4 Chan.

DannyL

Wild Horses
I enjoyed reading Angela Nagle's Kill All Normies for a potted history of 4 Chan and the culture surrounding it, though some of the rest of the book is a bit hmmmmmm
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
I used to hang around on /b/ about a decade ago, and stopped because I decided there was no reasonable excuse for continuing to scroll through message boards on which people were posting revenge porn images of teenage girls. There were things I liked about the culture - for all its malevolent puerility, it could be very inventive. But it was clearly bringing out the worst in people. I wrote this about the culture of desensitisation it promoted: https://thelastinstance.com/posts/b_movie/
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
(An interesting aspect of that culture: if someone had said to me “why didn’t you bail at the very first revenge porn image of a teenage girl”, I would have said something like “occasionally some random posts something really heinous, and you just have to sort of unsee it and carry on, but it’s not like I went there specifically to see that, it’s just a built-in hazard of that style of total anonymous free-for-all”, and that excuse only stopped working for me once it became apparent that this was something that didn’t just happen incidentally, but was kind of a regular occurrance. But that’s how a lot of stuff slips under the radar - it has the alibi of just being a random happenstance, so you’re not at fault if you just happen to stumble across it. Next thing you know you’ve absorbed an entire grammar of racist memes...)
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
I was on /mu/ for a bit. Similar experience.

The self hatred was infectious. Every comment on there revealed a personality carefully curated in avoidance of some hypothetical individual worthy of hate.

Cant say I didnt get a little bit of vindicating pleasure when about 5 years later the majority world seemed to discover 4chan and had the collective realization that the internet is much more toxic than they had surmised.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
I couldn’t point to any notable triumphs, but the sense that a cultural form - memeing - was being refined with extraordinary speed by a community of anonymous shitposters was occasionally exhilarating. The inside-joke aspect - getting to know the idioms, the copypasta, the rituals and routines.
 
I couldn’t point to any notable triumphs, but the sense that a cultural form - memeing - was being refined with extraordinary speed by a community of anonymous shitposters was occasionally exhilarating. The inside-joke aspect - getting to know the idioms, the copypasta, the rituals and routines.

Was it liberating? A kind of giddy collective and creative self destruction?
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
can you expand on that a bit I don’t quite get it
That individual worthy of hate being 'the normie,' I guess, though that word wasnt actually used all that often in mt experience. If you talked about artists that had been covered by a popular blogs like Pitchfork, RYM and etc. you were a normie. Even talking about artists popular soley on 4chan made you a normie. Anything at all that could link you back to some specific sub culture that could be identified by some other poster was a sin. The board behaved like an unspoken game was at play, the goal of which to find how everyone else on the board was actually just another mindless drone, yourself included.
 
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linebaugh

Well-known member
I couldn’t point to any notable triumphs, but the sense that a cultural form - memeing - was being refined with extraordinary speed by a community of anonymous shitposters was occasionally exhilarating. The inside-joke aspect - getting to know the idioms, the copypasta, the rituals and routines.
4chan also had the effect of the cool older cousin who revealed how some of the things you liked were actually cheap, fake, bullshit and changed your perspective in the process. Think that was a big draw.
 
Back in my trolling days that was the name of the game. Not unlike any playground / pub bullying stuff of being able to draw out someone’s lines of influence, to mock their way of thinking by summing it up more pithily than they can, preferably in a joke. I suppose that pressure does lead to innovations, horrible innovations
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
That individual worthy of hate being 'the normie,' I guess, though that word wasnt actually used all that often in mt experience. If you talked about artists that had been covered by a popular blogs like Pitchfork, RYM and etc. you were a normie. Even talking about artists popular soley on 4chan made you a normie. Anything at all that could link you back to some specific sub culture that could be identified by some other poster was a sin. The board behaved like an unspoken game was at play, the goal of which to find how everyone else on the board was actually just another mindless drone, yourself included.

The Game
 
4chan also had the effect of the cool older cousin who revealed how some of the things you liked were actually cheap, fake, bullshit and changed your perspective in the process. Think that was a big draw.

Total cynicism is very attractive to teenagers. It made me look clever to older people, feel smarter and cooler than people my age
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
Yah. It was theater to act out the logical ends of cynicism and put down culture held in moderation in irl social spaces.
 
have you moved on from this and how

Probably not entirely no. it was more of an online pose when I was 15 rather than my philosophy, I thought it was cool to attack anyone with beliefs, a style, predictable tastes Etc. There’s still traces of that impulse
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
Cynicism also works as a means to tear down you own contrived nature. So realizing that youre doomed to be a moron no matter what you do lessens the cynical impulse.
 
yes an interesting energy, the transgression and nihilism, for a while. Completely unsustainable and superficial but it’s a thrill to run with til you realise it doesn’t get you far, oh ffs I do need other people and love and purpose and all that.
 
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