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New York Times
4 days ago
- Lifestyle
- New York Times
The Apocalypse Is Here, and It's One Big Cult
CULTURE CREEP: Notes on the Pop Apocalypse, by Alice Bolin The modern age is overwhelming. There are so many things to look at, so many apps to track our calorie intake, our periods, what our friends and emotional-support celebrities are doing. There's so much suffering, so much trauma and so many men laundering myths of greatness in an effort to control our daily lives. How does an individual make sense of it all? According to Alice Bolin's new book of essays, 'Culture Creep: Notes on the Pop Apocalypse,' the answer is cult thinking. 'All the decisions are exhausting,' Bolin writes. 'Some part of us longs to cede control and have someone else tell us what to do.' And so we have, by and large, given in to lives 'shaped by groupthink and indoctrination.' In the process, we — every one of us, according to Bolin — have played right into the hands of a capitalist system looking to keep us complicit and wring our bank accounts dry. Bolin's first book of essays, 'Dead Girls,' explored the American obsession with victimized women. Now, Bolin turns her eye to the average American's social manipulation by industries that created everything from the 'startling regression' among women in the 1950s back into the confines of the home, to Gamergate and the rise of Donald Trump. In a world where our every data point is collected by tech giants, 'even our rage against the machine becomes just another way to feed the machine.' Bolin outlines the book's three main subjects as 'cults, corporate thought control and the end of the world as we know it,' and she covers these in seven roving essays all tied up in the Catch-22 of trying to exist as an individual in a hyperconnected age. Often these wanderings make it difficult for the reader to identify a central gathering point for Bolin's musings, though she manages to hit at some sharp truths. 'Foundering' excoriates the 'American mania for founder myths,' of which Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman-Fried and Elon Musk are only the most modern iterations. 'The narrative impulse comes from our own epic origin story,' she writes of the founding fathers, 'whose inspiring opening salvo, a poetic ode to all men being created equal, was maybe more marketing than actual game plan.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
BreakingNews.ie
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BreakingNews.ie
Explained: The demise of notorious online message board 4chan
While social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, now (X), Instagram, Reddit and Snapchat are still thriving despite being around for so long, the ugly duckling 4chan has seen a sharp decline since the 2010s. The online message board was initially a quaint place where people were able to chat about their interests and share images, but it almost inevitably became a den for more extreme content. Advertisement For every harmless post about anime, there were countless from far-right groups or involuntary celibate (incels) spreading hate online. How did it all start, and how did it get like this? Here is everything you need to know about 4chan's demise. When was 4chan created? Created in 2003 by American software developer Christopher 'moot' Poole. The idea was to recreate an English language version of the popular Japanese site Futaba Channel, also known as 2chan. That is a year before Facebook was created by Mark Zuckerberg and his roommates, and three years before Twitter came online. Advertisement It was primarily a place for people to talk and share things about anime, but it grew to become a haven for various subcultures. It was particularly influential in the creation of meme culturewith jokes often originating on 4chan and then spreading elsewhere on the internet. Much like Reddit, you can search for particular topics that interest you and get involved in discussions. The lack of moderation and the fact that users were anonymous, while good for users, ended up becoming 4chan's Achilles' heel. Why is it so controversial? Over the years, the messaging board has come under serious scrutiny for some of the content posted on the site. Advertisement In 2004, a board was created on the site which had child sexual abuse images posted on it. Seeing as the site's domain was hosted by GoDaddy, they suspended the domain name. Off the back of this, the site was down for six weeks in the summer of 2004 after PayPal suspended donations to the site, given the content that was allowed on it. While 4chan continues to operate to this day, it has never shaken its image of being a place where people were able to post obscene content on the site without much repercussions. It has also been seen as a haven for the far-right and the incel community with a some saying the managing moderator even attempted to use the site as a recruitment tool for the alt-right. Advertisement A screenshot from the /b/message