Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
If you have an email ending in @hotmail.com, @live.com or @outlook.com (or any other Microsoft-related domain), please consider changing it to another email provider; Microsoft decided to instantly block the server's IP, so emails can't be sent to these addresses.
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
The decline and fall of Anonymous
I know a lot of you hate Anonymous, the imageboard culture and what used to be Encylopedia Dramatica, but please, bear with me.
4chan is struggling. ED is destroyed. Across the internet, Hot Topic and the Cheezeburger Network co-opt memes and in-jokes - the product of an entirely different culture - and profit off of them, all the while diluting the culture among the masses. No longer is the knowledge of a particularly successful raid or joke a source of pride; instead it's considered a magic mantra for hipness, as if chanting it mindlessly will somehow confer a sense of tech-savvy and cultural sagacity that you're not intelligent or well-connected enough to acquire on your own.
Meanwhile, ad revenue for sites that have been the most culturally productive - namely 4chan and ED - have been slowing to a trickle or stopping altogether, and some (like ED) have been forced to radically purge themselves of any material that could even be remotely considered objectionable. In the process of purging themselves, however, these sites have managed to also purge themselves of the lewd, wild, and most importantly free spirit of what made them popular in the first place.
The most shameful example is most certainly Encyclopedia Dramatica's transformation into the abomination known as "Oh Internet." ED began as a chronicling of the internet viewed from the eyes of an anonymous image board contributor, and to be fair it accomplished that goal quite effectively. People wrote thousands of pages about everything from black people to the nature of pornography to video games, and they did so to portray the bitter, cynical and Schadenfreude-filled perspective of a troll on the internet. In the case of major trolling targets like DivineAngel and Chris-chan, they wrote a history of their encounters from their perspective, and, until the actions of the Australian government, advertising companies and Vinyl Girl, it was successful. Lewd, yes, biased, yes, but it was successful.
Virtually everything was lost when ED transformed into "Oh Internet." All of the work of thousands of collaborators disappeared with the stroke of a goddamn key. The history of an entire culture was gone, except for what scraps of knowledge we could acquire from Google and various third party sites interested in the preservation of our culture.
What I'm getting to with this rambling essay is this: the culture of anonymous internet nerds, "hackers on steroids," is disappearing. It's being censored in Australia, starved in America and everywhere else. That bugs me, and do you know why? It's cultural genocide. And everyone is fine with that kind of censorship, so long as it's of ideas they disagree with and would rather forget. The burning of a book is fine if you dislike what it says.
Whatever. It just bugs me.
4chan is struggling. ED is destroyed. Across the internet, Hot Topic and the Cheezeburger Network co-opt memes and in-jokes - the product of an entirely different culture - and profit off of them, all the while diluting the culture among the masses. No longer is the knowledge of a particularly successful raid or joke a source of pride; instead it's considered a magic mantra for hipness, as if chanting it mindlessly will somehow confer a sense of tech-savvy and cultural sagacity that you're not intelligent or well-connected enough to acquire on your own.
Meanwhile, ad revenue for sites that have been the most culturally productive - namely 4chan and ED - have been slowing to a trickle or stopping altogether, and some (like ED) have been forced to radically purge themselves of any material that could even be remotely considered objectionable. In the process of purging themselves, however, these sites have managed to also purge themselves of the lewd, wild, and most importantly free spirit of what made them popular in the first place.
The most shameful example is most certainly Encyclopedia Dramatica's transformation into the abomination known as "Oh Internet." ED began as a chronicling of the internet viewed from the eyes of an anonymous image board contributor, and to be fair it accomplished that goal quite effectively. People wrote thousands of pages about everything from black people to the nature of pornography to video games, and they did so to portray the bitter, cynical and Schadenfreude-filled perspective of a troll on the internet. In the case of major trolling targets like DivineAngel and Chris-chan, they wrote a history of their encounters from their perspective, and, until the actions of the Australian government, advertising companies and Vinyl Girl, it was successful. Lewd, yes, biased, yes, but it was successful.
Virtually everything was lost when ED transformed into "Oh Internet." All of the work of thousands of collaborators disappeared with the stroke of a goddamn key. The history of an entire culture was gone, except for what scraps of knowledge we could acquire from Google and various third party sites interested in the preservation of our culture.
What I'm getting to with this rambling essay is this: the culture of anonymous internet nerds, "hackers on steroids," is disappearing. It's being censored in Australia, starved in America and everywhere else. That bugs me, and do you know why? It's cultural genocide. And everyone is fine with that kind of censorship, so long as it's of ideas they disagree with and would rather forget. The burning of a book is fine if you dislike what it says.
