I feel like as long as the internet has been around, there have been warnings to parents about the horrible things that dwell within. One moment, your child is chatting with friends about Pokémon; the next, they’re on a plane to Israel to rendezvous with a pedophile. What once started as a haven for academic research has evolved to the point where no one can truly control it anymore. It’s home to an underbelly as seedy as any black market, as illegal as any whorehouse, and as strange as a freak show.
It is interesting to think then, that so many facets of this underbelly can converge in one place.
In 2003, a member of the
Something Awful forums named m00t founded a website called
4chan. Based around the Futaba technology powering its Japanese equivalent
2ch, its simplicity allowed for rapid-fire discussion, ease of use, and – perhaps most importantly of all – anonymity. The site was divided into boards running a large gamut of topics, ranging from video games to cooking to anime to pornography.
However, the most important board on 4chan is
/b/ - Random. Click at your own risk.Unlike the other boards on the site, /b/ has no clearly defined purpose. The only rule is that illegal content cannot be posted (though it doesn’t stop some people.) The board also has forced anonymity for all posters. This cocktail allows for perhaps some of the truest, most uninhibited expression on the internet, be it political, personal, or otherwise.
Because 4chan – at least in its early days – was not a mainstream website, it was often home to people who sat outside the usual spectrum of internet users. Loners, perverts, nerds, and weirdos were the site’s prime demographic. As /b/ grew, these strange people gave it a strange and unique culture, one that to outsiders must have seemed positively impenetrable, particularly without context. The site’s forced anonymity also often led to brash discussions full of hate, racism, anger, and logical fallacies. Jokes about pedophilia, 9/11, domestic violence and rape were oftentimes the norm, and many times people asking for advice were advised to kill themselves or something similar.
But /b/, always full of surprises, displays a fascinating duality here.
Much as a lack of identity gave these strangers the right to flame, degrade and insult, it also gave them the ability to connect on a level free from social constraints, from shame or awkwardness. These things occur in BAWW threads.
BAWWW (the amount of w’s is often inconsistent) is originally from a very disturbing furry comic called “Incontinent Student Bodies.” It’s about a freshman in college who has a problem holding his urine and is forced to wear diapers because, well, it’s a furry comic. They do this kind of stuff. When some of his classmates find out about his problem, they naturally mock him and laugh at him. He begins crying with the onomatopoeia “BAWWWWWWWWW!” Naturally, because this comic is based around a bizarre diaper fetish and involves furries, /b/ thought it was hilarious and it was reposted many times, with “BAWWW!” now used as a synonym on the board for crying.
BAWWW threads display that /b/tards, as they call themselves, do in fact have tender hearts. “What’s it like to hold a girl in your arms, /b/?” they might ask. Favorite images are reposted of lonely cats wandering through city streets, or stories of loving mothers and long lost pets are copied and pasted into posts. For once, in their perverse and embittered existence, the loners of /b/ unite and cry. Their screens become a gateway into the open arms of someone else for a moment, a stranger known only as “Anonymous” in dark green text. Where these threads become truly heartwarming is when someone opens up about something in their personal lives, or tells a secret they would never want anyone to know. “I’m in love with my stepsister,” someone might say. “When I was younger, I was gangraped by the football team, and to this day I’m scared to be touched by a man.” Though these are sometimes greeted by the aforementioned insults, it is not uncommon for people to genuinely comfort each other here, and to connect on a profound level as they share life experiences, all without even seeing or hearing the other person, all without a name.
I remember watching Wesch’s
“Anthropological Introduction to YouTube” and seeing his students create their vlogs. When speaking into the lens of that camera, they are often awkward, even candid. When your audience has no real face, when you’re not quite sure who you’re speaking to, self-expression takes on a new dimension. Your walls come down, your shame disappears. Here on /b/, these huddled masses find a strange kind of love and acceptance. Someone who may have previously insulted you may now become your best friend. In that /b/ often shows the worst of humanity, it can also show humanity at its most raw with things like this, at its most unadorned and – dare I say it – even most beautiful. When the collective Anonymous declare “We are legion,” that is just what they are. It is participatory culture at its finest.
There is still another duality on display here. Just as anonymity gives /b/ users a way to open up, it also gives them a way to act out. A curious thing about Anonymous is that they typically act with their own interests in mind, regardless of the benevolence of said interests. Sometimes these interests may be in comforting each other; other times, they may be in taking down a website,
or ruining someone’s reputation,
or harassing endlessly people who are easily harassed (often referred to as “lolcows.”) This is a different kind of raw humanity, but it is still a definite essence, and a core; people are acting as they really are without social constraints to bring them down, aided by their lack of identity.
This culture so often fueled by these baser instincts has, surprisingly, given rise to some of the most popular memes on the internet. The Cheezburger Network, founded by Eric Nakagawa, sold its
original website in 2007 for $2 million, and has since spawned several other websites including
Failblog and
Failbook. The very idea of the original site – funny cat macros – and many of the expressions used within came from a rather unlikely place: 4chan.
It has long been a practice on /b/ to post cat pictures on “Caturdays.” Every Saturday is Caturday. It is perhaps one of the few memes on /b/ that is actually accessible and easily appreciated by normal people who would normally have no reason to visit /b/. Better yet, there was a near constant influx of user-generated content, so the meme never got old. A favorite pastime of basement-dwellers and weirdos is now one of the greatest internet sensations in years. Whoda thunk it?
Ethan Zuckerman’s “cute cat theory” implies that government censorship of websites such as YouTube and Dailymotion due to fear of dissention unintentionally keeps people from doing what they actually want to do on the internet: look at funny cat pictures. When people are unable to look at funny cat pictures, they wonder why. Subsequently, the dissenters get more attention.
And yet 4chan, the origin of all of this chaos, remains peacefully in the background.
The internet is a difficult thing for anyone to truly control. The government censors can’t control it as well as they like, and anyone who publishes content to the web has a chance of being an overnight sensation. The first person to start Caturday wasn’t trying to start a revolution or to form the basis of an interesting article on the internet. All they really wanted to do was see funny pictures of cats. m00t wasn’t trying to create a springboard for digital activism, or a place to spawn countless cherished internet memes. He really just wanted a place for people to talk.
In this way, 4chan is itself a microcosm of the entire internet. It is a hodgepodge of cultures and a melting pot of people from every possible walk of life and every possible place. It is often useful, sometimes bizarre, and always interesting. And this hodgepodge, while being something truly beautiful and extraordinary, is impossible for anyone to control because no one really knows what it’s good for.
But that’s part of the reason it’s so much fun.
-JD
