Episode 128: From Anonymous to QAnon feat Dale Beran, Matt Alt, Fredrick Brennan & Fuxnet
The story of how "otakus" in 1980s Japan connect to the far-right conspiracy known as QAnon. How the alt right and the Capitol Riots are traceable to anonymous imageboards started by teenagers to trade anime. How 4chan birthed a group of hacktivists known as Anonymous and law enforcement destroyed it. And how social media companies lined their pockets while the credulous media were taken for a ride by organized trolls.
This episode was co-written by Dale Beran and Julian Feeld.
Follow Dale Beran: twitter.com/daleberan
Get Dale Beran's Book "It Came From Something Awful": http://bit.ly/3rxImFd
GUESTS:
Follow Matt Alt: http://twitter.com/Matt_Alt & http://www.instagram.com/altmattalt/
Get Matt Alt's Book "Pure Invention": http://amzn.to/2O0DxWd
Follow Fredrick Brennan: http//:twitter.com/fr_brennan
Check out Fred's font work on Github: http://github.com/ctrlcctrlv/
Follow Fuxnet: http://twitter.com/fuxnet
Check out Fuxnet's Cleveland-based mutual aid org providing relief to the homeless during COVID: https://twitter.com/therhizomehouse
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Episode music by Nick Sena (http://nicksenamusic.com), Doom Chakra Tapes (http://doomchakratapes.bandcamp.com
The idea that the far-right conspiracy theory known as QAnon, started by an anonymous internet user in October of 2017, and prevalent among the crowd that stormed the United States Capitol in 2021, could be traced back to consumerism in 1980s Japan.
That websites created by anonymous teenagers to trade pornographic pictures of anime girls evolved into the alt-right movement in the United States.
This is the story of how a hyper-complex, modernizing world gave birth to image board, or Chan culture, and unexpectedly transformed Japan, and the United States, forever.
This is the story of how the internet became a vessel for a set of narratives created by disaffected nihilists hoping for society's swift collapse, and how those narratives evolved on mainstream social media platforms before coming to define our politics.
This is the story of QAnon.
It begins in Japan in the 1980s, where a group of young people started opting for a new way of life.
They were called otaku, and they dedicated their lives to the novel trends that were driving Japan's unprecedented economic growth — electronics and consumerism.
Mat Alt is the author of Pure Invention, How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World.
Here's Mat explaining the origins of the term otaku.
Otaku is the word in Japanese for a super fan of something, almost anything, that they obsess over to the exclusion and detriment of everything else in their lives.
The word otaku first emerged as a descriptor for this type of people in the early 1980s, which was at kind of the peak of Japan's financial bubble, when it was this kind of ascendant economic superpower that was disrupting markets all over the globe.
People all around the world were imagining a future that was going to be very Japanized, where we'd all be working for Japanese corporations.
You know, we'd all be driving Japanese cars and our bosses would be Japanese salarymen, like in Back to the Future.
Japan had already, at the turn of the 20th century, been Asia's first industrial power.
Now it was looking to be Asia's first global power.
It was on track to be number one.
But in the shadows of this flourishing of economic might were young people who were disillusioned with
and dissatisfied with the choices that adult life offered them on the treadmill
of corporate success.
And they refused to give up the pleasures of their childhood
that had so nourished them and sustained them as they were growing up.
And in particular, things like manga, and anime, model kits, and toys.
At first, the otaku were considered outsiders, undesirables by those chasing the Japanese dream.
But then, something catastrophic happened.
The country's economy had been in a financial bubble since 1986, and as real estate and stock market prices became more and more artificially inflated, Japan's economy crashed.
In 1990, Japan's economic bubble burst.
Its real estate markets, its stock markets had just inflated to these insane highs, supported pretty much only by irrational investor exuberance.
And when that all crashed down, the whole Japanese dream crashed down with it.
And in effect, the last people standing, the last people still consuming who didn't really change their habits, were the otaku.
Because they had never really been part of the Japanese dream in the first place.
So as the kind of social compacts and social contracts and promises of Japanese corporate life and mainstream Japan sort of evaporated, like things like out of college, you'd have been guaranteed a permanent lifetime position at a big company or something like that.
You know, guaranteed promotions, guaranteed seniority.
You know, there was a system.
That system crumbled and this thing called the employment ice age set in.
So the Japanese economy goes into a recession.
Young people can't get jobs.
You get this kind of early version of the gig economy going on where Japanese people are forced to flit from job to job and they're called freeders.
You get all sorts of weird, then weird, social phenomena popping up that are chronicled in the Western press as completely bizarre, like parasite singles, which are mainly women who choose not to get married and just live with their parents so they can save their money to go out clubbing.
And like buy expensive gear or compensated dating, which are high school girls who basically sell their their bodies and not necessarily only sexually, like just like kind of selling their time.
