6 The New York Review
proposition. The two were highly asym-
metric and oddly complementary, the
tight geeky hierarchical organization
and the loose geeky distributed net-
work. The Church of Scientology had
been at war with the Internet for years.
Scientology zealously maintained that
it was a religion, while equally zeal-
ously maintaining that its scriptures
were valuable intellectual property,
and that the practice of keeping them
secret from outsiders, revealing them
to subscribers in a sequence of paid-for
initiations, was in no way a multilevel
marketing scheme. It was the kind of
religion—transactional, based on sci-
ence fiction—that might have appealed
to Anons had it not breached the fun-
damental rule of the Internet, the old
Whole Earth Catalog rule out of which
all the other rules sprang: Information
wants to be free.
The importance of freedom of infor-
mation on the Internet was just about
the only ethical principle that the frac-
tious populace of /b/ could agree on.
Scientology had a record of aggressive
action against its critics. It didn’t want
its information to be free. It wanted
its information to be controlled and
expensive. The casus belli had been a
video of Tom Cruise, in which he ap-
peared to claim to have special powers
as a result of his practice of Scientology.
To /b/ (and much of the rest of the In-
ternet), Cruise’s messianic confidence
was bizarre. Anons found it lulzy to
mock him. The church didn’t like being
mocked. It attempted to suppress the
video. It attempted to take lulz away
from /b/.
As an opening salvo, Anons up-
loaded a video in which what sounds
like a text-to-voice program reads out a
threatening letter to Scientology, over
images of scudding clouds: “For the
good of your followers, for the good
of mankind, and for our own enjoy-
ment... we shall proceed to expel you
from the Internet and systematically
dismantle the Church of Scientology in
its present form.” It signs off with one
of the most memorable slogans of the
2000s Internet: “We are anonymous.
We are legion. We do not forgive. We
do not forget. Expect us.” With this, the
online activist tactics pioneered in the
199 0 s by artworld- adjacent groups such
as Critical Art Ensemble and the Elec-
tronic Disturbance Theater erupted
into the global public sphere. In the
subsequent decade these tactics have
been deployed to all manner of ends by
organizations of every size and politi-
cal persuasion, up to and including na-
tion states.
In the action they called Op[eration]
Chanology, Anons had access to a soft-
ware tool called the “Low Orbit Ion
Cannon” (named after a particularly
destructive weapon in a science fiction
war game called Command & Con-
quer). This allowed them to sit in com-
fort in front of a nice dashboard and
conduct a DDoS (distributed denial of
service) attack, flooding Scientology’s
servers with requests and causing them
to crash. Anons (now calling themselves
by the collective name Anonymous)
also held real-world protests in dozens
of cities around the world, bringing sev-
eral thousand people onto the streets
wearing Guy Fawkes masks, which
were being produced in large quantities
to promote a film adaptation of Alan
Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Ven-
detta, a graphic novel about a masked
vigilante. Video of the New York pro-
test shows a happy crowd chanting,
“Don’t drink the Kool Aid,” and (ob-
scurely to anyone not on the Japanese
cat Internet), “Long cat is long.”
Anonymous didn’t dismantle the
Church of Scientology, though they
dented its public image, and opened
the way for legitimate criticism that
had previously been stifled about the
veracity of its teachings, its aggressive
behavior toward its critics, and the ex-
ploitation of its adherents. The Low
Orbit Ion Cannon was then deployed
in support of WikiLeaks, a group that,
like Anonymous, had inherited the
techno-libertarian ethos of early West
Coast hacker culture. At the time,
WikiLeaks was an organization with
a high reputation among journalists,
having published credible information
about a number of matters of public in-
terest, including corruption in Kenya,
toxic waste dumping off the coast of
Côte d’Ivoire, and the revelation that
some prisoners at Guantánamo Bay
were being kept hidden from the In-
ternational Committee of the Red
Cross. When WikiLeaks started post-
ing the highly consequential series of
Iraq leaks and became the target of
sustained US government pressure,
Anonymous retaliated, turning the
cannon against banks and payment
entities that were throttling the ability
of WikiLeaks to fundraise. As Beran
writes, this turned Anonymous against
“the same countercultural enemies as
the 90s hackers: the institutional pow-
ers of corporations and the state.”The result was a number of arrests,
and a split between the hacktivists of
Anonymous and “anons,” who began
to use lower case to distinguish them-
selves from the political faction. The
anons went back to the traditional busi-
ness of 4chan, forming romantic attach-
ments to My Little Pony figures and
yelling plot spoilers at children lining
up to buy the latest Harry Potter book.Anonymous, meanwhile, accidentally
pulled on a thread of scandal that only
began to unravel when the Cambridge
Analytica affair broke several years
later, revealing in early 2018 that the
company had used the personal data of
millions of unwitting Facebook users
to microtarget voters with inflamma-
tory and potentially misleading mes-
sages. In 2010 a security consultant
named Aaron Barr was foolishly trying
to drum up corporate and government
business by claiming to have infiltrated
A n o n y m o u s. H e s e v e r e l y o v e r e s t i m a t e d
his skills and found his company serv-
ers and backups wiped and 68,
company e-mails dumped on the open
Internet. This (Rule 26: Any topic can
be easily turned into something totally
unrelated) opened up questions about
the work Barr and other contractors
(including Peter Thiel’s Palantir) were
discussing in those e-mails, and the use
of private security consultants by gov-
ernments and corporations to engage
in dirty tricks and criminality against
their critics.
