4Chan 3.0
It’s web 3.0 now, which means new everything. New platforms, new technologies, new startups, new funds, new applications, new communities. New titties for the wives and mistresses, fuck it, new titties for everyone!
Of course, these “new” things are evolutionary in nature, so our understanding of this “newness” must of course of course also reference history. We have in this blog, talked about the new model of startups, the new model of e-girls in web 3.0, how sexual predation might look in the metaverse, talked about the new economic expansions of venture capital, and a number of other changes and evolutions that we may see here.
Which brings us to: what is the new 4chan et al.
These sites have dropped a little under the radar particularly in the wake of KiwiFarms getting shut down and perhaps more importantly, the centrist liberals that have so often been the target of these sites, have moved onto Blue Sky away from Twitter. But more fundamentally, 4/8chan, the hate groups of Reddit, the anonymous VC bootlickers at HackerNews, KiwiFarms, all that bullshit — throughout the last bubble, we saw the same types of communities form and cross-pollinate and utilize various of these platforms, including organizing attacks on these other sites and then attacking users on Twitter, causing much of the tension between Twitter and users that we saw so much of in the 2012-2015 time period.
These sites are just platforms; while we say 4chan to refer to this, the actual issue is the floating, loosely-organized, yet highly destructive and fascist groups that have been amalgamations of MRAs, incels, Nazis, fascists, violent misogynists, potential mass shooters, technofascists, accelerationists and so on. Importantly, this is NOT MAGA, this is not republican ideology that has been used. This has always been much more fascist than Republican. They’ve used different platforms at times but there has still been this constant body of almost entirely males, who have used technical attacks like hacking, doxxing, DDoSing, and digital stalking against almost all women targets, for what, two decades now?
I’ve written elsewhere in this blog about this, but its important to know that these groups have always been started and dominated by men in tech, the initial targets for these nascent attacks were women in tech, regarding issues only people in the industry would know or care about. Which is to say, there a huge number of programmers involved in these groups and tech itself has created and funded these platforms, in the case of Reddit and particularly in the case of HackerNews, a literal VC-funded site from which anonymous attacks on women in tech — identical to those we see on other sites — demonstrating clearly the connection. I personally observed dozens of times as in-industry discourse about misogyny in tech and about anti-venture capital resistance — suddenly resulted in women in tech getting mass attacked off of these other platforms that are supposedly not industry platforms. Then why did I get chased out of my house by fascist 4chan gangs for talking about how the Linux open source project is organized? LOL. I’m not stupid. In particular, I have documented ties between the Linux community and hate groups on other sites, and have requested full investigations, to no avail. For example, I once got into a public debate about comments made by the leader of the open source project from a developer conference in Europe… then I got doxxed and death threats and raid attacks from 4/8chan. Now why in the FUCK would anyone who isn’t in tech or a programmer, even give a shit about Linux, much less an internal industry debate about its culture, especially enough to start violent attacks about it?
They wouldn’t. The anon was coming from inside the house.
Point is, tech is at the center of all of these developments and has had very clear links to these sites, whether this coming from their own VC-backed sites (Reddit, Hacker News) or on the other tech platforms — importantly, created by computer programmers and with computer programmers as the early adopters (after all, they were the ones who built the sites), as in the case of 4/8chan. You might be amazed to know that Google actually HIRED the founder of 4 chan to help run their social media programs, so obviously those links are very much there.
The question thus becomes what does this group of people or this nebulous community of fascist, fascist-adjacent and violent misogyny/racism, look like in web 3.0?
I have had the misfortune of having to look into the “web 3.0” part of crypto — I.e., not Bitcoin or any of the mainstream established coins, but in the shitcoins, in the NFT community, and essentially, what we would think of as early community adopters of the new technologies: the part of the venture capital lifecycle where they are supporting and funding “organic” communities in order to build out the platforms.
I was actually quite ill during the period that all this NFT shit is popping off, so I missed some of this rise, but my pursuit of a16z led me right into the den of community around this stuff, so I have been forced to explore what I think of as the underbelly of the industry and the part of it that organizes technofascist attacks, The Shadow Movement.
The major flag here was an a16z company called Yuga Labs, which raised over $400 million in venture capital money from them and other investors. Yuga Labs was designed to create/participate in the creation of this kindof community-side offering/platform. The Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) is their most well-known offering — an NFT collection that proliferated into several other related collections, one that featured dogs and one that was “mutant apes”. They have a coin and have also held a lot of events and as far as I can figure out, their main project right now is “Otherside” — “the first metaverse that includes the community in the development process. Otherside rejects the walled gardens and closed networks of traditional gaming spaces in favor of interoperability and access, inviting everyone to play and create.”
