To: Daniel Conaway <dconaway@writershouse.com>, Anonymous <greggatghc@gmail.com>
I added 6,000 words to the original 8,000 of the chapter 3 draft from two days ago; chapter 4 will now begin with the Hal Turner affair and then go into Scientology.
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 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. And we need not rely on any victim testimony to determine this; like any nascent nation with the means to record its own exploits, the hordes of /b/ recorded their deeds so that all might take look upon them and despair, or giggle, or whatever.
**
Encyclopedia Dramatica was more of a gang than it was a chronicler. And it was very much a chronicler.
Utilizing the wiki format popularized by Wikipedia and adapted by countless other volunteer groups who sought to maintain a compendium of knowledge on some or another niche subject, ED allowed anyone to create new articles or edit existing ones - once, at least. Watching the "recent changes" tab from the confines of an IRC channel, those with the power to ban would-be writers were hardly shy about doing so. A new contributor who proved to be unfunny, sub-literate, or a combination of the two would not only be banned immediately, but often directed to what would turn out to be a special page on the site that constituted the most disgusting, offensive, and pornographic pictures that have ever been culled from the net.
But the majority of bans had nothing to do with whether a would-be contributor seemed capable of adapting the style in which the content was largely written; rather, they were in response to first-time users blanking entire articles in futile effort to remove information from the internet. The efforts were futile because any change to a wiki page may be reverted with the push of a button; the efforts were made because the articles were all about the people who tried to blank them.
ED grew into existence as the result of coordination by a certain network of people who rightfully considered themselves to be aficionados of online drama. In the beginning, that drama was most easily located within the sphere of Livejournal, an early blogging network that provided free blogging space to anyone who wanted it. As it turned out, there was a marked correlation between (1) people who really wanted to write about their private lives and (2) a tendency to say and do ridiculous things. Our drama aficionados felt the need to record the most spectacular of these incidents, and Encyclopedia Dramatica was born. Having been born, it came to develop certain appetites - a hunger which the various snits and squabbles of Livejournal, having been recorded ad naseum, could only so long fulfill.
So the purview of ED widened. It began to cover the memes and doings of /b/, and in doing so attracted /b/tards, as they were called, to the ranks of its contributors and even its admins. Thereafter ED and the chans would become culturally and strategically intertwined. And ED would come to serve as the consciousness of a pseudo-nation, recording, centralizing, and thereby perpetuating both the dialect and the mythology of a pseudo-people who were soon to become a geopolitical force. (Remember that the format of 4chan is such that entirety of the content - the threads - disappears into the ether within a few days, if not sooner; despite all of this consisting of text and pictures, then, we are dealing with something that is more akin to oral tradition than the written sort)
But EDs role as recorder constitutes only a portion of its significance - and one that lessens in relevance as time goes by. The other portion is supremely relevant, and becomes more relevant as the process we know as Anonymous proceeds to its inevitable conclusion. This other portion involves the means by which the internet may be used as a weapon.
Because the appetites which grew within ED were not to be satisfied merely by documenting the damage that certain people had already done to themselves.
**
Douglas looked at his future and saw that it was bright. Although the Virginia resident still lived with his parents and younger siblings at the age of 25 and had very little in the way of a career at this point, he knew this would all change by and by. Someday, he would join the Coast Guard. This was his dream. And in the meantime, he had managed to score a 13-year-old girlfriend.
Girlfriend is a relative term in our current era, the first age in history wherein two individuals can engage in sexual activity despite being separated by a thousand miles. This girl, Cyndie, lived in Florida. Douglas had met her via a chat service called Meebo, and two had hit it off, afterwards continuing their e-relationship via e-mail. At the beginning, Cyndie had sent him a photo of herself, her brother, her cousin, and her grandmother at a bowling alley. Douglas decided that she was sufficiently attractive - whats more, he knew he could get more than just a family photo if he were persistent. And so he wrote back:
Hey Cutie! I just got home from work. What are you up to? I'm getting out of my work clothes and about to take a shower. I'm definitely ready for a nice hot shower. Except that it's always so cold getting out :o( I think I'm looking forward to a hot shower because for some reason my shoulders are really tight, I'm hoping the hot water well help me relax.Unless you want to come over and try to give me a massage. :o) What else are you up to this evening?
Note: Douglas is in the habit of giving noses to his emoticons.
The correspondence continued back and forth for several days.
