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swampgallows · 5 years

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some of the tags on that 4chan post are so right, like... tumblr is extremely fucking sheltered compared to the shit i saw on 4chan at like 14 years old. i have infinite stories, some personal and some general. i had started visiting 4chan in late 2004—long before /r9k/ was even a board, back when /5/ was still a secret board and they had JUST taken /l/ down. that probably isnt even english to most people. basically i started visiting 4chan BEFORE i started playing world of warcraft. that’s how young i (and the site itself) was. i saw one of NCH85’s flash animations on deviantart and was directed to 4chan.

and that was even before 4chan became more “mainstream” after the “don’t mess with football” incident in 2007ish, when gaston and desu whatever became memes and all of a sudden there was some group of people taking “anonymous is legion. we do not forgive. we do not forget” to heart and very, very seriously, which is when all the v for vendetta mask shit started. before that it was just like “pool’s closed” and shit, which is a pretty innocuous but still incredibly offensive meme. the full phrase was “pool’s closed due to AIDS” from some homophobic fearmongering lifetime movie or some shit.

zippocat, cracky-chan, nevada-tan, and “babyfuck it’s awwright” were memes. shitting dick nipples was a meme. pedobear, “4chan party van”, and guilty gear’s bridget were memes. cockmongler and happy n*gro were memes. violent, homicidal, homophobic, transphobic, racist, pedophiliac, ableist, sexist, or just plain disgusting—it was regurgitated hundreds of times a day.

i think the average tumblr user would fucking faint if they saw half the shit i was exposed to on a daily basis as a teenager. AND THEY SHOULD. this isnt meant to be a posturing thing; it’s a testament to how fucking fucked up the place was/is and how white supremacy gaining real actual traction on the chons was pretty much inevitable. but even for “old” 4chan users, to genuinely care about anything on 4chan is also a noob move, and nazis are considered undesirables in that they are not in on the joke; the collective joke being that nobody on 4chan takes anything seriously or cares about anything, or, as the classic meme went, “Internet is serious business.”

overall 4chan’s focus was on desensitization to every degree. it made disenfranchised young dudes with zero power or skills or prospects feel like they were cutting their teeth in one way or another, upholding “lulz” as key currency. their naivete told them they were rational for hating everything, and their cynicism told them they were tough for being able to laugh at everything.

the infamous screenshot illustrating this is as follows:

“SMAP 01/23/05 [January 23, 2005] You COMPLETELY miss the point of /b/. /b/ is not Fark “oh hay guys i found a cute link ha ha.” /b/ is not Slashdot’s pseudo-intellectual discussion. /b/ is not LiveJournal, SuicideGirls, or HotOrNot. /b/ is a place for people to be monsters- the horrible, senseless, uncaring monsters that they really are.

Tsunami owns the Asian continent and we laugh. Psychotic emo takes his sickness out on a cat [zippocat] and we laugh. People mutilate themselves for no appearant [sic] reason [cracky-chan] and we laugh. Suicide, homicide, genocide- we laugh. Racism, sexism, discrimination, xenophobia and baseless hate- we laugh. We are mindless “me-too”ism; we are irrational preference; we are pointless flamewars; we are the true face of the internet.”

If you didn’t catch the date, this was in 2005. this mindset founded the event horizon for the descent into white supremacy.

“Anonymous [OP] 01/30/05 [January 30th, 2005] Why did you guys suddenly turn on Queen G? One day she’s one of you, the next you’re pouring on the h8. What’s up? What’d she do? Anonymous [1] SHE’S A FURRY Anonymous [2] FUCK FURRIES Anonymous [3] WE HATE EVERYONE Anonymous [4] INCLUDING OURSELVES”

there was a SHITLOAD of funny shit on 4chan, and that was part of the allure and self-aggrandizement as well; if you could stomach all of the shit, you were rewarded with the cream of the crop, top quality memes and lulz. a good chunk of the internet as we know it was defined by 4chan. people were saying epic win/fail in 2004 and then it started appearing on tshirts in 2008. rage comics, reaction images, and one could even argue image macros (the classic terminology for a meme) were started on 4chan. part of the mentality was that the lack of censorship or filter allowed ANY content to thrive, made by anyone and judged by all, and therefore only truly worthwhile content survived (especially on /b/, where you could refresh a thread and it would already be sage’d, or bumped down, by reams of new threads).

but we still weren’t truly aware of what we were laughing at, whether it was considered ironic or not, hence poor pepe the frog being stolen as an alt-right symbol. I remember having to stifle my laughter during a history of racism lesson in my junior year of high school (~2007) because they had slides of resist dot org racist cartoons. they are comics by a white supremacist, chiefly anti-black and featuring racist caricatures, but they had gained new life on 4chan as memes like “bix nood” and others. edits were made reappropriating racist cartoons like “around blacks, never relax” into “around snacks [W.T. Snacks, a 4chan moderator known for swift banning practices], never relax” and “around elves, watch yourselves” with the caricature edited to have long ears.

in our minds, we were laughing at the artist for his racism and moronic ideas, but the fact of the matter was that we were still consuming, and laughing at, racist cartoons. (cue “you are not immune to propaganda”.) much as dave chappelle realized his satire was being consumed straightforwardly by racists and used to reinforce the stereotypes he was making fun of, a lot of people on 4chan took these comics at face value, especially now that their messages had been “updated” in a language they understood.

i appreciate it for the wellspring of content that it was, but 4chan’s current users have forgotten its original cardinal rule of “Internet is serious business” and i feel like it now definitely needs to be terminated, especially now that moot has stepped down.

#slurs tw /#blathering #long post /#racism cw /#violence cw /#ok to rb

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