By 2010 4chan was one of the most
popular sites on the Internet. Its owner,
Christopher Poole, known as moot,
then a gaunt twenty-two-year-old, gave
an awkward TED talk in which he em-
phasized the fun-loving and socially
responsible side of /b/, showing slides
of cute memes and the Scientology pro-
tests and receiving applause from the
attendees of the “Davos of the mind”
as he told a story about /b/ doxxing
(publicly identifying) a man who had
posted a video of himself abusing his
cat. This was probably the reputational
high-water mark of the chan culture.
Beran recounts the confluence of
circumstances that led to 4chan’s lurch
to the extreme right the following year.
Though the chans had spawned all
kinds of scenes, the incel (“involun-
tarily celibate”) subculture that took
hold on parts of 4chan was particularly
bitter and violent, incubating a vicious
misogyny that came to wide attention,in 2014, after a twenty-two-year-old
who called himself “the perfect gentle-
man” drove around with a gun near
the UC Santa Barbara campus, shoot-
ing at young women like those he felt
had rejected him, killing six people and
wounding fourteen others.
A population of thwarted, angry
young men was ripe for radicalization.
After Anons raided the leading neo-
Nazi site Stormfront, various curious
fascists had become converts to 4chan,
and—proving my activist friend right
and me wrong—were organizing on a
board that moot had created as a news
section for 4chan. Moot deleted it, but
the Nazis just relocated to the interna-
tional (/int/) and weapons (/k/) boards,
and finally he decided to corral all the
extremists into a new board he called
/pol/ (politically incorrect). This was a
fateful decision. As Beran writes, “the
board didn’t get crowded out in the
marketplace of ideas. Rather, 4chan’s
new neo-Nazi section thrived.”
Then came Gamergate, which to an
outsider looked like just another one
of the plagues or manias that occasion-
ally burned over the chans. Billed by
its zealous converts as a crusade for
ethics in computer game journalism,
it started as revenge against a female
game developer by a jilted ex. The avid
gamers of 4chan’s /v/ board (inevita-
bly known as /v/irgins) joined with the
fascists of /pol/ and self-identified sub-
human “robots” from an incel board
called /r9k/ to unleash a slew of threats
and harassment against the woman,
Zoe Quinn, whose crime was to have
created a well-reviewed game called
Depression Quest. Quinn’s game used
the medium to simulate the experience
of depression, precisely the real-world
state that anons were trying to escape
by playing games. They interpreted the
lack of high-definition escapism in De-
pression Quest, according to their lim-
ited aesthetic standards, to mean that it
was objectively bad; thus the only suf-
ficient explanation for its favored status
among the media gatekeepers had to
be corruption. Soon Quinn was being
accused of trading sexual favors for
positive reviews—the sort of cynical
power move that incels suspect is going
on among the sexually active, proof of
the world’s unfairness and fuel for their
sense of otherness and resentment.
Gamergate gathered steam and
acquired additional targets, mov-
ing across the Internet like a relent-
less misogynist jackal pack. Someone
dropped a trove of celebrity nudes on
/b/ (an event known as “The Fappen-
ing,” after the “fap fap” sound effect
that indicates masturbation in manga),
and the combined legal wrath of doz-
ens of Hollywood stars started beam-
ing down on moot, who had become
increasingly alienated from his horde
of anons. Once he’d been their hero—
they even hacked a Time magazine poll
to put his name at number one. Lately
they’d turned on him, accusing him of
being a hated SJW (Social Justice War-
rior), no better than the various women
who were ruining gaming. Rule 30:
There are no girls on the Internet.Moot dealt with the situation by
banning all discussion of Gamergate
sitewide. Outraged, Gamergaters de-
fected from 4chan and looked for
other homes, eventually reassem-
bling on 8chan, launched as a “free
speech alternative.” Along with Reddit’sFORGETFUL ANGEL
Abroad again. Even the houses are dancing.
In all the uncertainties of Amsterdam
I reread old diaries to remember who I am:
there’s Happy Donut—none of your usual morose donuts here!—
and songs with the names of towns in them
and wicked, wicked Caroline.
Is any place better without a lover? At least
some make you want to learn, not do: the rain
beating on the skylight like Paul Klee’s Timpanist, the sound
of a Van Gogh painting, a nap outside
beneath medieval walls—none of it a “force of nature.”
Learning not doing is a form of forgetting.
The Berkeley conference on trace elements
has explained this easily detectable weight loss to our complete
satisfaction;
on the ocean you can learn the rest of the stars, all the way to
the horizon.
This guy in Zagreb knows forty languages but he’s crazy.—Damion Searls