They'll go out to eat dinner with kind of gross old men in exchange for designer bags or designer clothes or whatever.
The word hikikomori is first kind of coined in the 90s, which are people who don't leave their house at all, especially young men who kind of like lock themselves in their childhood bedrooms and don't even come out to see their own families.
And it was right around this time that the otaku made a big comeback too.
Before long, otaku culture coalesced around a popular message board on the early internet called 2channel.
A gentleman by the name of Hiroyuki Nishimura founded a website called 2channel, or Nii-chan, Nii-channel as it's
known in Japanese.
And it was a kind of reaction to other sites that had existed in Japan before that.
He wasn't the first person to come up with the idea of a skeevy anonymous bulletin board system, but his was arguably the best executed.
In keeping with the way the internet was consumed at the time, Incredibly stripped down by modern standards.
No images of any kind.
It was all text and people would speak in this kind of rapid-fire shorthand to each other.
It was actually very tough to read for outsiders and it quickly became this gathering place for young Japanese of all stripes who realized that they could now kind of speak to power and they could express themselves in ways that weren't considered socially acceptable when you had your name and face attached to it.
It didn't take long at all for kind of bad things to start happening on Knee Channel 2.
There were incidents of kids like making terroristic threats and occasionally being egged on to carry them out.
There were situations of like kind of brigading and trolling of other websites and other people and things like that.
And so it was very clear from very early on on Knee Channel that there was a kind of dark side to this unfettered expression too.
By 2002, alienated anime fans and trolling collectives on 2Channel began swinging to the far right of the political spectrum.
This kind of shrill, nationalistic, chauvinistic, racist sort of rhetoric.
started to spread in certain corners of Nii Channel.
And this highly vocal minority came to be called Nettouyou in Japanese.
Nettouyoku, shortened to Nettouyou, which is the net right, the net right wing.
They had this fixation that you couldn't trust the mass media.
You couldn't trust liberal politicians.
If you ever tried to argue with them, they would troll brigade you out of existence.
Within just a year of this worrying development, a 15-year-old boy living in upstate New York named Christopher Poole, aka Moot, copied the Japanese software to create an English-language clone of 2Channel, which he dubbed 4Chan.
One of 2Channel's kind of sub-sites, which is called FutabaChamp, literally provided the software for 4chan.
It was an image board.
It was a kind of image-based version of Nii Channel.
It was initially kind of set up as this sort of refuge for when Nii Channel went down, and it was a very different sort of discourse.
It was full of, like, people posting their own anime drawings and manga illustrations and stuff like that.
And that caught the eye of a lot of young otaku in America, because by this point in the early 2000s, 2004 or so, there's a lot of American kids who've been raised on Japanese pop culture since birth.
You know, they were raised on Power Rangers.
They were raised on Nintendo games and Sega games and Sony games.
They watched Sailor Moon.
They've been reading manga from borders, bookshops, and things like that.
So their sensibilities have actually been Japanized in a very real way.
It was a sort of culmination of the kind of hearts and minds, rather than the one that everybody had been expecting in the 1980s, which is that Japan was going to take over our cities and the world.
And this was a much more passive one.
It was just done by the fact that Japanese manga and anime were such expressive forms of entertainment.
Before long, the same dynamic as in Japan played out in the West.
Christopher Moote Poole's creation, 4chan, became the spawning pool for a new breed of American far-right thought.
Dale Buran is the author of the book It Came From Something Awful, an excellent history of the chansites.
He's written for The Atlantic and Der Freitag and was a contributor to the Reply All podcast
episode on QAnon entitled Country of Liars.
Over his career, he has spoken to many of the figures involved in the early creation
of the chans.
One of these users was a man who goes by the name Fuxnet for privacy reasons.
He was a teenager living in Cleveland when he first met Moot in a chatroom in 2003.
I first started to talk to Moot in their IRC channel like in the early days and that's
how Moot and I first started to communicate and I eventually created my own chan site.
Some would say it was like a spinoff of 4chan, but that's only because it got created because a bunch of people got banned from 4chan and we all created our own site.
So at that point, you know, I had my own experience being an administrator of a Chan site.
So Moot and I kind of connected in that way.
And we started to talk like on the cell phone fairly regularly for a while.
And that was kind of nice, but he was so young.
That always surprised me.
I remember talking to him on the phone one night, and he had told me that he went $60,000 in debt on his mom's credit cards to keep 4chan running, and I was just like, what the hell?
You're a literal child, what are you doing?
Moot and FoxNet first met in person at Otakon, a convention for American otaku in Maryland, in 2006.
4chan users traditionally gathered at the yearly event to meet each other and party.
There, Moot addressed the assembled posters.
So BT Internet and NTLI and Australian ISP, two major ISPs actually block B from their subscribers because we've been classified as a peddler of unsavory materials.
It very much did feel like a party, especially at the conventions.
