55 replies
9h19m
Part of me likes all the insanity with the internet back then, with mixed feelings.
I probably got computer skills wasting time on YTMND for one reason or another.
I 100% attribute 4chan's b for inspiring me to program. Their raids inspired me to learn programming when I was a teenager.
But... I see that the alt-right came out of 4chan and the previously funny memes were no longer funny memes but serious accusations.
Maybe its basic phenomenology, but I wish I could see these websites as I once did, funny and edgy. Today I feel like there was something a bit darker that corrupted many users.
I think you give too much agency to 4chan. It's just a imageboard - an internet forum - that happened to have some subforums related to alt-right. Maybe it had (has) a bad influence on people, but it's hundred times smaller than Facebook, Twitter or Reddit. To say it has single handedly started a movement is a huge stretch.
It’s more likely that it was just one of the places that movement coalesced. Others include Reddit before they ban hammered a lot of that stuff, Twitter, and Telegram.
As for the origin of the movement I remember saying exactly this way back in 2008 after the bank bailouts:
(Paraphrasing a bit)
“People don’t realize how much trust has been lost. People want pitchforks. I don’t think they care whether the far left or the far right is handing them out.”
The far left did hand out a few, but they tended to sublimate all their anger into race and minority grievances. Their pitchforks didn’t have enough mass appeal, especially to the white working class killing themselves with opiates.
The right handed out more classical pitchforks with more mass appeal. They went for the old timey scapegoats of immigrant and minority hate and good old fashioned antisemitism (thinly veiled).
They were also the only ones who started talking about “elites.” I remember reading an actual quote on Reddit back then that stuck with me: “if we can’t destroy the financial industry from the left we’ll do it from the right.”
Americans have a short memory. We’ve already forgotten the Bush administration and how it burned a century of goodwill toward our country and a trillion dollars or two in Iraq. We’ve already forgotten how banks that imploded were rescued in such a way as to give the executives leading them a bonus and a promotion for imploding them. (The blame for that goes to both Bush and Obama for doing nothing to intervene.)
So now people are like “where did all this populist rage come from?” They blame crap like gamergate and 4chan when those were just small lightning rods for niche communities. The USA around the turn of that decade was a pile of oily rags waiting for a source of ignition.
The alt right and Trump just saw an opportunity. They didn’t create it, nor did 4chan.
Yep, and I think that's why so many folks jumped from Bernie to Trump during/after the primaries. They couldn't be given a fair chance for peaceful change so they went for the other change option.
I wish I’d gone around the Internet screen shotting comments from Reddit and Twitter from 2008 until 2016 so future historians could understand. A lot of this stuff got purged.
Some others I remember (paraphrasing):
“I can’t throw a Molotov cocktail into the White House but I can throw a Trump.”
“I hope Trump does as much damage as possible.”
“When Trump said he’d do something about outsourcing I decided I’d die for this man. I don’t care what else he does. He can eat a baby on live TV.” (This was a self described former union Democrat from Michigan.)
The left almost gets it. “A riot is the voice of the disenfranchised.” They just need to understand that for many, especially in 2016, Trump was a riot. They were electing him to do harm, explicitly.
In some ways America’s short memory is a strength. It keeps us from getting caught up in stupid ancient conflicts like the Middle East. America tends to at least mostly move on. But it also means we walk around in this perpetual fugue state not understanding why anything is happening.
If you don’t know US history from 2001 until 2008 you can’t understand what’s happened since.
I recently heard that depressed people are unable to habituate to things. I think I might be very depressed because I was never able to accept the increasing inequality, pointless wars against "terror" (how do you ever win a war against an emotion/concept?), surveillance/ad-driven capitalism, and environmental degradation. I feel like I'm the one taking crazy pills.
Defining crazy is a weird thing. Most people don't hear voices in their head (unless its chalked up to a religious experience), so hearing voices is on the list of things that make one "crazy."
