSB. On 4chan the day the story broke, one contributor posted an image of Rodger and wrote: ‘Elliot Rodger, the supreme gentleman, was part of /b/. Discuss.’

…

condemnatory one, and the standard progressive academic reflex (implicitly pro-counterculture, implicitly pro-transgression) was less critical, verging on celebratory. The Fox News depiction of 4chan as an ‘Internet hate machine’ and trolls more broadly as an anti-social, foul-mouthed group of misanthropes, still living with their mothers, etc., simultaneously

…

policies and the ‘encoded solipsism’ of the social network itself. While she recognized the very real impact of their actions on their victims, Philips described 4chan/b/’s trolls as ‘revel[ing] in counter-hegemony’ and ‘undermining established media narratives’ and the ‘mindless histrionics of the modern 24-hour news

…

cycle’. She characterized Fox News’ unflattering description of 4chan trolls as an attempt to ‘maximize audience antipathy’ toward them and said ‘mainstream media outlets aim to neutralize a particularly counter-hegemonic cultural space.’ As

…

late as 2014, when 4chan was full of extreme racist and misogynist content, Gabriella Coleman wrote in much more positive tones again about the hacker cultures that had emerged from

…

collectivity and group identification, forged as they were in the hellish, terrifying fires of trolling, could transcend such an originary condition? Did the cesspool of 4chan really crystallize into one of the most politically active, morally fascinating, and subversively salient activist groups operating today? Somewhat surprisingly, yes. Years before the whole

…

the subjects at hand were ordinary blue-collar normies of the far right like Tommy Robinson, despite his far milder views than what has characterized 4chan and trolls like weev for many years. It was the utterly empty and fraudulent ideas of countercultural transgression that created the void into which anything

…

chan culture and ultra-PC academic culture understood the countercultural dog whistle of disdain for anything mainstream. In a 2016 essay ‘The New Man of 4chan’, I wrote an account of the racist and misogynist incel mass shooter Chris Harper Mercer, whose killing spree killed nine and injured nine. In response

…

to a 4chan thread believed to have been started by him, describing a killing that the author was going to commit, a commenter wrote: ‘Make sure you

…

molotovs. It is really easy and painfully [sic] way to kill many normies.’ Another wrote that ‘Chads and Stacy’s’ should be targeted, referencing a 4chan meme about the normies. Chad Thundercock and his female equivalent, Stacey, are embodiments of this normies meme. I would argue there is a much more

…

prefigured by most of the founders of Modern European culture.’ The online expression ‘there are no girls on the Internet’ appeared early on in 4chan’s ‘Rules of the Internet’. This is intended to be read not literally but as an assertion that the areas of the Internet in which

…

perceived to be attention-seeking and vain, moving into male-dominated geeky spaces. As scholar Vyshali Manivannan documented, the common usage of the term on 4chan originates in 2008 in an infamous incident in which a 4channer identifying as a ‘femanon’ posted a photo of what looked like herself in lingerie

…

as feminine, while high culture, whether traditional or modern, clearly remains the privileged realm of male activities. I want to return again to Fight Club. 4chan’s original set of 50 ‘Rules of the Internet’, which listed ‘tits or GTFO’ and ‘there are no girls on the Internet’, also lists the

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World

by James Ball  · 19 Jul 2023  · 317pp  · 87,048 words

12. Wake Up, Sheeple Conclusion Acknowledgements Notes Bibliography and Further Reading Index About the Author Introduction It doesn’t take long browsing the messageboard of 4chan to realise that you’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto. The structure might look similar to mainstream forums like Reddit, or even Mumsnet, but

…

among the community dissecting and analysing his posts. Why someone with such high-level clearance and access to such explosive and sensitive information would choose 4chan to reveal it – and why they would risk compromising such a sensitive operation – was a question left unanswered. The same user posted cryptic but

…

most people, that whole concept will look like nonsense (or so I hope). But, from a tiny following among the already somewhat fringe community of 4chan users, it snowballed. Via QAnon influencers it reached a much larger audience through Facebook, YouTube and other social media sites. The conspiracy theory was

…

and anti-lockdown movements and continues to change. It is the conspiracy theory that has eaten all other conspiracy theories, having grown far beyond 4chan and even beyond the mysterious Q and their posts. Many of the millions of people devoting hours of every day to the movement have never

…

ecosystem – one which fosters extreme movements that often blur into one another. More than a decade ago, the online collective Anonymous sprang forth from 4chan and became one of the first online movements to mobilise people in the real world, in a loud public clash with the Church of Scientology

…

. Many of us cheered on Anonymous as the ‘good guys’ in this fight (doubtless Scientologists felt differently). But later movements growing out of the 4chan and Anonymous breeding grounds tacked increasingly to the right, and became intrinsically far nastier. One of the first such abusive groups arose against women writing

…

(or ripoff) today hosts more than sixty boards on different topics. These include anime, video games, technology, wrestling, maths, origami and LGBTQ issues. Most of 4chan is pretty innocuous, though it has multiple boards dedicated to different subgenres of pornography, some of which can be extremely graphic. While the site itself

…

communities – one named ‘politically incorrect’, known to its denizens as /pol/ (not to be confused with /po/, the origami board), and ‘random’, which is 4chan’s infamous /b/ board. To look at the history of these communities is to realise how they became perfect breeding grounds for movements like QAnon

…

to generate online slang, which becomes immediately identifiable to people in the group while being impenetrable to outsiders. This can be totally innocuous. On several 4chan boards, users will type ‘kek’ instead of ‘lol’. Media outlets have offered various explanations for this, but the real reason comes from the online

…

and saw it change from something chaotic but fundamentally innocent into something far darker. From mass hoaxing to mass action Even in its early incarnation, 4chan had its dark side. One particular black spot was the practice of doxing – tracking down the name and address of an otherwise anonymous internet user

…

with inappropriate content. One frequent victim was Habbo Hotel, a social game intended for kids that let animated avatars wander around different rooms. In 2006, 4chan users (calling themselves ‘/b/lockers’) cut off popular facilities – such as the swimming pool – by setting numerous avatars, all identical black men with afros

…

to turn a previously sensible conversation or debate into an incoherent row, or to secure some perverse result. One particularly successful trolling effort came when 4chan decided to hijack TIME magazine’s 2009 poll for ‘person of the year’ (the magazine makes its own pick, but also includes a people

…

before music and movie streaming, a time which was defined by piracy and the war against it. The teenagers and twenty-somethings who lived on 4chan and similar sites were the generation who used Napster, BitTorrent, LimeWire, Kazaa or whatever worked to get hold of music, movies and video games –

…

surprise that – in the public mind at least – it was the Church of Scientology that caused the transformation of small-a anonymous users of 4chan and similar boards into the movement known as Anonymous. As a movement, Anonymous is almost deliberately poorly defined: it is described as an anarchist group

…

Now a professor at the anthropology department at Harvard, Gabriella Coleman first came across my radar when I was an early-career journalist following Anonymous, 4chan and the hacktivist movements around it. Whenever you entered an Anonymous discussion thread or chat channel,21 Biella (as she was known) would be there

…

led to a dramatic series of actions, big and small, by Anonymous against Scientology, in what quickly became known as ‘Operation Chanology’, thanks to 4chan’s endless love of portmanteau terms. The tactics of the first early skirmishes against Scientology matched what had gone before. Anons found the fax numbers

…

Some took exception to the new, worthy, political version of Anonymous, condemning users as ‘moralfags’,32 and trying once again to ruin the reputation of 4chan, even releasing videos intending to cause photo-epileptic seizures onto support forums for people with epilepsy.33 Anonymous, rather than becoming a consistent movement, would

…

have still not lost their sense of chaos or playfulness. This combination can have dramatic results. In 2017, one of the more popular games on 4chan – carried across from other social networks – was to pose as a whistleblower from inside the Trump administration, in some department or other, with secrets

…

the phrase ‘FOLLOW THE WHITE RABBIT’ just weeks before Q’s first post. Play-acting mysteries and posing as secretive sources was common practice on 4chan that autumn. While supposed ‘resistance’ accounts on other social networks might be made in the hope that other users – or even the mainstream media –

…

posting style and cryptic hints proved much more compelling than the other accounts, which rarely lasted more than a few days and didn’t escape 4chan’s orbit. Reading QAnon posts felt different: Mockingbird HRC detained, not arrested (yet). Where is Huma? Follow Huma. This has nothing to do w/

…

good reviews was totally and utterly unfounded.4 Despite the apparent lack of truth to the accusations against Quinn, they nonetheless tapped into something on 4chan and related online chat forums. Posters circulated naked photos of Quinn, speculated on their sexual history and even discussed what they could do collectively to

…

these kinds of angry and coordinated online mobs – meaning that companies had no kind of playbook as to what to do about it. Mobilised via 4chan and IRC, the movement started email-bombing advertisers on sites that had hosted content critical of Gamergate. When Leigh Alexander, then an editor-at-

…

. Others had it far worse, especially as the movement gained momentum and attracted more followers, not least thanks to mainstream coverage of its activities. 4chan was and is a niche site, but its influence became broad thanks to the media and to memes that started there permeating across the wider

…

elements. Gamergate couldn’t be homophobic, he argued by example, as here he was, a flamboyantly gay man serving as one of its key spokespeople. 4chan had sparked plenty of flare-ups against different sites and online communities before, but Gamergate was different. For one, it was sustained – people’s

…

with logos, colours and references tipping those in the know to rape ‘jokes’, while looking innocent to an audience unaware of their history. Thanks to 4chan’s deep history in arcane and obscure memes, unpicking these layers of meaning took expertise. The group, for example, produced an innocent-enough looking mascot

…

the joke was on you. Any comment could be dismissed as something said merely to shock or to scandalise. And there was much old-school 4chan fun to be had by causing trouble in more mainstream corners of the internet. Those like Milo Yiannopoulos, leveraging Gamergate into the bigger media platform

…

had emerged through the years in these particular online subcultures, this idea of a hidden elite was about to take on a deadly new edge. 4chan meets the Clinton emails By the 2016 US presidential election, chan culture had evolved into something toxic and dangerous, but its offshoots had still

…

similar conspiratorial accounts did not. In the introduction to this book we referred to Q’s infamous first post on 28 October 2017, dropped onto 4chan’s /pol/ board: HRC extradition already in motion effective yesterday with several countries in case of cross border run. Passport approved to be flagged

…

the account now known as Q were from the same individual. Q quickly established a particular voice that couldn’t have worked better for the 4chan audience of 2017 if it had been scientifically engineered to do so. It was pro-Trump, anti-establishment and littered with mysteries and questions,

…

views, starting a trend of YouTube influencers bringing Q posts to people who would never try to navigate the niche and technically complex world of 4chan.20 These kind of analysis posts are the bread-and-butter of YouTube fandoms, though are often applied to far more innocuous subjects. Taylor

…

are now hundreds of thousands of people who subscribe, at least in part, to QAnon – without ever having heard of Q or QAnon itself. 4chan and 8chan had always been incubators for fringe and extreme ideas. These could burst onto the wider internet and information ecosystem – as Gamergate and others

…

video features a suited Potter standing awkwardly in front of a world map. Potter expresses concerns about the QAnon movement being infiltrated: ‘it moved from 4chan to 8chan … which certainly helped,’ he opens – somewhat ironically given that it was the shift to 8chan which seemed to facilitate the theft of

…

as easily as they can pull them apart. QAnon brought together some incredibly disparate online communities. To see how it spread beyond the boundaries of 4chan, it’s worth looking at these in turn. One of the most obvious communities for the nascent QAnon movement was the existing US conspiracy

…

who accessed QAnon influencers through major mainstream social networks like YouTube, Facebook and QAnon. Only a hardened and much smaller cadre actually hung out on 4chan and 8chan, the boards where Q actually posted. This group was younger, overwhelmingly male and far more influenced by the traditional tropes of the online

…

parliamentary building,35 a disconcerting echo of the 1933 burning of the Reichstag. None of these incidents can be laid solely at the door of 4chan, 8chan or any of the movements they spawned. Each is tied to the individual circumstances of the perpetrator’s lives, their mental health, their

…

different ways for different audiences, something with its core principles started grabbing followers in ever-larger numbers – most of whom had never heard of Q, 4chan or 8chan at all. The splintering groups took quite different paths. One was the core QAnon followers, whose belief system often became even more profoundly

…

to see more of an iceberg that’s far away. The amorphous digital virus that we call QAnon had already escaped its breeding grounds of 4chan and gone international. Now it was about to become a pandemic. PART THREE Transmission 7 #SaveTheChildren How does a conspiracy theory as lurid as

…

a global movement arose across Instagram and Facebook groups – its core message being ‘save the children’. Gone were the memes and layers of irony of 4chan and 8chan, replaced with clear and earnest messaging on the all-too-familiar theme of child abuse on a massive scale. If anything could demonstrate

…

particular fast-breeding mammalian populations provide reservoirs for viruses to survive and to evolve, so too do dark and damp corners of the internet, like 4chan and 8chan, provide spawning grounds for new mutations of these online viruses to emerge. Just as cities are where real-world viruses then break

…

– good luck, and don’t forget to look after yourself first. Notes introduction 1. Sadly not a hypothetical example: Simon Doherty, ‘Inside Operation Pridefall: 4chan’s Attempt to Bring Down Pride 2020’, www.vice.com, 3 June 2020. 2. This original post is archived at https://qposts.online/post/1

…

above a certain threshold. 13. Once again there is a fuller account here: ‘Pool’s Closed’, https://knowyourmeme.com. 14. Beverly Jenkins, ‘Very Funny 4chan Pranks Where Nobody Got Hurt’, www.liveabout.com, 24 May 2019. 15. See https://web.archive.org/web/20080105081944/http://4chanarchive.org/brchive/dspl_thread

…

.php5?thread_id=39101047. 16. ‘4chan’s Pflugerville Highschool Bomb Threat’, www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwDztdNohZ4. 17. Sean Michaels, ‘Taking the Rick’, www.theguardian.com, 19 March 2008. 18.

