For a while now I’ve been kind of meaning to write a long, in-depth post about 4chan. With the recent controversy between them and some significant feminist figures in the gaming industry, I think it’s important that I finally go ahead and do this. Since, let’s be honest: any time there’s a big controversy on the internet, 4chan is going to be involved. And yet, a lot of people don’t really understand what 4chan is.

First, I should probably start with some explanation of where I am coming from. When my webcomic first began taking off, I went to great lengths to keep an eye on everyone who discussed it. I like feedback on what I’m doing; the way I see it, the natural progression of an artistic career is that you eventually come to rely on audience feedback rather than individual critics who purport to represent it.

For the most part, this just entailed reading forums and blogs, nothing too complicated. however, there was this one audience segment that continually eluded my sight: 4chan. I could see 4chan links in my referrers, but could never find anything there about me or my work. The threads, with their short, transient lifespans, were always gone by the time I got there.

Well, needless to say, I eventually did catch a Prequel thread, and then more, and gradually over the next few years I learned a lot about 4chan - as well as a lot of other sites, major and minor (this one included). Of them all, though, 4chan stands out to me as having the most interesting culture - as well as being one of the most confusing, misunderstood, and outright scary entities to outsiders. I can understand why they are such a prevalent and relatively powerful force online, and I think it’s important for everyone to understand exactly what 4chan is.

I’m going to be sharing my personal observations and conclusions regarding 4chan. So, buckle up and put on your ethnologist hats, kids, because we’re gonna talk comparative internet cultures!

Anonymity

The first thing that always trips people up about 4chan is this idea of an “anon culture”. Like, we all understand the idea of anonymous comments on a site, or accepting anonymous asks on Tumblr, and probably understand that such anonymous submissions are often used to attack someone without suffering any social ramifications or backlash for doing so. But what happens when you bring hundreds of thousands of people together who idolize the idea of anonymity and the freedom it brings?

Well, you get something kind of cool, in my opinion. What you end up with is this concept of a fluid identity. Not only do people on 4chan have no social ramifications for being rude, but they face no social ramifications for being inconsistent with themselves. On 4chan you have no obligation to stick to or defend your past beliefs or opinions, because no one knows they were your past beliefs, nor do you have any incentive to display beliefs that will make you look good - since no one will ever even know it was you.

It’s like… imagine being an invisible person in a room with a bunch of other invisible people. You, as well as each of them, are wearing an (also invisible) random voice-changing mask. From the seemingly empty room, one voice calls out: “so, what webcomics do you guys read?”

If you were in a public place, you’d pick the answer that makes you look good. It’ll be something pretentious (if you’re around pretentious people), or something relatively normal and acceptable (if you’re around normal people), and you’ll choose the answer that doesn’t ostracize you otherwise negatively affect you socially.

In the room of invisible people, that pressure does not exist. You are speaking to the equivalent of an empty room. You can say the most embarrassing shit you can think of - let them know about that horrible, poorly-drawn DeviantArt comic series you are super into. If they laugh at you for it and you regret your choice to bring it up, then all you have to do is step a few feet to the left and say you like something else. All of a sudden, you and are effectively a different person. Alternatively, you could just own up to your love of this awesome DeviantArt comic. Why not? You can unassociate yourself from these claims at any time.

Or, imagine someone else in the room says they like some poorly-written little ComicGenesis comic, and you decide to rail on them about how horrible it is. Suddenly, they come back at you with this amazing explanation about its hidden nuances, and you realize that you misjudged this little comic and it is in fact the epitome of perfection. If you want, you can just instantly pretend you are a different person who liked the comic all along. You don’t have to feel any shame for wrongly disliking it at first, or any obligation to remain consistent with your earlier beliefs. You just do what you feel like. It can’t hurt you. You are just you.

Of course, the consequence of this is that 4chan is completely depraved by normal societal standards. Without the pressure to conform, it turns out people are naturally pretty weird. But, you know, they live it. It’s a culture where nobody is really shamed or hurt for the things they enjoy. Someone can try to shame them, but it’s not going to have any effect and it’s usually more of a joke.

