Re: Updates

High above the earth, within the confines of Fort Longcat, the channers meet to plan their next move.

"This world must be cleansed of its faggotry," says a person who appears as a representation of the Kool-Aid man, his words appearing as text.

"Of course it must," says another, a figure dressed in the dark wool overcoat of the old Soviet NKVD and who bears the head of a cat, topped with a Russian fur hat.

"But how?"

"Our efforts thus far have drawn too much attention. Many /b/rothers have already met with the banhammer of the moderators."

"Damn the mods," says another - who, for reasons too complex to relate, takes the form of a defective animation cell from a popular Japanese cartoon. "They are beholden to the fascist landowners, the furry nightclub proprietors, the merchant class, the loli impersonators and their pedo admirers."

"The scum of Second Life," summarizes another, one of several present here and hundreds elsewhere who bear the dark skin of the Moor and the Afro of the Nixon-era African American, and who clad themselves exclusively in dark, three-piece suits - an ancient chan tradition that goes back almost two years.

"We need /b/lackup," another asserts.

"Someone start another thread at 4chan and tell them we need more help, then."

"Failchan is worthless. Recruit from the /i/nsurgent board at 7chan."

"The furries watch the message boards," someone else protests. "Already they know too much about our ways. They learn many of our user names and post them to their own damnable websites. They narc on us to the mods and ban us from as many region cells as possible."

"This cat and mouse game has gone on too long," says the cat.

"What do you propose to do about it?"

"Let's just go back to Habbo Hotel and raid that."

"Never! /b/ does not fail. We are here to wreak havoc upon the wicked and the lame. We stay until the rein of chaos eclipses the rain of fail."

"More accurately, we stay until we are banned. And we are being banned left and right. There are fewer and fewer of us to carry on the jihad, and the /b/lackup is insufficient to replace our numbers."

"Then we are doomed."

"NO ONE IS DOOMED BUT THOSE WHO OPPOSE US!"

Everyone spins around in different directions to see who has made this unlikely declaration, so bold in the face of such crisis. It is yet another Afro-clad Moor, one who seems to have appeared out of nowhere - as everyone does when they sign on to Second Life.

"Who are you, who speaks of victory amidst ruin?"

"I am merely a fellow /b/tard who comes bringing salvation," replies the faux-Negro.

"Salvation! Hah!"

"SILENCE!"

There is silence. Technically, there had been silence the whole time, what with the entire conversation having occurred in text, this 3D virtual world lacking voice chat. At any rate, everyone stops typing for a few moments as the stranger continues.

"YOU WOULD HAVE VICTORY IN THE FACE OF BANHAMMER, WOULD YOU? THEN FOLLOW ME TO X 455677.87 Y 343242.97, AND YOU SHALL SEE OUR WAY TO THE VICTORY YOU SEEK."

Before anyone can object or call him a faggot, the /b/tard disappears. A few seconds later, a couple of the channers receive messages to the effect that they have been invited to join this person at a particular place; by clicking on a button, they are able to join him at his new location via teleportation. Several decline to do so; a few agree and click the button.

These three observers - the communist cat, the Kool-Aid Man, and yet another guy with a cat head - appear on a hilltop overlooking a village, which itself sits what would be a few hundred meters away if this world were real, rather than virtual. Before them is the confident Negro - floating several feet off the ground. Anyone can float, though.

"So, what great deed have you brought us here to see, you who would promise us triumph?" asks the cat guy, or maybe the other cat guy.

"BEHOLD!"

The floating Negro sails through the air towards the village, a collection of homes situated around a small outdoor amphitheatre. In the center of the ampitheatre, some minor celebrity from the real world is giving a text-based talk on some subject or another while attendees sit on the steps, presumably enthralled. The Negro draws little attention as he lands on those same steps - being of human figure, he blends in well with the legitimate attendees, most of whom choose to depict
themselves in similarly unimaginative guises. He blends in, at least until such time as he activates a script which prompts a giant photo-realistic penis to emanate from his crotch. Also, the penis makes a loud, screaming sound. Its a giant, screaming penis.

But watching from on top of the hill, the three observers are unimpressed. Giant screaming penises are already an old trick, as are scripts of the sort that conjure dozens of penises and have them fly through the air towards a particular target. Penises arent going to salvage a dying campaign, no matter how delightfully disruptive they may be.

