EPIC WIN FOR ANONYMOUS (15 page)

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. This is what “they” call themselves. They are hackers on steroids, treating the web like a real-life video game. Sacking websites, invading Myspace accounts, disrupting innocent people’s lives—and if you fight back, watch out.

At this point, the ominous music begins.

“Destroy. Die. Attack.” Threats from a gang of computer hackers calling themselves Anonymous . . . They attack innocent people like an Internet hate machine.

“Hackers on Steroids” and “Internet Hate Machine” became instant memes. I can imagine the howls of laughter that met this sensationalized news report.

Those who fight back face death threats. Anonymous has even threatened to bomb sports stadiums. Their name comes from their secret websites. It requires anyone posting on the site to remain anonymous.

MySpace users are among their favorite targets. People like David. Anonymous hacked his site and plastered it with gay sex pictures. His girlfriend left him. They crashed his computer with a virus and used his own email to infect everyone on his friend list.

The report doesn’t mention 4chan by name, instead calling it “an underground hacker site linked to Anonymous.”

Anonymous gets big lulz from pulling random pranks. For example, messing with online children’s games like Habbo Hotel. The pranks are often anti-Semitic or racist, and always posted on the Internet. But truly epic lulz come from raids and invasion.

Their most notorious stunt? A bomb threat against seven football stadiums, which drew national media attention.

Cut to a woman drawing her curtains, presumably to keep out lurking members of Anonymous.

This mother’s also fighting Anonymous. Her whole family’s been under attack.

“They posted pictures of all of us.”

Anonymous has posted their home address and phone number.

“Pretty much said that ‘You’ve got all the information now. Do what you need to do. Go go go.’”

Death threats started pouring in.

“Your heart is breaking. You need to keep your family safe.”

She installed electronic security, a phone tracing system, and bought a dog. Then she started tracking down Anonymous members and brought in the FBI.

“Buy a dog” has become another legendary meme. It’s used as a catchall for mocking advice. If someone asks “What can I do to save money on my tax return?” on Yahoo Answers, some /b/tard will inevitably reply, “Maybe you should buy a dog.”

This news story set the tone for the media’s relationship with 4chan for years to come. It’s marked by a weak grasp of Anonymous’s structure, histrionic sound bites from supposed victims, and ham-fisted usage of 4chan lingo.

Slashdot founder Rob Malda posted the video, commenting, “Cringe as you watch this video explain terms like ‘LULZ’ and show inspirational poster parodies as evidence of the evils of this terrifying ‘Group’.” The thread received over five hundred comments, nearly all making fun of the report, which conflated comparatively harmless Anonymous trolling with actual domestic terrorism.

One anonymous Slashdot commenter nailed the sea change:

Seriously, /b/ is so mainstream now, it beggars belief. Here is a Slashdot article that mentions it in passing without so much as stopping to explain the term . . .

It’s a shame really. For a short while, /b/ was a great little Internet phenomenon. Anonymity, with all its baggage, and somehow no lawsuits. Now, though, the old guard is quickly moving on. Anybody who’s frequented the site can attest to this . . .

Despite my pessimistic tone, I predict that “Anonymous” will continue to grow. As more and more attention is given to these “secret websites,” more and more people are clamoring to become “hackers on steroids.” This new Anonymous will be larger, with more brute force at his call, but at the same time stupider, and less apt to create entertaining content. And paradoxically, he’ll be less anonymous than before. I see threads where a bunch of high-schoolers recognize each other based on posted photos and local memes.

A prescient analysis. Meanwhile, 4chan continued to grow as curious onlookers who caught the news coverage wandered onto /b/ to see what all the fuss was about.
Wired
ran a piece in 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 to 4chan), wrote “What the Hell Are 4chan, ED, Something Awful, and ‘b’?”—a report that remains the top source cited on 4chan’s Wikipedia entry.

And so, shortly after its fourth birthday, and now with more than fifty million posts, /b/ was flooded with new users like never before. Many veteran users bemoaned that the newfags were only interested in trolling, and cared not for meme creation and ultranerdy culture. This constant grumbling about the “cancer of newfaggotry” became a recurring theme on 4chan. You can barely scroll to the bottom of a page on /b/ without seeing someone complain about how newfags are ruining the board.

“Newfags can’t triforce” is a meme that began as a way for old users to assert their authority over the noobs, and more importantly it showed new users that they have a lot to learn before they can mess around on 4chan. The triforce is a bit of video game iconography, an ancient source of power from the
Legend of Zelda
franchise that looks like three triangles arranged in a triangular pattern. Oldfags will post the symbol along with “Newfags can’t triforce.” New users who try to copy-paste the symbol in their reply to prove their worth will learn that the pasted symbol appears misaligned. The only way to properly display the triforce is by using a complex set of Unicode characters.

