4chaan dead. His toxic legacy everywhere

Many of the 4chaan users who called me mid-Battletoad The left attack. I listened to them all. Style appeared quickly: young men, clearly tense until they leave a message, trying to harass a stranger, apparently, hell from him. These audio messages never left for me in the fifteen years that I spent covering 4chan as a journalist.

I had a seat in the front row of the way these shy men turned into violence, oh comfort in the Internet. The palpation engine for reactionary hatred that resented everything and everyone simply because discontent was the only language that its users knew how to speak. I traveled around the world in 2010, tracking the impact of 4chan on global democracy. She followed the matter to France, Germany, Japan and Brazil, where 4chan users are increasingly convinced that they can seize the planet through racist and advanced right -wing and e -popular meanings. In some way, they did. But everywhere in the 4CH culture ended until it was a strange victory for the same location.

Collins, like me, closely followed the rise of 4chaan in 2010S from BackWateer on the Internet to a member of the Trump Administration’s informal advertising. As he sees it, as soon as he bought Elon Musk Twitter in 2022, there is no longer any point to 4chane anymore. Why do you hide behind the lack of disclosure of his identity if the billionaire allows you to spread the same type of extreme content under your real name, and even pushes you for that?

“The base of user (4chaan) has just moved to a larger stadium and immediately started influencing American life and politics,” says Collins. “Twitter 4chaan became, then Twitter 4chanified the United States government. Its benefit was as an ammunition in the Culture War that dwindles when they were saying things you now hear every day on Twitter and then six months Out of mouth From the administration official. “

But understanding how 4chaan moved from the cat’s house to a real internet ghost requires an understanding of how the site is already working. Its features are often overlooked among all talks about the political influence of the site, but I claim to be equal, if not more important.

4Chan was established by Christopher “Death” Paul when he was 15 years old. Regular user on a slightly lower chaotic comedy site is a terrible thing, Paul creature A transverse site for the messaging painting there is called “anime Diet for a prostitute.” Paul was a fans of the Japanese messaging panel 2chaan, or Futaba channel, and he wanted to give the western anime fans their own copy, so he translated the site code badly, promoting his new location, 4chaan, into anime society in a terrible thing. Several basic features in this process have been transferred.

4Chan users were unidentified, the topics were not permanent, and they will do a time or “404” after a period of lack of activity, and there were dozens of sub -panels that you could spread. This unique mixture of the hole, not detecting its identity, and the organized chaos is a strong mixture, immediately creates a bottle culture from the race to the bottom unlike anything else on the web. The dark end point for the Utopianism that built the Internet. In 4chane, you were not one person and nothing did not matter unless it was shocking and disgusting, so this is so much that someone else noticed him and decided the screenshot before he disappeared in the digital ether.