A cycle of violence fed by decades of online culture. But what connects the mass shooters who posted manifestos on 4chan and 8chan? How does a massacre become a meme, begetting more tragedy? Dale Beran guest writes.
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Episode music by Nick Sena & Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz.
Welcome, listener, to Chapter 191 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the mass shootings and
the chans episode. As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Dale Buran, Julian Field, and Travis View. This week, we're
turning our wary attention to a topic that is difficult to cover.
The mass shootings whose perpetrators interacted with online image boards like 4chan and 8chan.
Our guest writer is Dale Buran, author of It Came From Something Awful, a book we definitely recommend that covers the history of these online communities and how they interacted with the alt-right in the lead-up to Donald Trump's presidency.
Since then, he and I co-wrote From Anonymous to QAnon, which is main episode 128 of this podcast.
In it, we explored the role that The Chans played in creating QAnon and radicalizing young men to the far right.
Now, one thing to note about this episode before we get started.
It is not our intention to comprehensively cover these mass shootings and the way they interact with mainstream culture, media, or even legislation.
There are many people doing a great job of that.
We're more interested in a very specific and often under-reported aspect of these tragedies, the online communities some of these shooters frequented, and how these communities mythologize and oftentimes worship past perpetrators, creating a repeating cycle of violence, a disturbing form of memification.
So, with that said, let's get started.
On May 14th, an 18-year-old man killed 10 people in a Topps grocery store in Buffalo, New York, while live-streaming the massacre to the gaming platform Twitch.
The attack was racially motivated.
In his manifesto, the shooter declared he was a fascist, a white supremacist, and a terrorist.
And he described how he came to these beliefs.
Two years ago, he started reading an internet message board called 4chan, specifically the far-right politics section, Poll.
4chan was originally started by teenagers in 2003 to swamp jokes and pictures from anime.
But in recent years, it's become infamous as a spawning ground for far-right beliefs.
And the site is now one of a dozen or so similar message boards, collectively called the Chans, that share a cruel-minded adolescent culture.
The Buffalo shooting wasn't unique.
Rather, it was an attempt to emulate a mass shooting in March of 2019, when a 28-year-old Chan user, another self-described fascist, live-streamed killing over 50 people in a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Afterwards, a spate of copycat attacks followed.
In 2019, Xen users attacked a synagogue in Poway, California, a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, a mosque in Barum, Norway, and another synagogue in Halle, Germany.
Each of these attackers, all young men, announced their plans on Xan sites and left manifestos inspired by Xan memes.
In particular, the meme of the Christchurch shooting itself, which, as the perpetrator had hoped, had become its own viral idea for users to replicate and modify.
But at the end of 2019, the sequence of shootings appeared to be over, until last month, when the Buffalo shooter added himself to the chain.
Oftentimes, in the wake of mass shootings, the reporting focuses on enforcement.
How do we ban weapons the shooter used, or monitor the sites where radicals plan the attack?
Looking the other direction, to the conditions and environment that spawn the attack is more difficult, partly because the shooters want to draw attention to their toxic ideas.
But it's difficult to understand the problem without tracing it to its source.
In 2019, I had published a book on the history of the Chans and their radicalization, which discussed the site's fascination with mass shooters and fascism, and their recent attempts to inject a then-obscure mass prank called QAnon into the mainstream discourse.
After that, I expected to never write about the sites again.
I didn't think the discontent that bred in these places would vanish, but the sites themselves, many over a decade old, already felt tired and irrelevant.
But I was wrong.
First, the string of Chan mass shootings occurred, then QAnon spilled over from the Chans into the rest of the world.
However, because the sites were so difficult to parse, the Chans themselves rarely became the focus of the problems they created.
So this piece is an attempt to understand the recent shooting in Buffalo by what it claimed to be, a product of the Chans and their radicalization.
There are three elements that have produced the toxic side of The Chans.
Two were large societal shifts.
The first was a worsening economic landscape that pushed more young people to the margins.
The second was the proliferation of screens and the fantasies that played on them.
The Chans became one of many online spaces where dropped-out, idle young people met to discuss escapism.