If its all about what is normal, actually caring about the things you mentioned are indeed crazy. Growing your own food, or even knowing where your food comes from, is then also crazy. Ironically, not taking any prescription pills is also on the list of taking crazy pills, as I think the last stat I saw was that something like 70% of Americans are on at least one prescription drug and a little over 50% are on two or more.
Normal today is a very strange thing, in my opinion.
Ironically, not taking any prescription pills is also on the list of taking crazy pills, as I think the last stat I saw was that something like 70% of Americans are on at least one prescription drug
Psychological drugs specifically? I imagine the bulk of these are people managing their cholesterol or something.
Oh no I may have phrased that poorly. I used "crazy pills" there in reference to the GP comment, definitely not as a reference to psych medications.
I don't have the stats handy though I do remember psych meds being a high proportion of those on prescription drugs.
The even more interesting/concerning (IMO) related stat is that the US military recently released a report that 77% (going off memory here, if that's not exact it was very close) of 18-24 year olds wouldn't be deemed fit for service and a majority of that was related to psych med prescriptions. Nothing wrong at all with taking those meds when they are needed, just an insight into how many younger people couldn't enlist due only to that rule.
Years ago, someone on HN made a comment to the effect of, "I feel less and less a part of this world. Like the world is just moving away from me."
I understood the sentiment perfectly. And, this was before the madness of the last 9 years or so.
Funny thing is it seems that a large number (perhaps the majority) of people feel this way, yet powerless to do anything about it. I think the things you mentioned represent a very short list of the total dysfunction to which people of conscience cannot (and probably should not) habituate. And, I wonder if it's really the sense of powerlessness in the face of these things that is actually the depressing bit.
Of course it seems that the sentiment has been weaponized, with a third to half of the U.S. (and some significant portion of other countries), now incited to destroy it all, including their fellow citizens whom they have been convinced are part of the problem.
While this superficially sates their disaffectedness by channeling it into a kind of frenzied bloodlust, their behavior further demoralizes those who consequently feel more powerless in a world that is now more hostile and even less sensible.
Yeah. The real reason America doesn't get caught up in stupid ancient conflicts is two fold:
1. The conflicts in the Middle East aren't ancient. They originate in the 19th Century at the earliest. 2. When you're the world's current most powerful global empire, you have the privilege of forgetting. Chile can't forget. Cambodia can't forget. Nicaragua can't forget. Etc.
The MLK quote is "a riot is the language of the unheard", and the full context is rich:
The last point in particular has proven quite prescient to our current moment.
I've tried to square the racial-justice-amorality of the "someone fck sht up, I don't care who" crowd with the racist sources of many of their grievances (as someone who can't afford such extravagant feelings). The roots of so many of our issues with abuse of the downtrodden, the impunity of the elite, the distrust of populist-minded institutions, the misplaced trust in monsters who whisper sweet words, etc., come from our history of racialized classism.
I don't know how you convey to such people how these problems don't get solved without rectifying the racist underpinnings - that "that's not okay" only gets teeth when "that's okay because it only happens to 'those' people" is no longer accepted. Only then do you see a substantial decrease in face-eating leopards.
A huge problem is that a lot of poor white folks see attempts to rectify racial or other injustices as a slap in the face, because they see themselves (perhaps correctly) as among the downtrodden. It turns into a battle of comparing wounds. Is a poor white person with no health care and no job prospects living in a dying town better or worse off than an urban black kid who grew up with a broken family in a bad neighborhood surrounded by crime? Are either of these better or worse off than a gay or trans person who's been bullied and ostracized by their community, or a battered wife whose community sides with her abuser, or a woman who was raped and forced to bear the child?
It's very easy for populist demagogue con artists to pit these groups against each other or focus all these groups' anger at one third party scapegoat ("the Jews," "the rich," or some foreign enemy are popular choices) in order to gain power.
A big problem is that real solutions to these problems don't fit nicely into 140 characters. They require that people stop and take the time to understand one another and the historical forces that created their situations, empathize with one another, and find win/win solutions. Populist demagoguery, scapegoating, and totalitarian schemes do fit neatly into sound bites, so they're easier to spread especially in an era of collapsing attention spans.
