The most popular and active board on 4chan is called /b/ - the random board. As it turns out, a venue designated as random on such a place as 4chan will nonetheless come to reveal a pattern, one that provides a window into the sensibilities of the turn-of-the-century Westerner.

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 couldnt 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 the physical world is known to those who divorce mans actions from the concepts that fuel them.  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. But 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.

One can imagine, then, that few serious-minded people felt prompted to come to such a place as 4chan to study such a thing as /b/. One could also guess, quite correctly, that most such people were unlikely to have even heard of it in those days. But you didnt have to seek out /b/ or come upon the subject by accident. /b/ had a tendency to come to you. 

***

I had become a black man in an Afro and a three-piece suit. 

Around me stood dozens of others bearing the exact same appearance. All of us had appeared out of the ether over the course of a few minutes. We all spoke a certain dialect riddled with phrases that were incomprehensible to outsiders but meaningful to each of us. We all shared the same objective. But none of us had ever met. 

Throughout the immediate area - a sprawling poolside patio - the locals seemed to have noticed that something was up. Dozens of well-dressed black men in Afros do not just appear out of nowhere. Individuals do, of course, but not groups of people looking exactly alike. That is unusual. So most of those people who had until now been standing around chatting with each other are now watching us, trying to determine what it all means. But a few of them know exactly what it means. Theyve seen it before.

o no not dem again, says a bystander wearing bermuda shorts and a striped t-shirt.

wut, asks his companion, a young woman.

there from sum web site, the fellow explains. 

He is absolutely correct. We had been summoned here by a post made on 4chan which had risen to the top of the /b/ board and had remained near the top for hours afterwards by virtue of the hundreds of replies it received. The post called for everyone to log in to the online virtual world known as Habbo Hotel, to do so at a certain time, and to perform certain actions. The replies it received were essentially RSVPs. The actions to be performed did not need to be specified; all of us knew the routine.

And so that evening, when I was done working for the day, I logged on to Habbo Hotel, picked out an avatar with dark skin, selected black dress pants and a black dinner jacket for my avatar to wear, and chose an Afro for his haircut. And then I entered the world of Habbo, just as several hundred others were doing at that very moment. A thousand or so latecomers would be joining us in the minutes ahead, appearing in large groups at various locations within a virtual world consisting of patios, hotels, cafes, and discos.

Taking little mind of those around us, each non-member of our non-squad chose his own individual course of action in service to the greater objective. Several went over to the side of one of the buildings adjacent to the patio and stood in front of the door, blocking it from use; the same thing was done in respect to other points of entry or exit. Others arranged themselves into lines by standing virtual shoulder to virtual shoulder, making passage between them impossible. Those who were not needed as sentries simply walked around talking what appeared to be gibberish - gibberish which appeared in cartoon-like speech balloons above their virtual heads before rising up the screen, covering that portion of the isometric view like so much smoke billowing into the air.

Though all of us were equal and independent agents of a collective cause, there was one pseudo-Moor among us who now held a temporary but glorious position of honor: the fellow who had managed to stand before the ladder leading into the swimming pool. Blocking the virtual worlds genuine participants from getting in and out of the area was important, to be sure - but it was peripheral to the most sacred mission before us, which was to prevent anyone from taking a swim. I myself had come to stand at the right hand of this hero among heroes, while another of us stood at his left. A few others of our number dutifully waited nearby, as a precaution.

One of the locals - a male wearing swimming trunks - strided up with the intention of accessing the pool ladder. Of course, he couldnt do so unless he convinced my comrade to move from his post. 

hi can u move for a sec, said the speech bubble that appeared over his head.

It took a moment for the ladder sentry to type out a response. But then it came:

pools closed.

The would-be-swimmer looked confused, or at least he would have if the avatars had facial expressions, which they do not.

thats bs its not a real pool, he noted.

sorry its closed

why would it be closed?

the pool has aids, came the response.

The boy just stood there for a while. 

AIDS, repeated the man in the middle. 

the pool is closed due to aids, I added, summing up the situation.

After another few moments, the chap in the trunks tried another tact.

then y are they in their

Two other frequenters of Habbo were in the pool, doing the virtual equivalent of swimming - which is to say they were walking around in a semi-translucent blue rectangle. One of them had been typing hey move let me out and variations on that request for several minutes now; the other didnt seem to notice or care that he was trapped. 

All three of us had a retort ready. Three speech bubbles arose from our heads more or less at once.

theyve got aids now, theyre under quarantine, I wrote.  

theres nobody in the pool wrote the guy in the center.