The other consequence of this - and the one that probably scares the most visitors away - is that people can’t really be shamed for being what we would consider horrible people. Someone can be flagrantly racist, homophobic, misogynistic, or whatever, and you can’t really harm them. All you can do is talk to them. Things that would garner death threats on Tumblr or Twitter tend to be short, comparatively nonconfrontational exchanges on 4chan. With many people from Tumblr or Twitter, that does not sit well.

The Anon

Sort of separate from this idea of “anon culture” is this idea of “the Anon” as an individual.

When we get an anonymous hate comment on Tumblr or something, we know that person has an actual identity they are hiding. It becomes a guessing game as we speculate who they “really are”,

With 4chan, however, there is this idea of anonymity as an identity. By posting an anonymous message, you are not “hiding” your identity, you are an Anon. In their art, you typically see the Anon represented as a thin, green-skinned man or woman with a suit and no facial features other than a mouth. It’s an intentionally race- and class-neutral representation of a human - the Anon can be anybody. They celebrate this idea that they are indistinguishable - coming across as one single, undefined individual with a lot of conflicting tastes and perspectives.

This is a somewhat foreign idea on other internet cultures like Tumblr, where individuality is greatly valued. Look at anyone’s Tumblr page - we go to great lengths to define what is us. We often wear a banner declaring our race, gender, and sexual orientation. We list our interests and phobias. We even choose a picture to represent ourselves - mine is a little blue butterfly drawn by me and colored by a friend. Our identity gains strength and influence as we do things that please people, and weakens as we do things that they disapprove of. After posting this, my influence will probably reach 1,100 people, and I’ll do a little dance in celebration of this milestone. But, posting in a random 4chan thread, I would still just be an anon like everyone else.

The World To 4chan

Looking at it from this perspective, you can hopefully start to understand the political angles that someone who regularly participates in 4chan is inclined to take.

In their own weird way, 4chan is a sort of utopia. They circumvent a lot of the harassment problems that places like Tumblr and Twitter have. You probably aren’t going to see someone on 4chan depressed over harassment they got on 4chan. They also circumvent most peer pressure problems - nobody on 4chan is going to agree with anyone else there just to look good. You are also going to have very few people who hide things, since there’s very little incentive to do so. If you feel a little gay that day and want some hot beefcake, say it, nobody will care and you’ll be happy.

Imagine how the rest of the internet looks to someone who is used to that as their background, though. It causes the person to develop a certain distrust. If someone publicly supports a position and a large group praises and rewards them for it, you wonder if they really believe what they profess. When someone publicly attacks and uses social leverage against a person who disagrees with them, you wonder if the attacker really has a decent argument that could stand on its own. The world becomes a vicious and uncivilized place full of powerful, violent people who might be lying or keeping secret agendas, and you want to look into it. You want to knock people off pedestals, jam their weapons, air their secrets, and leave nothing but a depraved and equal Anon behind.

And you see that in what 4chan does. When a controversial figure declares they were hacked or bullied, 4chan are the ones compiling evidence of whether or not it was faked. When someone tries to defend a position with their social standing or identity, 4chan is the first to stand against them, confronting them as an equal. And when someone preaches what others should be doing, 4chan is the first to get on their case if they don’t do it themselves. They are not a unified group so much as a group of people who share a common mindset - that inequality and its associated social pressures are the root cause of problems. They tend to confront people as equals - and if that doesn’t work, they try to knock them down to their level.

4chan To The World

Equally important to understanding 4chan, I think, is looking at the way 4chan is seen and portrayed by others - especially those who actively oppose its ideals.

It’s no secret that 4chan is often viewed as this hive of racism, homophobia and misogyny. They’re this chaotic force that harasses feminists, hacks websites, and spreads the personal information of any good people who try to stand up for justice. It’s this vague, faceless force, and it fits the common perception of “evil mooks” we are fed in movies.