board where people can only post images anonymously.. In January 2011, Poole announced the deletion of the /r9k/ ("ROBOT9000") and News boards, saying it had become devoted to racist discussions and no longer served its original purpose. In 2014, the site became embroiled in the Gamergate saga, which was a vendetta of harassment against women in gaming. It resulted in "bomb threats, death threats" against certain women. With all of this controversy, Poole would step down as the site's administrator on January 21st, 2015. He later announced that Hiroyuki Nishimura (former 2chan admin) had purchased the ownership rights to 4chan from him. Why has 4chan been in the news lately? A mere 14 days ago, according to posts circulating online, 4chan had been hacked. Advertisement Some of the posts said the hacker involved had revealed identifying details of the site's moderators to the public. The alleged hack first came to light when a defunct section of the site sprang back to life with the words "U GOT HACKED" emblazoned across the top, according to Wired magazine. Alon Gal, co-founder of Israeli cybercrime monitoring company Hudson Rock, said the claim of a hack "looks legit," citing the publicly circulating screenshots purporting to show 4chan's backend infrastructure. Ireland Irish incels: 'Their world view is their situation... Read More The publication TechCrunch cited an unnamed 4chan moderator as saying they had no reason to dispute the authenticity of the screenshots, and the site was only intermittently available on Tuesday. Messages sent to 4chan's press email went unreturned. One of the two dozen or so alleged moderators purportedly exposed in the hack wrote back using their 4chan email address to say that the site had released a "video statement." With the site currently only back up a day or so since the hack, it is unclear what will happen with the beleaguered messaging site, with many saying they should just keep offline for good. Additional reporting Reuters
WIRED
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- WIRED
4chan Is Dead. Its Toxic Legacy Is Everywhere
Apr 22, 2025 10:40 AM It's likely that there will never be a site like 4chan again. But everything now—from X and YouTube to global politics—seems to carry its toxic legacy. Photo-Illustration:My earliest memory of 4chan was sitting up late at night, typing its URL into my browser, and scrolling through a thread of LOL cat memes, which were brand new at the time. Back then a photoshop of a cat saying "I can haz cheezburger" or an image of an owl saying, "ORLY?" was, without question, the funniest thing my 14-year-old brain had ever laid eyes on. So much so, I woke my dad up from laughing too hard and had to tell him that I was scrolling through pictures of cats at 2 in the morning. Later, I would become intimately familiar with the site's much more nefarious tendencies. It's strange to look back at 4chan, apparently wiped off the internet entirely last week by hackers from a rival message board, and think about how many different websites it was over its more than two decades online. What began as a hub for internet culture and an anonymous waystation for the internet's anarchic true believers devolved over the years into a fan club for mass shooters, the central node of Gamergate, and the beating heart of far-right facism around the world. A virus that infected every facet of our lives, from the slang we use to the politicians we vote for. But the site itself had been frozen in amber since the Bush administration. It is likely that there will never be a site like 4chan again—which is, likely, a very good thing. But it had also essentially already succeeded at its core project: chewing up the world and spitting it back out in its own image. Everything—from X, to Facebook, to YouTube—now sort of feels like 4chan. Which makes you wonder why it even needed to still exist. "The novelty of a website devoted to shock and gore, and the rebelliousness inherent in it, dies when your opinions become the official policy of the world's five or so richest people and the government of the United States," The Onion CEO and former extremism reporter Ben Collins tells Wired . "Like any ostensibly nihilist cultural phenomenon, it inherently dies if that phenomenon itself becomes The Man." My first experience with the more toxic side of the site came several years after my LOL cat all-nighter, when I was in college. I was a big Tumblr user—all my friends were on there—and for about a year or so, our corner of the platform felt like an extension of the house parties we would throw. That cozy vibe came crashing down for me when I got doxxed the summer going into my senior year. Someone made a "hate blog" for me—one of the first times I felt the dark presence of an anonymous stranger's digital ire, and posted my phone number on 4chan. They played a prank that was popular on the site at the time, writing in a thread that if you called my phone number was for a GameStop store that had a copy of the ultra-rare video game