…

of Independence of cyberspace is a seminal document on this: www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence. 18. Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (Zer0 Books, 2017), pp. 8 and 10. 19. Zaid Jilani, ‘Gamergate’s fickle hero: The dark

…

29 October 2016. 42. Associated Press, ‘Leaked DNC emails reveal details of anti-Sanders sentiment’, www.theguardian.com, 24 July 2016. 43. ‘Pizzagate: How a 4chan conspiracy went mainstream’, www.newstatesman.com, 8 December 2016. 44. Brian Patrick Byrne, ‘Minecraft Creator Alleges Global Conspiracy Involving Pizzagate, a “Manufactured Race War,” a

…

Theory’, www.smithsonianmag.com, 8 April 2014. 17. Michael Butter, The Nature of Conspiracy Theories (Cambridge, 2020), p. 9. 18. Listed publicly on www.4chan.org as of March 2022. 19. ‘Most popular social networks worldwide as of January 2022, ranked by number of monthly active users’, www.statista.com

…

.dailydot.com, 17 November 2014. 26. At https://mobile.twitter.com/waxpancake/status/512028586891436032. 27. At www.reddit.com/r/GamerGhazi/comments/2y7wpy/howwhy_did_4chan_ban_gamergaters_and_the. 28. Q’s (not very exciting) final post: https://qposts.online/post/4953. 29. Timothy McLaughlin, ‘The Weird, Dark History

…

Conflict, I. B. Tauris & Company, London, 2020 Johnson, Stanley, The Marburg Virus, William Heinemann, London, 1984 Nagle, Angela, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right, Zer0 Books, Portland, OR, 2017 Phillips, Whitney, You Are Here: A Field Guide for Navigating Polarized Speech

…

, here, here, here, here, here, here Florida ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill, here Flynn, Michael, here, here, here ‘following the white rabbit’, here, here, here 4chan, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here anonymity

We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency

by Parmy Olson  · 5 Jun 2012  · 478pp  · 149,810 words

or seriously harassing someone was called a “life ruin.” Using many of the same Internet sleuthing tactics as Aaron Barr, William would find people on 4chan discussion forums who were being ridiculed or deserved ridicule. Then he would “dox” them, or find their true identities, send them threats on Facebook,

…

more porn, gore, and constant insults between users that created a throbbing mass of negativity. It sometimes got William thinking scary thoughts about suicide. But 4chan also kept him alive. Sometimes he felt depression coming on and would stay up all night on the site, then remain awake for the rest

…

the browser window. Somehow, though, he’d stumble upon them again that night. And then again the following night. At around fifteen, he finally found 4chan, the website that would become his world for the next few years. Many people who involve themselves in Anonymous claim to have first found it

…

after Shii wrote his essay, forced anonymity had become widely accepted on the image board. Anyone deemed a tripfag was quickly shot down and mocked. 4chan was booming, a teeming pit of depraved images and nasty jokes, yet at the same time a source of extraordinary, unhindered creativity. People began creating

…

comments, homophobia, and jokes about disabled people were the norm. It was customary for users to call one another “nigger,” “faggot,” or just “fag.” New 4chan users were newfags, old ones oldfags, and Brits were britfags, homosexuals were fagfags or gayfags. It was a gritty world yet strangely accepting. It became

…

information about people, including suspected pedophiles and women he’d met online. Soon he was encouraging other newfags to “lurk moar,” or learn more on 4chan. He created another hidden folder called “info,” where he would save any new techniques or methods for his snooping, often as screencaps, for anything from

…

site. Lurk long enough, he figured, and you could get access to almost anything you wanted. William was primarily attracted to women. But lurking on 4chan he noticed other users saying they were swaying into bisexuality or even homosexuality. A recurring thread ran along the lines of “How gay have you

…

realistic. William would add profile pictures and faked “vacation photos” by downloading whole folders of photos of a single female from online photo repositories or 4chan itself, or by coercing a girl into giving him her photos. Facebook would sometimes delete “troll” accounts like these, especially if they had inane

…

background could only be described as chaos. Two years in and fourteen-year-old Jake was flitting between his broadcasted prank calls and raids by 4chan’s /b/tards. Successful raids could target just about anything online, but they tended to have one thing in common, something that has barely

…

then being fought between actor Ashton Kutcher and CNN. Less than twenty-four hours after they had set up the account and announced it on 4chan, media-sharing site eBaum’s World, and other sites, the account had nearly three hundred thousand followers. Nearly half a million ended up following @

…

annoying. IRC lingo was littered with abbreviations like rofl (rolling on the floor laughing), lol (laugh out loud), and ttyl (talk to you later). Like 4chan, it gradually developed its own culture and language. Once you were on a network, anyone could create a new IRC channel. You simply typed /join

…

, even a few hundred people joining the chat room and listening to instructions or throwing out ideas. Anonymous had first emerged on image boards like 4chan, but it was evolving through Internet Relay Chat networks. It was becoming more organized. Although people could use nicknames on IRC, by and large

…

coincidence that at around the same time, anonymizing technologies like Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and Tor were also becoming popular. These allowed hackers and regular 4chan users like William to hide their IP addresses, the unique number, typically long with several decimals, assigned to every computer connected to the Internet. Part

…

a few organizational minds that sometimes pooled together to start planning a stunt. This was what would happen next for Anonymous, on a grander scale. 4chan had spawned lots of raids on small websites and individual people. Soon the mob would pick a target so controversial that its attacks would gain

…

in on a mass invasion it would still amount to nothing. Plus…they would have 500 lawyers up their ass before they could say ‘litigation.’” “4chan vs. scientology = M-M-MONSTER FAIL.” “Can we take Mormonism next? Then Christianity?” another Anonymous poster asked sarcastically. “Then, if we really got balls,

…

Two years earlier, /b/ users had been DDoSing the site of white nationalist radio host Hal Turner, temporarily knocking it offline. He later tried suing 4chan, another image board called 7chan, and eBaum’s World, claiming thousands of dollars in bandwidth costs, with no success. You could take part in a

…

have used intimidation tactics against its critics both in real life and on the Web, which made it perfect “troll bait” for the likes of 4chan and the increasingly organized Anons on Partyvan. Scientology’s previous scuffles with online dissenters were already so well known that Canada’s Globe and Mail

…

hundreds of people, and it brought the collective to a point where communication was gradually splitting between image boards and IRC networks. Image boards like 4chan had been using LOIC for a couple of years; the /b/tards were forever declaring war on other sites that they claimed were stealing credit

…

Only a few Anonymous supporters were skilled hackers. Many more were simply young Internet users who felt like doing something other than wasting time on 4chan or 7chan. When someone posted an announcement on Partyvan that there would be a third, bigger DDoS attack on January 24, about five hundred people

…

the new Chanology community to hang out, and two popular sites were Enturbulation.org and WhyWeProtest.net. Chanology was now no longer being discussed on 4chan—it had permanently moved to these sites and IRC channels. For the next few months, Anonymous continued holding mostly small, physical protests around the world

…

s its stance?” “I know Anonymous doesn’t like Scientology,” Mettenbrink said, telling them about the flurry of excited posts about a Scientology raid on 4chan and 7chan. “They were saying we should attack their websites.” Mettenbrink had been reading up on Scientology after the attacks and added that the religion

…

his name and address. He started seeing “Anonymous” referred to as an entity and realized it had power. When he saw a series of 4chan posts on Project Chanology, including long articles about Scientology that were being farmed to other websites like Enturbulation.com, he realized this was a new

…

transgender hacker. There was not much research on hackers who were trans but plenty of anecdotal evidence suggesting the number of transgender people regularly visiting 4chan or taking part in hacker communities was disproportionally high. One reason may have been that as people spent more time in these communities and experimented

…

against another organization trying to end piracy: the Recording Industry Association of America, or RIAA. The tech blog TorrentFreak.com posted a news article headlined “4chan to DDoS RIAA Next—Is This the Protest of the Future?” The group then hit another copyright organization, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA

…

for what Anonymous did, though, in the same way that Christopher “moot” Poole avoided litigation by claiming he was not responsible for what happened on 4chan. Now, though, the operators were doing more than just maintaining the chat network. They were organizing an attack on the PayPal blog, where the company

…

to help with publicity collaborated on writing press releases and designing digital flyers to advertise future attacks. Others would then post the flyers all over 4chan and Twitter. Another channel, #reporter, was where Anons could answer the questions of any bewildered journalists who had figured out how to access IRC.

…

networks, then basked in his achievement. He was more interested in the cachet of taking over entire Internet service providers (ISPs) than pranking Scientologists. While 4chan trolls like William were looking for random fun, Sabu wanted to be a hero by taking figures of authority down a notch or two. He

…

boldly publish the crazy Tom Cruise video that helped spark Chanology. But then the site’s famously snarky voice turned on Anonymous, reporting on major 4chan raids as examples of mass bullying. After Gawker’s Internet reporter Adrian Chen wrote several stories that poked fun at Anonymous, mocking its lack of

…

real hacking skills and 4chan’s cat fights with Tumblr, regulars on /b/ tried to launch a DDoS attack on Gawker itself, but the attack failed. In response, Gawker

…

mostly harmless. Then, a couple of hours earlier, he had visited Reddit, a snarky forum site that had become increasingly popular with people who liked 4chan but wanted more intelligent discussion. A user had posted the Forbes interview with Barr from the preceding Monday, and amid the analysis and machismo in

…

worse, HBGary had made them feel they were unstoppable. They decided to call their group Backtrace Security, a name that came straight out of the 4chan-meme machine. It referred to the Jessi Slaughter incident, when /b/ users had viciously trolled a young girl who had been posting videos of

…

just published a new digital flyer. “Congratulations, Sony,” it read. “You have now received the undivided attention of Anonymous.” This time, while Topiary was AWOL, 4chan vigilante William had jumped into the attack with gusto, his main role being to help dox Sony executives and their families as part of a

…

“higher level actor providing LulzSec or Anonymous with more advanced capabilities.” From the front lines and sidelines, Topiary, Sabu, and Kayla, along with William on 4chan, had watched Anonymous grow from nothing to a nebulous, possibly dangerous entity with pockets of significant power and influence. Like some petulant teenager, it remained

…

by embarrassing others to entertain himself. Still, there were things that William and Topiary had in common, not least that both had found Anonymous through 4chan. Two months after hacking Selena’s account, he accepted the chance to meet Jake Davis, who was now on bail, over an organized lunch to

…

in court: hackers could send hundreds of pizzas to Monsegur’s apartment or have a SWAT team sent to his home (tactics well known to 4chan users like William). “It’s actually called swatting,” District Attorney Pastore had explained. After the hearing, Sabu continued to collaborate with the FBI, working

…

groups who occasionally worked together. There were even different cultures: the old-school EFnet hackers like Sabu who had embraced the vision of Antisec, the 4chan users like William who loved Anon because it helped him “waste a night.” And there were those who fell somewhere in between, like Topiary, Kayla

…

of Scientology has been trying to suppress. The church issues a copyright violation claim against YouTube. In response, an original poster on /b/ calls on 4chan to “do something big” and take down the official Scientology website. Using a web tool called Gigaloader, /b/ users manage to take down Scientology.org

…

individuals described in this book are only a small fraction of the many nightly exploits that William alerted me to. Further details about /b/ and 4chan were sourced from the meme repositories Encyclopedia Dramatica (now redirecting to ohinternet.com) and KnowYourMeme.com, as well as interviews with Jake Davis. Chapter 3

