Anonymity as Culture: Treatise

by David Auerbach

Alienation, irony, autonomy, discourse. On 4chan and Internet masquerade.

Anonymity as Culture was produced by Triple Canopy as part of its Research Work project
area, supported in part by the Brown Foundation, Inc. of Houston, the New York City
Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York Council
for the Humanities.

BEFORE FACEBOOK AND TWITTER BECAME avenues for advertising ourselves and
our careers, before Internet dating became not only acceptable but preferable to the alternatives,
before so much of our social and professional lives came to be conducted on the Web, social
spaces of a different kind existed online. They were populated by people who, for whatever
reason, found a sense of belonging in communities built around semi-anonymous, real-time,
written discourse. Some were computer hobbyists and professionals, some were recluses, some
were anarchists; all of them found their local communities wanting and were willing to sacrifice
face-to-face interaction for a world of mostly unformatted text on a black screen.

Today, the most ubiquitous online communities are social networks where our identities are
mostly known and mostly persistent. Each tweet, each status update, is branded with a persistent
name or affiliation. The loudest voices on Twitter are celebrities. For Twitter and Facebook, the
connection of users accounts to their real identities is part of facilitating long-term connections
between people (and therefore to Twitter and Facebook and their advertisers).

Googles recently unveiled social network, Google+, has followed Facebook in suspending
accounts with suspected pseudonyms and demanding proof of identity.1

Yet for people who do not want to be known, do not want to be corralled into demographic
groups, and do not want the hierarchy of prestige, other spaces persist. These are the sort of
spaces that were the progenitors of social networks: newsgroups, chatrooms, online forums, and
Internet Relay Chat channels. They offer a lack of accountability for what one says, a way to
hide unappealing facts about oneself, and an instant escape hatch if things get unpleasant. They
offer anonymity.

The growth of these anonymous spaces marks the first wide-scale collective gathering of those
who are alienated, disaffected, voiceless, and just plain unsocialized. These are people whose
tweets will not make the headlines. They do not wish to create a platform that enables them to be
heard by the world; they want to shut out the world. Ironically, their popularity has exploded as
part of the Web 2.0 boom, despite serving a fundamentally different purpose. The foundation of
what I will call

1 Facebook VP Elliot Schrage told the New York Times, Facebook has always been based on a
real-name culture. We fundamentally believe this leads to greater accountability and a safer and
more trusted environment for people who use the service. While Google+ has introduced
restricted support for pseudonyms, Googles former CEO, Eric Schmidt, has described Google+
as an identity service: But my general rule is people have a lot of free time and people on the
Internet, there are people who do really really evil and wrong things on the Internet, and it would
be useful if we had strong identity so we could weed them out. Im not suggesting eliminating
them, what Im suggesting is if we knew their identity was accurate, we could rank them. Think
of them like an identity rank.
Lulz dubstep meme compilation.

A-culture, as opposed to the culture of Facebook, Twitter, and other mainstream social-
networking sites, is the intentional disconnect between ones real life and ones online persona
(or, frequently, personae). Online forums and chatrooms are by nature inward-looking, and the
lack of identitymuch less celebritymakes it difficult for the outside world to address them.

A-culture emerged only with the ubiquity of the Internet, though it had antecedents in hacker and
geek circles of the 1980s and 90s. Its members were generally young, many of them teenagers,
many of them alienated from the cultural

mainstream, adolescent or otherwise. But the growth of computer literacy and Internet
accessibility increased diversity. The computer geeks of the 90s are now middle-aged and have
seen an influx of science-fiction and anime fans young and old, many of them women. Though
frequently denigrated as homophobic, A-culture also possesses a significant queer voice.

By the mid-2000s, the locus for this sort of culture was the 4chan discussion boards, a massive
gathering of self-declared misfits that today attracts more than ten million unique visitors each
month and garners one million posts each day. Though 4chan was founded as a forum for
discussing anime, it soon attracted geeks of all stripes, who charted their enthusiasms, argued,
and trolled one another at an amazingly fast pace. The result was a generation of self-
perpetuating memes such as Goatse, Boxxy, All Your Base Are Belong to Us, and LOLcatsthe
mythos of A-culture, constantly being created and documented. Though occasionally memes like
LOLcats register in the popular consciousness, the role they play within A-culture is distinct:
They serve to reify a shared and progressive sense of culture and belonging that trumps
differences among individuals.

enlarge image
Not Wikipedia.

Many of the smaller, self-contained splinter groups that have sprung from the undifferentiated
mass of online forums explicitly seek to document, celebrate, and perpetuate A-culture. The wiki
Encyclopdia Dramatica, which began in 2004 (and in 2011 was taken down by its creator, only
to be revived elsewhere), was meant to be a monument to the transient threads of 4chan and
other boards. The Wikipedia-like site was full of profanity and slurs against any and all groups,
and proudly distilled the most misanthropic and antisocial aspects of A-culture into concentrated
shots of satiric hatred. The membership of Encyclopdia Dramatica were fiercely protective of

its culture:
do you honesty think we went to ED for memes? ED was our history. the history of our internet,
not those fags at facebook who play farmville. it was the greatest archive of our world outside of
this bullshit world we have no control over. it was a place where we can go and read about shit
that we find entertaining and sometimes informative in a fucked up way that we love. if you want
memes go to KYM [KnowYourMeme], if you want what the internet really is go to ED.
commenter Gofuckyourself on
Geekosystem, talking about the then-
dead Encyclopdia Dramatica, 2011

The political outgrowths of this movement have attracted the most attention: hacker collective
Anonymous, anarcho-libertarian groups like LulzSec and Antisec. The loosely activist arm of A-
culture made headlines with its 2008 attacks on the Church of Scientology, which had threatened
to sue websites posting a leaked church promotional video starring Tom Cruise. Fiercely
protective of the sovereignty of what they see as their domain,

A-culture pranked and hacked the church repeatedly and ruthlessly. Additional political actions,
ranging from campaigns in defense of WikiLeaks to hacking Syrias Ministry of Defense website
to messaging on behalf of Occupy Wall Street, have followed with the same loose orientation:
semi-anarchist, anti-censorship, and anti-interference. (For more on Anonymous and the
politicization of A-culture, see Gabriella Colemans Our Weirdness Is Free, also published in
this issue of Triple Canopy.)

