For the Lulz: The Politics of 4chan | by Hari Kunzru | The New Yo... https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/03/26/trolls-4chan-gamer...

For the Lulz

Hari Kunzru MARCH 26, 2020 ISSUE

It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump Into Office
by Dale Beran
All Points, 279 pp., $28.99

Sometime in the autumn of 2006, a friend sent me

screenshots of a chatroom in Habbo Hotel, a social
network for teenagers. Someone had flooded the space
with avatars of identical black men with Afros in suits and
ties. In one picture, the men were blocking the entrance to
a swimming pool, stopping other users from coming in. In
another they’d arranged themselves in the shape of a
swastika. My friend, an activist, thought this was sinister,
particularly since it was happening in a space aimed at
young people.

Habbo Hotel looked pretty slick for the Internet of 2006,

with public spaces like nightclubs and coffeeshops and
private rooms that users could rent and furnish with virtual
objects. It was cheerful and brightly colored. But due to a
programming glitch, if an avatar blocked a doorway or a
corridor, it was impossible for another to get by. Whenever A tweet by Donald Trump featuring an image of
kids asked one of the men what was going on, they were himself as Pepe the Frog, a symbol used by the
far right, October 13, 2015
told, “Pool’s closed due to AIDS.”

The “raid” was juvenile and offensive, which was the

point. Around that time, there was a fashion for posting “Rules of the Internet,” expanding on
the famous (and profound) Rule 34 that states: If it exists, there is porn of it. One widely
circulated list had as Rule 42 Nothing is Sacred, and as Rule 43 The more beautiful and pure
a thing is, the more satisfying it is to corrupt it. The organized invasion of a cheery and
wholesome space like Habbo Hotel obeyed these axioms—the humor of the lists was that
they were not so much rules to follow as descriptions of norms, observations about Internet
culture. The combination of homophobia, Nazi imagery, and what amounted to blackface was
impressively unpleasant, given the constraints of a graphical user interface that had to be
delivered at the speed of the 2006 Internet—on average about a fifth as fast as it is today.
Managing to be offensive at such low resolution, using imagery constructed of simple
pixillated blocks, was an achievement of sorts.

I was inclined to take the raid less seriously than my friend. I’d been digging around on the
Internet since the early 1990s, and I thought of myself as a grizzled veteran of online culture.

1 of 8 09.03.20, 17:11
For the Lulz: The Politics of 4chan | by Hari Kunzru | The New Yo... https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/03/26/trolls-4chan-gamer...

Another rule of the Internet was Nothing is to be taken seriously. Still, I decided to see if there
was anything organized behind it, any politics beyond teenage trolling.

This was how I started spending time on 4chan, a message board that had played a part in the
organization of the raid. 4chan was a site with a barely designed front page and a list of image
boards designated by uninformative letter codes, a format copied from a Japanese site called
2chan. Most boards on 4chan turned out to be devoted to some aspect of Japanese pop culture
—pictures of giant robots, cosplay (dressing up as a character from animations or computer
games), and so on. There was also a lot of gross-out porn and a persistent ironized flirtation
with pedophilia, mostly in the form of pornographic anime and winking memes of a character
called “pedobear,” who popped up in all sorts of contexts, lusting after “delicious cake.”
Pedobear imbued a cute cartoon bear with disturbing significance, allowing an innocuous
image to signify something transgressive—to those in on the joke. This ambiguity—the wish
to defy norms (and their upholders, the “normies”) while maintaining plausible deniability—
was a hallmark of 4chan, particularly of a popular board called /b/, a bin for anything that
didn’t fit the remit of the others.

/b/ had huge traffic, many thousands of posts a day. It was a place with its own highly evolved
subculture. Its denizens, who are (according to 4chan’s advertising page) overwhelmingly
young and male, called themselves “b/tards,” reveling together in an arms race of awfulness,
in which everybody and everything was reduced to its most base and abject form for the
entertainment of the mob. The raids on Habbo Hotel were an eruption of the culture of /b/ into
an unsuspecting normie settlement. On one of the many websites dedicated to archiving the
doings of /b/ and its offshoots, you can find a definition of the formation of black avatars I’d
seen on screenshots of the raid: “A SwastiGET is a formation done by Nigras while raiding
Habbo. Nigras strategically line up to form a Swastika for shock value and lulz.” The fashion
for raiding Habbo in blackface even spilled out into the real world, when young Finnish men
in suits and Afro wigs marched to the headquarters of Habbo’s parent company in Helsinki
and formed a SwastiGET in front of the building.