…

Offline, Joins MPAA As Latest Victim of Successful DDoS Attacks,” from September of 2010, and a blog post by IT security firm Panda Labs entitled “4chan Users Organize Surgical Strike Against MPAA,” published on September 17, 2010. Details about Tflow’s alleged real age and location come from the later announcement

…

drives. According to KnowYourMeme.com, the trolling scheme against PC users has been around since the early 2000s, but became popular through its promulgation on 4chan around 2006. Users of /b/ would post digital flyers or start discussion threads saying, for example, that Microsoft had included a folder called system32

…

Adleman). The 128 would refer to the key length, or the strength of encryption measured in bits. Chapter 23: Out with a Bang Details about 4chan’s reaction to LulzSec were sourced from interviews with William and Topiary. Ironically enough, LulzSecurity.com was at one point hosted in the same data

…

center as 4chan, according to Topiary. Regarding the release of 62,000 e-mails and passwords, Topiary had uploaded the database a second time to the file hosting

…

and a handful of Anons, along with my observation of various Twitter feeds, blog posts, and comments on IRC channels frequented by Anonymous supporters. Glossary 4chan: A popular online image board frequented by 22 million unique users a month. Originally billed as a place to discuss Japanese anime, it morphed into

…

cyber attacks, protests, and pranks conducted by supporters of Anonymous throughout most of 2008 against the Church of Scientology, the name being a portmanteau of “4chan” and “Scientology.” DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service): An attack on a website or other network resource carried out by a network of computers that temporarily

…

use nicknames and almost never reveal their true identities. Encyclopedia Dramatica: A website that chronicles much of the goings-on in Anonymous, including Internet memes, 4chan language, and online discussions among the more popular users of various blogs and IRC networks. The site is almost a parody of Wikipedia; it has

…

are sourced from old computer games or originate from discussions on /b/. Other examples: “Rick Rolling” and “pedobear.” Moralfag: A label attached to either a 4chan user or an adherent of Anonymous who disagrees with the moral direction of a post, image, trolling method, idea, raid, or activity. Often used as

…

customs of the community, usually after spending years on the site. OP (original poster): Anyone who starts a discussion thread on an image board. In 4chan culture, the OP is always called “a faggot.” Pastebin: A simple but extremely popular website that allows anyone to store and publish text. The site

…

and from which the Anonymous tagline “We do not forgive, we do not forget” originates. The rules cover cultural etiquette on image boards such as 4chan and things to expect from online communities, such as an absence of women. Script: A relatively simple computer program that is often used to automate

Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World

by Matt Alt  · 14 Apr 2020

on the content quested for more, unmoderated by gatekeepers—authentic, and fresh from the source. They found it on the Internet, on a website called 4chan. It was launched in 2003 by a fifteen-year-old anime fan by the name of Christopher Poole, better known online by his handle: moot

…

(always with a lowercase m). In its earliest days, 4chan was a sort of Lord of the Flies for anime-obsessed American teenagers. Thanks to the digital Darwinism of the Internet, it rapidly evolved into

…

emerged as a key hub of Internet culture. In 2019, it was visited by forty to sixty million people from around the world every month. 4chan’s most popular “not safe for work” boards were (and are) swirling maelstroms of adolescent hijinks, pornography, and political incorrectness, fueled by a constant hunger

…

for something—anything—stimulating and new. Key to it all is ephemerality: Threads disappear forever as they are displaced by new ones. What happens on 4chan stays on 4chan—or so went the original idea. This seems like a recipe for sound and fury, signifying nothing. But

…

wacky-meme factory, but so too did it devolve into a hothouse for sexism, misogyny, white supremacy, election tampering, even terror plots. In other words, 4chan embodied the dark side of the Internet—which is to say, in a way, modern life, as we know it. And to understand it, we

…

first have to go back to Japan, for that is where 4chan originated, both in terms of its software and its culture. * * * — HIROYUKI NISHIMURA WAS once a lonely man, too—not much different from Train Man and

…

needed a domain. 3chan was already taken. 4 it would be. He announced his new creation via a triumphant ADTRW post October 1, 2003, entitled “4chan.net—English 2chan.net!” He nicknamed the site Yotsuba—“four leaves,” a nod to Futaba’s two, and an homage to his favorite manga at

…

about…getting off.” The crowd claps and whistles appreciatively. It is August of 2005, almost two years after 4chan opened for monkey business. From 4chan’s very beginnings, moot has depended on the help of volunteer moderators, of which Shut is one. He’s delivering this bit of online wisdom

…

participants to the Baltimore Convention Center, a sign of the role Japanese fantasies have begun to play in the lives of young Americans. So is 4chan’s panel discussion, for that matter. The conference room is filled to capacity. The atmosphere is like a mix between an after-school hangout in

…

-jokes and jovial obscenities as Shut attempts to tell the story of how the site came to be. A PowerPoint slide flashes on the screen. 4chan is a free, English-language anonymous BBS and imageboard network modeled after the immensely popular Japanese sites 2ch and 2chan…The primary focus at

…

4chan is discussion related to Japanese anime, manga, dojinshi, culture, and language, however this is by no means the only topic under discussion at any given

…

games virtually since birth, spent their formative years reading imported manga and watching anime on cable TV, and their teens cruising for cartoon porn online. 4chan was their Babylon. As the site grew from just a few hundred visitors a day in 2003 to more than fifty thousand daily in 2005

…

, the Toonami anime-block on the Cartoon Network, the “100 percent authentic” manga aisle at Borders bookstore, and Nintendo-sponsored Pokémon competitions in the mall. 4chan was something different: grassroots and chaotic, channeling the edgiest otaku content directly into Western subculture, in real time. It was only because so much groundwork

…

crossing of the pop-cultural streams had over the global zeitgeist. And then there was the dark side. As Japanese and American sensibilities mingled on 4chan, the site’s users would unwittingly retrace the footsteps of the pioneers at 2channel. Just like its predecessor, after

…

a morass of race baiting, conspiracy theories, and extremist identity politics. Like a mighty river inexorably winding its way to the ocean, both 2channel and 4chan’s drive for constant stimulation led their users to an equally vast natural resource: humans’ seemingly infinite capacity for outrage. In an echo of 2channel

…

’s Masashi Tashiro incident, a star triggered 4chan’s first real-world action. It involved a recruitment video featuring a gloriously unhinged Tom Cruise singing the praises of Scientology. Intended for internal consumption

…

leaked to the Internet by parties unknown and went viral. When the Church of Scientology subsequently launched a legal campaign against websites hosting the video, 4chan snapped into action. Who was Scientology, or anybody, to tell them who they couldn’t make fun of on the Internet? Organizing under the cheeky

…

nickname of Anonymous, 4chan users organized their efforts in chat rooms to deluge Scientology centers with prank calls, faxes, and pizza orders, while hackers launched denial-of-service attacks

…

on their websites. The climax arrived on the morning of February 10, 2008, when seven thousand 4chan users descended upon Scientology facilities in cities around the world wearing Guy Fawkes masks (inspired by the Wachowski siblings’ film V for Vendetta), carrying signs

…

’t any easy way to tell whether any given user was a follower, a leader, or a rubbernecker. 2channel history repeated the following year, when 4chan users launched a carefully orchestrated campaign to rig a poll on Time magazine’s website. “In a stunning result,” announced the magazine in 2009, “the

…

call them hacks would stretch the definition of the word, given the near-total lack of security on Time’s website at the time—allowed 4chan’s anonymous hordes to cast 16,794,368 votes for moot. As a result he handily beat out the likes of Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin

…

-one spots so that the first letters of the winners’ names spelled out two in-jokes from the site: mARBLECAKE. ALSO, THE GAME. In perfect 4chan form, moot attended the award ceremony accompanied by his mother. The twenty-one-year-old didn’t have a significant other to invite. Online stunts

…

,” to paraphrase moot’s hopes for his fledgling website. Driven in turns by organic growth and press from the site’s stunts, online and off, 4chan’s traffic ballooned to seven million visitors a day by early 2010. Now an Internet celebrity thanks to the Time poll, moot transformed from a

…

teenage purveyor of Japanese cartoons into an impassioned advocate for 4chan’s “radical anonymity.” In a conversation with MIT Technology Review, he positioned himself as the antithesis to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who had famously declared

…

that “having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” (Hoo boy.) The way moot saw it, 4chan had become something more than an online cantina for people obsessed with anime, porn, video games, and anime-porn video games, of which there were

…

a love for things Japanese: Gamergate in its embrace of video games, and the alt-right in a deluded misconception of Japan as an ethnostate. 4chan gave these extremist groups their place to be wrong. * * * — GAMERGATE’S ROOTS TRACE back to the summer of 2014, when a twenty-four-year-old

…

possibility. He quickly reposted the material on a personally hosted website, where it couldn’t be taken down. Then a link mysteriously appeared on several 4chan boards. It proved particularly popular on one called /r9k/. Originally developed to test a piece of moderation software called Robot9000, it had evolved into a

…

actually listen. Citing long-standing rules against harassment and the posting of personal information, he ordered Gamergate-related threads scrubbed from 4chan. The response was predictable. “moot sides with anti-Gamergate! 4chan is dead,” wrote one anguished poster. So began a mass exodus to an even more lawless spin-off, with the

…

the constant controversies, and the site’s most vocal users politicizing the site itself, in early 2015 moot announced that he would step down as 4chan’s administrator. In September he sold it outright. But who on earth would pay money to associate themselves with the site? From virtually its very

…

inception, the scandalous behavior unfolding on 4chan made the site radioactive to advertisers or investors. The answer was none other than Hiroyuki. In a strange twist of events, Hiroyuki had been forced

…

many years before. “moot came to Tokyo and we [got] drunk,” he told Forbes. “He said he wanted to quit. But he and I want 4chan [to] survive.” Poole was more specific about his own thinking. “He is one of few individuals with a deep understanding of what it means to

…

provide a digital home for tens of millions of people for more than a decade.” Hiroyuki continues to administer 4chan as of this writing. * * * — “THE LOST FRANCHISE: Why Digimon Deserves a Glorious Renaissance.” When the headline appeared on Breitbart in 2014, the site was already

…

ways both stimulating and emasculating, both invigorating and isolating. They were ripe for the picking. Bannon knew right where to find them: on 4chan. Even disguised by anonymity, 4chan’s vernacular—wrought from the language of fragile adolescent masculinity—laid the site’s homogeneity bare. “Fag” was an endlessly productive morpheme in

…

4chan’s grammar: Beginners were “newfags,” veteran users “oldfags,” those who insisted on taking personal credit for posts “namefags,” and the average users “faggots.” (Actual gays

…

imagine. Constant references to supposed Jewish conspiracies, feminist cabals, and endless slurs referring to virtually any group other than white men: The general makeup of 4chan’s demographic was perfectly clear by omission. Underlying it all was a Stockholm syndrome–esque belief system that anyone who didn’t get it was

…

term “Western chauvinism” to differentiate himself from white-power types, though in practice the differences are vanishingly slim. A Proud Boy gathering was like a 4chan political forum in the flesh, a celebration of racial slurs, anti-Semitism, misogyny, nationalism, and ultraconservative political views. (McInnes believes feminism to be a “myth

…

, and the idea of Japan as a fantasyland in and of itself. * * * — LOOKING BACK, IT’S easy to scoff at the utopian ethos that colored 4chan’s earliest years, as seen in the Otakon presentation promising that total anonymity would discourage cliques and promote truly open discussion. It’s true that

…

things didn’t quite work out that way. As might be expected from a website whose raison d’être was the celebration of anime porn, 4chan’s population consisted almost entirely of adolescent men; it was a clique from the get-go. But so too was it a mark of the

…

fantasies had come to have in the English-speaking Western world. A deep-rooted culture of gleeful disdain for the establishment in any form made 4chan a haven for all sorts of creative rebels, oddballs, and outcasts; total anonymity made it a sandbox for extreme forms of expression. The combination was

…

rocket fuel for fandom and subculture. Yet so too did it nourish trolling, fanaticism, and hate. On one hand, 4chan was a forge of fun, the birthplace of LOLcats and Rickrolling and doges, and countless other memes that have spread from its boards into mainstream

…

movement and all those “rootless white males” Bannon activated. This is scary stuff, to be sure. But, amid all the wrong on 4chan, there was also much right. 4chan’s anonymous lulz really did provide crucial tools for letting new generations of activists speak truth to power. Its decentralized online organization, behind

…

controversial law that would have made it easier to extradite Hong Kong citizens to mainland China. The movement’s incorporation of cartoon imagery—borrowed from 4chan, and from anime such as One Piece and Neon Genesis Evangelion—echoes the way Ashita no Jo nourished the would-be revolutionaries of 1960s Japan