This activism, however various, is fundamentally in line with the self-willed autonomy of A-
culture. The participants want to beand, increasingly, are expressing an interest in
nonparticipants beingleft alone and allowed to thrive, and they want the principles of the
culture theyve created to be defended; anger at censorious forces, from Sony to the Syrian
government, has led to increasing political mobilization, albeit often haphazardly.

Here, though, I want to examine what underlies the politics and the memes: the rhetorical and
philological characteristics of A-culture. The nature of social interactions taking place on
message boards and online forums is different from any

Anonymous Scientology protest, 2008.

other form of communication, owing to the uniquely real-time, multiparticipant nature of the
written discourse. The social-libertarian ethos and the surplus of obscenity are partly products of
the medium, not just of the participants. Too little attention has been paid to this symbiotic
evolution of A-culture and the new mediums of online communication it employs. There has
never before been a space in which:

1. Discourse is primarily written rather than

spoken.
2. Participants are mostly if not totally
 anonymous.
3. Interactions are evanescent,
disappearing within hours, or minutes.

These are not incidental features of A-culture. They are fundamental to the way in which the
culture regulates itself and its members interact. And so rather than analyze the factors that lead
people to choose to be anonymous, I want to ask what effect being anonymous has on
interactions in these forums.

In 1991, anarchist writer Hakim Bey wrote of the Temporary Autonomous Zone, a space in
which people would be freed from structures of social control. Based on the then-small worlds of
computer bulletin-board systems and other hobbyist groups, Beys idea of the TAZ strikingly
anticipates what A-culture has come to provide: a semi-autonomous safe space for people who
otherwise are enmeshed in the majority culture. Bey wrote:

In the face of contemporary pecksniffian anaesthesia we'll erect a whole gallery of forebears,
heros who carried on the struggle against bad consciousness but still knew how to party, a genial
gene pool,

a rare and difficult category to define, great minds not just for Truth but for the truth of pleasure,
serious but not sober, whose sunny disposition makes them not sluggish but sharp, brilliant but
not tormented. Imagine a Nietzsche with good digestion. Not the tepid Epicureans nor the
bloated Sybarites. Sort of a spiritual hedonism, an actual Path of Pleasure, vision of a good life
which is both noble and possible, rooted in a sense of the magnificent over-abundance of reality.

Yet while Bey may have anticipated the form of the spaces provided by A-culture, he was
mistaken about the content. The realization of the TAZ is considerably less idyllic than Beys
Dionysian paradise: Masquerade is an integral part of social interaction; suspicion, pranking, and
unreality are pervasive; people join groups without revealing any more about themselves than
they wish. A-culture has different rules.

From Homosexuality: A Chatroom Debate (IRC), in Anonymity as Culture:

Case Studies

woofertweeter: yeah i don't think gay people deserve to live either

woofertweeter: ...so how was your weekend
DukePhillips: XD
Mastermind: lol...
DreamPolice: And what do you have against gays? You should be happy WE exist.
Mastermind: how is it gay for a girl to put a dildo into her anus
woofertweeter: that wasn't an invitation to talk about your sexual activity
DreamPolice: If I were straight, i'd see it this way.
woofertweeter: you're not, bro
Mastermind: homophobic person....
DreamPolice: If MEN... date OTHER MEN... that means... LESS MEN, are fighting for
WOMEN.
woofertweeter: Yeah. That's bad.
woofertweeter: Competition is necessary.
Mastermind: lol
DannoWilliams: the homosexual is right
DreamPolice: I still don't understand why people have problems with gays.
Mastermind: lol i never claimed to support gay's i just got nothing agaisnt them aslong
as they stay the f*ck away from me
DreamPolice: I'm glad a lot of my generation are open minded.
woofertweeter: yeah, from your standpoint, sure, there's nothing wrong with letting them
be.
ultramint: ...wtfbbq?

What Is A-Culture?
A stands for many things:

accelerated
adolescent
aggregation
alias
anarchy
anonymous
anti-
arbitrary
arch
asshole
attack
audacity
autonomous
auto-

Who participates in A-culture? Many already spend a great amount of time on computers:
programmers, hackers, gamers, and other professionals or enthusiasts. Others seek the benefits of
anonymity: the ability to antagonize, prank, and generally act out without facing the
consequences, without those actions being attached to ones real-life identity. Then there is a
crucial third category, which perhaps drives

A-culture more than computers or trolling. It is best summed up by the Japanese word otaku.

Otaku was originally applied, with negative connotations, to people whose obsessive, fanlike
interests in geeky things like video games, anime and manga, computers, comic books, science
fictionbut really in anything, including sports, cars, bodybuilding, gunsare such that they
become a distraction from real life. The term is associated with shut-ins, the unemployed, and,
generally, losers:
Otaku come in many flavors, but one thing can be said for each and every one of them. They've
each staked out their own favorite thing, and they obsess over it relentlessly. Regardless of other
intelligence, an otaku will have an obsessive, unhealthy, and almost encyclopedic knowledge of
their chosen topic.
TV Tropes, 2012

In 1991, cult anime studio Gainax made the half-animated, half-documentary Otaku no Video,
which featured a group of anime artists declaring themselves to be obsessive, socially inept fans
of

Stills from Otaku no Video, 1991.

the genre, ironically validating the shame and pride of being an otaku. Are we really that
depressing? Are we really that weird? one artist asks. Is it a crime to love anime or SFX
movies? Why should it be a reason to set us apart? If you're into playing tennis, that's just fine
and dandy, but if you watch anime, you're weird? Why?! I quit! No more job-hunting for me! If
otaku are going to be discriminated against, then so be it. I'm gonna become a total otaku! I'm
gonna be not just an Otaku but the Otaku of otaku Ota-king!2

