4 The New York Review
For the Lulz
Hari Kunzru
It Came from Something Awful:
How a Toxic Troll Army
Accidentally Memed Donald
Trump Into Office
by Dale Beran.
All Points, 279 pp., $28.
Sometime in the autumn of 2006, a
friend sent me screenshots of a chat-
room in Habbo Hotel, a social network
for teenagers. Someone had flooded
the space with avatars of identical
black men with Afros in suits and ties.
In one picture, the men were block-
ing the entrance to a swimming pool,
stopping other users from coming in.
In another they’d arranged themselves
in the shape of a swastika. My friend,
an activist, thought this was sinister,
particularly since it was happening in a
space aimed at young people.
Habbo Hotel looked pretty slick for
the Internet of 2006, with public spaces
like nightclubs and coffeeshops and
private rooms that users could rent
and furnish with virtual objects. It was
cheerful and brightly colored. But due
to a programming glitch, if an avatar
blocked a doorway or a corridor, it was
impossible for another to get by. When-
ever kids asked one of the men what
was going on, they were told, “Pool’s
closed due to AIDS.”
The “raid” was juvenile and offen-
sive, which was the point. Around that
time, there was a fashion for posting
“Rules of the Internet,” expanding on
the famous (and profound) Rule 34
that states: If it exists, there is porn of
it. One widely circulated list had as
Rule 42 Nothing is Sacred, and as
Rule 43 The more beautiful and pure
a thing is, the more satisfying it is to
corrupt it. The organized invasion of
a cheery and wholesome space like
Habbo Hotel obeyed these axioms—
the humor of the lists was that they
were not so much rules to follow as de-
scriptions of norms, observations about
Internet culture. The combination of
homophobia, Nazi imagery, and what
amounted to blackface was impres-
sively unpleasant, given the constraints
of a graphical user interface that had to
be delivered at the speed of the 2006
Internet—on average about a fifth as
fast as it is today. Managing to be of-
fensive at such low resolution, using im-
agery constructed of simple pixillated
blocks, was an achievement of sorts.
I was inclined to take the raid less se-
riously than my friend. I’d been digging
around on the Internet since the early
1990s, and I thought of myself as a griz-
zled veteran of online culture. Another
rule of the Internet was Nothing is to be
taken seriously. Still, I decided to see
if there was anything organized behind
it, any politics beyond teenage trolling.
This was how I started spending time
on 4chan, a message board that had
played a part in the organization of
the raid. 4chan was a site with a barely
designed front page and a list of image
boards designated by uninformative
letter codes, a format copied from a
Japa ne s e s it e c a l le d 2 c h a n. Mo s t b oa rd s
on 4chan turned out to be devoted to
some aspect of Japanese pop culture—
pictures of giant robots, cos play (dress-
ing up as a character from animations or
computer games), and so on. There was
also a lot of gross-out porn and a persis-
tent ironized flirtation with pedophilia,
mostly in the form of pornographic
anime and winking memes of a character
called “pedo bear,” who popped up in all
sorts of contexts, lusting after “delicious
cake.” Pedobear imbued a cute cartoon
bear with disturbing significance, al-
lowing an innocuous image to signify
something transgressive—to those in
on the joke. This ambiguity—the wish
to defy norms (and their upholders, the
“normies”) while maintaining plau-
sible deniability—was a hallmark of
4chan, particularly of a popular board
called /b/, a bin for anything that didn’t
fit the remit of the others.
