No one can be protected from Online anymore
A few months after her 60th birthday, my mother sent me the following text: "What is 8Chan?"
It was the summer of 2019, during what we hoped might be the apex of America's ongoing self-destruction era, where this fringe white supremacist image board was making headlines on CNN after a series of racially motivated mass shootings. The final straw came in August, after a pencil-necked weenie named Patrick Crusius brought an assault rifle to a Walmart in El Paso and murdered 23 people. As we scrambled for facts after the massacre, it was revealed that Crusius, in a delineative moment where he demonstrated how much his barbarism was married to his dweebiness, posted a manifesto to 8Chan shortly before carrying out the assault. In it, he cited the Christchurch terrorist plot, and the innately virginal Great Replacement conspiracy theory, as the divine progenitors of his putrid radicalization. The implications were dire. 8Chan, conceived as a deregulated rogue haven for gamergate morons who wished to be more open in their fanatic anti-semitism, shameless phrenology delusions, and medieval gender philosophies, was leaking into my mom's side of the internet. Within her sanguine topography of Sarah Cooper videos, celebrity Trump clapbacks, and the low-res clips of ducks eating crackers that my dad shares on Facebook, there must now also be the loathsome online haunts of people like Patrick Crusius. Her text broke the last levee; no longer could she safely ignore the ghouls.
There is a good chance that my mom is kind of like your mom. She is on Twitter for the sole purpose of reading my tweets. Her weeknight media diet typically consists of Jeopardy!, Colbert, and the NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt. She is more than capable on a computer, but is happily dissociated from the warped social contract and unwritten common precepts that define yours and mine's ordeal online. When she asks me what I'm working on, I occasionally experience a spiraling temporal lobe implosion as I realize our respective definitions of newsworthiness are on completely incommunicable planes of existence. She was generally okay with anyone in contention for the Democratic primary, with the potential exception of Mike Bloomberg.
I like to believe there is an alternative dimension out there where my mom was afforded to live out her glory years this way forever; logged on in her extremely matriarchal way -- checking like three websites a week, responding to Nextdoor queries and bookmarking restaurant listings deep into retirement. But the tripwire was crossed in 2016, and now our parents are forced into dialogue with the most deleterious corners of digital life. It is, unfortunately, impossible to be an avid newsreader in 2020 without also learning about incels, proud boys, and Comet Ping Pong. Joe Biden said the phrase "Bernie Brothers" during the primary. Dave Portnoy just interviewed Donald Trump. Jason Whitlock embedded an Ian Miles Cheong tweet into a column about the NBA, and The Atlantic put Andrew Anglin, America's foremost gonzo Nazi blogger, on its cover. The natural order of the internet is broken and bleeding to death, and so, I do my best to explain the ontological differences between 4Chan and 8Chan to the woman who taught me how to ride a bike.
I suppose I'm lucky. My parents are savvy people, and therefore, they've been immune to the toxic, centrifugal pull of deep-fried Pizzagate memes, and the ritualized shitposting of tweaked Turning Point uncles. Their curiosity about 8Chan germinated from a lifelong effort to be informed citizens, even in a political atmosphere that has been brutally @drilified beyond recognition. My mom was either going to read about where the Charlottesville tiki boys organize or give up on following the media altogether, which is the Devil's bargain offered to every center-left boomer in the aftermath of electing a man who posts images of his face Photoshopped over Rocky Balboa. Some sort of brain sickness, some ability to parse the uncanny gutterspeak of the terminally online, is now required of anyone who wishes to understand how things went so wrong in America.
Earlier this week, NBC reported that the QAnon discussion groups on Facebook have membership totals that exceed 3 million. The Q community, which holds faith that a soothsayer within the state department is laying out a cryptic series of riddles about the pedophilic corruption of Democrats and the crusadorial ambitions of Donald Trump, first materialized out of an anonymous post on 4Chan -- a website I used to visit in high school to read gossip about PlayStation leaks. Decades after the site's founding in 2003, 4Chan is the same as it's ever been; hateful and bitter, gorged on esoteric pornography, and rife with retrograde debates between the dumbest people in the universe. The only difference is that now, 4Chan is also embedded in our national politics. We're watching the deterioration in real time. In the forthcoming election season, there are several congressional candidates in contention who are proudly campaigning under the Q banner. Trump has signal-boosted tweets from 49 different QAnon-affiliated Twitter accounts, and the Deputy Chief of Staff is posting dogwhistle GIFs to galvanize the true believers. You get the idea. A pernicious forum, populated by middle schoolers and manchildren, has sprung to life as a federalized ideology thanks to a lethal combination of careerist grift and gubernatorial psychopathy. I still haven't wrapped my head around that.
Consider how many of those three million Facebook QAnon devotees are sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers, doctors and teachers, mailmen and bus drivers. These are the scrupulous normies we rely on to broaden our horizons after obsessing over one too many parochial tweets. Now, all of them have mutated into hardened 4Chan shitlords, breaking down the dams between common society and the deranged id of the misanthropic darkweb. They get online and leave paranoid vapor trails over their friends and family; poisoning the discourse until everyone, no matter how disconnected you aspire to be, lives in the same posting hell. The internet is infinite and yet the walls are closing in. What an unusual fate.
I still hope for an elastic effect in the years ahead. That maybe, the status quo will miraculously snap back into a contextual normalcy that people like my parents can recognize. Boomers would be at peace; blissed-out and logged off. Never again would they share a digital proximity with Mike Cernovich. We would develop Men In Black-style amnesia pens to purge the 4Chan demons and Andy Ngô zealotry from their brains. A government program would be instituted to redirect every QAnon Facebook link to an ongoing Words With Friends game with a cousin or nephew. Their Twitter feeds would be narrowed down to Yashar Ali, Tom Hanks, and ESPN Stats & Info. Antifa would mean anti-fascist again. This wouldn't be a long term solution -- the future of human civilization is growing worryingly febrile, and salvation will not be found in bipartisan détente. In fact, there is a compelling argument to be made that the ongoing polarization of our politics is a net good for society. I mean, if we can make it through the hot, bewildering chaos of the QAnon era -- where the dysfunction at the heart of America has inflamed in spectacular fashion -- then surely, anything is possible afterwards. In the meantime though, I still believe one of our best shots at survival is to foster a healthier, less catastrophic relationship with the internet among our elders; a future where my mom never needs to ask about 8Chan again.
And yes, I realize that ship has sailed. The bad actors online have festered for far too long. We were betrayed by those meritocratic, Silicon Valley fantasies about our forthcoming techno-utopia. Everyone was wrong, and we were well past the tipping point before we even understood that there was a problem. There is no way to insulate our loved ones from the ruinous forces of Online anymore. The tech oligarchy's options to stymie the pestilent momentum -- the press releases Twitter proudly issues when they've permabanned another 10,000 QAnon accounts or whatever -- are effectively irrelevant. We are barreling towards a terrifyingly Logged On era. The rot will accelerate, the veil will crumble, and America's internet sickness will continue to manifest into exponentially shocking moral cruelties. Decades from now, a President will make the call to nuke the servers, repossess the iPads, and melt down the phones into gardening tools. Our new Independence Day. They say the internet isn't real life. But as 4Chan continues to make the world wobble on its axis, I've been considering how long we’ve known that to be a lie.