While the word otaku carries stigma, questions of reclaiming it are paradoxical, because with
otaku stigma and pride are inseparable. To be an otaku is to willfully identify as rejected and
alienated. Otaku-like communities began when personal computers and modems first appeared
on the consumer marketplace in the 1980s, but did not grow significantly until Internet access
became widespread in the '90s. Large-scale precursors to A-culture sprang up: hacker boards like
SlashDot and kuro5hin, and Usenet groups like alt.2600, populated not only by computer
professionals but by amateurs, troublemakers, and freaks. A fast-moving discourse evolved, with
people fighting

2 Otaku no Video also sounds notes of sexual fetishism that would become extremely common in
Gainax productions and anime genrallysuch fetishism being an otaku approach to sexuality.

viciously in flame wars over the slightest matters; pranking was a constant pastime. The more
antisocial aspects of this behaviorwillful, disingenuous provocation and malicious deceit
became known as trolling:

Are you familiar with fishing? Trolling is where you set your fishing lines in the water and then
slowly go back and forth dragging the bait and hoping for a bite. Trolling on the Net is the same
conceptsomeone baits a post and then waits for the bite on the line and then enjoys the ensuing
fight.
post by ultimateego@aol.com on
wedding newsgroup, 1995, as quoted
in Peter Kollock and Marc Smith,
Communities in Cyberspace, 1999

Beyond provocation, early trolling entailed tricks like gulling SlashDot users into clicking on a
seemingly innocuous link that would in fact lead to a shock site like Goatse.3 SlashDot
moderators took increasingly strident countermeasures to prevent such trolling, which were
circumvented by even more complex tricks. The escalating fights and

3 This seminal shock site contains, in the words of Wikipedia, a picture of a naked man
stretching his anus with both hands, to approximately the width of his hand.
enlarge image
Otaku room, via rockshaman.
enlarge image
The Simpsonzu, by spacecoyote.

ridicule reinforced Godwins Law, coined by the Electronic Frontier Foundations Mike Godwin
in 1990: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis
or Hitler approaches 1 (100%).

Concurrently, sites like LiveJournal and deviantArt became gathering places for anime and
science-fiction fans. On these sites, participants frequently used pseudonyms or otherwise veiled
their identities, which allowed them to build reputations and personal linkages based solely
around their online presence. DeviantArt focused on sharing fan artwork; LiveJournal differed
from other blog communities in emphasizing social networking long before anywhere else did.4
But all of these sites were closely focused on interests rather than the personalities of users,
which links them to otaku and has come to distinguish A-culture from mainstream social
networks like Facebook. A-culture participants sublimate their social selves to transient groups
based on their interests.

As a result, A-culture provides an unparalleled space for registering the voices of a class of
people who cannot be heard on the more

4 These fan communities involved more women than did the hacker communities. Fandom has,
in fact, traditionally had a greater female presence than hacker culture. One common form of
Star Trek fan fiction in the 70s, the sexually explicit story pairing up Kirk and Spock, was
frequently written by women. (This is an early example of what is now called slash fan
fiction.) Female science-fiction fans such as Bjo Trimble and Dirce Archer were tremendously
influential in their communities as long ago as the 1950s and 60s.

prominent online channels. Historian Robert H. Wiebe writes, in Self-Rule: A Cultural History of
American Democracy (1995), of the emergence of a national class at the turn of the twentieth
century, the group of professional urbanites who held jobs that were more tied to the emerging
national, rationalized society than to any local community: engineers, doctors, lawyers,
professors, bankers, and the like. What remained was the local class, consisting of those
members of the middle and upper classes who were more deeply tied by professional bonds to
their communities: realtors, retailers, and other service providers who did not come to be a vocal
part of the national conversation.5 For the most part, that local class is not visible on the Internet,
having little presence in national media, traditional or otherwise. What A-culture has done,
inadvertently, is establish the largest virtual congregation of members of the local class
intermixing freely with members of the national class and foreigners. Rural high school dropouts
and Harvard PhD students interact often without knowing one anothers background, and the
uniformity of the discourse further eradicates such distinctions.

5 Wiebe stresses that the lower class wasand remainsexcluded from local and national
conversations.

Collective Stigma

The information of most relevance in the study of stigmas has certain properties, Erving
Goffman wrote in Stigma (1963). It is information about an individual. It is about his more or
less abiding characteristics, as opposed to the moods, feelings, or intents that he might have at a
particular moment. Largely because of the medium of communication, the abiding
characteristics of individuals are subdued in A-culture, which is not true of other Internet forums
and social networks. Beyond a certain level of anonymity, lasting indicators of stigma cannot be
attached.

The level of anonymity may vary between different A-culture locales, but what unifies them is
the contingent nature of recognition. Consider three common levels of anonymity:

1. Persistent pseudonym anonymity: A

users posts are persistently linked
across time to a single pseudonymous
moniker registered on a particular site.
2. Per-session anonymity: A users posts
are verifiably linked across time to a
single pseudonymous moniker within a
single thread or chat on a particular site,

but can change across threads, giving

the moniker a lifetime of minutes.
3. Per-message anonymity: There is no
verifiable way to identify a user even
from one post to the next.

Even in the least anonymous case, the only thing known about a user is her pseudonym and what
she has posted previously. This stands in stark contrast to Facebook, where real names are the
norm, and even to Twitter, where a previously unknown participant can only gain visibility by
either earning the trust of existing, known participants or by being discovered. Joke accounts
are not the rule but the exception. (One example is @MayorEmanuel, a spoof of Rahm Emanuel
that delivers profane updates like Carl the Intern wrote two speeches for me, one for winning
and one for a runoff. There's a lot more motherfucking profanity in the latter.)