Yuga came onto my radar because BAYC was full of fascist symbology, the NFTs themselves were racist, featuring standard racial caricatures, and intertwined with Nazi and fascist symbology, numerology, and in fact, the fucking logo for BAYC is literal Nazi insignia for Waffen Totenkopf, one of its elite SS units, modified… extremely slightly. You can find analysis of all the fascism out of Yuga in more depth here in this documentary, it has actually been well documented and protest activity against it from people inside the community — including protest NFT art — resulted in two crypto community leaders who had bravely spoken out about this and exposed this, getting actually sued by Yuga (again, an a16z company). While there was some resistance community organization in the wake of this, it quickly fell to venture capital as they infiltrated and compromised the leaders. Nonetheless, Yuga is a smoking gun for where the technofascist gangs are going next.
Something like Yuga — where you have a logo that literally is an almost exact replica of a well known Nazi insignia, where you have specifically anti-Black racism being expressed and sold as art in the form of the ape NFTs, and where you see multiple people who were involved in the project, having Nazi conceptions like the Kali Yuga, and consistent histories of knowledge and use of Nazi and fascist memes that came directly out of 4/8chan. This doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
Not only does this company exist, but it has been actually extremely successful in driving a huge amount of cultural activity, including mainstream celebrity deals, which to a company like a16z — that often refers to itself as a media company — this media activity is worth it in and of itself. This is another case in which people have accused Yuga/BAYC as a cheap and cynical way of making fast money screwing people over. The marketing and the community building itself, is worth all of that money to them. Especially because everytime there is a new set of technology platforms, they NEED a community and they need activity in order to attract corporate brands and get initial traction. This is a community that is used by venture capital in this stage. So they know that there there is this market space available, if you will, for this type of community and thus being the ones who capture and infiltrate and shape it and fund it and make a few key “influencers” rich on it (bribery), is very valuable and a big way they control and administrate communities.
From some of my backchannel discussions, the size of the BAYC community is somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 people. Now, that is not a lot of people in internet talk. This is not being done because there’s lots of them… it’s because of how important and valuable this demographic is to the venture capital cause. And at any rate, 10,000 technofascists is a major, major concern especially when they start making millions of dollars off of… technofascist VCs building entire companies for them.
A venture capital hates a community that it doesn’t have control over. That’s why nearly all online communities are surrounded in some way by venture capital spending, venture capital startups and platforms, and by various culture ops they run there, weather its through algorithmic manipulation, funding fake media companies, manipulating the community by buying people out (selling out / bribery), and so on.
So, this is not at all a situation where venture capitalists are just “putting things out there” to see what, organically and without tampering, will happen. That does happen occasionally on the level of single startups, but functionally and certainly in this example, they have no intention in letting the community do what it wants, but rather, to create the behavior they want in these really critical early communities, shaping how communities think about the space, how they interact, what products they use, and also, what is happening ideologically — because venture capital has a very specific ideology, that being technofascism, so an important piece of that is making sure that the technofascist ideology is baked in from the front and technofascists and technofascist adjacent power users are made first class citizens.
A16z invested a lot of money in this project - the round they led was $450 million. A16z is continually invested in various fake culture ops — their most recent including Pirate Wire, Evie, Urbit and Upstream and of course Yuga. From the last web: Soylent was very much a culture op. Buzzfeed was specifically founded to track and analyze social movements and then sell the secrets of vitality to corporations for advertising; they were pushing all kinds of ops out of that one. They have made hundreds of investments in media platforms of all kinds. So *one* way to look at this is at as a money grab and cheap attempt to scam people — but another way to look at this is that Yuga has been an important company for them specifically in doing culture ops on this community.
One of the truly unfortunate things about the crypto space — wealth inequality in bitcoin that is so entrenched at this point that its concentrations are enduring parts of the architecture which will not change, or be redistributed, but only grow. And that most of the early adopters of this have been out of the technology industry itself, where we have consistently documented fascism stemming directly from the fact that venture capital maintains control of the entire startup economy. So this early adoption stuff, is about who gets to make money out of it. This is how the industry operators: founders and early employees get stock, people later, don’t. But venture capital has a ton of sway over who comes first; like rolling out the red carpet for technofascists with Yuga.
