5 ms·

4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump (2017)

6 points by ivanvas 4y ago

dontbenebby 4y ago
I would love to know how much of the toxicity on 4chan is a small set of people, or even how popular it ACTUALLY is. I was in the Palin email hack thread (just watching, as usual, because I'm "a creepy guy" according to the folks I trained to get in and out of Russia and China with their skulls intact.) I can remember how people moved around... LUE, Something Awful, 4chan... then 8chan or whatever and so on and so forth, as in parallel sites like Rotten went down. It felt like some people... they went onto the net in the 2000s or so, found out what a snuff film or a tit looks like, got their fill for a while, and eventually stopped looking, and others... never could get their fill. (I remember striding across... uh... Not MIT's campus, with people doing that "poll the autisit" thing like I didn't know they knew I was a former altar server... some... not MIT girl... had done an art project that disrespected the church, I think it involved a pope hat and no pants and possibly some kind of motorized scooter? I decided not to Bing it, since we were technically at "work", whatever that means when you're the assistant to a bunch of human computer interaction researchers who give each other buckets of marital aids as pranks) I was like "well if the undergrads want to take off their pants, it's a private university, and the bishop's opinion shouldn't matter, but maybe they should be more careful not to be visible from the road since some people are prudes" and went off to get a giant curry from a truck, because I was hungry. Anyways, my magical townie view is that the rise of Trump centered around a bunch of policy people who did policy because they were too mentally ill, often specifically too narcissistic, to be lawyers, because there's a character and fitness test. Later on, because they're narcissists, they would whine and whine even in the classes designed to TEACH THEM STATS about their horrible lives up until then (rarely did I hear things like "my math teacher gave me a deviated septum"), and thus... everything had to be an A/B test, because they'd show up to everything with barely any actual quant knowledge and the US political system pretents to be a two party system when nowhere in the constitution does it say we have to have just two, or even any parties. So then, you've got a situation where there have to be "two sides" to everything. If you want a less gonza version of the above take, there's also this great article from July 2016 (people hate to be told "I told you so"): https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/how-american-politics-went-insane/485570/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/how-ame...
- serf 4y ago
  >I was in the Palin email hack thread (just watching, as usual, because I'm "a creepy guy" according to the folks I trained to get in and out of Russia and China with their skulls intact.) what a strange boast.
  - dontbenebby 4y ago
    It's not a boast. I have found out pretty much every person whose words inspired me is a huge shitbag. Assange and Appelbaum are terribe... ESR I never met and got a lot out of "how to be a hacker" etc, but he too offset that work by being terrible. Imagine spending ten or more years of your life, jumping from precarious position to precarious position, as folks exhaust you, then jump to something better, then if you ever ask them just to... fairly interview you for something on a different team than theirs, they don't. Ever since I left "civil" society all people do is make a show of doing courtesy interviews they could treat as free consulting sessions (paired with acting like victims if I then get annoyed they didn't do as I suggested and their bank fails or their agency gets their computers blasted full of Russian malware). These posts come from a place of caring, and hurt. I seriously considered leaving the country when Trump was elected, I had felt trapped behind enemy lines since 9/11, and it was a mistake that I did not. All that happened is my emergency fund was drained as folks used me like a prop as they have since childhood. Have you ever had to do a remote interview at gunpoint, because a company that claims to care about diversity refused to even do a flyout, since one of your coworkers was the daughter of a senator? Have you ever had someone stalk you for over a year, then had a local business with "no hate" and pride signs says "Oh, well he's not bothing me". I got into all this... stuff... because allegedly people were less homophobic or whatever, but all I've seen in the "hacker" community is folks who got in back when it was harder to get caught, amassed wealth, then kicked the ladder out. I'm not boasting, I'm depressed as hell because everything I used to take joy in just makes me sad. I'm "creepy" because I lurk a lot, but OTOH I left 4chan around then... in fact I've left a lot of things looking for less radicalized people, and it's been a consistent problem that folks murmur false concern like "get therapy", when every therapist I've seen agrees the core issue is instability -- if you don't have consistent income, and you don't have consistent income because people make emotional, irrational hiring decisions, then well... if I stay silent, my situation won't improve. At least when I write, I get feedback and can learn, and possibly attract the attention of some less angry gatekeeper. It's not at all a boast, it's a very bitter anger that being present and not participating and eventually maturing is a more dangerous path than... whatever the opposite was.
cyanydeez 4y ago
If anyone needs a sample, circa , 2016: reddit.com/r/4chan4trump

