4chan's moot takes pro-anonymity to TED 2010 | Hacker News Reader

4chan's moot takes pro-anonymity to TED 2010

arstechnica.com

67 pointsstumm42 comments

Ahh, 4chan.

I don't think 4chan, and /b/ in particular, get enough credit for being the... unique sociological artifact that they are.

There are many that extoll the virtue of "free speech", but how many are able to gaze unflinching at its unrestrained exercise? The teeming, faceless horde that is 4chan's population is perhaps the truest, purest exemplar of the free exchange of ideas; unshackled from the restraints of purpose, propriety, coherence, and even (at times, on /b/, at least until the moderators notice) legality.

It is likely impossible, in the course of normal social situations, to escape certain limitations; be they social, cultural, or even biological. Reputations are built or destroyed, relationships formed, a complex and pervasive network of interconnections. A person may be taller than you, or shorter; younger, or older; attractive or ugly; hesitant or confident; wealthy or poor; or any of countless factors that subtly, deeply, and inevitably color the way people interact.

But in an environment like 4chan, all that is stripped away. No status games, no authority, no obligations, no expectations. What you say one minute matters not at all the next, crude obscenity and pearls of wisdom alike slipping into the seething, aimless morass. Cloaked in anonymity, where even the flimsy identity of a pseudonym is cause for mockery, what emerges is a shocking sort of honesty. Revolting, yet oddly beautiful; an ever-shifting, ephemeral monument to every embarrassing thought, guilty pleasure, squelched impulse and repressed desire--in short, an expression of humanity, in basest form.

...well, either that, or it's just about porn and cat macros. I'm not entirely sure.

Some credit may be due to Shii, who was the admin on 4chan who implemented FORCED_ANON on /b/. See: http://shii.org/knows/Shii

Some of his thoughts and findings on anonymity can be found here:

http://shii.org/knows/Anonymous

http://blog.topix.com/archives/000106.html

http://wakaba.c3.cx/shii/

Moot disagrees.

Can you provide more detail?

I showed him the comment and he gave a longer response that I don't remember entirely. But basically it has more to do with the original cloned software.

4chan is one of the purest and most coherent exemplars of the philosophy of Absurdism I've ever seen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdism

Yes, somewhere between that and an unselfconscious Dadaism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada

>But in an environment like 4chan, all that is stripped away. No status games, no authority, no obligations, no expectations.

You know I here that one a lot, but really /b is a perfectly addictive status game. There are right and wrong responses to a situation, which you only learn if you hang out for a bit. Get things right you get praised, get them wrong you get flamed. The anonymity lets you take the praise to heart and basically ignore the flame. It's like tetris or peggle, when you fail you can blame it on the random nature of the game, but when you do well you can claim it was skill. /b is absolutely FULL of status games, obligations and expectations. What emerges is a game of one ups man ship and me too isms played 24/7 that has no bearing on honesty or the participants actual thoughts.

I second that.

It always struck me that 4chan is not the most positive example of what happens when an unlimited number of people are given unlimited anonymity.

Sure, 4chan was there for Anonymous, which engages in some political activity. But 4chan also spawns a massive amount of graffiti, grossness, shock images, juvenelia, etc. Most people don't think of 4chan as the brave home of political protesters; they think of it as in immature dumping ground for memes and shock porn.

If the goal is really to show the importance of anonymity online, a protester from Iran or Wikileaks would be taken far more seriously. Sending somebody from 4chan will just focus attention on the many ways that anonymity is abused.

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." - H.L. Mencken

I would agree that it's not the most wholeheartedly positive example, but I think it's one of the most honest examples in a sense if you really want to evaluate anonymity on the internet in context and show the bad with the good.

Excellent Mencken quote. Another relevant one: "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth." --Oscar Wilde

I've sometimes wondered what Mencken would have thought of the internet.

Especially given that large parts of his life could be plausibly summarized by "he did it for the lulz".

I think the messiness and multifaceted nature of 4chan is one of its most interesting features. Even a cursory look reveals that it's shockingly horrible, mind-numbingly mundane, and a surprising force for good, all at the same time.

To me, that makes it deeply human in a way that wikileaks and political protesters are not. They're largely one-sided, at least in their public appearances. The kind of honesty that seems to come out at 4chan is interesting, and possibly a good thing. If moot is right, that honesty depends on anonymity, and that seems worth talking about.

I was trying to think of a good meatspace analog to 4chan, and the closest seems to be basically "bar conversations", which is an interesting comparison. They're not anonymous in the same way, but they have some of the same expectation of privacy, in that you aren't broadcasting everything you say to the world / your boss / your parents with your name attached, which allows for more honesty.

Unfortunately not full honesty. It's easier to complain about embarrassing problems with internet anonymity than it is to complain about the same things to someone at bar. There are something that will be hard to say so someone else face-to-face whether or not they are a complete stranger.

Bar conversations are probably more along the lines of complaining about people without your 'real' thoughts about them getting back to them. Or dropping a persona that you put up for certain people (and keep up with others just so that you don't ruin the charade).