There's a lot of camaraderie, and I think that did go a long way for a lot of people, including myself, you know?
I mean, I'm a nerd, I was always a nerd, never really felt like I fit in, so the internet, that's where I spend most of my time, even nowadays.
When Poole created 4chan, the explosive growth of consumerism in the 80s hadn't yet produced otaku-style dropouts in the United States.
But it had generated a deep nihilism among young people, who felt the only way to resist corporate co-option was to retreat into numb irony.
Poole and many of his friends had met on a website called Something Awful, which was dedicated to celebrating a swirling debris of pop culture.
There, old snippets of films, advertising campaigns, cartoons, video games, and other meaningless marketing detritus were repurposed into cynical jokes they called memes.
Teens competed to post the most offensive and transgressive images and grouped up in vast trolling collectives to organize cynical online pranks.
Before long, Both memes and trolling collectives were banned on Something Awful.
And, naturally, they flocked to Moot's new creation.
4chan became their home online.
The result was a huge influx of new users and an explosion in collective trolling, projects referred to as Ops or Operations in chan parlance.
By 2007, 4chan appeared very much like social media does today, as a constantly updating feed, an endless pageant of memes and shitposts.
This attracted a new wave of users, who quickly became addicted to the relentless flow of content.
Meanwhile, copycat sites, including Fuxnet's own image board, became the center of a renaissance in trolling
collectives.
It was led by a group of anonymous internet users who wanted to transform shitposting into something more
constructive, something that might disturb or disrupt the powers that be.
PartyVan was an IRC network that came to be, I want to say, like around 2007.
It was kind of an amalgamation of trolling groups and different chan sites.
It was a bunch of trolls coming together just to start trolling stuff, basically.
There was a big thing called the Caturday Nap where like some of the trolls from PartyVan went to Moot and said, Hey, you should move 4chan to the Partyvan IRC network.
And he refused, and so they said, okay, we're gonna shut down 4chan.
They DDoS'd 4chan, and it was down for days.
And it caused this mass exodus of users from 4chan to, like, a bunch of the smaller chans, and I think that caused kind of, like, a growth in the subculture, because a lot of people met different people through that, and then started to do their own thing, kind of.
And that started leading into the insurgency stuff where different chans started making boards
dedicated to raids.
And they had to do that because it got banned on 4chan.
People weren't allowed to organize raids on 4chan because there was so much trouble
that was starting to come from that.
The Scientology raids were also organized on PartyVan within the next year.
And that was kind of where everything blew up from there.
You got Oprah talking about the hacker known as 4chan.
It just kind of spiraled out of control.
There was FBI people in the IRC during Scientology like offering people money for docs on other people.
You know, it was crazy.
By the point that I was involved with Anonymous, you know, I was involved with these hacking operations with LulzSec and Antisec, and this is kind of like a point of contention that people have.
They often say, like, well, how did you not get arrested?
Like, you must be an FBI informer or something like that.
It's like, no, like, I just literally didn't do anything That was arrestable.
Whenever I was helping, I would help with like open source intelligence stuff.
At one point we hacked like an entire police department in California.
But what I did was I just used Google and was able to find literally just an Excel file with every single employee of the department's docs was in this document.
And it was just publicly available on Google, you know?
And that's the kind of thing that you can do that's like not technically illegal, but is helping out the cause, you know?
It's hard for me to look at everything that happened and think, oh yeah, there was like a guiding hand to this, you know?
And maybe there didn't need to be for there to be like a collected I have no idea of where things should go, but it just never felt like there was anybody in control at any point in time, you know?
Trolls kind of rely on the ignorance of journalists sometimes to spread their own message.
You may remember at the Super Bowl when the power went off that one year.
So we tweeted on the Rust League account that we did it and we posted like a picture of like an MS painted like control panel that we said that we used to hack the The stadium?
And I mean, it was like all over news sites within the next day, you know what I mean?
It's just like, I don't understand how they just...
Report that as news, but okay, you know, we're going to take advantage of that.
The party van IRC, or Internet Relay Chat, trolled as a group under the label Anonymous, which is just the default name for a user on 4chan.
By 2008, against all odds, this group of users had broadly transitioned from cynical shit posters to earnest hacktivists.
That same year, investment bank Lehman Brothers went bankrupt and the American economy collapsed, much in the same way Japan's had in the early 90s.
As the political class bailed out the banks in Wall Street, everyday Americans entered the Great Recession.
And the hacktivists went to work.
They launched a series of ops aimed at what they considered to be worthy targets.
After cutting their teeth on the Church of Scientology, by 2010 they were targeting governments and corporations.
Soon the world understood Anonymous to be an international hacktivist collective aligned with the loose-knit Occupy Wall Street movement.
The organization that we did start to see coming out of PartyVan though I think led to that.