On 4chan, threads that received replies were bumped to the top, and old threads were
deleted automatically as new ones were posted. There was no archive, no memory.
Everything vanished. On high-traffic boards like /b/, the result was a sort of productive churn,
a memetic primal soup that spawned jokes and fleeting crazes and outbreaks of unsettling
behavior. Other than 4chan’s sitewide ban on actual child pornography, in 2006 there was no
content moderation, at least none visible to the human eye. Posters could remain anonymous,
and almost all of them chose to do so, to such an extent that 4chan users termed themselves
“Anons.” This turn toward a collective identity would later drive /b/ and its successor /pol/
into the realm of real-world politics, a wild history that is meticulously and grippingly
detailed by Dale Beran in It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army
Accidentally Memed Donald Trump Into Office. As the book’s subtitle suggests, 4chan’s
future lay far closer to the White House than any reasonable person would have predicted.

One day in 2007 I was (still) on /b/ and came across an image of two crude-looking
homemade bombs, with a message saying that they would be detonated the next morning at a
Texas high school. “Promptly after the blast,” wrote the poster, “I, along with two ther [sic]

2 of 8 09.03.20, 17:11
For the Lulz: The Politics of 4chan | by Hari Kunzru | The New Yo... https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/03/26/trolls-4chan-gamer...

Anonymous, will charge the building, armed with a Bushmaster AR-15, IMI Galil AR, a
vintage, government-issue M1 .30 carbine, and a Benelli M4 semi.” The replies were mostly
devoted to best wishes for the project’s success and a critique of the choice of bomb-making
materials: “WTF are you using PVC for a pipe bomb?” I looked at the timestamps and
realized that I was, remarkably for 4chan, reading a thread that was many hours old. It was so
popular that it was still floating at the top of the page, instead of falling down into oblivion.

Gradually, I pieced together what happened. Within fifteen minutes of the initial post going
live, an Anon had extracted metadata from the pipe bomb image that included the name of the
owner of the camera. Later, a fifteen-year-old boy—who’d borrowed his dad’s camera to
stage the picture—was arrested as he was getting ready to go to school. The bomb, as the
skeptics on /b/ suspected, was fake.

/b/ was split on whether possible lulz (a corruption of “lols,” itself a corruption of LOL or
“laughing out loud”) had been squandered by the boy’s arrest. The absolute fungibility of lulz
was the driver of /b/’s cynical economy. It didn’t matter where the lulz came from. If they
derived from besmirching some other subgroup’s special sacred thing, they were particularly
excellent. During the period I was lurking on /b/, lulz were being extracted from harrassing
the friends and family of a Minnesotan seventh grader who had committed suicide after being
bullied at school. According to a New York Times report quoted by Beran, the dead boy’s
family received a stream of prank calls that went on for more than a year.

I found /b/ a depressing place, and there was an element of self-hatred in the way I kept
returning to it, forcing myself to look at its bleak picture of human nature. It was, as Beran
puts it, like “drinking from a concentrated font of misery.” But I didn’t see evidence of far-
right political organizing there, and eventually I drifted away to other things.

Inext paid attention in 2008 when all of a sudden my Internet was full of Anons in Guy
Fawkes masks protesting the Church of Scientology. This was more than a change in tone. It
was an evolution, as if, in my absence, cells had begun to divide in a petri dish left overnight
on a lab bench. /b/ had, as Beran writes, “accidentally discovered agency.”

A battle between Scientology and /b/ was undeniably an interesting proposition. The two
were highly asymmetric and oddly complementary, the tight geeky hierarchical organization
and the loose geeky distributed network. The Church of Scientology had been at war with the
Internet for years. Scientology zealously maintained that it was a religion, while equally
zealously maintaining that its scriptures were valuable intellectual property, and that the
practice of keeping them secret from outsiders, revealing them to subscribers in a sequence of
paid-for initiations, was in no way a multilevel marketing scheme. It was the kind of religion
—transactional, based on science fiction—that might have appealed to Anons had it not
breached the fundamental rule of the Internet, the old Whole Earth Catalog rule out of which
all the other rules sprang: Information wants to be free.