Moreover, the self-proclaimed savior - having deployed the penis in question and thereby ruined the event - has now brought attention to himself. His screen name, which floats above his head, is identifiable to all. Anyone around may now report him to the mods - those elite few employed by Second Life to maintain order - and he will be subject to the banhammer.

It is no surprise to the three witnesses, then, when the pseudo-savior disappears less than 30 seconds after having taken out his giant penis. He has been banned. He is gone.

A brave /b/rother, one notes, but bravery does not trump folly.

Truth, replies another. As Patton said, one does not win a war through dying for ones country, but rather by making the enemy die for his own. Here we have martyr, but no savior is he.

Let us proceed back to Fort Longcat. There is still much to be discu-

I AM RISEN.

Before them stands the very same /b/rother whom they had just seen fall to the banhammer.

Hark! How can this be?

He has been banned, but now he has returned!

LISTEN WELL! I AM IN POSSESSION OF AN ALTERED SECOND LIFE CLIENT WHICH TRICKS THE SERVERS INTO ALLOWING ME TO RE-REGISTER BY SPOOFING MY MAC ADDRESS. THUS IT IS THAT I MAY BE BANNED, BUT I MAY THEREAFTER RETURN, EVEN WITHOUT SWITCHING COMPUTERS.

It is as Prophecy foretold!

What prophecy?

That guy on the partyvan IRC, Prophecy. He said someone was working on this, but we thought he was trolling.

BE STILL A MOMENT! I TELL YOU THAT AS I HAVE CONQUERED THE BAN, SO MAY THOSE WHO PUT THEIR FAITH IN THE CLIENT. YOU MAY DOWNLOAD IT FROM THE FOLLOWING URL.

And so it was that he gave the Three Witnesses the link to the altered Second Life client. And the Three did go back to Fort Longcat, and they did tell of the deed they had seen, how the Savior had come and had disrupted some gay poetry reading and had been banned but had risen and promised eternal Second Life to those who followed in his path. And there were mockers and scoffers who denied this truth, saying that the altered client was probably malware, and so they did not download it, and eventually they found themselves banned for one thing or another, and to them was Second Life denied for all time, but those who did place their faith in /b/ and its ingenuity did download the client and did rise again after banning, just as was promised to them.

The jihad resumed.

***

When I got out of prison in 2007, I needed a new hobby. The last one hadnt worked out.

Like many whose work and play revolved around the internet, I was familiar with 4chan.org, the increasingly popular image board that had appeared in 2003 and which had gradually gained in notoriety. Having been inspired by a Japanese website called 2chan, and having initially appealed to the young and net-saturated, 4chan was a world unto itself: a sign of the times and a propagator of the culture.

The format, like all formats, helped to define the nature of the content. 4chan is divided into a couple of dozen different boards, or web pages, divided by topic. The /v/ board is concerned with video games; the /a/ board deals with with anime and manga; the /x/ board is given over to discussions of the paranormal. Naturally, each of the various boards attracts different sorts of people, and thus develops its own character.

Each particular board is divided into ten individual web pages, and those who access a board will first view page one by default, with the option to click on nine other hyperlinks which link to the nine other pages, respectively. The format works as follows: A user will begin a thread by posting some image, with the option of including any amount of text as well. Having been posted, the thread begins at the top of page one of the board, only to sink down into a lower position on the page (and then down into pages two through ten) as time passes and other new threads are created and get their own fresh start on the top of the first page. But each time another user replies to the thread, either with another picture or text or both, the thread is bumped back up to the top of page one. In this manner, popular threads that elicit many responses will tend to remain on the first couple of pages and thereby be seen by more people, whereas a new thread that no one considers worthy of reply will sink down to page two - where already it is far less likely to be seen and replied to than it would have been on page one - and then down to pages three, four, etc, until such time as it descends to page ten, and then off the board altogether, forever lost.

