Anonymity as Culture: Treatise
by David Auerbach
Alienation, irony, autonomy, discourse. On 4chan and Internet masquerade.
“Anonymity as Culture” was produced by Triple Canopy as part of its Research Work project area, supported in part by the Brown Foundation, Inc. of Houston, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York Council for the Humanities.
BEFORE FACEBOOK AND TWITTER BECAME avenues for advertising ourselves and our careers, before Internet dating became not only acceptable but preferable to the alternatives, before so much of our social and professional lives came to be conducted on the Web, social spaces of a different kind existed online. They were populated by people who, for whatever reason, found a sense of belonging in communities built around semi-anonymous, real-time, written discourse. Some were computer hobbyists and professionals, some were recluses, some were anarchists; all of them found their local communities wanting and were willing to sacrifice face-to-face interaction for a world of mostly unformatted text on a black screen.
Today, the most ubiquitous online communities are social networks where our identities are mostly known and mostly persistent. Each tweet, each status update, is branded with a persistent name or affiliation. The loudest voices on Twitter are celebrities. For Twitter and Facebook, the connection of users’ accounts to their real identities is part of facilitating long-term connections between people (and therefore to Twitter and Facebook and their advertisers).
Google’s recently unveiled social network, Google+, has followed Facebook in suspending accounts with suspected pseudonyms and demanding proof of identity.1
Yet for people who do not want to be known, do not want to be corralled into demographic groups, and do not want the hierarchy of prestige, other spaces persist. These are the sort of spaces that were the progenitors of social networks: newsgroups, chatrooms, online forums, and Internet Relay Chat channels. They offer a lack of accountability for what one says, a way to hide unappealing facts about oneself, and an instant escape hatch if things get unpleasant. They offer anonymity.
The growth of these anonymous spaces marks the first wide-scale collective gathering of those who are alienated, disaffected, voiceless, and just plain unsocialized. These are people whose tweets will not make the headlines. They do not wish to create a platform that enables them to be heard by the world; they want to shut out the world. Ironically, their popularity has exploded as part of the Web 2.0 boom, despite serving a fundamentally different purpose. The foundation of what I will call
1 Facebook VP Elliot Schrage told the New York Times, “Facebook has always been based on a real-name culture. We fundamentally believe this leads to greater accountability and a safer and more trusted environment for people who use the service.” While Google+ has introduced restricted support for pseudonyms, Google’s former CEO, Eric Schmidt, has described Google+ as an “identity service”: “But my general rule is people have a lot of free time and people on the Internet, there are people who do really really evil and wrong things on the Internet, and it would be useful if we had strong identity so we could weed them out. I’m not suggesting eliminating them, what I’m suggesting is if we knew their identity was accurate, we could rank them. Think of them like an identity rank.”
Lulz dubstep meme compilation.
“A-culture,” as opposed to the culture of Facebook, Twitter, and other mainstream social-networking sites, is the intentional disconnect between one’s real life and one’s online persona (or, frequently, personae). Online forums and chatrooms are by nature inward-looking, and the lack of identity—much less celebrity—makes it difficult for the outside world to address them.
A-culture emerged only with the ubiquity of the Internet, though it had antecedents in hacker and geek circles of the 1980s and ’90s. Its members were generally young, many of them teenagers, many of them alienated from the cultural
mainstream, adolescent or otherwise. But the growth of computer literacy and Internet accessibility increased diversity. The computer geeks of the ’90s are now middle-aged and have seen an influx of science-fiction and anime fans young and old, many of them women. Though frequently denigrated as homophobic, A-culture also possesses a significant queer voice.
By the mid-2000s, the locus for this sort of culture was the 4chan discussion boards, a massive gathering of self-declared misfits that today attracts more than ten million unique visitors each month and garners one million posts each day. Though 4chan was founded as a forum for discussing anime, it soon attracted geeks of all stripes, who charted their enthusiasms, argued, and trolled one another at an amazingly fast pace. The result was a generation of self-perpetuating memes such as Goatse, Boxxy, All Your Base Are Belong to Us, and LOLcats—the mythos of A-culture, constantly being created and documented. Though occasionally memes like LOLcats register in the popular consciousness, the role they play within A-culture is distinct: They serve to reify a shared and progressive sense of culture and belonging that trumps differences among individuals.
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Not Wikipedia.
Many of the smaller, self-contained splinter groups that have sprung from the undifferentiated mass of online forums explicitly seek to document, celebrate, and perpetuate A-culture. The wiki Encyclopædia Dramatica, which began in 2004 (and in 2011 was taken down by its creator, only to be revived elsewhere), was meant to be a monument to the transient threads of 4chan and other boards. The Wikipedia-like site was full of profanity and slurs against any and all groups, and proudly distilled the most misanthropic and antisocial aspects of A-culture into concentrated shots of satiric hatred. The membership of Encyclopædia Dramatica were fiercely protective of
its culture:
do you honesty think we went to ED for memes? ED was our history. the history of our internet, not those fags at facebook who play farmville. it was the greatest archive of our world outside of this bullshit world we have no control over. it was a place where we can go and read about shit that we find entertaining and sometimes informative in a fucked up way that we love. if you want memes go to KYM [KnowYourMeme], if you want what the internet really is go to ED.