But after decades of this unhappy activity, the discussion slid into radical politics of discontent.
Fantasies about utopias and worlds beyond this one became mixed up with plans for bloodthirsty revenge and revolutions.
And so radical politics became another two-dimensional game they played on the screen to be memefied and hoped for among a group of people defined by inertia, dysfunction, and inaction.
And this gets at the third element that created the chants.
The communities draw in people who are dysfunctional.
Who have a difficult time engaging with the real world in a meaningful way.
And when they spend time on the chans, the gap only widens.
In this way, the most radical parts of the chans became a place where users could ignore internal problems by obsessing over how society was to blame.
They expressed their discontent in conspiracy theories and searches for scapegoats.
To outsiders, these ideas were absurd, but they were the ones that ultimately motivated the shooters.
I first encountered 4chan in 2005.
It had been founded in late 2003 by a 15-year-old boy named Christopher Poole, who went by the screen name Moot.
In the mid-2000s, Poole and his teenage friends met at my local anime con, Otacon, where they joked and performed skits in costume.
In the beginning, On the first day, Mook created 4chan and said, hello, this is 4chan, the breaker of pain.
Poole had created the site by copying a Japanese message board called 2chan.
The original site was for otakus, insular nerds in Japan who watched anime and played video games, sometimes to excess.
Before long, 4chan became wildly popular for Americans with similar interests.
It defined much of mid-2000s internet culture and largely invented the internet meme.
If you want to know what 4chan looked like in its heyday around 2006 or 2007, it's easy to tell you.
It looks like Twitter or Facebook today.
An endless scroll of memes competing for attention.
A format that now dominates the rest of the internet.
But 4chan's culture was also dark and nihilistic, composed of adolescent boys who reveled in cruel-minded jokes.
Poole's approach to the site was experimental.
He encouraged users to stay anonymous, and largely let people post what they pleased.
The result was that the site filled up with weirdos of all stripes.
In particular, fetishists, hackers, and trolls.
That's our entire audience, Dale.
Be careful.
I know, I know.
I know.
That's our base, yeah.
As Poole wrote in 2004, "I started 4chan when I was very bored, in need of porno,
and wanted a cool email address.
The immediate result was a cool 2chan clone that provided me with all such things,
but a few unwanted side effects, the predominant one being people who are complete wastes of human life and made
running the site hell not only for me, but the original users."
In the early years, the hackers and trolls ganged together to pull off mass pranks they called raids, where they disrupted online games, live streams, and other sites with weird images and offensive language.
One user who found the site in 2006, when she was 12, described it to me this way.
What I saw on 4chan on a daily basis was so fucked up, it was only plausible to me because we're all just fucked up on 4chan.
Doesn't make sense now looking back at it.
There were memes that I saw when I was 12 or 15.
Crush Cat, a woman crushing a cat with high heels.
Zippo Cat, a cat that was decapitated.
An entire generation was desensitized.
I think what made 4chan go south is all the focusing on raids.
Mood attempted to crack down on raids.
He created rules against users harassing other people on websites.
But the users rebelled.
They were now calling themselves anonymous, after the default display name on 4chan.
And they simply flit it between 4chan and smaller, alternative copies of the website other users had homebrewed.
And there, they could do what they pleased.
Soon, something even stranger occurred.
The teenage pranking societies began to hack targets they felt deserved punishment.
First, a neo-Nazi radio host named Hal Turner, then the Church of Scientology.
And out of this, the movement spilled into real life, into street protests against Scientology, then a full-blown leftist libertarian political movement.
A Chan user named James Galloway, who was there in the early days, told me in 2020,
"Gaining administrator access to Hal Turner's websites and stuff.
And that again is the roots of the righteous arm of anonymous."
Before it was Anonymous with a capital A, it was just a moniker on the website.
And we happened to enjoy fucking with this racist guy.
And it was righteous at the same time.
It's the perfect set of pranks where you feel like you're cleaning up society at the same time as you're doing all your little party tricks to him.
