On the Margins

This essay is not intended to offend but may do so.

A small group of people work behind the scenes and fundamentally alter the course of society. Right now, you’re probably wondering which insane conspiracy theory I’m about to promote. But this isn’t the Illuminati or Reptilian shapeshifters controlling our government. It’s a well-known but poorly understood part of the internet called 4chan, which is incredibly influential. And instead of some sinister plan for world domination, much of what 4chan does has no motive other than “Because we can.”

Founded in 2003, 4chan is an English-language version of a site known as 2chan. It’s important to know that there are many Chan websites; 4chan is simply the most famous. Another famous one is 8chan, where most QAnon conspiracies come from. But 4chan and its clones have three characteristics that, when put together, separate them from more typical parts of the internet.

Chan sites are primarily image boards, which function similarly to a Facebook page. Anyone can start a new topic by posting an image, and anyone else can reply. The user base of Chan sites is primarily composed of anime fans. Because of the heavy emphasis on sharing pictures, 4chan has become where the vast majority of memes come from. It is also an anonymous messaging board, meaning you do not have to register to post, and it has almost no moderation. Illegal content is relatively commonplace.

I’ve seen it said that when people obtain both anonymity and complete freedom, they become complete assholes. Because of this, 4chan is not the kind of website most people want to be on. On any given day, a standard 4chan board will have topics and people embracing racism, sexism, transphobia, distastefully disturbing content, and an inhuman amount of porn. Offensive words like the F-slur are standard vocabulary terms to the point that 4channers communicate how long they have been part of the community by calling themselves and others newf**s, midf**s, and oldf**s. It’s a mind-meltingly offensive place, and most people who frequent it are outcasts.

4chan contains a variety of boards, similar to Facebook pages for different topics. R9k is an infamous one, composed of incels or involuntary celibates. They are primarily men who blame their lack of ability to find a romantic partner on society rather than taking a look in the mirror. There are also femcels, but interestingly, they never want to date each other.

I’m not one to judge others; ordinarily, a community of people who share the same struggles can be incredibly supportive and valuable. But the incel community has become an echo chamber of sexism and phobias. They aren’t interested in bettering themselves. Instead, they look to change society in a way that suits them. Incel rhetoric has become a dangerous form of anti-feminism that has spread into mainstream culture through people like Andrew Tate. Several mass shooters became radicalized on 4chan’s incel and politically incorrect boards, the Christchurch shooter being an example.

I grew up in a cult-like environment, being very isolated and homeschooled until my parents divorced when I was 13. My first taste of public education was during my first year of high school. I had no social skills and quickly gained a reputation as an unlikable outcast. Naturally, I found a community of like-minded people and frequented 4chan as a lurker, someone who is on the website but doesn’t post. After graduating, I gradually forgot about the website until I saw that 4chan had a Minecraft server called 2b2t.

Minecraft is a game nearly everyone is aware of, but few understand the possibilities. When you start a new game, you load into an almost infinite procedurally generated world and collect resources like wood, food, iron, and stone. But Minecraft is a sandbox with no apparent objective. Many players build houses and towns. Others create imaginative designs and mini-games that are digital works of art. Technical players construct fully automated farms to gather resources automatically. Because the Minecraft world is nearly infinite, it only loads areas that are near players. Many players leave a character online to run automated farms while going about their day, which is known as AFK or Away From the Keyboard.

Minecraft isn’t just a single-player game. You can let your friends join your world and play with you, or you can join a server. There are servers for nearly any way one wants to play the game, fighting other players, playing mini-games, or just seeing what you can create. Most servers have a few rules. You aren’t allowed to hack, need to behave in chat, and the world usually resets every so often. 4chan’s server had no limitations whatsoever. You could hack, lie, steal, and destroy other players’ creations. When I joined, the world was almost seven years old, and I was more curious than anything else.

I joined 2b2t and loaded into a desolate wasteland. Hundreds of thousands of players have visited over the years, each leaving a mark in their own unique way. Previous players destroyed the terrain to the point no food grew, monsters covered the landscape, and impassable obstacles blocked many exits. The server is a place where your first challenge is to survive long enough to play the game.