That was the way that I wanted to go and and it did kind of start to go that way maybe not because that was the way everybody wanted to go but for instance the Hal Turner trolling that that was great because we got to go after a white supremacist and everybody loved it because he
reacted so well.
He was like what people refer to as like a lol cow, you know, like you poke him and
things come out that make you laugh when you do it.
And he just continually repeatedly was giving us laughs.
It was great fun.
We got to troll white supremacists and have fun while we did it.
And I don't want to say that I'm responsible for any of that, like by any means, you know,
it was definitely like a group effort from a lot of people that didn't even know
each other a lot of the time, you know, people doing their own things in different places
and kind of pieces just falling together.
So how did the chans end up swinging from this far left hacktivism collective into fascism?
I don't know.
Can you ask the question again?
After quite a bit of shenanigans, we found out that the piece of shit that was running the group,
that someone who I had thought was a friend previous to this,
turned out to be a confidential informant for the FBI and...
And through him, the FBI was directing people in our group To heck specific targets, including government servers in other countries, you know, like that alone is kind of a big deal.
And the government did try to suppress that information too.
The way that we found out that he was a fed was because a bunch of my friends got arrested in a coordinated raid.
Across the world.
And the next morning after that is when the news hit that that had happened.
You know, they waited a day and then that's when the news pieces came out.
The night before the raids were made public, I got contacted by who I thought was one of
my friends in the group that wove me a tale about how they were going to be starting up
a new job soon and that they would need help with some future hacks basically for the group.
And I was like, Oh sure, you know, I can help out, you know, whatever.
And then they started giving me like specific targets to go after and then gave me like
the exact vulnerability that the server had and like how to get in, which was very strange.
And that just set off all kinds of alarms that and so and a bunch of other things about
the context of how this was happening.
So that you know, that gave me a very uneasy feeling.
The next morning is when I found out that that was not my friend talking to me that
was probably an FBI agent that was on his computer.
You know, I was super spooked that this all happened and I essentially left my home for
months just.
On trains, on buses, I used an assumed identity.
I mean, all I did was stay at people that I knew from the Internet's houses,
and I was really lucky to have a place to stay everywhere, but it was pretty scary nonetheless.
After the FBI raids, the Chans experienced what could best be described as a moral vacuum.
Many first-generation users had grown out of the culture, and others were spooked by the spate of arrests.
What remained was a hardened, cynical user base that drew in a new generation of trolls, and shifted the politics of Chan culture to the right.
A lot of people who were already deeply involved were Pretty spooked by what happened and kind of went back into the shadows more and
That gave way for some newer faces to come in, some who maybe didn't have the best of intentions.
And at that point, you know, the media really didn't have a good grasp on everything that was going on, but everything was revolving anonymous was so popular that they kind of started to latch on to like the loudest people and a bunch of misinformation started to spread, which is like a whole nother conversation.
I can't say that the feds were.
We're leading it along to to move it further to the right.
I would say that their intervention could have scared away a lot of the people who were trying to get involved with the kind of left wing activism aspect of it.
And that kind of gave way for the right to be like, oh, well, maybe it's OK for us to do this, you know.
I saw them go that way when they started to realize that there was money in it for one thing, because some of the people that were involved with a lot of the trolling we did over the years recognized that some of our tactics are very sought after, especially with like political operatives and stuff like that.
There's no way that we could have thought ahead of time whether or not, like, organizing a bunch of greasy nerds on IRC channels to, like, attack websites and corporations was gonna, like, turn into...
A LARP about the president and eating babies?
I don't know, like what?
After 2013, 4chan's influence on American culture kept growing.
As economic prospects for them worsened, young Americans continued their retreat into the escapist realms of the internet, video games, and television.
Soon 4chan was filled to the brim with a new generation of dedicated otaku, far more despairing than the last.
One of these young users was Frederic Brennan, who discovered 4chan in 2006, when he was only 12 years old.
A forum he frequented at the time, created to discuss the Sonic Adventures 2 video game, was raided by a group of disruptive and boastful chan users, who broke their own unofficial rule.
Don't tell the people you're harassing that you came from 4chan.
Frederic was immediately fascinated by what he found on the image board.
I think because I got involved so young, I did not really understand a lot of the fishbowl angle of it, and I'm not really thinking about the cross-section of society that is using this site, right?
When you're kind of 12, 13, that's not something you're thinking about.
You're kind of thinking about, oh, well, this must just be the average person that's using 4chan, and this must represent the average person's beliefs in some way.
And as I got a lot older, I Recognize that no, far from it.
In fact, this site attracts an extremely specific type of person and what does well here is not in any way representative of what most people think.
And that actually I am harming myself in many ways by continuing to associate only with this site.
That it is kind of poisoning my mind in many ways and making me believe things that are Not true.
I was a disturbed child also.
I mean, I was in foster care at a time.
I was in a psychiatric hospital for children at one time.
