Our pal Jon has sent us a heads up on a place called 4chan. He wonders "Real cyberpunk or real bullshit?"
“They say the children are our future. But if 4chan is any indication of what they have in store for us, we are in for a very rough time indeed. For the blissfully innocent, 4chan is an image board -- a format copied from popular Japanese sites, it allows users to post text and images anonymously. The anonymous nature of the board, of course, allows users the courage to post everything from the most extreme pornography to death threats to the coordination of raids on public institutions. The site was started in 2003 by a kid named “moot” (then fifteen) who set up the site with his mom's credit card, and who has managed to keep it going with sporadic ad revenue from only the dodgiest, least scrupulous advertisers. (Improbably, moot was a top 100 finalist for Time magazine's “most influential person of the year” award for 2009.) 4chan and its sister sites, the other “Chans”—7chan, 420chan, 711chan, etc. al.—are the black hole of the Internet. They collect the worst that the Internet has to offer, a morass compounded from the ids of the world's adolescent shut-ins.” (Click here for more.)
YOU DON'T FUCK WITH 4CHAN!!
ReplyDeleteSeriously, it isn't quite the filth hole you claim & what's more, 4chan in tandem with partyboards helped to organize Project Chanalogy, the Church of Scientology protests.
People organizing a protest against an institution known to take names & pictures of faces of those who openly speak with dissent need somewhere they can be anonymous... this provides a vital function in the digital era's need for an underground & counter culture, you just need to look beyond the porn & border-line-insane type of humor.
I'm honestly surprised you folks around here aren't more appreciative of the unique qualities such a site has to offer.
Further more... how is this only getting notice? I know I've mentioned 4chan here in comments before, just like ytmnd.com
ReplyDeleteWTF?
Forgive me. I guess it was overlooked. But now we're trying to get up to speed.
ReplyDeleteSince the days of bulletin boards, the internet has been crawling with with boys talking about their weenies. I liked the article. Along with the comments, it's way more interesting than 4chan.
ReplyDeleteForget the weiner kiddies that populate it; they're just camouflage. 4chan is the black, twisted heart of the internet: the place where all the most paranoid rantings of anti-net politicians are just descriptions, the crucible of filth that is responsible for most of the crazes, fads and original thought that makes the Internet what it is. Despite seeming to be a very basic image board, 4chan really is the very cutting edge of net.culture -- and it bites.
ReplyDeleteIts most notorious section is /b/, the Random board, where even other 4channers tend to tread lightly. /b/astards pride themselves on being offensive, peurile, whimsical, manipulative and, just occasionally, blindingly brilliant.
I seriously do not recommend 4chan to anyone at work, scared about turning up on government watch lists, or lacking an extremely strong tolerance for being disturbed and disgusted.
4chan: recycling the old stomping grounds of alt.tasteless, alt.peeves, and all the bad craziness of USENET in the 80s and 90s for a new generation.
ReplyDeleteNB: have been lurking there while generating 2011s novel. (See "bad craziness" above.)
Ghostwoods, suggest that the paranoid use a proxy or an IP mask, though certainly nsfw & nfts... & Mick, don't take my ranting so serious, I was massively twisted yesterday when I got home & looked on here... what can I say? When the weight gets off your shoulders, you just tend to cut loose & seek the excess you had previously denied yourself.
ReplyDeleteForgive the semi-belligerence, at least I saved the worst of it for elsewhere, namely the open mic in modern warfare 2 on xbox live... I think the likeness I would describe anonymity online to would be the uninhibited fervor a vagrant drunkard has while screaming curses at an invisible phantom in the middle of the road an hour after last-call.
The downside is that such true & honest sincerity will forever damage one's interpersonal relationships in real life... it's like the first time you drop acid or see a dead body, you look at everything differently from then on out, there's no going back, you might get to some place similar, but it'll never be the same as before. I love this digital renaissance, I just hope we can retain some level of net neutrality, otherwise we're all fucked & things are going to bottom out faster than you can google "mayan calendar 2012"
WV=billys
A Japanese friend contends that the motivating force behind the internet is voyeurism. My own Virgo sense of order suggests that for every voyeur there is an exhibitionist somewhere over the rainbow. Capitalism likes to keep these things transactional but plainly can't. I think the basic lesson here is that freedom ain't no Maxfield Parrish.
ReplyDeleteThere is an evil and intelligent supernatural force hellbent on dehumanizing us. The evilest and vilest things in the world today are the same things we entertain our minds with and it's becoming more mainstream by the minute.
ReplyDelete