Whatever. It just bugs me.
Comments
So you're okay with cultural genocide.
That is the end of the life span of a meme. Rejection of this is about the same as Hipsters dishing off out-of-date irony fads to the scenesters and then to the main populace. Every meme dies eventually, either by publication or expiration. I remember when they threw a huge fucking fit about fffuu guy being made into a shirt and tried to claim their under-advertised counter-meme got Hot Topic to stop printing the shirt when in all reality it got cycled out for the next front-board merchandise presentation, like everything else in the store (they should have fucking known that but of course everyone affiliated with these guys is stupid anyway).
What I'm getting to with this rambling essay is this: the culture of anonymous internet nerds, "hackers on steroids," is disappearing. It's being censored in Australia, starved in America and everywhere else. That bugs me, and do you know why? It's cultural genocide. And everyone is fine with that kind of censorship, so long as it's of ideas they disagree with and would rather forget. The burning of a book is fine if you dislike what it says.
I'm glad it's disappearing, that bullshit caught on for too long, and eventually all of the radical advertising of Anonymous and /b/ being the worst thing on the internet helped make it popular enough for the oldfags to fuck off and give up. The new arrivals are what is purging the internet of this pretentious unifying bullshit and getting 4chan's claim to fame silenced. Whenever a bored hacker did something but didn't credit himself for it, the /b/itches from 4chan claimed it was them and stroked their dicks to all of the attention they were getting.
You know what was cultural genocide? The Marias Massacre. The Trail of Tears. The Holocaust. Plenty of shit like that. Don't compare some bullshit internet club being disbanded to a theoretical genocide. It's so self-absorbed and misrepresentative it's not even funny. It's unfunny.
I am not happy about losing ED either but the dick-stroking of the Anonymous bandwagon makes me sick.
>cultural genocide
You keep using that hghword. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Seriously, though, the culture you speak of basically amounts to this:
know what was cultural genocide? The Marias Massacre. The Trail of
Tears. The Holocaust. Plenty of shit like that. Don't compare some
bullshit internet club being disbanded to a theoretical genocide. It's
so self-absorbed and misrepresentative it's not even funny. It's
unfunny."
I said it was cultural genocide, not literal genocide. Cultural genocide is the deliberate destruction of the cultural heritage of a group of people for political purposes.
You may dislike what 4chan has become, or what ED was like prior to OI, but don't try to argue that the destruction of a culture is a good and noble thing if you dislike some of its members.
Describing the decline of the "4chan culture" as a cultural genocide? Sure, i wouldn't mind having a Godwin cookie.
For every instance of Anonymous hacking an epilepsy site, there's an instance where it also helped rescue an abused cat, or catching a child molester, or fighting a corrupt religious organization. For every time someone got trolled, an idea was developed, and those ideas were exchanged without fear of external repercussions.
but don't try to argue that the destruction of a culture is a good and
noble thing if you dislike some of its members.
It is if it was a disgusting array of college freshman, wannabe edgy teenagers and shock jocks trying to ride on a name with plenty of notoriety just for spamming in a shit-filled board with server management problems, then yes, eliminate their culture and make way for one that doesn't suck. The first wave was excellent, enjoyable, fresh. Then came all of the lemmings that latched on to the term Anonymous and tried to unify like they were stand-ins for Guy Fawkes from V for Vendetta except they were obsessed with trolling bullshit and some secret agenda that eventually amounted to sitting on the computer replying to inane threads and downloading porn and pirated software.
If you can call that a culture, I feel sorry for those who devote more time to the internet than humans normally should.
@Hatter: Anonymity is not a bad thing; I never said anything of the sort. It's the hateful, go-nowhere zeitgeist that developed around the chans that I'm glad to see go.
Besides, if you don't purposefully reveal your real-life identity, anywhere on the Internet is anonymous, and the stuff you do and say is free from repercussion, in the real world anyway. And guess what? Not everywhere on the Internet is a misanthropic hellhole.
For example, my favorite board is /tg/, where a common pasttime is creating new roleplaying systems. Here's an incomplete list of the stuff we've made. People troll everywhere, but there are also legitimate opinions out there, and even the trolls can have legitimate points sometime.
Shut up, Bob.
@/tg/: I like those guys. I hope they find a new home after 4chan goes down.