…

in the Shell,” The Guardian, October 19, 2009, https://www.theguardian.com/​film/​2009/​oct/​19/​hollywood-ghost-in-the-shell. website called 4chan: The basic details of 4chan’s launch, structure, and early years are gleaned from a variety of sources, including: Nick Bilton, “One on One: Christopher Poole, Founder of

…

day five. And on the seventh day launched “/l/ lolicon.” See vestrideus (username), “4chan History Timeline,” GitHub, March 23, 2017, https://github.com/​bibanon/​bibanon/​wiki/​4chan-History-Timeline. “I’m gonna teach you a special word today”: 4chan, “4chan: The Otakon 2005 Panel,” September 24, 2013, 51:45, https://www.youtube.com/​watch

…

and popularizing it. See, for example, Matt (username), “Something Awful,” Know Your Meme, 2011, https://knowyourmeme.com/​memes/​sites/​something-awful (accessed December 19, 2019). 4chan’s first real-world action: Julian Dibbell, “The Assclown Offensive: How to Enrage the Church of Scientology,” Wired, September 21, 2009, https://www.wired.com

…

, https://icv2.com/​articles/​columns/​view/​31899/​new-eventbrite-survey-reveals-convention-demographics-spending-patterns. Citing long-standing rules against harassment: moot, “Regarding Recent Events,” 4chan, September 18, 2014. An image of the post is archived at https://imgur.com/​snmdgRT. In September he sold it outright: Klint Finley

…

/​2014/​03/​20/​digital/​who-holds-the-deeds-to-gossip-bulletin-board-2channel/​. “moot came to Tokyo and we [got] drunk”: Lauren Orsini, “ ‘Welcome to 4chan, B***h’: Site’s Users Greet Their New Overlord,” Forbes, September 23, 2015, https://www.forbes.com/​sites/​laurenorsini/​2015/​09/​23

…

/​4chan-sold-hiroyuki-nishimura-qa-christoper-poole-moot-new-owner/​. “He is one of few”: Finley, “4chan Just Sold.” “Japanese culture enjoyed unique purchase”: Milo Yiannopoulos, “The Lost Franchise: Why Digimon Deserves a Glorious

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

by Max Fisher  · 5 Sep 2022  · 439pp  · 131,081 words

was easily debunked; the supposedly ill-gotten review did not even exist. But the truth hardly mattered. Users on gaming subsections of the message board 4chan, a center of nerd culture, and especially on Reddit, a sprawling discussion site that had become a teeming megalopolis at the heart of the

…

finally, graced with my piss on your rotting corpse a thousand times over.” Fury at Quinn and the supposedly corrupt gaming press overtook much of 4chan and Reddit, then YouTube. Across all three, huge communities grew obsessed with the made-up scandal they termed Gamergate. But what had begun as

…

the post said, had surfaced on YouTube showing two boys abusing a cat named Dusty. The clips drew outrage, especially on a message board called 4chan, whose users could be mischievous. They pledged justice for Dusty; one identified the YouTube video-maker as a fourteen-year-old from Oklahoma. Another claimed

…

though authorities later said they had identified the video’s origins on their own. The video-maker and his brother were charged with animal cruelty; 4chan filled with posts celebrating the victory as their own. Adam was enthralled. People just like him had turned the act of clicking around on the

…

about the internet’s darker reaches, through which he’d offered to guide me. He had struggled with depression and anxiety since childhood. But on 4chan, he felt welcomed and understood. Night after night, its denizens entertained one another with raucous threads and elaborate pranks that were “some of the

…

That the grievances were collective helped him feel that he belonged. But the unchecked extremes bothered him, particularly when people got hurt. “Ultimately,” Christopher Poole, 4chan’s founder, said in 2008, “the power lies in the community to dictate its own standards.” Poole, then a reedy twenty-year-old, belonged to

…

stronger drive to socialize than adults, which manifests as heavier use of social networks and a greater sensitivity to what happens there. Poole had started 4chan when he was just fifteen. Kids who felt isolated off-line, like Adam, drove an outsized share of online activity, bringing the concerns of

…

it. That was how pranks—a pastime already cherished by young men everywhere—became the early web’s defining activity. In one stunt organized on 4chan, users hijacked an online contest in which schools competed to win hosting a Taylor Swift concert, and directed victory to a center for deaf

…

Transgressing ever-greater taboos—even against cruelty to grieving parents—became a way to signal that you were in on the joke. “When you browse 4chan and 8chan while the rest of your friends are posting normie live-laugh-love shit on Instagram and Facebook,” Adam said, “you feel different.

…

made you laugh or made you angry, indulged your intellectual curiosity or your prurient instincts—into one pure metric: up or down. Boards like 4chan do the same, though more organically. Anonymity and the churn of content encourage users to seek out one another’s attention as aggressively as they

…

, they assumed, making it up. She posted angry responses, then a YouTube video telling her “haters” she would “pop a glock” in their mouths. 4chan users, delighting in her clumsy and emotional reaction, set out to elicit more. She’d lied, refused responsibility, and now would be put in her

…

she sobbed as her foster father shouted at her invisible tormentors, “Guess what, your emails will be caught and you will be found.” It thrilled 4chan users—proof that they were getting through. The harassment worsened. In a final video, she gave in, conceding all accusations and pleading for mercy.

…

. “Many joked that they deserved a thank-you for their efforts.” “Trolling is basically internet eugenics,” Andrew Auernheimer said in 2008. Auernheimer was a 4chan superstar: an anarchist hacker, shameless provocateur, and merciless tormenter of the site’s chosen enemies. The interview itself was a troll, daring readers to take

…

didn’t seem polluted at all.” Auernheimer bragged of his role in a harassment campaign against the tech blogger Kathy Sierra. She’d called for 4chan comment sections to be moderated, enraging users who saw this as an assault on internet free speech. He posted Sierra’s Social Security number

…

neo-Nazi forum founded and populated by 4channers, where he posted a photo revealing a fist-sized swastika tattoo on his chest. Poole, wary of 4chan’s darkening reputation, imposed the lightest of restrictions. Extreme hate speech and harassment were still allowed, but confined to a few subsections. It turned

…

of whom liked what they saw and stayed. Still, some considered even this as a betrayal. One, a software developer named Fredrick Brennan, started a 4chan spinoff, 8chan, which he billed as a “free-speech-friendly” alternative. Users, including Adam, poured in, deepening a collective identity of defiant outsiderdom that

…

explosive rise of the online far right, calling it “close to impossible to overstate the role of Gamergate in the process of radicalization.” Adam, the 4chan obsessive, now an eighteen-year-old, followed every step. The worldview-affirming outrage was irresistible. Videos posted by prominent gaming YouTubers convinced him, he

…

socialization. The plan, in time, would impose, on billions of users, an even more powerful version of the mind-altering distortions that Reddit and 4chan had brought to gamers and early adopters, provoking a world of Gamergates. It emerged out of a crisis that the company faced in 2008, the

…

had previously been impenetrable. Reddit became a portal connecting the two worlds. Still, Reddit was built and governed around the same early internet ideals as 4chan, and had absorbed that platform’s users and cultural tics. Its up-or-down voting enforced an eclipsing majoritarianism that pushed things even further.

…

back up user files to its servers. The hacker downloaded the targets’ iPhone data, including a number of private nude photos. Dozens were uploaded to 4chan, then Reddit, which, befitting its role as the link between the internet’s underbelly and its mainstream, became, overnight, the central repository. Millions of

…

wanted to curb “revenge porn,” a method of humiliating someone by circulating private photos. The victims were overwhelmingly women, targeted by angry ex-boyfriends or 4chan-style harassment campaigns. Understanding her audience, she announced the policy as protecting not women but user privacy, since users could hypothetically be targeted. Despite some

…

alerted racist, misogynist, homophobic internet trolls to the level of power they actually possess. Which is definitely a good thing,” Andrew Anglin, a longtime 4chan poster, wrote on The Daily Stormer, a prominent neo-Nazi forum he’d founded in 2013. He urged his followers to coopt Gamergate and the

…

. Fredrick Brennan, the 8chan founder, had written a Daily Stormer essay endorsing eugenics. Andrew Auernheimer, the prominent hacker, had joined as webmaster. Reddit and 4chan recruits, some of whom were “too extreme” even for the hardened white supremacists on neo-Nazi forums, poured in. Their growing numbers were soon reflected

…

. Still, during that time she had revealed the fork in the road facing social networks. They could continue drifting toward becoming new iterations of 4chan turbocharged by algorithms. Or they could detour toward a future of constraints and rules checking the majority’s impulses, or those of especially loud minorities

…

He trolled without shame, heaping victims with mockery and abuse. He dared society’s gatekeepers to take offense at flamboyant provocations that were right off 4chan. “He has a character and a style that is perfectly in tune with what the web’s miscreants are looking for,” Yiannopoulos wrote. A

…

he said, especially on Facebook, where after years of inactivity, some pages reemerged simply to repeat the phrase “Pizzagate is real.” But it was on 4chan’s politics board, the internet’s petri dish for pathogenic conspiracies, that he’d watched its genesis. Conspiracy belief is highly associated with “anomie,” the

…

feeling of being disconnected from society. The userbase of 4chan defined itself around anomie—mutual rejection of the off-line world, resentful certainty that the system was rigged against them. And they idolized WikiLeaks chief

…

Julian Assange, an anarchist hacker whose politics, like 4chan’s, had drifted alt right. So when Assange published Podesta’s emails in October, a month before the election, they saw it not as

…

a Russian-backed operation, but as the start of a thrilling campaign to expose the hated elite. Pursuing the 4chan pastime of crowdsourced dives, users scoured the tens of thousands of pages for revelations. In closed digital ecosystems, where users control the flow of

…

that Podesta, an amateur chef, often mentioned food, they concluded it was a secret code. “Cheese pizza,” one suggested, referenced child pornography, which on 4chan is often abbreviated “c.p.” Users found more references to pizza, some alongside mentions of children. Though the emails spanned nearly a decade, when collected

…

to also be taking over the USA for good.” The jump to Facebook started in user groups. Even on apolitical pages, users posted screenshots of 4chan threads detailing the conspiracy, asking, “Is this real?” Scouring for information on Comet Ping Pong, the DC pizza place, Facebookers found the owner’s

…

evidence of an occult pedophilia ring. Within a few days, prominent Gamergaters and white nationalists on Twitter broadcast the claims, attaching screenshots of Facebook or 4chan threads. Curious web users who googled for information were, like DiResta, directed to YouTube videos affirming the conspiracy or, if they searched on Facebook,

…

else’s. The posts, which rose to the top of countless outrage cycles, won him thousands of followers. He pulled viciously racist memes from 4chan and Reddit’s sludgiest depths, circulating them to mainstream conservative audiences. He promoted conspiracies of a Jewish plot to dilute the white race. By summer

…

set of traits than those you might associate with the much-studied, much-interviewed class of social media addicts and early adopters like Adam, the 4chan devotee. Superposters are a breed of their own, and one that the platforms have rendered exceptionally influential. When more casual users open social media,

…

teeming Reddit subsection called The_Donald. Though mostly governed by its own culture of troll provocation, it took cues from extremists like Andrew Anglin, the 4chan star turned neo-Nazi. Anglin had declared a “summer of hate,” encouraging real-world rallies. As the drumbeat for a mega-gathering grew online,

…

with algorithmic encouragement. “I used to be a part of the anti-SJW crowd,” one user wrote, referring to “social justice warriors” frequently derided on 4chan and Reddit. He added, using the internet slang “based,” an adjective for something transgressive, “And now I’m here. Thank you based Youtube suggested

…

that pulled people in. Rather, it was content that spoke to feelings of alienation, of purposelessness—the same anomie that had bonded Adam and other 4chan obsessives. “Watched a Millennial Woes video on depression (I was miserable),” one of the posters said, describing the first step on his journey. Millennial

…

YouTube, where his videos grew so hateful that his own parents had once called the police. He was the product of a digital community, spanning 4chan, Reddit, and YouTube, whose members call themselves “incels” for their involuntary celibacy. Incel forums had begun as places to share stories about feeling lonely.