/b/ had huge traffic, many thousands
of posts a day. It was a place with its
own highly evolved subculture. Its den-
izens, who are (according to 4chan’s ad-
vertising page) overwhelmingly young
and male, called themselves “b/tards,”
reveling together in an arms race of
awfulness, in which everybody and ev-
erything was reduced to its most base
and abject form for the entertainment
of the mob. The raids on Habbo Hotel
were an eruption of the culture of /b/
into an unsuspecting normie settle-
ment. On one of the many websites
dedicated to archiving the doings of /b/
and its offshoots, you can find a defini-
tion of the formation of black avatars
I’d seen on screenshots of the raid:“A S w a s t iGET is a formation done by
Nigras while raiding Habbo. Nigras
strategically line up to form a Swastika
for shock value and lulz.” The fashion
for raiding Habbo in blackface even
spilled out into the real world, when
young Finnish men in suits and Afro
wigs marched to the headquarters of
Habbo’s parent company in Helsinki
and formed a SwastiGET in front of the
building.On 4chan, threads that received re-
plies were bumped to the top, and old
threads were deleted automatically
as new ones were posted. There was
no archive, no memory. Everything
vanished. On high-traffic boards like
/b/, the result was a sort of produc-
tive churn, a memetic primal soup
that spawned jokes and fleeting crazes
and outbreaks of unsettling behavior.
Other than 4chan’s sitewide ban on ac-
tual child pornography, in 2006 there
was no content moderation, at least
none visible to the human eye. Posters
could remain anonymous, and almost
all of them chose to do so, to such an
extent that 4chan users termed them-
selves “Anons.” This turn toward a
collective identity would later drive /b/
and its successor /pol/ into the realm of
real-world politics, a wild history thatis meticulously and grippingly detailed
by Dale Beran in It Came from Some-
thing Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army
Accidentally Memed Donald Trump
Into Office. As the book’s subtitle sug-
gests, 4chan’s future lay far closer to
the White House than any reasonable
person would have predicted.
One day in 2007 I was (still) on /b/
and came across an image of two crude-
looking homemade bombs, with a
message saying that they would be det-
onated the next morning at a Texas high
school. “Promptly after the blast,” wrote
the poster, “I, along with two ther [sic]
Anonymous, will charge the building,
armed with a Bushmaster AR-15, IMI
Galil AR, a vintage, government-issue
M1 .30 carbine, and a Benelli M4 semi.”
The replies were mostly devoted to best
wishes for the project’s success and a
critique of the choice of bomb-making
materials: “WTF are you using PVC for a
pipe bomb?” I looked at the timestamps
and realized that I was, remarkably for
4chan, reading a thread that was many
hours old. It was so popular that it was
still floating at the top of the page, in-
stead of falling down into oblivion.
Gradually, I pieced together what
happened. Within fifteen minutes of
the initial post going live, an Anon
had extracted metadata from the pipe
bomb image that included the name
of the owner of the camera. Later, a
fifteen-year-old boy—who’d borrowed
his dad’s camera to stage the picture—
was arrested as he was getting ready to
go to school. The bomb, as the skeptics
on /b/ suspected, was fake.
/b/ was split on whether possible lulz
(a corruption of “lols,” itself a corrup-
tion of LOL or “laughing out loud”) had
been squandered by the boy’s arrest.
The absolute fungibility of lulz was
the driver of /b/’s cynical economy. It
didn’t matter where the lulz came from.
If they derived from besmirching some
other subgroup’s special sacred thing,
they were particularly excellent. Dur-
ing the period I was lurking on /b/, lulz
were being extracted from harrassing
the friends and family of a Minnesotan
seventh grader who had committed sui-
cide after being bullied at school. Ac-
cording to a New York Times report
quoted by Beran, the dead boy’s fam-
ily received a stream of prank calls that
went on for more than a year.
I found /b/ a depressing place, and
there was an element of self-hatred in
the way I kept returning to it, forcing
myself to look at its bleak picture of
human nature. It was, as Beran puts it,
like “drinking from a concentrated font
of misery.” But I didn’t see evidence
of far-right political organizing there,
and eventually I drifted away to other
things.I next paid attention in 2008 when
all of a sudden my Internet was full of
Anons in Guy Fawkes masks protest-
ing the Church of Scientology. This
was more than a change in tone. It was
an evolution, as if, in my absence, cells
had begun to divide in a petri dish left
overnight on a lab bench. /b/ had, as
Beran writes, “accidentally discovered
agency.”
A battle between Scientology and
/b/ was undeniably an interestingA tweet by Donald Trump featuring an image of himself as Pepe the Frog,
a symbol used by the far right, October 13, 2015