Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Locked thread
Rocko Bonaparte
Mar 12, 2002

Every day is Friday!
My wife caught this on Twitter and found it to, well, be a poor summary of what all went down. Or rather, it is insufficient to describe the human (mis)behavior that has gotten us to right here, right now. She commented on it and started to get questions from, well, serious people.

People want to know what the hell happened over a decade ago that got the world to alt-right Internet troll Pepe :barf:.

So here's part of the article. In particular, the part at the beginning about the Something Awful/4chan thing.

"Some dude on the Internet published: posted:

1. Born from Something Awful
Around 2005 or so a strange link started showing up in my old webcomic’s referral logs. This new site I didn’t understand. It was a bulletin board, but its system of navigation was opaque. Counter intuitively, you had to hit “reply” to read a thread. Moreover, the content was bizarre nonsense.

The site, if you hadn’t guessed, was 4chan.org. It was an offshoot of a different message board which I also knew from my referral logs, “Something Awful”, at the time, an online community of a few hundred nerds who liked comics, video games, and well, nerds things. But unlike boards with similar content, Something Awful skewed toward dark jokes. I had an account at Something Awful, which I used sometimes to post in threads about my comic.

4chan had been created by a 15 year old Something Awful user named Christopher Poole (whose 4chan mod name was “m00t”). Poole had adapted a type of Japanese bulletin board software which was difficult to understand at first, but once learned, was far more fun to post in than the traditional American format used by S.A., as a result the site became popular very quickly.

These days, 4chan appears in the news almost weekly. This past week, there were riots at Berkeley in the wake of the scheduled lecture by their most prominent supporter, Milo Yiannopoulos. The week before that neo-Nazi Richard Spencer pointed to his 4chan inspired Pepe the Frog pin, about to explain the significance when an anti-fascist protester punched him in the face. The week before that, 4chan claimed (falsely) it had fabricated the so called Trump “Kompromat”. And the week before that, in the wake of the fire at Ghost Ship, 4chan decided to make war on “liberal safe spaces” and DIY venues across the country.

How did we get here? What is 4chan exactly? And how did a website about anime become the avant garde of the far right? Mixed up with fascist movements, international intrigue, and Trump iconography? How do we interpret it all?
At the very beginning, 4chan met once a year in only one place in the world: Baltimore, Maryland at the anime convention, Otakon. As a nerdy teen growing up in Baltimore in the 90s, I had wandered into Otakon much like I had later wandered into 4chan, just when it was starting. I also attended Otakon in the mid-aughts when 4chan met there, likewise to promote my webcomic.

As someone who has witnessed 4chan grow from a group of adolescent boys who could fit into a single room at my local anime convention to a worldwide coalition of right wing extremists (which is still somehow also a message board about anime), I feel I have some obligation to explain.

This essay is an attempt to untangle the threads of 4chan and the far right.

Now there is where I'd say some stuff to all the young whippersnappers, but I have seen much better details of things from others on here than I ever saw. Hell, I vaguely recall 4chan starting around 2005, when it really started in 2003. God drat! So I'm more asking than telling to figure out what the evolution was.

My executive's-abridged understanding of all this is:
1. Once upon a time, Something Awful really did have lots and lots of assholes. We like to joke, but yes, real assholes. Forum invasions were a sanctioned event that would leak over into doxxing. It was considered funny. Anybody who called it out was told, "it's called Something Awful. What did you expect?"
2. During that time, FYAD was it's own wonderful world of animated hello.jpgs among other things. Some (apparently very left-winging) people would blow steam by assuming personas of angry racist assholes. Some other people saw this, loved the hate, but didn't get the joke. I wouldn't have been able to tell the difference at the time, but some people within D&D and subforums seem to know a lot more about individual users and what they do now.
3. ADTRW was scaring the rest of the site with pictures of 40-story tall anime women shooting lasers out of their vaginas--among other things. Actually, IIRC posting anime torrents--and any files and porn for that matter--was getting shut down.
4. 4chan shows up. It's like that crazy Japanese 2chan message board. You can post all your torrents and laser vagina waifus in there. The assholes that were getting banned from SA for being actually racist had a place to go to save :10bux:, and when invading and doxxing fell out of vogue, the assholes found their new home.

I guess it just happened to be around 2005 when there was a more tangible schism, although no particular event to which to point that I know about. The demographic split had happened. Although people will still peruse both forums, I think by the late 2000s that they definitely had different crowds, and different histories.

