the 4channification of the web

No, NYT, no one forgot about 4chan. The site may be on and off, but we all live in the world its worst trolls built.

According to an article in the New York Times, the once thriving forum of extreme and edgy content that is 4chan is a now obsolete, partly because of its run of catastrophic technical problems including hacks and badly configured infrastructure, and partly as more and more edgelords are spreading to other platforms. It simply no longer has its impact and bite, both online and off, which is both true and false.

This backhanded eulogy for the hub of weaponized autism and flame wars just for the sake of flame wars glosses over a point that should’ve been its main focus: that we no longer need to go to 4chan to get the full 4chan experience. What was once the web equivalent of Fight Club is just how we all talk online these days. Not only that, there’s no need for the anonymity on which 4chan thrived.

Hell, there’s plenty of money to be made and political power to be won in trying to be the biggest ragebaiting asshole you can be, both online and off. We just had an entire successful presidential campaign based on this exact strategy while the mainstream stood slack jawed. Who needs to go to an anonymous message board when you can post all the same vile bait under your government name, and have the world’s richest man send you thousands per month?

So, not only are there no longer consequences for antisocial or regressive behavior, it’s actively being rewarded. If 4chan was like the internet equivalent of hot sauce to challenge your palette, today’s web is nothing but stunt burgers rabidly competing for the title of the world’s hottest. Flavor? Not even a remote consideration. Doling out as much pain as possible for spectators with sadistic tendencies to watch people tear up and suffer is the whole point.

In some ways, I would argue that what we have today on every platform is worse than the worst of 4chan. One of the defining rules of those forums was to take nothing you saw seriously. Anons were going to mess with you and any normies who came across the screenshots. You knew that the bait was almost certainly false and when they did mess with you, it was because you took them seriously. It was all a game. A weird and really messed up game, but still a game.

When they did have real targets, those targets tended to be people we all legitimately disliked, like the Church of Scientology, creepy internet stalkers, celebs whose antics rubbed us the wrong way, and nefarious spy agencies, which blunted the parts of the forums where neo-Nazi trolls cheered on mass shootings and terrorism. But even in these cases, the cheering was a competition of who could make the most awful joke and seem the most unhinged.

Now, the edgelords aren’t playing around. They’re eagerly lying and baiting normies because it gets them attention and makes them money. Their targets aren’t a bunch of fellow trolls to see who can take the harderst verbal punch, but gullible and angry Boomers, bigots, fascists, and assorted info-allergic rubes who think that the three branches of government are cable news, the NFL, and the Pentagon.

Their goal? To create chaos, upset elections, and undermine all public discourse on the payroll of misanthropic billionaires addicted to cyberpunk fantasies. All of these post-4chan trolls have the machinery of a global superpower at their disposal. Just a single viral post and the FBI launches a campaign against their targets while an EO to terrorize whoever they just took issue with flies off the Resolute Desk.

So, yeah, who needs an anonymous message board for trolls and incels when that’s the kind of power you have? But let’s give 4chan some credit here. Without their /b/ and /pol/ boards, and the zeal of their worst members during Gamergate and the fun they had during the 2016 election, none of this would be possible. We may have lost that it once was, but in many ways, we now all log into 4chan whenever we use what is still left of the web.