4chan Is Likely, Finally, Dead

4chan, arguably the internet’s most notorious website, was taken down yesterday by hackers from an even more racist message board called soyjak.party. They leaked all of the emails and passwords of the site’s moderators and “janitors,” or junior moderators. And the hackers also, apparently, have access to 4chan’s literal code, which, according to one description I’ve seen, is basically just a 10,000-line PHP file.

Right before the site went offline, the hackers restored 4chan’s /qa/, or “Question & Answer” board, to gloat. And it’s possible this very short thread on /qa/ yesterday is the last thing that will ever be posted on 4chan. Which is kind of fitting, I suppose.

Writing a proper eulogy for 4chan would take more space than a newsletter — or maybe even a book — would allow. It was many things throughout its 22-year existence, few of them particularly good. It was the site that hacked online polls to make a new flavor of Mountain Dew called “Hitler did nothing wrong,” and nominate the site’s founder, Christopher “Moot” Poole, as TIME Magazine’s Most Influential Person of 2009. It went to war with the Church of Scientology. It was the unofficial home of Anonymous, the launch pad for “The Fappening” celebrity nudes leak, the birth place of Gamergate, the digital foot soldiers of the 2016 Trump campaign, the inventor of QAnon, a watering hole for the world’s most violent spree shooters, and they even doxxed me and my family at one point in 2012. But it was also a website that, effectively, invented the concept of the internet meme and was one of the last truly anonymous spaces left on the web.

It was a place where guys would “microdose bullets,” eat monkey chow, boil chicken in Nyquil, listen to one song by Linkin Park 64,694 times, and write devastating screeds about Harry Potter. It was a site Taylor Swift possibly spent some time on in the early 2010s. And a place where Elon Musk may have done an AMA in 2022. And its users learned about Jeffrey Epstein’s death approximately 38 minutes before everyone else.

It was founded by teenage Something Awful users who were mad they weren’t allowed to share violent anime pornography on the forum anymore. So they stole and poorly-translated the code of a Japanese message board called 2chan, or Futaba Channel, and created their own site with lower standards. Inadvertently porting Japanese NEET culture (not in education, employment, or training) for the west. It quickly became the deranged and uncontrollable Id of the internet, one that would eventually swallow the world, swallow culture. And, thus, had already rendered itself pointless long before it was hacked into oblivion this week by fans of Hatsune Miku and the video game series Danganronpa. Two fandoms its users loved to make fun of. Once again, fitting.

Similarly fitting for a website that has distorted reality more than any other, the hack this week unleashed a tidal wave of misinformation. There are erroneous reports that several of 4chan’s mods were using .gov emails. Garbage Day has a copy of the leaked email addresses, there weren’t any with .gov, but there was a janitor using “michaelsteele” in their email address, which may be where that idea came from. There were also several mods using student email addresses from schools like Washington University and Harvey Mudd College. There are also reports that IP addresses were leaked that revealed that 4chan was run by Israel. This is, obviously, also not true. Also, 4chan going down has nothing to do with USAID being defunded.

Perhaps the most pressing question right now, though, is where 4chan users will go now that their favorite shit hole is gone. This is connected to the migration theory of social media. The most popular version of which is that after the 2018 porn ban, Tumblr users moved to more mainstream platforms and, thus, made the rest of the internet much, much more annoying. (I buy it.) We, likely, won’t know for a bit how 4chan users infect the greater web, but the subreddit for the Red Scare podcast is likely going to feel the migration first. But, also, X.com exists and its content is more racist and violent and psychosexually depraved than 80% of the posts you’d find on 4chan and people not only pay to use it, they post under their real names. So maybe we won’t notice at all.

But the most fitting synchronicity of all might be that the day that 4chan died — which is also the same day the Titanic sank fwiw — was the same day it was revealed by The Verge that OpenAI is building a social network. A literal changing of eras right before our very eyes. The demise of the text-based, anonymous website that overran the rest of the internet happening the same week we discover the company that continues to promise a new internet may be actually trying to build one. A new internet not just full of autoplaying videos and verified user names, but one where a machine would sort through the human chaos we upload every second of the day. Chaos that, thanks to 4chan, we have to begrudgingly accept is somehow innate to what people will just do when they are safely anonymous behind a computer.

And so, yes, we did lose something this week. And it is almost certainly a better world without it. But it’s also possible we look back one day and wish the internet still felt as messy and, more importantly, human as it did when 4chan ruled the world.

Adam Bumas contributed reporting and research to this story.

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Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading by Nadia Asparouhova

Why do some ideas stay hidden despite their importance? 