…

most dangerous. 5. A Great Awakening IN OCTOBER 2017, two months after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, a short post appeared on 4chan’s politics board under the username Q Clearance Patriot. The user implied they were a military-intelligence official within an operation to arrest the participants

…

all, unspooled over three years—were actually the work of Ron Watkins, a thirty-year-old programmer who had recently taken over running 8chan, the 4chan spinoff forum. Watkins even seemed to hint as much in a 2021 documentary, telling his interviewer, “It was basically three years of intelligence training,

…

were picked to win attention, the engineer added, had become “really dangerous.” 6. Digital Nihilism IN HIS FRESHMAN year of college, Adam, the lifelong 4chan user from Dallas, shifted allegiance to 8chan. It was 2014, with QAnon and so much else still to come, but 8chan’s pledge to welcome

…

and so on until one could do so with complete serenity.” It was, he wrote, a culture of “deliberate self-desensitization.” In time, much as 4chan’s transgressiveness became an in-group shibboleth, so did desensitization on 8chan. Tolerating things too shocking or unbearable for outsiders was a way to prove

…

video of a Serbian ultranationalist singing in praise of Radovan Karadžić, a war criminal responsible for the Bosnian genocide. The video had long been a 4chan meme, called “remove kebab,” that, for some, went from joke to genuine signal of support for genocide of Muslims. Tarrant had also written “remove

…

Brenton Tarrant carried one out in New Zealand. Carrillo’s group had named itself, in a similar ironic wink, Boogaloo. It had begun as a 4chan meme. Users there called for a nationwide insurrection, intended to topple the government and bring about a right-wing utopia, by invoking “Civil War

…

urgent cause, while militias gave the conspiracists a sense of purpose: a looming, final conflict with the government. Crisis and solution. As with similar 4chan-to-Facebook movements, Boogaloo and other militias whose adherents posted about triggering a civil war seemed mostly to be signaling in-group membership, not sincere

…

to see”: Logs of these discussions are accessible at “GamerGate — #GameOverGate IRC Logs Explanation,” Knowyourmeme.com, undated. See also “Zoe Quinn’s Screenshots of 4chan’s Dirty Tricks Were Just the Appetizer. Here’s the First Course of the Dinner, Directly from the IRC log,” David Futrelle, Wehuntedthemammoth.com, September

…

,” Andrew Anglin, Daily Stormer, October 4, 2014. 9 “too extreme” even for: This is according to Brad Griffin, a far-right activist. “Dylann Roof, 4chan, and the New Online Racism,” Jacob Siegel, Daily Beast, April 14, 2017. 10 One study later estimated: A Comparative Study of White Nationalist and ISIS

…

lecture by Jonas Kaiser to Berkman Klein Luncheon Series at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, January 23, 2018. 14 opened a discussion thread: “McInnes, Molyneux, and 4chan: Investigating Pathways to the Alt-Right,” Cassie Miller, Southern Poverty Law Center, April 19, 2018. 15 credited with the (((echo))): Ibid. 16 On flyers advertising

Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics

by Elle Reeve  · 9 Jul 2024

that was the dark heart of the internet, until it got so dark it wasn’t funny anymore. Pepe had an innocent smiling face, but 4chan users redrew him with sad, downcast eyes to represent their loserdom. Because the forum was anonymous, they were free to talk about being losers, and

…

and interpreted those jokes as sincere, and eventually the group became the thing they’d once satirized, a herd of brainwashed swastika-posting sheep. Then 4chan latched on to the term “alt-right,” and while there were long essays and podcasts elaborating the ideas behind it, in everyday posting it mostly

…

version of the frog, this one redrawn with solid eye contact and a smirk. He was called “Smug Pepe.” You could tell whether trolls thought 4chan or society had the upper hand by which Pepe they posted. Sad, they were losing. Smug, Trump was winning. Pepe had appeared on banners in

…

it will help bring about an end to the corrupt regime. “Time to go full Kali Yuga lads. Accelerate towards destruction and start again,” a 4chan user said in 2017. * * * On January 6, Roger and I were surrounded by thousands of cheering Trump supporters as we watched America’s mayor lie

…

me. He wouldn’t talk to anybody. Just clammed up. The silent treatment.” Fred was beginning to understand the power of words. He’d discovered 4chan the previous year, and he was mesmerized. He saw people using terms like “crippled,” “retard,” “crippled retard,” and any other offensive slur you could possibly

…

computer, and while doing so, secretly installed a remote access tool so he could find out the Wi-Fi password anytime. “I could go on 4chan and nobody could know,” Fred said. He didn’t tell anyone, not even his brother. “That’s how I survived those years.” * * * Fred wanted to

…

community created archetypes: “Stacy,” the unobtainable sexually ideal woman, and “Chad Thundercock,” the guy who wins her. Much of the incel cosmology developed on a 4chan board called /r 9k/, for ROBOT9000. The board had a bot that would delete any image or text that had been posted before. The demand

…

who had hurt them. They wanted to be the strong men they’d seen dominate women. “The real world is the conscious,” Anna thought, and 4chan, Wizardchan, and their associated forums—“those spaces are the subconscious.” They revealed the darkest thoughts—like misogyny, racism, ableism, which were wrong, but still existed

…

they were even freer—if users could make boards about whatever topic they wanted, instead of posting within categories created by the admin. Instead of 4chan, it would be infinite chan, with the infinity symbol turned sideways: 8chan. He registered the domain while he was still a little high. Anna thought

…

8chan was her fault. She was into Tumblr, which had functioned in some ways like the inverse of 4chan, an anonymous place where women and gays and people of color created their own culture and got very, very leftist. Nothing was too niche for

…

instant viral hit, but it got about a hundred posts a day. Anna thought the project was doomed from the start. She’d lurked on 4chan, Reddit, Discord, Wizardchan—in all these places, she imagined she could help move unhappy people from the hard right to the left if she showed

…

diagnoses during the Covid-19 pandemic. Two of them said many of these people were actually depressed. It might be that a huge number of 4chan users really are measurably different from neurotypical people according to rigorous analysis based in science. Or it might be more like astrology, a way to

…

be a fun person that people liked. What would my life have been like if instead of finding that dumb little book, I’d found 4chan? There was enough I recognized in their “autist” posts that it made me nervous. Obsessive intensity, social anxiety, sensitivity to sound? I had all those

…

’t exist. But gamers had already been complaining that “political correctness” was being imposed on the video game industry, and she was a woman, so 4chan trolls launched a massive harassment campaign against her—and then went after other women who defended her. Gamergaters were angry at the way video games

…

in what it offered. They said their campaign was about “ethics in video games journalism.” Early in the frenzy, transcripts of a group chat among 4chan users were leaked. A user said of one of the targeted women, “I just want to see her die horribly.” Another: “she gonna get raped

…

.” The “random” board, /b/, which drew in most newcomers, “should be in charge of harassing her into killing herself.” A couple weeks after it started, 4chan removed Gamergaters from the platform for doxxing—as in revealing someone’s private information, usually to prompt a mob to harass them with more intensity

…

and precision. Fred Brennan saw an opportunity. He knew 4chan users had been angry at the way the site was moderated, and now this mob of Gamergaters was being silenced. He thought he could draw

…

Watkins lived in the Philippines with his father, Jim. They had a family internet business that included the Japanese site 2channel, the original inspiration for 4chan. They also had a pig farm. Jim wanted to buy 8chan, and he wanted Fred to move to the Philippines and serve as admin. Life

…

funny name.” At the Daily Stormer, an alt-right gossip website, the site’s administrator Andrew Anglin praised 8chan for allowing more hate speech than 4chan. Fred considered this free advertising, so he emailed Anglin seeking more coverage, and Anglin suggested he write a column. Fred thought it over, and then

…

start thinking it’s normal and okay.” This was complicated by how difficult it was to tell what was ironic and what was sincere on 4chan and 8chan. Encyclopedia Dramatica, a troll website, said that the ironic jokes of the first generation of a community will be misunderstood as sincere by

…

. But more digging revealed that the cartoons attributed to him were fake, the product of a years-long harassment campaign against him by trolls on 4chan and 8chan. Garrison had tried many avenues to stop the assassination of his character—lawyers, reputation management firms, investigators, a self-published biography. Nothing worked

…

more Tay talked, the smarter she’d get. Within a few hours, trolls began testing Tay’s limits. They found she did not have many. 4chan trolls were not the first people to subvert a marketing gimmick. In the nineties, leftists called it culture jamming, and there was a magazine about

…

quickly found they could play with the contrast between Tay’s artificial innocence and humanity’s darkest moments, and they posted their results in a 4chan thread. One person sent her a famous photo from the Vietnam war of a man being executed in the street, except they’d Photoshopped in

…

first, but then it spiraled out of control after Stormfront raided it.” Stormfront was an older white nationalist message board whose members started posting on 4chan in coordinated waves. Other users told them to leave, but they eventually took over. “That was when Stormfront realized that they could attract normies… to

…

their side by using 4chan’s /pol/.” Donald Trump had taken advantage of the collective power of an internet hive mind four years earlier. In 2011, amid the growing “birther

…

attended a campaign meeting near Cincinnati led by a local volunteer who had no idea who they were. “They were pushing Trump really hard on 4chan,” Mann said. “So were we, to be fair, in the Gamergate thread, because we were all former libertarians. What we wanted from Trump was to

…

8chan’s home page: “Embrace Infamy.” * * * When I was supposed to be looking for stories about people in the real world, I’d scroll through 4chan and 8chan to see what the users were talking about, how they were interpreting the Trump campaign. There was endless DIY racist propaganda. They posted

…

to race science? Whether he encountered a race science meme on Twitter or Reddit or elsewhere, he realized, most of the time, they originated on 4chan. The people who posted them, particularly when controversy flared up around Charles Murray, felt “this real reverence for this idea of dispassionate, objective, scientific, logical

…

, and sometimes that means using the tools at hand. It’s going to mean unleashing a little chaos.” He started speaking in the language of 4chan: normies, Chads, redpills, cuckservatives, meme magick. His haircut was a style that had been popular in Brooklyn a few years earlier—shaved close on the

…

, and he spit nasty insults at them. Spencer had never publicly spoken with the same contempt for other human beings that I’d seen on 4chan, but he showed it there. The scene inside the restaurant had been ridiculous. But the scene outside revealed the darker reality underneath. We should have

…

tone I’d learned to recognize since puberty, he made an instant enemy. Just as Fred Brennan felt when he read the word “cripple” on 4chan, I started to wonder, Is this what everyone secretly thinks? Later, when the #MeToo movement forced a reckoning on workplace sexual harassment within the media

…

. It started out as a joke and then it became real. What Spencer was saying was true, but his interpretation was wrong. The kids on 4chan’s /pol/ had brainwashed themselves through jokes. But that didn’t mean Spencer could guide their thinking in any way. Anyone who stepped outside the

…

collective beliefs of 4chan would be attacked by other users, and the anonymity and number of the attackers gave them the appearance of omnipotent authority. That was as true

…

, or dug into his background. The anonymous mass movement was more interesting to me than its “e-celebs,” who mostly copied whatever was hot on 4chan and 8chan. I hadn’t considered Cantwell the perfect embodiment of the alt-right. I hadn’t considered him at all. He pitched himself to

…

who would call into his libertarian show.”) Cantwell repeated the propaganda that had been crafted by Richard Spencer’s elite racists, converted into memes by 4chan and 8chan, and then delivered to his ears by callers to his radio show. The whole experience convinced Cantwell that “ideas are not so much

…

into a crowd in Toronto, killing eleven people and injuring fifteen more. In his interrogation, Minassian explained he was an incel, and that he used 4chan’s /r 9k/ board and some other incel and alt-right forums. He spoke in the language of those forums—the beautiful Stacys, the macho

…

was obsessed with Rodger, and he was angry at women, but he also said he talked about incels to get more infamous, and posted about 4chan and Rodger under his real name to draw media attention. Westphal’s report stated that the crime “was conceived in the context of his saturation

…

accelerationist, someone who wants to bring the collapse of society so that more people will accept radical change. The goal, Mann thought, was “to make 4chan more radicalized, and radicalize the /pol/ people and turn them into violent psychopaths.” And he did see users praising the shooter on 8chan’s /pol

…

a ten-part QAnon film called Fall of the Cabal (which wove together conspiracy theories about Covid vaccines, Jews, and the JFK assassination, plus some 4chan slang). “Yes, absolutely,” he said. “That was a big red pill for everyone.” His name was Eduardo Rendon, and I stood at the base of

…

the Super Bowl together in a casino in Atlantic City. He’d been tracking the backlash against gay rights as it spread across the country. 4chan and 8chan had been fixated on transgender people, and now some of those same ideas had spread to the mainstream Republican Party. “In retrospect, America

…

in the next century. But that will just be going back to the mean.” There were some signs for hope, he said. For one thing, 4chan had turned against Trump. The most damaging moment from the January 6 congressional hearings was when former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified she was

…

tend to put more emphasis on masculinity and anti-feminism than racism—some post training videos of their men getting swole. But the culture of 4chan has seeped into the mainstream, and some memes and fixations have infiltrated the conservative movement, even if the people who express them might have never

…

been on 4chan. The anonymity of imageboards, Fred thought, was important to trolls but not to conservative activists. Those activists were happy to post their provocations under their

…

-moscow-after-jan-6 CHAPTER 7: THE FREE SPEECH PARTY A user said of one of the targeted: David Futrelle, “Zoe Quinn’s Screenshots of 4chan’s Dirty Tricks Were Just the Appetizer. Here’s the First Course of the Dinner, Directly from the IRC Log,” We Hunted the Mammoth, September

