For many, 4chan is a mysterious place on the web, disturbing and difficult to access, whose name could be read in the general press around New Year's Day, when information slows down and topics are scarce. First house of the Anonymous collective, between anonymous communitarianism and hive mind, this image platform created in 2003 by a teenager had its hours of glory as long as it remained in the shadows. Now part of popular culture, 4chan now tells its story with a passivity that may prove fatal.
"Rule #1: Don't talk about /b/.
Rule #2: Do NOT talk about /b/. »
This is how the now famous Rules of the Internet as established by users of the 4chan site less than a decade ago. Though they seem whimsical and haphazard, these 47 commandments were seen as serious business when they were first created—instilling pride in one and terror in another—but now they evoke the same charming naivety as a advertisement from the fifties or a child trying to show himself to be more mature than he is. For if hearing the name of this imageboard pronounced orally was previously strange to us, discussing it today amounts to knitting with Arielle Dombasle in terms of old-fashionedness. It's March 2014: College students raise eyebrows at Anonymous videos, their little sisters rave about images created on 4chan when they still had all their baby teeth, and their neighbors are hanging out on /b/ Classes.
For those who haven't set foot on the Internet since the heyday of GeoCities, 4chan is an English forum structured in boards (i.e. categories to categorize each thread, or thread, by theme) and based on the sharing of images (hence the name " imageboard “), like the Japanese community Futaba Channel.
Asshole of the Internet
Wearing the sweet nickname of "Internet asshole" - an affectionate but reductive nickname - it is from there that come the lolcats, the hacktivist collective Anonymous and most of the memes that are exchanged during breaks or in working hours. Conceived in the New York room of Christopher "moot" Poole at the tender age of 15, the site which dissects everything from politics to Pokémon, had only two boards when launched in 2003: /a/ – Anime and /b/ – Random. Marked by an almost total absence of censorship or moderation, the latter has always been the front of 4chan and accumulates around 30% of its traffic.
At first glance, 4chan's interface doesn't look too bad. Its sleek, almost retro appearance is comfortingly innocent. The input field that dominates the top of each page suggests a very simple handling, and the skills required to post are very rudimentary. It is only when one seeks to join the community that it reveals itself as an exclusive underground club, with its own initiation rites and coercive tactics.
“Like any secret society, 4chan has a multitude of internalized constraints and more or less punitive unspoken rules, including one that is aimed specifically at newcomers: “ lurk more ". "
Make an off-topic contribution and the IP address of the unfortunate Internet user will be blocked until further notice. Ask the wrong question in the wrong place and the onlooker will be asked to " die in a fire ". Like any secret society, 4chan has a multitude of internalized constraints and more or less punitive unspoken rules, including one that is aimed specifically at newcomers: “ lurk more ". Approximate translation: "shut up, observe, and come back to see us when you have adopted a behavior worthy of our time". Like a thread that no one cares about disappears in less than five minutes, this wisdom quickly pays off.
4chan or the hive mind
What sets 4chan apart from other virtual exchanges of its kind is that its millions of users remain anonymous by default. While an average forum such as JeuxVidéo.com's 15-18 requires account registration before you can participate, borrowing usernames and/or passwords on 4chan is strongly discouraged. Anonymity is a playground where the Freudian child, the " polymorphic pervert can express themselves freely and satisfy their slightest impulses, whether they are of a pornographic or intellectual nature.
This Obscuration voluntary identity also allows one to become absorbed by the masses and become part of Anonymous — not the individuals with computerized voices wearing masks of the protagonist of V for Vendetta, but the concept. Before being a cybermilitant movement, Anonymous is what is called a egregore, that is, a group of individuals united in a common goal and acting as an autonomous psychic entity. This entity knows how to lower Apple's share price, hack Sarah Palin's mailbox and avenge countless abused kittens. It is also to this Anonymous that we owe the vigilante force of the same name.
Let a bunch of chimpanzees type on keyboards and given enough time, they'll create something solid. Order arises from chaos, and this is how Rules of the Internet emerged: of themselves. From the egregore Anonymous flowed a certain hive mind or " wintermind » as they say themselves, that is to say an ambient consensus which governs the thoughts and actions of all. At 4chan and more particularly /b/, there is only one motto: revolt for revolt. The prevailing policy is one of enforced cynicism, and anything resembling moral conscience was formally banned long ago. Anonymous fetishizes gratuitous rebellion and wants to be dissident, but paradoxically, its culture is as standardized as it is standardizing.
