What 4chan Doesn’t Mean to You

gil ray baker
Jul 22, 2017 · 11 min read

A neo-pulp writer I know was just all trembly-sweaty over the Medium article which he declared had “explained 4chan!” As he was relentlessly PC in his worldview, I was pretty sure the link would lead me to something that confirmed that worldview. Aha. Because we don’t really want explanations, we want confirmations.

Sure enough, an “expert on web culture” offered up 411 that the users of the politically hostile image board were unemployed feckless basement troglodytes, with little fresh-air exposure, no girlfriends, each overweight, and all had to be told — by 4chan — simple hygiene instructions like “shower daily.”

I told said pulpeteer that the article was meant to reassure people like himself. Among bourgeois pseudo-intellectuals, this kind of tarring is effective, because deodorant is their God. They are preset to believe that their perceived enemies are subhuman and repulsive. I have long noticed that outragers prefer to have their prejudices confirmed in a witty piece by one of their own than to explore the subject themselves.

Most analysis of the ‘phenomenon’ of 4chan is motivated by mainstream writers intent on shaping an opinion ( unfavorable) about it, as opposed to offering any sort of basic observation or primer. Certainly the topic cannot be pursued as if the offending material was anything other than evil, without any underlying cause but evil.

If the pulpster had gotten his nose into the image board himself, he would have discovered that this unfriendly picture of the warty cellar dweller was, in fact, how 4chan users describe themselves. In our duckface Instagram-led mainstream strata of bubblegum, such anti-celebrity should be a clue that we are closer to where tygers lurk, when we dare at the cellar stair of 4chan.

I might mention that the author of the Medium piece had offered his own photograph, and I saw an obese man with a hairline far-receded for someone in their twenties. Hmm. But I was more interested in the fact that he was an obvious liar, at least on one fundamental point.

4chan does not have any hierarchy instructing its users on behavior. This is one thing that commentators in the mainstream media do not get; they just can’t wrap their minds around it. They mistake 4chan as a political movement, primarily because this was how it was introduced into their class consciousness. Alas, there is no Jones in its Jonestown.

4chan is a format heisted from early Chinese image board forums. The structure permits the posting of pictures and commentary. The board (actually, boards, but the media is fixed on /pol/), is overseen by moderators. The moderators have few ground rules. They offer negative reinforcement: they either ban you, or don’t ban. End of engagement. There is no mentoring process.

I’m sure any “hygiene instructions” found on 4chan were posted by a user. There is no 4chan leader. This is not an SEIU meeting, where somebody hands you a sign and tells you the chant. The users can be as nasty as they want to be, and the upper limits are reached ending in a ban. Most of the 4chan posts are “LULZ,” they are ironical; they are only intermittently meant to be taken seriously. Much is troll bait, intended to outrage readers and drive them into defensive postures.

In some ways, it resembles a game of psychological engagement, like Chess.

The problem is, outsiders take it all as straight, in one big gulp. Sure enough, there are real axes to grind. There are people with hot anger and a true hope of frightening the horses. But it is a largely reactive mass of individuals engaged in strategic mind games, some of whom are also sophisticated hackers. When Hillary Clinton and CNN began whinnying about the board during her campaign, and insisting it was the latest stormtroop of a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, she and the corporate piñata invited themselves to Play.

In this respect, 4chan is more Ouija than image board. What will your local Catholic church tell you about strange raps and footsteps in the dead of night? Ignore them. Evil spirits feed on whinnies. But the Establishment doesn’t get that either.

When CNN recently moved on a Reddit user for creating the famous “wrestling meme,” desecrating their holy logo, the corporation obtained a good deal of ordure smeared upon itself. And it notably allowed 4chan wrath and commentary to again enter the national debate. CNN also received a retaliatory dose of member doxing, which was 4chansters wishing to let CNN feel what it does to others every day, and was threatening in this case in particular.

CNN had apparently hoped to create a position of victimhood for itself, a lunatic forgetfulness of its status as a multimedia conglomerate with billions of dollars at hand and thousands of unsympathetic employees. It was like Exxon pursuing a bird for bitching about the oil sheen over its feathers. Moreover, it made the CNN caste look a bunch of idiot, reactionary sissies.

All they had to do was wait for the offending meme to cycle through and be forgotten. But CNN had to act. They appear as a body to have considerably thinner skin than Trump. Trump can outwait a covfefe.

Think of 4chan as primordial ooze. It only deepens its suck when you struggle. CNN’s doyennes never saw that movie where the robot told them that the only Winning Move Was Not to Play.