The bar to visibility in A-culture is vastly lowerfrequently nonexistentand so the

requirements for identity are that much lower. The result is a greater collective mentality. The
more people have to distinguish themselves to acquire a reputation, as on Twitter, the less reason
the louder voices have to identify with the hoi polloi. Remove that path
to prestige, as well as hard prestige measures like number of followers, and the collective,
agglutinative character of a social space increases. While A-culture includes plenty of people
who know one another offline, the dominant and more distinctive phenomena are consequences
of the disconnect between online personae and their real-life equivalents. Even close-knit groups
within A-culture tend to remain diffusely anonymous to outsiders, making it difficult to know
who has contributed any particular piece of content. Oftentimes nothing more than a pseudonym
links people who have interacted online for years. The offline world is to be minimized, not
invoked.

Even when participants partially abandon anonymity by revealing themselves visually in video
or pictures, or by talking about their lives, there is frequently no lasting thread to connect this
momentary revelation with future participation. Thus the individual stigma that someone might
feel

is replaced by a collective stigma belonging to the entirety of A-culture, as sites like 4chan are
branded cesspools of hate and obscenityto the delight of many of their participants.

4chan, created in 2003 by the then-fifteen-year-old admin known as moothe still runs the site,
and has since revealed himself to be Chris Poolein some ways represents the apotheosis of this
mind-set, as the allowance for near-total anonymity (per-message anonymity) and lack of user
registration enables participants to post quickly with few impediments. The emphasis on posting
images allows people to create their own variations on content; these variations can easily be
exported, repeated, and cited, causing the number of cultural referents to balloon in a very short
time. (This mode of participation, as well as the general adulation of bad taste, can be traced to
the more regulated forums of website Something Awful.) Auxiliary sites like Encyclopdia
Dramatica

were established to document the obsessions of participants, the memes they created, and also
the members unfortunate enough to gain some notoriety within the community. As if to
underscore the self-declared virtues of anonymity, any reputation achieved by a member, even
under a pseudonym, is almost invariably negative, though a very small senior subset of the
community such as moot himself are treated as guardian angels, and the abuse heaped on them is
tinted with respect.6

The sites of A-culture fall into four loose categories:

1. Precursors: BBSes, kuro5hin, SlashDot,

Usenet, Fark, Stile Project
2. Messageboards, forums, chatrooms:
4chan (and countless spinoffs),
Something Awful, Internet Relay Chat
(including EFNet and Anonymous),
massively multiplayer online role-
playing games (World of Warcraft
in particular), GaiaOnline
3. Social-network blogs: LiveJournal (and
 derivatives like Dreamwidth and
InsaneJournal), deviantArt

6 Contrariwise, alienating, provoking, or merely irritating the community can result in a

members being deanonymized and doxed by having their personal information published: A-
cultures form of ostracism.

4. Wikis and documentation:

Encyclopdia Dramatica, LurkMore,
TV Tropes, Urban Dictionary

Innumerable other sites have sprung up (and often died) that cater to particular subcommunities
(420chan, WikiFur) or just imitate existing sites (DeadJournal, 7chan).

Today, A-culture offers a place for obsessive discussion of many otaku-like interests. Some of
the most prominent are anime, video games, bodybuilding, guns, sports, science fiction, comic
books, cosplay (costuming oneself as an anime, science-fiction, or other character), furries
(dressing up as and/or fetishizing furry anthropomorphic animals), and trolling. (Trolling makes
up only a fraction of the activity that occurs on even the most troll-centric forums.) More
significantly, A-culture offers a place for discussion of A-culture. Because the community is so
autonomous from the real world, there is great opportunity to continually redefine ones role in it
and even redefine the nature of the community itself. A-culture is a space for playing with
unrestricted notions of identity and affiliation and for the establishment of a private set of in-
jokes and references that come to constitute a collective

memory.

While A-culture has always had a largely adolescent, white, and male population, the
demographics are not so homogenous. 4chan reports that 35 percent of its members are female;
half the visitors are from the United States, with the rest being chiefly drawn from other English-
speaking countries, European countries, and Japan. The most dominant sites all use English, but
Chilean and Brazilian users have also created 4chan-like image boards in Spanish and
Portuguese. Racial data is harder to obtain; a majority of known A-culture figures are white, but
posters identifying as Asian, black, and Hispanic are not uncommon. A-culture has the flexibility
to absorb people of vastly disparate backgrounds without those backgrounds causing conflict
or even being apparent:

dude I'm black, and I am straight, but none the less I think they didn't care who it offended. I
doubt anyone who wrote those articles seriously hold those opinions even some of the same
authors talked crap about racist and xenophobic people in general. A lot of different people liked
it. It is funny you are assuming he is white. It

brings back the meme "there are no black people on the internet" I bet was started by a black
person btw :P But you assumed everyone on here is white which you think is somehow the
default. If anything I will accuse you of white privilege.
commenter none on Geekosystem,
 defending Encyclopdia Dramatica,
2011

And though anonymity does not play directly into the majority of the discussions on forums
associated with A-culture, it is responsiblealong with the written nature of the discoursefor
the characteristics that have emerged from those sites, four of which follow.

enlarge image
The hierarchy of 4chan, via chan4chan.com.

Four Aspects
Velocity

At its peak, discussion proceeds at such a fast pace that the ground disappears beneath the
participants feet as they are typing. Updates are delivered every few seconds. Hundreds of
people can participate in a single thread or chat, and digressions are wiped off the front page by
whatever conversation is trending. On 4chan, threads can expire within minutes or hours, at
which point they are deleted. (Notable threads are occasionally archived on another site.) Other
boards move more slowly, but the idea remains the same: Discourse and culture are evolving
every moment. The velocity, in tandem with the volume, of discourse, means that no
participants words will be seen more than momentarily, and so each participant must continually
reassert herself, which contributes to the fluid sense of identity.

Irony

Any point of discussion made can be immediately ironized, either through ridicule, parody, or
metatextual maneuvers. Participants are acutely aware of the characteristics of the culture and

make reference to them asor even beforethey come into being. The irony of A-culture is
different from blas hipster irony because it is a structural fixture, independent of sincerity. It is
not a tool of condescension, but a consequence of an overload of self-knowledge and cultural
knowledge.