As with most textual descriptions of a system, the system itself is far more simple than a reading would suggest. But even a simple system gives rise to complex behavior, particularly when such a system is utilized by something so complex as an individual human - and especially when more than one individual humans are interacting within that systems confines. And so although we have yet to go into the nature of the content nor that of the people involved, we may now productively examine a few of the dynamics that would come into play due to the tendency of each user to wish success upon the thread he himself creates. For one thing, a user whose thread is descending down into lower, lesser pages after receiving no or few replies may game the system by bumping his own thread - replying to it - and thereby send it right back to the top of page one, where the process begins anew. The reasoning behind this is that a thread/submission which receives no replies and so descends down into the depths towards page ten didnt necessarily fail due to a lack of worth; oftentimes, it simply wasnt seen.

Which brings us to the next crucial dynamic of 4chan - that the various boards differ quite broadly in popularity, and thus in views, new threads, and replies. A board such as /tg/, traditional games, attracts a relatively small following of pen-and-paper role playing game enthusiasts of the sort who spend their free time painting tiny miniatures of dwarves and space marines. In such an environment, where few posts are made, a fellow may post a picture of the miniature battle zone he created out of cardboard and cotton, write a few lines of text inquiring as to whether this particular battle zone is suited to the fictional environment in which his game of choice is set, and hit the submit button. The thread appears at the top - and will likely stay at the top for at least a few minutes before another submission is made. Even if the thread receives only one or two replies over the next hour, its likely to remain on page three or two or even one during that time. Whatever happens, the cardboard-and-cotton battleground will get its due attention.

But this is the exception to the rule. To varying degrees, the more popular boards will attract more threads and more replies to those threads - vastly more, in the case of one board in particular, where thousands of people are submitting content and commenting on that content at any given time. On that board, a post that appears in its allotted top-of-the-first-page space will not remain there for more than a second - by the time one refreshes the page, it will likely be on page three or four. Of course, there was a second or so during which anyone who happened to pull up the page will have observed it there at the top, in all its majesty. And so long as those who are viewing the page dont click on refresh or go to one of the other nine pages, none of the threads will change position; there is plenty of time to read the text or ponder the picture and to reply as warranted - although, as the precious moments pass, others who didnt load the page at that particular moment but instead five seconds afterwards arent seeing it at its original position at the top, but rather in some new and lesser position down the page or even on another page altogether. In fact, if one takes too long to reply to a thread, and then tries to reply, one might find that the thread has already passed into the great void, beyond page ten, having no received no reply at all from anyone.

Such an environment as this, in which the harsh competition of natural selection is applied to the information submitted by tens of thousands of people - information which is to be read, viewed, added to, and possibly even acted upon by a million others - leads in turn to other dynamics. There is one in particular that bears noting.

The natural solution to the problem of the harsh and arbitrary competition that has just been described is to simply reply to ones own post, thereby bumping it back to the top. At 4chan, one may do this quite easily and without the likelihood of raising suspicion, and this is due to yet another fundamental aspect of the medium - with extraordinarily rare exceptions, users of the site do not bother to use their names or even any sort of moniker that would differentiate themselves from any one of the millions of other individuals who have posted to the site in its decade-long history. In fact, there is no convenient way to associate ones self with any name at all, and rarely is there any impetus to do so. Most every post made to the site, then, is automatically noted at the top as having been produced by Anonymous.

That this accident of web history led into something bigger - a loose-knit network of activists who have since scored hits against institutions ranging from NATO to Sony to the Church of Scientology - is already widely known, this having been noted in countless feature magazine articles of the sort that have appeared over the last several years. But there is something else in all of this that has proven itself to be even more important, although the full implications are only beginning to be seen. It involves that very same dynamic whereby some people found it convenient to pretend to be other people entirely, if only to ensure that their 4chan thread received more views than it would have otherwise. Gunpowder, likewise, was originally used to make fireworks.

It wasnt until 2008 that I began to see what could be done, and then did it. And only in 2011, in the wake of one of Anonymous most dramatic and far-reaching operations, did I first learn that I had competition - and that the competition was organized, automated, and funded by the most powerful institutions in the history of mankind.

But first, back in 2007, I had my new hobby.

***

The most popular and active board on 4chan is called /b/ - the random board. To provide a real sense of what it is and why it matters, we may quote from a collection of descriptions that appear on several other websites of the sort that chronicle such improbabilities as occur on the internet:

/b/ is the guy who tells the cripple ahead of him in line to hurry up.
/b/ is first to get to the window to see the car accident outside.
/b/ is the one who wrote your number on the mall's bathroom wall.
/b/ is that bat-shit crazy old man who sits on his porch and threatens to shoot the children that step on his lawn.
/b/ is the guy who calls a suicide hotline to hit on the adviser.
/b/ is the one who left a used condom outside the schoolyard.
/b/ is the homeless person at the bus stop who wraps his arm around you and starts a conversation.
/b/ is the guy who sticks his dick in the vacuum cleaner.