From here, 4chan continued to garner news coverage for various trolls and hacks, culminating in the anti-Scientology movement Project Chanology, which made Anonymous, if not 4chan itself, a household name. (See Chapter 8.)

Meet Moot

On July 9, 2008, moot’s identity was revealed in a
Wall Street Journal
article, “Modest Web Site Is Behind a Bevy of Memes.” The article followed the template for 4chan exposés, starting off with a brief introduction to memes (e.g., Have you seen these lolcats things the kids are into?), easing into 4chan culture, highlighting Anonymous, and dropping a few quotes from eggheads and anons that demonstrate the surprising influence and size of the site. This was the first time moot, now unmasked as a handsome young man named Christopher Poole, showed his face in the media.

In the following three years, Project Chanology would peter out, with Anonymous moving on to other targets (everything from Paypal and Mastercard to Oprah and the Recording Industry Association of America). 4chan continued to churn out memes, and sites like Know Your Meme, Buzzfeed, Urlesque, and the Cheezburger Network rose up to serve as gateways between 4chan and the rest of the Internet. In 2010, Christopher Poole announced a new project called Canvas.

Shii has mixed feelings about 4chan today, and he hasn’t followed the site closely since 2005.

Before 4chan, posting online meant developing an Internet reputation, no matter what you wanted to say. I only saw this as a negative thing, because I could only see the downside of traditional forums; self-aggrandizing egos became famous while interesting voices were drowned out, and pointless and exhausting Internet drama was constant. Anything that would shake up that banality was interesting to me. But I don’t think I could have foreseen the shape it would take beyond mere entertainment, which 4chan certainly invented and improved tremendously.

Shii explains that 4chan has created both good and bad: Anonymous as social activist and Anonymous as stalker and harasser. Technology has served the group well in both directions, with members becoming skilled in initiating “life-ruining” attacks as well as impressive feats of social good. He says that both types of activity are now coordinated outside of 4chan in places like IRC and AnonOps. “4chan itself is not really innovative anymore,” he says.

Today moot’s busy with Canvas, though he occasionally gives an interview about the still-growing popularity of his first endeavor. In April 2011, moot gave an AMA on Reddit, where he engaged with the community in a Q&A session about Canvas and 4chan.

Someone asked him, “What do you think, ten years from now, the lasting cultural legacy of 4chan will be?”

He replied, “That it shaped ‘net and IRL culture in a way that few other communities/websites have.”

Quite an accomplishment for a 15-year-old kid.

Chapter 6

The Meme Industry

B
ECAUSE 4CHAN HAS no archives, a host of websites have sprung up around it in order to analyze and document meme culture. Some of these sites act almost like museums, adding sociological commentary and in-depth research in order to place memes in context. Others behave more like comedy sites that go straight for the lulz. As Internet culture becomes mainstream, even massive media organizations like CNN dedicate more space to viral content.

Consider the following two case studies in meme celebrity.

In the fall of 2002, a chubby Canadian student named Ghyslain Raza filmed himself wielding a golf ball retriever like a lightsaber in his high school film production studio. Providing his own sound effects, the poor kid spins and kicks his way through a clumsy martial arts routine. It was perhaps the most pitifully nerdy thing committed to film in a pre-YouTube era. Of course, one of his friends discovered the tape and passed it around. Eventually, one of his classmates uploaded a file called Jackass_starwars_funny.wmv. This was during the height of
Star Wars
prequel mania, and the video went on to become one of the most viral clips in history.

If the Star Wars Kid video had been uploaded today, the kid probably would have been featured on
Good Morning America
, done a parody video for the comedy site Funny or Die, guested on
Late Night with Jimmy Fallon
, and been given a low-budget reality TV show in which he judged martial arts routines across America. That’s because today, there’s a massive infrastructure built around the memesphere that’s driven by the media’s insatiable desire to be first to market with the next big viral craze. Being first can make the difference between hundreds of page views and millions.

But there was none of that around back then. Instead the clip was parodied on a few dozen TV shows against his will—just a humiliating experience for Raza all around. His family filed a $250,000 lawsuit against the families of the classmates who distributed the video, eventually settling out of court.

Two years later, a video of 19-year-old Gary Brolsma hilariously gesticulating and lip synching to a Romanian pop song went viral. The “Numa Numa” phenomenon brought immediate media attention. Brolsma appeared on
Good Morning America
, but soon decided to reject his designated fifteen minutes of fame, shunning all interviews. Brolsma reappeared in 2006 with his own website, merch, and a remix of the original song: a cash-in attempt that smartly coincided with the birth of YouTube, which allowed countless others to upload renditions of the legendary meme.