Self-Documentation

A-culture documents itself in temporary and more persistent forms, incessantly creating common
knowledge to ironize. The nature of the discourse is such that anything can be archived, even if
much is not. Self-mythologizing occurs at high velocity, with memes being created, parodied,
and dismissed. This material is taken seriously because it forms the groundwork for future
discussion.

The combination of self-documentation and irony has led to chaotic levels of metatextuality. One
peak of self-referential meta-irony is reached in ForumWarz, an online single-player game in
which one encounters parodies of various A-culture forums. One can play as Internet archetypes
such as hackers, trolls, camwhores,7 and emo kids.8

7 Camwhore: an individual who performs sexual services on the Internet with webcam software
in exchange for money, goods, or attention (Wikipedia).
8 Emo has been associated with a stereotype that includes being particularly emotional,
sensitive, shy, introverted, or angst-ridden. It has also been associated with depression, self-
injury, and suicide (Wikipedia).

The game itself contains a fictional ForumWarz server to be hacked, while the sites real forums,
where players can interact outside the game, include a set of role-playing forums in which
participants are expected to act out the behaviors of their assumed identities. As many players
already fall into one of these categories, the game offers the chance for participants to play
archetypal versions of themselves and their brethren.

Elitism

Ironically, the anonymous nature of A-culture produces a very pure form of elitism. Because

participants are shielded from having their real-life qualities associated with their personae and
words, frequently the only defining characteristics of participants are their memberships in these
forums. This instantly provides a point of commonality among all participants by which they can
define themselves in opposition to all nonparticipants, or some chosen subset of them.

In Sum: Meta-awareness

The following quote, from an academic paper on 4chan, illuminates the interaction of the four
qualities, with elitism, velocity, and irony driving constant self-documentation (/b/ is 4chans
random image board, and its most popular):

On /b/, ephemerality and deletion create a powerful selection mechanic by requiring content the
community wants to see be repeatedly reposted, and potentially remixed. We believe this is
critical to the sites inuence on internet culture and memes.
Michael S. Bernstein et al., 4chan and
/b/, 2011

Self-documentation, catalyzed by the other three

qualities, produces a kind of meta-awareness in which a poster is assumed not only to have
intimate knowledge of the culture in which she is participating but also to anticipate responses
based on that history:

What makes memories hang together is not that they are contiguous in time: it is rather that they
are part of a totality of thoughts common to a group, the group of people with whom we have a
relation at this moment, or with whom we have had a relation on the preceding day or days. To
recall them it is hence sufficient that we place ourselves in the perspective of this group, that we
adopt its interests and follow the slant of its reflections.
Maurice Halbwachs, The Social
Frameworks of Memory, 1925

What occurs in A-culture is a minimization of memories particular to the individual or subgroup

and a maximization of the larger collective memory, thus enabling and encouraging the meta-
awareness of that collective memory. This meta-awareness fuels the three main economies of A-
culture.

An apropos xkcd comic.

Elitist Economies
A-cultures techniques of elitism, exclusion, and inclusion do not greatly differ in character and
quality from those of other exclusive groups such as fraternities and secret societies. But due to
the diffuse and open nature of participation, as well as the non-oral nature of interactions, the
particular methods and mechanisms of A-culture are wildly at odds with most typical hazing and
membership rituals of cliques:

wondermint: Ruining the lives of noobs makes me a troll.

keynsham: noobs are too easy to troll, it doesn't count
trolling as status indicator, IRC, 2011

The techniques, while highly variable, are quite robust and serve to regulate both participants and
content:

Dante: dude, i hate religion

ROFLCopter: We all do.
JON50K: yes, religion is crap
JON50K: we need a fucking big nuthouse
Moses: Yeah, bunch of bullshit
Thersites: yeah
JON50K: to put them all away

ROFLCopter: I believe in a flying spagetti monster.

LeSonyrRa: like... a concentration camp?
JON50K: but that'd probably turn into the next israel, ocne they're done killing each other
JON50K: lesonyrra: nah if we put them all in the same one
JON50K: they'll just clean each other up for us
elitism on display, IRC, 2011

The Economy of Offense

Anyone entering into an A-culture forum is likely to witness a nonstop barrage of obscenity,
abuse, hostility, and epithets related to race, gender, and sexuality (fag being the most
common, often prefaced with any trait, e.g., oldfag, straightfag).9 Anyone objecting to this
barrage will immediately attract a torrent of even greater abuse. These forums maintain an
equilibrium of offense designed to drive away anyone who is not sympathetic to the general
libertarian mind-set. This is not to say that the participants are not racist;

9 Even comparatively polite venues such as deviantArt host a remarkable amount of contention
and baiting, sometimes made all the worse by participants taking offense more easily.

the point is that theres no way to know the views of the participants, even more given the self-
referential irony in constant play. A-culture is hardly a utopia of free speech, but neither is it a
fulcrum of hate speech. Yet the barrage inoculates against sincere, extreme hatred by making it
harder for genuinely virulent views to stand out, homogenizing the group.

The result is a mix of pride and shame in regards to the offensive material. A-culture echoes H.
P. Lovecrafts Cthulhu Mythos stories, in which exposure to some secret, Gnostic knowledge
forever pollutes ones mind, leaving one vulnerable to terrible forces that to most people are
imaginary and harmless. The danger attached to this knowledge gives it currency.

The Economy of Suspicion

While participants come to forums with no real-world baggage, conversations cant remain
hermetically sealed. In the case of discussions of pop culture or other common knowledge, the
tension is less meaningful, since the matters are independently verifiable. But when the issue is
the limited revelation of personal information, there is always reason to suspect that the poster is

A Lovecraftian/Gnostic comment on Goatse.

trollingespecially when a story is in the making.

The degree of suspicion varies. Within 4chan, the /b/ board is far more likely to be given over to
trolling and fraud than other boards. But since the possibility always exists, there is a persistent
need to take nothing at face value.