Another issue is that class-based inter-racial cooperation was actively persecuted and propgagandized against by the government. Fred Hampton was an American activist who was building a coalition across racial divides. The FBI launched an entire political campaign to sow dissent against him specifically and, when that wasn't working, the police shot him in his bed.
I mean from looking back as a non participant in either (way too young to even care), it seems like occupy Wallstreet and the alt right pretty much pretty much had a similar message, some people have used money and power to make the US far more unbalanced and it's grinding people down. So 2008 seems a good benchmark
The anger was palpable back then. The MSM swept it under the rug and replaced it with BLM.
Being anti globalism was THE left wing thing back then. Trump sounds more like Michael Moore / Noam Chomsky than anything approaching right wing. He’s classic 90s left wing, especially the taking the jobs thing, that’s Michael Moore to a T.
Before BLM, OWS was hamstrung by the introduction of the Progressive Stack, ensuring that they could not effectively organize or even remain coherent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_stack
FWIW, the book The Identity Trap by Yasha Mounk attributes the popularisation of what it calls the Identity Synthesis to social media such as Tumblr, then later Reddit, Twitter, Instagram; and web sites such as Thought Catalog, later Jezebel, xoJane, Rookie Mag, and the Daily Dot, then everydayfeminism.com, Salon, Vox.
I think it's conceivable that, while these ideas on the left and right later entered all social media and even mainstream media, they originated on Tumblr and 4chan, respectively. I wonder whether one could quantify/measure it somehow.
As someone who was exposed to 4chan at far too young of an age, I don't buy this. There's no political philisophy happening on /pol/, nor has there ever been. Granted, I avoided that board like the plague, but cursory glances never showed me any novel ideas being formulated. Even if there is real conversation of various political ideologies, it's drowned out by a sea of kids who think it's cool to say the N word online.
4chan is unique because of its combination of scale, relative lack of moderation, and relatively high anonymity. By nature, it's a place where political radicals would be able to shitpost freely en masse. 4chan was absolutely a vehicle for platforming radical politics, but the word "shitpost" is key - the average discourse on 4chan isn't at a level where ideological formulation can happen at a meaningful scale.
Memes are the only exception. 4chan memes have, on multiple occasions, turned into widely-known (and sometimes widely-misunderstood) political imagery. That imagery routinely has no clear symbolism whatsoever, and is assigned all kinds of wacky meanings depending on you ask... which is what you'd expect from 4chan, I guess.
It's absolutely baffling to me that despite the sheer amount of garbage, people still choose to post non-garbage content there at all. You sort through a hundred neo-nazi and race-baiting posts and then you find news that happened less than thirty seconds ago and won't be on CNN for two hours. I wish these "insiders" would find a better place share their information.
There is no voting system by which to gauge one's popularity. There is no profile or personal brand to be crafted. There is no follower count to build. Post ranking is most-recent-reply first, and nothing more.
This model attracts all manner of idiocy and hatred, and it's much too easy for one provocateur to hijack the system. The result is that the site requires several containment zones like /b/ and /pol/.
However, the upshot of 4chan (or any imageboard, really) is the total lack of narcissistic incentive. If you stick to blue boards, consciously avoid the containment zones, and you ignore the provocateurs (big IFs, I know), 4chan hosts some remarkably eclectic discussion of the arts, science, and entertainment. It's really good at elevating things that are thought-provoking or avant garde, if only within the bounds of a polarizing and inaccessible platform.
It's the very fact that it's unmoderated that it can be unfiltered.
If you happen to get footage of a "happening" and post it on 4chan, people will notice (and call you various slurs).
If you post it anywhere else it's liable to be deleted, or worse, ignored.
Agreed, but to be fair, /pol/ was created with the officially stated goal of acting as a containment board. And tbh, that’s exactly what it still is to this day.
4chan is the infinite racists on infinite typewriters analogy; that said, some ideas converge and crystallize and escape out of the shitposts. Greentext screenshots and images that are distributed outside of the cesspool and get mainstream appeal though e.g. Reddit.