In a way, Star Wars Kid is an artifact of a bygone era. Meme fame is so easy to monetize now, it’s unlikely we’ll ever see meme celebrities of that magnitude shun fame the way Star Wars Kid did way back in 2002.

Encyclopedia Dramatica

For several years, Encyclopedia Dramatica was the only place to go to read about 4chan culture. It’s a wiki site that contains thousands of entries dedicated to all things drama. Like 4chan, it’s almost incomprehensible to outsiders, as every entry is written in an intensely mean-spirited tone, peppered with obscure Internet slang and populated by lolcows.

A lolcow is someone who offers lulz like a cow offers milk. People who just never learn, who post their hysterics on the web, who try to fight back against Anonymous and lose. Lolcows are people who play by the old rules, who smugly declare that they’re going to sue 4chan, or tearfully threaten to call the police.

Lolcows just don’t know when to give up, and Encyclopedia Dramatica made documenting lolcow behavior its mission. For example, here’s an excerpt from the entry on Asperger’s Syndrome:

Assburgers is a made-up disease, most common in overachieving middle-class families, because little Johnny is either a social outcast, or is just acting fucking retarded. The parents diagnose their child, and the “doctors” go along with and encourage it because of the money it generates. Fuckers. The truth is, the Assburgers diagnosis has become popular with parents because they need a good excuse as to why their “fucktard children are dumb faggots who will be dying alone.”

While each entry is intended to provide some informational content, it’s conveyed in such a way as to troll the unsuspecting reader and delight those who are in the know.

It surprised me to find that Encyclopedia Dramatica’s creator, Sherrod DeGrippo, has absolutely zero interest in 4chan.

Just so you aren’t shocked or disappointed . . . I am not a walking encyclopedia of memes. I don’t really follow Anonymous or 4chan or anything like that.

What? This woman runs a site that behaves as the definitive repository for 4chan culture, and is telling me that she could not care less about 4chan? As it turns out, she launched the site in order to chronicle the hilarious drama she saw on LiveJournal, the online diary/social network that predated the blog revolution. DeGrippo discovered LJ in 2000, when it was mostly “people posting pictures of their cats and detailing what they had for breakfast.”

DeGrippo quickly became fascinated by LJdrama, a community on the site that eventually got booted off, and later resurfaced with its own domain. An Urban Dictionary entry describes the site as “the high school cafeteria of the Internet.” DeGrippo and her cohorts posted reports of LJ gossip. Their coverage of the community acted as a Gawker or a TMZ for the LiveJournal community, and gained notoriety quickly.

The rise of LJdrama coincided with the rise of reality television and the blogging revolution, when regular folks began to garner headlines alongside Hollywood A-listers and pop stars. It was a huge shift in the nature of celebrity and tabloid culture. LiveJournal users soon learned that if they stirred up drama on their journals, they could build bigger fanbases. Some went as far as to threaten suicide or document their mental imbalances.

People were accessible and it was bidirectional. Voyeurs and exhibitionists were able to interact in a way that was normalized. That’s why I started ED. It was mostly just personalities that were just so nuts and fascinating.

Technology gave us an environment in which people are empowered to project their dysfunction to millions of viewers. DeGrippo found this environment intoxicating. The lolcow who started it all was mediacrat, aka Joshua Williams, a student at the University of Washington, Seattle.

In 2002, Williams began a relationship with another LJ user, Andrewpants. The relationship soured, and drama ensued. When LJdrama documented Williams’s online histrionics, he threatened to sue. He even went so far as to drive to Portland, Oregon, to talk to LiveJournal’s abuse team about the matter. He claimed that he underwent online harassment when unflattering pictures of him were posted online.

Williams contacted a local TV news station to report the harassment. He threatened to press charges and get restraining orders. The drama resounded throughout the Internet until July 19, 2002, when Williams updated his LiveJournal account for the last time, leaving the controversy behind. Encyclopedia Dramatica was born in the wake of this scandal. According to DeGrippo, there were a lot of people on LiveJournal faking pregnancies, diseases, and relationships to get attention. People had become fascinated with these lolcows in the same way they used to obsess over the antics of Elizabeth Taylor or fictional drama like
Dallas
’s “Who shot JR?” phenomenon. “It turns regular people into paparazzi,” says DeGrippo.