After a few attempts, I escaped the dystopian nightmare of spawn and began exploring the server. Evidence of other players was everywhere, mainly in the form of ruins. Someone would build something, and another player would destroy it. Groups of players collaborated on impressive projects but often betrayed one another or got discovered by rival groups. Occasionally, I would stumble across something intact. Sometimes, I was the first outsider to find it, but more often, I would be the latest to discover something the server community decided to keep intact for one reason or another. Every build and ruin had a story, created and written by players in a world without rules. I was hooked.

I have a pathological need for attention. From the day I joined the server, my goal was for people to remember me. I wanted to make my mark on server history, whether by destroying what others built or something else. On a server as chaotic as 2b2t, one must do something incredibly impressive or unique to stand out. I stumbled into it when I made an account to keep my farms loaded and created a chatbot called AutismBot.

I created a list of jokes for my chatbot to post regularly. Most were standard dirty jokes, but I realized dark, edgy ones got the best responses. One of my first ones was, “My Grandpa said, ‘Your generation relies too much on technology!’ I replied, ‘No, your generation relies too much on technology!’ Then I unplugged his life support.” Players thought the jokes were hilarious, and the entire server soon talked about my bot. Before it, I was invisible. 2b2t typically has several thousand active players at any given time, and almost none of them even knew I existed before the bot. This sudden attention made me feel validated, and I began obsessively adding to the bot.

Over time, the things my bot posted became part of the background noise. In response, I added progressively darker and more distasteful jokes to the list. When “How many dead babies does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Not 5, because my basement is still pitch black” stopped getting a response, I added things like “I lost my virginity to a retarded girl last night… I wanted my first time to be special.” But it was never enough. No matter how edgy I made the bot, eventually even, “What’s the hardest thing about murdering innocent toddlers? My dick!” faded into the background.

When I couldn’t find or come up with any more awful jokes, I started making the bot more personal. I added a function where players could type !insult (player name) in chat, and it would select a random insult and add their name to it, like “(Name) is a turbo autistic estrogenized beta cuck.” I also added !suicidetips, which the bot would respond to with something like “Suicidetip: Setting yourself on fire is widely considered to be painless!”

I didn’t become an edgelord instantly overnight. Instead, I slowly developed and added to my bot over two years and justified it to myself by saying I was messing around. I didn’t believe people were actually racist and discriminatory. I assumed everyone who saw my messages would know I was joking because I was always kind to people when interacting with them. Eventually, I stopped adding edgy jokes and insults. I couldn’t come up with any more of them. I attempted to crowdsource my edgy content, allowing players to set custom messages for when they joined. Eventually, my bot became part of the background, and other players began imitating it with their own bots. Somehow, I made the 4chan Minecraft chat more toxic and edgy than it already was. But I knew nobody took me seriously, until my online persona started affecting me in real life.

I worked at a welding shop. I was having a busy day. The project I was putting together needed to ship as soon as possible, and I had just enough time left in the shift to get it done. But my co-worker approached me and told me he accidentally made some parts wrong. I was going to have to stay late. Without consciously realizing what I was doing, I looked him in the eye and told him to kill himself. I created an absurd online persona, but that crazy persona had started to become me. I turned off the bot and quit the server.

But I wasn’t entirely done with 2b2t. About a year later, I logged back on. I found my old chatbot file and cringed. The server had become an even worse place, with doxing, swatting, and grooming becoming common. I’ve heard a saying, “If you spend enough time pretending to be stupid, you will be joined by idiots who think they’re in good company.” I had one rule when I played: keeping everything in the game. I would betray, destroy, lie, and steal but never do anything outside Minecraft. Not everyone had the same morals; the server had changed to the point that it was common practice to find the names and addresses of people you disliked and start harassing them in real life. I felt incredibly guilty for constantly making jokes about these topics and making them less taboo.