In fact, /b/ is what happens when an entire generation is given virtually unlimited access to information from adolescence onwards - and then given absolutely unlimited access to each other. It is a million Tom Sawyers if Tom Sawyer were a nihilist and had a million other Tom Sawyers with whom to conspire. In a larger sense, it is a microcosm of the internet as a whole, and driven by the same tendencies. Along those same lines, the forces that were brewing within /b/ and the processes that drove them are comparable to the forces and dynamics that have defined the internet, which itself has begun to redefine the world. Incidentally, there are many within the fields of intelligence, journalism, and commentary who could have better anticipated the trends that are now coming into play if they had only taken the internet seriously. And many who could indeed bring themselves to take the internet seriously were unable to go so far as to take /b/ seriously, and for many of the same reasons.

After all, /b/ dealt in obscure Japanese cartoons and video games and mean pranks and Dadaist short stories. /b/ was the province of the hyperactive teenager and the bored undergrad - the clinically depressed genius who couldnt get any job worth having and who instead spent his time altering photos in service to inside jokes that are only decipherable to those of his online contemporaries who are familiar with no less than six different other inside jokes, all involving Pokemon characters. /b/ was to the internet as the internet was to real life, as it is known to those who divorce mans actions from the concepts that fuel them. Few suspected that there was something here worth learning, something indicative of the culture that also contributed to same. But we will come back to this complaint, as the reader has probably guessed.

For now, we ought to delve into the world we are discussing, just as I first did in earnest shortly after leaving prison.

In order to do this, we must first become familiar with the word "meme" and its current application. The term was first coined by the evolutionary biologist and professional atheist Richard Dawkins, who, having already written so eloquently on the matter of the gene and its drive towards self-perpetuation, now needed a way in which to describe the similarly unconscious processes by which units of information may spread. Appropriately enough to those familiar with how biology co-opts certain of life's functions for other purposes until the original purpose is lost, the term found its ultimate niche as a means of referring to stories, concepts, pictures, and even people who at some point or another have been the focus of a certain sort of repeated, evolving attention on the part of the internet's natives.

Now, let us see an example of how a meme is created.

At some fairly early point in the history of 4chan, some fellow somewhere was playing an old Super Nintendo game called The Secret of Mana. Like many people, he was doing this using a computer program which emulates the SNES and its games, rather than on the actual SNES hardware. Among other features not present within the old hardware, the emulator allows one to play these games with someone else over the internet - which is to say that a two-player game which once required two people to play together in the same room may now be played together in realtime by two people in different countries.

All was going well, presumably, until the two friends had themselves a difference of opinion. It seemed that one of them insisted on equipping his game character with an item called the Power Wrist, which conferred a certain nature and extent of statistical advantages on his character. But the other friend wisely recognized that his friend was in error by believing this item to be superior to another item that could be bought at a nearby shop within the game world. And it also happened that the friend who was in error had to pause the game to get a soda or go to the bathroom or something. While the one friend is away, the other goes into the fellow's inventory, takes this particular item, and goes into the shop to sell it. With the money he earns from the transaction, he buys an item which is quite arguably better, and then equips his friend with it. His friend then comes back and is none the wiser - until an hour or so later, when he happens to notice that his item of choice is gone. His friend comes clean about the deception and explains why he felt the need to take charge of the situaton.

But the friend who has had his item taken and sold and replaced with another item is upset. He wants his item back. And as such, he is unwilling to proceed into the next regions, knowing that the shops to which he will be privy in far-off lands do not stock this particular item. After all, the item really isn't that good, and is thus only sold in earlier portions of the game, where players fight lesser enemies and only come across lesser options, this being a common convention in such games.

Though distraught, the one who had his item of choice taken from him is defiant. He insists that the two return to the village where his item was sold so that he can buy it back and re-equip it. And thus the two friends begin their trek back to the village.