I find it kind of a shame that, for all that 4chan’s culture does to maintain the Anon’s gender, race, and class neutrality, the common assumption is that they consist entirely of middle-class, straight, white males. You see this whenever there’s some clash between 4chan and Tumblr - 4chan is the oppressor; some angry, privelaged mass that wants to make life difficult for minorities.

The nature of an anon culture makes it difficult to get actual statistics on 4chan - these are people who are not only anonymous, but often revel in the nature of anonymity. Race is almost impossible to analyze, since someone will only bring it up if it’s relevant to what they’re saying. Gender is easier though - according to 4chan’s advertising page, the userbase is 30% female - if you don’t believe their self-report, the third-party analytics site Alexa.com claims it to be over 50%. I have a few friends who frequent the site’s (often extremely risque) My Little Pony board - they once ran a lingerie selfie contest there, and exactly 50% of the entrants were female.

Overall, you’re looking at this very diverse community that has its minorities effectively erased by its opposition so it can make a better enemy. 4chan knows this, and you can see it leading back into that aforementioned concept of them seeing their detractors as hypocritical and barbaric. You’re not likely to get any big moment where 4chan’s minorities band together and say “hey, we exist!” because so much of 4chan values their anonymity. Gaining social leverage by declaring what you are is the sort of thing they generally stand against.

Equally interesting is the way 4chan responds to hatred against them. Though it may not be readily apparent from the outside, they stick by their ideals at least as strenuously as Tumblr does. With the recent controversy in feminist gaming, for example, a number of people from 4chan have been watching Twitter and boycotting any company that claims the attack on The Fine Young Capitalists was justified. There’s been a lot of disappointment any time a loved developer comes to the attack’s defense. 

Similarly, there’s a lot of disappointment every time a creator directly speaks out against 4chan. I remember a time a few months back when the author of the comic Paranatural tweeted about how nobody should ever go to 4chan. Over on 4chan, there was a rather touching post where an anon described how it hurt them to have a figure they admire speak out against a community they loved. I actually emailed the Paranatural guy about that, though I never got a reply. I like to pretend it’s because he got a million other emails about it, but it’s probably not.

Open Door

I think the one last thing that is most misunderstood about 4chan is that if you are a horrible person, it can be a tool.

4chan has no barriers to entry. There’s not even a signup process; anyone who wants to can go there and instantly become a part of their community. If you want to do something bad and hide that it was you, you can go to 4chan, make posts about it, and have it look like 4chan is to blame. You will suffer no ramifications for doing so - like any action on 4chan, it is effectively done by “the anon”.

Nothing keeps someone from setting 4chan up as a scapegoat. Heck , you could even go there and pose as multiple people, organizing entire attacks on someone. Even yourself, if you want. This is not a hard thing to do.

The question is why you would do it. Like, 4chan is fundamentally not a bad place. Its one property is that people there interact anonymously - for better or for worse, that ideal of fearlessly being the person you want to be is viciously preserved. It has a very interesting and generally nonconfrontational culture that can still bring ridiculous change or over-the-top revenges when them or their ideals are attacked directly. Between the social equality, lack of fear, and ability to drive action, it sometimes feels like everything Tumblr wants to be. 

I guess what I’m saying is: be informed. It’s easy to use 4chan as a scapegoat, or construe it as an unstoppable force of evil, but if you really look into it it’s one of the more interesting cultural designs to come out of the internet. It’s worth lurking and understanding where they are coming from on things before dismissing them enemies.

Rather than making a bunch of small posts, I’m just going to hit a bunch of small things in one medium-sized post.

MWK has informed me that the unnamed raptor game I mention in the post Indie is actually called Sixty Five Million And One BC. It’s a cute game that 9/10 raptors agree perfectly captures the raptor experience, and you can get the full version for free now at the developer’s site. Go ahead and check out what a $10 indie game was like six years ago. 

I have also been informed that the poorly drawn woman who photo-realistically chronicles her life on Hyperbole And a Half has finally almost released her book for real this time. This isn’t a followup to anything I’ve written, but it probably ties up a loose end for a lot of people here. While you’re there, be sure to check out the “not order button” button. 

