Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web by Cole Stryker

Author:Cole Stryker
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Non-fiction
ISBN: 9781590207383
Publisher: Overlook
Published: 2011-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

A prescient analysis. Meanwhile, 4chan continued to grow as curious onlookers who caught the news coverage wandered onto /b/ to see what all the fuss was about. Wired ran a piece in January 2008 called “Mutilated Furries, Flying Phalluses: Put the Blame on Griefers, the Sociopaths of the Virtual World.” This article, written by Julian Dibbell, mentioned 4chan and finally provided noobs with a reasoned analysis of troll culture.

Meanwhile at Gawker, my friend Nick Douglas (the college buddy who turned me on to 4chan), wrote “What the Hell Are 4chan, ED, Something Awful, and ‘b’?”—a report that remains the top source cited on 4chan’s Wikipedia entry.

And so, shortly after its fourth birthday, and now with more than fifty million posts, /b/ was flooded with new users like never before. Many veteran users bemoaned that the newfags were only interested in trolling, and cared not for meme creation and ultranerdy culture. This constant grumbling about the “cancer of newfaggotry” became a recurring theme on 4chan. You can barely scroll to the bottom of a page on /b/ without seeing someone complain about how newfags are ruining the board.

“Newfags can’t triforce” is a meme that began as a way for old users to assert their authority over the noobs, and more importantly it showed new users that they have a lot to learn before they can mess around on 4chan. The triforce is a bit of video game iconography, an ancient source of power from the Legend of Zelda franchise that looks like three triangles arranged in a triangular pattern. Oldfags will post the symbol along with “Newfags can’t triforce.” New users who try to copy-paste the symbol in their reply to prove their worth will learn that the pasted symbol appears misaligned. The only way to properly display the triforce is by using a complex set of Unicode characters.

From here, 4chan continued to garner news coverage for various trolls and hacks, culminating in the anti-Scientology movement Project Chanology, which made Anonymous, if not 4chan itself, a household name. (See Chapter 8.)

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