By 2010, Anonymous formed into a hacktivist collective that targeted governments and corporations, riding the same wave of popular resentment that motivated Occupy Wall Street.
But in 2011, key members of Anonymous were arrested by the FBI, and the movement shattered.
After the activists left 4chan, the site grew darker.
4chan had always been a place that celebrated nihilistic, excessive internet use, but slowly the users on the site stopped joking about it and began to discuss it as a genuine way to describe their lifestyle.
It became increasingly difficult for young people to find fulfilling work or move out of their parents' house.
But dropping out and playing video games all day?
Becoming a real otaku?
That was easier than ever.
And so Fortune became a hub for idle young people who had given up.
They adopted terms to describe their situation.
They regarded themselves as neats, not in education, employment, or training, or incels, involuntary celibates, or beta males, as opposed to the more successful alpha men.
For years, 4chan's culture had centered around a freewheeling, anything-goes section of the site called Slash B, the Random Board.
That was the place that had spawned Anonymous and the best of 4chan's memes.
Back in 2008, the site's founder, Chris Poole, had tried to create a new and improved B called Robot 9000, or R9K.
It was an attempt to make the site even more creative, to emphasize the good things about 4chan.
R9K employed a robot moderator, which automatically deleted repeated posts, forcing users to come up with original content.
But instead, R9K became a hub for despair and incels.
One lifelong 4chan user I spoke to over the years, named Warzy, frequented these parts of the chans around this time, though he originally found 4chan in 2005, attracted by the rude culture of the raids.
Alright, uh, hello, uh, I go by the handle of, uh, Warzy?
I am a black male in my early 30s.
I grew up in a large midwestern city.
I have a degree from a college.
What else precisely?
What did you study in college?
Political science and history.
That was my main focus.
When I was in elementary school, someone who was a friend of mine who we were both part of, you could say, I guess, kind of a gifted program or something equivalent to, The gifted program in elementary school had some like printouts of this site called Totsie Temple of the Screaming Electron.
Totsie is basically and it was well there's still archives was basically a remnant of the dial-up BBS internet like you know when you had to dial in and they still had the detailed text files which dated from the 1980s so stuff on war dialing and and phone phreaking which is a old form of phone hacking where you would like make a certain noise to get free free calls from the 70s and 80s the chans were like absolutely
That's awesome.
Like, the Tazi forums for comparison were pretty much a fucking shithole.
Like, the Tazi forums were absolutely Toxic people were like assholes people had their vendettas people would like like you know how forums with registrations have people with personalities and they get into it and they fuck things up or they follow each other out follow each other around like the
Flame Warriors.
Like, uh, there's a website called Flame Warriors which lists, like, the personality types of people who post on forums with registrations.
So, posting on a chan, you didn't really have that personality clash.
Everyone was anonymous.
Everyone was very free.
By 2012, Warzy grew increasingly interested in the manosphere, an adjacent community to R9K that taught men to resent women or objectify them in an effort to win them over as, quote, pickup artists.
As he browsed the chans, he watched as R9K became increasingly depressing and interested in similar subjects.
Unable to think of anything else original to share, the R9K users started telling sad stories about their own lives.
It started as, like...
A default to old school B and then it moved to people posting sad things about their like parents dying or like I like there's this there's this image of there's this there's this comic of this guy who realized that his mom left gifts for him and Animal Crossing and then she like died and then a few years
later. He logged back on to Animal Crossing and like saw the like oh
She left this for him. So it was a like ball. It was the ball or like
Sad thread and there there was other stuff like some guy who had a friend
he played a game with who was Israeli and then a terrorist attack happened in the city in Israel.
His friend was in and he never saw him come online again.
So it started as like general sad things and then it migrated to forever alone threads where people talked about being forever alone and I guess by
2013 it kind of shifted into an insubord as users on r9k continued the post
They were all sad and alone and so slowly began to form into a coalition at the same time
4chan was filling up with a growing population of fascists and far-right ideologues
Some users speculated that because Anonymous had targeted Hal Turner, the neo-Nazi radio host in 2007, and adjacent neo-Nazi sites like Stormfront, the racist users had learned of 4chan and began to use it themselves.