Cyndie described the nature of her school uniform and noted that she was often bored while at home, without any parents around. Douglas replies, I bet you look hot in your little skirt cause you have a nice body... I would definitely love to come over and help you with that boredom, adding a ;o) for good measure.
Some time later, Douglas expresses his desire to make out with his young acquaintance. Cyndie replies that shes unclear on the concept. Douglas is more than willing to instruct her. Making out can be done in a number of ways, he writes. But it's basically when a boy and girl get intimate with each other and mess around sexually. Do you want to know more about it?
Cyndie replies, id like to no more... this isn't sumthing they talk about at skool and i kinda want to no wut to do wen i get together with a boy neway....
Douglas takes his role as educator seriously and sends back the following treatise:
It's too bad I don't live close to you cause then I could just show you in person. If I went to your house, and you were there alone, I would walk up to you and start kissing you. I would hold you close to me and run my hands all over your body. I would lightly push you up against a wall and start to kiss your neck, maybe slide my hands up inside your shirt. Then I would start to undress you and take off all your clothes. You would then undress me. I would start to kiss you all over your body. Starting at your neck, and kiss down to your chest. I would kiss your boobs and suck on your nipples. Then I would kiss down a little further till I got to your belly button. I would then pick you and lay you down on your bed, spreading your legs open. I would start kissing at your belly button again, but start working down lower until i'm kissing your pussy. I would kiss it and suck it, and slide my fingers inside of it until you start moaning because it feels so good. Then we could switch, and you could start kissing me, and work your way down my body until you're sucking my penis. You would keep sucking it until I cum. A lot of girls like to swallow it, some just like the guy to shoot his cum on her face or on her boobs. Now we could go far enough to where actually have sex. I could slide my penis inside your pussy and fuck you. It feels so good, you would love it. There's all kinds of cool different positions to have sex. Then I could shoot my cum inside your pussy which feels sooo good for both of us. What do you think of that?? :o) <3 you sweetie!
Cyndie responds:
i cant even imagine wut its like... but it seems like it'd be amazing!!! does that mean u want to come over wen my parents rnt home?
Douglas replies in the affirmative, and the two begin conspiring to figure out a time when Douglas could fly down to Florida at such a time as Cyndies parents will be out of town. But this will take some doing, and in the meantime Douglas photographs himself in the nude, videotapes himself masturbating to climax, and e-mails the materials to Cyndie, who seems to appreciate the gesture of goodwill. But Douglas is an ambitious fellow:
Have you told any of your friends about us having sex? If so what do they think about it? If you have any other female friends who want to try having sex for the first time you can invite them over too.
Cyndie relates that one of her little friends is indeed intrigued. Seeing his opening, Douglas proposes that this other girl be present when he finally makes it down to Florida, and that in the meantime the two of them should learn about lesbianism and record what they can of their early experimentation. Cyndie agrees, but notes that she has no way of taking digital pictures; however, she has access to a Polaroid camera. Also, she explains, it has become known to her that some guys like to receive pairs of panties from girls; along with the Polaroid pictures of her and her friend engaging in the various sexual practices that Douglas has proposed to them, she could also send along whatever panties are worn, used, and scented in the process. Douglas, in his benevolence, agrees to all of this. And then he gives Cyndie his home mailing address. And yes, he adds, Im starting to love you.
Douglas never received any such package. But he did get another response from Cyndies e-mail address, which he must have opened with excitement.
You are a sick individual. I have watched you over the past month attempt to solicit this girl and get sexual satisfaction from talking to a 13 year old. The bottom line is, you were being lead on, and not only do I have email evidence, I have your nude pictures (that show your face), your cell, your home address (which luckily happens to be your parents address), and videos of you masterbating.
Everything has been posted on the internet. The videos will be up tonight, but your pictures, phone number, and address can be seen. You will probably start recieving phone calls tonight, and your parents will definitely get mail.
Additionally, I will be submitting all of your information to the US Coast Guard and attempt to keep you out, since you are someone that should not be serving the public. While I don't have enough evidence to have you put on the sex offenders list, this should be enough to make you miserable, especially once this gets indexed with google and any search of your name will pull this up. How does it feel to know that potential employers will see your dick?
Have a great day Doug, check yourself out at:
and then there is a link to Encyclopedia Dramatica, where a new page had just been created and titled with Douglas full name. By this point - late 2007 - ED had built itself into a power player in terms of Google search returns, which is to say that anyone who happened to search for the name of anyone listed on the site would likely find that site at the top of their search results.