A few people have brought up that my post on 4chan doesn’t say anything about “tripcodes”, which can be used to maintain a consistent identity, and the attitudes surrounding them. This is because I really don’t think it's that important or outside of what I already wrote there. Basically, it’s just a string of coded characters that only you know how to type, which you put at the top of posts to confirm you are actually you. The response to it is about what you would expect from someone going to a anonymity-focused community and declaring their identity at the top of all their posts even when it’s not important to the discussion: people will be pretty disgruntled toward it and want them to stop. 

One of my more interesting run-ins with 4chan’s attitudes about identity actually happened after I posted this essay on static protagonists. As mentioned in the post, I had been anonymously posting in one of their webcomic threads and having a discussion with another creator. After I posted the essay to my Tumblr, though, they knew I was there making a lot of the longer posts. This exchange occurred:

The first anon was happy that I had respected their culture and played along despite being a “foreigner” who was used to wearing a name. The second one, though, was upset that I had come out, in his eyes effectively taking retroactive credit for every good post in the thread. It was just kind of a neat moment for me, seeing this short little argument about how serious of a faux pas I had committed by confirming my identity. And it kind of reaffirmed that, yeah, this was their thing, and it was weird.

It’s one of the reasons 4chan appeals to me on an academic level: it’s an almost alien culture unlike anything you could see in real life. It’s like something you’d see humans making first contact with in a science fiction novel - a race of blind creatures with identical voices. You can even imagine a lot of neat plot hooks surrounding that: maybe the humans arrive and discover that each of these creatures is a completely different color, and the aliens have to adapt to outsiders whose very presence changes the way they interact. Or maybe the aliens are terrified, viewing consistent identity as the root cause of all mankind’s societal problems (something I think you could even have them make a decent argument for!). 

In addition to influencing real-life events and conflicts, these things carry the seed for a lot of interesting fiction. How often do we play with concepts of identity perception in our fictional species and cultures? Humans have our own nuances when it comes to those things: we can’t tell the age, race or gender of writing or applause, and our sexual dimorphism is subtle enough to be masked - both of which come up often in our history and fiction. How would things be different for a species that has more options here? One that has less? Or how about one that just has different ones? It’s neat to consider; too often these concepts are simplified into “lack of individuality is evil, displays of individuality are good” without considering the in-betweens or the cultural backgrounds these could exist in. 

And, lastly: I just want to point out that if you look at my 4chan essay, I open up by describing the way I first discovered the site, how my understanding of it grew over time, and how that led to my current feelings about it. This sets the context for my relatively positive appraisal. I didn’t even think before adding this stuff in it; it just seemed important to understanding where I was coming from and the potential biases my info might carry.

I just kind of wanted to put that out there, since I know at least one Kotaku writer follows me. 

EDIT: okay, that was mean. I’m sorry. I’m sure you tried hard. 

I don’t think I could fill a whole essay on this, but it’s really sad whenever I see someone say I “drank the kool-aid”. Usually it’s in reference to some contentious opinion I have, like my commentary on 4chan. My positivity is taken as evidence that I have “drank 4chan’s Kool Aid” - a reference to cult-like manipulation being used to poison someone’s beliefs.

But like, cult mechanics and social manipulation are my jam. I love talking about those things; they’re pretty much all I write about on this blog. I really dislike it when “he/she drank the kool-aid” is treated like an explanation of why someone holds an opinion. That’s like a doctor looking at your test results and saying “I’m afraid you’re not healthy” before silently walking away. It’s just weird.

On stuff like the 4chan post in particular, I go into a lot of depth about where my opinions on that are coming from, and in the greater context of things I’ve written it’s really easy to understand why I look favorably upon anonymity. You could accurately say I have a bias toward cultures like that, but it’s a bias that largely exists due to the demands of my career path. 