Here, for authenticity, is the original text, as posted on 4chan:

So I'm playing Secret of Mana with my friend Senate over ZSNES. We just got to The Empire (more than halfway through the game), and he's still wearing his fucking power wrist. It has 4 defense, as opposed to the ~20 defense from the armor available to us right now (this makes a lot of difference in the world of mana), but he keeps it anyways because it has +5 STR which he is convinced is more important than any amount of defense (it's not).

So while we were in the shop at The Empire, he gave up control of his character for a moment to go AFK, so I popped into his inventory and unequipped his power wrist so I could sell it and buy a Golem Ring instead. He noticed soon after he returned that his power wrist was missing, and became irate.

So now we're on our way to "potatos" (he means Potos Village) to buy back his power wrist. What he doesn't know is that he can buy it at the shop we just left in The Empire.

And the image which this 4chan user and Super Nintendo enthusiast posted to begin the thread is a screenshot of the persons view of the game in which he and his friend, or their Secret of Mana equivalents, are standing outside the shop. At the bottom, overlaid above the game view, is the text that his angry friend has written to him and which is displayed via some instrument of the emulator:

WERE GOING BACK TO POTATOS TO GET MY FUKING POWER WRIST
ASSHOLE

Power wrist, potatos, were going back to potatos, fuking power wrist, and were going back to potatos to get my fuking power wrist all became memes. This is to say that each of these phrases would be repeated over and over again forever, the original story would be recorded verbatim and kept at a certain other website that is in the business of chronicling such things, and the basic concepts laid out therein would eventually find themselves placed in new contexts. All of this naturally raises several questions among the uninitiated, such as What? and Who the fuck cares? Now, now. There, there.

This particular meme did not come from 4chan, although 4chan was the that popularized it. Rather, it stems from a comment made on the website DeviantArt, a venue from which users may create and maintain pages for the purpose of displaying their artistic creations. There is more to be said about DeviantArt, its demographics, and the particularities of its content, but for now it will suffice to say that it is probably the worlds greatest repository of drawn pornography depicting characters from the Sonic the Hedgehog series of video games. In fact, lets not say anything more about it at all, other than to note that following account refers largely to the Pokemon franchise, that Ash is the protagonist of the overarching Pokemon narrative, and that Mudkip is an especially cute specimen of Pokemon. Im not going to tell you what a Pokemon is because its a secret.

Today being Halloween, I decided to fuck with the major retard at school when I came out of science for break. He was dressed as Ash. Knowing this was going to happen, I brought a Mudkip doll. Thus I started the conversation, making sure no one saw me.

"So I heard you like Mudkips..."
"MUDKIPS? I LUUUUUUUUUUUUVE MUDKIPS."
"O RLY? So, would you ever fuck a Mudkips, that is.." (he cuts me off before I could said 'if you were a mudkips')
"OF COURSE."
"Well I just happen to have a Mudkips here, and..."

Before I finished the sentence, which would have resulted in me hitting him across the face with the doll, he grabbed it. In one swift motion his pants were down and he was violently humping it. Not to get between a man and his Mudkips I started to walk away, because there is no way I'd be caught wrestling a half-naked crazy guy humping a Mudkips.

Needless to say, within 5 to 10 seconds, some girls saw him and started screaming. I cooly walked into a restroom, pretending nothing had ever happened; not that I had intended that outcome, but now that it was in play I didn't want to be involved.

I came back out two minutes later, and like any wanton act on school grounds there was now a huge crowd around him. He was still fucking it and baying this real fucked up 'EEEEEEEEEEINNNNF EEEEEEEEEEINNNF' sound. Suddenly a scuffle broke out in the middle, meaning he probably did something stupid.

I asked someone what had happened. A girlfriend of one of the football players tried to get him to stop, but he bit her for trying to take it away. Someone called in a few football players (all dressed up like Road Warrior) who proceeded to pummel the shit out of the guy. Meanwhile the school police were freaking out and having trouble getting in to the situation.

A few minutes later the intruder alarm went off and we were all shuffled into classrooms. Over the intercom the principal announced that someone had thrown a flaming plush toy into the library. Uh.. what the hell.

So we were kept there and about 30 minutes later the principal came on again. This time he was saying that whoever was behind the beating should turn themselves in. All of a sudden this woman began yelling, "I WILL SUE YOU FOR DAMAGES. YOU LITTLE PUNKS, I'M GONNA SUE..." and it was cut off.

