EPIC WIN FOR ANONYMOUS Read Online Free PDF Page A

rock. I became obsessed with punk music and its associated aesthetic. During those years I read probably thousands of music reviews and participated in countless forum arguments over the authenticity of certain bands. I got turned onto indie game development and the software piracy scene. I engaged in conversations about the nature of art, pop culture, and the web itself. I felt as though I was a part of something to which literally no one I knew in real life was privy. At home, amid miles of cornfields, I had one neighbor (a middle-aged couple), but online I was a part of a cadre of critics and tastemakers on the bleeding edge of culture. (Looking back, I was probably pretty insufferable in those days.)
    And then college happened. I went to a tiny liberal arts school a few miles from my hometown. Culturally speaking, it didn’t have much more to offer, but I fell in with a small group of indie rock geeks. We were
aesthetes
, silently projecting an aura of cultural superiority over the normals, who likely never noticed.
    One of my friends shared my enthusiasm for the web, though his knowledge of its emerging trends dwarfed mine. He was the sort of guy who wore a fedora, started a satirical newspaper, and had dreams of developing a gossip site that would act as sort of a hyperlocal Gawker for our rinky-dink campus. Perhaps more than our shared love of the web, we had in common a basic desire to be a part of a world bigger than the one in which our bodies were trapped. We’d talk about New York business moguls and Silicon Valley upstarts, referring to industry personalities by first names though we were miles away (geographically and experientially) from either of those scenes.
    This friend and I developed a habit for sending each other, via instant messenger, links to funny or interesting web content. It became a challenge to beat each other to the latest story, and since we were pretty much the only people we knew who spent most of their waking hours in front of a computer, this practice continued after college. To this day, we still IM each other stuff.
    Sometime in 2006, this guy sent me a link to 4chan—to a gross-out photo of an anime (Japanese animation) character doing something unspeakable involving at least three bodily fluids. For us, the Internet was a magical ladder reaching to new heights of the human imagination, but it was also a hilarious cesspool of depravity.
    “Dude, WTF,” was probably my response, incredulity giving way to laughter at the existence of the kind of mind who would create such an atrocity. “Where did you find this?”
    “4chan.org. It’s a gold mine.”
    And so began my relationship with 4chan. My friend went on to write, in a blog post for Gawker, one of the first mainstream reports of 4chan as a growing phenomenon.
    4chan users would likely call me a newfag (read on, offended readers) and a lurker. I’ve rarely ever posted anything on the site, and I came to the scene relatively late. But what I found on 4chan was a distillation of what made the web so special. It’s wild and weird—a level playing field where physicists and fathers rub shoulders with horny teenagers and senior citizens who compulsively collect their belly button lint in mason jars, with photographic proof. To be honest, I often find the place generally repulsive, but sometimes repulsive things have massive influence.
    On 4chan, you never quite know whom or what you’re going to run into. 4chan is like that burnout teenager who asked you and your childhood friends if y’all wanted to see a dead body down by the train tracks. 4chan is that kid in your class with Asperger’s who sketched out a hundred-page graphic novel based on the entire recorded output of the prog-metal band Rush. It’s the lightheartedly sadistic next-door bully named Sid from Pixar’s
Toy Story
. It’s Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden from
Fight Club
. It’s Willy Wonka and Boo Radley and Johnny Knoxville all rolled into one throbbing,