I'm around the same age as moot and lied about my age to sign up for the SA forums, where I first heard about 4chan. It always tickles me pink when people reminisce about the "old internet" because what I remember is way worse.

I suspect there's a tendency for anything with a public, fully anonymous (rather than pseudonymous) format to eventually become something some people use for the worst things imaginable.

For example, people used to write bomb threats and racial slurs on bathroom stall walls at my middle school. Anonymous imageboards are kind of the global version of a public bathroom stall wall. Sometimes there are funny or uplifting things on it, and sometimes the polar opposite.

This theory was described most succinctly here IMHO: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19

I'd be interested in pointers to prior art of things which started asinine, and wound up literally deadly.

> I haven't bothered with 4chan for a decade now, but it definitely tickles me to see something so purely moronic now so heavily politicised and even feared.

"tickles"

> I'd be interested in pointers to prior art of things which started asinine, and wound up literally deadly.

I've had a running interest for years in deaths caused by bad software design. "Bad design" doesn't necessarily mean bugs (although in rare cases it can). More often, it means building a system without thinking through the real world consequences, or hewing to an unconfirmed, biased view of how it "should" act in the real world. The 737 Max software that tried to deduce an angle of attack with too few redundant measurements, and discarding unlikely results, is an obvious example of programmer hubris. Facebook's news feed is another example of the failure to consider how individual secondary effects from an interface can engender massively catastrophic events at scale.

Cryptocurrency also started asinine, and is becoming increasingly deadly, as it facilitates ransomware attacks on hospitals and infrastructure. Any car manufacturer claiming to be "FSD" right now also meets the definition.

Whenever stories warn us about the dangers of technology, from Daedalus to the Terminator, they're really warning us about hubris. When tinkerers make machines or programmers write code based on their idea of how things should go, or how they're expected to go, based on their personal prior experience or fondest wishes, that's usually when shit goes off the rails.

If you've collected any links or other resources on this topic I'd love to learn more. I'm interested in this and what we can do about it.

> I'd be interested in pointers to prior art of things which started asinine, and wound up literally deadly.

I first heard 4chan mentioned in conversation around 2005 or so. It was a remarkably different cultural phenomenon then, as everyone has noted. I had been a regular reader of TOTSE's BBS long before 4chan emerged. TOTSE fits your description of a forum with humble beginnings in the 80s BBS counterculture, which ended up appealing exclusively to antisocial pursuits.

>militant commitment to stupidity

Indeed, I would say that even now the extant textboard and irc users are still attempting to push the boundaries of sophisticated stupidity and they have become experts at it.

I've been wondering what's been going thru moots mind from 2015-now regarding it.

Perhaps related, on this page musing about Wikipedia (https://shii.bibanon.org/shii.org/knows/Wikipedia.html): "It is founded on the unfortunate belief that people will always do good things and be nice to each other, and after a few spectacular years that everyone involved will remember, it falls apart in a miserable, unhappy mess, which everyone will later insist they had no hand in."

That belief isn't unfortunate - technological optimism or what Wired once called "extropianism" is just the same as every other kind of utopian fantasy. And when you're young, and kind, and full of love, and think the world can be fixed if only everyone had the tools and the motivation to express their best selves, it's seductive. And it should be. Because if teenagers and twentysomethings were as cynical and resigned as the rest of us, we'd be doomed. Every generation architects some new utopian paradigm, and has to go through its own process of disillusionment as they watch the mob tear it limb from limb. Ultimately, the best you can hope for is that people learn from history and don't repeat the same mistakes.

But that is exactly what happens: Human civilization is a generational loop of genocide and treachery. All of these wonderful things we enjoy exist in spite of everything we are.

Yeah, but I see some incremental progress. Legal systems, institutions, human rights, technology that alleviates misery (as opposed to gadgetry, or worse, tech that enalaves people). It's definitely been two steps forward and one step back. Unfortunately, we seem to have entered the back step. Friend said to me the other day "we peaked so hard in the early 90s". Hard to argue with that.

I think 4chan managed to distance themselves quite a bit from the worst of it - that went to 8chan, Gab, etc.

That's true, and moot left right before things took their major turn (possibly precipitated by Gamergate, which moot soon banned all discussion of; he left about 6 months later), but 4chan /pol/ is still more extremist than even Stormfront, and nearly as uniform in terms of beliefs. It's not quite as bad as 8chan /pol/, but 8chan /pol/ is as bad as or perhaps even more extreme than Nazi Germany's actual "Der Stürmer", and is where a lot of the far-right mass shooters have posted.

Other boards have varying concentrations of /pol/ injected, with /mu/ ("Music") having a spread of far-left, left-leaning, right-leaning, and far-right posters, and /tv/ ("TV / Movies") and /biz/ ("Business / Finance", but mostly just cryptocurrency gambling/scams) being almost exclusively right-leaning, and mostly far-right.

Low-censorship forums tend to be 90% idiocy, 10% really interesting and accurate takes on reality that are suppressed elsewhere. Often they also have a lot of brilliant humor. So I would not say that they are purely idiotic, just largely idiotic. To me it is often worth it to dig through the idiocy in search of the awesome content.

> militant commitment to stupidity

hah

Memes have been weaponized in the modern political era. Anecdotal, of course, but I have read interviews with Qanon/hard core Trump folks and a lot of them started with pretty neutral or even liberal views that shifted over time. Many of them attributes the red pill and right wing memes as a contributing factor to their radicalization. Despite your labeling it stupid and moronic these forums do have the power to shift political narratives. I’m not passing judgement on these forums, but I no longer view them as harmless toys. Real people are shaping their world views on these forums and they are having a noticeable impact in the world.

Young people can be very bored and lazy and are very impressionable at the time in their lives when they may end up on these counter culture style forums.

Yeah nah. I think all that radicalisation is more easily explained by America being a terrible country full of miserable people. I thought (re)creating /pol/ was a bad move at the time, but it's very out of touch to blame some naughty anime website for the mess your country is in.

I think dismissing the negative effects so out of hand is silly. Ideas have power. You can’t hand wave things away that easily. I’m not blaming 4chan and sites like it either, it’s more of a trend across the entire Internet. The forums are just part of the story. I am amused, but not surprised, a former chan user would casually dismiss such a correlation. It is at least an idea worth exploring.