Consider this 4chan thread, in which the original poster (OP) confesses to having a drunken bout
of sex with his sister:

awwshit !!7M/e4Locp No.4962356

She got dumped today and came home a mess, crying, hysterics, the whole she-bang, I was
sitting on my sofa flicking through the channels and waiting for the A-Team to download when
she came in crying, she came into the livingroom, pulled out 2 bottles of jack daniels and a 2L
bottle of coke from a grocery bag, muttered something about the shop being kind enough to
refund her the champagne she bought, went into the kitchen, got some glasses, poured herself a
straight double, downed it, then sat in silence for a moment, then burst into tears and fell into my
lap.

So, she cries and cries, making my shirt soggier and soggier with her tears and bleeding mascara,
I stick the A-Team on and she finally settles down, then she had a bright fucking idea, "Adam!
lets go shot for shot, I wanna forget about today as fast as possible", great idea right? great...

So we go at it until the first bottle was dust, then we slow it down and start

Regarding 4chan's /b/.

adding coke, and we get to talking, i was going to write out the whole conversation but fuck it,
we talked she complimented me on being a "good man", I said she deserved better, she
drunkenly, jokingly came onto me, I tried to back off, we left it alone for a while and continued
drinking, then she started joking about it, and it came down to "If you wasn't my brother, I
would"

"Well lets say today, you can pretend I'm not, you don't have the guts"

Then she jumped me, grinded, started stripping, I got turned on, then she tore down my jeans and
rid me on the sofa.

on the screen BA's face was that of disappointment, he knew I would regret this.

we fucked on the sofa, then she took me into her bedroom, and fucked me again, and we fell
asleep, her naked ontop of me, with her arms wrapped around me, I only just managed to escape
without waking her up.

now im shitting myself because I fear what will happen when she does wake up.

gentlemen, advise me, what the fuck should I do now!?

The prurience and the unlikelihood of the incident are draws. Some take it seriously, some half-
seriously, and some dispute the truth of the story while still trying to help it along. One posters
assessment:

Theme - 2/10 (unoriginal)

Writing - 4/10 (poor)
Trolling Effort - 2/10 (very poor)
Trolling Effect - 8/10 (very good)
Total - 4/10 (40%)

This is a good troll. Note that this post, while demonstrating the appropriate sentiments of a man
in his situation leaves the door open for an ongoing story. Also note the rushed feel to the words,
as though it were a train of thought rather than a calculated reply. The use of commas rather than
full stops enhances this. Through these techniques he draws in the reader, ensnaring them in this
twisted fantasy. I will admit, I am left wanting to read more, despite the knowledge that this is
fictitious.

I want to believe and not believe. Let's hope that if this isn't fictional you and you

sis can still chill out. I'd say this might be a good time to start dating other chicks to forget this
asap.

Another poster is dubious while also offering advice:

She'll be hung over, act like it never happened and try to make her think it was a bad dream.

Also, unsuccessful troll is unsuccessful. Learn to be less obvious.

Others indict the critics as trolls for doubting the OP. This poster taxonomizes those participating
in the thread:

psuedo intellectuals flood to this thread trying to point out that it's a clever troll.
/b/ tards screaming "FUCK HER AGAIN LOL!"completely ignore OP and the fact that he's
asking for good advice, not opinions OP is probably a scared and lonely young man turning to
the only people he can ask for help in his final hour, and only a hand full of people give him
legitimate, well thought out advice.

who is really the troll?

enlarge image
Trolling 101.

But such critics might be trolling as well.

A more innocuous but similarly unlikely story plays out when a femanon (anonymous female
poster) confesses to having a crush on her coworker, who then shows up on the same forum and
confronts her. Much suspicion ensues. One poster carefully analyzes the evidence:

The timing looks about right on all of these. If you go through and check the timestamps on
Marie and Grant's posts, see how long it takes them to post again or reply to what the other one
said,

consider how long they are, etc. they are pretty consistent with an actual conversation. Too often,
I've seen threads like this with the replies shot out one after the other, with no time for the
players (samefagging OP) to read what the other wrote, think about how to respond, fret over
what they wrote, that sort of thing, and it gives away that it's the same person. I mean, look at
these two:

>>6372459 2:54, sends facebook message

>>6373041 3:52, gives up waiting and posts explanation
I read that as he decided to wait an hour, started writing that long thing after a decent amount of
time had passed, and cut off the last few minutes of the hour because it became obvious she
wasn't gonna show.

I'm not saying definitively that it's not a troll, I'm just saying that the probability that it's not is
higher than some people seem to be implying, and it's a pretty good one if it is.

Another poster seeks to justify his enjoyment in spite of his suspicions:

it's obvious fiction but 4chan eats this shit up

i mean, it's like movies/books/pro wrestling, even if you know it's fake doesn't mean it can't be
entertaining

And that ambivalence toward the reality of the situation leads to the final, most complicated
economy.

The Economy of Unreality

The separation of participants from their real-life personaealong with the constant irony,
sarcasm, and trollingmandates that some aspect of unreality be present in all proceedings. But
the chief engine of unreality is role-playing and the sense of gamesmanship by which
participants exert control over their A-culture personae.

A-cultures anonymity favors three cultures that are defined in part by masquerade: those of
fandom, trolling/pranking, and role-playing games. The cultures of science-fiction and
anime/manga fandom emphasize fan fiction and cosplay; furries

enlarge image

have made the assumption of anthropomorphic animal personae central to their culture.
Masquerade is, of course, central to role-playing games online and offline, from Dungeons &
Dragons to World of Warcraft to LARP (live-action role playing, as practiced by the Society for
Creative Anachronism and others). The masquerade demands that participants take on roles as
actors or witnesses, and it requires that the focus not be on the identities of the enthusiasts
themselves. Consequently, the links between the personae of participants and their real lives are
far looser than pretty much anywhere else on the Internet. (Women

have good reason to keep their identities secret, lest they be doxed, i.e., have their location and
identity revealed by gangs of trolls.)