LOL AIDS wrote the one his left. 

Elsewhere on the patio, the speech bubbles were flying fast as the invaders spouted nonsense and the innocents plead, queried, and cursed. Many of the latter were trapped by the former, who had collectively refined their positioning so as to prevent movement by the victims. Even those who could still roam freely were denied access to the doors and gaps leading into adjacent areas; the sentries had stood firm. Every once in a while someone else come up to my companions and I and negotiate for access to the pool, but we would duly inform them that it had AIDS. Similar scenes were occurring all across the pixilated land. 

In the brick-and-mortar world, I sat at my desk grinning at the monitor on which my Habbo Hotel application was displayed. Turning to another monitor, itself connected to another computer, I hit the refresh button on my web browser. The /b/ thread updated with new reports on the raid. I caught snatches of text as I scrolled down through new posts. 

This is fucking epic

better than the last one

need more /b/lackup, come on /b/rothers

no more reinforcements necessary at the goth nightclub, its totally filled up as usual

This was the first time Id been involved in a Habbo raid. Id been hearing of them for a while, but the idea of screwing with an online game really hadnt appealed to me. Like Ive said, I dont really dig games of any sort. And I had no real desire to inconvenience people Ive never met, even if that inconvenience was relegated to preventing a couple of them from getting into a non-existent pool in some never-never world. 

But when you read the accounts on 4chan or one of the user-driven sites that covered its antics, you couldnt help but find it amusing. The /b/tards, as they called themselves - the term Anonymous was sometimes used, but hadnt yet eclipsed the centrality of 4chan and /b/ - were interesting people. This isnt to say that they were necessarily admirable people; it was evident that some of them were at least partly fucked up, that others werent particularly bright, and that a few shared both of these traits. But many of them showed a peculiar combination of creativity and worldliness that seemed to have a lot to do with their exposure to the internet.

By this time, I was also convinced that there might be something of real significance going on here - several things, in fact. But it was hard to pin any of them down. 

There was one thing I had come to realize for certain, though: /b/ is what happens when an entire generation is given virtually unlimited access to information from adolescence onwards - and then given virtually 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. 

Gregg, are we going to watch this movie or what?

The girl I was dating at the time had been hanging out in the other room.

Later! Almost done coding!

I figured I should wrap it up. Turning to the Habbo monitor, I saw that things had changed little - except that there looked to be fewer /b/tards in Afros among the battleground, or whatever it was. I turned to refresh the 4chan page and saw new posts.

oh snap I got banned

lol me too

My fallen brothers! do not give up hope! youll be avenged!

mods are racist for banning all the black guys!

Dont worry Im coming and Ill recruit more

Back to the Habbo screen. Yep, there were definitely fewer /b/tards present on the patio wed occupied. The moderators who were paid to oversee the world were going through the presumably long and irritating process of banning everyone whose avatars happened to be depicted in the black guy/three piece/Afro ensemble. And right then, the guy who had blocked the pool ladder disappeared; hed been banned, too.

I moved my little avatar one space over to where hed stood, then got up and went to the living room. 

***

Five years after I was first detained, prosecution began. A few months later, I was convicted of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement and sentenced to three months in federal prison. It would have been longer had I not agreed to cooperate against thieves and pedophiles; I wouldnt have had to serve a day had they managed to make this happen. 

But three months was reasonable. It would have been reasonable had I not been sent to one of the more derelict and dangerous prisons, rather than the far less notorious one that was originally to be my home. Very likely, this was done out of anger on the part of certain federal agents that Id managed to get off with such little time.

On the day I was told to report in, my friend dropped me off at X prison, walked me to the door, and said goodbye. Coming in, I saw that the intake lobby was crowded as hell; I had to wait 45 minutes to actually become a prisoner, which annoyed me for some reason. When my turn finally came, I still had a great deal of processing ahead of me. They fit you for your jumpsuit, take all your belongings, and compel you to sign every manner of document. No surprises until an administrator explained that I was going to be put in the special housing unit because they didnt have any beds right now. I asked him what that was, exactly. In return, I got a strange smile, and years later Ive still yet to decide if it was malicious or sympathetic. What I knew then was that I was being sent to solitary, and that this was the doing of whoever still had it out for me.

Also, its going to be a few days until we have sheets for you. And were out of pillows.

