Firstly, what do you mean solely responsible, secondly, groypers, pepe the frog, wojaks, incels, the proud boys, whoever was running Ron Desantis’ media accounts and throwing sonnenrads behind his head in promotional videos, and many people currently working for Trump right now have roots in 4chan.
Frankly, I think you’re getting a bit defensive.
[edit] Oh, I always forget about QAnon. That’s like the first one I should say. The capital riot was QAnon. That’s 4chan, man.
Appropriately attributing blame to those who perpetuate it. It is possible that 4chan was a useful tool, but 4chan itself is hardly invested it keeping everyone divided to pull people away from actual issues.
They also pale in comparison to the influence political leaders, mass media, and billionaires have.
Billionaires that want to influence people find them in places like Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and yes, 4chan.
The fact that 4chan is a wild west, rules-less zone is why nazis congregate there the most (or used to, Twitter is basically rules-less now), and that’s why it was able to operate as a cultural think-tank.
I take it back, I don’t think you’re defensive, I think you just find the idea of funny green frogs unraveling democracy too embarassing to consider.
There is a lot of blame to go around but 4ch was the face of it and the place to foment, it’s not a cop-out to suggest that in the same capacity GamerGate was the direct project of Steve Bannon there is a degree of “culture-bending” by people who see the culture’s stress points. The scars go back to the foundation of the country sure, but people actively work to keep the wounds open and weeping. How do they do that? Were they supposed to take power through one-off wing nuts like Timothy McVeigh, Randy Weaver, William Luther Pierce? Those guys could be incendiary but they couldn’t penetrate the culture itself, the right had to come up with a way to sell their shit in the 21st century. 4chan brought them all onto the information superhighway, merging the culture of Something Awful, Stormfront, and every contrian-filled anime BBS board. It doesn’t all trace back to Epstein but it does all trace back to class war, white supremacy, sex trafficking, and patriarchal chauvanism, and these were the tools available to them.
I think I agree with everything you said except that 4chan was the face of it. Even in the digital realm alone, there are far larger and far more toxic avenues, and one of the largest is staring at most everyone in the face every day. Facebook has been far worse imo than 4chan could ever dream to be, for the very same reasons 4chan is condemned.
I’ll concede that could be my subjective viewpoint tho based on my interactions with both of them.
By that logic nearly everything on the internet came from 4chan. Like, substantial parts of internet culture actually started on 4chan and bled outwards from there when the channers interacted with normies.
Any definition in which incels originate from 4chan is so broad as to be meaningless. Basically every single part of Internet culture that didn’t exist prior to 2003 or became more prevalent after 2003 would also originate from 4chan. All of it.
4chan is (or was; relevancy) a place that fosters extremely negative and nihilistic views about the world and the self because it makes people much easier fruit to pluck for conservative aims. This includes incels. I have no idea what you’re upset with me about.
If something that had already existed for 6 years when 4chan first opened can be said to originate from 4chan, then what can’t? Hell, large portions of internet culture as you know it for good or for ill were actually born out of the chaos of /b/, but your metric for “originating from 4chan” seems to be “do I think of it as negative and/or nihilistic, if yes then it must have originated from 4chan” rather than anything about where something actually started from.
Firstly, what do you mean solely responsible, secondly, groypers, pepe the frog, wojaks, incels, the proud boys, whoever was running Ron Desantis’ media accounts and throwing sonnenrads behind his head in promotional videos, and many people currently working for Trump right now have roots in 4chan.
Frankly, I think you’re getting a bit defensive.
[edit] Oh, I always forget about QAnon. That’s like the first one I should say. The capital riot was QAnon. That’s 4chan, man.
And? 4chan was a shithole. I don’t know why I’d be defensive over it.
I just thinking blaming edgelord neckbeards with terminal online syndrome for the current political landscape is a cop-out and naive at BEST.
If that’s a defensive position to take of 4chan your bar is extremely low.
A cop-out from what?
Appropriately attributing blame to those who perpetuate it. It is possible that 4chan was a useful tool, but 4chan itself is hardly invested it keeping everyone divided to pull people away from actual issues.
They also pale in comparison to the influence political leaders, mass media, and billionaires have.
But the internet is mass media.
Billionaires that want to influence people find them in places like Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and yes, 4chan.
The fact that 4chan is a wild west, rules-less zone is why nazis congregate there the most (or used to, Twitter is basically rules-less now), and that’s why it was able to operate as a cultural think-tank.
I take it back, I don’t think you’re defensive, I think you just find the idea of funny green frogs unraveling democracy too embarassing to consider.
There is a lot of blame to go around but 4ch was the face of it and the place to foment, it’s not a cop-out to suggest that in the same capacity GamerGate was the direct project of Steve Bannon there is a degree of “culture-bending” by people who see the culture’s stress points. The scars go back to the foundation of the country sure, but people actively work to keep the wounds open and weeping. How do they do that? Were they supposed to take power through one-off wing nuts like Timothy McVeigh, Randy Weaver, William Luther Pierce? Those guys could be incendiary but they couldn’t penetrate the culture itself, the right had to come up with a way to sell their shit in the 21st century. 4chan brought them all onto the information superhighway, merging the culture of Something Awful, Stormfront, and every contrian-filled anime BBS board. It doesn’t all trace back to Epstein but it does all trace back to class war, white supremacy, sex trafficking, and patriarchal chauvanism, and these were the tools available to them.
I think I agree with everything you said except that 4chan was the face of it. Even in the digital realm alone, there are far larger and far more toxic avenues, and one of the largest is staring at most everyone in the face every day. Facebook has been far worse imo than 4chan could ever dream to be, for the very same reasons 4chan is condemned.
I’ll concede that could be my subjective viewpoint tho based on my interactions with both of them.
Incels didn’t originate with 4chan, 4chan just gave them a more visible home than they had previously.
Culturally? They absolutely did.
By that logic nearly everything on the internet came from 4chan. Like, substantial parts of internet culture actually started on 4chan and bled outwards from there when the channers interacted with normies.
I don’t understand what you’re saying. “Substantial parts of internet culture started on 4chan and bled outwards,” yes, this is what I’m suggesting.
Any definition in which incels originate from 4chan is so broad as to be meaningless. Basically every single part of Internet culture that didn’t exist prior to 2003 or became more prevalent after 2003 would also originate from 4chan. All of it.
I have no idea what you’re talking about, man.
4chan is (or was; relevancy) a place that fosters extremely negative and nihilistic views about the world and the self because it makes people much easier fruit to pluck for conservative aims. This includes incels. I have no idea what you’re upset with me about.
If something that had already existed for 6 years when 4chan first opened can be said to originate from 4chan, then what can’t? Hell, large portions of internet culture as you know it for good or for ill were actually born out of the chaos of /b/, but your metric for “originating from 4chan” seems to be “do I think of it as negative and/or nihilistic, if yes then it must have originated from 4chan” rather than anything about where something actually started from.