What went through Douglas mind at this point? We may get an idea by his response, which came a few hours later:
okay, you got me. i was never actually intending to meet her. it was just talk to kill some boredom. i said i would try to meet last weekend, obviously i didn't even make any attempt. please, you definitely got my attention, i've learned my lesson. we talked for a long time before it got into anything sexual. it definitely went too far and i didn't know what i was doing. i made a mistake. and i swear you're the only person i've ever done this with. please take the site down and i swear i'll never do this again.
Soon afterwards, Douglas receives another response in which the mysterious sender notes that a desire to kill some boredom hardly justifies the manipulative sexual pursuit of a 13-year-old girl and her friends, and additionally that Douglas is connected to a number of other underage girls via MySpace. The page, declares the sender, will remain accessible forever.
It is some time before Douglas tries his luck again.
To Whom It May Concern, This is the first time I've had a chance to e-mail you today, since I have not been home since about 4:00 pm yesterday. You and I have a few things we need to discuss. First of all, all those e-mails that were sent to you, did not come from me. Despite what you believe or don't believe, my computer has been hacked a couple of times in the last couple months. My myspace page has been phished three times to the point of it being blocked and I was required to change my password on more then one occasion. Whoever got into my computer got my password to everything and started using my e-mail. I have two different e-mail address, and don't check this one regularly. So who ever was using this e-mail started a conversation on Meebo pretending to be me, when I never use meebo. I have instant messanger downloaded, why would I get on meebo?
And as far as the e-mails go, the company I used to work for recently had a huge merger with another company. I was sent on the road for eight weeks straight to travel around Virginia and help some of our new offices get set up. It was such a hectic merger, I never got a lunch break much less get online everyday. And being in a hotel every night, I did not have access to a computer. So during the time the e-mails were going on I wasn't even in town and didn't have any computer access. So he could've easily had all the conversations he wanted without my knowledge. And even if I did get online at work, they have departments that track what sites we go on, I could get fired for going on chat rooms.
Once I got back in town, came time to start the moving process back to my parents house. I e-mailed a few people as to what was going on with my moving, so whoever was reading my e-mails on the other address probably read when I was finished moving. My phone number and home address, was unfortunately on my facebook page but I thought I had it set for friends only. So he could've gotten that info off of old e-mails as well. The e-mail you got last night about me "learning my lesson" was not me either, and I have proof. I was at the Washington Capitals game last night and didn't get home until well after 11:00 pm and didn't even get on my e-mail last night. Then I had to leave early this morning and was out most of the day, I only heard of this because my siblings called me when they got the facebook messages from you.
The first e-mail I've ever seen from you is the one I got this afternoon when I first got home in response to the "I've learned my lesson" e-mail. So I gave them my passwords and it was I that told them to delete my pages and all my past e-mail to try to prevent anyone from getting more information. After this e-mail is sent, this e-mail will be deleted as well. As for those pictures and videos, yes, they're me, however I took those a while ago and they were meant for another girl that I liked who is almost my age. He got on my e-mail, found those pictures, and used them to send to you. This is not the first time I've been hacked like this. Something similar but not to this extreme happened a couple years ago. None of my friends believe your site, I've had friends IMing me all morning telling me that those e-mails don't even sound anything close to the way I talk. Even people I've dated who I have talked dirty too before said that doesn't sound like me. It's possible in opening junk mail a couple months ago I got a virus. There are virus's that can send basically everything on my computer, pictures, e-mails, passwords, everything to whoever sent the virus.
I'm having my computer checked as we speak. Also, a friend of mine googled the e-mail addresses, and actually found the real Cyndipie or whatever her name is, and IMed her, and she told her that her information was also hacked about two months ago, and she was forced to change all of her stuff. Bottom line, this was not me. I have been a good standing citizen my whole life, I have a record that's clean as a whistle, I have never done anything like this before. I may not be the sharpest pencil in the box, but I'm not stupid. And for me to actually give someone permission to mail that kind of stuff to my parents house and take the chance of them finding it? My father is a police officer and I'm joining the military. Do you really think I'd be that dumb? You know as well as I do that computers get hacked all the time. And that's what happened here. Whoever was sending you these e-mails was someone that was using my e-mail address and probably deleting the messages before I could see them. I'm not sure if it's someone I know or not, but I will continue to do research of my own to try to find out, and in the mean time, you need to take down the sites that you have created about me, or I will be forced to come at you with legal action! That is all.