The nice thing about bar conversations is that in almost all instances, the only pictures are the ones a raconteur paints in your mind.

Much easier to purge from one's mind if desired.

You should see my cellphone wallpaper.

I think it's pretty eye opening. These people are anonymous, i.e. far away from societal pressure and judgement, and so their statements are much more likely to be exactly what they think. Think about it. These people are expressing themselves without any restraint, which leads to the question: "Do the majority of people actually think these things?" Does your average serious boss or political leader think the "unthinkable" along with these people? Is this "grossness and juvenelia" actually very common and our interpersonal facades are far from sincere?

One true test of the 1st Amendment was the prosecution of Larry Flynt and Hustler Magazine. It pretty much demolished the obscenity exception to the right to freedom of speech. Pornography was a no-no back then, but now it's much more commonly accepted. This situation looks exactly the same. Sure, it's the "asshole of the internet" for some, but it's as much of a poster child as Hustler, and a test of free speech if there ever is one.

> These people are anonymous, i.e. far away from societal pressure and judgement, and so their statements are much more likely to be exactly what they think.

Not necessarily. There are plenty of people that say things just to piss off others, things that they might not actually believe themselves (i.e. 'trolls trolling trolls trolling trolls).

And those that follow the general trend, just for fun or a sense of belonging or whatever else currently motivates them.

an immature dumping ground for memes and shock porn

Would you mind if I used this as the tagline for my new blog?

There's more to 4chan than /b/.

For example http://dis.4chan.org/prog/

It's true. They recently launched boards for Literature, News, International, Science & Math. But /b/ is by far the most, how you say, "impactful" of the boards, at least in terms of attention from the wider Internet community.

And yeah, sad to say, if you only looked at /b/, you'd think that anonymity led straight to kiddie pr0n.

/b/ also functions as a honeypot. The other boards are more strictly moderated to stay on topic, free from trolling and racism, and worksafe. The ability of those boards to stay sane is in part a function of having a board like /b/ where misbehavior is permitted (with only the bare minimum of limits). Were it not for the ability to let off steam at /b/, the other boards might not function as well and might be disrupted more often.

Just look what happens to /x/ every time /b/ goes down.

"But 4chan also spawns a massive amount of graffiti, grossness, shock images, juvenelia, etc. Most people don't think of 4chan as the brave home of political protesters; they think of it as in immature dumping ground for memes and shock porn."

You and I may find these things distasteful but it's a disturbing notion that because these things exist, unlimited anonymity might not be a good thing.

The OP was simply pointing out that 4chan is an exceedingly bad example to hold up for online anonymity: it is difficult to point to anything that even a small portion of the public would find to be a "good" use of anonymity and there are a lot of examples that can be pointed to by many as "bad" uses of anonymity.

I understand but that's actually my point. I consider it an individual right, regardless of whether it contributes something to society at large.

Your post shows how little you know about 4chan.

4chan isn't anything special. However there are certain sections of 4chan that do have some adult material. For instance, /tg/ is just a board filled with RPG and Warhammer material.

Come back when you know what you're talking about.

I'm trying to make sense of what you're saying. Are you saying: "Yes, many sections of 4chan exhibit the qualities described. But, not all sections of 4chan do. Therefore, 4chan doesn't exhibit the qualities described and the parts of 4chan that do exhibit the qualities shouldn't be counted"?

Of the many boards on 4chan 10 are adult (porn) and 2 are extremely adult. 37 boards are normal and very rarely have anything adult oriented.

These are just the image boards.

I wonder what they would do if they didn't have /b/'s outlet.

first you dont send anyone to 4chan. Simply because the posts there are made to die after a time of innativity... Days on some boards, minutes on others.

and i think this is beautiful. 4chan represents the internet to its fullest. Random gross offtopics posts that no one cares and that will be literarily forgotten in a short while.

...pretending its isnt so is why you will never understand the former post about facbook login

I disagree that being non-anonymous on the Internet via social networking (etc.) is harmful. You can be non-anonymous and still be anonymous when you want to.

For example, it's clear that I'm jrockway. It says right above my comment. If you Google the name, you will find that that is pretty close to my real name, and you can reasonably make a guess about who I really am. (And where I live, and who I work for, and how old I am, etc.) But that's not really important -- what the world knows about "jrockway" is completely under my control, and anything posted under that name is intentionally designed to be linked back to a certain real person.

The important question is, "what other online IDs does that real person have"? And because of anonymity, you will never know.

There's an interesting distinction to be made between true anonymity and "pseudonymity", though. In particular, a pseudonym identity can eventually acquire as much baggage as a real identity--the more social connections and reputation that become associated with an identity, the harder it is for someone to discard it.

Total anonymity, with no expectation of moment-to-moment continuity, is in many ways a very different beast.

indeed

Quoting Ars:

"but moot didn't speak to the dangers of anonymity"

Not entirely true: he did speak about the guy torturing a cat.

is the video of his talk up yet? I cant find it on the ted site

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9CJdBugDxE

They start putting the videos up a few at a time after the TED conference itself is over. I think it is still going on.

Some take months to go up, from what I hear. It was an okay talk.

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