My bed turned out to be industrial shelving - it even had the OSHA logo on it. On my fourth day there, they brought me sheets. This was nice, as both the steel shelf and the concrete cell were extraordinarily cold. I never got a pillow. And thats how my sentence started.

Now, the solitary I did wasnt quite as harsh as what Malcolm X went through. I got an hour of exercise each day. We got desserts, such as pudding cups. They were six months expired and disgusting but nonetheless popular in the same way that the Democratic Party is popular. We were allowed to receive mail, which the guards slide through the slit under the door. And because of that slit, there really was a we; although you couldnt see them, you could communicate with anyone within ear shot - and, with the proper tools, anyone else on the block. There was also a system of trade in place. All of this was thanks to fishing, something I was taught my first day by one of the two prisoners whose cells were closest to me - and whom I never laid eyes on until the day I left.

The cell doors werent placed directly across from each other, but rather in a zig-zap pattern. The slits at the bottom have about an inch of clearance. With this in mind, you would take a sheet and unwind it until you had a few long strands of thread, which you would wind together so that the end result would be sufficiently strong. Then you would take an empty toothpaste tube and rip the end off, poke a hole through it, and fill it with whatever you had that possessed some weight (well-behaved prisoners could earn tiny little AM/FM radios; the dead batteries from these worked best). The thread goes through the hole you poked in the tube end. Now, you take a letter you got that was a pretty good read, or part of a newspaper youd been receiving if you were special (if you had USA Today, you were a god, as is also the case in Kentucky), and fold it up with the line in such a way that its firmly attached enough to go where that line goes. Then you slide the whole contraption around a little on the floor and make sure that the paper is slick, with no crumples to disrupt its flow. Youre not quite ready to throw yet; first you have to lie down next to the slit and tap the concrete floor right outside of it in order to determine by echo if one of the guards were standing in the hall. Upon determining that none are around, you take your fish line - now youre lying down flat on your chest - and, using the weight, you slide it under the slit in the direction of one of the two doors located six feet diagonal to yours, hoping to get your little fish under their door slit. He grabs it and then pulls as fast as he can, takes off the reading material, and then, yelling Fish, slides the contraption back to your own slit, where you likewise pull it in as fast as possible lest a guard see you do it and come and confiscate the fish you made with eminently valuable materials, some of which, like toothpaste tubes, youll never receive again if caught. The process could be repeated in order to get something to other cells down the block, though this of course entailed extra time and risk. This was our internet.

It was a lucky thing that the guards considered fishing a game worthy of participation, rather than strictly as a rule to be enforced. If a guard at the end of the hallway saw a fish sliding across the floor, hed run as fast as possible down the corridor and even jump towards it with hands outstretched in order to nab it. But if it made it under nonetheless, the guard wouldnt come in and take it, but rather say, Aha, next time, punk, or something of the sort, and walk back to his post.

Fishing is among the many clever, desperate techniques developed by prisoners who work under the threat of hunger, madness, further punishment, and other pressures of the sort that hone ones creativity into a laser beam. Without access to the many, one does wondrous things with the few - not just in terms of making inventions, but also developing mental skills and pursuing specialized avenues of study. In The Count of Monte Cristo, the imprisoned Edmond Dantes asks the Abbe - whose ingenuity in the face of solitary confinement was enough to produce books written in blood ink - what wonders he might have accomplished had he been a free man. The Abbe replies that, being free, he would have been distracted by the whole of lifes offerings, thus never having to focus on a few segments of it in the way that yields such results as he had produced while imprisoned.

I thought about the Abbes explanation quite a bit while I was in solitary. But I contrasted that thought with another one. Focusing on the few segments certainly has some advantages. But perhaps theres also something to be said for being distracted by the whole of lifes offerings, assuming one can contend with it all in the right way. 

Thanks to the internet, the whole of lifes offerings had increased exponentially over a short time frame. What could this mean? And how would it jibe with the fact that potential access to other people had increased in a similarly unprecedented way at the same time? What would the Tom Sawyers do when they got bored with raiding virtual worlds and set their eyes upon greater matters?

I had plenty of time to think about it.

***

The guy across the hall seemed like a really nice fellow. He shot me over a fish - the contraption itself - on my first night in solitary, after having determined I wasnt yet ready to build my own. He held it on another line and passed it to me several times so that I could get the hang of it. Eventually, he sent it back again with a magazine.

Heres something for you to read. Enjoy.

It was a copy of Maxim - a major item due to it being the most pornographic thing one is allowed to have in federal prisons.