The importance of freedom of information on the Internet was just about the only ethical
principle that the fractious populace of /b/ could agree on. Scientology had a record of
aggressive action against its critics. It didn’t want its information to be free. It wanted its
information to be controlled and expensive. The casus belli had been a video of Tom Cruise,

3 of 8 09.03.20, 17:11
For the Lulz: The Politics of 4chan | by Hari Kunzru | The New Yo... https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/03/26/trolls-4chan-gamer...

in which he appeared to claim to have special powers as a result of his practice of

Scientology. To /b/ (and much of the rest of the Internet), Cruise’s messianic confidence was
bizarre. Anons found it lulzy to mock him. The church didn’t like being mocked. It attempted
to suppress the video. It attempted to take lulz away from /b/.

As an opening salvo, Anons uploaded a video in which what sounds like a text-to-voice
program reads out a threatening letter to Scientology, over images of scudding clouds: “For
the good of your followers, for the good of mankind, and for our own enjoyment…we shall
proceed to expel you from the Internet and systematically dismantle the Church of
Scientology in its present form.” It signs off with one of the most memorable slogans of the
2000s Internet: “We are anonymous. We are legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget.
Expect us.” With this, the online activist tactics pioneered in the 1990s by artworld-adjacent
groups such as Critical Art Ensemble and the Electronic Disturbance Theater erupted into the
global public sphere. In the subsequent decade these tactics have been deployed to all manner
of ends by organizations of every size and political persuasion, up to and including nation
states.

In the action they called Op[eration] Chanology, Anons had access to a software tool called
the “Low Orbit Ion Cannon” (named after a particularly destructive weapon in a science
fiction war game called Command & Conquer). This allowed them to sit in comfort in front
of a nice dashboard and conduct a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack, flooding
Scientology’s servers with requests and causing them to crash. Anons (now calling
themselves by the collective name Anonymous) also held real-world protests in dozens of
cities around the world, bringing several thousand people onto the streets wearing Guy
Fawkes masks, which were being produced in large quantities to promote a film adaptation of
Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta, a graphic novel about a masked vigilante.
Video of the New York protest shows a happy crowd chanting, “Don’t drink the Kool Aid,”
and (obscurely to anyone not on the Japanese cat Internet), “Long cat is long.”

Anonymous didn’t dismantle the Church of Scientology, though they dented its public image,
and opened the way for legitimate criticism that had previously been stifled about the veracity
of its teachings, its aggressive behavior toward its critics, and the exploitation of its adherents.
The Low Orbit Ion Cannon was then deployed in support of WikiLeaks, a group that, like
Anonymous, had inherited the techno-libertarian ethos of early West Coast hacker culture. At
the time, WikiLeaks was an organization with a high reputation among journalists, having
published credible information about a number of matters of public interest, including
corruption in Kenya, toxic waste dumping off the coast of Côte d’Ivoire, and the revelation
that some prisoners at Guantánamo Bay were being kept hidden from the International
Committee of the Red Cross. When WikiLeaks started posting the highly consequential series
of Iraq leaks and became the target of sustained US government pressure, Anonymous
retaliated, turning the cannon against banks and payment entities that were throttling the
ability of WikiLeaks to fundraise. As Beran writes, this turned Anonymous against “the same
countercultural enemies as the 90s hackers: the institutional powers of corporations and the
state.”

The result was a number of arrests, and a split between the hacktivists of Anonymous and

4 of 8 09.03.20, 17:11
For the Lulz: The Politics of 4chan | by Hari Kunzru | The New Yo... https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/03/26/trolls-4chan-gamer...

“anons,” who began to use lower case to distinguish themselves from the political faction.
The anons went back to the traditional business of 4chan, forming romantic attachments to
My Little Pony figures and yelling plot spoilers at children lining up to buy the latest Harry
Potter book. Anonymous, meanwhile, accidentally pulled on a thread of scandal that only
began to unravel when the Cambridge Analytica affair broke several years later, revealing in
early 2018 that the company had used the personal data of millions of unwitting Facebook
users to microtarget voters with inflammatory and potentially misleading messages. In 2010 a
security consultant named Aaron Barr was foolishly trying to drum up corporate and
government business by claiming to have infiltrated Anonymous. He severely overestimated
his skills and found his company servers and backups wiped and 68,000 company e-mails
dumped on the open Internet. This (Rule 26: Any topic can be easily turned into something
totally unrelated) opened up questions about the work Barr and other contractors (including
Peter Thiel’s Palantir) were discussing in those e-mails, and the use of private security
consultants by governments and corporations to engage in dirty tricks and criminality against
their critics.

