What I Learned Reading 4chan/pol for a Year

What is 4chan?

4chan is an board on the internet. It's a forum where each user uploads a photo with a comment and from there a thread forms. It's anonymous and content gets archived after a while. The success of the post determines how long it stays on the front page.

4chan is divided into channels. There are all kinds. One of the most well-known is /b dedicated to random content: it's full of porn, gore, and the like. That's where, among others, the famous pedobear meme was born. There are also some pretty chill ones like /tv dedicated to TV shows and movies or /vg dedicated to video games.

But perhaps the most recognized and infamous is /pol. The channel dedicated to 'political incorrectness'.

For those who know Reddit, 4chan is similar but a bit more edgy, more underground, and more nazi. For a long time it was the home of anonymous and from there massive trolling operations were coordinated against tons of websites. Remember the bot that Microsoft put on Twitter and within 24 hours it was a nazi? Well, those kinds of operations were organized on 4chan. But the site gained greater relevance in 2016 during the US presidential campaign. A lot of people dared to say that Trump was an invention of 4chan and that thanks to them he won the election. It was a joke that stuck.

While this is impossible to prove, there's a video created by some anonymous user of the channel that shows many of the coordinated actions from the board that trolled the hell out of the media during the campaign. The main symbol at the time was Pepe, a sad frog created by Matt Furie. A very old forum meme that had fallen out of use for becoming mainstream and which the forum reclaimed to turn it, once again, into a symbol. One of the high points was when the New York Times dedicated a special double-page spread to it, describing how dangerous it was and how it had become a symbol of racism and white supremacists.

Back then, the Argentine newspaper Clarin used to publish a selection of the "best" articles from the NYT and I remember having the pleasure of reading that article, in Spanish, in my in-laws' living room.

How does it work?

Using 4chan can be a bit confusing at first because the interface isn't very user-friendly. But there's a simple trick. You go to the page, then to the channel, and finally click the 'catalog' button. You can also type it directly in the browser, for example:

4chan.org/pol/catalog

This way we have all the comments organized by thread and it's much easier to read. Simple as that. Also, since everything is in super basic html, any internet connection is more than enough. It runs fast on 3G, 4G, and edge.

There are a lot of angry people

The first thing you see when you enter 4chan is angry people. At first it reminds you of the old internet forums where everything was trolling, bashing, and chaos. But after spending some time you realize it's something else. There's a kind of hatred or frustration with the world that manifests itself in several ways. The most obvious is racism and white supremacism.

Many of the memes circulating on the channel reference the racial 'inferiority' of Black people, Latinos, and Arabs. Everyone defends some type of ethnocentrism and a large part of the forum's discussion is about defining who is white and who isn't. Are only ethnic components considered? Or does culture and religion also count? Each comment in the thread is accompanied by a flag that identifies the IP from which it was posted. This way it's super common to see cross-accusations about who is really white. Americans against Europeans, Nordics against Balkans, Latinos against the English. And so on. The common denominator is the belief, on one hand, that Europe is being 'invaded' by Arab immigration and, on the other hand, that the United States is in a process of 'decline' because of multi-ethnic couples.

The slurs

Another important factor to understand the language of 4chan is the slurs. They allow us to see what kinds of things they consider derogatory and show us how certain forum mechanisms work. Nigger is an obvious slur. The derogatory connotation of this word for the African American community in the United States is so strong that its use is banned in public. On 4chan it's used every other line. They also use cucs, which refers to cuckhold, which is a type of paraphilia in which a man enjoys watching his woman have sex with another man. It's used as a synonym for being unmanly, or lacking decision-making power. They also use fag which is short for faggot and is the equivalent of nigger but applied to gay people. Kike is used to accuse someone of being Jewish and, obviously, carries a derogatory connotation.

The alt-right doesn't exist

There is no unified ideology. 4chan doesn't have monolithic thinking. You have everything from pro-Israel Jews, liberals, and nazis. But the unifying factor is that they share a common narrative about the world: current society is in decline, a product of cultural Marxism that promotes the "mixing" of races, and this is producing a "white genocide". Almost any 4chan user believes in that narrative or some equivalent. And we're not talking about stupid people. They have a theoretical framework with academics leading the way. In fact, every now and then you read an incredible reflection on the forum and it stays with you.