Sincerely, The real Doug [last name redacted]
Among the various problems with Douglas story is that there was no real Cyndipie, as the reader will have probably guessed (and as Douglas should have guessed himself).
The ED page dealing with Douglas kept growing. The above e-mail exchange between Doug and the manipulator was added, as were portions of additional threats, pleas, and threat-laden pleas made by Doug and certain of his acquaintances. The page was blanked out by a new user who would likely be either Doug himself or one of his friends; as is always the case, it was immediately restored with the click of a button, the internet being forever. Douglas dad made contact with the manipulator and denied knowing who blanked the page. Like all victims or proxies for victims, he was invited to come to the IRC channel from which unknown forces had overseen the destruction of his family. He wisely declined; by this time, he had read through enough ED pages to learn that the resulting conversations are invariably added to the relevant ED pages.
Sometime afterwards, a Fairfax County detective wrote to the manipulator. By this time, the manipulator had moved on to other other things, but not before handing over access of the Cyndiepie e-mail account to the ED admins - who, upon being contacted by the detective, were more than happy to cooperate. In late 2008, Douglas was arrested and charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor and possession of a computer used in child pornography; two months later he was convicted and put on the Commonwealth of Virginias sex offender list, where he remains today. All of this was documented and added to the ED article, which was now complete.
***
The practice of pedo baiting is merely one of the many weapons that were conceived, developed, and refined within 4chans sphere of influence. And the particular path that Douglas destruction took was merely one of many ways in which such a weapon can be used.
For instance, a manipulator posing as a minor (or at least as a different minor - note that some of the practitioners are actually 15-year-old kids) can take the procedure down a variety of directions. One of these is to provide the target with a phone number that is allegedly that of the minor; the victim, being desirous of engaging in phone sex with a child, then calls the number. Usually a man answers, but sometimes a woman; either way, it is clear to the target that this is not the minor he wanted to reach. Likely he hangs up. And likely he realizes that the person he is talking to gave him a fake or random number. But he is wrong, as the number was not random at all. It was to a police precinct. And the target is now informed of this. Then it is explained to him that if the manipulator chooses to do so, he may take a screenshot of the online conversation that led up to this, and may send it along to the precinct in question along with the date and time on which this conversation occurred, and that the precinct need only to confirm that this call occurred at the same time as the target was meanwhile proclaiming his desire of making it. The precinct can therefore trace the call to determine the identify of the individual, already having more than enough evidence necessary to make an arrest. After this explanation, the target is informed that there is only one way by which he can get out of the trap - one way by which he can disincline the manipulator from proceeding with the act that will destroy the life of the target. The target need only type out the phrase, I liek mudkipz. The target does so, and then the game is over. The target is free to go about his business.
To the extent that such games are played in this way, we may think of them in terms of catch and release. Nothing truly terrible happens to the target, who is shaken but otherwise unscathed; likely he will think twice about attempting to engage a minor in sexual activity of any sort, which is for the best. But catch and release is not the only way in which this may end.
What sort of person does this sort of thing? There are several sorts. One sort tends to have a grudge against the adult male who seeks sexual dalliances with children, and in such cases the game is likely to end with the arrest or public documenting of the target. Another sort is motivated by less noble forces and simply wishes to gain amusement from the pain of others, and in such cases the game is also likely to end with the arrest or public documenting of the target - unless the manipulator is lazy, in which case it will probably just end as a screenshot and placed on /b/ for the enjoyment of others.
And then there is a third sort of person who engages in this sort of thing, and many other things besides. He is best described as an experimenter. His ultimate goal is to develop methodology that may be applied elsewhere for other reasons. And in another time and place, he would have been employed by the intelligence services of some or another national power. In fact, it is very possible that even in this time and place, he works for a government - as many such people do, either directly or under the auspices of one of the many private institutions that are hired by the state to do things of a certain nature.
But there are only so many roles for experimenters within the realm of the state. Moreover, many experimenters have an animosity towards the state and would be disinclined to work for it. The result is that we have, on the one hand, people who seek to weaponize the internet for the purposes of supporting the state, and on the other, people who seek to do so in hopes of bringing the state down. And these two groups are not fond of one another.
But again, were getting ahead of ourselves.
