kamikadse161

(this is part of a series, linked together there: https://rant.li/kamikadse161/online-far-right)

Content Warning for all kinds of fascist symbols, and fascist bigotry like explicit antisemitism, racism, misogyny, glorification of violence and so on in the provided examples

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(thread)

This is part 4 of a thread on the coded language the alt-right uses to identify as and talk like nazis right under our noses.

If you want to read from the beginning, here's where this sewage masterclass starts off.

Today we're going to talk about the toxic waste dump that is the bulk of 4chan and the entirety of 8chan.

Let's start with 4chan.

4chan is the brainchild of a then-fifteen year-old online forum user named Christopher Poole, who had a dream.

Poole's dream was to create an anime/manga discussion board in the spirit of the Japanese Futaba Channel (“2chan”), which housed similar forum content.

4chan rapidly expanded past content related to anime, with discussion boards of all sorts.

One of the most legendary/infamous forums on 4chan is/was /b/, the “random” channel.

/b/ quickly earned a reputation of being the asshole of the internet, a title it richly deserved.

/b/ and its users (who charmingly call themselves “/b/tards”) evolved a culture of shitposting (posting low-quality, trollish posts) and meme-heavy content.

/b/ users insisted they were ideology-free and only in it for the lulz, that any and all of their standard virulently misogynistic, homophobic, and racist content existed not to promote misogyny, homophobia, or racism, but to mock anyone who might take it seriously.

Sound familiar? /b/ really is the cultural grandparent of the alt-right. A lot of that disingenuous “haha you think I'm racist? You fell for it! You took my ironic shitpost trolling seriously!” response you get when you call the alt-right out for doing racist shit comes from /b/.

/b/ culture— which increasingly spilled into forum culture at large. 4chan posts are anonymous— users call each other anons— so to create and sustain a sense of ongoing community, they really had to develop a deep and specific coded language to show who belonged & who didn't.

If you were up on the coded language and norms, you were accepted by the other veterans.

If your post demonstrated that you were clueless, you got deemed a “newf*g” and told to “lurk moar.”

That's pretty consistent across 4cham culture still today.

One activity anons on /b/ took particular glee in was raids. They'd go to other 4chan forums, deliberately shitpost content they knew would be deeply offensive to each particular forum's membership, trying to derail and destroy the conversations and culture of the victim forum.

Not shockingly, they found that left, liberal, and progressive forums were expecially likely to respond strongly to white supremacist and other fucked up content, making them ideal raid targets.

A lot of /b/ culture was just competing to see who could shitpost most offensively, which meant it was home to some of the most disturbingly racist, violent, misogynist, and homophobic material available online.

So you had to be able to at least tolerate that shit.

Those elements together— disgusting extreme right content, a particular pleasure in trolling the libs— made /b/ a very appealing place for both white supremacists looking to fit in and white supremacists looking to recruit.

It's really important to understand that while /b/ is a hotbed of reactionary right wing shitposting, it's also, in theory, militantly non-ideological.

Any glimmer of sincerity would get piled on and mocked mercilessly.

Which brings us to /pol/, a forum that was created to be sort of a quarantine zone for 4chan right wing extremism.

/pol/ quickly became a primordial stew of /b/'s overt, shock value far right content and the sincere racism of committed and sincere white supremacists.

For a long time, 4chan (and /b/ and /pol/ in particular) was an internet oasis for “edgier,” younger, more ironic white supremacy (as opposed to sincere and very boomer Stormfront).

Nu-misogynists like incels and gamergaters, meanwhile, flocked to Reddit, creating their own niche, extreme culture with strong influences from 4chan board culture.

The real cunning of Steve Bannon wasn't that he created this audience; it's that he identified it, named its disparate elements “alt-right,” and marketed to it as a whole by hiring experienced purveyors of board culture's trademark disingenuous irony (Milo, for example).

His strategy was simple, and similar to but very slightly more subtle than Andrew Anglin's strategy on Daily Stormer.

The key was for authors to use an ironic tone to deliver the far right and white supremacist talking points Bannon wanted delivered.

That ironic tone gave everyone- Breitbart, Bannon, the author, the reader- plausible deniability. The idea was to ease readers into a place of saying “well that's just ironic racism, not real racism” while also, over time, gradually considering and adopting the talking point.

As the irony became less deniable in the forums, deplatforming cries grew stronger, especially as news outlets began to trace mass murderers like Elliot Rodgers and Dylan Roof back to forum and especially 4chan.

Not great for ad revenue.

As Reddit cleaned house (some) in response to Gamergate and 4chan began to impose (slightly) more stringent rules in hopes of better monetizing itself, a moderate percentage of displaced extremist anons increasingly found their way to a third site: 8chan.

8chan was started in direct opposition to what its founder saw as 4chan's increasing authoritarianism re: content rules.

On 8chan, you can't get caught posting DMCA-violating material or child porn.

Anything else goes.

It's the Wild West, but with nazis instead of cowboys.

One other forum site in the competition is Neinchan.

Where 2chan & 4chan referenced “channel” numbers and 8chan (technically pronounced “infinite chan”) is supposed to suggest infinite possibility, Neinchan's name is a hat tip to the Third Reich.

Neinchan is up and down a lot. As 8chan users increasingly complain that feds and “civnats” (see earlier thread) are taking over 8chan, Neincham is often suggested as the next home for the true white supremacist faithful, but connectivity issues have mostly thwarted that exodus.

I know that was a lot of background for the middle of a terminology thread, so thanks for bearing with me. You really have to have a bare minimum of board history knowledge to contextualize a lot of the chan-specific verbal and visual vocabulary.

So in this section of this ongoing thread, we've covered /b/, /b/trds, /pol/, newfgs, anons, lulz, lurk moar, shitposting, & chans.

That sets us up to talk about the way the chans produce “memetic warfare” like “it's okay to be white,” white power 👌 sign, & the honkler.

(/thread), for now.

Tune in for memetic warfare next time- it's bound to be depressing!