(Other prison systems have implemented similar restrictions against anything that includes nudity, and not always simply to protect the innocence of prisoners. A few years ago the Texas Board of Corrections passed a two-pronged revision that restricted pornographic magazines and quickly became known in the media as the Playboy Ban. The other part of the provision, which placed new restrictions on communication between inmates and the media, was largely ignored by the media itself.)

My new neighbor showed a friendly interest in my background, asking me where I was from and all that. In return I asked him what hed done to get solitary in the systems worst prison.

There was a riot in Leavenworth and I killed a couple guards, so they sent me here.

You must be a pretty big guy, I replied, diplomatically. He confirmed this with some modesty.

For a month, he was the only person I could talk to with any regularity. The usual presence of guards in the corridor prevented most any form of human interaction except for a few times a day. Talking to those in other cells was prohibited, and this rule was enforced to the letter despite the sporting chance we were given on the fish thing; those caught talking could lose their dinner, among other things. Of the 23 hours one spent in the cell - the other hour being given over to exercise outside - almost all of it had to be spent by ones self, incommunicado.  

Only when I was released from solitary did I happen to catch a glimpse of my friend across the hall, as he was being led to exercise; a huge, bald white guy with a motorcycle beard and a giant swastika tattoo.

This wasnt an uncommon look in general population, where I was to spend the next month and a half. But no one was rioting or killing guards; one can generally avoid violence and other forms of prison drama if one knows what to do, which I instinctively did. The racial animosity that varies from system to system wasnt a serious problem here. This was for the best, as the blacks controlled the chess boards, one of the few amenities I sought. Otherwise, I kept to myself, spending most of my time scribbling on a pad.

Finally, my sentence ended. As I went through processing, one of the guards who knew what I was in for took the occasion to mock me one last time. I had been a hotshot computer guy, he noted, who would never get another job in computers again. Through the transitive property or something like it, he concluded that, in fact, I wasnt such a hotshot after all, and that Id better get used to working a real job. Id be lucky to find one doing anything now, he added; the economy was about out of gas, and there were plenty of people looking for work who didnt have a federal conviction to their name. I took my clothes and left.

A few days later I reported to my new probation officer, with whom Id have to check in every week for quite a while. She was more sympathetic than the guard, and right off the bat started telling me about the various federal programs that were in place. There were some ride share programs I could sign up for; until then, there were a couple of good bus routes to the probation office that would save me some trouble.

I thanked her for everything, but pointed outside, where my company car sat.

I hadnt lost my job went I went in for my sentence; to the contrary, my employer at the time had expected me to complete a piece of software. The language it was to be written in was so new that the first book describing it had yet to come out at the time I went to prison; I had to have my mom send it to me upon its release, about two days after I got out of solitary and with two months left to serve in general population. Now having access to whole pads of paper and pens, I read the book from cover to cover and wrote out a draft of the program, followed by an improved version, followed in turn by the final product, 30 handwritten pages of commands that needed only to be fed into an actual computer, where the two or three errors could be fixed, after which it would be ready to go. More importantly, the language itself, Ruby on Rails, would soon come into heavy demand; I had gotten into the Ruby market on the ground floor, already able to boast of having written a program in it.

My job future was secure. Now, I could get back to my game, and to the whole of lifes offerings.

***

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 (technically they are imperatives). 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 messages 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 the participant in question wrote a clearly fictional account of several football stadiums being blown up by terrorists (Tom Clancy, meanwhile, is still at large). I believe theyre domestic terrorists, says a woman interviewed for the story. Her opinion is supported by subsequent stock footage of an exploding van.

Their name comes from their secret website, the narrator continues, in reference to 4chan, which was hardly a secret by this point. 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, were 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 childrens 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, its 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 subjects 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. Its also claimed that mom began tracking down Anonymous members herself. Perhaps she feared that her calls to the FBI about the assassination plot against her son might not be taken seriously. 

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, Dont 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 scrambling software that Fox deploys lest Anonymous discover the identity of the fellow whose identity they already posted on the web. Presumably he is referencing Anonymous motto, We do not forgive. We do not forget.

**

Ah, so thats where that came from.

Ten of thousands of other Anons had seen the Fox segment by the time I did; one of them had put it up on YouTube so that others might enjoy it. I certainly did - and not just because of the amusing manner in which the producers had overstated their case. I finally knew the origins of a number of memes that had come into regular use over the last few months - phrases such as bought a dog and hackers on steroids.

