The OP is a wreck. “How old were you when you lost someone you love?” he writes. “Today i received the worst news of my life, lung cancer stage 4. My mom, strongest woman i know….. i can’t even finish saying what i want to. Can’t stop crying, being mad, blaming myself, cope with this shit.”
The first response comes three minutes later: “Keep your head up OP. There’s a good chance she beats it.”
Then: “Everybody dies sometime OP. It’s a fact of life. But don’t let that stop you from living. Shit happens that you can’t control. You just gotta accept it.”
OP stands for original poster—the person who started the message thread, which after thirty-six minutes has been replied to two hundred and twenty one times. As a rule, the OP is always teased, fucked with. Usually he’s labeled a faggot—that’s a matter of course here on 4chan, the website where this conversation is taking place. No matter what, no matter whether the OP sparked a really good discussion that got a lot of replies, he is probably going to be called a faggot. For example, on a different thread the OP asks how best to smoke weed (joint or bong?), and the third response on the thread is: “OP, you’re fucking retarded. I’m making a stoner thread for coherent individuals who like weed and porn. You’re a faggot.”
This is 4chan.org, the nightmarish website—really, better described as an online message board—where everyone is anonymous and everything is temporary. The gross underbelly of the Internet, the dark web. Or just a place to talk about anime. When the site was launched in 2003 (out of the bedroom of a fifteen year old living on Long Island) that’s what it was intended for. Now it’s divided into sixty-three subsections, or boards, some of which relate to anime, manga, and other Japanese pop comics, but the vast majority of which do not. There is 4chan.org/an/ (animals and nature), /lit/ (literature), /sp/ (sports), /mu/ (music), /k/ (weapons), /s/ (sexy beautiful women). Thousands of people visit these boards everyday, debating and discussing topics that range from science and politics to classic films and Pokémon.
And then there is 4chan.org/b/ (the “random” board), which is the object of this piece (all of the message threads that I’ve quoted from here took place on /b/). /b/ is where most of the scary stuff happens, and it’s the most interesting part of 4chan.
***
The OP is in pain:
>>left arm is numb/tingly
>> 29 yo
>>no health insurance
wat do?
The first response comes one minute and 13 seconds later: “what do you expect to achieve by giving very little info nigga.”
The OP responds: “idk, should i sit on my hand or something?”
Some anons offer genuine advice: “sounds like a heart attack or a blood clot, go to a walk in clinic, they’re usually a lot cheaper and don’t require health insurance.”
Then the next one: “Don’t be a faggot ur 29.”
People who post on 4chan are called anons because their usernames on the website are usually simply “Anonymous.” (The hacker group Anonymous, which gained notoriety in 2010 for disabling the websites of Visa, Mastercard, and Paypal after those companies blocked donations to Wikileaks, was born on 4chan about a decade ago.) Within each thread on 4chan, anons are assigned eight-character ID codes, but the IDs are randomly generated each time you enter a thread and apply only within a given thread. So if you post in two different threads, you’re given two different randomly assigned ID codes, one for each thread, which means a specific anon can be tracked within a specific thread but you can’t identify him anywhere else on the site.
For twenty-four minutes the thread about the numb arm evolves normally, with anons bickering at each other, bickering at the OP, offering advice, making jokes. Then one anon asks the OP to film his own death on a webcam so that the rest of them can watch it (“set up cam before you start convulsing and die op”). This is a common request on /b/; it comes up in threads that have absolutely nothing to do with death or health issues. In the thread about how best to smoke weed, most of the anons offer advice (“get a cheap bong, no need to be fancy about it”) until out of the blue one asks for a suicide video: “suicide. film it, post here. many keks.” On 4chan, kek means lol, or laugh out loud. Many laughs. Film your own suicide and post it here. It will be hilarious.
This is one of the most troubling parts of 4chan, this desire for images and videos of violence—gore, in 4chan parlance. Many anons love gore and come to 4chan to find it. In August, when the terrorist group ISIS videotaped the beheading of the American journalist James Foley, YouTube removed the videos from its site. They were immediately re-uploaded onto 4chan, and every few days, sometimes every few hours, the images and videos are reposted on /b/.
Far more prevalent than this type of high-profile carnage, though, is regular, run of the mill gore. Videos filmed from traffic cameras of people getting into car accidents. Images of amputations. Self-inflicted and self-documented physical violence. Videos of random street attacks. After a particularly gruesome video of a man running in front of a moving car, anons ask, “is he kill?”
Is he dead?
