Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web
by
Cole Stryker
Published 14 Jun 2011
In August 2006, moot posted a message to /b/, declaring that anyone who posted illegal content (e.g., child pornography, personal information, and raid-related calls to action) would be banned permanently from 4chan, and anyone who posted within illicit discussion threads would be banned for two weeks. This led many users leave 4chan for other chan boards. It has gone down in chan lore as /b/day. 4chan’s Eternal September Moment If one had to pick an eternal September period for 4chan, it began in 2007. That was the year of lolcats and Tay “Chocolate Rain” Zonday. Most importantly, it was the year of the Internet Hate Machine. A Los Angeles Fox affiliate put together a breathless exposé on Anonymous. It starts off like this: Anonymous.
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#3 would probably be any attempt made to paint them as politically one way or another, since it is quite obviously apolitical Housh recently gave a speech on the steps of New York’s City Hall with a handful of other Anons, journalists whom he feels are responsible for the media climate marked by lazy and fearmongering characterizations of Anonymous. Housh is hardly the angst-ridden teenager that many journalists would like you to believe makes up Anonymous. He’s in his mid-30s, and he’s been online since ‘93, when he used a text browser. He remembers Usenet’s eternal September, which he, perhaps jokingly, calls “the worst thing that ever happened to the Internet.” Usenet before eternal september? Very few stupid questions, mostly just good chat and sharing interesting files. it was quite a good community of pretty intelligent people Like the folks I spoke with at the WELL, Housh insists that in the early days the web wasn’t a chaotic Wild West.
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Given that the WELL was founded by optimistic hippies, I assumed these geeks on the forefront of technology would have high hopes for their hobby, but I was surprised to find the opposite. “I had no idea the Internet would expand to the scale it is today. Absolutely no idea,” says Figallo. The Eternal September Throughout the late ’80s and early ’90s, universities granted their students access to Usenet and other BBSes. Every September these online communities would be flooded with new users who hadn’t learned the lingo or the etiquette. The veterans would naturally look down on these noobs with disdain, and dreaded the coming of September.
The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
by
Walter Isaacson
Published 6 Oct 2014
Kimsey the bar owner could never quite get why healthy people would spend their Saturday nights in chat rooms and on bulletin boards. “Admit it, don’t you think it’s all horseshit?” he would ask Case half jokingly.36 Case would shake his head. He knew that there was a pony in it. AL GORE AND THE ETERNAL SEPTEMBER Online services such as AOL developed independently of the Internet. An entanglement of laws, regulations, traditions, and practices made it impossible for commercial companies to offer direct Internet access to ordinary folks who were not connected to an educational or research institution.
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It began in earnest when AOL, following the lead of a smaller competitor named Delphi, opened a portal in September 1993 to allow its members access to the newsgroups and bulletin boards of the Internet. In Internet lore, the deluge was called, especially by contemptuous veteran netizens, the Eternal September. The name referred to the fact that every September a new wave of freshmen would enter universities and, from their campus networks, get access to the Internet. Their postings tended to be annoying at first, but within weeks most had acquired enough netiquette to assimilate into the Internet culture.
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“September 1993 will go down in net.history as the September that never ended,” an Internet hand named Dave Fischer posted in January 1994.38 A newsgroup sprang up named alt.aol-sucks, where old-timers posted their diatribes. The AOL interlopers, read one, “couldn’t get a clue if they stood in a clue field in clue mating season, dressed as a clue, and drenched with clue pheromones.”39 In fact, the Eternal September’s democratization of the Internet was a good thing, but it took a while for veterans to appreciate this. This opening up of the Internet, which paved the way for an astonishing era of innovation, did not happen by chance. It was the result of government policies, carefully crafted in a thoughtful and bipartisan atmosphere, that assured America’s lead in building an information-age economy.
Orwell Versus the Terrorists: A Digital Short
by
Jamie Bartlett
Published 12 Feb 2015
* * * fn1 In 2010 Tor was awarded the Free Software Foundation’s Award for Projects of Social Benefit, in part for the service it provides for whistleblowers, human-rights campaigners and activists in dissident movements. fn2 September 1993, the month America On-Line started to offer its subscribers access to Usenet, is etched into internet folklore as ‘the eternal September’, when newcomers logged on to the internet en masse. This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law.
Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software
by
Nadia Eghbal
Published 3 Aug 2020
Kraut and Resnick observe that a community needs to “protect itself from the potentially damaging actions” of newcomers in order to survive,127 since newcomers can destabilize preexisting social norms: “Because newcomers have not yet developed commitment to the group and have not yet learned how the group operates, it is rational for established group members to distrust them.”128 The newcomer effect is also known as the “Eternal September” problem, a term coined by members of the early online community Usenet, which experienced an influx of newcomers every September due to new students getting access for the first time. But once America Online (a sort of early highway system itself) began offering access to Usenet, the service provider exposed the community to a constant stream of new users, creating an “eternal September.” Kraut and Resnick further suggest that successful online communities need to “designate formal sanctioning rules so that those imposing sanctions have legitimacy,” noting that this role typically falls upon moderators or administrators, who are “less likely to generate drama or retaliation than the same message coming from someone without a formal role.”129 Today, however, these dynamics seem to be reversed, if anything.