What 4chan did — grabbing the baton from the actionless Reddit — was to unmask the Establishment. Reveal it as bloated, cheap, and non-discerning. As the Demogorgon Time-Warner playing at being the bully. It could not have done so without CNN’s engagement. This is important to understand. The tar-baby only beats you if you take him on.

The Mainstream outrage over 4chan is the Establishment’s primal fear that any revanchist rightism is going to — in about twenty minutes — morph into a full-bodied, full-blooded Nazi swastikeagle. That every spurt of racial slime is going to send the people on trains back to Buchenwald. It’s the midcentury Donna Reed dream of the Spotless Kitchen, the companion to the empty braggadocio of zero-tolerance non-starters.

The 4chan dilemma is a bit like facing down a schoolyard of unhappy adolescents. Ignoring the jellyrolls and concrete ankles of lore, those cellar-dweller hallmarks of a preternatural middle age, the nature of 4chan is simply adolescent snark. It’s that little pocket of brats who roll cherry bombs and jerk each other off with snarling swagger. Just when you’ve made your big Substitute Schoolteacher Speech, one of them hawks a loogie onto your pantsuit.

You won’t get anywhere scolding them. You won’t get anywhere insulting them. For fifty years, the Establishment has prospered by the long gutting horn of Shaming. Tag them. Call them a Racist. Call them a Nazi. A hater. A deviant. Up till now, the victim recoiled and recanted. Backpedalling, followed by hugging members of a BLM rally. In a shot glass, the last thirty years of the Republican Party.

But the 4chanist is a different animal. His logic belongs to Eminem. Call him any old dog and he’ll pop back that “I am whatever you say that I am, if I wasn’t, why would I say that I am?” Call them a Nazi, they’ll post a Nazi flag. Call them a cellar dweller and they’ll find a photo of a basement cybernest. It’s a poker sensibility of raising the stakes. These guys do not see lowlife as shame.

For all the Establishment’s admiring theories of Black sang-froid exposed to the Master’s Whip, it’s strange that they don’t see it activating under the crack of their own. To be shamed is to be punked. Escalation is the only outcome.

It’s funny, because ten years ago, 4chan was the exclusive target of the right wing. Hysterical Bill O’Reilly, claiming to have discovered it as a propagator of forbidding porn and gross-out images. He thought it had something to do with Satan. Back in the day, 4chan was less-fenced in, and the cry of “mods are asleep” would bring hellfire out across the boards. Sometimes the mods really did seem to be asleep — or unstaffed — and the imp of the perverse held sway over all. But the political evolution of the board’s users has changed this relationship.

The nature of 4chan is essentially anarchic and tends towards nihilism. Real reading soon finds that the site’s appetite for Trump was based on his trickster, divisive nature. His recklessness is his appeal. After all, here’s a guy who told Hillary he’d put her in jail and hung 9/11 horns around the Bush family within days of one another. That is something new in American politics. There has never been a jester onstage before. Politicians effected bogus mutual-respect while employing the daggers through avatars.

Moreover, the mainstream media clearly spitting-hates Trump. Watching them having beshat their every-claimed journalistic ethic to Get This Guy, and to rage at his slipperiness, has unmasked them before the nation as never seen before. They look like frauds, and limpdick frauds. This is exactly the kind of black comedy/ farce that 4chaners savor. It is full of LULZ. They want Trump to break things.

Hillary Clinton, the nation’s most famous and credentialed conspiracy theorist, favors vast empires of intrigue and shadowy enemies. Some might call that Paranoia. But her claims are routinely treated soberly by a press that otherwise is immune to suggestions of collusion.

Personally, I think she jumped the shark in her Glenn Beck chalkboard moment of attempting to explain to America that a cartoon frog, with which they were unfamiliar, heralded the Return of National Socialism.

This was an idea that should never have left the war room.

This sort of claptrap was assisted in every way possible by 4chan’s pranksters. They were the ones who blurbed vulnerable media patsys and lurkers with notions of memes like Pepe Frog as White Power symbol, or pizzagate, because they knew people like Hillary Clinton would buy into it. They knew that the media would take these kerfluffles on, and address them, which in turn exposed those memes to the ordinary uninitiated and placed doubt into citizen minds. As Hillary is fond of saying, her very counterpose acted as a recruitment tool.

Here, what we’re really seeing a mutation of the Ken Kesey Merry Pranksters, or even the Lettrist Internationale. In the past, such Marxist-friendly institutions were allowed to thrive. 4chan is the first time we have seen Rightist Absurdists — that is, intentionally absurdist. Guess what? The Liberal Establishment isn’t any better at reacting to or understanding such meddlers than the churchy shoeshine boys of 1966 were theirs.