But, and this is a personal hypothesis, I believe 4chan works as a catalyst or a place where people angry with the current world order converge but who found an outlet through the right. During the 2016 presidential campaign, American media exhausted the term "alt right," an acronym for alternative right, to talk about neo-nazi groups. They presented it as a movement of racists, white supremacists, organized and pro-Trump. Gathered by 4chan. The alt right doesn't exist. Trump himself is a focus of discussion and division within the forum. Many supported him but because they expected him to be the anti-establishment president who would reverse the state of affairs that enables the 'white genocide.' Many were disappointed. Others never supported him. What does exist is a group of people, angry and frustrated with current capitalism, who through some reasoning, at minimum strange, found a scapegoat: communism or cultural Marxism.

Red Pills

The idea that communism is in charge of the world is related to another key term for understanding 4chan: Red pills. This term is a direct reference to the red pill that Morpheus offers Neo in The Matrix. Taking the red pill is what allows Neo to exit the Matrix. In the context of 4chan, red pills are arguments meant to reveal a hidden truth. Something like exiting Plato's cave. It's very common to find tons of posts that go:

"Hey guys, red pill me on X".

Most of the responses to these topics are a way of introducing extreme arguments about some subject, such as Holocaust denial. Red pills are fundamental to the channel because they generally serve to break some taboo of 'political correctness.' In general, all red pills are xenophobic or anti-Semitic arguments that explain through "scientific" data the cognitive inferiority of Black people; or how Jews control the media and the economy; or how gender ideology is destroying "Western values."

These topics are by no means minor and are part of the fundamental beliefs of 4chan users. For example, there's a documentary that gets posted from time to time explaining the supposed connection of the Rothschild family with the Russian Revolution and how communism has been from its origin an ideology to control citizens, steal their money and their freedom.

Other red pills explain how the left culturally took over universities -- which is true -- and from there launched its extermination campaign against "the West" or the Caucasian race -- which is a lie. With these concepts, 4chan builds a common sense that spreads far and wide across the internet, where being a communist is synonymous with being a feminist, being in favor of abortion, or gender equality.

Ultimately it's a conservative reaction to a complex and changing world. The funny thing is that it's a conservative reaction led by young people. It's the idea that the world is decaying and it's necessary to restore the "classical" values of the West. But such a thing never existed. Of course it's a way for users to deal with a world that is transitioning into postmodernity hand in hand with a turbo capitalism that produces anxiety in citizens as a mechanism of control.

Now, this didn't stay on the forum. It mutated into a clear narrative, with a high contagion power thanks to the lethal weapon of 4chan. Memes.

Incredible memes

The advantage someone who is sexist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic has is that they have no taboo or moral consideration when making a joke. For example, this track that uses "I Need a Hero" by Bonnie Tyler and changes the lyrics to "I need a Pinochet". Horrible. But very, very, very funny. And that's nothing, then we have super cruel jokes about Black people, Jews, and others. All with enormous contagion power. 4chan is the meme factory of the internet. For example, the chad vs. the virgin series. The replicating power of an idea contained in a meme is incalculable. Memes are the vectors of the new narrative of the cool right.

They believe in a god: Pepe

Pepe the Frog, a meme, is the god of 4chan. Many users refer to him as Lord Kek. Pepe is credited with Donald Trump's victory in 2016 in what 4chan called "The great meme war," and hence the divine status.

Likewise, the spiritual component is not foreign to the forum. In contrast with the left, which is generally atheist, users advocate for maintaining some type of religion. Ultimately because it's a kind of moral anchor in the postmodern sea. While Christian expressions prevail and we constantly find memes about the superiority of one church or another, there's also a battlefront with paganism.

Every now and then you read a brilliant take

Beyond the fact that it's a page full of racist, xenophobic, and discriminatory comments, every now and then you also find a gem. Like the one in the image below.

Conclusions

4chan managed to create a narrative about how the world works and why it's a mess. That's no small thing. I'd like to better explain the importance of having a narrative that explains the world but that would take an entire other article.

After a month of participating in the forum you can already predict how new users' questions will be answered. It's a manual of simple explanations for the current state of the world, which generates a profound sense of anxiety, lack, or despair in more than one person. And 4chan found an answer to that feeling and channels it through graphic pieces and/or arguments with high replication power.

Furthermore, this narrative is built on the idea that the left won the culture war. And that gives it extra appeal: now the right is anti-establishment. When generally, that was a classic role of the left. Through this device, 4chan created a conceptual framework in which the right functions as an alternative to the world order. In a way, the right is the new sexy.