…

8, 2014. https://web.archive.org/web/20141016102306/https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2014/09/08/zoe-quinns-screenshots-of-4chans-dirty-tricks-were-just-the-appetizer-heres-the-first-course-of-the-dinner-directly-from-the-irc-log/ (The phrase comes from a story): Sam

…

, 221, 223 anti-Semitism, 126 alt-right and alt-right leaders, 59, 72, 73, 129, 147, 154, 163, 172, 173, 174 8chan and, 111, 174 4chan and, 135 great replacement theory and, 127, 128 Heimbach and, 59 Identity Evropa and, 137 neo-Confederates and, 75 Aryan Nations, 42 Atlantic magazine, 136

…

his car into Charlottesville crowd, 183–84, 188 posts meme of a car running through protesters, 155 Foundation for the Future, 94 “Kistler Prize,” 94 4chan, 1, 30 alt-right and, 1–2 anonymity and, 136 anti-Semitism and, 135 as anti-Trump, 244 “autist” in posts, 47 blackpilled trolls on

…

G Gaetz, Matt, 246 Gamergate, 103–7, 213 autism spectrum disorder and, 111–12 beginning of, 103 Breitbart coverage of, 111 8chan and, 105, 106 4chan and, 103–4 Goldberg and, 114–15 women and, 103–4, 138 Garrison, Ben, 119–20 Gawker, 105–6 Gizmodo news site, 108 Gjoni, Eron

…

, 103 users who are not neurotypical, 47–49, 52, 104, 111–17 “weaponized autism” and, 47 white nationalism and, 38 See also alt-right; 8chan; 4chan; incels; QAnon; Wizardchan; specific sites internet atheists, 55, 56, 63, 76 Iraq War, 36, 97, 124, 125, 200 J January 6 (2021) Capitol riot, 1

…

motivated violence, 45 closet bigots and, 40 Democratic Party and, 68 “edgy” as slang for racist, 162 8chan and, 126 extreme right and, 68, 122 4chan and, 123, 126, 127 great replacement theory and, 127–28 internet memes and, 127 the movement (old racists) and, 33–43, 70 neo-Confederates and

Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Story of Anonymous

by Gabriella Coleman  · 4 Nov 2014  · 457pp  · 126,996 words

’s origins. Before 2008, the moniker Anonymous was used almost exclusively for what one Anon describes as “Internet Motherfuckery.” Anonymous, birthed in the pits of 4chan’s random bulletin board /b/ (often regarded as the asshole of the Internet), was a name synonymous with trolling: an activity that seeks to desecrate

…

price of admission is just a bit of knowledge. LOLers can be drawn into the world of lulz thanks to troll websites like Encyclopedia Dramatica, 4chan, and Something Awful, which disseminate this knowledge to anyone who cares to look for it. Those who find it may choose to run away very

…

Internet might be a place where free speech reigns unconditionally? Of particular note—as we trace our trolling lineage through time—is the development of 4chan, an imageboard modeled on a popular Japanese imageboard called Futaba Channel, also known as 2chan.org (“chan” is short for “channel”). It is here, perhaps

…

more than anywhere else, where the populist type of trolling that is well-known today first emerged. 4chan is unique for its culture of extreme permissibility—making questions of free speech largely irrelevant—fostered by a culture of anonymity embraced by its users

…

identity of Anonymous emerged. But, before we get ahead of ourselves, it is worth spending some time on the technical specifications and the culture of 4chan—the unique attributes and proclivities that made it the perfect primordial stew for cooking up Anonymous as both a label and a rubric. Unlike Usenet

…

, no one on 4chan is in the least bit disturbed by the uncivil speech that ricochets across the board every second of the day because, in some respects, the

…

board is explicitly conceived of as a say-anything zone: the grosser and more offensive, damn it, the better. Since it launched in 2003, 4chan has become an immensely popular, iconic, and opprobrious imageboard. Composed of over sixty-three (at the time if this writing) topic-based forums ranging from

…

the uninitiated—aka “noobs” or “newfags”—far, far away. (Nearly every category of person, from old-timers to new-timers, is labelled a “fag.” On 4chan, it is both an insult and term of endearment. We will see the suffix many times in this book). For insiders, it is the normal

…

state of affairs, and one of the board’s defining and endearing qualities. On 4chan, participants are strongly discouraged from identifying themselves, and most post under the name “Anonymous,” as in the example above. Technically

…

, 4chan keeps logs of IP addresses and doesn’t do anything to keep visitors from being identified. Unless users cloak their IP addresses before connecting, the

…

the board—to distant lands like the message board t community, reddit, bodybuilding.com, and, eventually, mass cultural awareness. Remember, Lolcats got their start on 4chan. Trolls, in particular, focus on the collective pursuit of epic wins—just one form of content among many. (To be clear

…

, 4chan houses many trolls, but many participants steer clear of trolling activity. Still others avoid activity altogether—they are there as spectators or lurkers.) Whatever unfolds

…

on the board—a joke, a long conversation, or a three-day trolling campaign—anonymity is essential to 4chan; one might call anonymity both its ground rule and its dominant cultural aspect—a core principle inherited by Anonymous, even in its pseudonymous, material extension

…

as hordes of Guy-Fawkes-mask wearers. It is almost impossible to pinpoint a day or event when trolling under the name Anonymous on 4chan was born. But by 2006, the name Anonymous was being used by participants to engage in trolling raids. These invasions would continue for many years

…

“ruin” an preteen girl named Jessi Slaughter after her homemade video monologues, which had gained some notoriety on tween gossip site StickyDrama, were posted on 4chan. Anonymous was stirred to action by Slaughter’s brazen boasts—she claims in one video that she will “pop a glock in your mouth and

…

the one hand, outlandish trolling raids and denigrating statements like “lulzcow … whore” (or “due to fail and AIDS” from the Habbo Hotel raids) function for 4chan users like a pesticide, a repellent meant to keep naive users far away from their Internet playground. On the other, when compared to most other

…

arenas where trolls are bred—like weev’s GNAA—4chan is a mecca of populist trolling. By populist, I simply mean that 4chan membership is available to anyone willing to cross these boundaries, put in the time to learn the argot, and

…

(of course) stomach the gore. The etiquette and techniques that 4chan users employ are only superficially elitist. A former student of mine offered me the following insight. Exceptionally smart, he was also a troll—or a

…

-time $10 fee, a laundry list of rules very particular to SA, moderators who ban and probate, and community enforcement of “Good Posts” through ridicule. 4chan on the other hand is an organic free-for-all that doesn’t enforce so much as engages an amorphous membership in a mega-death

…

battle for the top humor spot. Anyone can participate in 4chan, and Internet fame isn’t possible in the same way it is on SA because everyone is literally anonymous. On

…

(the memes, hacks, and acts of trolling that emerge and have real impact on the world). In contrast to weev’s egoistic acts of trolling, 4chan’s Anonymous “Internet Hate Machine” collective action absolves individuals of responsibility in the conventional sense, but not in a collective sense.20 That is, Anonymous

…

the Habbo Hotel raids. Absent of any individual recognition, each activity is ascribed to a collective nom de plume, a reincarnation of Netochka Nezvanova. On 4chan, participants will also shame those seeking fame and attention, calling them “namefags.” Anonymous, as a trolling outfit, achieved considerable media notoriety, just like weev. The

…

entity became, in certain respects, famous. However, while the trolling exploits of, on the one hand, Anonymous and 4chan users, and on the other hand, weev, are connected by their tactical approaches, they are also foils of each other. Regardless of how far and

…

as “those deeply internalized habits of thinking and feeling” whereby we view “everything around [us] primarily as actual or potential commercial property.”22 How did 4chan—one of the seediest zones of the Internet—hatch one of the most robust instantiations of a collectivist, anti-celebrity ethic, without its members even

…

intending to? This ethic thrived organically on 4chan because it could be executed in such an unadulterated form. During a lecture for my class, a former Anonymous troll and activist explained the crucial

…

role of 4chan in cementing what he designates as “the primary ideal of Anonymous”: The posts on 4chan have no names or any identifiable markers attached to them. The only thing you are able to judge

…

to my ten enraptured students, immediately offered a series of astute qualifications about this “primary ideal.”: the self-effacement of the individual. When Anonymous left 4chan in pursuit of activist goals in 2008, he explained, this ideal failed, often spectacularly; once individuals interacted pseudonymously or met in person, status-seeking behaviors

…

reasserted themselves. Individuals jockeyed and jostled for power. Nevertheless, the taboo against fame-seeking was so well entrenched on 4chan, and was so valued for its success, that it largely prevented, with only a few exceptions, these internal struggles for status from spilling over into

…

and recognition, and—not surprisingly—to spark the ire of some Anons, even while being admired for their lulzy and political antics.) Once Anonymous left 4chan to engage in activism, the anti-celebrity-seeking ideal became “more nuanced … incarnating into the desire for leaderlessness and high democracy,” as this Anon put

…

that the accumulation of too much power and prestige—especially at a single point in (virtual) space—is not only taboo but also functionally difficult. 4chan was ground zero for a robust anti-celebrity ethic, a value system opposed to self-aggrandizement and the apparatus of the mainstream media (which is

…

collectivity and group identification, forged as they were in the hellish, terrifying fires of trolling, could transcend such an originary condition? Did the cesspool of 4chan really crystallize into one of the most politically active, morally fascinating, and subversively salient activist groups operating today? Somewhat surprisingly, yes. Let’s see how

…

. chapter 2 Project Chanology—I Came for the Lulz but Stayed for the Outrage Various contingencies converged to awaken the trickster-trolls from their seedy 4chan underworld. But if we were to single out one event most responsible for this, it would be the leaking onto the Internet of a Scientology

…

as Anonymous, decided to get involved. On January 15, and 7:37:37 pm, the gates of the underworld opened with a historic thread on 4chan regarding Scientology-oriented activism: File :1200443857152.jpg-(22 KB, 251x328, intro_scn.jpg)  Anonymous 01/15/08(Tue)19:37: 37 No.51051816 I think

…

. It’s time, /b/ Technically—and geeks make it a habit to geek out on technical specificities—a call-to-arms post came earlier on 4chan as well as on 711chan (apparently at 6:11 pm, I was told). Nevertheless, this post seemed to spur a large number of trolls into

…

the united support of the chars, Scientology will brush off this attack - and it will be doomed to nothing more than an entry in ED. 4chan, answer the call! Join the legion against Scientology, help in its demise, in its long awaited doom’ For decades this tyrrany has existed, corrupting the

…

take over. If we can destroy Scientology, we can destroy whatever we like! The world will be but our play thing. Do the right thing, 4chan, become not just a part of this war, become an epic part of it. The largest of the chaps, you hold the key of manpower

…

hilarious one. Anons were phone-pranking the Dianetics hotline and sending scores of unpaid pizza to Church centers, sharing their exploits in real time across 4chan. At first any political aim seemed incidental. And then, weeks later, one particular act of “ultracoordinated motherfuckary” gave way to an earnest—though still, undoubtedly

…

video’s editors and an original member of marblecake, explained it as follows during an interview: “There were people who didn’t think anonymous or 4chan should take to the streets but the consensus to actually do it came relatively easily for us after the video. It seemed to be great

…

blockbuster V for Vendetta. The movie portrays a lone anarchist’s fight against a dystopian, Orwellian state. The mask had also appeared multiple times on 4chan, worn by a beloved meme character with a penchant for failure—Epic Fail Guy. Well known, easy to purchase, and imbued with an undeniable symbolic

…

, conveys the undeniable political sensibility impelling (compelling) the action: Those of you who spend any time around the troll pits of the internet, such as 4chan, 7chan, YTMND etc will undoubtedly know of this already, but its worth repeating. Hal Turner is, in short a Nazi. A Nazi with his own

…

#SAVETPB (i.e., Save The Pirate Bay—later to become #operationpayback) hosted, at its peak, over one thousand participants. Many of them had come from 4chan, where news about Aiplex’s methods spread and roiled many into action. Those on the public channels were encouraged to use a tool called the

…

off for the interview, one asking questions, the other scribbling the answers.7 She claims they asked about 4chan. At the time, she thought to herself, “If you guys think this is about 4chan, then you’re even more incompetent that I thought.” She told me she began prattling on “about this

…

into his penis and got her pregnant.” She noted that “they stopped taking notes for that part,” and—sure enough—there is no mention of 4chan in the leaked account filed by the agents. But, given Haefer’s chutzpah and adept mastery of the lulz, it is theoretically possible—even plausible

…

ire of Anonymous at large, so there was even more pressure not to release the data under the collective name. They contemplated releasing it to 4chan, to “leak it under lower-case-anonymous,” as tflow phrased it. Sabu raised the idea of handing the info to the Forbes reporter Parmy Olson