Russia came to replace the threat of the alt-right when Hillary’s handlers realized that 4chan was — and remains — too obscure for the hoi polloi to get their fingernails into. Something –anything — has certainly become necessary because Hillary’s subsequent failure is a tremendous axe-chop to the Powers That Be. Her loss was a particular embarrassment, and remains so.

The real villain here was Hillary. When anybody loses office, it’s almost always the fault of the package. Her collusion with DNC officials to bump off Bernie left a bitter taste in her would-be Youthquake bloc. A party too comfy with the Clintons, and too certain of its deliverance at the hands of Youthquakes and Blatino Explosions and History-Making Women allowed its candidate to swish through industrial states with heavy electoral votes basically sneering that she was cutting their jobs. One too many fainting jags into the hands of escorting suits added the nails.

With Hillary’s election night slaughter, no Princess has come to so quick and complete an ending since Diana’s Gumball Rally along the Pont d’Alma. Certainly the nation may regret Trump, but it may not regret tossing Hillary.

Yet Hillary did manage to move 4chan into legend time.

The wags of 4chan like to brag that “meme magic” brought Trump to victory. Because even they know that a bunch of politically unconnected, brokedick guys, with no friends in the media, weren’t going to seriously shunt an election bid. Hillary gave them credibility, and obliging lapdogs like CNN have perpetuated the myth. Truth is, if 4chan is going anywhere as a social force, it’s Hillary and CNN picking up the hitchers.

The media is completely blind to the fact that 4chan has no organizing principle. There are no basic agreed-upon tenets and no master plans. There are no great figures. The default posting on 4chan is to Anonymous (and yes, that implies exactly what you think it does, the breakaway hacker movement which does seek core principles, and which Hillary will STFU about, because she doesn’t want them mad at her). Even the Justice League and the Avengers know who all their other guys are. At 4chan, the masks never come off at the bar. Kind of kills the idea of Hanging Together. 4chan is not the modern day Green Dragon tavern.

Think of 4chan as a collective crowd consciousness, but dissonant. A honeybee democracy, but not all the honeybees fundamentally agree. They may not even agree about the necessity of honey. And they celebrate that disconnect. There are no illusions there, as on Facebook, that fellow posters are “friends.”

This is not the formula for a “movement.”

Yet the Establishment fears them, and is engaging. CNN was basically threatening Exposure, not realizing the holy hell that might bring back upon them. There are many, many Internet factions who value the alleged Anonymity of the Internet as more sacred than any other principle. 4chan is likely to prove to have, not friends, but common interests.

Another recent anti-4chan step is that there are disinformation agents swarming the board. These operators are clumsy and transparent. One of their essential fails is their blinders-on attempt to use Shame. They still don’t get it; that game has changed. Accusing the individual whacko 4chaner of “discrediting the board” translates as “My Name is Agent Smith.” Nobody discredits 4chan. It is perpetually incredible. Are alley walls discredited by graffiti? It’s like warning a fish that he’s getting into deeper water. 4chan is full of LULZ. Discredit is activism.

These “web culture experts” are largely snake-oilers who are the cancer that is killing the Establishment. They are know-nothings because they cannot see. Their familiar worldview prevents them from grasping the 4chan paradigm. They are part of the past.

Understand that the 4chan contingent is not the latest iteration of knuckle-dragging klansters as plotted out by the Southern Poverty Law Center. In most of the analysis of the disaffected — les deplorables — of 4chan, what you are doing is asking dinosaurs what the rat means. They do not see either the true causes or the rise of this new anger. The experts are still rapt by their handbooks printed in 1964, beholden by political leaders and manipulators who have all left age seventy well in the rear view mirror.

Did you really think an increasingly one-sided quest to buy up certain segments of the population while disenfranchising others wouldn’t bring about push-back? The Establishment have taken away these guys’ dignity, their opportunities, their employability, their history. Yes, they will hate you for that. Yes they do. And you’ve pretty much given them nothing left to lose.

Maybe you should fear 4chan.

Or perhaps fear its absence. If I knew brats were going to be acting out, I’d sure as hell rather let them work it off in cyberspace, satisfying one another with Being Bad and then breaking for lunch, then a round of World of Warcraft. That versus breaking glass in the real world. Spent venom is spent. Conserved venom is always fatal in the end. As with talking dirty, the force of the dirty joke, the tension of urge is reduced.

Perhaps we will reach a more effective non-engagement. Let it be. You don’t have to crush every atom of wrongthinking. The more you tighten your grip, the more a crushed honeybee sends out chemical signals to Swarm. And the more venom injects into your fist.

-30-

gil ray baker

Written by

Here we are with the world I was born in transforming into quite something else. I can best be described, perhaps, as an eulogist, with a midge of history.

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