4Chan was hacked to death

Amid all of the snark in this article Did you even notice 4chan’s gone? by Ryan Broderick & Adam Bumas (Garbage Day), which doesn’t even try to pretend to have an any objectivity about what the author very clearly considers an unsavory place, was at least an admission that 4Chan was,

“[…] a website that, effectively, invented the concept of the internet meme and was one of the last truly anonymous spaces left on the web.”

A plea for an NC-17 Internet

I never used 4Chan. I didn’t have an account there. I would occasionally see flashes of brilliance and dark humor cross-posted to Reddit, though. It wasn’t nearly as surprisingly good as Tumblr but it had its moments. Not everyone on that forum was a frothing racist fool. There were a lot of clever people who very clearly enjoyed the anonymity of the place, and the fact that it was a chaotic space where you could push nonexistent limits. It was, in a way, the NC-17 internet that I wish we had more of.

Just yesterday, I was writing to a friend on Signal, from an iPhone and was making joke about how the Wordle is running out of words—we trade Wordle scores as a bit of a daily touchstone—and I joked that they might need to open things up to include words like “penis”. But, I couldn’t swipe-type “penis” because it’s a naughty word. It first converted it to “permits”, then “pennies”. This is so stupid. So mind-numbingly stupid. It’s a part of the body. About half of the planet has one. Is there an R-rated version of the Internet? Or are we doomed to be trapped in a child’s sandbox, playing with plastic toys provided by billionaires and trillion-dollar companies trying to keep us docile and quiet?

Does no-one else notice this? Does no-one else care? You know, people in the U.S. are either completely ignorant of or literally munching popcorn while the U.S.‘s closest ally Israel slaughters hundreds of children per day on purpose and as part of a genocide but we are safe and sound because no-one can write shit, fuck, vagina, or penis on their phones. What in the holy hell is going on?

Insightful commentary from 4Chan

Anyway, 4Chan was a place where adults could interact with adults and be as horrible as they wanted to be. It was also a place where people posted incisive commentary that was much more clever and insightful than anything you’d find in the New York Times. For example, here’s a long post from 4Chan, which just shows that every public forum is multi-dimensional and has intelligent potential allies on it. Painting a site like 4Chan with a broad brush is stupid.

Hey guys, wanna buy some magic?

It very neatly describes the way liberals see the world and political struggle. It’s from 2017, about six months in to the first Trump regime. I have transcribed it below.

“Lots of people complain about the anti-climactic ending, but really I don’t think it could [have gone] any other way. I’d like to imagine that there’s some alternate universe where Rowling actually believed in something and Harry was actually built up as the anti-Voldemort he was only hinted as being in the beginning of the books. Where he[…] opposes all the many injustices of the wizarding world and determines to change their frequently backwards, insular, contradictory society for the better, and forms his own faction antithetical to the Death Eaters. And, when he finally has his showdown with Voldy, Harry surpasses by adopting new methods, breaking the rules and embracing change and the progression of history. While Voldemort clings to an idyllic imaging of the past and the greatest extent of his dreams is to become the self-appointed god of an eternally stagnant Neverland, Harry has embraced the possibility of a shining future and so can overcome the self-imposed limits Voldemort could never cross, and Voldemort is ultimately defeated by this.

“But that would require a Harry that believed in something, and since Rowling is a liberal centrist Blairite that doesn’t really believe in anything, Harry can’t believe in anything. Harry lives in a world drought [sic] with conflict and injustice, a stratified class society, slavery of sentient magical creatures, the absurd charade the wizarding world puts up to enforce their own self-segregation, a corrupted and bureaucracy-choked government, rampant racism, so on and so forth. But Harry is little more than a passive observer for most of it, only the racism really bothers him (and then, really only racism against half-bloods). In fact, when Hermione stands up against the slavery of elves, she’s treated as some kind of ridiculous Soapbox Sadie. For opposing chattel slavery! In the end, the biggest force for change is Voldemort and Harry and friends only ever fight for the preservation and reproduction of the status quo. The very height of Harry’s dreams is to join the aurors, a sort of wizard FBI and the ultimate defenders of the wizarding status quo. Voldemort and the Death Eaters are the big instigators of change and Harry never quite gets to Voldy’s level. Harry doesn’t even beat Voldemort, Voldemort accidentally kills himself because he violated some obscure technicality that causes one of his spells to bounce back at him.