But it's just as likely these groups were drawn to 4chan because of the site's lack of restrictions on speech.
Reluctant to ban ideas, Poole responded to the influx of far-right users by creating a "containment board" for them
on 4chan called "Politically Incorrect" or "/Poll."
But the containment board didn't work, as Warzee recalls it.
The Stormfront users apparently saw a chance to change the culture of the first incarnation of Poll, which was the
news board.
Moot eventually got tired of having, like, the Newsboard being full of, like, 1488 types, so he deleted it and then resurrected it as Pol because the containment board spilled everywhere which is like because there's a there's a common saying on the chans which goes something along the lines of if if the containment board goes down for any reason the shitposts are going to flood the rest of the site
Was Poole kind of aware of the double entendre he was creating with Politically Incorrect?
Like, did he want to kind of jokingly point out that these people were incorrect?
Yeah, he always had a sense of humor about all of this, so he liked to—whatever he did, he liked to do with this sort of goofy air that I think defined 4chan in a lot of ways.
And he also had a very contentious relationship with this group of people on his site, like a lot of people on his site.
So he had deleted the board once, and then that wasn't working, so he restored it.
So I think the changing it to politically incorrect was part of his way of expressing tongue-in-cheek contempt for it, but obviously it probably wasn't a very successful strategy in the end.
There's also something about Fortune where they do just celebrate being wrong.
Like, part of them knows whatever they're believing or doing is wrong, and then they celebrate it.
So if someone says something really outlandish, they say, well, that seems untrue, so I'm going to believe it.
Yeah, so that was definitely part of their culture.
I mean, that's also just a core part of trolling, right?
It's like not really caring about whether or not, you know, stuff that you put out into the internet is helpful or corresponds to reality in any significant way.
Rather, it was whether or not it gets reaction out of people.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
If you're totally powerless, trolling provides some form of power, even though it's the smallest form.
It's like all they have.
And then, since it's about being untethered from reality, eventually, they just can't find their way back.
They just cut the last cords between them and what's real, and they're just on the internet all day.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it becomes about being wrong.
By 2013, both Pole, the fascist board, and R9K, the incel board, were prominent parts of 4chan.
The next year, in 2014, these sections of the site launched a harassment campaign called Gamergate against a female game developer they had come to resent, along with what they believed she represented.
Feminism entering video games, a place that they believed belonged to them.
When 4chan's founder, Poole, banned all discussions of GamerGate, citing the rules he had created against harassment all the way back in 2006, the users turned on him, labeling him a traitor.
As in 2006, many migrated to alternative chans, in particular a new site called 8chan, to continue the harassment.
Then, at the start of 2015, Poole quit his website, selling it to a Japanese chan site owner named Hiroyuki Nishimura, who still owns it today.
To say farewell, Poole held a marathon question and answer session for 4chan users.
Though Poole insisted he was leaving for personal reasons, unrelated to GamerGate and the troubling trajectory of the site, many of the questions he fielded were themed with the new problems 4chan was encountering.
Here's a segment of Poole answering questions before he leaves.
To put it to rest once and for all, does your mom have Jewish ancestry regardless of your religious beliefs?
Not that it should matter, but people think you've been misleading about it, 2082.
Nope, but again, I'll say that and I'm sure in the next, you know, whenever I get to that part of this thread in four hours from now, I'll see a thousand people, you know, claiming bullshit.
So, I don't even know why I read that nor why I responded, but... 2083, why do we delete RNNK considering the board no longer serves its original purpose and only causes further emotional damage to those who frequent it?
It doesn't, you're right.
I mean, it doesn't serve its original purpose, but...
A lot of people still use it and take comfort in it.
I made the mistake of deleting it, what was that, three years ago?
About three years ago when I removed RNNK, and I realized after I had that conversation with Sherrod Grovinal, the founder of ED at a ROFL, what was it called, ROFL thing, Portland, a ROFLCon Summit rather, you know, I realized the error of my ways and I decided that, you know, it was it was inconsiderate of me to have removed that board.
Yeah, so I don't think there's any reason to remove it.