I asked an office later what had happened. Apparently his mother had come to pick him up and threatened to sue for the beating and 'whatever else happened.' The school threatened to counter-sue because of lewd conduct, inciting a riot, and starting a fight.

So I ask you: do u leik Mudkipz?

There is more to a meme than simply being created and disseminated; it must evolve as well. And to the extent that it is grabbed hold of by 4chan, it will indeed evolve. The preceding story, having been posted into 4chan some years ago, could already disseminate itself in three general forms: that of the story itself, that of the closing line, do you leik Mudkipz?, and the concept of the Mudkip itself. The last of these, being taken from the Pokemon universe, is a blue and grey little monster with a happy, open-mouthed smile, fins, and an overall bearing of cuteness that could only have been conceived and executed in Japan. Being the most basic, the image of the Mudkip was also the most easily applicable to other contexts - the variations on a theme to which every good meme is subjected over time.

For example, I am looking at a particular web page which deals with the subject of the Mudkip. Included on this page is a gallery of images onto which the humble Mudkip has been Photoshopped, or in which the Mudkip has been redrawn or otherwise reimagined. There is a dancing Mudkip with a top hat and cane; there is a Mudkip whose mouth is filled with cigarettes and who is captioned with the single word, Gentlemen; there is a Mudkip whose face has been replaced with that of a particular cartoon bear who happens to serve as a visual representation of pedophilia; there is a Mudkip re-rendered onto a famous old poster that once depicted a stylized Andre the Giant with the word OBEY underneath; there is a photo of a naked and well-endowed young woman who has painted herself as a Mudkip; there is another version of the Mudkip with a mouth full of cigarettes who is this time captioned Mudkip-men; there is a drawing of two anthropomorphic female Mudkips passionately kissing each other on a grassy field; there is a Mudkip drawn in yet another style but with an especially large and open mouth above the words MUDKIPZ MAH BOI; there is what looks to be a 12th century parchment depicting a Mudkip above the Old English lettering reading, I hath heardth that thou liketh kips of the mud; there is an old photo of Hitler and his close associates at a rally except that the swastika of the banners have been replaced with Mudkips, as have the swastikas of the armbands; there is a Mudkip that has the head of the character Milhouse from The Simpsons; and there is a Mudkips head placed upon the body of a young man who is pointing in a macho way towards his black t-shirt while holding a camera and facing a mirror, with the t-shirt reading, Bitches dont know that you liek me. And there are many, many more. And this page is nothing close to a comprehensive repository of Mudkips that have been altered and distributed for mysterious reasons.

Those who are new to the subject may have noticed that several of these variants seem to make no sense, or are exceedingly bizarre. In such cases, a mix of memes has taken place. The two Mudkips whose mouths are filled with cigarettes, for instance, are a take on an entirely separate meme of more recent origin, one which originally depicted the spy character from the multiplayer online game Team Fortress 2 as having his mouth filled with cigarettes while saying the word Gentlemen. Why such a meme developed in the first place - and why another variant of it depicted the spy as more crudely drawn and instead muttering the word Mentlegen - is unknown to me at this time.

Now, there are countless other memes of these sorts, all of which either began or incubated at 4chan. Some are visual; some consist of narrative; some are best described as thematic; some are no more than a word or a corruption of a word. Many draw from video games or other forms of niche culture; of these, many originate from amusing errors in spelling, grammar, or translation, some of which may have been made by a single party on some long-lost occasion, some of which are common mistakes endemic to an internet that caters to the literate and semi-literate alike.

There are now, and remain, untold tens of thousands who have been heavily exposed to what could be called the great plurality of these memes. Altogether, such things eventually come to constitute a shared narrative, a shared dialect, a shared sensibility, and a shared history - and he who objects to the idea of some six or seven years constituting any sort of history is still thinking of history as something that reaches significance only over generations, rather than a few years.

History once worked that way. There was a time in which a particular region would produce a particular pattern on its pottery, and would do so with little change over the course of several centuries; as such, archaeologists can track a particular shard of pottery to a particular time and place in ancient Greece, and place another with a slight variation to another time and place a hundred years further down the line and a hundred miles away on the axis known as space.