Battletoads . I received no less than 250 phone calls over the next 48 hours asking if I had a copy of the game. Many of the 4chan users that called me mid- Battletoad attack left messages. I listened to all of them. A pattern quickly emerged: young men, clearly nervous to even leave a message, trying to harass a stranger for, seemingly, the hell of it. Those voice mails have never left me in the 15 years I've spent covering 4chan as a journalist. I had a front row seat to the way those timid men morphed into the violent, seething underbelly of the internet. The throbbing engine of reactionary hatred that resented everything and everyone simply because resentment was the only language its users knew how to speak. I traveled the world in the 2010s, tracing 4chan's impact on global democracy. I followed it to France, Germany, Japan, and Brazil, as 4chan's users became increasingly convinced that they could take over the planet through racist memes, far-right populism, and cyberbullying. And, in a way, they did. But the ubiquity of 4chan culture ended up being an oddly Pyrrhic victory for the site itself. Collins, like me, closely followed 4chan's rise in the 2010s from internet backwater to unofficial propaganda organ of the Trump administration. As he sees it, once Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, there was really no point to 4chan anymore. Why hide behind anonymity if a billionaire lets you post the same kind of extremist content under your real name, and even pays you for it? "[4chan's] user base just moved into a bigger ballpark and started immediately impacting American life and policy," Collins says. "Twitter became 4chan, then the 4chanified Twitter became the United States government. Its usefulness as an ammo dump in the culture war was diminished when they were saying things you would now hear every day on Twitter then six months later out of the mouths of an administration official." But understanding how 4chan went from the home of cat memes to a true internet bogeyman requires an understanding of how the site actually worked. Its features were often overlooked amid all the conversations about the site's political influence, but I'd argue they were equally, if not more important. 4chan was founded by Christopher "Moot" Poole when he was just 15. A regular user on slightly less anarchic comedy site Something Awful, Poole created a spin-off site for a message board there called 'Anime Death Tentacle Rape Whorehouse.' Poole was a fan of the Japanese message board 2chan, or Futaba Channel, and wanted to give Western anime fans their own version, so he poorly translated the site's code, and promoted his new site, 4chan, to Something Awful's anime community. Several core features were ported over in the process. 4chan users were anonymous, threads weren't permanent and would time out or "404" after a period of inactivity, and there were dozens of sub-boards you could post to. That unique combination of ephemerality, anonymity, and organized chaos proved to be a potent mix, immediately creating a race-to-the-bottom gutter culture unlike anything else on the web. The dark endpoint of the techno-utopianism that built the internet. On 4chan you were no one and nothing you did mattered unless it was so shocking, so repulsive, so hateful that someone else noticed and decided to screenshot it before it disappeared into the digital ether. "The iconic memes that came out of 4chan are because people took the time to save it, you know? And the fact that nobody predicted, nobody could predict or control what was saved or what wasn't saved, I think, is really, really fascinating," Cates Holderness, Tumblr's former head of editorial, tells WIRED . Still 4chan was more complicated than it looked from the outside. The site was organized into dozens of smaller sections, everything from comics to cooking to video games to, of course, pornography. Holderness says she learned to make bread during the pandemic thanks to 4chan's cooking board. (Full disclosure: I introduced Holderness to 4chan way back in 2012.) "When I switched to sourdough, I got really good pointers," she says. Holderness calls 4chan the internet's "Wild West" and says its demise this month felt appropriate in a way. The chaos that defined 4chan, both the good and the very, very bad, has largely been paved over by corporate platforms and their algorithms now. Our feeds deliver us content, we don't have to hunt for it. We don't have to sit in front of a computer refreshing a page to find out if we're getting a new cat meme or a new manifesto. The humanness of that era of the web, now that 4chan is gone, is likely never coming back. And we'll eventually find out if that's a good thing or a bad thing. "The snippets that we have of what 4chan was—it's all skewed,' Holderness says. 'There is no record. There's no record that can ever encapsulate what 4chan was."
Gulf News
21-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Gulf News
Anurag Kashyap apologised, but why is his daughter facing rape threats?