It definitely did not help that I had so much 4chan exposure in my life.
You know, those two things.
And when I look back, for example, at some of the things that I used to champion as a 4chan user, right?
For example, eugenics.
I mean, that in many ways is just a rationalization Of depression.
And I am just coming up with a logical explanation for why I shouldn't exist instead of just admitting I'm depressed, my brain chemistry is probably not right, and it is abnormal that I don't want to exist so badly when other disabled people are fine, right?
And it's not that I'm so much smarter than them, it's that I'm depressed, you know?
And that is something that I was not even able to understand until I was an adult because I would just continue to fight it like the logical way instead of just seeing it as, well, your political beliefs don't exist in a vacuum and a lot of them are coming from your feelings.
Then, Moot banned Frederick's favorite board on 4chan, dedicated to self-described incels or involuntary celibates and other young men with little hope for the future.
But Brennan was dedicated to chan culture.
Brennan worked as the administrator on several other image boards, before eventually creating 8chan.
The image board was defined by the ability users had to create their own boards, as well as the lax administration and moderation.
Although 8chan was slow to take off, it received a massive influx of users from 4chan when Christopher Mootpool banned users organizing Gamergate, a trolling campaign aimed at harassing a feminist game developer.
Seeing an opportunity to grow his user base, Brennan invited them onto his platform.
But Moot's attempts to stem the growing problem through bans were futile.
4chan and 8chan continued to be pressure cookers for angry young men who resented women, members of the LGBTQ community, and racial minorities.
They seethed with anger, feeling the culture was leaving them behind as they wasted their days away, locked out of the mainstream with no financial prospects.
Chan users failed to recognize anything resembling themselves in the pseudo-woke cultural products pumped out by the corporate giants.
Before long, they became deeply enamored with fascism.
They would either reshape the world in the image of an idealized past or burn it to the fucking ground.
It's just disillusionment in their personal lives that leads to wanting to constantly get back at society.
Having spoken to many 4chan users in my life, I know that the majority do not have jobs.
If they do, the jobs are low paid.
Something like stacking groceries, working at 3am at a McDonald's or something like that.
Very few of them have kids.
Very few of them are married, and if they are, it's a very unhappy marriage.
If they have any girlfriend, it's kind of a very casual matter.
It's not really, like, a plan to get a house and have kids and raise a family.
It's none of that, you know.
It's a certain type of person that is a 4chan user.
There are very few happy 4chan users, let's say.
What is it that they're looking for?
They're looking for fulfillment, and a lot of these fascist narratives on the surface seem like something that could fulfill their desires.
Look at, for example, the images that the Gab account shares.
The Gab account is essentially marketing to these people.
They share that image of the father coming home, and then the two kids in their, like, immaculate dresses running up to him, and then the wife who is, you know, in a very traditional garb, With a house, with a lawn, and a car, and all of that.
And they're trying to say, you know, this is what they took from you.
Their highest aspiration is to be Hank Hill.
They feel like leftist narratives are not going to give them that, and they do not see women as equal to them.
They do not see LGBT people as equal to them.
They do not think that they should have to see things that way.
4chan users, especially in my experience, are kind of very controlling people.
They want to know that they can Kind of lured over, you know?
Like, that's why I put it that way.
Like, they don't want to just have a wife.
They want to have a wife who has no ability to divorce them and who is kind of stuck to their income in a one-income household.
They want to have a lot of control over people.
They are able to sometimes take back a modicum of power and to strike fear into the hearts of society and media through their antics on 4chan.
Thus 4chan's favorite pastimes were bent to a new purpose.
They would continue generating viral content by shitposting thousands of memes every day and organizing misinformation trolling campaigns.
But now they would do it in service of promoting far-right ideas.
And by 2015, they would find the perfect figure to troll for in Donald Trump.
Here was a presidential candidate who ticked all their boxes.
Trump was offensive, destructive, and often hilarious.
His countless cameos and appearances on TV and in movies meant that he was already a piece of garbage pop culture, catnip for 4chan.
As an added bonus, Trump's very existence was an offense to what 4chan resentfully called normies, who they imagined to be happy, well-adjusted people who led normal offline lives.
They pushed Trump because they saw it as countercultural to do so.
And that is one of the main things that helps on these sites.
If it is seen as something that would be really funny if it were to happen, then that immediately helps.
One of the main things that the users want to do is to get back at institutions, media, and rich people.
Those kind of three areas.
And they don't necessarily care why Trump is disliked by the three.
They just know that if Trump were to somehow win, That would really piss off all three.
They had no plan for Trump actually becoming president, right?
Like, they didn't know, like, what they wanted to happen after that.
They just knew that they wanted to stick it to the media.
And I mean, when you watch, kind of, some of the videos that they produced about the election night coverage, with people just shocked and freaking out, I mean, that is like catnip to the 4chan poll users.
