Emma Watson Nude Photo Leak Was a Marketing Stunt to Shut Down 4Chan

[TygrBright]

26. ahhh... This makes sense. Thanks for posting. n/t

It's amazing how little ANY of the media bothered to do their homework about 4chan and, more particularly, the /b/ forum where all of this went down.

The key thing to know is that any time you say "4chan is" (meaning participants on their fora) you're already giving misinformation, because there is NO commonality among the myriad factions, groups, and users of the site.

Some of 4chan's fora (there are a great many) are relatively quiet, and even to some extent coherent in the sense that most regulars on that forum share a good deal of common ground on the topic of the forum.

/b/ is not that forum, though.

Yes, there are plenty of immature, hostile, misogynistic script-kiddie wannabes who hang there. The herd instinct does operate (viz. the pile-on after this particular posting.)

However, in the main, /b/ may be as close to a working headquarters for anarchy as the human race has yet devised. And that by design.

/b/ is also the place where the organizing was done to out the solons of the town that allowed a rape victim who was left on her parents' lawn in the dead of winter and nearly froze to death, and they refused to go after the known and identified perpetrators.

/b/ is a place where people who want to "stick it" to any group, institution, spokesbot, etc. for those who assume power or control, can communicate. It's the Internet equivalent of a flashmob phone tree, or rather hundreds of them, since they operate on confusing and even contradictory philosophical bases (not to mention impulses.)

You can see why this would be a valuable place to put out of business entirely.

That, in itself, is a fairly ludicrous ambition.

If /b/ were pulled from the 4chan site tomorrow morning, it would simply reconstitute elsewhere by noon.

Do smarmy little misogynist trolls hang out there? Yep.

Do dedicated anti-capitalist hackers hang out there? Yep.

Do independent anarchists with socially unacceptable senses of humor hang out there? Hell, yes.

Is there ANY point in trying to fathom, control, defame, shame, corral, or even collaborate with them?

That may be the new definition of "futility."

They're like any other social phenomenon: If there's a Heisenberg effect, it becomes part of the phenomenon. You can observe all you want, but you cannot direct, control, or even influence to any very lasting or substantial effect.

amusedly,
Bright