I mean, people obviously still enjoy it and are free to enjoy it.
I mean, even if it doesn't Service original purpose, and I wish that there was kind of a board that was in the spirit of the original RNNK, which was kind of the gentleman's, you know, be in original content and all that.
But when we have that kind of in the form of S4S as far as original content, but it is what it is.
It doesn't make any sense to remove it at this point.
And to the extent that it's emotionally damaging to people who use it, then, I mean, I hope it'd be more supportive than anything.
But, you know, I just looked at the stats.
360,000 people visit R9 Cana in a given month.
And so, again, they find utility from it then.
Who am I to say otherwise?
4chan is all, again, it's anonymous.
Another problem on 4chan, a fascination with mass shooters and posting violent threats.
I mean, again, if there's a threat of serious injury or death against somebody, it's good that people report these.
Again, you shouldn't, I've said this a long time, you're an idiot if you post anything
illegal to slash B, you're just a complete fucking idiot if you think that you can get
away with that.
And posting a school shooting threat or whatever, it's just, again, it's a one-way ticket to
landing in jail because those actually do get reported by users.
I mean, users see them and they go to tips.fbi.gov or ic3.fbi.gov or they call their local law,
I mean, they submit them and then law enforcement comes to us and says, "Hey, we heard about
this shooting threat."
From the very beginning, 4chan had made jokes out of mass shooters.
In 2005, they fixated on a 12-year-old Japanese schoolgirl who had murdered a classmate in 2004, dubbing her a Nevada tan, because she was wearing a sweatshirt that had the words Nevada on it.
And in 2007, 4chan frequently made light of the massacre at Virginia Tech that year, framing it as a video game and jokes and memes.
Then, in 2014, a self-described incel named Elliot Rodger went on a shooting spree in California in the hopes of killing as many women as possible.
The now incel-dominated 4chan became obsessed.
In his rambling manifesto, Rodger called himself a, quote, Supreme Gentleman, and 4chan users adopted the term as a way to idolize him, first ironically, then in earnest.
Right after Pooh left in 2015, the chan-themed shootings began.
In that year, a 26-year-old man killed eight students and a professor at Humpqua Community College in Oregon.
Evidence suggests that the night before, he left a note on 4chan, along with a meme about the beta uprising.
A joke that 4chan beta males and incels would soon attack their oppressors.
Some of you guys are alright.
Don't go to school tomorrow if you're in the Northwest.
He also left a racist manifesto, blaming minorities for his low status in the world.
Three years later, in 2018, a 25-year-old man rammed a rental van into pedestrians in Toronto.
In a Facebook post uploaded the day of his attack, the killer declared,
"Wishing to speak to Sgt. 4chan. The Incel Rebellion has already begun.
All hail the Supreme Gentleman, Elliot Rodger."
As Worsey got older, he was growing more radical.
He wasn't turned off by what was occurring on 4chan.
He watched it with a detachment that now typified many chan users, in which anti-social behavior was reduced to something to browse on the boards.
By 2015 and 2016, there's this poll section of 4chan that's heavily racist, white supremacist.
Misogynistic, Steve Bannon is saying, well, I have all these young idol men who come in through Gamergate, through 4chan and 8chan, and now I get, and then I can turn them on to Trump.
Yeah, the way I remembered the argument going, it was that the Stormfront board was intentionally trying to recruit people because, you know, there's that old saying that If you pretend to be stupid, eventually you're going to be full of actual stupid people or a newer term, which comes after Paul was a thing, which is ironic.
X is still X. Yeah.
So let's, let's kind of talk about, I guess the, the school shooters that were kind of up to that point where The incel board starts idolizing Elliot Rodger, the incel shooter from California.
The Supreme Gentleman, the St.
Elliot.
St.
Elliot, yes.
These are 4chan memes about the shooter Elliot Rodger.
Yes.
Chad.
Yes.
him the supreme gentleman and then they start joking about the beta uprising, beta I guess
Yeah.
Yeah.
meaning like a beta male uprising like they're gonna go out and shoot up schools or shoot
up society and start a revolution.