She defines an lolcow as “someone who just doesn’t know when to stop. They just won’t wise up and stop posting pictures of themselves naked, or [writing] insane posts, or whatever. They just keep fanning the flames of the fire they claim to hate.” She considers Courtney Love to be a prominent celebrity lolcow, given her perpetual legal trouble, drug addiction, public mental instability, and seemingly insatiable lust for the limelight. A more recent example would be Charlie Sheen, whose recent manic downward spiral has been documented in real time via streaming video, live performances, and Twitter feeds throughout 2011.

“You want to just grab them and be like, ‘Look! Just STOP it! For your own good!’” says DeGrippo, but of course there is a certain voyeuristic pleasure in rubbernecking at the celebrity train wreck. And the Internet offers much more delicious schadenfreude than Hollywood does. But TV is catching up.

DeGrippo is really into reality TV gossip, especially the various iterations of the
Real Housewives
franchise, which is basically built around lolcows. But the experience of enjoying the shows doesn’t stop when the credits roll. In fact, for DeGrippo, the real fun begins the following morning, when Gawker’s Richard Lawson posts snarky commentary of the previous night’s drama. The mayhem continues in the comments following the article.

Producers recognize this phenomenon, and they facilitate it with crazier, more dramatic content. Because now Demi Lovato isn’t just competing with Miley Cyrus for your attention; she’s competing with Jessi Slaughter, and Kiki Kannibal (teen webcam microcelebs who were recently targeted by trolls). This forces Hollywood celebs to make themselves more accessible, offering the public their illicit cell phone photos, for instance. Celebrities used to be unattainable demigods, and now we’re watching them fart and philander on YouTube.

According to DeGrippo, LiveJournal became such fertile ground for drama because it was particularly open, making it easy for noobs to spew their dysfunction into the world. It provided an early example of the “follow” function called “friendslist,” which created a chronological feed for users to browse their favorite LJ personalities. This functionality would come to define social blogging platforms like Twitter and Tumblr years later. It also included a clever 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, how is it that Encyclopedia Dramatica is so inextricably linked to 4chan rather than to LiveJournal? DeGrippo claims she created ED to house one article about LiveJournal, and completely lost interest after that.

I think this is something that many 4chan users wring their hands and tear their hair about. I still use LJ every day. Ha! I have never been a 4chan user, so I just assumed these people were seeing stuff on the Internet. As long as something wasn’t submitted as illegal or an abuse complaint, I didn’t even see it. Wikis are something that you either closely, closely monitor and manage, or you just let it go.

And let it go she did, allowing Encyclopedia Dramatica to mutate into a museum of 4chan-related lulz and drama. It also acts as a troll hall of fame.

In 2006, Seattle-area network administrator Jason Fortuny, who described himself as “a normal person who does insane things on the Internet,” became an Encyclopedia Dramatica microceleb when he posed as a woman seeking a partner for some rough sex in the “Casual
Encounters” section of the Seattle Craigslist personals. Fortuny then posted each response, many of which included personal and contact information, to Encyclopedia Dramatica, calling it the Craigslist Experiment. A few respondents were fired when companies caught wind of the information dump. This scandal gave ED its first taste of mainstream media attention. Fortuny was required to pay one victim $74,252.56 in damages, attorney fees, and costs.

When the focus of Encyclopedia Dramatica shifted away from LiveJournal, that’s when DeGrippo stopped having fun. She kept paying for server space because she thought maybe it might turn back around to focus on lighthearted, sarcastic LJ drama again, rather than the mean-spirited trolling of 4chan.

Encyclopedia Dramatica never turned a profit. Like 4chan, it had just too much vile content to turn the heads of any serious advertisers. DeGrippo never set out to make millions, and never used the popularity of the site to further any personal agenda. Despite her fascination with Internet celebrity, she prefers to keep her identity under wraps, so much so that I had no idea she was a woman in her 40s when I was first able to track her down. She’s spoken to the press twice in the last seven years.

DeGrippo loved the Internet because of the interesting personalities she found there, ever since she discovered BBSes at age 13 in the back of
Thrasher
, a skateboarding themed counterculture rag. Her dad was a “mega hard-core smarty type,” who taught her basic computing. But she wasn’t a shut-in. She was also on homecoming court and president of several clubs in high school.

Her experience with BBSes and IRC was controlled chaos. She claims that people were generally friendly and wanted to collaborate, but Internet users back then were much more equipped to fight back against antisocial behavior, since the very fact that they were on the Internet at the time meant that they knew a thing or two about the technology. Plus the online experience was slow. “Being a dick took forever, so why bother?” she says.

DeGrippo always suspected the Internet would go mainstream, but not exactly the way it has.

Technology is cheap and ubiquitous now. It’s just assumed. I used to think that everyone would be programming C and writing their own operating systems. File systems would be taught in middle school, kids would all be kernel committers.