In the shitcoin/NFT space overall, we see tons of evidence that this has been the establishment of 4chan on web 3.0 platforms. The sheer amount of 4chan-related symbologies, the use of memes that were developed and popularized on 4chan, they are talking to each other about NFTs on 4chan boards, come ON. Especially when we look at the history of the interest and discussion of these technologies happening on these 4chan-style communities, we can know for a fact that some of the biggest adopters of this web 3.0 shit were these distributed, roaming hate groups that we have been able to connect to venture capital and to Silicon Valley programmers again and again. (Consider Cloudflare, which supported groups like 8chan for years and actually employed known fascists associated with that group.)
As a personal data point, this entire part of the crypto space feels like living in 4chan. I’ve been studying them for over 12 years, because I was a major target of attacks by them during the last bubble — at times resulting in my partner having to get armed security at his offices, me leaving my house due to specific death threats to my home address, and ultimately having to live in fucking hiding in the city of my own industry. I have helped dozens of women in the industry who have been attacked by these groups, worked with tech platforms themselves on these problems, created material education and documentation of how they work, and have worked against them in dozens of operations, surveilled and documented them — all that is to say is that, I am very familiar with these fucking people and when I dipped my toes into this space, I gotta tell you: it is 4chan.
This is also evidenced by the strong crypto communities that have formed on the /biz board and other boards of 4chan, focusing on the “weird crypto” area, Ripple, DogeCoin, various NFTs and DAOs, shitcoins, etc.. It makes sense that they would form here: lots of technologists are on these boards, 4chan users are familiar with managing anonymity, most of them are broke fucking losers who would be eager to go into the get-rich-quick scheme; of the 4chan types who are not directly in the industry, most of them assume that they are naturally gifted computer programmers because they own an xBox and have helped doxx dozen of women in technical attacks they learned from actual programmers. So to them this is a natural fit — just sleazy, slime ball, anon, trolling shit.
You can see the natural affinity and obvious cross over in how these groups have operated — 4chan et al and now, shitcrypto. In both: Totally anonymous in almost all cases. Almost no women in the space — I attended a dozen or so spaces in shitcoins, memecoins, NFTs., etc., explored the influencers in the space, made contact with several of the very few women that exist in this space, and yeah, there’s about as many women in this part of crypto as there were in 4chan. LMFAO.
These things are data signatures and markers as extreme as this, are unique to certain systems.
These spaces, groups, events have LESS women than even your general startup meetup fare, which is particularly ridiculous because most of the people in these crypto communities, the level of technical knowledge that exists is “I can turn on my GameBoy if I ask my wife”. The justification for women being left out of startup spaces is that they just aren’t technical enough to hang; in shitcrypto, the ability to install an application on your phone that will take your money, makes you among the more technically savvy individuals. So there is no reason here that women should be excluded. And yet, you see not even the distribution of gender we would see in a Silicon Valley tech meetup, but what you would see in the distribution of funding to women by venture capital: 2%. Weird.
This ties back to this whole “no women” idea; which is showing up consistently in various areas of the conspiracy and I think if it is coming up this much, that is something that is a danger and a warning for us. There’s some interesting analysis coming out about how women will be affected economically by web 3.0, and certainly exclusion from crypto wealth is a huge part of that; this again, always goes back to wealth and wealth concentration and what not. MRAs are getting rich as shit on crypto; women are not, especially because they are chased out by… fucking 4chan psychos. Time is a flat circle.
As a devoted and true believer in Conway’s Law, there’s some other interesting patterns, particularly in how this community acts and behaves. 4chan et al attacks have always been brief but devastating strikes; they operate in swarms and with mindless group think, the ideology and pattern acting through them without them even thinking about it. This is the type of energy that pumps and dumps, the type of energy that can catalyze at-scale, reckless activity like rapid FOMO adoption of shitcoins. As well as the general “gray hat” mentality where you see a ton of petty scams and obvious tricks and financial frauds, where this whole “trickster” archetype is operating on the field and in some cases is acting directly on parts of the crypto financial infrastructure. Burstiness, spontaneous activity that results in massive spikes — traffic, adoption, etc., — even if unsustainable, is loved by the venture capitalist — it can be directed usefully. You can see it in the insufferable use of memes from 10 years ago from 4chan, the same weird gatekeeping around if you understand a meme, the same cruel hearted joking, and the tearing down of each other, but now its happening in a Twitter space and some meth head’s shit token. The one good thing here is they are so busy in a dick measuring contests with other fucking losers that they haven’t evolved yet into a force that can catalyze on these new platforms and achieve the type of attack formations that have been so useful to venture capital in the past; but they’ll get there. Creating and deploying digital attacks, using humans, is a favored activity of the venture capitalist.
