The antisocial network: memes for chaos (Netflix) really floods the area between those two words with “M” in the title. Co-directed by Giorgio Angelini and Arhtur Jones, the documentary explores how early internet shenanigans on sites like 4Chan spawned an entire universe of “a” prepositions, leading to everything from aggressive hacking attacks and online vigilante justice to the Occupy movement. . Anonymous, 8Chan, Gamergate, MAGA social media, and closed-circuit fantasies of the aggrieved propagated by QAnon conspiracy theories. Included here are interviews with 4Channers from the founding era, plus hackers who caught the attention of the FBI, and people who hoped to reclaim the Internet as a forum for the community but found it all too far away to recover. “All of us who had built the culture began to see that our work was used by people we literally despised…â€
THE ANTISOCIAL NETWORK – MEMES TO CHAOS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The essence: They are managed by identifiers, not names. “Fuxnet.” “Kirtaner.” “CardCaptor Will.” They sit for interviews, either at benches crammed with terminals, hard drives and monitors or next to images of their lives as cosplayers or convention-goers on forums. And their collective experience with the Internet beast brings The antisocial network: memes for chaos from AOL hangouts and the first outbreaks of meme farming to the toxic work and problems of today’s social media landscape. There’s an overused meme that still says it best: “everything is connected.” AND Antisocial shows your work.
4Chan, created by Christoper “moot” Poole in 2003, was itself a riff on the Japanese message board 2Chan. And in its early days, users like Fuxnet, Kirtaner and “Amanda” say 4Chan was a place for like-minded people to share subversive humor as a way to laugh at the world at large. Memes, .gifs, emojis – these days, all of them are simply accepted as communication tools. But its use has its roots in the spread of 4Chan, which by the mid-aughts had become a platform for increased trolling, the planning and execution of real-life “raids” against specific companies, the birth of the movement Anonymous, happy with cyberattacks. and a schism within Anonymous that put dishonest hacktivists on one side and a faction that still found humor in aggressive agitation on the other. The spread continued, with no signs of stopping, and as the messages of the Occupy movement found support through Anonymous, 4Chan itself began to mutate into a haven for hate speech and other, often deliberately offensive, behavior.
When Frederick Brennan founded 8Chan in 2013, there was a constant supply of gas to the fire. The feelings of helplessness that inspired Occupy, says journalist Dale Beran, were still active. “He just sunk into this new, dark, nihilistic place.” Over a visual flurry of overlays, banner ads, scrolling message boards, contextless animations and memes, Antisocial traces the rise of hostile corners of the Internet populated by men with a range of perceived grievances, the “rootless white men” that Steve Bannon helped indoctrinate into MAGA and convert into votes for Donald Trump in 2016. Anger was now recognized as the cause of social networks. ultimate money maker. And with Trump’s election, the disinformation tools established by early 4Chan users became fuel for QAnon conspiracies. There were retaliatory measures; Kirtaner hacked government websites and even claims to have discovered Trump’s Twitter password. But the dream of community, or what started as a simple love of online shenanigans, had really gone from meme to chaos. Antisocial shows how social media has brought Rick into mass deception mode to sections of society.
What movies will it remind you of? The visual aesthetics of Antisocial network It resembles the same meme farms and verbiage-filled message boards that the documentary discusses, which is also a tactic adopted by Max’s docu-series. gaming wall street. (Like the 4Chan people and the hacker types AntisocialThe Very Online people also fueled the GameStop Stock revolution, people who were later played by movie stars in the 2024 film. dumb money.) AND Antisocial It is not the first document to explore the insidiousness of social networks: see The social dilemma, After the truth: misinformation and the cost of fake newsand Alex Gibney’s 2013 paper. We steal secrets: the story of WikiLeaks.
Performance worth seeing: The observations of the writer Leigh Alexander are fundamental to The antisocial network As the documentary moves forward to 2014, the emerging factions of aggrieved men online and the rise of Gamergate. “These young people were experiencing this deep mass alienation and coping with it through extreme humor and sexual and violent images. “It became very clear that there was a desire to cultivate a hostile space for women.”
Memorable dialogue: Once Antisocial Connecting the dots between how 4Chan started and where our current online malaise is going, journalist Dale Beran gives a terrifying summary. “Everyone’s experience on the Internet is a corporate, monetized form of 4Chan,” Beran says, but it’s even worse because of the greater signal strength of social media in general. “We are constructing elaborate and grotesque fantasies out of our own unhappiness.”
Sex and skin: Nothing direct, but since the constant flicker of the Internet drives the footage in this documentary, suggestive or overtly offensive memes appear alongside images of simulated sex, as well as many disgusting examples of the toxic takes thrown around on message boards and at meetups. from Zoom. dedicated to crazy QAnon.
Our opinion: The antisocial network: memes for chaos makes a pretty strong case for blaming 4Chan entirely for the social media rot that permeates our society. The document is filled with images pulled from the site, and together they actually resemble a vision board for what we today think of as online communication tools: body-swap bits, strange juxtapositions, random still images transformed into jokes. a single panel. “ while the language used on the message board – cryptic abbreviations, reconfigured profanity, and bitingly sarcastic invective – is no longer the purview of an Internet silo. It has been codified and commodified. That’s exactly the point. The things that “landed the Chans in the mainstream media,” to quote one of the 4Channers interviewed in Antisocialnow it’s just the stuff everyday complaints are made of, whether you’re posting a TikTok, participating in the group chat, or spouting meaningless nonsense on cable news.
Antisocial It doesn’t really offer solutions for any of this. By the end of the doc, the 4Chan creators interviewed are mostly slowly backtracking, admitting that their relatively innocent interest in exchanging memes and building a community is now completely corrupted. (Maybe they’re building, like, 36Chan now or something to talk to each other; who knows.) Antisocial What it does effectively is build connectivity between all the social media-driven movements that have dominated the previous two decades of increasingly fragmented discourse.
Our call: TRANSMIT IT. The antisocial network: memes for chaos constructs a surprising timeline that connects the insular online jocularity of 25 years ago to the many, many forms of hostility that fuel the Internet today. Where once jokes were kept within clicks, now Rickrolls come from outside the house of society. And we will never give up on it.
Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is a freelance writer and editor living in Chicago. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.TO