By 2010 4chan was one of the most popular sites on the Internet. Its owner, Christopher
Poole, known as moot, then a gaunt twenty-two-year-old, gave an awkward Ted talk in which
he emphasized the fun-loving and socially responsible side of /b/, showing slides of cute
memes and the Scientology protests and receiving applause from the attendees of the “Davos
of the mind” as he told a story about /b/ doxxing (publicly identifying) a man who had posted
a video of himself abusing his cat. This was probably the reputational high-water mark of the
chan culture.

Beran recounts the confluence of circumstances that led to 4chan’s lurch to the extreme right
the following year. Though the chans had spawned all kinds of scenes, the incel
(“involuntarily celibate”) subculture that took hold on parts of 4chan was particularly bitter
and violent, incubating a vicious misogyny that came to wide attention, in 2014, after a
twenty-two-year-old who called himself “the perfect gentleman” drove around with a gun
near the UC Santa Barbara campus, shooting at young women like those he felt had rejected
him, killing six people and wounding fourteen others.

A population of thwarted, angry young men was ripe for radicalization. After Anons raided
the leading neo-Nazi site Stormfront, various curious fascists had become converts to 4chan,
and—proving my activist friend right and me wrong—were organizing on a board that moot
had created as a news section for 4chan. Moot deleted it, but the Nazis just relocated to the
international (/int/) and weapons (/k/) boards, and finally he decided to corral all the
extremists into a new board he called /pol/ (politically incorrect). This was a fateful decision.
As Beran writes, “the board didn’t get crowded out in the marketplace of ideas. Rather,
4chan’s new neo-Nazi section thrived.”

Then came Gamergate, which to an outsider looked like just another one of the plagues or
manias that occasionally burned over the chans. Billed by its zealous converts as a crusade for
ethics in computer game journalism, it started as revenge against a female game developer by
a jilted ex. The avid gamers of 4chan’s /v/ board (inevitably known as /v/irgins) joined with
the fascists of /pol/ and self-identified subhuman “robots” from an incel board called /r9k/ to
unleash a slew of threats and harassment against the woman, Zoe Quinn, whose crime was to

5 of 8 09.03.20, 17:11
For the Lulz: The Politics of 4chan | by Hari Kunzru | The New Yo... https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/03/26/trolls-4chan-gamer...

have created a well-reviewed game called Depression Quest. Quinn’s game used the medium
to simulate the experience of depression, precisely the real-world state that anons were trying
to escape by playing games. They interpreted the lack of high-definition escapism in
Depression Quest, according to their limited aesthetic standards, to mean that it was
objectively bad; thus the only sufficient explanation for its favored status among the media
gatekeepers had to be corruption. Soon Quinn was being accused of trading sexual favors for
positive reviews—the sort of cynical power move that incels suspect is going on among the
sexually active, proof of the world’s unfairness and fuel for their sense of otherness and
resentment.

Gamergate gathered steam and acquired additional targets, moving across the Internet like a
relentless misogynist jackal pack. Someone dropped a trove of celebrity nudes on /b/ (an
event known as “The Fappening,” after the “fap fap” sound effect that indicates masturbation
in manga), and the combined legal wrath of dozens of Hollywood stars started beaming down
on moot, who had become increasingly alienated from his horde of anons. Once he’d been
their hero—they even hacked a Time magazine poll to put his name at number one. Lately
they’d turned on him, accusing him of being a hated SJW (Social Justice Warrior), no better
than the various women who were ruining gaming. Rule 30: There are no girls on the
Internet.

Moot dealt with the situation by banning all discussion of Gamergate sitewide. Outraged,
Gamergaters defected from 4chan and looked for other homes, eventually reassembling on
8chan, launched as a “free speech alternative.” Along with Reddit’s r/The_Donald, 8chan and
/pol/ became major drivers of far-right content into the mainstream media. After Trayvon
Martin was murdered in 2012, a user called Klanklannon hacked the dead teenager’s e-mail
and social media accounts, changed the passwords to racial slurs, and posted a set of slides to
/pol/. These slides showed proof of the hack and doctored screenshots of Martin’s messages,
under titles like “Trayvon Martin Was a Drug Dealer” and “Trayvon Martin Used Marijuana
Habitually,” fueling a narrative that percolated up through the right-wing media ecosystem.
During the Black Lives Matter protests, /pol/ produced a constant stream of memes framing
the protests as if they were a race war. Like a bolus of food passing through some awful
human centipede, the notion of a “great replacement”—the conspiracy theory that white
Europeans are being deliberately replaced with a nonwhite population through mass
migration and a declining white birth rate—has made its way from the salons of the French
far right into the chans, and out again to Fox News, informing the Trump administration’s
staging of the so-called border crisis (a term that is often enough repeated uncritically even by
members of the so-called fake news media). Fox host Tucker Carlson was, according to a
study by the monitoring group Media Matters, mentioned over 19,000 times on the chans in
the first seven months of 2019, with many proposing him as a presidential candidate.

