In defence of 4chan

I feel slightly ridiculous for the title of this post, 4chan doesn't need defending, hell it'll probably lash out violently at something else in the near future, and I hope I am never on the receiving end of what can be done.

But on to business; some people may have heard the story of William J Lashua, but for those who haven't, read the (probably most accurate portrayal) of the events here. All well and good right? After all this isn't the first time that anonymous has done something generally decent as these will prove [NSFW].

General Sherman: Father of modern trolling

Granted this is the first time that the reason for doing this was a human being, and the first time that the actions taken don't involve tactics that would make William Tecumseh Sherman proud. But apparently this isn't good enough for some people, case in point gawker.

In an article recently published, they asked the question "Is 4chan Turning into Internet Good guys?", now lets get a couple of things straight:

1. I regularly visit 4chan, I consider myself a /b/tard, and on occasion a /d/eviant (but the less said about that in public the better).
2. The person who wrote the gawker article is a self aggrandising douche nozzle.  

The author in question is a man who criticises anons for their actions against Jessi "You done goofd" Slaughter, claiming that they had gone to far; but when faced with decent reasonable behaviour starts to throw his toys out of his cot, claiming that anonymous has gone soft. Now I'm not going to look for reason in all of this, down that path lies pointlessness and fail. What I am going to comment on is this strange perception that anonymous has a sense of morality, and that there is some organising force behind it.

Lets get something clear, anonymous doesn't have a sense of morality, it is neither moral or immoral, in all likelihood, it's probably one of the purest illustrations of amoral behaviour available. If you had to describe anonymous' sense of right and wrong in simple terms, I would suggest Alpha from Dollhouse as a good starting point:

"There are many parts of me who know that this is wrong, none who care, and six they just find it funny!" - Alpha (A Love Supreme)

 We are talking about a group that is an event horizon for 'The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory', and people are trying to ascribe Black and White morality to it. But this segues nicely into the second part of the second part of this discussion...

...See, told you it did. Carrying on from our last area of focus, it is inevitable that we should deal with the question of organisational structure; after all, many people (who don't know any better) have compared anyone associated with anonymous as being like the average German citizen in the build up to Nazi Germany, naturally there must be some charismatic individual(s) controlling everything from the shadows - there must be a leader!

Such a conclusion is naturally fallacious. We are dealing with an organisation where no one knows who anyone else is, every single exchange of information purportedly comes from the same identity. Oh granted there are individual names that appear amongst these - case in point moot, but he's far to busy making soup to be a charismatic leader. So in essence, this is a group organised like no other in the history of civilization, an organisation where there is no clear leader, no followers, a grouping that even transcends mob dynamics, to be even closer to a more pure sense of an emergent system, like a swarm or a flock.





When you see starlings, or even bird behaving like this, you're seeing how anonymous is organised, in a flock there are no leaders, and no hard coded behaviour about what to do in a given situation, instead we get simple rules like:

1. Fly close to your neighbours
2. But don't crash into them
3. Follow the general path of your neighbours

and these simple rules can generate the behaviour that was illustrated above, a clear demonstration of the power of emergent behaviour in complex systems. If we apply similar rules as these to the actions of anonymous, we can clearly see that the behaviour becomes much simpler to understand (although probably still beyond the average Fox News pundit), there is no leader, it's simply a series of very basic social rules being expressed by a large collective.

In conclusion, happy birthday Mr. Lashua, hope you enjoy the cards.