INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
My earliest memory of 4chan was sitting up late at night, typing its URL into my browser, and scrolling through a thread of LOLcat memes,
without question, the funniest thing my 14-year-old brain had ever laid eyes on
So much so, I woke my dad up by laughing too hard and had to tell him that I was scrolling through pictures of cats at 2 in the morning
wiped off the Internet entirely last week by hackers from a rival message board, and think about how many different websites it was over its
more than two decades online
What began as a hub for Internet culture and an anonymous way station for the Internet's anarchic true believers devolved over the years
infected every facet of our lives, from the slang we use to the politicians we vote for
But the site itself had been frozen in amber since the George W
But it had also essentially already succeeded at its core project: chewing up the world and spitting it back out in its own image
Which makes you wonder why it even needed to still exist."The novelty of a website devoted to shock and gore, and the rebelliousness
inherent in it, dies when your opinions become the official policy of the world's five or so richest people and the government of the United
States," the Onion CEO and former extremism reporter Ben Collins tells WIRED
the more toxic side of the site came several years after my LOLcat all-nighter, when I was in college
house parties we would throw
That cozy vibe came crashing down for me when I got doxed the summer going into my senior year
phone number on 4chan.They played a prank that was popular on the site at the time, writing in a thread that my phone number was for a
GameStop store that had a copy of the ultra-rare video game Battletoads
I received no less than 250 phone calls over the next 48 hours asking if I had a copy of the game.Many of the 4chan users that called me
mid-Battletoad attack left messages
I listened to all of them
A pattern quickly emerged: young men, clearly nervous to even leave a message, trying to harass a stranger for, seemingly, the hell of it
Those voicemails have never left me in the 15 years I've spent covering 4chan as a journalist.I had a front-row seat to the way those timid
men morphed into the violent, seething underbelly of the Internet
The throbbing engine of reactionary hatred that resented everything and everyone simply because resentment was the only language its users
I followed it to France, Germany, Japan, and Brazil as 4chan's users became increasingly convinced that they could take over the planet
through racist memes, far-right populism, and cyberbullying
But the ubiquity of 4chan culture ended up being an oddly Pyrrhic victory for the site itself.Collins, like me, closely followed 4chan's
rise in the 2010s from Internet backwater to unofficial propaganda organ of the Trump administration
As he sees it, once Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 there was really no point to 4chan anymore
Why hide behind anonymity if a billionaire lets you post the same kind of extremist content under your real name and even pays you for
"Twitter became 4chan, then the 4chanified Twitter became the United States government
Its usefulness as an ammo dump in the culture war was diminished when they were saying things you would now hear every day on Twitter, then
six months later out of the mouths of an administration official."But understanding how 4chan went from the home of cat memes to a true
Internet bogeyman requires an understanding of how the site actually worked
Its features were often overlooked amid all the conversations about the site's political influence, but I'd argue they were equally, if not
fans their own version, so he poorly translated the site's code and promoted his new site, 4chan, to Something Awful's anime community
Several core features were ported over in the process.4chan users were anonymous, threads weren't permanent and would time out or "404"
after a period of inactivity, and there were dozens of sub-boards you could post to
That unique combination of ephemerality, anonymity, and organized chaos proved to be a potent mix, immediately creating a race-to-the-bottom
gutter culture unlike anything else on the web
The dark end point of the techno-utopianism that built the Internet
On 4chan you were no one, and nothing you did mattered unless it was so shocking, so repulsive, so hateful that someone else noticed and
decided to screenshot it before it disappeared into the digital ether."The iconic memes that came out of 4chan are because people took the
time to save it, you know? And the fact that nobody predicted, nobody could predict or control what was saved or what wasn't saved, I think,
is really, really fascinating," Cates Holderness, Tumblr's former head of editorial, tells WIRED.Still, 4chan was more complicated than it
The site was organized into dozens of smaller sections, everything from comics to cooking to video games to, of course, pornography
Holderness says she learned to make bread during the pandemic thanks to 4chan's cooking board
(Full disclosure: I introduced Holderness to 4chan way back in 2012.)"When I switched to sourdough, I got really good pointers," she
The chaos that defined 4chan, both the good and the very, very bad, has largely been paved over by corporate platforms and their algorithms
now.Our feeds deliver us content; we don't have to hunt for it
We don't have to sit in front of a computer refreshing a page to find out whether we're getting a new cat meme or a new manifesto
The humanness of that era of the web, now that 4chan is gone, is likely never coming back
There's no record that can ever encapsulate what 4chan was."This story originally appeared on wired.com.
