Like millions of other irreverent young men, I would find my way to 4chan.org, which, like Hegel, was to later give birth to two formidable yet opposing political currents, and which, also like Hegel, was filled with nonsense, though in this case the nonsense was fully intended.
I had stayed largely on the internet’s surface from the time it became easily accessible in my early adolescence. I used it to find writing gigs, primarily, and to do research and pirate games and music; my life was given over to the world of bone and flesh. And then, in 2006, I happened upon an article about a guy in Seattle who had just ruined the lives of dozens of people with a few minutes of work. This fellow, it was reported, had posted a fake personals ad on Craigslist claiming to be a female with submissive tendencies and desiring a strong male partner.
Upon receiving the inevitable flood of responses, he posted them all—along with whatever names, pictures, email addresses, and phone numbers had been included. The material was kept on a website called Encyclopedia Dramatica, which had already achieved a considerably high Google rating; searches for these names would generally yield what the subject had intended to be a private communication to a compliant female, and, in some cases, a picture of his erect penis. The fellow’s experiment was successful enough that he’d had to go into hiding immediately afterward.
ED was a revelation. It had the format of a wiki, whereby in theory anyone could contribute directly to its pages. In reality, it was maintained and largely written by a group of youngish hipsters based in San Francisco, mostly female or gay. The founding editors had developed a taste for internet drama from LiveJournal, an early blogging platform that brought together the sort of people each of us encounters through life, and whom we must normally content ourselves with merely describing to those who weren’t there to meet them—it brought them all together and put them in a place where their exquisite nonsense would never be lost again.
As Anonymous proliferated, it became even more difficult to control—for there were always those who sought to guide its path.I’m talking about the guy in your apartment complex who informs you, apropos of nothing, that he’s good at naming new kinds of acid, and tells you of the time when, after a friend of his who had created a batch produced a sheet that was entirely white, this fellow called it, without hesitation, “Black Magic.” The fat girl who reemerged in high school as a Goth, and pretended to conceal books on Wicca during lunch. All of those whose utterances became catchphrases in your circle of friends, even among those who’d never had a chance to meet them—all of them were on LiveJournal, and each was just a click away, if only you knew where to find them.
The purpose of ED, then, was to document the most ridiculous people the internet had to offer, to categorize and collate them, to develop new terminology by which to describe all of the new brands of social failings that online interaction had brought to the fore. Over time its mission expanded to cover the entirety of online phenomena, always with a satirical bent, eventually describing itself as a sort of postmodern version of Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary. In fact it was something very different, serving not merely as a satirical chronicle but also as many other things; it was, for instance, an incubator of language, lovingly adopting online malapropisms and incorporating them into its editorial voice, inventing phrases where none existed, and otherwise serving to catalog the evolving parlance of a world in which the output of previously unheard-from groups like fourteen-year-old boys was now readily accessible, and sometimes inescapable.
Deciphering either the tone or the content at ED took time; it made heavy use of memes, not all of which were readily identifiable as such, and referenced entities and sometimes entire concepts that were wholly alien to the uninitiated. But all of these phrases and identifiers were hyperlinked to other pages in which the background was explained with varying degrees of straightforwardness. Sometimes an example is given, as in the page on the postmodern text rejoinder no u:
Prima: If you’re just going to sit back and criticize the furry fandom without doing any research on the socio-political ramifications of the lifestyle or culture, then you’re nothing more than a prejudiced, narrow-minded homophobe.
Secunda: no u
Thus I learned that “internet disease” was the tendency for overweight people to use deceptive camera angles for their profile pictures, and was known more technically as “fat girl angle shots”; that a “Marie Sue” was a character, generally in fan fiction, that was clearly intended as an unrealistically perfect projection of the author; that there was such a thing as fan fiction; that lolicon was manga depicting prepubescent girls for the enjoyment of pedophiles; that a furry was someone, generally an autistic male, who identified as an animal, sexually and otherwise, and that this sort of thing came in a range of sordid variations.
I learned about DeviantArt, where teenagers were concocting all manner of bizarre sexual trends involving depictions of themselves as Sonic the Hedgehog characters. All in all, I discovered that the internet had provided for the endless multiplication of subcultures, and indeed of culture, and of content. It was worth knowing about, at least in broad terms. There were dynamics in play that could prove important later, and they were mostly invisible to the media, and thus to the world at large. And some of those dynamics spoke to me—in a faint whisper, not yet fully understood—of power. I began editing pages in my free time, and hanging out in the internet relay chat channel that ED’s contributors used to coordinate their work.
For as with the Craigslist experiment, some of these contributors were not content to document amusing things for their own entertainment; some felt compelled to cause drama as well. Among the most active in this regard was a fellow who went by the name Weev, a hacker of some sort. His most obvious attribute was a malevolent core, which is the kind of thing that can override comedic talent, but which in his case often drove it forward; he lacked subtlety, and even a conscience, and this made certain patterns of humor unavailable to him while also opening up horizons that were closed to the rest of us. He appeared perfectly at home with dishonesty and this, too, worked in his favor.