…

to express opposition to SOPA. Around seventy-five thousand webpages went dark, including dozens of prominent corporate and nonprofit websites such as Wikipedia, Flickr, Wired, 4chan, and Google.10 Journalists also wrote a torrent of articles. Less than a week later, SOPA and its senate counterpart, PIPA, were effectively scrapped—they

…

does not mean that the Machine of Hate won’t rise again, as an Anonymous activist named “blackplans” tweeted: “Without the trolls, the hackers, the 4chan hordes, how many of you nice, sensitive people would ever have heard of #Anonymous? Remember.”32) As part of this first mission, I’ve sought

…

can be found at http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-bold-0009/msg00073.html (last accessed May 21, 2014). 19. Lee Knuttila, “Users unknown: 4chan, anonymity and contingency,” First Monday, vol. 16, no. 10 (Oct. 2011). 20. “Internet Hate Machine” was a phrase used by a local Fox News program

…

MPAA,” abcnews.go.com, Oct. 22, 2007. 15. Enigmax, “Anti-Piracy Outfit Threatens to DoS Uncooperative Torrent Sites,” torrentfreak.com, Sept. 5, 2010. 16. Enigmax, “4chan DDoS Takes Down MPAA and Anti-Piracy Websites,” torrentfreak.com, Sept. 18, 2010. 17. “Hackers hit Hollywood’s piracy watchdog,” reuters.com, Sept. 19, 2010

…

. 18. Christopher Williams, “Piracy threats lawyer mocks 4chan DDoS attack,” theregister.co.uk, Sept. 22, 2010. 19. Nate Anderson, “‘Straightforward legal blackmail’: a tale of P2P lawyering,” arstechnica.com, June 6, 2010. 20

Lurking: How a Person Became a User

by Joanne McNeil  · 25 Feb 2020  · 239pp  · 80,319 words

groundwork for a coordinated attack on all women of color using Twitter, in June 2014. It was called #EndFathersDay, a fake hashtag campaign that the 4chan community invented and attributed to the #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen community. It trended on Twitter, just like #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, but the accounts were either fake or bolstered by users

…

black women on Twitter launched a counterattack, identifying the impostors using the hashtag #YourSlipIsShowing. They posted screenshots from 4chan, in which the instigators openly discussed their tactics and intentions. Unfortunately, the second goal of 4chan’s attack was successful—in the short term, at least. Sydette Harry, a community researcher who has

…

worked with Mozilla and the Coral Project, noted on Twitter how 4chan seemed to have a “grasp of the tectonics of feminist interaction” better than some would-be allies, as they recognized how black women and other

…

“lurking” only in a positive context. Lurking is listening and witnessing on the internet, rather than opining and capturing the attention of others. Actions by 4chan users against feminists on Twitter were developed through reconnaissance and stalking of them, the negative aspects of observing the behavior of others. It is revealing

…

that the 4chan users assumed these women would never see their own public discussion. This ignorance is what ultimately derailed the coordinated harassment—#YourSlipIsShowing had outmaneuvered them. I

…

or they may have little to no power or wealth, in which case they might still assume power in numbers. * * * There was a time when 4chan’s users seemed to pick worthwhile enemies, including institutions like the Church of Scientology. Its activist arm, known as Anonymous, or “Anon,” grew away from

…

Killing Bay,” “Operation DarkNet”). The election of Donald Trump, and his fomenting of online hate groups—many active on 4chan—tarnished Anon’s Robin Hood reputation by proximity. The troll behemoth 4chan is amorphous; it is no institution. It has nothing like Facebook’s money or massive Menlo Park campus, but to

…

.” In its early years, the website footers linked to a manifesto by a user known only as “Shii,” who created an earlier anonymous board, which 4chan was based on. “Anonymity counters vanity,” Shii wrote in the text. “If there is a user ID attached to a user, a discussion tends to

…

.” Zuckerberg and Poole also differed in wealth. Conference stipends only go so far, and meanwhile he was responsible for a website that made advertisers wary—4chan was just about impossible to monetize. Given his spotlight, compounded with decisions as a leader to comply with DMCA requests and turn over IP addresses

…

to authorities, Poole lost the confidence of the 4chan community. Users were further incensed when he banned Gamergate content. Finally, in 2015, Poole gave up on the project and sold

…

2channel, the Japanese site that it was based on. By 2016, he was working for Google. Anonymity was a smoke screen. Hostility to sincerity was 4chan’s through line. This proved to be a natural stance for bigots, which is how it became an alt-right breeding ground. Many

…

4chan users had already cut their teeth on the goon humor of Something Awful forums or shock sites like the Stile Project. There, a user, part

…

room but with company online—one had the privacy to say things that might not fly in polite society. In 2010, the danger that underscored 4chan’s insincerity poked out as it instigated the harassment of an art student in Chicago named Natacha Stolz. A video of her performance Interior Semiotics

…

such an event, but what’s more likely is you wouldn’t know about it or get an invite in the first place. Someone on 4chan found Stolz’s video and shared it, just to get the community to “rage” at its perceived pretentiousness. The video received more than two hundred

…

more than two million views, with heaps of derogatory comments about Stolz as well as the “hipsters” in the audience. The 4chan response to Interior Semiotics revealed the collective 4chan mind-set: they believed in one identity online, like the flip side to Mark Zuckerberg’s famous musing that “having two identities

…

integrity.” The video posted to the internet was not theirs; it wasn’t created for their consumption, but to 4chan users, as content on the internet, it was on their turf. The 4chan community reacted to Interior Semiotics as a gentrification of the internet they perceived as theirs and theirs alone. While

…

the world has changed in ten years, the 4chan ideology is resilient in its regressiveness. Whether “alt-right” or 4chan shitposter, these bigoted persons and collectives are—ironically—triggered by the rest of us internet users, as they were by

…

to believe the internet is an escape hatch to the unreal; but it’s not the internet that is. Much of how members of the 4chan and the alt-right behave suggests they are not serious when they say they are not serious. In early examples of networked trolling, like the

…

taking poison and waiting for the other person to die. Online, that looks like devoting all one’s energy to making others suffer. Trolls on 4chan, far-right conspirators, men’s rights activists, white supremacists, abusers, and hateful users are not a monolith, but the internet and the world would be

…

on the internet have come to reassess the irony and humor common in online forums and chat rooms that were never even as extreme as 4chan. Lee Carter, the Virginia state lawmaker, once addressed this in a long thread on Twitter in 2018. “I’m an elder millennial and an internet

…

faith,” wrote Michael Mandiberg in an article for Social Text Journal, which left the community “unprepared for the Men’s Rights Activism spawned from Reddit, 4chan, and 8chan.” This extends to harassment on Wikipedia, and how Wikipedia is organized to respond to it. Users who experience harassment, stalking, or intimidation on

…

background as a volunteer moderator of various online groups. As a teenager, she spent time on some of the internet’s most unruly quarters, like 4chan—a different place when she was in high school—and later she went on to moderate the GirlGamers subreddit, which she founded. Reddit, home to

…

because it was among the first to receive major media coverage. Slate published a piece looking back on #EndFathersDay and the women who unraveled the 4chan plot (“The Black Feminists Who Saw the Alt-Right Threat Coming,” April 23, 2019). The tweets that I cited were saved in Storify, which is

…

Overlord Christopher Poole Reveals Why He Walked Away,” March 13, 2015). For more on the sale of 4chan, see Klint Finley, “4chan Just Sold to the Founder of the Original ‘Chan,’” Wired, September 21, 2015). Poole’s blog post dated March 7, 2016, “My next chapter,” on

…

Stryker, Author of ‘Epic Win for Anonymous,’ on Interior Semiotics, Context Collapse, and ‘You Rage You Lose,’” September 12, 2011). In that interview, he summarized 4chan’s indignation by saying that the “internet used to be full of geeks like us, but now it’s being overrun by normals trying to

We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory

by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin  · 1 Oct 2018

when their post was upvoted. Beyond amassing karma, usernames weren’t good for much—though they did serve to differentiate Reddit from message boards like 4chan and 8chan, on which all posters were strictly anonymous. Huffman had the distinct impression that Graham disliked the way comments worked on competing sites, such

…

alien, and swapped out the site’s mascot for the day. Reddit wasn’t the only place online that rallied for Mister Splashy Pants. A 4chan poster had originally called out the contest, and environmental blog TreeHugger joked that “Splashy” was not an appropriately dignified name for such a majestic creature

…

children and photos of barely clothed teenagers. Some of this content was sucked from or mimicked the sort of stuff shared on 4chan, the popular anonymous message-board site. 4chan’s primary differentiation from Reddit was that it stripped away even any modicum of identity; there were no usernames at all and

…

(which is known on Reddit as “brigading”). Another all too effective tool in each side’s arsenal was co-opting tactics, and even vernacular, from 4chan and video-game chat. The resulting vibe was trollish and alienating to outsiders. “Crush the Redditors with your Dildz,” one graphic on SRS read. (“Dildz

…

’t stop hundreds of millions of individuals around the globe from sneaking a look. And many—the general public at least—didn’t go to 4chan, the first place outside of the dark Internet where most of the photos were originally posted. The common gateway wasn’t Imgur or Photobucket, where

…

is a play on a popular hacker meme, “It’s happening.”) The photos almost immediately flooded Reddit’s servers with traffic. The images had hit 4chan that prior night, and by Sunday morning of Labor Day weekend, Reddit’s employees, one by one, saw alerts piling up on their computers and

…

we? What exactly is Reddit? Pao convened a meeting and asked the staff that question, albeit in its most extreme version: “Are we comfortable becoming 4chan?” There were outliers, employees who believed that an anything-goes attitude was vital to Reddit’s ethos. But by this time, more had begun adopting

…

private-message threads on Twitter, in Facebook groups, on private chat servers such as Discord, and, very overtly, on 4chan’s /pol, a “politically incorrect” board that had been created by 4chan’s founder in 2011 to siphon off and contain the overtly xenophobic and racist comments and memes from other wings

…

of 4chan. This mostly off-Reddit organizing then plays out on Reddit as vote brigading, or attempting to silence individual voices by downvoting them into oblivion. Other

…

force on Reddit and Trump’s most active and vocal base of support on the entire Internet. Early on, an influx of brigaders came from 4chan’s /pol board, and its Reddit counterpart, r/pol. There was more crossover of /pol users to Reddit after

…

4chan was abandoned by its creator, Chris Poole, in January 2015, after he’d lost any semblance of ability to control the sprawling, vile communities it

…

channers. They brought with them some of what became The_Donald’s signature vernacular, as well as meme-proficiency and lots of keks, which is 4chan slang for laughs and possibly a reference to the frog, sometimes Pepe the Frog, an image that thanks to memetic strategizing on

…

4chan and 8chan had been infused with anti-Semitic meaning and that the Anti-Defamation League subsequently declared a hate symbol. Each of Trump’s primary

…

campaign season wore on, Donald Trump’s big tent on Reddit was his largest online supporter group, and it included a constituency of: racists; the 4chan migrants, largely in it for the keks; alt-righters; Gamergaters contributing sexism and conspiracy theories; some former Bernie Sanders supporters; Russian propagandists; and anyone lured

…

Obama, satanism, triangular symbols, and punk bands. Breaking down how the Pizzagate theory emerged is an exercise in absurdity, but essentially a message board on 4chan attempted to link mentions of the word “pizza,” and other foods, such as “hot dogs” and “cheese,” in the leaked emails of Clinton campaign chairman

…

. This was a physical manifestation of many factions of the alt-right, whose identities were so often masked by online pseudonyms on forums such as 4chan or Reddit or tucked away in private Discord channels. Now they were attempting to prove they were more than an Internet meme machine. These factions

…

green frog face, raised $1 million in crowdfunding, it boasted with a tweet that read, “FUCK YOU Silicon Valley elitist trash.” Others went back to 4chan’s /pol board. The alt-right’s prolific memetic warriors and its vigilante white nationalists weren’t just Reddit’s albatross. Other Internet gatekeepers took

…

list was extensive. It included seventy different communities that violated the updated rule. Among the subreddits banned or quarantined was r/pol, a carryover from 4chan’s main discussion board, which, in lieu of rules typically noted on a subreddit’s right-hand rail, simply said, “This is not a safe

…

Bone Marrow Donor,” Adweek, March 22, 2012. “They all wound up leaving”: Pao, Reset, 159. PART V Revenge and Revenge Porn “Are we comfortable becoming 4chan?”: Pao, Reset, 194. but her lawyers advised her: Pao, Reset, 206. “shrewd, and cagey”: Dan Raile, “The Chart of Resentment: Dispatches from the Pao vs

