Millennials love to wax poetic about the “simpler times” of the early internet in the 2000s, when memes were harmless internet jokes and no one running for president had a Twitter account. But the new Netflix documentary The antisocial network: memes for chaos—which began airing today—will make you realize that the early days of the Internet were not as innocent as we remember. Through interviews with former programmers, hackers and trolls, The antisocial network traces the origins of the dangerous far-right mass hoax known as “QAnon” to the first version of the so-called “edgy” online posting board, 4chan. And while some of the connections drawn in the film seem tenuous, the bigger picture is terrifying.
Directed by Giorgio Angelini and Arthur Jones (who also directed the 2020 documentary It feels good manabout how Pepe the Frog became a mascot of the far right), The antisocial network features talking head interviews with formally notorious “Internet” kids, identified not by their legal names, but by their username aliases. This includes a former 4chan user who calls himself “fuxnet,” one of the most lucid interviewees featured in the film. “I’m just trying to clean up what I consider my old mistakes,” they tell the audience.
What exactly are those errors? Angelini and Jones quickly review the history of the website 4chan, an American version of a Japanese Internet forum, 2chan, launched by Christopher Poole (aka “moot”) in 2003. (Moot itself is conspicuously absent from the document and (presumably he declined to be interviewed.) The site exploded in popularity, and it wasn’t long before its user base began using the platform to wreak havoc in the real world. That included, but was not limited to: white teenagers wearing afros and forming swastikas in public spaces, harassing and hacking white supremacist commentator Hal Turner, and protesting outside the Church of Scientology. Some of those activities sound more noble than others, but almost all of them were done, first and foremost, in the name of “avant-garde” humor.
Or, as fuxnet says in the film, “I don’t want to imply that all the people who were trolling Hal Turner were anti-racists. “A lot of them just wanted to screw people.”
One of those people was a user who calls himself “kirtaner,” a Canadian man whose real name is Aubrey Cottle. Cottle claims to be one of the founders of the “hacktivist” movement known as Anonymous, which emerged after Poole stripped Cottle of his 4chan administrator privileges. (Cottle says Poole wanted 4chan to become a social network more like Facebook, while Cottle felt the site should retain its anonymous, chaotic spirit.) Cottle happily admits that he thought his “trolls” were hilarious: “If you were in on the joke, you would just be laughing out loud.”
But the joke became much less funny after Anonymous, in retaliation for what they saw as state-sanctioned violence against the Occupy Wall Street movement, hacked into the CIA and the FBI and put a target on their backs. The FBI arrested Anonymous hacker Jeremy Hammond and sentenced him to 10 years. Anonymous’ other veteran hackers, like Cottle and fuxnet, were afraid to hang up their keyboards.
This is where The antisocial network It gets a little cloudy. With the disappearance of big-name hackers from the Internet, 4chan (as the film suggests) became a darker place. This led to Gamergate, a harassment campaign targeting female gamers. Poole banned discussion of Gamergate on 4chan, so users moved to 8chan to talk about it. Breitbart, the ultraconservative website run by former Donald Trump strategist Steven Bannon, sympathized with and covered Gamergate. Therefore, all these angry and depressed former 4chan users were courted by Trump and used his trolling power to get him elected.
However, once elected, Trump failed to deliver on his promise to “drain the swamp,” unless one believed he was secretly fighting the evil, pedophile, blood-drinking Democratic elites behind the scenes. In 2017, an anonymous user on 4chan posted a cryptic message with three plus signs and signed the post “Q.” Another 4chan user, Isaac HP, made a YouTube video about the post, which he said predicted a Trump tweet that also used a triple plus sign, by seven minutes. (It is explained later in the documentary that Internet users were simply changing the timestamps on Trump’s tweets, to make it look like they had predicted what he would say.) The idea was that Trump would not be able to speak freely about his grand plan. , but he could distribute “breadcrumbs” through Q.
The QAnon conspiracy quickly spiraled out of control. Any anonymous 4chan user could claim to be “Q,” and he did. They were happy to troll gullible people, as they had been doing since 2003. But a certain subset of Trump’s base fully accepted and still today believes that Hillary Clinton drinks the blood of children to stay young. It is an absurd mass deception that led to countless acts of violence in real life, and highlights the unfathomable dangers of fucking with people for fun.
No person interviewed in Antisocial networksIt seems like we’re willing to accept that the undercurrent of violence and hate was built into 4chan’s culture from day 1. That’s where the documentary falls short. Former users interviewed are quick to distance themselves from what they describe as the website’s truly dark days in the late 2010s. But there’s nothing light-hearted, harmless or fun about kids giving the Nazi salute at conventions. anime. 4chan is not a “memes to chaos” story. the memes are the chaos.
