EPIC WIN FOR ANONYMOUS (11 page)

Tim Hwang, who went on to found the meme-centric ROFLCon convention, admits Rotten’s peculiar appeal:

In middle school, we were spending a lot of time online. And a big part of the attraction of the Internet is finding really nasty things to send to your friends. So, at the time we were passing around a lot of Rotten links.

For a wide swath of my generation, Rotten was a gateway drug that would eventually introduce users to places like 4chan. More importantly, Rotten served as an early whipping boy for censorship crusaders. In 1997, the Rotten staff unleashed a manifesto that would shape the way people approached censorship on the web:

The definition of obscenity, according to the Supreme Court and known informally as the Miller test, is:

• must appeal to the prurient interest of the average person,
  
• must describe sexual conduct in a way that is “patently offensive” to community standards, and
  
• when taken as a whole, it “must lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”
  

Certain people (including parents and schoolteachers) have complained to us and stated that rotten.com should not be “allowed” on the net, since children can view images on our site.

One US schoolteacher wrote us a very angry email that complained some of her students had bookmarked images on this site, that our site shouldn’t be on the net, and other claptrap.

This is our response. The net is not a babysitter! Children should not be roaming the Internet unsupervised any more than they should be roaming the streets of New York City unsupervised.

We cannot dumb the Internet down to the level of playground. Rotten dot com serves as a beacon to demonstrate that censorship of the Internet is impractical, unethical, and wrong. To censor this site, it is necessary to censor medical texts, history texts, evidence rooms, courtrooms, art museums, libraries, and other sources of information vital to functioning of free society.

Nearly all of the images which we have online are not even prurient, and would thus not fall under any definition of obscenity. Any images which we have of a sexual nature are in a context which render them far from obscene, in any United States jurisdiction. Some of the images may be offensive, but that has never been a crime. Life is sometimes offensive. You have to expect that.

The images we find most obscene are those of book burnings.

In 2001 the Rotten staff launched The Gaping Maw, which offered biting cultural commentary and satire, like a bizarre, adults-only
Mad
magazine. Because The Gaping Maw was hosted on Rotten, a site that was routinely threatened with lawsuits, its writers could get away with just about anything, providing some of the freshest commentary on the web.

A similarly rude site called Stile Project was founded in 1998 by a teenager named Jonathan Biderman. In 2001, it gained notoriety for hosting a video of a kitten being killed and prepared for a meal. PETA naturally flipped out and attempted to shut down the site. Strangely enough, Stile Project had been nominated for a Webby award the year before. Stile warned, “This is quite possible [sic] the single most offensive thing I have ever seen” in the video’s description; however, he felt the video exposed people’s hypocrisy toward their food.

To us it seems like the ultimate taboo. How could those Godless Asians do such a thing to such a beautiful creature? Well, I’m sure Indians wonder the same thing about us, but you don’t see North Americans shedding a tear every time a cow is slaughtered. . . . When’s the last time you cried over a Big Mac?

I do not condone animal abuse, and I view the video more as an educational tool than one of shock value. For us to say it is wrong, it would just make us all hypocrites since most of us eat meat. I never get hate mail when posting images of dead people . . .

Rotten and Stile represent two sites that were built upon a larger web trend of gross-out content. When I was a freshman in college, I remember someone telling me to visit lemonparty.org (Don’t do it). The URL of course leads to another shock site, this time a photo of three elderly gentlemen tangled in bed. (And in the last US presidential election, 4chan trolls posted signs on telephone poles reading, “Politics left you bitter? lemonparty.org.” Another sign read, “Sick of gas prices? www.lemonparty.org.”)

For many, the experience of Internet shock sites began with goatse, a notoriously repulsive image that is considered the king of shock sites. It features a hirsute gentleman bending over and stretching his anus wider than you’d think was humanly possible. The image was originally hosted at goatse.cx (as in goat sex). The link to goatse.cx was passed around by giggling teen boys, mostly, and used to troll unsuspecting browsers.

In 2010, a group of trollish hackers associated with Encyclopedia Dramatica, a wiki site focusing on 4chan culture, exposed a flaw in AT&T’s security, revealing the email addresses of iPad users. They called themselves Goatse Security (themselves an offshoot of the Gay Nigger Association of America troll collective). Their logo was a cartoonish parody of the goatse shock image, and their motto was “Gaping Holes Exposed.”

Nerd News: Slashdot & Metafilter

Slashdot founder Rob Malda, aka “Commander Taco,” says that he created Slashdot because he missed the high-minded technical community he enjoyed in the BBS era that discussed the sort of “news for nerds, stuff that matters” that interested him.

In 1997, Slashdot offered something new: user-submitted stories. Each story became its own discussion thread. The site became so popular that when a story was linked by Slashdot, the site’s host would often buckle under the weight of all the traffic. This phenomenon became known as the Slashdot Effect. This phenomenon is not unique to Slashdot, but Slashdot was one of the first to be routinely recognized as a server killer. Other sites can be
farked
, for example, or undergo the Digg Effect, demonstrating the power that content aggregators wield.

Malda says that Slashdot developed its own unique memetic culture almost instantly. He remembers lots of gross-out memes popping up in addition to stuff from the
Star Wars
prequels, which were hugely popular during Slashdot’s early years. I asked him if there was a specific moment when he realized that memes were a thing. He replied, “Long before I heard the word, that’s for sure.” Many of Slashdot’s memes deal with ultra geeky science and computing puns.

Malda claims that since he started Slashdot, the corporations have taken over, our rights are on the decline, and our privacy is gone. Back in the early days it was chaotic, but free. He recognizes the value in anonymity, and feels that there’s something special about 4chan’s community.

