The Internet was so much better before they allowed the normies access. You know I was going to write something here but fuck it. The guy's other writings scream "I don't get it" and it fits. 4Chan is the whipping boy when most of the really evil shit done was by Something Awful Goons (and it should shock nobody with an internet history that this author is a goon). The guy wrote 10,000 words on what a hipster is. All I will say here is that if you see an article on 4Chan by someone outside of Chan culture, that article is almost always wrong.
Devil's advocacy: Considering that the internal culture has no points of reference from person to person and does not interact with the outside world, the inside doesn't fucking matter, yo. What defines 4Chan is where it touches the "normies." I've fought off raids. I've browsed /b/ as they tear people's lives apart. I know that it signifies me as an Internet SJW by saying this, but I'll fuckin' say it: /b/ is an attractive nuisance. I don't give a fuck how cool it is inside the club, if you can't keep your chavs from breaking windshields and queer-bashing in the alley, you are a negative influence and unworthy of praise or nostalgia.
That statement makes you a thinking human being with a working brain; I hang out in 4chan and 8chan and I hate /b/. /b/ was always the shitpost containment board. /pol/ is a joke inside a comedy wrapped in the tragedy that there are people taking it seriously. (fun fact about /pol/? I know a Jewish guy who posts in there as a flaming neonazi. he thinks its hilarious and takes the bite out of the horror of racism. not sure I agree.) The tech boards like /v/ /g/ /sci/ all developed a culture that created a high cost of entry that kept out a lot of the undesirables. The thing about /b/ is that the goons descended into the board and used it to wage wars on each other. 4chan, and all the chan boards serve a purpose. Knowing what they are going in, and having the think skin and solid sense of "not giving a fuck" are the only requirements. Not everyone should go there. Hell there are people here I'd warn in loud, steady tones that they should avoid Chans. I know that it signifies me as an Internet SJW by saying this, but I'll fuckin' say it: /b/ is an attractive nuisance
so hard not to go Godwin on this... The raison d'etre of the article is that the shitposts are not only uncontained, but that they're fully malignant to democracy. Whether you like Trump for the lulz or because he destabilizes Western democracy enough for you to seize Poland doesn't matter - you get to seize Poland. And again - the purpose they serve internally has been superseded by the effects they have caused externally. You can warn people to stay way from the Chans in loud, steady tones... but they're fucking up democracy now. When someone calls you a cuck in a WeHo bar there's no avoiding it anymore. "Wealth - any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband." - HL Mencken Assume you're a basement-dwelling /b/tard. Assume your high school rival is a coder for Google. From a comparative wealth standpoint it is just as effective to destroy all employment prospects for coders everywhere as it is for you to find a killer gig writing in Ruby. That is what the article is about./b/ was always the shitpost containment board.
4chan, and all the chan boards serve a purpose.
I don't think that's an SJW thing to say at all, there are some very dark things passing through /b/. I'm just worried that if /b/ were disbanded, a wrath of least-common-denominator types would be unleashed onto the rest of the internet for at least a few weeks. People.. who... (gasp I don't know if I.... gulp if I can do it..) ...people who call /b/ their home. 4chan was a great lesson for me into 1. the power of images, 2. how anonymity can serve as a window into the thoughts of others (and they had some bad fuckin' thoughts) 3. the intrigue of the guarantee of "temporariness" (each thread having a finite lifespan, even though archiving typically happened to the most significant stuff) and 4. the power of DDoS, among other things. Maybe hubski will get an image board someday that could get shut down just a few days later, who knows?
Sorry, I'll retract some of what I said. There are some rough spots (affect vs. effect, phrasing, ranting, etc.), but this caught my mind's eye: I think we're starting to see what a huge influx of devalued college degrees and student loan debt is going to do to the young collective psyche. Ho boy.My private school and private college education was the deviation from the norm. My chances were better than the majority of people my age. Yet here I was stone broke. All I owned (and still own) is my college debt. So it wasn’t a surprise there were a teeming mass of people out there who knew with fatalistic certainty that there was no way out. Why not then retreat into your parents’ basements? And instead of despairing over trying and failing, celebrate not-trying? Celebrate retreating into the fantasy worlds of the computer. Steer into the skid — Pepe style. Own it. And why wouldn’t they retreat to a place like 4chan? To let their resentment and failures curdle into something solid?
Study finds young men are playing video games instead of getting jobs Thing is? Inside the confines of video games, there are achievements and social class. It's when the dissatisfied shift to another gamified environment (CoughREDDIT) that they start getting points and achievements for MAGA. They aren't being drafted to fight in 'nam but they've got it pretty shitty. It's when they gather anonymously to try and shock each other into an ever-lower value system that things go pear-shaped."Happiness has gone up for this group, despite employment percentages having fallen, and the percentage living with parents going up. And that's different than for any other group," says the University of Chicago's Erik Hurst, an economist at the Booth School of Business who helped lead the research.
In 2010, I got out of college and I couldn't get a job for a bit. I eventually was a janitor for a while and I hated the job. Worked almost two years as a janitor before being at my current company. Anyways, my time as a janitor was depressing but never did I felt compelled to visit a place like 4chan and try to form some sort of identity there. The place never attracted even though I did hear about it sometimes. I think it was the ugly design that might have turned off. Or maybe I felt like I would have never fit even in that weird outsider culture. I don't know really. During this janitor period, I did venture over to Reddit and I went to Reddit meetups in New Jersey. Reddit eventually led to Hubski.
If you lived in Baltimore! you might have joined Hubski sooner. :) NSFWish JK I went to 3 reddit meetings and they were all fun. A 4chan gathering; no thanks. Since everything is Anon there, there is no such thing as developing an identity so IMO they all just act like the description of people in this article. Nihilists?
Ah the infamous Baltimore meetup. I have seen that picture before and it's interesting. None of the reddit meetups I went to had that kind of atmosphere. I meant developing my own personal identity or whatever the hell I was trying to look for when I was 22.
Okay I read some of it and it basically states how these awkward young men went from protesting Scientology to being some sort of alt-right movement for lulz. These men that didn't have much going on for them went for Trump because he seemed to be the perfect joke for them.
I'm with am_Unition in that the real point of the article is how the loss of masculinity in modern society combined with the devaluation of something which has historically been held in high esteem (a college degree) has resulted in a not-insignificant chunk of society becoming very disenfranchised. The article is very rambling and roundabout in making that point, but kind of touches on it at points. This is the kind of thing where Medium is a complete failure, with an editor I think this could have been a great article.
I skimmed through it and decided someone should clean it up, because it's a pretty interesting story. Once again, good journalism and 4chan know-how seem mutually exclusive.