4chan was where I learned that the internet could be bad. I first encountered the site during high school, not long after its founding, in 2003, by an American teen-ager named Christopher Poole (better known by his username, moot). Poole copied the format of a Japanese message board nicknamed 2channel; users on 4chan could anonymously post an unfiltered mix of text, images, and animated GIFs. Illicit material was never hard to find on the internet, but 4chan served as an early hub\u2014or \u201cdumping ground\u201d might be more apt. The site was inundated with pornography, pirated files, and uncensored screeds about dating or politics. Its background, a pale yellow gradient, still gives me a slight frisson, like a Playboy issue hidden under the bed. I would often test the censorship settings on a library or school computer\u2019s LAN internet connection by trying to load 4chan. Usually, it wouldn\u2019t work, which hinted at the site\u2019s infamy: even the grown-ups knew at least its name, and that it warranted a place on ban lists.<\/p>\n
On 4chan, usernames were most often just \u201cAnonymous\u201d or a string of numbers. I never posted, but I understood the appeal of hiding behind a mask and becoming one of a crowd. The site formed a collective id that could be called up in a web browser, years before the digital gang wars of Twitter began. Learning the forum\u2019s slang was the key to understanding its jokes: lulz, fren, TFW, troll. Posts were deleted when they stopped getting new engagement, which typically happened quickly, especially if the messages failed to provoke. At a time when the internet was still sparsely populated, 4chan guaranteed constant energy, no matter the time of day or night. But as the social-media landscape grew up around it, during the twenty-tens, and other sites competed as spaces for \u201cshitposting,\u201d that digital term of art, 4chan faded in relevance. In 2015, Poole sold it to the owner of 2channel, the Japanese site that had inspired it. It survived as a basement of the internet\u2014dingy, subterranean, and in a state of arrested development\u2014which is why it wasn\u2019t exactly surprising when, on April 14th, 4chan suddenly disappeared. A spinoff forum called Soyjak.party (even harsher and more political than its predecessor) took credit for hacking the site and shutting it down.<\/p>\n
After a week and a half, 4chan limped back online over the weekend, but an air of embarrassment hung over its return. The hackers had leaked 4chan\u2019s source code, along with the accounts of its anonymous volunteer moderators. \u201cIt\u2019s pretty archaic internet infrastructure,\u201d Jared Holt, a researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue focussing on domestic extremist movements on the web, told me. Rather than an act of total destruction, the hack appeared to be a troll, a dig at 4chan\u2019s secondary status two decades into the forum\u2019s existence. Once a digital home to political incorrectness, and a staging ground for incel culture, white-power groups, mass-shooting manifestos, and more, 4chan is now one among many platforms just as conducive to hate speech. President Donald Trump\u2019s own Truth Social is another, as is Parler, the right-wing video site offering \u201cTrue Freedom.\u201d There\u2019s Patriots Win, a kind of Trump-focussed Reddit clone; Kiwi Farm, a hub known for co\u00f6rdinated online harassment; and X, which under the ownership of Elon Musk has loosened content-moderation policies and allowed the kind of conspiracy theories and graphic imagery that once thrived on 4chan. As Holt put it, \u201c4chan had essentially been outflanked to the right.\u201d<\/p>\n
What\u2019s undeniable is that 4chan helped form the content ecosystem as we know it. The kind of real-time one-upmanship that happens on X, TikTok, and video podcasts; the culture of \u201cowns,\u201d clapbacks, and online putdowns\u2014all of it crystallized on 4chan. The site demonstrated, before many people realized it, that the internet existed fundamentally in a Hobbesian state of nature, hosting a war of all against all. Cole Stryker, an editorial consultant in Los Angeles and the author of \u201cEpic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan\u2019s Army Conquered the Web<\/a>,\u201d from 2011, summed up the forum\u2019s influential attitude as \u201cnonstop playful misanthropy.\u201d 4chan played a role in the acceleration of digital culture, the onslaught of discourse in the form of a million multimedia particles. On 4chan, \u201cit was just as easy to share an image as it was to share words,\u201d Stryker told me, adding, \u201cNow everyone kind of has that capability to speak in that language.\u201d Today, a fluency in memes extends to the highest levels of authority. \u201cEven our President and our Vice-President are posters,\u201d Stryker said. The official White House account on X, in particular, has taken on a trolling aspect; one A.I.-generated image it posted in March, of the arrest of an alleged drug dealer in the anime style of Studio Ghibli<\/a>, resembled nothing more than a 4chan post in its nihilistic combination of implicit violence and absurdist humor. 4chan thrived when such edgelord content wasn\u2019t acceptable on more mainstream social-media channels; now it can be found most anywhere.<\/p>\n When 4chan came back online, a post<\/a> on a company blog explained that the site had been suffering from a lack of resources that had prevented the team from upgrading its servers. The damage from the hack \u201cwas catastrophic,\u201d the post said, but during the downtime the team had finally moved onto new, secured infrastructure. Though the functionality that allows users to upload new posts and images has remained down, and some features have not yet been restored, the blog post proclaimed, \u201c4chan is back. No other website can replace it, or this community.\u201d Even if 4chan could reclaim its position as a nucleus of online radicalization, the reality is that more and more extremism is happening in private digital niches. School shootings have been planned and broadcast<\/a> on the decentralized chat platform Discord. The brain poisoning of the internet is now perpetuated through closed groups on Telegram or Signal, which offer some encryption and automated erasure of messages. In Semafor<\/a>, the journalist Ben Smith recently broke the news of a collection of influential group chats involving Silicon Valley investors, media executives, politicians, and writers, including the MAGA-friendly venture capitalist Marc Andreessen<\/a>, the right-wing entrepreneur-turned-politician Vivek Ramaswamy<\/a>, and the anti-woke author Thomas Chatterton Williams. The chats had jokey names such as \u201cLast Men, apparently\u201d and hosted sniping conversations about workplace identity politics and the rise of China which provided test runs for those figures\u2019 publicly stated opinions. \u201cEvery group chat ends up being about memes and humor, and the goal of the group chat is to get as close to the line of being actually objectionable without tripping it,\u201d Andreessen told the podcaster Lex Fridman in February. 4chan could just as easily disappear again, but its sensibility endures in a grungy corner of our brains, a shitposting thread that can never be erased.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"4chan was where I learned that the internet could be bad. 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