A-culture contains far fewer collateral indicators of everyday reality than one finds on Twitter
or Facebook. There are mentions of it everywhere, but context is virtually absent. Anyone asking
for advice on a forum will post only select details, leaving little background knowledge with
which to fill in the blanks; this is assuming that the poster isnt trolling, which is often trivially
easy, precisely for this reason.
Beyond breeding suspicion, these pervasive gaps in information and this focus on masquerade
produce a general sense of unreality: Effects are detached from causes, the distinctions between
fiction and truth are blurred. And so participants often take on the role of spectators or
commentators, treating all happenings as theater:

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. Imageboards are the best
example of this. Just sit back and enjoy the show.
anonymous poster, 4chan, 2011

The extensive TV Tropes wiki began by

documenting archetypes and clichs in television and fan fiction but has since extended to other
media, online culture, and real life. It distinguishes between these categories, but since they share
an overriding ontological structure, there is increasing pressure to relate to and analyze one
category just as one would relate to and analyze others:

The wiki is called "TV Tropes" because TV is where we started. Over the course of a few years,
our scope has crept out to include other media. Tropes transcend television. They reflect life.
Since a lot of art, especially the popular arts, does its best to reflect life, tropes are likely to show
up everywhere.

We are not a stuffy encyclopedic wiki [like Wikipedia]. We're a buttload more informal. We
encourage breezy language and original thought. There Is No Such Thing As Notability, and no
citations are needed.
TV Tropes homepage, 2012

Fiction and reality are merely different instantiations of the same thing. Spectators on a thread
will often treat the action as a fiction. When a 4chan poster

about to join the army shares a picture of himself, another relates him to a fictional character:

You look like Joker from Full Metal Jacket.

All in all, I think he had a good war experience and that bodes well for you.

The appeal to fakery and unreality can even be a defense mechanism when confronted with a
particularly troublesome post. Consider some of the responses on 4chan to a purported teenager
who confesses to raping a friend, in a thread called "I'm a rapist, what do?":

a friend calls in the middle of the night

she's scared of her creepy neighbor
her bf is on vacation in Germany or something
I pass by
I go and talk to the neighbor, he's crazy but harmless
suddenly I'm a knight in shining armor

till that point all is good

I want to leave but the fucking subway is closed
she offers me to stay

okay nice, we watch a movie

she clings on my hard cause she's scared of zombies
she's in her sexy pajamas
being the dumbass I am, I misread ther signals
I make a move
ie jump on her and crunch her under my weight. I'm not very good at it
she's too surprised to react

finally she tries to push me away

my brain is off, I keep going
I take her pants off and penetrate her
it lasts for I think 10 minutes maybe less
a few seconds after I ejaculate, the truth hits me
I just raped her

she's in shock, doesn't say a word

I babble and leave, I walk on the streets and call a cab
it's now the morning, I freak out and asks for advice here

I don't know what I should do. I ruined her life and probablu mine too. Pic related, where I'll be
soon.

The thing is, I tried to control myself for the longest time, like an hour or so. I had a crush on her
since forever. She was half naked, against me, her head on my chest at every SHOCK moment. I
was in maximum erection mode. And eventually I just lost it and jumped on her like a stupid
horny dog.

So should I text her then go to the police? And what should I say? Rape, sexual assault? I picture
my mother's reaction to this.. oh jesus fucking christ..

Some advised him to turn himself in, others told him to apologize, others just trolled, and others
retreated into reacting as they would to a television drama. (Multiple anonymous posters are here
indicated by alternating roman and italic type.)

Yeah you misread the whole situation dude, you are a guy she trusted, someone she felt safe
around. You betrayed that trust, and her with what you did. That said, don't say anything to the
cops if they come, they will try to get you to incriminate yourself. They will lock you in a room
for hours to "interview" you (interview is just the politically correct way of saying interrogate).
Don't go anywhere with them unless they have a warrant, etc. You dun goofed OP and you
probably won't ever be able to repair your relationship with her ever again, I personally hope you
rot in prison, but your rights to a fair trial are important so.
I don't know what to think anymore OP. And I love it, this is just like Law & Order. Did you save
her from the creepy guy, or did you abuse her? Are you a hero or a villain? Did you rape her.. or
did SHE raped YOU?
MORE TWISTS!!!

I hold my girlfriend down when we're having sex too. Although I am not rejecting that OP most
likely raped her. It is unfortunate though, I actually feel sorry for OP and that's the first time that
has happened to me on this website

same here I actually feel for him and I'm a girl

he got me at "oh god what will my mother think of me now"

I sincerely hope OP is trolling, if not, this is all terribly depressing.

All participants in A-culture must deal with the conflicted coexistence of sincere personal
involvement and detached spectatorship. What may seem to be a problem is also a panacea, as it
shelters participants from inextricable involvementor at least guiltthough it also

means that narratives are never fully developed, nor are the personae who are the protagonists
and narrators of the stories. Participants fill this void with their own pieces of reality and fiction,
but it is never enough to turn the events that transpire on-screen into reality. Hence the strange
mixture of emotional investment and detachment on the part of participants in the above
conversationand on the part of the original poster narrating his life. Yet in making their own
contributions to that world (however unreal), participants establish ownership; the world
becomes their own because it is distinct and detached from the real one.

In this case, the original posters invocation of a serious moral issue causes two reactions. First:
This is too real/sad/horrible and must be made less real. Second: This isnt actually real. The
original poster, if he is to be believed, ends up following the advice of some of the posters. He
later returns to say that he has spoken to the girl and apologized, and that she is not going to turn
him in to the police. He exits on this final, uneasy note, perhaps his own attempt to dictate the
moral of the story:

By the way I do not endorse rape, its not cool, Im not bragging at all.

The Rantings of a
4chan Hipster
i want to scream. I hate everything that my corner of life is being exploited, and mass produced,
and torn apart so fucking hip faggots and teenagers can suddenly say something like im behind
seven proxies and [k]now what the fuck that means.