I’m not saying I’m not being manipulated, because the whole point of harmful manipulation is that the victim isn’t aware of it. Rather, I’m saying that harmful manipulation is something you should discuss, not just declare. All it comes down to is strategically presenting falsified information in a way that discourages people from questioning it - and you can actually isolate the pieces that have been falsified, the techniques used to do it, and so on. Not just that, but someone being manipulated really is a victim, and if you can discern it you have an obligation to help them.

Manipulation is not mysterious magic, nor is it an abstract concept like Irony or Fate that you can blame bad things on. It’s observable: you can actually identify falsified information and call it into question. As usual, if you think I am being fed misinformation on something, I really do implore you to talk to me about it. My contact information is on the sidebar, and I will not think any less of you for being concerned about me. 

I write a lot of posts here about anonymity.

One one level, it’s because I just really enjoy the concepts and ramifications anonymity - which by extension makes me one of the disconcertingly small number of creators who can maintain a positive relationship with 4chan and the other Anon Cultures. On another level, though, it’s a professional interest: anonymity is very important to anyone who deals with crowds, public opinion, and data gathering. Statistically speaking, the responses people give when others are watching and judging them tend to be very different than the responses people give under the veil of anonymity. 

However, the other thing I like to talk about on this blog is social manipulation. In all my discussions of anonymity, there’s still one topic I haven’t really touched on very much: how do you control anonymous people?

Anonymity as a data gathering tool is well and fine, but one of the big fears people have of 4chan and similar cultures is their seemingly uncontrollable, chaotic nature. With 4chan in particular, popular culture knows them largely by their external actions - 4chan raids, 4chan harassment, 4chan hacktivists, etc. Content creators especially seem pretty clueless when it comes to actually exhibiting control over anonymous figures - which is strange because, like I’ve said before, it's not complicated. It’s really kind of confusing how people can be so bad at it.

So, in this post I’m going to more or less just talk about how to control anons. To understand the techniques, though, we have to get into a bit of psychology and history.

Put on your psychologist scarves, kids. We’re gonna talk about brains.

Crime and Punishment

Before I get into the thick of this, the first thing you have to understand is the difference between reinforcement and punishment.

The concept is pretty simple. The idea behind reinforcement is that someone receives a reward for behaving in a certain way, which encourages them to behave that way more frequently. It can be a positive reinforcement (giving them something they want, like a cupcake) or a negative reinforcement (taking away something they dislike, like an annoying singer), but in both cases it leaves them better off than they were. 

Punishment is the opposite. Someone faces consequences for behaving a certain way, and this discourages them from doing it again. Like with reinforcement, punishment can be either positive (someone sings annoyingly until you leave) or negative (they take away your cupcake). The common trend is simply that it leaves you worse off than you were before. You fear the punishment happening to you, and this causes you to act a certain way.

Our culture has a very large emphasis on punishment. On some level, this is an institutionalized thing we recognize and accept - we know and approve of the fact that people get charged money for driving recklessly, or will be locked away from people if they physically harm someone else. There are a lot of other types of punishment that are used to control behavior, though, which we tend to overlook.

For instance: social ostracization. We have very strict and complicated rules governing everything from eye contact to the appropriate progression of discussion topics. If someone violates these rules, it’s not a crime, but we still try to make them get hurt a little. For things like inappropriate conversation progression or eye contact, they’ll be accused of obsession with a topic, or their sexuality will be called into question in a way that makes them uncomfortable. In more serious cases of someone violating norms in a way we disapprove of, we will inflict viral misinformation against them - this is where you see stuff like slander and decontextualized quotes used to harm someone’s reputation or career. At this point, you’re usually not trying to discourage that person’s behavior - you’re trying to make an example out of them, and show others the cost of violating your beliefs of how people should act. 

Rape is another punishment that is pretty widely accepted in our culture. If you go to prison, for example, it’s taken for granted that you’re going to get raped. People don’t complain about this a lot, probably because they recognize that prison on its own looks like a pretty good deal for a lot of people - it’s a warm place to sleep and three state-funded meals a day. The fear of rape is regarded as one of the things that makes prison an effective punishment. You also see this fear of rape used in politics - any time a conservative politician uses the classic “it was her fault for dressing that way” line, he’s establishing rape as a de-facto punishment someone incurs for violating what he sees as an appropriate dress code. It’s effectively an attempt to weaponize rape as punishment.