The term meme 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. 

Eventually, the term meme came into wide use as a means of referring to stories, concepts, pictures, and even people who at some point or another have been the focus of repeated, evolving attention on the part of internet users - and particularly Anons.

By this time, Anonymous had come to overshadow /b/ as a self-identification and as a culture. An Anon could refer to someone who frequented any number of online venues aside from 4chan. There was 7chan, the most popular of 4chans growing number of alternatives. There was reddit.com, a site that consisted of user-submitted articles and discussions; there was Something Awful, a series of text-based forums that catered to much the same constituency as did 4chan; and there was Encyclopedia Dramatica, a sarcastic, pseudo-encyclopedic repository of online drama that covered a great deal of Anonymous doings. Several IRC servers dedicated to Anonymous and its culture had also sprung up here and there.

But how did one identify, or self-identify, as an Anon? If the term Anonymous derived merely from some aspect of 4chans posting system, and had originally described users of 4chan in general and /b/ in particular, how can one point to a scattered online population and refer to them as being Anons?

The answer is that these people had come to share a culture. And this culture consisted in large part of memes. 

The Fox News segment was correct in asserting that Anonymous was very much in the business of conducting raids. But not all Anons engaged in raids, and its very possible that not even the majority of them did. And many who did go on raids - overrunning virtual worlds, screwing with MySpace pages, calling into talk shows en masse - did so in a way that is best described as being in service to memes.

When hundreds of people streamed into Habbo Hotel with the key objective of blocking the pool, we did so with memes in mind. The gibberish that most raiders contented themselves with shouting at everyone was not gibberish at all, but rather a series of phrases that had originated within our pseudo-community in intensely obscure ways. set us up the bomb, desu desu desu, imma chargin my lazer, its over 9000, and other memes of the sort were considered very amusing to us, particularly when thrown out among those who would have no reason to understand them. 

And to understand them was difficult, even for many Anons. There are too many of the damned things, and they keep evolving and combining.

For example, I am currently looking at a particular web page which deals with the subject of the Mudkip. The Mudkip is a character from the Pokemon universe that happened to play a role in a long and hilarious anecdote that someone once wrote out on a website called Deviant Art - yet another venue that was frequented by Anons and which was the subject of much analysis on 4chan, 7chan, and Encyclopedia Dramatica. 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 a photo of someone who has tattooed their arm with that same Old English phrase out of sheer enthusiasm; there is an old photo of Hitler and his close associates at a rally except that the swastika on the banners have been replaced with Mudkips, as have the swastikas on the armbands; there is a Mudkip that has the head of the character Milhouse from The Simpsons; and there is a Mudkips 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 dont 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 and enjoyed.

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 mixture of memes has usually 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, although I have several hypotheses.

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 some huge number of these memes. Altogether, such things eventually come to constitute a shared narrative, a shared dialect, a shared sensibility, and a shared history. And it goes to show how much time Anons have put into this particular hobby - and at the same time, it goes to confirm that Anonymous is better defined by its cultural trappings than by the nature and intent of its actions at a given time.

After all, the memes are all still used. It is the actions that would come to change.

***

Not long after the Los Angeles Fox affiliate was denouncing Anonymous as an internet hate machine and a threat to all, other outlets were praising it as a heroic band of online watchdogs who had prevented some great degree of harm to coming from untold numbers of children.

But Anonymous had not changed at all, at least not yet.

Recall that, in the period of my legal limbo, the FBI had discussed with me the possibility of using me and my ethically ambiguous talents to go after child pornographers, child predators and the like. That potential deal never came to fruition. But I still had a shot at doing that exact same thing, with or without the FBI. And so did thousands of other people. 

Pedo baiting has long been a popular sport among Anons, and was a particular favorite of mine. You go on some sort of chat network disguised as an underaged minor - which is to say, using a screen name like kelly1995 and otherwise adopting the persona of a teenage girl. Sometimes youll have to drop some bait by announcing in the channel that youre bored or want to chat, but if youre in one of the more pedo-oriented networks, you probably wont have to do even that; the targets will see that a kelly1995 has entered the channel, and several of them are likely to send you private messages within 30 seconds of your arrival. A target will usually start off with an introduction to the effect that he is an older male, and is that okay? Oh, of course its okay; youre a teenage girl, and you love older men, particularly the sort who hang around internet chat rooms catering to teenagers. 

