Knew a guy for a while, one of those types who loves to say “most of 4chan isn’t bad, it’s only /b/ and /pol/, here look at this funny meme they made” I rolled my eyes whenever he said something like this but figured he was just in denial.
Then one day I mentioned to him that I cut contact with someone for defending drawn CSAM, explaining that I did it because it’s used to groom minors and accustom them to being sexualized, and his response was “I don’t care, it’s the parents’ responsibility to protect the kids, there should be no legal or moral barrier to what people draw”
Anyone who browses or defends 4chan is a fascist, a pedophile, or most likely both. Every interaction I’ve had with them only gave me further proof.
It makes more sense in the historical context: 4chan was incoherent libertine-slanted counter-culture shit for about the first decade of its existence. Like when I was in highschool all the queer theater kids and general outcasts were avid 4chan users, and while it was still awful then it’s not like the mainstream norms of the time weren’t as bad or worse. That’s sort of what western counter-culture has been like, just a bunch of incoherent self-serving libertine shit that hated the establishment because the theocratic mainstream was getting in the way of their treats, and in general counter-culture is where new culture comes from even if it remains on the fringes itself.
The problem is incoherent self-serving libertinism has no real revolutionary or even progressive potential: where it pushes for liberation it does so because it wants to be free itself, and it is just as capable of being reactionary and chauvinist as it is anti-establishment when it inevitably comes to perceive the left as a bigger threat to its treats than the establishment. And that’s what happened with 4chan and the broader counter cultural movement it was part of: the far-right propaganda funding temporarily shifted from theocracy to astroturfed fascism and it successfully convinced a whole bunch of self-serving chauvinist treatlads that the right was no longer coming for their treats but that women and minorities were, causing a schism where everyone in the sort of vaguely-left-by-american-standards counter culture either reformed and moved left or became a babytalking anime frog nazi, with only a few weirdo grifters like v**sh trying to keep the pre-gamergate chauvinist libertine sucdem counter culture alive.
But also there’s the fact that people on 4chan were extremely terminally online and so just spread things by also posting aggressively everywhere else. It’s like how r/chapotraphouse had a massively outsized presence on
because we were all just terminally online and posted everywhere.
It makes so much sense when viewed in this way. Concise, accurate, informative. A far better explanation than the tired old “People who enjoy pretending to be idiots will inevitably be crowded out by actual idiots who think they’re in good company” chestnut.
Jonah Paretti wrote about this back when he was an academic Marxist. He outlined the general process by which subcultures get recuperated by capital. Then he went and followed his own blueprint, I guess. Now we have Buzzfeed. I have a bunch to say about that article but I’ll leave it at that unless someone’s interested.
I’m interested
Hi, interested. I’m drunk. So the basic premise of Paretti’s paper is this. We form identities based on desire. Capitalism inserts itself into the process of identity creation in order to get us to desire capitalist commodities. Not only that, but this process of adopting and discarding identities is being accelerated by capitalist forces. There’s a lot of psychoanalysis jargon involved in describing how this works.
Paretti argues that countercultures have the potential to avoid recuperation by capital when they offer a positive form of desire rather than a desire based on lacking something. If all your counterculture wants to do is watch pirated media, there’s not a good way to monetize that. But if that counterculture can get bogged down in minutia about the implications of Blu-ray sales, for example, capitalism can and will step in and insert itself into the identity creation process of the subculture. He also cites women’s rights and queer activism as a counterculture which could resist recuperation while outlining how rainbow capitalism would work. And he did this in 1996 and with seemingly minimal background in feminist theory compared to his peers with a focus on it.