Many of the 4chan users who called me mid-Batalatode Attack left messages. I listened to them all. A pattern quickly emerged: Young men, clearly nervous to leave a message, are trying to disturb a stranger, appearing, its hell. Those voice mails have never left me in 15 years that I have covered 4chan as a journalist.
I had a front ro seat as those sneaky men had separated violent, internet underbels. The engine beating the reactionary hatred raised everything and everyone was the only language that its users knew how to speak. I traveled to the world in the 2010s, detecting the impact of 4chan on global democracy. I followed it to France, Germany, Japan and Brazil, as the users of 4chan became increasingly convinced that they could take the planet to the planet through racist memes, far-flung populistism and cyberbuling. And, in a way, they did. But the 4chan culture’s omnipresent was a strange pai -paired victory for the site.
Colines like me closely followed the rise of 4chan of 4chan from internet backwater to the informal promotional organ of Trump administration in the 2010s. As he sees it, once Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, in fact 4chan had no meaning. Why hide behind oblivion if a billionaire allows you to post the same extreme material under your real name, and even pays you for it?
,[4chan’s] The user base simply moved to a large ballpark and immediately began to influence American life and policy, “Collins says.” Twitter 4 became a chain, then 4chanified Twitter became the United States Government. Its utility as a gunpowder dump in the culture war was reduced when they were saying things that you now heard on Twitter every day, then six months later out of the mouth of an administration officer. ,
But understanding how a true internet from the house of 4chan Cat Mems left from the house of Bogman, needs an understanding of how the site actually works. Its characteristics were often ignored among all conversations about the political influence of the site, but I argue that they were equally, if they were not more important.
The 4chan was founded by Christopher “Moot” Pule when he was just 15 years old. A regular user on a slightly less chaotic comedy site, some terrible, Pole created a spin-off site for a message board, called “Anime Death Tental Rape Prostitute”. Poole was a fan of Japanese Messages Board 2 Chan, or Futaba Channel, and wanted to give his version to Western Anime fans, so he poorly translated the site code, and promoted his new site, 4chan to some terrible anime community. Many main features were depicted in this process.
4chan users were anonymous, threads were not permanent and “404” time or “404” after the inaction period, and dozens of sub-boards you could post. That unique combination of almanac, oblivion, and organized chaos proved to be a powerful mixture, immediately creating a race-to-the-boatum gutter culture unlike anything on the web. The dark complex point of techno-uutopianism that manufactures the Internet. You were none on 4chan and nothing that you did until it was so shocking, so replicated, so disgusting that someone else saw and decided to screenshot it before disappearing in digital ether.