**
In 2005, /b/ got into the habit of raiding Habbo Hotel, a rather simple online virtual world that catered to kids and teenagers. Someone would post a thread on /b/ proposing that everyone log into the world with a new character and then proceed to wreak havoc. Hundreds would respond to such a call each time it was made. Once logged in, the raiders would proceed to block entrances and exits, particularly those to and from the virtual pools that littered the isometric landscape, itself made up largely of hotel patios. Those who objected were told that the pool was now closed due to AIDS. The moderators would ban as many as the intruders as possible - something that would have been more difficult if the raiders didnt tend to construct their characters in the form of black men wearing three-piece suits and donning Afros. Now that Habbo Hotel was forced into denying access to virtual blacks, the moderators could be accused - improbably, and thus hilariously - of racism.
The Habbo Raids continued for years, but branched out into Second Life, a much more advanced virtual world that offered the ability to script, or create any number of features, items, processes, and the like. Those among the /b/tards who could program thus had a special advantage, as they could build any number of in-game devices intended to disrupt and amuse. Any of these items could be copied and given to others, and often were.
Those who couldnt quite handle the in-game scripting system had plenty to do as well. They could organize others into tightly-knit groups of effective raiders; they could distribute weapons; they could scout out and propose targets; and they could engage in counter-intelligence against the enemy, which was essentially everyone else.
Counter-intelligence was becoming key. Second Life was a huge, sprawling world populated by countless users who spent their time building virtual houses, selling virtual products, and engaging in virtual relationships. The general objective was to disrupt all of this and to do so in amusing ways; to those who came to raid, Second Life was the greatest and most nuanced game ever made, and even featured actual people who would get mad at you and seek to get you banned.
(something something kids playing games)
And the game was larger than Second Life. Recruiting additional raiders from 4chan and similar sites was a big part of it. Providing those recruits with information as to where to start, how to get certain weapons, where to meet with their co-conspirators, where those co-conspirators could be found, which of them could be trusted and which ones couldn't - all of this was an integral part of the mission. And as time went by, those things got more complicated. Because as time goes by and as things are done, a reaction occurs.
It wasn't long before many of Second Life's employees had a sense of what was going on - that there was a loose-knit array of people who congregated on certain sites and shared a certain inexplicable culture who were in the practice of causing trouble within the pseudo-world that the employees were paid to keep trouble-free. They learned that these people could be identified by certain signs - usage of certain terminology, images, and the like. For example, a new user on Second Life could choose any first name they'd like for their character, but the last name had to be pulled from a long list of names.
One of those potential surnames was "Fapp." And it happened that the term "fap" is chan slang for "masturbate." As such, someone who had chosen the last name "Fapp" could very well be one of these virtual terrorists, whereas someone whose name was "Mudkipz Fapp" was even more likely to be one.
But things weren't as easy as all that. The term "fap" may have been popularized by the chans, but the chans had become widely influential incubators of the culture by this point, and thus the term had spread across the internet by this point, making its usage an unreliable indicator of one's intent to wave a giant screaming penis in the middle of a virtual concert. There were, in fact, a great deal of phenomena, terminology, mythology that had once been the purview of 4chan but had migrated elsewhere with a speed and degree of proliferation made possible only by the internet. What once served as hallmarks of the chans were now going mainstream.
Now, it is also true that there remained many memes which remained obscure to the outside world at large. And this was to the advantage of the raiders, who could use such things as signs of recognition in the same way that Freemasons once did. An "administrator" of a terrorist cell was likely to admit a new participant only if that participant could demonstrate his familiarity with some number of memes. "We're going back to Potatos," the cell leader would type out to the stranger. "To get my fuking Power Wrist," would respond the applicant - who would then be supplied with all manner of weaponry and given the coordinates to Fort Longcat or some other, less prominent safehouse.
But there are no sure things in this sort of enterprise. An applicant may know the memes without supporting the objective, having learned those memes via Encylopedia Dramatica or even a deep familiarity with 4chan, and his intent may simply be to infiltrate the safehouse - the coordinates of which he now has by virtue of having been told them - and jot down the names
of those present.
What does this spy do with the names? Likely he will send them to the moderators, who may or may not ban those who have been betrayed. If this spy is of a certain constituency, he will also add them to a certain website on which is recorded the Second Life screennames of every known or suspected infiltrator. And those names will be used by those Second Life users who "own" a portion of land, and who thus have the option of blacklisting any user he'd like from that land. And the problem with this, from the standpoint of the raiders, is that it is on such parcels of land where sit the ultimate targets - furry nightclubs. The spy, most likely, will have been a furry, too.