It was not necessary to wait for this virtual power to be superimposed on IRL, real life, as Catherine “Boxxy” Wayne or the Church of Scientology can testify. As 4chan's notorious pranks multiplied, polemicists around the world took a liking to this bizarre cult of spontaneity and " lulz ". At the dawn of 2009, newspapers were competing to immortalize /b/ at its zenith. Moot has been voted "the most influential web entrepreneur you've never heard of" by none other than the Guardian. The dark side of the Internet has gradually come under the spotlight and media prophecies are often self-fulfilling, the journalistic hype around the 4chan phenomenon has been both an announcer and catalyst for its popularity.
“There are no girls on the internet”
"There are no girls on the Internet" is an expression created around 2006 and is the thirtieth Rules of the Internet. Originally, this adage was not intended to prohibit women from occupying virtual spaces but rather referred to the tendency for female avatars to be played by men. The American sociologist Amy Bruckman had already analyzed the phenomenon in 1993 in her article Gender Swapping on the Internet : " A lot of people, both male and female, appreciate the focus on female characters. Male players will embody female characters and behave suggestively, encouraging sexual advances. Pavel Curtis noticed that the most familiar and sexually attractive women are usually played by men. If you meet a character named "FabulousHotBabe", she is definitely a "he" in reality. The myth then turned into a joke and then spread on the various internet interfaces, including 4chan, and thus became one of the first recognized memes.
The first definition of the term on Urban Dictionary dates from January 2007 and explains that this was " created as a result of circumstances that most Internet users are men ". But according to statistics, the gender gap among young adults at the time was only 5%. The collective imagination has since appropriated this legend of a world Wide Web populated only by men or men as women. Partly out of mistrust but above all out of more or less claimed misogyny, 4chan users have also adopted this ideology in order to spare their community from any female threat. It is also from this need to exclude a minority that rule #31 was born, with which " there are no girls on the internet goes hand in hand, namely " TITS or GTFO ».
This rule #31 requires that anyone who wants to express their femininity must bare their breasts afterwards: identifying as a woman on 4chan and other chat platforms has never been a celebration, but a chore. Women were therefore killed if not expelled from these virtual spheres and this is how a saying intended at first to be descriptive, but already in error, turned out to be prescriptive. As Laurie Penny says so well in her book Cybersexism : " The feminist revolution and the digital revolution have matured together and both remain unfinished. They pose fundamental and alarming questions about the nature and organization of human society that those in positions of power particularly fear, and in both cases the repercussions are beginning to manifest themselves. »
Fifteen years before the first publication of Rules of the Internet on Encyclopædia Dramatica, the mystical-anarchist philosopher Hakim Bey had already exposed the concept of a temporary autonomous zone or “TAZ” in his homonymous book. The TAZ is an invisible space and self-explanatory whose transience allows its members to evade control structures. It is the spontaneous eruption of an area land, time, imagination within which the individual escapes all constraint and can fully express his will and his creativity. Just like the festival Burning Man and the movements at the origin of the Black Blocks, 4chan has all the characteristics to allow the establishment of these spheres: a non-hierarchical grouping of individuals, the glorification of the present moment and a tactical awareness of the environment. .
Just as rules 1 and 2 of /b/ require that his name not be pronounced, he is " deliberately forbidden to define the TAZ because language imposes spatio-temporal limits on it and thus becomes the guarantor of its extinction. If the thread, by their independent and ephemeral nature, allowed a certain freedom of expression, one could not speak of real autonomy because this one is simulated in a mechanism which compresses time and space. The error, as much on the part of the general public and journalists as of /b/late — name /b/ users use to recognize each other - themselves, was to consider 4chan as a temporary autonomous zone when it is at best a matrix allowing the creation and protection of these said zones.
Any attempt to preserve a space for digital free expression stifles its creative potential to the point of setting an expiration date. Thus, each “Pedobear” t-shirt printed, each sensationalized paper on the latest operation of Anonymous published constitutes one more nail in the coffin of 4chan. In 2014 the founder of the site is an international celebrity, so much so that he participates in conferences TED and makes a brief appearance in the clip Meow from Anamanaguchi. L'imageboard has fully entered the collective imagination, not for what it was, but for what we have built on top of it.