Yeah, shoot up the like Stacys, yeah.
A Stacy is a female version of the Chad, the people that 4chan users are not, the healthy
people that live life out of doors and so forth.
As 4chan started to spawn real life social problems like fascists and mass shooters, the users often reacted with indifference or celebration, because things weren't going well for most of them anyway.
Like many chan users, Warzy found few prospects in the real world.
Though he was born middle class, in adulthood he immediately slid into poverty.
So you said you graduated college in 2015.
I remember when I first talked to you, you were really angry that you couldn't find a job.
How did going out of college feel and what happened job-wise for you?
Well, it took several years for me to find a shitty job working in a restaurant.
Also, I kind of expected I was going to be fucked anyway because, you know, I kept trying to like, to fucking tell my mom as late as, as early as like 2008 or 2010 that things are going to get worse.
Or like something like that.
And oh look, I was proven right.
I was proven right.
I was proven right.
Because there were econometric pieces of data that I read in 2012 or so which like mentioned that well technically the financial recession is over but Everyone's still pretty, you know, economically fucked.
Economically immiserated.
Yeah.
I think you told me last we talked a few months ago, even, that you had spent some time living out of a tent?
Oh, yes.
Yes.
Yes.
How long were you?
Oh, yes.
Well, you see, I was prepared for that.
Because I generally expected that I would end up being like homeless so I was prepared for it and actually when I was homeless the problem was not so much money because I had enough money and because it was you know summer I could just camp out in the woods and like tent up and like Have a, like, right-winger take me to an anime con for a little bit or, like, random adventures like that.
So, did you find housing eventually?
Are you still... Oh, yes, yes, yes.
For now, yeah, I currently have housing.
Worsey's search for answers as to why he wasn't finding meaningful work or a place in society by sifting through economic data and large social trends was also common on the chans.
Many other users were trying to do the same thing, but the men who now occupied the chans had poor reality testing, and they were looking to find someone to blame for their low status in life.
So the ideas they settled on were far-fetched conspiracy theories that resembled all the fiction they consumed.
Users often discussed the so-called Great Replacement, a conspiracy theory which posited that all the world's ills were due to a secret cabal of Jewish leftists conspiring to replace white people with minorities, a belief that ultimately motivated the Buffalo Shooter last month.
Likewise, many poll users became obsessed with the idea of accelerationism, their hope that somehow, through terrorism, indifference, or trolling, they could accelerate what they imagined was society's inevitable collapse.
When this occurred, they figured their lives would finally be meaningful, and they would possess the absence that defined them, a role in society.
This idea was also in the Buffalo Shooters writings.
It's a common sentiment on the Chans, and a variety of similar online spaces.
Unhappy young people can only imagine their life will change after a collapse of the world order they despise.
Yeah, I mean, I think before, maybe I got this wrong, you describe yourself as accelerationist or communist at times.
Yes.
Accelerationism is the tactic.
It's not, I would not say it's necessarily an ideology, but I do know there are people who are like unconditional accelerationists who just say like, everything sucks.
You need to accelerate in like some way or Another, like, you know, the people who probably went from supporting Sanders to supporting Trump in the 2016 elections.
But, accelerationism is basically a tactic which says that the current system cannot be fixed in any way possible.
The TLDR version is accelerationism means shit's fucked.
Shit's gonna get more fucked.
It is going to be literally less harmful to work to, like, sabotage everything and crash the system now, so less people suffer in 5, 10, 20 years.
Revolutions are bloody and unpredictable and you don't know what's going to happen.
And that if you wish for one, you, you might be the first one against the wall.
I mean, do you?
Oh yeah.
But is it, is the feeling that you don't really have anything to lose any anyway?
Oh yes.
Yes.
I'm a yes.
I mean, uh, I, I remember talking on, on, on, on Reddit and someone was like complaining about these, like, uh, You know, uh, what if, what if you don't have any shelter?
And I'm like, I've been homeless before, honestly, so, uh, I've been homeless before, honestly, uh, it might be, like, better, and, uh, there's, uh, there's a bunch of, like, writings.