Because you stuck it to them all in a big way.
And you screwed with them.
You trolled them.
You trolled the entire media class.
That's what they feel like.
For them, it wasn't really about Trump's agenda or anything.
I mean, yes, we can say that Trump's agenda is closer to kind of a poll neo-Nazis agenda than Biden's would be, but I mean, it isn't extremely closer, right?
Like, there is no way that they approve of Israel.
There is no way that they approve of tax breaks.
There is no way that they approve of a lot of what he did and that they knew he was going to do.
It was more about sticking it to CNN, MSNBC, The media, from their perspective, they have nothing to gain by Hillary being in office.
But they do have at least the goals to gain by Trump being in office.
4chan's pro-Trump trolling campaigns were wildly successful.
First, they turned one of their favorite memes, a hapless cartoon character called Pepe the Frog, into a hate symbol, prompting Hillary Clinton to condemn a cartoon frog in one of her campaign trail speeches.
A 2020 documentary titled FeelsGoodMan brilliantly recounts the attempts of Matt Fury, the cartoon's original author, to reclaim Pepe from the neo-Nazi abyss.
Man, I'm like an artist, so I don't like suing other artists.
We just kind of was like, oh yeah man, just let them do what they want.
Using Pepe as a meme, that's cool, you know?
Meme?
I didn't even know what a meme was, or I don't even still know if I'm saying that correctly,
but it was through Pepe that I learned what a meme was.
4chan followed up the Pepe stunt by starting a viral rumor that Hillary Clinton was secretly
deathly ill, a lie that propagated into the mainstream media and had real effects on her
Then 4chan used a trove of Hillary Clinton's emails, which were leaked during the campaign by Wikileaks, to build the Pizzagate conspiracy theory.
They did this by recycling an old 4chan meme about CP, a joke that anything with the initials CP, like Cheese Pizza or Captain Picard, was a secret code for child pornography.
The trolls incorporated the meme into their prank by pretending that all references to pizza made by Clinton and her associates were actually codes used to conceal a child trafficking ring in the basement of a popular Washington D.C.
restaurant which also had the initial CP, Comet Ping Pong.
It was pure fabrication.
These trolling campaigns were so effective at deforming reality that after Trump won the election, the Chans saw no reason to stop.
2017 was an endless procession of Anons pretending to be government insiders leaking secrets about Pizzagate.
These included users known as FBI Anon, White House Insider Anon, and Mega Anon, all of which rose to some level of notoriety on 4chan by claiming the same thing.
They knew when and where Hillary Clinton would be arrested for her alleged abuse of children.
But anonymously faking insider information was nothing new for the Chan users.
In fact, it was one of their favorite pastimes.
Whenever somebody is pretending to be an insider, that automatically gives their thread more power.
And I would even say that pretending to be an insider is something almost as old as 4chan itself.
I mean, it's so common on there that even I don't feel bad admitting that I have done it before.
I mostly would do it on the Gboard, which is for technology, but I would pretend to be an Apple employee.
That was one of my favorite larks.
I would pretend to be an Apple employee, and I would pretend to give them all this kind of new information on the new iOS or the new iPhone.
I didn't even have an iPhone.
I kind of understood the tech well enough that I could make lies good enough that enough of them were kind of believing it, that it just kind of continued.
Another LARP that I personally played was I pretended to be from Hong Kong at one point.
This is way before the protests.
But I used a VPN in Hong Kong to give myself the flag and I would just post a thread about Hong Kong independence.
And I would, like, search Google Images in Chinese for the words Hong Kong independence and, like, post a book about it as my image so I seemed more legit.
There's thousands of people doing what you're describing, right?
And sometimes users buy into it.
But there's also this second class of user that are looking but are kind of on the outside and they're looking for something useful to them, whether they're a MAGA person or whatever.
Correct.
They might come there and they might not have that distinction that a user has to be like, oh, this is just another another LARP.
That's interesting, because as 4chan got older and older, this second class of users grew more and more.
It wasn't just are in group talking to each other. It became, well, Alex
Jones's employees are looking at 4chan to be able to say, this is what the internet is
talking about, right?
What's difficult to understand from our vantage point in 2021, when only one anon stands out
in the culture, is just how shoddy and confusing the content posted to 4chan was in 2017 and
continues to be.
I think that for people who are not acquainted with chan culture, it seems like there just
This has to be a mastermind who's orchestrating all this.
Everything is planned.
I mean, I had somebody tweet at me yesterday, this that's going on right now with the Wall Street bets.
I just feel like there's this genius behind it.
And who is getting all these 4chan kids and predators together?
And I'm like, dude, are you okay?
This stuff, it is organic.
Having administrated these sites, you see kind of how some things rise up and some things don't.
I mean, To kind of make a meme that does well, it has to be a simple narrative that hits a lot of buttons.