In the breakout new book Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading, author Nadia Asparouhova (Working in Public, Stripe Press) delves into the unseen world of antimemetics where taboos, uncomfortable truths, and important ideas go to hide. The first-ever nonfiction book mapping this territory, Antimemetics explores how ideas stay hidden, how to see them, and where they might take us. 

Preorder a first edition paperback and digital edition here, only on Metalabel. 

Published with the Dark Forest Collective.

A Good Post

A Musk Fanboy Got DOGE’d

The cartoonist of an impossibly cringe anti-woke comic strip called Lil’ Chad announced on X, the fell for it again app, that he was laid off due to Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cuts. I have to assume that he was not given a federal contract to make his horrible comic, but had some other kind of government job and Lil’ Chad was a side hustle. So I’m glad DOGE is cutting the fat and getting rid of a tax-funded employee that had enough free time to draw comics all day. (In a follow up reply, he explained he worked for a government contractor.)

Speaking of DOGE, NPR reported this week that DOGE staffers may have accessed data from National Labor Relations Board, citing a whistleblower that has come forward. Cybersecurity experts that NPR spoke to compared it to the same kind of malicious activity you’d see from a state-sponsored hacker. Which makes sense because DOGE is basically a state within a state. A deeper state, if you will.

And it seems like Elon Musk is trying to personally populate his state-within-a-state. The Wall Street Journal has an outrageously grim and, frankly, disgusting feature out today outlining how Musk is using X’s Verified user program to reportedly find, bribe, and, subsequently, extort women to breed with him.

Though, it’s unclear how that will work in the future, as it involves a lot of DM sliding and an X engineer this week said that they can’t figure out how to fix the site’s very broken DM feature and are thinking about scrapping it all together.

The UK Officially Rebrands From Knife Crime Island To TERF Island

Apologies to anyone who has listened to today’s Panic World, where I made the offhand comment that the UK is still a relatively safer place for trans people than the US. That is, as of this morning, no longer true.

The UK Supreme Court ruled today that the legal definition of a “biological woman,” does not include trans women. It is still unclear exactly how this will play out with regards to single-sex spaces and employment in Britain, but the bulk of the case was focused on blocking trans women from obtaining legal documents that would legally recognize trans women as women. As The Washington Post reported, the Supreme Court decision would effectively allow organizations and businesses to discriminate against trans women going forward.

In reports about the ruling you’ll, no doubt, see mentions of a campaigner group called For Women Scotland. And, well, if you’ve been online at any point in the last decade, you can guess the name of one Scottish woman who had a hand in all of this.

Last year, the black mold that pilots JK Rowling like a mech donated £70,000 to For Women Scotland for the legal challenge that resulted in today’s Supreme Court ruling. Rowling had already been a long-time vocal supporter of For Women Scotland. And Rowling has been have a big ol’ celebration on X today. And in case you need a really clear example of how UK TERFs are treating this almost exactly like anti-DEI Republicans are dismantling civil rights here in the US, here’s Rowling in her own words:

A Really Incredible Mexican Political Scandal

A reporter friend of mine in Mexico has been keeping me up to date with a scandal that’s been playing out in the country this month.

Reports surfaced last week of a naked woman being spotted in the window of the governor’s residence in the state of San Luis Potosí. And, obviously, people had some questions, seeing as how Governor Ricardo Gallardo is married and the naked woman, I guess, did not appear to be his wife.

Naturally, Gallardo held a press conference to address the scandal and made a very curious claim. The naked woman wasn’t a mistress, Gallardo told reporters, but, actually, the ghost of Mexico’s Empress Charlotte. People didn’t really buy this, but Gallardo was undeterred. He decided to double down on his claim that the governor’s mansion is haunted and is now…

Wait for it…

Hosting ghost tours.

Gawr Gura Retired

VTuber Gawr Gura announced she was “graduating” this week. Gawr Gura was the VTuber that sang “Take Me Out To The Ballgame” at a Dodgers game last year, if any of those words mean anything to you. Or as X user @YourBudTevin posted today, “People telling me this was the Vtuber Lebron… I’m so sorry for y’all loss, man, I’d cry too.”

According to The Gamer, the “graduation” was actually a breakdown in negotiations betweem the human person that operates the Gawr Gura avatar and her management group Hololive, which is sort of like a record label for anime girl streamers. They also have public drama over contracts with their stars pretty regularly.

“VTubing once felt like a cute little niche, an odd extension of Hatsune Miku bleeding into the world of online streaming that has since become a media phenomenon all its own,” The Gamer’s Jade King wrote. “None of it would have been impossible without the original Hololive English or torchbearers like Gawr Gura, and to see them leave this world behind as it lives on without them is bittersweet.”

Another Good Post

Some Stray Links

P.S. here’s recent Letterboxd titles making me feel like a rambunctious baby getting my photo taken at Sears while my parents try and quiet me down.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***