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4Chan and Anonymous
Sunday Times, 30 January 2012
Epic Win for Anonymous by Cole Stryker
On July 5, 1993, The New Yorker published a cartoon by Peter Steiner showing a black dog sitting at a computer screen talking to a white dog with black spots sitting on the floor. “On the internet,” says the black dog, “nobody knows you’re a dog.”
Anonymity is a defining feature of the internet; people routinely hide behind pseudonyms. Many find this alarming, even dangerous. Cole Stryker seems to disagree. “I wrote this book,” he states, “because I wanted to set the record straight. Namelessness matters. Freedom matters.”
The subject of Epic Win for Anonymous, the website 4Chan.org, is certainly nameless and, in one sense, free. Basically it is an image-upload site with comment threads. It has numerous categories ranging from Japanese manga to toys and fashion. It was founded in 2003 by Christopher Poole, a 15-year-old student hiding behind the pseudonym “moot”. His real identity was exposed by The Wall Street Journal in 2008; he has now gone on to launch a new website called Canvas.
Originally, 4Chan was all about Japanese anime. Now it is about everything and it has about 10.2m visitors a month and hundreds of thousands of new posts a day. It changes all the time but a quick check on the category known as “random” — usually the most hair-raising — reveals a boy asking for advice about what to do when his sister offers him cannabis, a lot of teenage girls in states of undress moaning about being dumped, speculation about why Stephen Hawking is confined to a wheelchair if he is so smart, assorted gay shots featuring freakish penises and…well, this is a family newspaper.
Anonymity is a defining feature of the internet; people routinely hide behind pseudonyms.
These things come and go because nothing is saved, the median life of a comment thread being just under four minutes. If you have a desperately short attention span, 4Chan is for you.
Why should this matter? In part, because it has become one of the most effective generators of internet “memes”, ideas that spread rapidly. The word was coined by Richard Dawkins, who speculated that memes could be cultural units that behaved somewhat like genes, sustaining and replicating themselves, using human minds as their medium. A typical internet meme has been “lolcats”, cute pictures of cats with speech bubbles that make them speak in a curious pidgin English.
Stryker’s first contact with the site was in 2006 when he was sent a link to an anime character “doing something unspeakable involving at least three bodily fluids”. Further study led him to conclude that this was “the most fascinating place on the internet”.
Actually, the most fascinating place on the internet is the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy, but I can see what Stryker means, in the sense that 4Chan is the most direct expression of what is utterly novel about the internet. Never before have we been able to hide behind a mask of anonymity and expose our lowest, our most intimate concerns before an audience that may include the entire world.
Stylistically, this generates a kind of vast in-joke. Regulars on 4Chan seem to despise newcomers and anybody who is not in on the specialised language — “newfags”, they call them, as opposed to “oldfags”. “Fags” is a frequently used suffix which seems to have become detached from its American role as an offensive term for gays. Similarly “nigger” seems to be okay on the site. Indeed, the only thing that seems to be positively discouraged — and suppressed — is child pornography.
The in-joke is, of course, increasingly an out-joke because virtually everybody now gets the references. But things become much more serious when we consider one of 4Chan’s offspring — the hacker group Anonymous, which shares with WikiLeaks the determination to subvert and sabotage in the name of absolute freedom of information. It was born on 4Chan in 2003 as an attempt to become a global, anarchic network.
Anonymous has been spectacularly successful, notably in defending Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, by bringing down Mastercard and Visa when they refused to process payments to his site. Most recently they have hacked into the Nigerian government’s computers in support of the fuel-price protesters and this month they attacked the US Department of Justice in retaliation for the shutting down of the file-sharing site Megaupload.
A fabulously vain control freak, he seems to see himself as a lone hero whose privacies are uniquely excluded from the free flow of information
In this form, internet anonymity becomes a global, political and economic force. You may sympathise with some of Anonymous’s goals, but do not forget they are entirely unaccountable. They subscribe to an extreme anarchic ideology, not to anything resembling democracy. They are cyber-utopians, a creed whose shortcomings became most vividly apparent in the character of Assange. A fabulously vain control freak, he seems to see himself as a lone hero whose privacies are uniquely excluded from the free flow of information. He can steal your privacy but you can’t steal his. As ever, utopianism crashes into the brick wall of human personality and ambition.
And that is the point. For all Stryker’s strained justifications, 4Chan is a prison that is only called free. Real freedom is a way of restraining the worst excesses of human nature so that we may, indeed, be free to live, love and die in as much peace as we can manage.
But, abominably written though it is, Epic Win for Anonymous has, nonetheless, a certain anthropological interest, which is a smart way of saying if you really want to know about this stuff, it’s all pretty much here. But be warned, there’s nothing pretty about unfettered human nature.
One Response to “4Chan and Anonymous”
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1 February 2012 at 4:40 pm
It’s funny. 4Chan has done some good, especially lately as they have been mentioned in a Japanese manga’s popularity.
Also, it’s advised to not visit 4Chan without a plan. Some of the threads there aren’t all that bad.