***
My first semi-successful post on /b/ is about amputated toes—“how many toes would you give up before you gave up a finger?”—and I add a photo of a foot (with all its toes intact) from Google. I post it at 8:45 p.m., which is a time when there’s a good amount of traffic on /b/, new threads popping up every minute. For some time my post sits there all on its own, gathering Internet dust. My previous attempts had all fallen flat. “let’s free associate /b/, what’s the first word that pops into your head?” 0 responses. “what’s the worst text message you got today /b/?” 0 responses.
But after a little over six minutes someone responds to my post about toes: “i am a professional piano player so i would never give up a finger.” Then another person: “three for one but not the big toe and no thumb or index finger.” Both anons had taken the question seriously, which I found satisfying and somewhat surprising. A third anon writes a more involved response:
it depends what the situation is and which toes
if i were being tortured or if i had the potential of being given large portions of money i would probably give up a finger for 3 or 4 toes, but not if they were all on the same foot and the thumb or index are more valuable, for that it would have to be all ten toes probably
Then the next anon: “well i have an amputation fetish so…”
With that the trickle of posts stops and I consider bumping the thread. To bump is to post a comment with just the word “bump.” Anons do it when they don’t have anything to add to the thread but they do want to continue reading responses; a bump keeps the thread alive. Threads that don’t get a lot of responses are the first to be removed. I decide to leave it be and wait to see how my post plays out on its own. I refresh the page a few times and no new responses appear. I refresh the page and the post is gone—Page Not Found. Fifteen-minute lifespan. I’m still learning how to stoke the fire on /b/.
Some posts remain on the site for hours. After mine is deleted I return to the board and look through the posts that are really popular, the ones getting a lot of responses. One post (“In this thread we post the last 3-5 items that you’ve spent at least 50$ on, excluding bills-and food, and get judged by other anons based on your list”) has two hundred and forty nine responses after just under two hours. Another (“Fast food experiences thread”) has one hundred and sixty seven responses in less than an hour. Some have fewer than ten responses, but most have more than twenty or thirty.
***
In a 2011 Vanity Fair article that ran under the headline “4chan’s Chaos Theory,” Vanessa Grigoriadis wrote, “Anonymity is part of the culture of 4chan, a complex network of millions of trolls—(mostly) young men who are entranced with the notion of acting as one, as a ‘hive mind,’ and at the same time desperate to assert their individuality apart from whatever pressures they feel in society, or ‘I.R.L.’ (in real life).” That’s true, except not everyone on 4chan is a troll. A troll is someone who goes online just to mess with people, to fuck stuff up—“destructive agitators who torment and heckle others online,” to borrow from the New York Times. There are tons of them on 4chan, to be sure, but to characterize the site as a network of trolls is wrong. What Grigoriadis is right about, if you ask me, is the fact that 4chan is dominated by young men. In this piece, I’ve referred to every anon with male pronouns because it has seemed to me during my time on the site that most of them are men and boys. There’s no way to prove that, though. As Grigoriadis writes, “4chan does not have archives or searchability. It’s one of the last places on the Internet where you really can say anything you want and it won’t come back to haunt you.”
I had not heard of 4chan until recently, when a hacker caused an international media frenzy after breaking into the private files of dozens of female celebrities. He stole large caches of their intimate photos and dumped them onto 4chan—specifically, onto /b/. Other people immediately ripped the files off 4chan and placed them elsewhere on the Internet—mostly public data storage websites, but also blogs and porn sites—so that they would not disappear after the 4chan boards recycled. For a moment, the name 4chan had entered into the water supply. The Huffington Post wrote about the site and the photo leak many times. The New York Times mentioned 4chan when they covered the story, as did the Washington Post, the New Yorker, and the Guardian, to name just a few. I went on 4chan to see what the site was about, which inspired me to write this piece.
If online anonymity is dying, 4chan is one place where it is alive and well. On 4chan you can say whatever you want, you can scream it, and people will hear you—they just won’t know it was you that they heard. I wonder what the site will look like ten years from now. Today’s 4chan is certainly much different from the 4chan of 2004, when it was mostly nerdy teenagers who wanted a place to talk about anime. Now FBI agents stalk the site—they have for years, ever since a hacker broke into Sarah Palin’s email account in 2008 and chose 4chan as the first place to dump the messages. Maybe ten years from now the site will no longer exist. Or maybe it will be more robust, more immune to federal intrusion, more bold. With a site that reinvents itself one thousand times per hour, I’m not sure anyone can say.