This isn't to say that SA is now some benign place of high moral standing or anything.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

deadgoon
Dec 4, 2014

by FactsAreUseless
cant wait for the chapter on lf and how it's rebirth as cspam lead to the fall of the amerikkkan ampire

SpiderHyphenMan
Apr 1, 2010

by Fluffdaddy
From later in the article

quote:

Also like adolescent boys, 4chan users were deeply sensitive and guarded. They disguised their own sensitivity (namely, their fear that they would be, “forever alone”) by extreme insensitivity. The rules, like everything else, were always half in jest. Everything had to be a done with at least a twinkle of winking irony. This was an escape route, a way of never having to admit to your peers that you were in fact expressing something from your heart, in other words — that you were indeed vulnerable. No matter what a user did or said, he could always say it was “for the lulz” (lols). Like (by comparison the tame and sophisticated precursor) “Something Awful” board that spawned it, 4chan defined itself by being insensitive to suffering in that way only people who have never really suffered can — that is to say, young people, mostly young men, protected by a cloak of anonymity. The accepted standard was a sort of libertarian “free speech” banner, in which isolated man-boys asserted their right to do or say anything no matter someone else’s feelings. This meant generally posting pornography, swastikas, racial slurs, and content that reveled in harm to other people.
This seems fair to me.

Tales of Woe
Dec 18, 2004

i thought SA and 4chan had drifted pretty far apart already even before 4chan transformed from weeaboo imageboard into teen nazi breeding ground

Mariana Horchata
Jun 30, 2008

College Slice
take my advice and make it an oral history instead

Yossarian-22
Oct 26, 2014

Mariana Horchata posted:

take my advice and make it an oral history instead

I vote for Martin Sheen

Darkman Fanpage
Jul 4, 2012
so?

Lindsey O. Graham
Dec 31, 2016

"We're not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term."

- The Chief
ok but i'm hearing 4 chan is anti trump now, what's that about?

Grand Prize Winner
Feb 19, 2007


SpiderHyphenMan posted:

From later in the article

This seems fair to me.

since the gently caress when have we been tame and sophisticated

Doorknob Slobber
Sep 10, 2006

by Fluffdaddy
wasn't part of it the whole cracking down on porn and file sharing? especially porn that wasn't very legal?

Pener Kropoopkin
Jan 30, 2013

History should remember us as monsters

Fallen Hamprince
Nov 12, 2016

Doorknob Slobber posted:

wasn't part of it the whole cracking down on porn and file sharing? especially porn that wasn't very legal?

i think the ADTRW pedo purge postdates the founding of 4chan

ironically ADTRW is apparently the least pedo-infested anime forum on the internet because it used to be full of them until lowtax banned them all.

lowtax shoulda looked a little harder at TVIV while he was at it lol

Grand Prize Winner
Feb 19, 2007


Pener Kropoopkin posted:

History should remember us as monsters

we should write the guy and let him know that SA is now a not-very-secret NAMBLA front group

Noun Verber
Oct 12, 2006

Cool party, guys.
Remember helldump? Good times.

Grondoth
Feb 18, 2011
We're the eldar to 4chan's dark eldar

Fallen Hamprince
Nov 12, 2016

Noun Verber posted:

Remember helldump? Good times.

i think the gamergate lady was a helldumper at one point

all kinds of shameful things crawl from something awful

BexGu
Jan 9, 2004

This fucking day....

Fallen Hamprince posted:

i think the gamergate lady was a helldumper at one point

all kinds of shameful things crawl from something awful

Yepppppppp.

Lowtax is the disappointed drunk dad of some of the Internet worst creations.

1994 Toyota Celica
Sep 11, 2008

by Nyc_Tattoo

Grondoth posted:

We're the eldar to 4chan's dark eldar

d&d's arrogance is matched only by their wordcount

The REAL Goobusters
Apr 25, 2008
Hahahaha wow

Can't wait for the documentary about this poo poo is made

Hodgepodge
Jan 29, 2006
Probation
Can't post for 272 days!

zeal posted:

d&d's arrogance is matched only by their wordcount

That would make c-spam Eldar corsairs.

Checks out.

Slow-Scan Shep
Jul 11, 2001

The chanology -> "Anonymous" as movement -> "hacktivism" -> Occupy pipeline isn't so much as mentioned, I see.

StashAugustine
Mar 24, 2013

Do not trust in hope- it will betray you! Only faith and hatred sustain.

papa_november posted:

The chanology -> "Anonymous" as movement -> "hacktivism" -> Occupy pipeline isn't so much as mentioned, I see.

it's a pretty big part of the article???

succ
Nov 11, 2016

by Cyrano4747
I always thought the internet was drifting further and further left. But after this election I have no idea what to think. 4chan, alt-right Twitter, and all of the anti-academic/alt-right popular Youtubers shot that theory down.