I love that they interact anonymously. Slashdot was similarly completely anonymous for the first year of our existence, and still today we allow anyone to post without any identifying information whatsoever.

I think a registered pseudonym is useful because it gives you continuity if not accountability. You might not know that “CmdrTaco” is actually a dude named Rob, but on Slashdot at least, you know that each time you see a post with that name attached, you know it’s the same guy. I felt for Slashdot that it was important to provide that for people that wanted it. I don’t think that creates a sense of “personal responsibility” in any sort of globalized sense, but it allows you to build a reputation and history which might be important if you want to be taken seriously.

Interestingly, anonymous posters on Slashdot are jokingly labeled “Anonymous Coward.”

Matt Haughey was a big fan of Slashdot, but he wasn’t crazy about the interface. Slashdot had editors that picked from submitted stories. Matt was looking for something more democratic, so he created MetaFilter, a community where anyone’s story could land on the front page.

The community blog became most notable for its Ask Metafilter section, which was an early example of information crowd-sourcing. You could ask an obscure question and, due to the size and quality of the community, sometimes get surprisingly informed answers. This kind of querying would influence sites like Yahoo Answers, Quora, Reddit, and, to an extent, even 4chan.

According to Haughey, MetaFilter also developed its own memespeak pretty early on.

Probably in the first year, 2000 or so, I noticed people shouting “double post!” to something they’d seen before became a sort of game for people, where they wanted to be first to notice something was old and demonstrate their expertise at MetaFilter. There was also this early meme where a post that was really awful or boring would elicit a response of someone saying “I really like pancakes” and then everyone would talk about pancakes and we sort of had a pancakes-as-mascot thing for a while.

My favorite meme is the current one where someone overanalyzes something at MetaFilter, people tell them they are “bean-plating” which started with one user poking fun at another by saying “HI I’M ON METAFILTER AND I COULD OVERTHINK A PLATE OF BEANS.”

MetaFilter users were known for being creative smarty-pantses, which was reinforced by a simple decision by Haughey to charge users $5 to participate for life. It’s a modest fee, but according to Haughey it worked wonders in keeping out trolls and casual passersby who would contribute nothing of value to the conversation.

Haughey is fascinated by 4chan, especially how it produces interesting memes “from a place of total fuck-off anonymity.” Like most online communities, MetaFilter asks its users to post under usernames, but Matt recognizes the value in namelessness.

I do appreciate moot’s point about how anonymity lets you be ok with failing, while a username feels more like “everything is on your permanent record” and people might be afraid to ever try something. I’m a big fan of failure and I think everyone should be terrible at everything they love for the first year or so they do it. I guess I’d rather see a world where everyone has a username and a permanent record and we all have these embarrassing beginnings where we openly failed again and again before we started to figure things out.

Slashdot and Metafilter were the first big content aggregators, and their elegant feature sets have had a massive impact on the way all media now behaves on the web. Long before Digg and Reddit came along, Slashdot and MetaFilter provided users with a way to define what their news would look like. This democratization of the media has influenced not only the way news is consumed, but how it is formed, framed, and distributed.

But what about all the news for nerds that
doesn’t
matter? What if it’s not news, but . . . something else?

“It’s Not News. It’s Fark”

In 1999, Drew Curtis unleashed Fark (a purposefully misspelled euphemism for a word you can probably guess), an offbeat news aggregator that would become a meme creation powerhouse. The formula was simple: Fark’s community submitted articles to the site’s admins, who then green-lighted the best ones for inclusion in the site’s news feed. Each news story had an accompanying discussion thread that allowed the users to engage in witty banter on very specific, immediate topics.

Before Fark, Curtis often read news stories on the web and emailed the best ones to his friends, which he found to be a cumbersome way to share and discuss information. So he created Fark, allowing millions to share what essentially amounted to a giant global “News of the Weird” section.

Curtis was attending college in Iowa but living in Kentucky during the early ’90s. A friend advised him to check out email, a cheap way to circumvent expensive phone calls to campus. So he got an account and started using email to correspond with his contacts in the Midwest. He remembers a conversation with some friends:

I asked, “What is the Internet good for other than chat and text games?” They couldn’t think of anything. Even porn wasn’t doing all that great. Conventional wisdom was free porn sites had no chance of working because the minute people found out about them they crashed under the traffic.

Because every news story provided a comment thread full of geeks trying to outwit each other, Fark was an early breeding ground for Internet memes. The comment fields allowed for images, so clever Photoshops and wordplay abounded. One early meme was “Still no cure for cancer,” which would append stories dealing with scientific advances in obscure, seemingly useless fields of interest.

Curtis remembers when he first became acquainted with the term
meme
, recalling the development of Memepool in 1999 and rattling off some older memes that dried up long ago, such as Troops and I Kiss You. “It’s how I know I’m old,” he says. One meme that sticks out most in Drew’s mind is the legendary All Your Base Are Belong to Us, a garbled bit of Engrish (i.e., badly translated Japanese often found in video games) spoken by a villain from an old coin-operated arcade game called
Zero Wing
. The phrase took off on Something Awful and was further popularized by Fark. It eventually became a popular taunt in online gaming, a way to tell your opponent that they’d just been
pwned
. (This was another goof from video game land: in the frenetic pace of online play, people wishing to taunt their opponents with “hahaha owned,” as in “You’ve been owned,” easily made the mistake of typing
pwned
instead, as the
p
and
o
keys are adjacent on most keyboards.) Today there are thousands of photoshopped All Your Base images, and even T-shirts. It was one of the first image memes to be endlessly remixed.