—commenter “Gofuckyourself” on
Geekosystem, talking about the then-
dead Encyclopædia Dramatica, 2011
The political outgrowths of this movement have attracted the most attention: hacker collective Anonymous, anarcho-libertarian groups like LulzSec and Antisec. The loosely activist arm of A-culture made headlines with its 2008 attacks on the Church of Scientology, which had threatened to sue websites posting a leaked church promotional video starring Tom Cruise. Fiercely protective of the sovereignty of what they see as their domain,
A-culture pranked and hacked the church repeatedly and ruthlessly. Additional political actions, ranging from campaigns in defense of WikiLeaks to hacking Syria’s Ministry of Defense website to messaging on behalf of Occupy Wall Street, have followed with the same loose orientation: semi-anarchist, anti-censorship, and anti-interference. (For more on Anonymous and the politicization of A-culture, see Gabriella Coleman’s “Our Weirdness Is Free,” also published in this issue of Triple Canopy.)
This activism, however various, is fundamentally in line with the self-willed autonomy of A-culture. The participants want to be—and, increasingly, are expressing an interest in nonparticipants’ being—left alone and allowed to thrive, and they want the principles of the culture they’ve created to be defended; anger at censorious forces, from Sony to the Syrian government, has led to increasing political mobilization, albeit often haphazardly.
Here, though, I want to examine what underlies the politics and the memes: the rhetorical and philological characteristics of A-culture. The nature of social interactions taking place on message boards and online forums is different from any
Anonymous Scientology protest, 2008.
other form of communication, owing to the uniquely real-time, multiparticipant nature of the written discourse. The social-libertarian ethos and the surplus of obscenity are partly products of the medium, not just of the participants. Too little attention has been paid to this symbiotic evolution of A-culture and the new mediums of online communication it employs. There has never before been a space in which:
1. Discourse is primarily written rather than
spoken.
2. Participants are mostly if not totally
anonymous.
3. Interactions are evanescent,
disappearing within hours, or minutes.
These are not incidental features of A-culture. They are fundamental to the way in which the culture regulates itself and its members interact. And so rather than analyze the factors that lead people to choose to be anonymous, I want to ask what effect being anonymous has on interactions in these forums.
In 1991, anarchist writer Hakim Bey wrote of the “Temporary Autonomous Zone,” a space in which people would be freed from structures of social control. Based on the then-small worlds of computer bulletin-board systems and other hobbyist groups, Bey’s idea of the TAZ strikingly anticipates what A-culture has come to provide: a semi-autonomous safe space for people who otherwise are enmeshed in the majority culture. Bey wrote:
In the face of contemporary pecksniffian anaesthesia we'll erect a whole gallery of forebears, heros who carried on the struggle against bad consciousness but still knew how to party, a genial gene pool,
a rare and difficult category to define, great minds not just for Truth but for the truth of pleasure, serious but not sober, whose sunny disposition makes them not sluggish but sharp, brilliant but not tormented. Imagine a Nietzsche with good digestion. Not the tepid Epicureans nor the bloated Sybarites. Sort of a spiritual hedonism, an actual Path of Pleasure, vision of a good life which is both noble and possible, rooted in a sense of the magnificent over-abundance of reality.
Yet while Bey may have anticipated the form of the spaces provided by A-culture, he was mistaken about the content. The realization of the TAZ is considerably less idyllic than Bey’s Dionysian paradise: Masquerade is an integral part of social interaction; suspicion, pranking, and unreality are pervasive; people join groups without revealing any more about themselves than they wish. A-culture has different rules.
From “Homosexuality: A Chatroom Debate (IRC),” in “Anonymity as Culture: Case Studies”
woofertweeter: yeah i don't think gay people deserve to live either
woofertweeter: ...so how was your weekend
DukePhillips: XD
Mastermind: lol...
DreamPolice: And what do you have against gays? You should be happy WE exist.
Mastermind: how is it gay for a girl to put a dildo into her anus
woofertweeter: that wasn't an invitation to talk about your sexual activity
DreamPolice: If I were straight, i'd see it this way.
woofertweeter: you're not, bro
Mastermind: homophobic person....
DreamPolice: If MEN... date OTHER MEN... that means... LESS MEN, are fighting for WOMEN.
woofertweeter: Yeah. That's bad.
woofertweeter: Competition is necessary.