Survivorship bias, evolutionary somethings, and curation help the shit escape 4chan's confines. I can probably word that more eloquently when my brain isn't fried.
I would posit that the proportion of "originated from 4chan" notes on knowyourmeme.com are an indicator of its outsized influence.
I wouldn't bet much on KYM's provenance research. Memes spread so far so fast on the information superhighway, those that started on some Korean photography forum or Russian anime newsgroup, you'd never know if you weren't there ... or know where to look. KYM often cites 4chan because it's popular, in English, and well-archived (ironic indeed) and KYM editors will take the earliest hit from the third-party archives as provenience, when the archive itself might be younger than the meme.
You can find discrediting examples in the mid-2000s thread collection the internet archive recently released ("archive ten billion"): memes appear in the chanological record years before they anywhere Google knows of. But how can you know that's the real origin? Even "Know your memes" first appears in there as a /b/ catchphrase in April 2006, but you must notice that's also when the /b/ posts in the collection begin.
Edit, another example:
4chan is also known as a Mongolian basket-weaving forum, among other things: corruptions descended from the meme of referring to anime as "Chinese cartoons". An old 4chan saying, as KYM finds? No, it came from that Russian anime newsgroup, ru.anime.chainik, after its parody FAQ from 2002 was translated by users of an associated LiveJournal group and added to a since-deleted Uncyclopedia article.
The full FAQ is on the author's website, which is still online, shounen.ru/anime/tech/afaq.shtml But is it entirely original to that newsgroup? Some of those terms seem to have come from FIDO...Thanks for your reply and examples, very informative. I agree it's an awful metric but seemed it might hold water when I first typed it. Full disclosure, I have never actually visited 4chan despite ample opportunity.
This is exactly why it's so famous; everyone knows of it but is scared to visit (or admit they visit) so it's a perfect "source of anything".
(This post originated on 4chan)
"Underwater basket-weaving" was a derogatory term for impractical university classes back in the 70s (?)
and Mongolian is a stand-in for mongoloid, which fell off the euphemism treadmill as a descriptor for people with Downs syndrome.
So "Mongolian basket-weaving forum" means "place for r*, useless people"
4chan is the America of the internet, the only reason it has outsized influence is because ideas were allowed to incubate.
Most memes and ideas went no where but some had a chance to multiply without getting stamped out by the censors.
You could probably use something like genetic tracing, if you could come up with a way of fingerprinting free text semi-reliably.
My expectation is there are probably "tell words" (i.e. not used elsewhere or for that purpose) in novel ideas, and you could likely observe these spreading over time, as the ideas carrying them did.
One of the first things groups tend to do is specialize and redefine language / create jargon.
A complication is that some of this jargon gets mangled over time. "Based and redpilled" is definite jargon associated with certain subcultures, but you won't see it in mainstream media other than articles about that exact phrase.
Very little in human history has had the reach of those websites you're talking about, and on those users tend to be in their own bubbles. On 4chan, with its millions of users over the past couple of decades, attention is centered around a few boards.
I think you are underestimating the reach of TV before the internet.
For better or worse, TV is paid for by advertisers. On the upside, that does put some limits on how objectionable the content can be before nobody's willing to pay for its distribution.
I remember TV from my childhood being just people shooting each other and screaming at each other. Advertisers didn't have any problem with that, or with monsters tearing people apart or with gangster rap.
On the downside, it does away with ethical and quality standards, in trying to maximize viewership while minimizing cost, which in turn tends to make the content objectionable anyway.
Counterpoint, the owners and showrunners of those TV channels decide what is aired and how, so a lot of TV channels have become propaganda outlets for one side or another. Most infamous in the English speaking countries is News Corp / Rupert Murdoch, who has pushed a right-wing, anti-lgbt narrative for a long time now.
Producers vs Consumers.
I just thought of television as something much more fragmented and localised compared to the billion and more poepie flowing through the same Facebook funnel. I'll grant you that some things in the past did transcend boundaries and gain global reach but those I counted amongst the referenced "few things."
Very little?