Even death is a pretty common punishment in our culture. Like, even outside arguments of capital punishment, we are taught that you simply don’t walk certain places at night, or reach into your pockets in the wrong way, or make any sudden movements when a cop pulls you over, or things like that. We recognize that, yes, if you do these things then you're probably going to die. Like rape, it’s also something that’s been politicized in the past - if you’ve ever read the beautifully dated “Homosexuality: Legitimate Alternate Deathstyle”, the comic’s whole premise is that if you’re gay you will die. It’s not used as a statement of “we should do something about HIV”, but instead as a political statement that you really shouldn’t be gay. In general, our culture is pretty okay with death as long as the person was doing something we disapprove of.

And like… sometimes, I just like to think about how fucked up and dangerous our entire culture would seem to an alien visitor. 

Anyway, the point here is that our culture is utterly terrifying. Outside of the written rules, we have a complex web of social standards and personal beliefs that are enforced through vigilante justice. Good and bad are irrelevant - you just can’t piss off the wrong people, or they’ll come and get you. However, there’s always been one defense to this: anonymity.

One of the earlier forms of this was confessionals in the Catholic church. People who committed a mortal sin would confidentially tell it to a clergyman who offered them ways to seek absolution without the clergyman judging or hating them. Later on, you also saw the concept of anonymous crime tipping emerge - letting people report a crime in a way that the criminals could not trace it back to them. In both cases, anonymity was being used as a way to encourage positive behavior by inhibiting problematic people who would enforce punishments on it. The tipper or confessor could still be rewarded with the positive feelings of making amends for their wrongdoing or inhibiting a crime, but they were less likely to be punished for it. 

In some ways, this had a dark side: it’s where we got things like the magazine-clipping ransom letter. In other ways, it got romanticized: we saw fiction stories of superheroes concealing their identity so that criminals could not attack them or their families at home. In all cases, though, anonymity came about as a defense against punishment. 

With the advent of the internet, it became easier than ever to conceal your identity. You might be a lowly fry cook by day, but by night you were just a name on a forum like everyone else. At school you might get beat up for being a nerd, but at home you were a Level 50 Paladin in your MMO guild. Nobody could hurt you for what you were or did while wearing a mask.

On top of this, people discovered that they could have their identity completely concealed to the point of not even having a persistent online name, and it would still be psychologically rewarding to interact with people. Under complete anonymity, people could act and take chances without even the fear that their beloved Level 50 Paladin would be punished for it in their stead. 

In a hostile and punishment-driven world where you could have all your career aspirations permanently destroyed by holding a conversation topic for a sentence too long, people realized that they could be invincible. They just needed to put on a mask.

Fighting Faceless

As long as there is punishment, there will be anonymity. The very act of punishment gives people two options: they can meet the punisher’s demands, or they can learn to defend against it. Anonymity represents the latter: people weakening the effectiveness of punishment. For better or for worse, an anonymous individual can act without personally suffering negative consequences.  

This, I think, is where most people falter in their attempts to fight anons. Anonymity is a defense against punishment. They are still susceptible to everything else. 

For a lot of people, this can be a kind of disconcerting experience as they realize exactly how much they rely on threats and coercion to control others. Sometimes, this is a very big sign you are doing something wrong - if you rely on bullying or slander to control others, you will have a very hard time controlling an anon culture. Other times, it’s a bit more innocuous - if you rely on institutional laws like DMCA, the inability to punish people in an anon culture who violate it can be frustrating. 

External punishments still affect them. You can threaten to hurt someone an anon cares about, or destroy something they love - all the standard villain tactics that work against masked superheroes also carry over here pretty well. Of course, this is also a really stupid thing to do, since it provides them with positive reinforcement in the form of moral justification. 