Even within that context, the Neolithic inland village changed far more slowly than did the coastal Neolithic center of trade. The village, void of stimuli and the thought-products of others, had little to spur it on; the center of trade, relatively blessed with the commotion that comes from man and man while meanwhile privy with the inventions of a hundred communities, is where the patterns on the pottery would come to vary most - and most quickly.

Within the human fold, there remain isolated communities that, being isolated, have undergone almost no change at all. The extreme opposite of such places were the bustling cities of the Western world in large part because such cities played host to the infinite combinations of concepts and ideas which make up the units of culture. The perpetual shuffle of such units advance, differentiate, and multiply that culture, which expands and evolves and then divides, in the sense that a single person can only take in so many units from such a single and ever-diversifying pool of phraseology, of literature, of sensibility, and of belief.

But the opposite of the paralyzed backwater tribe is no longer the city, but the online community; the latter exceeds the former in the potential geographical diversity of the human pool from which it draws, in the sheer number of interactions that may occur between such participants in a given space of time, in the ease with which such interactions may take place when there is no need to take into account the logistics of mass human interaction and the time-consuming and content-limiting social conventions that tend to arise when mammals meet in meatspace - in the speed with which a new culture may arise when that culture is built with unprecedented freedom from the friction of time and space.

When an array of individuals come to share a culture, they can be said to have become a people. It matters very little whether that culture is defined on the one hand by a certain layout of zig-zap pattern on its pottery, or on the other by a series of variations on some more complex symbol. There is nothing more fundamentally uniting about a stated appreciation for apple pie than there is in a stated appreciation of Mudkips. The various Arab peoples differ in dialect and see this as both the result and reason of their existence as peoples who vary; the dialect of the chans is so specialized and linguistically storied that the account with which this chapter begins has had to be rendered into proper English so that it can be understood, and even with that I have left in a sampling of terminology that will still have to be explained as the book proceeds. And to the extent that some readers recognized some of those terms, it is because the channer culture disseminates its memes beyond its own purview, giving and taking as does any culture that is in contact with others.

Perhaps the most natural objection to this line of thought is that the 4chan hordes are made up of individuals who hail from any number of more traditional cultures to which they may more rightfully be said to belong. This is a point that I ought to concede. But what does it say about such people and their national loyalties that they have lately begun striking out against each of their own governments in turn, and doing so under a single banner?

Which brings me to another point that will become evident as we proceed - that the model of the chan culture as a nation unto itself is only accurate to a certain degree, and useful mostly for tracking its trajectory in familiar terms. After all, if this people constitutes a nation, it is a nation that now exists in near-total opposition to nationalism, and often to the states in which real nations have long manifested themselves.

But now we are jumping ahead. Before there is a nation of any sort, there is a horde of barbarians. And I do not believe it will take much rhetoric on my part to make the case that the chans once constituted such a thing as a horde of barbarians, regardless of what else it was or has since become.

**

In July of 2007, the Fox News television affiliate in Los Angeles aired a story on a nefarious group of computer hackers - promoted elsewhere in the segment to hackers on steroids - who had been treating the web like a real-life video game: sacking websites, invading MySpace accounts, disrupting innocent peoples lives, these apparently being the kinds of things that one does in an average video game in the view of whoever it is that writes scripts for this particular TV station.

Destroy. Die. Attack, read the menacing red letters that kick off the segment, with these alleged quotes being described as threats made by the hackers and Ill not quibble by noting that all three are actually imperatives, rather than threats, per se, as Ive already come off as pedantic enough for one chapter. But an actual threat, by the English language reckoning, is soon played: an answering machine message in which some adolescent caller proclaims that he will slit the throat of the messages recipient. It is noted, or at least claimed, that Anonymous has even threatened to bomb sports stadiums, this being a reference to a message board thread in which the topic was frightening terrorist scenarios and which prompted an arrest by the Department of Homeland Security after someone wrote a clearly fictional account of several football stadiums being blown up by terrorists (Tom Clancy, meanwhile, is still at large). I believe theyre domestic terrorists, says a woman interviewed for the story, her assertion supported by subsequent stock footage of an exploding van.