The Dark Net
by
Jamie Bartlett
Published 20 Aug 2014
* * * fn1 In 2010 Tor was awarded the Free Software Foundation’s Award for Projects of Social Benefit, in part for the service it provides for whistleblowers, human-rights campaigners and activists in dissident movements. fn2 September 1993, the month America On-Line started to offer its subscribers access to Usenet, is etched into internet folklore as ‘the eternal September’, when newcomers logged on to the internet en masse. Chapter 1 Unmasking the Trolls ‘At the top of the tree of life there isn’t love: there is lulz.’ Anonymous A Life Ruin ‘HI /B/!’ READ the small placard that Sarah held to her semi-naked body. ‘7 August 2013, 9.35 p.m.’ It was an announcement to the hundreds – thousands, perhaps – of anonymous users logged on to the infamous ‘/b/’ board on the image-sharing website 4chan that she was ready to ‘cam’.
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p.6 ‘In July 1973, Peter Kirstein . . .’ Kirstein, P.T., ‘Early Experiences with the ARPANET and INTERNET in the UK’. This new international version of the Arpanet was being called informally at the time the ‘Internetwork’, and was shortened to the ‘Internet’ in 1974. p.6 ‘September 1993, the date . . .’ One Usenet group – www.eternal-september.org – gives the date, as of writing, as September 7247, 1993. Further information about ‘the September that never ends’, in Dery, M., Escape Velocity, p.5. p.7 ‘Leading psychologists of the day . . .’ Turkle, S., Life on the Screen. p.7 ‘Parents panicked about children . . .’ http://textfiles.com/bbs/fever.
Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language
by
Gretchen McCulloch
Published 22 Jul 2019
AOL began sending out internet connection CDs in the mail and thus, according to the book Net.wars, in the space of a single year “unleashed its one million users onto the Net in what was then the largest single block of new users the Net had ever been asked to absorb.” Existing netizens were unable to fully acculturate this influx and were Not Pleased by the results, dubbing the period thereafter Eternal September. Although counter-memetics may not have become quite the noble cause Godwin envisioned, the idea of memes—the meme of memes, if you will—certainly did spread and mutate online. A meme in the internet sense isn’t just something popular, a video or image or phrase that goes viral. It’s something that’s remade and recombined, spreading as an atom of internet culture.
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Weird cultural artifacts spreading through a whole bunch of people deciding to replicate them is older than the internet: in the book Memes in Digital Culture, Limor Shifman points to “Kilroy Was Here” (a graffiti sketch of a big-nosed man looking over a wall that became popular during World War II) as an example of a pre-internet meme. The new part is the connection of the name “meme” with the kind of cultural replication that happens on the internet. All the way back to Godwin’s Law and Eternal September, making and sharing memes is about policing what’s in and what’s out of internet culture. This became difficult as aspects of internet culture changed, especially the relationship between cultural and technical fluency. Like how the first wave of Internet People conflated knowledge of programming jargon and internet slang, the early waves of meme creators felt that there was a link between knowing the technical tools required to make memes and understanding the subcultures in which they fit.
Bleeding Edge: A Novel
by
Thomas Pynchon
Published 16 Sep 2013
“You lucked out, this is the last call I was planning to take on this thing.” “Changing your carrier service?” “Shitcanning the instrument. I think there’s a tracking chip on it.” “Lester, I’ve come across something kind of serious, we should meet. Leave your cell phone at home.” She can tell from his breathing that he knows what it is. • • • ETERNAL SEPTEMBER, dating from the high nineties, is a disused techies’ saloon tucked away between a barbershop and a necktie boutique half a block from a low-traffic station down one of the old IND lines. “Some sentimental attachment,” Maxine looking around trying not to make a face. “No, I’m figuring anybody who actually comes in here in the middle of the day is so without clue that we can talk safely.”
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Is it so crazy to imagine the two countries cooperating? Getting upset when Lester started collecting unauthorized bonuses?” “Maxine. No. It wasn’t only because of money.” “Excuse me? What then?” He waits a fraction of a beat too long. “Lester saw too much.” She tries to remember that last time she and Lester talked, in Eternal September. There must have been a tell she missed, a lapse, something. “If he understood what he was seeing, wouldn’t he have told somebody?” “He tried to. He called me on my mobile. Night before they got him. I couldn’t pick up. Left long message on voice mail.” “He had your mobile number.” “Everybody does.
