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4chan was where I first realized that the internet could be dark. I stumbled upon the site in high school, shortly after it was created in 2003 by an American teenager named Christopher Poole (better known as moot). Poole had adapted the format of the Japanese forum 2channel; 4chan’s users could anonymously post an unsifted mix of text, images, and animated GIFs. Finding illegal material on the internet had never been difficult, but 4chan was an early hub—or perhaps “dumping ground” is a better word. The site was filled with pornography, pirated files, and uncensored musings on dating and politics. Its background, a pale yellow gradient, still makes me feel a little uneasy, like a copy of Playboy hidden under my bed. I’d often check the censorship settings on the LAN connection of the library or school computer while trying to access 4chan. This usually failed, which hinted at the site's bad reputation: even adults knew at least its name, and it rightfully occupied a place on the banned lists.
On 4chan, usernames were often simply “Anonymous” or strings of numbers. I never posted, but I understood the appeal of anonymity and the ability to be part of a crowd. The site created a collective identifier that could be called up in a browser years before the digital gang wars of Twitter. Mastering the board’s slang was key to understanding its humor: lulz, fren, TFW, troll. Posts were deleted when they stopped getting new engagement, which was usually quick, especially if the posts weren’t engaging. In a time before the internet was overcrowded, 4chan provided constant activity, no matter the time of day. But as the social media landscape evolved in the twenties, and other sites emerged to vie for space for “shitposting”—that digital art form—4chan lost its relevance. In 2015, Poole sold it to the owner of 2channel, the Japanese site that inspired it. It survived as the internet's basement—grimy, underground, and stagnant—so it was no surprise when 4chan suddenly disappeared on April 14. A breakaway forum called Soyjak.party (even more violent and political than its predecessor) claimed credit for hacking the site and shutting it down.
A week and a half later, 4chan came back online over the weekend, but its return was to an embarrassing degree. The hackers had published 4chan’s source code, along with the accounts of its anonymous moderators. “It’s pretty old-fashioned internet infrastructure,” Jared Holt, a researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue who studies domestic extremist movements online, told me. Rather than outright disruption, the hack was an act of trolling, an attack on 4chan’s secondary status after two decades of existence. Once the digital home of political incorrectness and a springboard for incel culture, white-power groups, mass-shooting manifestos, and more, 4chan is now one of many platforms similarly conducive to hate speech. President Donald Trump’s own Truth Social is another, as is Parler, a right-wing video site that purports to offer “True Freedom.” There’s Patriots Win, a Trump-focused Reddit clone of sorts; Kiwi Farm, known for coordinated online harassment; and X, which, under Elon Musk’s leadership, relaxed content moderation policies and allowed the conspiracy theories and graphic imagery that once flourished on 4chan. As Holt noted, “4chan has essentially been right-sided.”
There’s no denying that 4chan has had a profound impact on shaping the content ecosystem as we know it. The kind of instant one-upmanship that emerges on X, TikTok, and video podcasts; the culture of “owning,” slapping, and online humiliation — all of it was crystallized on 4chan. The site showed, before many realized it, that the internet, at its core, exists in a Hobbesian state of nature, waging a war of everyone against everyone. Cole Stryker, a Los Angeles-based editorial consultant and the author of the 2011 book An Epic Victory for Anonymous: How the 4chan Army Conquered the Internet, summed up the forum’s influential attitude as “continuous, playful misanthropy.” 4chan played a role in accelerating digital culture, the onslaught of discourse in the form of a million media particles. On 4chan, “it was as easy to share an image as it was to share words,” Stryker told me, adding, “Now everyone has the ability to speak this language.” Today, meme-freedom permeates the highest levels of government. “Even our president and our vice president are poster boys,” Stryker noted. The official White House X account, in particular, has taken on elements of trolling; one AI-generated image posted in March of an alleged drug dealer’s arrest in the style of a Studio Ghibli anime resembled nothing so much as a 4chan post in its nihilistic mix of subtle violence and absurdist humor. 4chan thrived when Edgelord’s kind of content was unacceptable on more mainstream social media; it can now be found on virtually
Sourse: newyorker.com
