The Hacker Known as 4chan

Once, Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering about, happy with himself and doing as he pleased.
He didn’t know that he was Zhuang Zhou
— Zhūangzi, On the Equality of Things // 《齊物論》

Experiencing the rush of entering the amorphous highways at the nexus of the Western Hemisphere’s meme economy would overwhelm the uninitiated. Behind this unassuming GeoCity-era interface, lies the mimetic potency for a thought to christen itself superfluid, overflowing into the semiotic circuitry of the rhizomatic rivers into deltas of the internet. As one and many, the network that is 4chan weaves semiotic chains cognitive and mimetic in nature that often is looked upon as straight up weird or repulsive.

The topology of the cognitive resonance exhibited by 4chan has erupted from a lack of primarily two structural impediments, one the lack of the need for even pseudonymization, most of the network goes by “anon” short for Anonymous, and the other is the lack of data retention. Notably antithetical to current identity orientated and data fetishized paradigms of Big Tech, the lack of a persistent state and permanence of actors in the networks has led to distinctive flavor of virtual social dynamics and semiotic terrain for incentivizing certain mutating tendencies of the lines of discourse. Due to a distinct lack of a Skinner Box-like reward system, the only corrective incentivization barometer in 4chan is pegged against one’s fluency and hyperliteracy in the discourse, which favors individual’s adept at handling mimetic lightning through the subvertion of the internal patois and manipulation of in-group markers of signification. The production of memetic rituals just like that of great books as Proust would say, “are written in a kind of foreign language.” Continuous variation and iterations result in semiotic concoctions that ephemerally radiates across the byways of the digital libidinal economy often with collapsing logic, semantics and pragmatics.

Jonah Peretti laid the theoretical foundation for his media empire - Buzzfeed in a piece where he posits that “A successful contemporary politics has stakes in defining the rhythmic flow between schizophrenic and identificatory impulses.” 4chan in this sense synthesizes a form of meta-stable unity of transient individual identities. In the flatlands of pure image and representationalism to those that are entangled within the webs of epidemic communication the words of Bane would resonate “No one cared who I was ‘til I put on the mask.” Namelessness makes failure costless (through the absence of identity and thus cultural capital) and re-enforces the distributed topologic dynamic through the curbing of centralisation and hierarchies of status. Though one can claim a stable identity through the process of trip coding, those who do are often met with hostility for being attention-starved and branded as “tripfags” for their sense of self-importance thus suppressing what the system views as taboo or radical behavior. This starkly juxtaposes against systems and services built upon the paradigms of radical transparency that rely on the coupling between the lived and virtual self.

This anonymity while fostering experimentation and recursion however doesn’t compromise on decision-making due to the previously noted lack of persistence of state where threads are dropped chronologically, stabilization through reboot of threads or the system of bumping is viewed as accretion of the cultural and social capital for larger scale mobilization of the tribe. This phenomenon has been a critical topic of interest for information operations and the Fifth Estate for its proven capacity to reshape the Digital Maginot Lines and the fluid battleground of the theatres of war on the web.

The prolific Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges builds a world Tlön where its inhabitants speak a language that lacks any nouns. The narrator speaks of a thinker who “advanced a most daring hypothesis. This felicitous supposition declared that there is only one Individual, and that this indivisible Individual is every one of the separate beings in the universe, and that those beings are the instruments and masks of divinity itself.” Similarly, the sublimation of the virtual space that 4chan holds has enabled a dance of just such masks that resonates as an unitary artefact propagating virulence and modulating the zeitgeist. However, behind these very masks are the eyes wide shut?