So the conversation proceeds. Hes going to navigate the subject to sex, and then to what your sexual experiences will have consisted of at this point. Of course, youve been with a couple of boys but you didnt really like it. Well, Captain Douchebag here is going to suggest that maybe you need a real man, and also, whats your bra size? Do you masturbate? What do you think about when you masturbate? Are you masturbating right now? Maybe you two can both masturbate over the internet together, especially if youve got a webcam. Theres a neat idea, right there.

Sure thing, you say. Let me just turn on my webcam and get my panties off an-

NOTICE TO CHATTER: The Federal Bureau of Investigation has logged a record of this chat along with your IP address due to potential violations of U.S. law. VIOLATION: Solicitation of a minor. IMPORTANT WARNING: If you think this chat session was logged in error, please state your reasons to the F.B.I. agent currently monitoring this chat and quote the reference number #2334531343. Failure to do so within the next 2 minutes will result in your IP and address being entered into our criminal database and legal action.

Thats the time-tested paragraph youve just pasted into the discussion - one of several variants that exist for the purpose. Captain Douchebags entrails have now turned to ice. And he has two minutes to talk himself out of his predicament. In some cases, hell log off immediately and do God knows what - cancel his e-mail accounts, start thinking up a story, delete his child porn, call a lawyer, whatever. In other cases, hell stick around to argue, plead, and threaten suicide. If its the latter, and if the results are especially amusing, youll likely copy and paste the whole thing into a 4chan thread, or perhaps onto an Encyclopedia Dramatica page that serves as a compilation of such conversations. Or, you might do nothing with it, being out merely to scare the targets - and its likely that youve got a dozen other targets waiting in the wings, all of them having sent you a private message while you were chatting up Captain Douchebag.

This isnt the only way the game is played. In some cases, the one doing the pedo baiting will ask the target for his phone number so that they can do their mutual masturbation via phone - and then the phone number will be used to determine the identity of the person, which will in turn be published somewhere so that a Google search of his name brings up his secret hobby. In other cases, the game will be played even more thoroughly.

A certain fellow named Douglas was once reeled in by an especially resourceful Anon who switched the convo from chat room to e-mail at the beginning of the convo. He made up a whole persona and backstory for the 13-year-old girl he was imitating. Eventually he got the fellows physical address as well - the target wanted her to send him some panties and Polaroid pictures. What the target got instead was a long e-mail explaining that every bit of the correspondence - along with the targets full name, address, phone number, and e-mail addresses, plus a video he had made of himself masturbating and then sent along to the pseudo-girl - were all on display now at an Encyclopedia Dramatica page that had been made just for him. 

Douglas, who was in his mid-20s, replied first with an apology and half-assed explanation of his actions; he had just been trying to kill time. When the Anon didnt buy it, Douglas responded with another, far more elaborate e-mail to the effect that his computer had been hacked, and that this was actually the first time he had learned of the matter, having been away on business for several weeks and... it went on for a while. He even claimed that he had gotten in touch with the young girl, who confirmed that her computer, too, had been hacked. That the girl in question had never existed seemed not to have occurred to him. Both of these responses were added to his new page. Months later, he was arrested and charged, and is now on sex offender status. 

In another case, the culprit - a weird-looking old Canadian guy named Chris Forcand - was caught in a similar manner - but on this occasion, the incident made international news. Thus it was that the very first thing that some hundreds of thousands of people learned of Anonymous was that it was in the business of defending the public from pedophiles.

And many of them wanted to join. 

***

In those days, I wasnt yet thinking much about what would happen if a great number of well-meaning people starting calling themselves Anonymous, not realizing what sort of negative baggage was rightfully associated with it at that point. But I do remember how scandalized certain Anons were that they were starting to be associated with the forces of good, rather than evil. 

I was very amused by that, at first. A few articles and TV news broadcasts here and there portraying Anonymous as the good guys werent going to have that much of an effect on some amorphous non-group that was still best known for mean-spirited pranks. We were trolls. We were terrible people. If some degree of good was done by accident, so be it - but as the Fox segment had noted, in one of its more lucid moments, we did what we did for the lulz. That was the truth.

Anyway, I didnt dwell on the subject just then. Something else had struck me recently. Id been reading a 4chan thread on pedo baiting, where people were pasting in their transcripts and lulzing over the pedophiles theyd frightened away from their attempts to manipulate children. Hundreds of them had been nabbed in the course of an hour - all for fun. Id done a few as well, just in the space of a few minutes. 

And I thought to myself, Jesus Christ. Theres a lot of power locked up in all of this.