Their name comes from their secret website, the narrator continues, in reference to 4chan, which had long before developed into one of the most popular and best-known sites on the web. It requires anyone posting on the site to remain anonymous, he adds, in reference to a requirement that never actually existed. MySpace users are among their favorite targets, he goes on, with sudden accuracy. And then the viewer is introduced to a fellow whose profile was taken over thanks to a list of MySpace passwords that had been posted on 4chan a few months before; gay sex pictures were posted on his page, were told, allegedly prompting his girlfriend to break up with him. She thought I was cheating on her with other guys, the fellow explains to Fox.

A self-proclaimed hacker, rendered the regular sort of anonymous for the purpose of the interview, next explains that the agenda of Anonymous hinges on sowing chaos and discord in pursuit of lulz, a term our narrator explains to be a corruption of LOL - laugh out loud. Anonymous gets big lulz from pulling random pranks, the voiceover continues, for example, messing with online childrens games like Habbo Hotel, an example that Fox somehow neglects to illustrate with footage of exploding vehicles. Truly epic lulz, he goes on, come from raids and invasions, like their nationwide campaign to spoil the new Harry Potter book ending. It should be noted that the sinister background music which has played since the beginning of the segment continues through this particular revelation. Of course, its needed for the next bit in which Anonymous threat to blow up several football stadiums are described in a bit more detail, although not so much detail as to relay that the scenario was intended as fiction.

The soundtrack does manage to obtain some level of appropriateness as the segment comes to explain the background of the unknown hacker. Though once a participant in the then-nascent Anonymous culture, he claims to have since changed his ways, likewise attempting to convert his former associates to a kinder, gentler set of activities. Unsurprisingly, the fellow had little luck in changing anything at all and promptly became the subject of a harsh campaign of mockery and intimidation that prompted the threatening answering machine message played earlier (a more complete version is now run, revealing that the caller had not only threatened our subjects life but even called him an emo bitch, one of the cruelest insults to which one could resort in 2007). We learn that his frightened mother responded to the posting of their address and phone number by installing an alarm system; a brief clip seems to imply that she also got into the habit of closing the living room curtains. They even bought a dog, says the narrator, overlaying an action shot of the pet in question. Its also claimed that mom began tracking down Anonymous members herself, fearing that her calls to the FBI might not be taken seriously, and perhaps also worrying that unless she herself took them down first, some crack team of Anonymous techno-assassins might someday manage to get past the dog.

As the segment ends, it is noted that many of Anonymous victims of chance are hopeful that their antagonists will simply get bored and move on. But insiders say, Dont count on that, the narrator summarizes, prompting a final statement from the unknown hacker. Garble garble mumble never forget, the latter says, or attempts to, through the voice garbling software thats been deployed lest Anonymous discover the identity of the fellow whose identity they already posted on the web. Presumably he is referencing the groups longtime motto, We do not forgive. We do not forget.

Anonymous never did forgive or forget the hacker in question, a fellow named Paul Fetch, for proclaiming himself to be their leader and attempting to clean up the organization. But then one never forgives or forgets their first romantic partner; one moves on nonetheless. After the airing of the segment, some number of Anonymous participants attacked the Fox affiliates website, preventing users from viewing the segment online. This was not done out of concern for bad press, but rather out of a sort of collective instinct. In fact, the segment was promptly re-cut into a sort of techno music video and placed on YouTube, making repetitive use of such lyrics as:

Hackers on steroids!
Anonymous has even threatened...
I believe theyre domestic terrorists
Destroy. Die. Attack.
Gay sex pictures.
Secret website!
Truly epic lulz
Even bought a dog.
She thought that... that I was cheating on her with guys.

most of which quickly established themselves as beloved memes.

As delightfully ridiculous as the now-legendary segment happened to be, the general idea that there were many mean and, in some cases, vastly terrible people hanging around on 4chan in those days was entirely accurate.

On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 12:49 PM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:

Apologies for the delay; had to spend some time figuring out what do about Sabu in terms of the narrative, which often hinged on him, so was working on chapter five and six so I could get a clear idea of how certain things need to play out. I'm back on chapter three now, which I'll absolutely have in to you by noon tomorrow.

On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 12:43 PM, Daniel Conaway <dconaway@writershouse.com> wrote:

Guys: its the fourteenth. Subpeonas or no, Ive got a serious gun to my head here, and were falling further and further behind.

Gregg, have you done your part on those first two chapters?

--
Regards,

Barrett Brown
940-735-9748

--
Regards,

Barrett Brown
940-735-9748