Let me introduce you to: newspapers, radio, television, books.
I disagree. Anonymous was an substantial movement.
4chan has long existed before the concept of facebook and to compare 4chan to the new trends of the likes such as facebook or reddit when 4chan is it's own, you can't.
Reddit and Facebook have all been designed to cater to the masses; 4chan not so.
To rule out that 4chan has never been influential is incorrect.
4chan was founded about 5 months before Facebook and about 2 years before reddit. 2ch and Something Awful are quite a bit older, but it's debatable how much of the cultural DNA of each transferred over.
4chan is definitely old internet, it reminds me of IRC, completely unmonetizable.
No, there was a concerted effort to radicalize the site.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7aap8/the-man-who-helped-tu...
My serious but unsubstantiated suspicion is that this was part of a neoconservative campaign, which included the likes of GamerGate, all in the interests of defanging and commodifying observant, critically-minded, tech-savvy young people (mostly men, mostly white) who otherwise would have found themselves on the progressive end of the political spectrum (as per their class affinity).
If you ask many of them, they will tell you that they were "red-pilled" after Occupy Wall Street so spooked the establishment that "wokism" was deployed to split the bottom 3 wealth quintiles and pit them against each other. My take is that the premise is correct (OWS did indeed push the elite to take class solidarity as a serious threat in a way that they hadn't previously), but that the conclusion is wrong. Rather, "red-pilling" was the intended remedy, and "meme magic" was the vector.
Case-in-point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39905726 and parent.
As far as the alt-right goes, this is true, but they're definitely responsible for Pizzagate and QAnon. One might consider those the genesis of a "post alt-right" movement but it might also be too soon to tell.
Stormfront targeted 4chan because the "not your personal army" crew could be easily turned into whatever the white supremacists wanted.
All you had to do was say "this will offend people" and 4chan rushed off to do exactly that, over and over.
4chan was originally just a contest to show how much something doesn't bother them, because they were still competing with each other like a clique of schoolkids, and any feelings were viewed as weakness.
Also, 4chan spawned QAnon. That was absolutely "starting a movement".
It's hard to take anyone who uses the term "alt-right" seriously and without irony as a legitimate label in 2024.
2016 called—they want their guilt-by-association blanket branding for any and all thought outside of what the established media corporations and entrenched political class consider to be acceptable political thought back.
The term "alt-right" contains the more or less the same legitimacy and valence as the term "libtard"—except, you see pundits use it in headlines in mainstream publications, so you think it's more acceptable and less of a nonsense blanket term designed to conveniently silo anything that exists outside of a general sphere of acceptable thought together so as to encourage political tribalism and prevent critical thinking.
The term "alternative right" was coined by its own members to describe themselves, starting with Richard Spencer's "The Alternative Right".
Is everyone—or even most of everyone—tarred by the "alt-right" label a Richard Spencer follower/supporter/endorser? If not, then would they self-describe at "alt-right", still, in 2024? If not, then why would the term apply to them?
The top post was their historical recount about how the alt-right presence on 4chan and makes no specification or claims to maintaining this label for these groups of people in 2024, so this tirade seems like a nonsequitur. But don't worry, we have new names for these people now :)
You got a lot of great responses to your observations around 4chan, partly debating whether it should be to blame for the growth of the alt-right. I think it boils down to one simple thing: 4chan was unfettered. Anyone could go there and do anything - learn to code, coordinate a LOIC attack, draft an Anonymous army, or brew an ultra-conservative movement. Those things will happen in places where there aren’t guards in place. The fewer of those places there are, the slower things on the fringe will develop. If an open forum is shut down, these things find new places to grow. But they won’t stop.
Dale Beran's It Came From Something Awful is a good history of the evolution of the scene from edgelords to alt right.
I agree, actually most of my memories of that time are of pretty horrible sights online too. Shock gore sites, snuff films, etc. way more often than today
You have it backwards. The alt-right didn't come out of 4chan. It came in and displaced the existing culture. The term 'election tourist' (referring to the 2016 US Presidential elections) is still a common pejorative.