Slow-Scan Shep
Jul 11, 2001

StashAugustine posted:

it's a pretty big part of the article???
gently caress oops

it does skip over some things, such as the whole "sabu" mess, but it's an earnest effort

Slow-Scan Shep has issued a correction as of 11:43 on Feb 20, 2017

The Brown Menace
Dec 24, 2010

Now comes in all colors.


this part is severely good

quote:

In the third presidential debate, Hillary evoked her conservative father as a way of appealing to the electorate, “My father was a small-businessman.” she said. “He worked really hard… And so what I believe is the more we can do the middle class, the more we can invest in you…”

No one noted how wildly outdated Clinton’s picture of the average voter was (her father, a suburban business man in the 50s) because we are used to every politician holding up the same faded 65 year old snapshot anytime he or she regards the American electorate. Just like how images of Christmas on Coke bottles and catalogs are forever stuck in the 30s and 40s, so we expect politics to be eternally frozen in the 1950s. That is to say, as a nation still (somehow!) defined by its baby boomers, we understand this era as the baseline for understanding ourselves, considering it, “where we are from”.

But what does the American electorate look like if we put down the snapshot? Peel away how we perceive ourselves from what we actually are? How has that image of a 1950s business man who owns his own home in the suburbs changed after decades of declines in wages, middle classdom, and home ownership?

To younger generations who never had such jobs, who had only the mythology of such jobs (rather a whimsical snapshot of the 1950s frozen in time by America’s ideology) this part of the narrative is clear. America, and perhaps existence itself is a cascade of empty promises and advertisements — that is to say, fantasy worlds, expectations that will never be realized “IRL”, but perhaps consumed briefly in small snatches of commodified pleasure.

Thus these Trump supporters hold a different sort of ideology, not one of “when will my horse come in”, but a trolling self-effacing, “I know my horse will never come in”. That is to say, younger Trump supporters know they are handing their money to someone who will never place their bets — only his own — because, after all, it’s plain as day there was never any other option.
In this sense, Trump’s incompetent, variable, and ridiculous behavior is the central pillar upon which his younger support rests.

Such an idea — one of utter contemptuous despair — is embodied in one image more than any other, one storied personage who has become a(n) hero to millions, the voice of a generation.

I am speaking, of course, of Pepe the Frog.

but also lol pepe

Red Dad Redemption
Sep 29, 2007

deadgoon posted:

cant wait for the chapter on lf and how it's rebirth as cspam lead to the fall of the amerikkkan ampire

:same:

tadashi
Feb 20, 2006

Tales of Woe posted:

i thought SA and 4chan had drifted pretty far apart already even before 4chan transformed from weeaboo imageboard into teen nazi breeding ground

I thought the whole reason 4chan came into existence is because Something Awful was ban-happy but allowed you to be an rear end in a top hat, to an extent, as long as it was funny. 4chan, on the other hand, is full of posters with no sense of humor and incredibly thin skinned about their rights to post terrible poo poo with impunity.

rudatron
May 31, 2011

by Fluffdaddy
The real reason is because of image embedding/hosting

breaklaw
May 12, 2008
SA was so much better back then

Fidel Castronaut
Dec 25, 2004

Houston, we're Havana problem.

Rocko Bonaparte posted:

things were typed here

I like the art for Friday and the game too so your av is v cool to me. :)

OWLS!
Sep 17, 2009

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

What do you think this is, something sensetive?

Tunicate
May 15, 2012

https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2014/06/getting-serious-about-collecting-and-preserving-digital-culture/

Remember that the library of congress is archiving SA

rudatron
May 31, 2011

by Fluffdaddy
some things aren't worth preserving

Brother Friendship
Jul 12, 2013

deadgoon posted:

cant wait for the chapter on lf and how it's rebirth as cspam lead to the fall of the amerikkkan ampire

dk2m
May 6, 2009
irony and deconstruction, the ideas that you can mock supposed universal values like what racism is or the role of a modern woman is more central to the culture of 4chan than sa imo, which led to the schism. posting outright nazi things here and not getting banned is highly dependent on context, but there it's just a thing you do because we live in an absurd world

Plutonis
Mar 25, 2011

It's fairly win that the liberals are still trying to peg trump's win to /pol/ which probably has 5k posters maximum.

jarofpiss
May 16, 2009

lf will be vindicated as the revival of the left in our future communist history books

Baku
Aug 20, 2005

by Fluffdaddy

Plutonis posted:

It's fairly win that the liberals are still trying to peg trump's win to /pol/ which probably has 5k posters maximum.

the thing pol is is a reflection of more widespread feelings among american men under 40 tho

Plutonis
Mar 25, 2011

wizard on a water slide posted:

the thing pol is is a reflection of more widespread feelings among american men under 40 tho

A lot of it can be blamed on late capitalism but hey better pick up the loving cartoon frog as a scapegoat.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Pener Kropoopkin
Jan 30, 2013

The Brown Menace posted:

this part is severely good


but also lol pepe

Business owning suburban baby boomers also voted overwhelmingly for Trump, lmao.

  • Locked thread