For legal reasons, I’m not going to tell you how. But I got access to the account of someone grooming an 11-year-old boy. The server owner did nothing about it, and neither did Discord, a group chat app commonly used by video game players. Most people know that horrible things happen online reasonably regularly, but this hit me more personally. My children are 10 and 11. They could be exposed to people like this just by playing Minecraft, the literal definition of a family-friendly game. I needed to do something.

Eventually, I made a phone call and spent several hours talking to a police officer from rural Indiana. A few days later, I got messages notifying me of the predator’s arrest and a thank-you note from the child’s parents. The experience felt like it took a tiny part of my soul. How many other people prey on innocent children who just want to play a game? How much of this is my fault for creating a culture where these topics aren’t taboo?

I wrote a detailed letter to the FBI, a few journalists, and Microsoft. I am still waiting to hear back from any of them, but shortly after, Microsoft created a global reporting system to try to crack down on servers like 2b2t. I don’t think this did anything to solve the problem; it probably just moved it somewhere else.

4chan is a truly chaotic, neutral place. We all know it is the birthplace of memes and jokes, like LOLcats and Rickroll. 4chan has also participated in more dubious pranks, like rigging a poll to name a new Mountain Dew flavor “Hitler did Nothing Wrong” and engaging in a troll campaign to convince people they could charge their iPhones with a microwave. It has also been entirely evil, harassing an 11-year-old girl named Jessie Slaughter to the point where her entire family required police protection. But this chaotic nature hides the fact that 4chan is an incredibly influential site that affects our lives.

It is also the birthplace of QAnon, the insane conspiracy theories your weird uncle spouts, and possibly got Donald Trump elected president. Most well-adjusted people think QAnon beliefs are hilarious, like we laugh at flat earthers. Some of these conspiracies are more serious than believing John F. Kennedy is still alive and planning to reinstate Trump as president. A theory claiming a pizza restaurant used its basement to sex traffic children resulted in a 4chan user holding employees at gunpoint demanding to see the basement, which the restaurant didn’t have. 4chan is a community of primarily angry, broken individuals with nothing better to do than spread their ideas.

Max Weber was a German sociologist who believed people’s motivations were the key to creating lasting societal change. Good people can find a way in a bad system and vice versa. Michael Foucault was a French philosopher who argued that social movements start with discourse, or how we talk about a topic. I genuinely believe that we need to communicate and understand each other to have any hope of fixing society’s problems. But how do you help a group of angry, broken individuals who have tremendous influence over our culture and know that you aren’t one of them the moment you refuse to call someone the F-slur?

4chan functions on the power of words and ideas. Because many of them have nothing better to do, they dedicate a substantial amount of time to spreading whatever ideas they come up with to more normal places on the internet.

I’ve always believed that words aren’t the problem; it’s the intent. People will always find ways to insult each other. The word “retarded” was a common insult when I was in high school, but its become taboo. In its place, I’ve seen people use “regarded” or “mentally disabled.” The hate is still there, and banning words will do nothing to solve that.

To be absolutely clear, I’m not advocating we reintroduce racist and homophobic slurs into our everyday vocabulary. But the tolerance paradox is a real phenomenon we need to be aware of. If you’re tolerant of everything, you’re tolerant of intolerance, which leads to more intolerance. If you don’t tolerate intolerance, people who hold even slightly intolerant views will be shunned from mainstream society and find community with other bigots.

Political and social divisions are at an all-time high. We’re no longer debating facts and policies. We can’t even agree on what the facts are. Most of these “alternative facts” come from places like 4chan, a community where the N and F slurs are so common the refusal to use them paints you as an outsider, one to be opposed. This defends the community from people who are often too repulsed by the language to attempt to interact with its members. These words have been used to hurt many, many people. But can they also be used to reach people on the fringes of society? Can they be used to heal as well?

I left 4chan after high school, but not for the reasons you might expect. I didn’t have a massive change in my beliefs or suddenly become a better person. I met the woman who is now my wife. With someone to love, spending time on hate-filled sections of the internet felt like a waste of time. It is challenging to communicate with 4channers without outing yourself as an outsider, but sometimes, the hardest people to love are the ones who need it the most.

Featured image from David Valentine on Unsplash.