Uh, you know, Chris Hedges, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning?
Uh, Chris Hedges was a journalist who was stationed in Sarajevo when the state collapsed, and he goes and points out how there was a unified sense of purpose as the society collapsed, and there's other
Reports from, like, World War II Britain of, like, people who were, like, literally in mental asylums suddenly were, like, competent enough to, like, check themselves out of the asylum and, like, crew an anti-aircraft battery or be a firefighter or be a paramedic driver.
So you're saying that your role in society now is Yes.
someone who works at a restaurant and doesn't really enjoy it.
If the system got rearranged, you might have a role that was actually meaningful for you.
Yes. Yeah.
To me, Worsey's politics have a dimensionless quality, typical of the chans in other radical online spaces,
in which bloody thoughts about revolutions are flattened into abstractions.
Because of course, they're not real, or rather they're peered at through the keyhole of the
internet.
Millions will die, but in this hypothetical scenario, one might get shuffled out from the bottom of society, where you're browsing the internet for no reason, into a meaningful role.
Fantasizing about total societal collapse seems like the least likely way to improve your lot in life.
But that's the element of the problem that isn't economic.
That's personal.
The Chans are an agglomeration of people who settle on the least likely way to solve their problems, who have a dim and distant connection to reality.
In some sense, Warzy is an exception on the Chans.
He's a minority.
Many of his Chan friends who were white also became increasingly radical, but moved to the far right.
Another thing we talked about was that you helped me when I was writing my book on the history of the Chans.
You connected me with people that you had met that were alt-right, that had gone to the alt-right through the Chans.
Thomas... Thomas was basically my, like, con senpai.
For lack of a better term, he was my senpai at, like, cons.
He basically, you know, showed me around cons and brought me to like parties and stuff.
He was actually kind of a liberal.
He actually supported and worked for the local branch of the Democratic Party, but he took a rightward turn.
Over like, years.
I'm not sure- I'm not sure if it was like, pole-rotting your brain or something, but yeah, basically my like, con-senpai went right-wing.
Over a period of time.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt describes fascism as an outgrowth of industrial capitalism.
It occurs when large groups of people become isolated and cast to the margins of society as modern economies shift rapidly in booms and busts.
Those left on the margins retain capitalism's set of ideas on how the world works.
Their view from the bottom convinces them human interaction is a cruel competition, a zero-sum game where if one person or group of people is winning, They must be losing.
They then become fixated on displacing an ethnic minority, or a set of them, who they believe have taken over their rightful spot above them in the power pyramid, similar to 4chan's obsession with replacement theory.
Arendt writes that proto-fascist movements from the 1920s "grew out of the fragments of a highly atomized society
whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held in check only through
membership in a class."
When the class around these people disintegrated, or they were ejected out of it, they were defined by
"isolation and lack of normal social relationships."
Or as Steve Bannon described the far-right sections of 4chan and 8chan, they were rootless white males with monster power.
Lacking self-definition and pride, chan users became obsessed with ideas of racial pride and racial definition.
Though as I mentioned at the beginning, I think this only half explains the chan's radicalization.
The other part of the explanation is how the structure of the internet worsens isolation and personal problems.
When users with unhealthy ideas mass together on 4chan or elsewhere, they often exacerbate their issues.
Forums for people who obsess over anything from body issues to suicide or romantic failures develop elaborate toxic doctrines.
Eventually, these belief structures become too delicate to survive outside of the internet.
So once people commit to them, they can't go back.
And their original problem, the gap between them and reality, only grows.
And this makes them more miserable.
One thing that separated the latest shooter in Buffalo from those he tried to emulate was that he left an 800-page diary.
What it reveals is that he was lying when he blamed 4chan for what he did, at least partially.
Like his predecessors, the shooter wanted to present himself as sane, so that his act would appear purely political.
But the diary contradicts that.
There is an illusion of normalcy.
But then there are moments, like when he finds his cat being attacked by a stray in his garage, and his response is to catch the other cat and decapitate it.
He fixates on a few topics and speaks about them endlessly, in nitpicking detail.