6 points by ivanvas 4y ago

I would love to know how much of the toxicity on 4chan is a small set of people, or even how popular it ACTUALLY is. I was in the Palin email hack thread (just watching, as usual, because I'm "a creepy guy" according to the folks I trained to get in and out of Russia and China with their skulls intact.) I can remember how people moved around... LUE, Something Awful, 4chan... then 8chan or whatever and so on and so forth, as in parallel sites like Rotten went down. It felt like some people... they went onto the net in the 2000s or so, found out what a snuff film or a tit looks like, got their fill for a while, and eventually stopped looking, and others... never could get their fill. (I remember striding across... uh... Not MIT's campus, with people doing that "poll the autisit" thing like I didn't know they knew I was a former altar server... some... not MIT girl... had done an art project that disrespected the church, I think it involved a pope hat and no pants and possibly some kind of motorized scooter? I decided not to Bing it, since we were technically at "work", whatever that means when you're the assistant to a bunch of human computer interaction researchers who give each other buckets of marital aids as pranks) I was like "well if the undergrads want to take off their pants, it's a private university, and the bishop's opinion shouldn't matter, but maybe they should be more careful not to be visible from the road since some people are prudes" and went off to get a giant curry from a truck, because I was hungry. Anyways, my magical townie view is that the rise of Trump centered around a bunch of policy people who did policy because they were too mentally ill, often specifically too narcissistic, to be lawyers, because there's a character and fitness test. Later on, because they're narcissists, they would whine and whine even in the classes designed to TEACH THEM STATS about their horrible lives up until then (rarely did I hear things like "my math teacher gave me a deviated septum"), and thus... everything had to be an A/B test, because they'd show up to everything with barely any actual quant knowledge and the US political system pretents to be a two party system when nowhere in the constitution does it say we have to have just two, or even any parties. So then, you've got a situation where there have to be "two sides" to everything. If you want a less gonza version of the above take, there's also this great article from July 2016 (people hate to be told "I told you so"): https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/how-american-politics-went-insane/485570/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/how-ame...

serf 4y ago
>I was in the Palin email hack thread (just watching, as usual, because I'm "a creepy guy" according to the folks I trained to get in and out of Russia and China with their skulls intact.) what a strange boast.
- dontbenebby 4y ago
  It's not a boast. I have found out pretty much every person whose words inspired me is a huge shitbag. Assange and Appelbaum are terribe... ESR I never met and got a lot out of "how to be a hacker" etc, but he too offset that work by being terrible. Imagine spending ten or more years of your life, jumping from precarious position to precarious position, as folks exhaust you, then jump to something better, then if you ever ask them just to... fairly interview you for something on a different team than theirs, they don't. Ever since I left "civil" society all people do is make a show of doing courtesy interviews they could treat as free consulting sessions (paired with acting like victims if I then get annoyed they didn't do as I suggested and their bank fails or their agency gets their computers blasted full of Russian malware). These posts come from a place of caring, and hurt. I seriously considered leaving the country when Trump was elected, I had felt trapped behind enemy lines since 9/11, and it was a mistake that I did not. All that happened is my emergency fund was drained as folks used me like a prop as they have since childhood. Have you ever had to do a remote interview at gunpoint, because a company that claims to care about diversity refused to even do a flyout, since one of your coworkers was the daughter of a senator? Have you ever had someone stalk you for over a year, then had a local business with "no hate" and pride signs says "Oh, well he's not bothing me". I got into all this... stuff... because allegedly people were less homophobic or whatever, but all I've seen in the "hacker" community is folks who got in back when it was harder to get caught, amassed wealth, then kicked the ladder out. I'm not boasting, I'm depressed as hell because everything I used to take joy in just makes me sad. I'm "creepy" because I lurk a lot, but OTOH I left 4chan around then... in fact I've left a lot of things looking for less radicalized people, and it's been a consistent problem that folks murmur false concern like "get therapy", when every therapist I've seen agrees the core issue is instability -- if you don't have consistent income, and you don't have consistent income because people make emotional, irrational hiring decisions, then well... if I stay silent, my situation won't improve. At least when I write, I get feedback and can learn, and possibly attract the attention of some less angry gatekeeper. It's not at all a boast, it's a very bitter anger that being present and not participating and eventually maturing is a more dangerous path than... whatever the opposite was.

cyanydeez 4y ago

If anyone needs a sample, circa , 2016: reddit.com/r/4chan4trump