Instead of being an Eden of subversion and bad taste, /b/ is an alternative discussion channel serving to perpetuate the culture mainstream. Because not only has 4chan never been a temporary autonomous zone, but it has never been radical either. While they had all the props in hand to emancipate themselves from the shackles of the material and very real world, 4chan users were content to simply reproduce pre-existing paradigms of oppression inside their own refuge. (“ there are no girls on the internet for example, is a popular adage on the site). Just as the infatuation that accompanied 4chan's dilution into the macro culture quickly turned into utter disillusionment, the community was built in chaos and will be unbuilt as well.
In the shadow of the shadow
In terms of statistics, 4chan is more popular now than ever. If no one talks about it seriously anymore, it's neither out of embarrassment, nor out of secrecy, but because the reader of yesteryear is as jaded with this virtual universe as with The Walking Dead after the death of his favorite character. The work of moot has been rendered outdated by its own success: it is no longer the last bastion of hackers but a sordid corner among many others on the web, eclipsed by its more sophisticated neighbor Reddit and closely pursued by its dozens of dolphins (one will think in particular of 420chan on the English-speaking web or underfoule on the French-speaking web).
This lair of Ali Baba where jewels once spouted out by themselves has lost its magic since information sites like BuzzFeed have recovered and optimized the process of " memification to such an extent that even the Anonymous collective — preferring the organizational and/or promotional qualities of Twitter and the IRC discussion platform — left the family home.
The "Internet asshole" has revolutionized the web and vice versa: the tools needed to infiltrate a network or generate a meme are much more accessible than in 2003, but it has become almost impossible to bring together a large number of people for a subversive or socio-political cause as was done at the time. As its inventor acknowledges in an interview with Forbes, our generation of Internet users suffers from a general post-4chan apathy: “ as online culture materialized, pop culture virtualized and they found themselves halfway to becoming the same thing ". And perhaps just reading about it is proof of 4chan's decadence: nothing better guarantees that a civilization has died out than an archaeologist looking into it.
Just as certain species of mushrooms grow better in the dark, 4chan was able to proliferate as long as it remained unseen. It is the gradual loss of its primary interest in relation to other media, that is to say its invisibility, which has prevented its development. We cannot say that this manifestly nihilistic community failed because it never really had a goal, but what is certain is that its autonomy could never have been proven. The media sham sometimes called "/b/", sometimes "4chan", often interchangeably, has surpassed the site itself, to its detriment.
“Between the hyperactivity of /v/ and the slow and peaceful conversation of /lit/, between the lolitas of /cgl/ and the “ gym bros » of /fit/, everyone can find happiness on one of the many little-known boards. »
Accustomed toimageboard, I feel like I'm walking among the ruins of an old empire when I venture into /b/, seeing people reproducing mechanisms tarnished by time, ghosts stuck in the same room for eternity. But if we look perhaps at the history of 4chan from another angle, we discover an alternative course: on about fifty boards, only one served as a filter for the rest, allowing a large part of the site to remain in the shadows (not least thanks to the unfortunate merger that most uninitiated commenters make between /b/ and 4chan). It is behind this shield that the quintessence of 4chan lies today, and perhaps this is where the Anonymous should dig for a survival strategy.
Between the hyperactivity of /v/ and the slow and peaceful conversation of /lit/, between the lolitas of /cgl/ and the gym bros » of /fit/, everyone can find happiness on one of the many little-known boards. Whether it's discovering new music or sharing a recipe for carrot cake, a room has been reserved for the occasion and an interested readership is waiting there. Within the global culture of 4chan, subcultures unique to each cluster have arisen, each with traditions so distinct that a site alumnus can be called a newfag, that is to say, a beginner, during his first visit to a board unknown. Thus, it is beyond the deliberately repulsive storefront of /b/ that one can experience 4chan in all its richness and diversity.
THEimageboard has other resources that will never have been put to good use, in particular its alternative construction, which has rarely been exploited for militant ends. If these weapons are mastered, internet users will have in their hands the ability to alter the real world for the better. A first clumsy attempt to use this generator of temporary autonomous zones wisely can be discerned in the creation of the /lgbt/ board in March 2013. It is perhaps in this type of approach that the future of 4chan is built. , but as a thread which no one wants anymore, this little microcosm is doomed to eventual disappearance. While waiting for 4chan's corpse to rot, Internet users attentive to changes in virtual territories will watch this web dinosaur to see if something even more marvelous and revolutionary can be born from it.