This highlights an important point, though: moral justification does affect them. Feeling like they made a positive difference affects them. Heck, any kind of positivity or reward affect them.

Like I mentioned above, anonymity is a defense against punishment, and everything that isn’t punishment is fair game. You can reinforce positive behavior, evoke feelings of righteousness, reward them with things they want, and even influence them with empathy and camaraderie. You can control them or stop them or anything like that, and it’s really not that hard. Most people outside of me wouldn’t even call this “manipulation”. It's kindness. They’re incredibly susceptible to it. 

The Big Twist

So, you know all that stuff I just wrote about controlling anons? It also works on normal people. In fact, it works better than coercion.

Like I mentioned earlier, we often don’t recognize the degree to which we rely on fear and punishment as a culture. We’re accustomed to it, and those of us lucky enough to be born with social aptitude can navigate these complex interpersonal relationships with relative comfort. Someone’s reactions and strategies in their first encounter with an anon culture can be a telling indicator of how much said person relies on punishment - or even the ways in which they rely on punishment. It can be a humbling experience, having a branch of manipulation tactics suddenly cut off from you, but you become more powerful because of it.

Anonymity and similar defenses against punishment are an ingrained part of our culture that will not be going away any time soon, and your success these days will largely depend on your ability to adapt to them. Services like Steam, for example, are viable in the modern age because they try to combat the unpunishable forces of piracy by providing better service than the pirates can. They rely on reinforcement rather than punishment, and it works. Meanwhile, companies that try to enforce punishments slowly dry up and die. 

And not only is it economically non-viable, but a reliance on coercion can be dangerous and self-deceptive. As I said at the very beginning, the opinions people present around others differ from the opinions they present under the veil of anonymity, and their actual habits are better reflected by the latter. Someone might share your political beliefs when they see how you treat people who disagree with you, for example, but you have no idea what that person is doing when they enter a voting booth and gain their anonymity. If they are siding with you out of fear, you can bet they’re secretly fighting you when consequences are removed. Thanks to the very existence of anonymity, all coercion does is obscure your knowledge of who’s on your side and who isn’t. When the masks are on, the rules are different.

I think that’s what makes anon cultures so interesting to me. For all their depravedness and hostility, they largely represent a place in which punishment is less effective. The cultural differences that emerge from that are neat - not entirely positive, nor entirely negative, but certainly different. I think the world would benefit from more people learning the techniques to effectively control anons, because they carry over into about everything. People in an anon culture are no different from normal people, other than being more resistant to the cheapest of manipulation strategies. 

That’s not to say I think anonymity creates the end-all perfect culture or anything like that, but it’s definitely an interesting step that is worth learning from. In particular it’s important to know how to respond to it, since elements and effects of of anonymity are only becoming more prevalent as time goes on. 

Anonymity and the idea of consequence-free social interaction might be be scary, but as long as you understand how it works, it’s relatively harmless and there’s nothing to be afraid of. If nothing else, it’s simpler and safer than the world you’re living in now.

Speaking of 4chan, someone emailed this article to me a few days ago. If you’re interested in anon cultures and can tolerate heavy academic writing, I’d highly, highly, highly recommend checking it out. 

While most of the stuff I write about anon culture is fairly light and based on my personal experiences with the boards that talk about my comic, the researcher behind this is way deeper into this shit. She specifically looks at 4chan’s notorious /b/ board, and goes into a lot of its history and cultural shifts that you don’t normally hear about - including some cross-cultural comparisons to Something Awful and 2chan. 

I’m beginning to realize that a lot of the problems I have with modern Social Justice culture have to do with its economic structure.

I don’t mean “economic” in the monetary sense, but in the more general sense of drawbacks/incentives. Once upon a time, advocating for the visibility and fair representation of marginalized groups was a bad thing. It came at a social cost: many people were openly racist/sexist/homophobic and saw nothing wrong with it, and pushing for these groups’ rights was seen as naive or futile. You had to legitimately care deeply about these issues if you wanted to press them, since fighting for them came at a personal detriment.