You can't really, in advance, know what that's going to be because so many people are using the site.
When you look back, you always understand how this narrative or post, which buttons it pressed and why it was so successful.
Like when we look at Q, we see, oh, well, there were so many people at the time who were trying to explain why Trump isn't doing certain things.
Why Trump's presidency isn't going well.
And this explanation did so well because it explained that.
The same thing is with the Wall Street Bets thing.
This narrative here did so well because it had like all of these features.
Attack hedge fund managers, help a beloved company that's very nostalgic for a lot of people, save jobs.
You know, it's like all of this together.
And it's sort of the same with Q.
I would encourage anybody to just take a look at 4chan or 8chan and to just look at the normal threads there and to see how many of the memes are dumb, not funny, somebody's trying to force them, and it's obviously only one person that keeps posting it again.
I mean, there's a meme counter to that, which is, mom, look at me, I posted it again.
You know, that's a joke that people will say, you know, to try to get these people to stop.
Like, stop posting this dumb thing over and over.
Finally, in November of 2017, after hundreds of similar attempts spawned and died on the chans, one of these government insider memes finally went viral.
Its name was QAnon, and it didn't take long before it started spreading like wildfire across the social media platforms.
By that point, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube had created a formidable content mill, algorithmically programmed to show its users an endless stream of images, video, and text that inflamed their passions, usually negatively.
The never-ending feed wasn't just cooking the brains of Chan users any longer.
Now the rest of the population had been sucked into the great experiment as well.
Social media companies designed platforms in which content rose or fell in popularity, not in accord with its usefulness or factual accuracy, but whether it garnered engagement in the form of likes, comments, and reposts by other users.
In this way, the social media ecosystem became a macro-environment, where toxic memes thrived because a majority of the users viscerally hated them.
This extension of the chans had another advantage.
Regular social media users were often just as addicted to the feed as hardcore image board users.
What's more, this new breeding ground provided a glut of credulous and naive newcomers for trolls to trick and confuse in a race for virality.
The social media companies lined their pockets by selling ads.
The more engagement, the higher they charged.
Small, legitimate news sites withered, crowded out by YouTubers promoting viral content.
Under the gaze of a new class of tech billionaires, QAnon memes spread among the normie population, many of them jumping at the opportunity to become promoters of the movement, especially once they found out that social media companies would pay them to do so.
Establishment media outlets were utterly confounded by the deluge of bloodthirsty conspiracy theories and far-right propaganda that suddenly seemed to be filling people's social media feeds.
Where had this ridiculous stuff come from, and why should they give it any oxygen?
But the monetized ecosystem fueling the spread of QAnon was already firmly in place.
The conspiracy theory wasn't going anywhere.
When the COVID-19 pandemic forced the population indoors in early 2020, it couldn't have come at a worse time.
Millions of Americans and people around the world Suddenly found themselves with more time on their hands, just as economic conditions were worsening dramatically.
In reaction, many took refuge on social media, where they were subjected to QAnon, alongside a massive catalogue of far-right conspiracy theories and extremist content, all thriving in the algorithm.
Less technologically savvy and more earnest QAnon promoters, many who had never visited the chans, created and spread high-production videos like Out of Shadows and Plandemic, or the shoddier but highly effective Fall of the Cabal series.
A new class of normie grew enamored with QAnon and Trump.
These new converts were more diverse.
Wellness influencers, yoga teachers, celebrity chefs, new age gurus, police officers, musicians, and failed screenwriters, to name a few, all started falling down rabbit holes on YouTube and Facebook.
They emerged as Trump voters praying for military tribunals and the execution of the satanic deep state pedophile cabal.
The main solution provided by Q?
Post.
And so they did.
Social media companies attempted to crack down on QAnon content, but were unable to stop what had become an online army dedicated to reposting QAnon content when it got taken down.
Meanwhile, Trump recognized that QAnon could boost his re-election campaign and started praising its followers.
After he lost, he used the network of QAnon evangelists to promote a new conspiracy theory, that he had been cheated out of an election victory.
By this point, QAnon believers composed a sizable portion of his supporters.
White supremacists, anti-immigrant militias, and other far-right movements had long embraced or at least tolerated QAnon, but on January 6th, 2021, the conspiracy theorists became remarkably more useful to them.
Of the five people who died during the storming of the Capitol, two had posted publicly in support of QAnon, and another, the Capitol police officer who was beaten by the crowd and later died, was following multiple QAnon promoters on social media.
In the wake of the events at the Capitol, legacy media scrambled to understand how a Q shaman, whatever the fuck that was, had ended up on the floor of the Senate sporting face paint, a horned fur hat, and a sign exclaiming, Q sent me.
For a long time, the media had sought answers about the identity of QAnon.
Some research produced results.