This Facebook comment bemoaning the appropriation of A-culture by the mainstream was
reposted on Reddit last October as the rantings of what i call a 4chan hipster. The worries of
the hipster are unfounded, though, as A-culture is specifically designed to resist this sort of
appropriation. No matter how much A-culture memes permeate sanitized websites like
knowyourmeme and OhInternet (which displaced Encyclopdia Dramatica last year), and no
matter the constant stream of respondents bemoaning the good old days (a necessary component
of any avoidance of appropriation), A-culture resists absorption precisely through its economies
of ironizing and offense, and because of the persistence of anonymity.

4chan is already designed to deal with these

enlarge image

issues, wrote Reddit user ineedbeta:

By being anonymous, they not only remove ego from the users (which might be why theyre
such dicks to everyone else) it also combines the power of every member into one force, which
we've seen them use to great effect. I like the way you described them as self-exiled. Thats
exactly what they wanted. By making it difficult and uncomfortable to become one of them, they
keep their numbers low and they give value to membership. So, all that strange and alienating
content becomes a wall that the users can take shelter behind.

Yet the maintenance of that wall remains an appealing form of self-creation, and so it will

endure. A-culture is the first heavily populated social space in which traditional relations
between the individual and the group are overturned. Georg Simmel describes this dynamic in
his 1908 essay Group Expansion and Development of Individuality:

There is an unalterable ratio between individual and social factors that changes only its form.
The narrower the circle to which we commit ourselves, the less freedom of individuality we
possess; however, this narrower circle is itself something individual, and it cuts itself off sharply
from all other circles precisely because it is small. Correspondingly, if the circle in which we are
active and in which our interests hold sway enlarges, there is more room for it in the
development of our individuality; but as parts of the whole, we have less uniqueness: the larger
whole is less individual as a social group. Thus, the leveling of individual differences
corresponds not only to the relative smallness and narrowness of the collectivity, but alsoor
above allto its

own individualistic coloring.

The changes in communication enabled by the Internet have created a situation in which the
force of anonymity, combined with the inability to assert ones own particularity, facilitate the
leveling of individual differences even in a large collective.10 The result has been the
establishment of an immensely large playground. In Homo Ludens (1938), Johan Huizinga
bemoaned the loss of cultural spaces explicitly devoted to unserious, disinterested recreational
activities such as potlatches, Eskimo drumming contests, and contests of rhetorical and athletic
ability; the stratifying effects of industrialization and liberalism removed both the capacity and
the impetus for the existence of a unifying cultural locale for competitive and agonistic play. He
described three main characteristics of play:
Here, then, we have the first main characteristic of play: that it is free, is in fact freedom. A
second characteristic is closely connected with this, namely, that play is not ordinary or real
life. It is rather a stepping out of real life into a

10 Fan conventions for Star Trek and the like, which are defined in part by group masquerade
with a common cultural referent, provide the best antecedent.

temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own. Every child knows perfectly well
that he is only pretending, or that it was only for fun.

Not being ordinary life it stands outside the immediate satisfaction of wants and appetites;
indeed it interrupts the appetitive process. It interpolates itself as a temporary activity satisfying
in itself and ending there. Such at least is the way in which play presents itself to us in the first
instance: as an intermezzo, an interlude in our daily lives.

Play is distinct from ordinary life both as to locality and duration. This is the third main
characteristic of play: its secludedness, its limitedness. It is played out within certain limits of
time and place. It contains its own course and meaning.

The anonymity of A-culture has unexpectedly provided the conditions for a reestablishment of
what Huizinga thought had disappeared by the nineteenth century, with its increasingly
bourgeois, professionalized, and industrialized cultures. With

those elements of individual identity that might be divisive and might reference the positions and
responsibilities of real life obscured, freedom is reestablished. What looks like anarchy from
the outside is rarely actually anarchic; it is play, carefully regimented and circumscribed.

For the most part, A-culture does not consume its participants lives. As a form of play, it
requires reality as a complement to each participants online masquehence the stigma of the
otaku, for whom the life of play is realer than their real lives. A-culture derives its vitality from
the otaku-like commitment its members bring to the masque, affirming its importance to them
over their real lives. Yet real life remains A-cultures necessary complement.

Though A-culture overlaps with the political activities of Anonymous and Occupy Wall Street,
those groups, in their partial or total earnestness, lack the formers recreational spirit, and
consequently factionalism can more easily prove terminal to them. A-cultures seclusion
facilitates homogeneity, and thus the persistence and autonomy of the space of play, which is A-
cultures only operational goal.

Despite the general lack of seriousness, there is sincere commitment to the play space itself: to
Encyclopdia Dramatica, to 4chan, and so on. To quote Huizinga again:

This only pretending quality of play betrays a consciousness of the inferiority of play
compared with seriousness, a feeling that seems to be something as primary as play itself.
Nevertheless, as we have already pointed out, the consciousness of play being only a pretend
does not by any means prevent it from proceeding with the utmost seriousness, with an
absorption, a devotion that passes into rapture and, temporarily at least, completely abolishes that
troublesome only feeling. Any game can at any time wholly run away with the players. The
contrast between play and seriousness is always fluid.

Huizingas description may seem more sanguine than it actually is when applied to A-culture. In
the case studies that form the second part of this article, I focus on the frisson and friction that
occur when A-cultures spirit spills over into the realm of the serious. In these four instances
revolving

around real and personal concerns about homosexuality, suicide, hate, and the manufacturing of
pornographythere is solidarity, bonhomie, and sympathy but also fear, xenophobia, and,
frequently, callous disregard for people outside the circle of play. The fluidity and unreality of
the ever-growing space of A-culture are so enveloping that harmful, even dangerous forms of
play can emerge and run rampant before any self-regulatory principle can kick in. Its all fun
and games until someone commissions a Brazilian scat-porn video.

Continue to Anonymity as Culture: Case Studies.