Filmmaker Anurag Kashyap may have sparked controversy with his recent remarks on caste while defending his upcoming film Phule, but it is the women around him—particularly his daughter—who are bearing the brunt of the backlash. As an FIR was filed against him in Jaipur for his social media post, the online mob turned its fury toward his family. His daughter, Aaliyah Kashyap, has reportedly received rape and death threats from faceless strangers—just for being his child. How is that fair? This piece is not about whether Kashyap was right or wrong. He has publicly apologised, clarified his intent, and even admitted that a particular line was taken out of context. And yet, instead of engaging with his words or actions, the rage has zeroed in on the women in his life. Because when the patriarchy feels threatened, it strikes where it hurts most—by targeting women. This isn't new. Deepika Padukone, one of India's most respected actors, was threatened with having her nose cut off and her head paraded in public for simply acting in Padmaavat. She, too, was used as a scapegoat for a film made by a man. If you thought this scourge of online misogyny was unique to India and Bollywood stars, think again. Women in the public eye across the globe face the same vile threats, especially when they dare to speak up—or even worse, when they stay silent but are associated with someone who does. British actress Emily Atack has spoken about receiving constant rape threats online. In the US, actor and activist Ashley Judd was bombarded with sexually violent abuse on Twitter. Feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian became a symbol of online hate when she was targeted during the Gamergate movement. Even Strictly Come Dancing contestant Amanda Abbington reported threats so severe, she said she no longer feels safe on public transport. This is not just an Indian problem. It's a global epidemic. A woman's visibility—especially if linked to dissent, art, or activism—makes her a target. And the internet, with all its anonymity, has become a breeding ground for this gendered violence. Whether it's Aaliyah Kashyap receiving rape threats for something her father said, or Deepika Padukone being vilified for playing a historical character, the question remains: why are women always the ones to pay the price? Until we collectively recognise and challenge this disturbing pattern, the cycle will continue. A man will speak, and a woman -- who may not even have anything to do with the controversy like Anurag's daughter Aliyah -- will suffer.
Yahoo
16-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
4chan Likely Gone Forever After Hackers Take Control
The post 4chan Likely Gone Forever After Hackers Take Control appeared first on Consequence. Finally, some potential good news. 4chan, the anonymous message board that's been the breeding ground for some of the worst shit on the internet, could be gone forever. On Tuesday, the notorious site began experiencing a series of outages following a major hack that purportedly exposed its source code. As reported by WIRED, a user on rival forum claimed responsibility for the attack, posting screenshots allegedly showing 4chan's backend structure and a list of alleged moderator email addresses. users then started doxxing the accounts included in the data leak. TechCrunch spoke to a 'janitor' (or junior moderator) whose email was listed in the leak, reporting that the person said they were 'confident' that the hack was 'all real.' Although the janitor said they were unhappy about the 'greater magnitude' of the leaked information compared to the past, they expressed greater concern about 4chan's future. 'I'd wager that the fact that 4chan was effectively taken over by a hacker(s) is probably 'worse' than screenshots, at least from the perspective of the site's continued operation,' the janitor said. WIRED spoke to UC Riverside computer science and engineering professor Emiliano De Cristofaro about the potential impact of the hack. 'It seems true that 4chan hasn't been properly maintained and patched for years, which might indicate that a hack would have definitely been a possibility,' he said. 'There might be some 'high profile' users exposed as moderators — traditionally, 4chan users hate them, so they might be targeted. It might be hard or at least painfully slow and costly for 4chan to recover from this, so we might really see the end of 4chan as we know it.' If that's the case, the final words posted on 4chan may be 'CHICKEN JOCKEY,' as The A.V. Club points out. Outside of launching the hacktivist group Anonymous, 4chan's greatest hits include 'The Fappening' celebrity nude photos leak, Gamergate, QAnon, and a connection to the racially motivated 2022 mass shooting in Buffalo. Good fucking riddance. Popular Posts Wife of Weezer Bassist Scott Shriner Shot By Police, Charged with Attempted Murder The 100 Best Guitarists of All Time Green Day Open Coachella With "American Idiot" Performance: "Not a Part of MAGA Agenda" Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne: Billy Corgan Was a "Raging A**hole" on Lollapalooza Reggie Watts Bummed Out by Coachella: "[Its] Soul Feels Increasingly Absent" A Night of Mayhem: Lady Gaga's Coachella Performance Is One for the History Books Subscribe to Consequence's email digest and get the latest breaking news in music, film, and television, tour updates, access to exclusive giveaways, and more straight to your inbox.