Among his most memorable capers was his operation against a strange middle-aged fellow who was in the habit of getting into inane political debates on some forum or another; Weev created a page for him, using the fellow’s full name and ascribing to him the unlikely assertion, “I want to kill six million Jews.” When the fellow started threatening to sue, Weev called him, claiming to be ED’s lawyer. The recording that resulted—in which Weev repeatedly refers to himself as a “qualified attorney at LOL” without the other fellow seeming to notice—was thereafter added to the fellow’s page. This formula would be repeated over and over again as other victims of originally minor articles arrived at ED’s internet relay chat server to beg or threaten or cajole, only to find that the ensuing conversation had been published immediately thereafter.
I didn’t have much interest in that sort of thing, but I was very much taken with the idea of using Google results to do damage to actual villains. And so I briefly worked with Weev on a campaign he termed Operation Ruin, which would target regional and local political figures who, being not so prominent as to have Wikipedia pages or any coverage among national publications that Google ranked higher than ours, could be written about in such a way that our page would come up in the first few results for their name, forever.
There was a Dallas city councilman named Mitchell Rasansky, who, some months prior, had made local headlines by coming to a meeting wearing plastic vampire fangs and giving a bizarre speech denouncing a local Boy Scout who, for his Eagle badge project, had built bat hutches in a city park. “I have enough people to take care of in my district. I don’t need a colony of bats,” Rasansky had been reported saying, after denouncing the Scout as “Count Dracula.” “We want people in our parks,” he explained, “not flying mice.” So I wrote a few paragraphs summarizing the incident and mocking Rasansky. Weev, as was his wont, photoshopped Rasansky’s face onto some vintage gay pornography and placed it atop the ED page, which, ten years later, remains among the first results for the councilman’s name.
After this proof of concept, I lost interest, for there was something else I’d discovered in all of this that seemed to hold even greater promise. Littered across Encyclopedia Dramatica’s esoteric maze of high-concept novelty were references to something called /b/, a vague designation that tended to come up in the most confusing contexts and from which many of the most amusing memes seemed to derive. It was, apparently, an “image board,” akin to message boards but emphasizing the posting of pictures; and it was only one of many such boards located at a site called 4chan.org. For reasons unclear to me, /b/ stood for “random.”
I have noted above how the concept of Anonymous grew out of the simple mechanism whereby a post on 4chan would default to the username “Anonymous” unless the poster entered a screen name, which almost no one did. As a result, a typical message thread on /b/ in particular looked at first glance to consist of a single person having a conversation with himself. It was a rather disturbing conversation, in many cases, given how /b/ had come to exist as the internet’s de facto id.
The characteristic user, as far as can be discerned from the sorts of anecdotes that were posted, was a high school boy, bright but by no means a genius, and probably not terribly popular. His habits were unwholesome, his hobbies unproductive. His sexual desires were somewhat irregular. He was prone to depression and internet addiction, and both of these fed on each other. To be sure, most users likely didn’t match this persona, but to the extent that there was a /b/ type, this was it. It was the sort of person who would have generally been better off in a prior age, I think, before the era of the internet and of extended adolescence.
By the time I began to frequent the message board, much of the cultural framework that would long define /b/ was in place. Indeed, some of its key aspects had already been trimmed back lest they draw heat; 4chan’s founder, a kid who went by the name Moot, had felt the need to ban the “raids” that had built /b/’s reputation and which ranged in nature from generally harmless group forays into various online communities with the intention of causing amusing havoc to more consequential crowd-sourced mobs against individuals who’d somehow gotten their attention.
What these raids involved, and how they were interpreted by outsiders, may be gleaned from the first notable public account of Anonymous. In July 2007, the Los Angeles Fox News affiliate ran a story on a nefarious group of “computer hackers”—promoted elsewhere in the segment to “hackers on steroids”—who had been “treating the web like a real-life video game: sacking websites, invading MySpace accounts, disrupting innocent people’s lives,” these apparently being the kinds of things that one does in video games. “Destroy. Die. Attack,” ran the menacing red letters that began the segment, in which the three imperatives are oddly described as “threats” in accordance with the same brand of conceptual free association for which the report has since become legendary.
“Their name comes from their secret website,” the narrator continues, in reference to 4chan, which had long before developed into one of the most popular and best-known sites on the web. “It requires anyone posting on the site to remain anonymous,” he adds, in reference to a requirement that never existed, since some users did indeed use names. “MySpace users are among their favorite targets,” he continues, with sudden accuracy. And then the viewer is introduced to an actual human being whose profile was taken over after a list of MySpace passwords was placed on /b/ a few months prior; “gay sex pictures” were posted on his page, we learn, allegedly prompting his girlfriend to break up with him. “She thought that I was cheating on her with guys,” the fellow tells Fox.
A self-proclaimed hacker, rendered the regular sort of anonymous for the purpose of the interview, explains that the agenda of Anonymous hinges on sowing chaos and discord in pursuit of lulz, a term our narrator explains to be “a corruption of LOL, which stands for laugh out loud,” before going on to note that “Anonymous gets big lulz from pulling random pranks—for example, messing with online children’s games like Habbo Hotel,” an example that Fox somehow neglects to illustrate with footage of exploding vehicles. “Truly epic lulz,” he goes on, “come from raids and invasions…like their nationwide campaign to spoil the new Harry Potter book ending.” It should be noted that the sinister background music that has played since the beginning of the segment continues through this particular revelation.