Of course, fascist radicalization on the chans is not just a question of a “battle of ideas.” The
manifesto of the Christchurch mosque attacker, who murdered fifty-one people and wounded
forty-nine in March 2019, blends 8chan in-jokes with material that reflects exposure to
European far-right thinking. In his last message posted to 8chan, he wrote, “Time to stop
shitposting and make a real life effort post.” Then he began to livestream his attack, wearing a

6 of 8 09.03.20, 17:11
For the Lulz: The Politics of 4chan | by Hari Kunzru | The New Yo... https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/03/26/trolls-4chan-gamer...

tactical vest bearing a patch of the Sonnenrad, or black sun, an occult Nazi symbol. His
weapons were painted with a palimpsest of names and references, many of them to historical
figures associated with the Crusades and other Christian wars against Muslims.

The descent down the golden escalator of the orange-hued candidate whom /pol/ dubbed
“God Emperor” was the catalyst for the underemployed proto-fascist Gamergate army to form
itself into an effective political force. As Beran writes, to the cynics and self-identified losers
of 4chan, Trump “embodied their beliefs in how the world worked—as a series of flickering,
promotional lies.” He was a loser’s bitter caricature of a winner, a boorish, brash serial liar, a
holder of grudges, proof that you could run for the most powerful political office in the world
and still be a small man. He was, in effect, a human shitpost, calculated to stir up trouble
among the normies. His opponent was symbolically (and literally) a mom. Electing Trump
would annoy Mom and bring on race war. So Trump became the candidate of the chans.

The story of 4chan is often treated as a sort of grotesque sideshow to the growing populism of
recent politics, but Beran’s book shows how central it was to the changes that have taken
place as Internet natives reshape political discourse. Stephen Miller, the thirty-four-year-old
white nationalist who runs US immigration policy, is clearly a product of the chan culture.
The recent chaos at the Iowa Democratic caucus was exacerbated by eager Anons responding
to a 4chan call to “clog the phone lines,” making it difficult for precincts to report results. The
origin of Pizzagate, the conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton and John Podesta were running
a child sex ring out of the basement of a pizzeria in Washington, D.C., betrays 4chan’s
longstanding compulsion to make jokes out of child pornography (or “cp”). “Denizens of
/pol/,” Beran writes, “saw references to cheese pizza in Podesta’s email…and noted the
initials of Comet Ping Pong, the rest of the tale wrote itself.”

During the 2016 election campaign, the raiding party of hyperactive anons found it all too
easy to sow panic among a demographic new to the Internet, older people who lacked the
skills or discernment to assess the sources of the “news” they were consuming. Research has
suggested that older Internet users are more likely to get trapped in “filter bubbles”—chains
of websites that prevent them from seeing opposing views—and this tendency made them
perfect targets for disinformation.

The question of causality preoccupies anons, many of whom believe they were instrumental
to Trump’s victory. /pol/ promoted Trump relentlessly, never missing an opportunity to go on
the offensive against his enemies. On October 13, 2015, Trump acknowledged his far-right
fans by tweeting a picture of himself as their cartoon alter-ego Pepe the Frog, a louche figure
who’d been appropriated from a comic by Matt Furie, and had been through a complicated
life as a meme, ending up as a vehicle for jokes about gas ovens and SJWs being thrown out
of helicopters. Now Pepe was going to be president, and the scent of lulz was in the air.

On election night in 2016, I had /pol/ open on my phone. I found the anons professing to
believe (ironically, of course) that through “meme magic”—an occult system elaborated with
a theology incorporating an ancient Egyptian frog god and a 1980s Italian synth-pop record—
they were actually willing into being a Trump victory. Many posts were variants of “God
Emperor take my power!,” as if we were in the final scene of an anime whose heroes channel
energy into some cosmic weapon or vessel. When Trump did in fact win, there was a moment

7 of 8 09.03.20, 17:11
For the Lulz: The Politics of 4chan | by Hari Kunzru | The New Yo... https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/03/26/trolls-4chan-gamer...

of stunned incomprehension at this unprecedented intrusion of the real into the world on the
other side of the screen. Or was it vice versa? Then the board set about celebrating by
memeing pictures of crying Clinton supporters.

© 1963-2020 NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved.

8 of 8 09.03.20, 17:11