The King in Orange by John Michael Greer

Author:John Michael Greer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Occult
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: 2021-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

To make sense of what followed, it’s going to be necessary to take a closer look at a corner of internet culture that most of my readers have probably never encountered in person: the online forums known collectively as “the chans.” These started out innocuously enough with Futaba Channel, a Japanese-language electronic meeting place for fans of anime, which (for reasons that make perfect sense if you speak Japanese) came to be called “2chan” in online slang. In 2003, in much the same way that an amoeba breeds, a group of anime fans hived off onto a new site, 4chan, which did the same thing in the English language.

In the same way, other sites such as 8chan spun off 4chan in due time. In practice, 4chan and all its offspring are venues for anonymous unmoderated talk, places where anything goes—the more offensive to the conventional wisdom, the better. Long before Trump announced his candidacy, the chans were already having a significant impact on internet culture. Most people these days know, for example, what a lolcat is; 4chan invented lolcats. One of the subdivisions of 4chan and many of its offshoots is /pol/, short for “politically incorrect,” and that’s one of the places where the young and disgruntled gathered to talk about the things you can’t talk about in the workplace or the academy these days.

That’s a phenomenon that deserves a little further discussion here. One of the lessons of the history of morals is that the more stridently you repress something, the more desperately people want to do it. The status of sex in the Victorian period is an example we’ve already discussed. The drug abuse epidemic in the United States today, similarly, is almost entirely a product of the much-ballyhooed War on Drugs—countries that treat drug addiction as an ordinary medical issue, not a subject for moral grandstanding, have much lower rates of drug use.

Recent crusades against “hate speech” have had exactly the same effect in today’s America. Those who attend university classes or work in white-collar jobs know that their every word is scrutinized by jealous rivals ready to use accusations of sexism, racism, or the like as a weapon in the endless competition for status. Many people, forced into so stifling an environment, will end up desperately longing for a place where they can take a deep breath and say absolutely anything, no matter how offensive. The chans were among the internet venues that offered them that freedom. Posts on the chans are anonymous, so there was no risk of reprisal, and the culture of the chans (and especially of /pol/) tends to applaud extreme statements, so they became a magnet for the people who for one reason or another lost out in the struggle to become flunkeys of the established order of society, were locked out of what had been the normal trajectory of adult independence by plunging wages and soaring rents, and were incensed by the smug superiority of a system that assumed that it had all the answers.

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