Lurking: How a Person Became a User
by
Joanne McNeil
Published 25 Feb 2020
The company strategy was to build accessible, attention-grabbing content so new users wouldn’t feel overwhelmed. The company’s target audience, Leonsis said, was the kind of person who might “run to the Hard Rock Cafe” once they arrived in a foreign country. The CEO’s comments confirmed all the suspicions of longtime internet users. “Eternal September”—a term that fittingly outlived Usenet—was coined in the fall of 1993, when AOL offered Usenet access to its users, disrupting countless communities; the influx never ceased, but continued to wreak havoc on various rec and alt groups. To them, AOL users were the fanny-pack masses, an invasion of the squares.
Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media
by
Tarleton Gillespie
Published 25 Jun 2018
For others, the same awareness may fuel a political mission to knowingly impose cherished American values. 48Julia Angwin, Stealing MySpace, 64–65. 49Mathew Ingram, “Here’s Why Disney and Salesforce Dropped Their Bids for Twitter,” Fortune, http://fortune.com/2016/10/18/twitter-disney-salesforce/. 50Burgess, “From ‘Broadcast Yourself’ to ‘Follow Your Interests.’” 51Lessig, Remix. 52Tim O’Reilly, “What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software,” O’Reilly Media, September 30, 2005, http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html. 53boyd and Ellison, “Social Network Sites”; Beer, “Social Network(ing) Sites”; Ellison and boyd, “Sociality through Social Network Sites.” 54Gehl, Reverse Engineering Social Media; Baym, “Social Media and the Struggle for Society”; Hearn, “Verified”; Langlois and Elmer, “The Research Politics of Social Media Platforms.” 55Helmond, “The Platformization of the Web”; Plantin et al., “Infrastructure Studies Meet Platform Studies.” 56Alexis Madrigal, “The Perfect Technocracy: Facebook’s Attempt to Create Good Government for 900 Million People,” Atlantic, June 19, 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/the-perfect-technocracy-facebooks-attempt-to-create-good-government-for-900-million-people/258484/. 57Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything. 58Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture. 59Dibbell, “A Rape in Cyberspace”; Kraut and Resnick, Building Successful Online Communities. 60Personal interview. 61Platforms experience what is known as “eternal September.” In the days of Usenet, newsgroups tended to receive an influx of new members every September, when arriving college students got access to the web for the first time and were unfamiliar with the norms of the community. When, in 1993, AOL linked its users to the web, this problem of maintaining community norms in the face of new users became a constant.
Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture
by
Kyle Chayka
Published 15 Jan 2024
Gradually the noobs—as my generation of Internet slang would put it—became overwhelming, annoying the veteran users. Corporations also began to offer access to Usenet over home dial-up connections. America Online (AOL) incorporated Usenet in 1993, and the sudden influx of noobs became known as “Eternal September.” The implication of the phrase was that the wrong kind of user was suddenly dominant in these once-niche groups. The digital landscape, the early version of digital culture, seemed to be ruined, though of course it persisted. AOL simplified the Internet into an easy menu of options, centralizing it for the peak of twenty-three million subscribers that it reached around the year 2000.
To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise
by
Bethany Moreton
Published 15 May 2009
The quoted term Â�comes from Hochschild, The Second Shift, p.€12. 71. Bob Mumford, “Fatherpower,” New Wine Magazine, April 1978, 4–10. An audio version was circulated on cassettes beginning in 1977; Burks and Burks, Damaged Disciples, 122. 72. David Waterman, “The Care and Feeding of Growing Christians,” Eternity, September 1979, 16. 73. Joel A. Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 306 n.17. 74. Bob Mumford, www.lifechangers.org/html2/about_bob.php, accessed August 24, 2006. 75. For example, Kent Marts, “Friends Remember Folksy Mr. Sam as Very Uncommon Common Man,” DR Special Commemorative Edition, April 5, 1992, 1, 6; Angel Hernandez, “Front Range Wal-Mart Workers Mourn Death of Boss and Friend,” Rocky Mountain News, April 6, 1992. 309 NOTES TO PAGES 117 – 1 2 0 76.
We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory
by
Christine Lagorio-Chafkin
Published 1 Oct 2018
Outside of school, they together took up ballroom dancing. The one aspect of Huffman’s Wakefield years that didn’t seem ripped from a Wes Anderson film was his deep love for computers. He’d been dabbling in programming since he was eight years old. His dad encouraged early web browsing by giving young Huffman access to AOL—before the “Eternal September” of 1993 when AOL opened up Usenet access and connected millions of new users to the Internet proper. Summers with his dad were time for offline engineering, too: He would roam the cul-de-sacs with buddies, find discarded appliances such as a lawn mower or a washing machine, and tinker with and repair them.