One of our primary tasks in the Valley is to move internet communities, pretty much solely according our own business desires, but in particular when we are upgrading tech and platforms. This is called “adoption”. Thus, many, many efforts are launched to secure the safe transfer of desirable communities - like 4chan (did you know Google hired its creator to run their social media lab? LOL), transfer them onto the new platforms.
VC needs the 4chan et al community — we need a better name for these people but you all know what I’m talking about, we all do: that is how big of an impact, even culturally, that these rotating, moving fascist, MRA, incel, Nazi and hate groups have come to have, particularly as they generalized from attacking women in tech to women in feminism more generally. This community has served venture capital very well — one of its most successful culture ops, a plausible way to build a distributed fascist party (even if unorganized, the RULES and STRUCTURE of the ideology and community still result in highly “organized”(predictable) and consistent activity). 4chan and 8chan ran campaigns of absolute terror against women in tech for years during the last bubble, helping to literally drive women in the industry out of it, into hiding, and even out of the country. There women were a threat to venture capital because we were literally demanding that they be removed from power and have all their wealth taken back. As I have discussed elsewhere, these attacks were incredibly public, both allowed and endorsed by venture capital, clearly emerging from the tech industry itself, and helping venture capital put down the vibrant social justice movement in tech, which was aggressively advocating (lots of my behest), for the overthrow of venture capital (due to it being fascists). And obviously we can see in followings like Elon Musk that these same types of behaviors, memes, ideologies, traffic patterns, attack patterns, extremely bizarre MRA co-bonding, etc. Are just classic 4chan. The fact that Musk posts like a channer is not an accident nor is it “just his personality”.
So “moving” 4chan onto web 3.0 has included all of these coins and startups and investments and culture ops. 4chan and 8chaners were very early to these sketchy parts of web 3.0, because they are used to doing illegal shit on the internet. And because these sites were filled with VC-backed computer scientists and programmers who were getting all the slow ones in the class on board. And now a16z has used Yuga, full of fascist dog-whistles and inside jokes, to welcome these communities onto the group, demonstrating an extremely sophisticated form of community/psyop warfare, to help transition 4chan et al into not just crypto but…. they are trying to make sure that 4chan, a community that has largely operated via simple HTML, to make it successfully and ideologically intact, into the metaverse. That is why Yuga’s model and stated goal is moving from the coin and NFT and using that as a basis for, essentially, a metaverse 4chan. That is what is going on here. A lot of fucking ops to make sure the precious hate groups are operational for web 3.0 and don’t get left behind on a barely maintained message board. No, far too much has been invested in this community to leave it behind. 4chan is getting a forced upgrade by venture capital and Yuga is Exhibit A for that argument.
It is also worth mentioning, the other groups that are no where in sight as a priority for venture capital getting them successfully involved in the new arena. We talk a lot in tech about “first movers advantage” which is basically, that the first ones to get into whatever market space or what have you, and venture capital has been very much in control of who crypto is introduced to first, and how, and how those communities are managed, who gets the education and outreach, the tools and the incentives, and the early subsidies. These are CHOICES they are making — we have a fuckton of control over “adoption”, and you see it in how bitcoin itself, has a far worse wealth distribution than even America, with all of those players continuously building their stake. Being left out of the early adopter period — which we are still very much in — is a huge deal and is a matter of fundamental inclusion/exclusion that ends up being baked into the system from the very beginning; another way that venture capital is purposefully disrupting blockchain’s POTENTIAL to serve as a critical platform for a better economic systems.
One of the issues we’re gonna have is that with crypto, venture capital is providing a way for 4 chan et al to make… potentially a lot of money. While the majority of these people are going to get wrecked, we’re still talking about hundreds of millions of dollars that have, and will continue to, flow into this specific configuration of fashy, Nazi, MRA, incel, terrorist bullshit — this gives 4chan et al …. The ability to build. Which is emphatically not what we want to see.
So, don’t say I didn’t warn you: 4chan is still here, it’s not going away, it’s getting upgraded and replatformed by VC… and it’s getting funding. A lot of it.
You’ll notice that our side is broke as shit because fake leftists have spent years trying to convince you that all of this technology was just vapor in order to get clout.
Fucking us financially for decades to come.
Cool.