It was verified, for example, that Jim Watkins, the current owner of 8chan, now renamed 8kun, and his son Ron, himself immersed in chan culture, played a role in platforming QAnon.
At multiple points, they verified Q's identity so the anonymous poster could continue posting to 8chan, the image board they owned.
This would have required some contact between them and the anonymous poster.
But some wanted more spectacular and specific answers.
They wanted to unmask Q. And like clockwork, Chan users responded to the media demand with more trolling and disinformation.
A small coalition of these trolls allied themselves with credulous laymen to spread disinformation about the identity of the poster known as QAnon.
Incredibly, their claims evolved on social media and ended up in a TEDx talk, a Financial Times piece, and just recently, a Vice documentary.
The story derives from a conspiracy theory YouTuber and 4chan user named Manny Defango Chavez, who claims, without evidence, to have invented QAnon with a former business partner named Thomas Schoenberger.
The pair were already known for claiming, variously, that they either invented or solved a famous cryptographic puzzle posted on 4chan in 2015 called Cicada 3301.
In fact, the legitimate creator of the Cicada puzzle employed a nearly foolproof method to identify themselves, a cryptographic PGP code.
Which neither Chavez or Schoenberger ever possessed.
Currently, both Chavez and Schoenberger are named in a civil suit alleging fraud regarding their claims about Cicada.
Nonetheless, the Vice documentary lends credence to Chavez's claim that the duo was behind another famous 4chan personality as well.
QAnon.
Ironically, the story does demonstrate exactly how narratives like QAnon are created.
Idleman on 4chan sift through nearly two decades of viral memes, recombining them into ever more florid conspiracy theories for anyone willing to pay attention.
Today, the same forces that generated Japan's lost decade and the rise of the American far-right persist.
The post-industrial, post-boom, post-war economies seem to be at an impasse.
As opportunities in the material world shrink, alienated citizens continue their retreat into an ever-expanding world of escapist fantasies, curated by a handful of corporations.
Otaku were sort of the canary in the coal mine for late capitalist society.
The things that happened to them were a harbinger of things that would happen to all late capitalist post-manufacturing societies in trouble.
This episode was co-written with Dale Beran.
You should pick up his fantastic book that provides more context.
It's titled, It Came From Something Awful, How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump Into Office.
You can also follow him on Twitter, at Dale B-E-R-A-N.
If you want to learn more about otaku culture in Japan, pick up Matt Alt's book, Pure Invention, How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World.
You can also follow him on Twitter, at Matt underscore Alt.
FUXNET can be found on Twitter at FUXNET, and he runs a non-profit called The Rhizome House, which manufactures and distributes hand sanitizer, disinfectant wipes, ear savers, and masks for homeless shelters and hospitals.
They recently earned a COVID relief grant to continue their work.
On Twitter at The Rhizome House, Frederick Brennan can be found at FR underscore Brennan.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast.
Please go to patreon.com slash QAnonAnonymous and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second episode every week plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes.
When you subscribe you help us stay advertising free and editorially independent.
We usually stream twice a week at twitch.tv slash QAnonAnonymous and for everything else we have QAnonAnonymous.com where you can find merch, a link to our discord, access to the lost episodes, etc.
Listener, until next week, may the Deep Dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy, it's a fact.
And now, today's Auto-Tune.
I guess the reason that belonging feels different on these sites is because it's all anonymous.
So the ways that you signal belonging are a lot different.
If you think of a traditional internet forum, the ways that you kind of signal belonging are the number of posts you have, Kind of your rank on the forum, if you're a power user, you know, super user, they have all these tags.
Your relationships with other named users also represent, you know, how much you kind of fit in.
But on 4chan or 8chan or sites similar, the only ways that you really signal belonging are by saying the right words.
By understanding, like, how to move the memes forward, by understanding how to make a thread that will get a lot of replies.
That is a kind of very different way of looking at it, and, I mean, it can be seen as a challenge to learn how to belong on this site.
I remember when, um, I first started posting on 4chan when I was, like, 12.
I kept wondering, how do these people keep figuring out that I'm underage, right?
Like, how does this keep happening?
How do I get- and, and, you know, Obviously, if we could go back and look at my old posts, it would probably be laughably obvious why they know.
But, you know, for me at the time, it was like, ah, ah, I did this wrong, I did that wrong.
So you're constantly trying to evolve your own messaging to fit in the collective.
Try to imagine somebody who works a 9-to-5, has a loving wife, and has children going on 4chan.
It's impossible.
You could not spend the amount of time necessary on 4chan.
To become an experienced enough 4chan user to fit in with those criteria, you need to have at least five hours a day, I would say, to devote to 4chan, to fit in on 4chan.
There is no other way.
I lied about my life constantly on 4chan.
You know, you would just be trying to prove other users wrong and you know that they have no way to know if what you're saying is true.
So yeah, you could say like, oh, well, I just banged my wife like last night.
