spoonman wrote: ↑Sat Mar 16, 2019 1:21 am
MisterMuncher wrote: ↑Fri Mar 15, 2019 11:54 pm
The bother with /pol and the rest of the Chan-sites is that it's almost literally impossible to separate the genuinely dangerous lunatics from straight-up sick little bastards. It's GIFT in a box.
I've came to the conclusion over its existence that 4chan is secretly a sociological and psychological long term experiment to measure in time the idea that the longer one acts being a complete idiot, the more likely it becomes that the same is actually becoming a complete idiot, and that those who are acting the complete idiot are attracting actual complete idiots to the point that the site becomes an idiocracy that is actively rotting from its core, eating up the new idiot fodder it attracts.
4chan didn't used to be quite so bad even if the site was the dictionary definition of NSFW from the beginning, as at one time they actually used to rat on neo-Nazis and dregs like the Westboro Baptist Church & Scient0l0gy in amongst a lot of dumb stuff that occasionally could be at least slightly amusing and being the birthplace of the modern day Internet meme. But it seemed to turn a sharp nasty corner all round sometime in 2013 or so which started to see the scum rise to the surface when "gamergate" became prominent. It became so bad that even Moot was getting fed up with the shit that was happening and banned doxes, causing large numbers of dickheads to find a home elsewhere (mainly 8chan, which is even worse if that can be imagined).
It could be said that "chan culture" has ended up becoming a parody of itself.
I suspect it's a generational shift as well. As a teenager using the one family computer, I made a few curious visits to it but at face value the site culture and mythos was so hyperactively random that I decided to not invest anymore time on there and do something else with my day.
Now younger and younger children have access to internet on the go and it's with them always, allowing for full immersion into Chan culture. They've grown up with it, it's their lens for perceiving the world. Maladjusted outcasts seek haven there and adopt contrarian views to further embrace not fitting in with society. The neo-fascism was for cheap shock value, to upset polite sensibilities. Channers would get their yuks, then summer vacation would end and they'd move on (apart from a niche that genuinely were Nazis).
As you say, 2013 seems to be the watershed. A culmination of Gamergate, youtube becoming a viable mass media platform for greater alt-right outreach and seemingly a consensus rising amongst content producers that it's interesting and nice to experience things outside of the hetero white male hegemony. This gives a bit of legitimate traction to the white genocide crowd who are probably crowing "See? We were right all along!" and grants them dangerous legitimacy and influence with impressionable youth now feeling that there's real, active machinations against them and they must take action to defend themselves.
I've probably gone way off the deep end there but I suspect global events have shifted the mainstream ideology from detached contrarianism to the paranoid conspiracy commentators on identity politics. People gearing up to fight Brie Larson for making clumsy promos about a sodding superhero movie empowering feminism because they feel that's a battle they can win, rather than confronting neoliberalism gutting their job oppurtunities to increase profit margins, as that would be a long and arduous campaign of being roundly ignored by government.
EDIT: quick tidying of typos