A furry is someone who identifies with an animal. This identification may be integral to his own being, or it may be a passing hobby. It may be central to his sexuality. He may very well be in the habit of drawing pictures of the creature he wishes himself to be - often an anthropomorphic fox or wolf. He may also commission such pictures from one of the many other furries who supplement their income by doing so. Some of these pictures will be pornographic, and may depict the furry in some sexual liason with yet another furry with whom he has entered into an online relationship. The sort of furry who draws or commissions such pictures will also take advantage of any online world in which he is able to carry on a virtual life in the guise of his inner image. Second Life is very much such a world.
How does the furry spy know the meme-oriented codewords that allow him to infiltrate those groups that are intent on disrupting his online affairs? Because 4chan and other sites are frequented by furries and cater, in fact, to every imaginable sub-culture, as well as several that are barely imaginable at all. 4chan is not, by any means, a monolith. And neither is the Anonymous of today, or of yesterday. In fact, the raiding group which the furry managed to infiltrate will have included several furries who are known to their compatriots as such, and who are just as intent on launching raids against furry-oriented targets as anyone else. The point of the enterprise is not to hassle furries. It just so happens that furries, when attacked, will react - they are the only demographic within Second Life that will consistently pursue their attackers by attempting to infiltrate their hideouts and identify their members. And this a very important part of the game. And the group which the furry spy infiltrated will be made up of a great number of people who have a variety of reasons for doing what they do.
A majority will be here simply because they enjoy the game. They like to take a certain weapon known as a "Cosby Bomb" and go to some well-populated Second Life attraction and deploy the weapon and thereby send out a multi-directional stream of little in-game entities shaped like the head of Bill Cosby and which elicit sound clips of Mr. Cosby endorsing Jell-O Pudding Pops, and which in doing so disrupt what legitimate events may be occuring in the proximity. They enjoy recording the results and putting them on YouTube for others to enjoy. They enjoy building and acquiring and spreading even better weapons, weapons which send in-game particles flying in all directions and in doing so overwhelm the robust servers that keep a given online region in existence, and thereby crashing the server and bringing the region to a temporary end. Some of these individuals are what we might term "bad people" - people who take joy in causing problems to others - and probably regarded themselves as such. Others among this classification were simply playing a game in which they know that the stakes are low for the victims, who themselves would suffer nothing more than temporary inconvenience.
Others here are entirely disinclined to cause any problems for others, but are more than willing to develop the methods by which such things may be done because these are complex problems to be solved. Unlike Oppenheimer, they need not be kept up at night by the potential results of their creations, because we are talking about a virtual world in which no one is hurt, even if they are inconvenienced. Still others are merely intrigued by what is going on and what the implications might be, and will participate as a means of seeing more, of learning more. Later, they will have a chance to think, and then to extrapolate. Both of these types may be described in a number of ways, but it would be difficult to call them "bad people," and they would likely not have identified as any such thing.
But aside from all of this, there were yet others who were present on Second Life in those days - certain individuals with no connection to the chans or anything of that sort. These individuals were there on somewhat more official business. They wanted to learn how to manipulate people on a large scale, and to do in the service of goverments, corporations, and anyone else who can pay for such a service. These people were experimenters. As to whether or not they were "bad people" - well, none of them seem to have given it much thought. But we will have a chance to decide this for ourselves, because Anonymous now has their e-mails, and thus a degree of insight into their mindsets. And the reason that Anonymous has their e-mails has a great deal to do with the training that one undergoes when one plays games.
**
The hobby I picked up upon my release from prison in 2007 did not involve going onto Second Life in order to conduct raids and counter-intel, nor did it involve the entrapment of pedophiles. Even if I had been inclined to do those sorts of things, I wouldnt have had the time. But I was very much inclined to learn about them, and did. I became acquainted with the various sorts of people who did do these things - the bad people, the good people, and the experimenters of both the pro- and anti-state sorts. Some of these people, in fact, were old friends of mine who had become drawn to all of this over the last couple of years, while my attention had been elsewhere. Certainly I had been familiar with 4chan, but apparently not with the dynamics that had grown out of it. And these dynamics were clearly important.
There were others like me in this sense - people who found all of this fascinating and had come to the vague conclusion that it was all going somewhere, and quickly at that. Increasingly, we found ourselves discussing what potential there might be in all of this. And that became my new hobby.