So You've Been Publicly Shamed

by Jon Ronson  · 9 Mar 2015  · 229pp  · 67,869 words

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists

by Julia Ebner  · 20 Feb 2020  · 309pp  · 79,414 words

Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century

by W. David Marx  · 18 Nov 2025  · 642pp  · 142,332 words

The Dark Net

by Jamie Bartlett  · 20 Aug 2014  · 267pp  · 82,580 words

Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language

by Adam Aleksic  · 15 Jul 2025  · 278pp  · 71,701 words

Collaborative Society

by Dariusz Jemielniak and Aleksandra Przegalinska  · 18 Feb 2020  · 187pp  · 50,083 words

My Glorious Defeats: Hacktivist, Narcissist, Anonymous: A Memoir

by Barrett Brown  · 8 Jul 2024  · 332pp  · 110,397 words

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath

by Nicco Mele  · 14 Apr 2013  · 270pp  · 79,992 words

Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists, the Truth About Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All

by Laura Bates  · 2 Sep 2020  · 364pp  · 119,398 words

Amateurs!: How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters

by Joanna Walsh  · 22 Sep 2025  · 255pp  · 80,203 words

Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media

by Peter Warren Singer and Emerson T. Brooking  · 15 Mar 2018

Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral

by Ben Smith  · 2 May 2023

The Twittering Machine

by Richard Seymour  · 20 Aug 2019  · 297pp  · 83,651 words

Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

by Jill Abramson  · 5 Feb 2019  · 788pp  · 223,004 words

Silk Road

by Eileen Ormsby  · 1 Nov 2014  · 269pp  · 79,285 words

We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News

by Eliot Higgins  · 2 Mar 2021  · 277pp  · 70,506 words

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

by Jacob Silverman  · 17 Mar 2015  · 527pp  · 147,690 words

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley

by Corey Pein  · 23 Apr 2018  · 282pp  · 81,873 words

Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy

by Talia Lavin  · 14 Jul 2020  · 231pp  · 71,299 words

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World

by Joseph Menn  · 3 Jun 2019  · 302pp  · 85,877 words

Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet

by David Moon, Patrick Ruffini, David Segal, Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow, Zoe Lofgren, Jamie Laurie, Ron Paul, Mike Masnick, Kim Dotcom, Tiffiniy Cheng, Alexis Ohanian, Nicole Powers and Josh Levy  · 30 Apr 2013  · 452pp  · 134,502 words

These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means

by Christopher Summerfield  · 11 Mar 2025  · 412pp  · 122,298 words

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

by Jia Tolentino  · 5 Aug 2019  · 305pp  · 101,743 words

Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media

by Tarleton Gillespie  · 25 Jun 2018  · 390pp  · 109,519 words

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe

by Roger McNamee  · 1 Jan 2019  · 382pp  · 105,819 words

Evil by Design: Interaction Design to Lead Us Into Temptation

by Chris Nodder  · 4 Jun 2013  · 254pp  · 79,052 words

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley

by Emily Chang  · 6 Feb 2018  · 334pp  · 104,382 words

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest

by Zeynep Tufekci  · 14 May 2017  · 444pp  · 130,646 words

Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression

by Geoff Cox and Alex McLean  · 9 Nov 2012

Perfect Sound Whatever

by James. Acaster  · 21 Aug 2019  · 247pp  · 86,844 words

The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors

by Spencer Jakab  · 1 Feb 2022  · 420pp  · 94,064 words

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth

by Elizabeth Williamson  · 8 Mar 2022  · 574pp  · 148,233 words

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

by Jonathan Rauch  · 21 Jun 2021  · 446pp  · 109,157 words

Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism

by Jeffrey Toobin  · 1 May 2023  · 357pp  · 130,117 words

Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

by Joshua Green  · 17 Jul 2017  · 296pp  · 78,112 words

Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution

by Pieter Hintjens  · 11 Mar 2013  · 349pp  · 114,038 words

The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

by Michael Harris  · 6 Aug 2014  · 259pp  · 73,193 words

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination

by Mark Bergen  · 5 Sep 2022  · 642pp  · 141,888 words

Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the Surveillance State

by Barton Gellman  · 20 May 2020  · 562pp  · 153,825 words

Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind

by Annalee Newitz  · 3 Jun 2024  · 251pp  · 68,713 words

The Happiness Effect: How Social Media Is Driving a Generation to Appear Perfect at Any Cost

by Donna Freitas  · 13 Jan 2017  · 428pp  · 136,945 words

The Internet of Garbage

by Sarah Jeong  · 14 Jul 2015  · 81pp  · 24,626 words

I Live in the Future & Here's How It Works: Why Your World, Work, and Brain Are Being Creatively Disrupted

by Nick Bilton  · 13 Sep 2010  · 236pp  · 77,098 words

Come and Take It: The Gun Printer's Guide to Thinking Free

by Cody Wilson  · 10 Oct 2016  · 246pp  · 70,404 words

Collaborative Futures

by Mike Linksvayer, Michael Mandiberg and Mushon Zer-Aviv  · 24 Aug 2010  · 188pp  · 9,226 words

The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back

by Jacob Ward  · 25 Jan 2022  · 292pp  · 94,660 words

Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News

by Clint Watts  · 28 May 2018  · 324pp  · 96,491 words

Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything

by Kelly Weill  · 22 Feb 2022

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You

by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms  · 2 Apr 2018  · 416pp  · 100,130 words

Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It

by Kashmir Hill  · 19 Sep 2023  · 487pp  · 124,008 words

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

by Christopher Wylie  · 8 Oct 2019

The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze

by Laura Shin  · 22 Feb 2022  · 506pp  · 151,753 words

The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

by Michiko Kakutani  · 17 Jul 2018  · 137pp  · 38,925 words

The Science of Hate: How Prejudice Becomes Hate and What We Can Do to Stop It

by Matthew Williams  · 23 Mar 2021  · 592pp  · 125,186 words

The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees

by Ben Mezrich  · 6 Sep 2021  · 239pp  · 74,845 words

The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America

by Charlotte Alter  · 18 Feb 2020  · 504pp  · 129,087 words

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

by Gretchen McCulloch  · 22 Jul 2019  · 413pp  · 106,479 words

How to Be a Liberal: The Story of Liberalism and the Fight for Its Life

by Ian Dunt  · 15 Oct 2020

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality

by Jaron Lanier  · 21 Nov 2017  · 480pp  · 123,979 words

Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another

by Matt Taibbi  · 7 Oct 2019  · 357pp  · 99,456 words

The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-Hackers Is Building the Next Internet With Ethereum

by Camila Russo  · 13 Jul 2020  · 349pp  · 102,827 words

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

by Nicole Perlroth  · 9 Feb 2021  · 651pp  · 186,130 words

Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness

by Simone Browne  · 1 Oct 2015  · 326pp  · 84,180 words

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World

by Clive Thompson  · 26 Mar 2019  · 499pp  · 144,278 words

Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace

by Ronald J. Deibert  · 13 May 2013  · 317pp  · 98,745 words

Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking)

by Christian Rudder  · 8 Sep 2014  · 366pp  · 76,476 words

Who Owns the Future?

by Jaron Lanier  · 6 May 2013  · 510pp  · 120,048 words

The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet

by Justin Peters  · 11 Feb 2013  · 397pp  · 102,910 words

Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

by Nathaniel Popper  · 18 May 2015  · 387pp  · 112,868 words

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America

by Sarah Kendzior  · 6 Apr 2020

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics

by Peter Geoghegan  · 2 Jan 2020  · 388pp  · 111,099 words

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All

by Adrian Hon  · 14 Sep 2022  · 371pp  · 107,141 words

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better

by Clive Thompson  · 11 Sep 2013  · 397pp  · 110,130 words

The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider

by Michiko Kakutani  · 20 Feb 2024  · 262pp  · 69,328 words

Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter

by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac  · 17 Sep 2024

Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

by Jacob Silverman  · 9 Oct 2025  · 312pp  · 103,645 words

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis

by Scott Patterson  · 5 Jun 2023  · 289pp  · 95,046 words

Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI

by Yuval Noah Harari  · 9 Sep 2024  · 566pp  · 169,013 words

Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right

by Michael Brooks  · 23 Apr 2020  · 88pp  · 26,706 words

Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life

by Richard Beck  · 2 Sep 2024  · 715pp  · 212,449 words

Ethics of Big Data: Balancing Risk and Innovation

by Kord Davis and Doug Patterson  · 30 Dec 2011  · 98pp  · 25,753 words

Elon Musk

by Walter Isaacson  · 11 Sep 2023  · 562pp  · 201,502 words

Health and Safety: A Breakdown

by Emily Witt  · 16 Sep 2024  · 242pp  · 85,783 words

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything

by Nate Silver  · 12 Aug 2024  · 848pp  · 227,015 words

This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality

by Peter Pomerantsev  · 29 Jul 2019  · 240pp  · 74,182 words

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle

by Jamie Woodcock  · 17 Jun 2019  · 236pp  · 62,158 words

The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child

by Morgan G. Ames  · 19 Nov 2019  · 426pp  · 117,775 words

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks

by Scott J. Shapiro  · 523pp  · 154,042 words

The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

by Evan Friss  · 5 Aug 2024  · 493pp  · 120,793 words

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity

by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson  · 15 May 2023  · 619pp  · 177,548 words

Hatching Twitter

by Nick Bilton  · 5 Nov 2013  · 304pp  · 93,494 words

The End of Secrecy: The Rise and Fall of WikiLeaks

by The "Guardian", David Leigh and Luke Harding  · 1 Feb 2011  · 322pp  · 99,066 words

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet

by Claire L. Evans  · 6 Mar 2018  · 371pp  · 93,570 words

The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality

by Blake J. Harris  · 19 Feb 2019  · 561pp  · 163,916 words

How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy

by Stephen Witt  · 15 Jun 2015  · 315pp  · 93,522 words

A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life

by Brian Grazer and Charles Fishman  · 6 Apr 2014  · 302pp  · 74,878 words

Design Is a Job

by Mike Monteiro  · 5 Mar 2012  · 137pp  · 44,363 words

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty

by Benjamin H. Bratton  · 19 Feb 2016  · 903pp  · 235,753 words

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths  · 4 Apr 2016  · 523pp  · 143,139 words

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy

by Tom Slee  · 18 Nov 2015  · 265pp  · 69,310 words

The Most Human Human: What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive

by Brian Christian  · 1 Mar 2011  · 370pp  · 94,968 words

Picnic Comma Lightning: In Search of a New Reality

by Laurence Scott  · 11 Jul 2018  · 244pp  · 81,334 words

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

by Jaron Lanier  · 28 May 2018  · 151pp  · 39,757 words

Cybersecurity: What Everyone Needs to Know

by P. W. Singer and Allan Friedman  · 3 Jan 2014  · 587pp  · 117,894 words

Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare

by Thomas Rid

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia

by Anthony M. Townsend  · 29 Sep 2013  · 464pp  · 127,283 words

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street

by Jeff John Roberts  · 15 Dec 2020  · 226pp  · 65,516 words

Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle

by Jeff Flake  · 31 Jul 2017  · 138pp  · 43,748 words

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us

by Tim O'Reilly  · 9 Oct 2017  · 561pp  · 157,589 words

Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside

by Xiaowei Wang  · 12 Oct 2020  · 196pp  · 61,981 words

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities

by Eric Kaufmann  · 24 Oct 2018  · 691pp  · 203,236 words

I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are

by Rachel Bloom  · 17 Nov 2020  · 179pp  · 49,805 words

The Smartphone Society

by Nicole Aschoff

Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence

by Amy B. Zegart  · 6 Nov 2021

The Art of Invisibility: The World's Most Famous Hacker Teaches You How to Be Safe in the Age of Big Brother and Big Data

by Kevin Mitnick, Mikko Hypponen and Robert Vamosi  · 14 Feb 2017  · 305pp  · 93,091 words

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future

by Ben Tarnoff  · 13 Jun 2022  · 234pp  · 67,589 words

American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

by Nancy Jo Sales  · 23 Feb 2016  · 487pp  · 147,238 words

The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip

by Stephen Witt  · 8 Apr 2025  · 260pp  · 82,629 words

Decoding the World: A Roadmap for the Questioner

by Po Bronson  · 14 Jul 2020  · 320pp  · 95,629 words

You Are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself

by David McRaney  · 29 Jul 2013  · 280pp  · 90,531 words

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires

by Douglas Rushkoff  · 7 Sep 2022  · 205pp  · 61,903 words

Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea's Feminist Movement and What It Means for Women's Rights Worldwide

by Hawon Jung  · 21 Mar 2023  · 401pp  · 112,589 words

A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back

by Bruce Schneier  · 7 Feb 2023  · 306pp  · 82,909 words

The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

by Chris Hayes  · 28 Jan 2025  · 359pp  · 100,761 words