In the absence of any structure, Anonymous could become anything at all.We now meet the ex-hacker himself. Though once a participant in Anonymous, and thus a domestic terrorist, he claims to have since changed his ways, likewise attempting to convert his former associates to a kinder, gentler set of activities. Unsurprisingly, the fellow had little luck in changing anything at all and promptly became the subject of a harsh campaign of mockery and intimidation that manifested in the threatening answering machine message played earlier (a more complete version of this recording is now played, revealing that the caller had not only threatened our subject’s life but also called him an “emo bitch”).
We learn that his frightened mother responded to the posting of their address and phone number by installing an alarm system; a brief clip seems to imply that she also got into the habit of closing the curtains. “They even bought a dog,” the narrator tells us, overlaying an action shot of the pet in question barking. It’s also claimed that Mom began “tracking down Anonymous members” herself, fearing that her calls to the FBI might not be taken seriously, and perhaps also worrying that unless she herself took them down first, some crack team of Anonymous techno-assassins might someday manage to get past the dog.
As the segment ends, it is noted that many of Anonymous’s victims of chance are hopeful that their antagonists will simply get bored and move on. “But insiders say, ‘Don’t count on that,’ ” the narrator summarizes, prompting a final statement from the unknown hacker. “Garble garble mumble never forget,” the latter says, or attempts to, through the voice-garbling software that’s been deployed lest Anonymous discover the identity of the fellow whose identity they posted on the web. Presumably he is referencing the group’s longtime quasi-motto, “We do not forgive. We do not forget.”
This first major instance of media attention set the basic pattern for countless others to come. Although that delightfully surreal degree of inaccuracy would never be reached again, it would be a rare news segment that managed to get every little thing correct. But this was understandable; Anonymous was too vague an entity to lend itself to the certainty of description that the average journalist inexplicably believes himself capable of providing, whatever the subject. For instance, “We do not forgive. We do not forget,” was not really Anonymous’s motto, even though it was a popular and nearly ubiquitous phrase among its participants; Anonymous could have no motto, because there was no one in a position to give it one. Likewise, a popular text laying out the “Rules of the Internet,” which focuses on /b/, despite the title, begins as follows:
1. Do not talk about /b/
2. Do not talk about /b/
The reader will perhaps recognize this exhortation as a loving tribute to the film Fight Club. Later on, these exhortations—all the more seemingly forceful by virtue of being listed first, just like the First Amendment and the First Commandment—were taken by many as actual rules that must actually be followed. As is so often the case with budding religions, there are always those who seek to codify well past the point of certainty; also akin to religions, the rules were reinterpreted as desired by the literalists themselves, some of whom decided that /b/ also meant Anonymous, and that one must thus never speak about Anonymous (except on 4chan and associated internet relay chat networks and anywhere else that these rabbinical sorts deemed to be constituting hallowed digital grounds).
But Anonymous had expanded beyond /b/, and beyond 4chan. Other “chan” sites proliferated, each with a different emphasis and character. And after Moot banned raids, those with a taste for such things increasingly congregated at 7chan; that site’s /i/nsurgency board became the chief organizing venue for the mass visits to the youth-targeted virtual hangout Habbo Hotel, for instance, where Anons donned avatars of Black men with Afros and three-piece suits and blocked the entrances to the community’s pool, claiming that it was closed due to contamination by AIDS. And beyond such well-entrenched traditions as these, other methods, more sophisticated and more novel, were being incubated. In the process, people were learning kills that would someday be honed against considerably larger targets, and for more legitimate reasons. It was within the context of Second Life that I developed some of the organizational skills that would serve me well in the conflicts to come.
As Anonymous proliferated, it became even more difficult to control—for there were always those who sought to guide its path. Beyond the literalists, there were the trolls—those who subscribed to the doctrine that Anonymous was the “Internet Hate Machine,” devoid of ideals and seriousness, and who enforced this program via campaigns of harassment against those who strove to change its character. They succeeded for a while, but others would come along bearing a different program, one that offered victory on a grander scale than the trolls dared to imagine, while still allowing for the satisfaction that comes with participating in the mob.
This new class—later termed moralfags—could thus still appeal to those Anons who raided for raiding’s sake, simply by changing the targets from the innocent to the guilty. More critically, they could also attract hordes of new participants from beyond the fold: people intent on doing actual good and often possessed of capabilities that are generally unavailable to the sort of person who really identifies, above all, as a troll. As the new blood poured in, it would dilute Anonymous until the trolls came to constitute a minority within their own digital clubhouse. In the absence of any structure, Anonymous could become anything at all.
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Excerpted from My Glorious Defeats: Hacktivist, Narcissist, Anonymous: A Memoir by Barrett Brown. Published by MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a division of Macmillan, Inc. Copyright © 2024 by Barrett Brown. All rights reserved.