“And this is really the struggle of liberals, they live in a world fraught with conflict, but aren’t particularly bothered by any of it except those bit that threaten multicultural pluralism [or their own comfort and security; ed.]. They see change, and the force behind that change, as a wholly negative phenomenon. Even then, they can only act within the legal and ideological framework of their society. So, for instance, instead of organizing insurrectionary and disruptive activity against Trump and the far-right, all they can do is bang their drum about what a racist bigot he is and hope they can catch him violating some technicality that will allow them to have him impeached or at least destroy his political clout. It won’t work, it will never work, but that’s the limit of liberalism just as it was the limit of Harry Potter.”

Pretty good, right? It hits the nail right on the head. Liberals are conservative: they are terrified of change because they know that it would impair their ability to live lives far more lavish than any sane remuneration for their contributions to society would entail. In that sense, Trump is much more radical than the Progressives, who can’t even come out against an obvious genocide because they’re afraid that it would end their political careers—and probably their revolving-door post-political careers.

Everyone else is lying

Anyway, Broderick continues, writing obvious mendacities that his filters would never allow him to see as such. 4Chan was a cesspool of lies, whereas his newsletter and the liberal news media that he frequently cites are sources of capital-T truth.

“[…] fitting for a website that has distorted reality more than any other, the hack this week unleashed a tidal wave of misinformation. […]”

COME ON…REALLY? You can’t think of any other web site in the world that spreads more misinformation and has a wider reach than 4chan? Are you really, as a purported media researcher, so blind to your own side’s propaganda? That is PATHETIC. Like, it’s complete capitulation, on the scale described just above in the 4Chan post that Broderick himself cited. The irony is quite thick but it’s invisible to Broderick. This is why I’ve almost stopped reading this guy. He’s so far up his own team’s ass that he doesn’t even understand the irony of it.

An example of non-4Chan propaganda

A couple of front pages of the Swiss 20 Minutes propaganda rag

I can think of so many easy targets. For example, the propaganda I’ve seen in major Swiss newspapers this week about having Switzerland move closer to NATO and for Switzerland to send weapons to Ukraine and for Switzerland to hate China, and to hate Russia, and about Chinese soldiers fighting for Russia.

Although the top headlines are pushing young Swiss people to WAR, the mid-third of the front page is viciously brainwashing young women in Switzerland to sacrifice their entire lives to spend 17 hours of each day being a financefluencer., celebrating how awesome it is to be a mindless cog in the orphan-crushing machine.

Just make you stay on top and you’re a winner. Who cares about the losers? Only losers. And communists who hate money anyway. You don’t hate money, do you? Of course you don’t. You need lots of money to buy that CHF40K.- Birkin Bag the previous day’s edition (not shown) was telling you’re a fool and a loser for not having, or at least willing to mortgage your future to have.

And since women can never be brainwashed enough, let’s plaster the next day’s newspaper with a picture of a bleached-blonde young woman sucking her CHF200.- replacement for the ludicrously stupid craze from last year, in which women were buying entire closets full of Stanley Cups. Well, you can throw those all away because the Bink Bottle is the new “must have”.

These media do all this while burying articles about Israel not allowing Palestinians to eat for going on 60 days now in a tiny, tiny, tiny box on the eighth page, near the bottom—all of those things are far more damaging and far-reaching propaganda than trying to rig the name of the next Mountain Dew flavor to be “Hitler did nothing wrong.”

4Chan was not influential

It is utterly insipid to claim that 4chan had anything approaching the influence of F@&KING RUSSIAGATE on human history. The U.S. is literally right-now engaged in a war with Russia that they have only recently revealed hasn’t been a proxy war for over two years—a historical fact of which the Russian have been aware the whole time.

It is largely the animosity constantly engendered and reinforced by propaganda like Russiagate that allows people to shrug and decide that they suppose they support a world war between nuclear powers. How couldn’t they? They’ve been brainwashed to deeply believe that Russia and China are irredeemable evils that cannot be reasoned with[1] and that are constantly seeking to not only to undermine our way of life, but probably take us over militarily in what we are led to imagine would look something like The Man in the High Castle.[2]

“[…] yes, we did lose something this week. And it is almost certainly a better world without it. But it’s also possible we look back one day and wish the internet still felt as messy and, more importantly, human as it did when 4chan ruled the world.”

4chan never ruled the world, FFS. It’s a tragedy that so many people are celebrating the destruction of an online community. That celebration reflects more poorly on them than the light they attempt to shine on 4 chan’s sins. It reveals how badly they want to put on the chains thrown to them by their masters.