Mastermind: lol
DannoWilliams: the homosexual is right
DreamPolice: I still don't understand why people have problems with gays.
Mastermind: lol i never claimed to support gay's i just got nothing agaisnt them aslong as they stay the f*ck away from me
DreamPolice: I'm glad a lot of my generation are open minded.
woofertweeter: yeah, from your standpoint, sure, there's nothing wrong with letting them be.
ultramint: ...wtfbbq?
What Is A-Culture?
“A” stands for many things:
- accelerated
- adolescent
- aggregation
- alias
- anarchy
- anonymous
- anti-
- arbitrary
- arch
- asshole
- attack
- audacity
- autonomous
- auto-
Who participates in A-culture? Many already spend a great amount of time on computers: programmers, hackers, gamers, and other professionals or enthusiasts. Others seek the benefits of anonymity: the ability to antagonize, prank, and generally act out without facing the consequences, without those actions being attached to one’s real-life identity. Then there is a crucial third category, which perhaps drives
A-culture more than computers or trolling. It is best summed up by the Japanese word otaku.
Otaku was originally applied, with negative connotations, to people whose obsessive, fanlike interests in geeky things like video games, anime and manga, computers, comic books, science fiction—but really in anything, including sports, cars, bodybuilding, guns—are such that they become a distraction from “real life.” The term is associated with shut-ins, the unemployed, and, generally, losers:
Otaku come in many flavors, but one thing can be said for each and every one of them. They've each staked out their own favorite thing, and they obsess over it relentlessly. Regardless of other intelligence, an otaku will have an obsessive, unhealthy, and almost encyclopedic knowledge of their chosen topic.
—TV Tropes, 2012
In 1991, cult anime studio Gainax made the half-animated, half-documentary Otaku no Video, which featured a group of anime artists declaring themselves to be obsessive, socially inept fans of
Stills from Otaku no Video, 1991.
the genre, ironically validating the shame and pride of being an otaku. “Are we really that depressing? Are we really that weird?” one artist asks. “Is it a crime to love anime or SFX movies? Why should it be a reason to set us apart? If you're into playing tennis, that's just fine and dandy, but if you watch anime, you're weird? Why?! I quit! No more job-hunting for me! If otaku are going to be discriminated against, then so be it. I'm gonna become a total otaku! I'm gonna be not just an Otaku but the Otaku of otaku … Ota-king!”2
While the word otaku carries stigma, questions of “reclaiming” it are paradoxical, because with otaku stigma and pride are inseparable. To be an otaku is to willfully identify as rejected and alienated. Otaku-like communities began when personal computers and modems first appeared on the consumer marketplace in the 1980s, but did not grow significantly until Internet access became widespread in the '90s. Large-scale precursors to A-culture sprang up: hacker boards like SlashDot and kuro5hin, and Usenet groups like alt.2600, populated not only by computer professionals but by amateurs, troublemakers, and freaks. A fast-moving discourse evolved, with people fighting
2 Otaku no Video also sounds notes of sexual fetishism that would become extremely common in Gainax productions and anime genrally—such fetishism being an otaku approach to sexuality.
viciously in flame wars over the slightest matters; pranking was a constant pastime. The more antisocial aspects of this behavior—willful, disingenuous provocation and malicious deceit—became known as trolling:
Are you familiar with fishing? Trolling is where you set your fishing lines in the water and then slowly go back and forth dragging the bait and hoping for a bite. Trolling on the Net is the same concept—someone baits a post and then waits for the bite on the line and then enjoys the ensuing fight.
—post by on
wedding newsgroup, 1995, as quoted
in Peter Kollock and Marc Smith,
Communities in Cyberspace, 1999
Beyond provocation, early trolling entailed tricks like gulling SlashDot users into clicking on a seemingly innocuous link that would in fact lead to a shock site like Goatse.3 SlashDot moderators took increasingly strident countermeasures to prevent such trolling, which were circumvented by even more complex tricks. The escalating fights and
3 This seminal shock site contains, in the words of Wikipedia, a picture of “a naked man stretching his anus with both hands, to approximately the width of his hand.”
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Otaku room, via rockshaman.
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The Simpsonzu, by spacecoyote.
ridicule reinforced Godwin’s Law, coined by the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Mike Godwin in 1990: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1 (100%).”
Concurrently, sites like LiveJournal and deviantArt became gathering places for anime and science-fiction fans. On these sites, participants frequently used pseudonyms or otherwise veiled their identities, which allowed them to build reputations and personal linkages based solely around their online presence. DeviantArt focused on sharing fan artwork; LiveJournal differed from other blog communities in emphasizing social networking long before anywhere else did.4 But all of these sites were closely focused on interests rather than the personalities of users, which links them to otaku and has come to distinguish A-culture from mainstream social networks like Facebook. A-culture participants sublimate their social selves to transient groups based on their interests.