The two ideas that obsess him are guns and the far-right politics of 4chan's poll board.
Though prior to that, it was collecting silver coins.
"I'm not an incel," he writes, "because I don't meet the condition of desiring a romantic or sexual partner."
The world he inhabits is familiar in that it is shabby and dysfunctional and seems to be fraying at the edges.
When he writes on a form that has plans for high school graduation or a murder-suicide, he describes how he's taken to a hospital where he waits in the ER for a day, sleeping in chairs, until they ultimately send him home after a brief consult.
But the 4chan conspiracy theories he settles on to diagnose his problems.
And the worlds are deranged and naive, even for a teenager.
And he's not without lifelines.
He runs into friends who want to spend more time with him.
He's in college on a scholarship.
Though some undefined quality in him separates him from everyone else.
He's among people, but a million miles from them.
It's not that I actually dislike other people.
It's just that they make me feel so uncomfortable.
He writes, "I've probably spent actual years of my life just being online, and to be honest,
I regret it. I didn't go to friends' houses often or go to any parties or whatever.
Every day after school, I would just go home and play games and watch YouTube, mostly by myself.
I had some activities, like Boy Scouts, and I was in my school's swim and soccer team once.
Out of my years of playing video games, I only remember a few moments. Everything else is just
blank." He considers himself a neat, 4chan's term for someone who's dropped out of life.
Eventually, his interest in silver coins pulls racist politics and guns combined.
He begins to sell his silver collection to plan his copycat attack.
Though in his imagined fascist utopia, the thing he believes he's working to bring about through terrorism, people like him won't exist.
To accelerate is the goal, he wrote.
In a decent society, neats are unacceptable.
When I wrote my book on the history of The Chance, I managed to track down a lot of the teenagers who started the site.
By then they were, of course, adults and had moved on to other lives and careers that had nothing to do with The Chance.
Some were professors and journalists.
Others worked in tech.
The founder of the site, Christopher Poole, went to work for Google.
Slowly, the administration was replaced by people who resembled the users.
Lifers.
Few of the founding members would go on the record, but one of the teens who was influential in defining Shang culture, an author himself, did recommend the book, The 20 Days of Turin.
In the 1975 Italian surrealist novel, a group of clever, clean-cut boys invent what they call a library, a place where anyone can contribute a piece of writing anonymously.
Inevitably, the anonymous contributions become more deranged.
People turn themselves inside out, spilling their inner desires into the library.
Their pain, their kinks, their secret desires, they post it all.
The result is that the town's youth, having drained away their passions into this common pool, become listless and subnambulistic.
No longer awake or alive in the real world, they meet late at night, in public squares, jostling each other, sometimes dying in bloody spectacles.
Ultimately, I have no idea why 4chan, of all places, is still a conduit for this type of misery.
But it does feel like the shootings succeed in spreading it elsewhere,
as we all feel alternately stung and benumbed by online life.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Thank you so much, Dale, for this work.
Where can people find you?
Where can they read your book?
I have a Twitter account that I rarely use because 4chan has, I think, taken all of the fun out of online life, but my Twitter account is just my name, Dale Buran, and my book is called It Came From Something Awful, and you can find it wherever they sell books.
Thanks again, Dale.
Yeah, thanks for having me on.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
You can go to patreon.com slash QAnon Anonymous and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second episode every week plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes.
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We're going to do the next four over the next couple weeks, and they're going to be really interesting stuff.
We'll be talking about the Cold War, and yeah, so I'm excited about that.
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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.
The saying is that B is the asshole of the internet, which is different than the Chan sites in general, because different Chan boards were significantly different.
Like, for example, there was Uh, C, which would be anime slash cute, and that would be largely, like, people being chill and nice.
There was, they also posted, like, Vocaloid stuff.
So, it was specifically B, which was the asshole of the internet.
B was, for lack of a better term, the, like, shock troops of the chan-raids.
And then I was...
I have to really think what the best analogy for I, which is the invasion boards, would be.
It would be maybe the fucking marines or like special forces of the chans, compared to B being the shock troops.