As social justice issues began to gain visibility and acceptance, however, entrepreneurs began to see it as a opportunity. New voices started to enter social justice, ones whose goal was not to change minds and laws but to cater to this newfound-yet-significant demographic of majority individuals who wanted to be progressive. These entrepreneurs took moderate, palatable positions that idolized the most progressive ideas their audience already accepted, and silenced their competition through the sheer scale of their reach. Social justice advocacy became a business: they could no longer focus on giving voice to all marginalized people, but instead had to focus on specifically giving voice to the minorities who best fit the image they were trying to sell, or best justified the need for such advocacy. 

A more harmful consequence of this structuring, however, was that it changed why people got involved with social justice. Unlike its earlier years when it came at a detriment to its members, social justice now carried power. People who advocated social justice issues or showed support to notable social justice groups could be rewarded with special benefits or support, or rendered exempt from attacks and criticism. More and more people got involved in social justice despite many of them being apathetic toward (or even outright disliking) the marginalized groups it purported to support. They were in it for special considerations from the (often privileged, majority) people at the top of the totem pole, and the issues they advocated were nothing more than a tool to appease those in power.

I write a lot about anon cultures, something many self-identified social justice advocates vehemently oppose or speak out against, and I think this theory gives an interesting angle to that conflict. Like, I don’t think anyone can deny that minorities are incredibly over-represented on places like 4chan. I don’t mean the cool minorities that society accepts and praises people for defending, but the ones that are still kind of taboo: people with autism, schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, or sexual deviancies outside of vanilla-enough-for-straight-people-to-like homosexuality. Anon culture, by its design, provides them with an environment in which their identity is irrelevant and they have as much voice as anyone else. 

And I think this really peeves the more mercenary social justice advocates. They can’t brag to their SJ-superiors about helping these people, since there is no way to tell which anon is and isn’t in a marginalized group. They won’t receive special treatment in an anon environment for their beliefs or positions, since they would get ridiculed for the very act of wearing an identity. And not just that, but everyone there is free to criticize or attack them - even the minorities they could usually silence - and it will carry just as much weight as anyone else. It terrifies them: the whole reason they got into social justice was to have more rights than other people, and they want their privilege back.

They lash out, claiming that anon culture only enables problematic behavior and bullying without consequence, not realizing that their privilege already lets them get away with these things. They demand new leaders and regulations on what can and can’t be said, doing everything they can to try to create an environment where they are still above others. They don’t even care that they have the ability to interact with the culture first-hand, understand it, earn its favor, and shape it from the inside, but rather they just want to receive special rights directly from someone in power. This is what they care about.

The problem is, these people defend their actions as “social justice” and there’s not really a good way to call them out. There’s not a word for exactly what they are, nor any accusation for them to try and refute. 

So, I’m going to make one!

Ivory Noser

This is a silly term, and for these purposes I like that. It’s a play on “brown noser” - someone who kisses ass to gain favor. Only, this refers to someone who prefers to fellate an entire ivory tower. 

Specifically, I’m going to say that this refers to someone who engages in behaviors to gain the approval of a clique or leader-group, disregarding or attacking the masses. A director makes a pretentious movie meant only to appeal to film reviewers? Ivory noser. Writer says nice things about some more popular writer while attacking their own audience as being savages who don’t “get it”? Ivory noser. Artist puts all their effort into mingling with and defending other artists while showing complete apathy toward their fans? Ivory noser. 

It’s an accusation that someone only cares about the top of the totem pole and the benefits it can give them. Unlike a “brown noser”, it’s not even personalized - they just want to show the general behaviors that will gain them favor with those above them.

In some places, like the pretentious movie made specifically for reviewers, that might occasionally be acceptable. Against a social justice advocate, though, it is a dire accusation. The very nature of social justice means they are advocating for the rights and visibility of people society views as being “beneath” them, and to call them an “ivory noser” suggests they are perfectly willing to step on these people to gain favor with the higher-ups. It’s the one industry where it is completely unacceptable to be someone who serves those on top, and this term is meant to call that out.

Social justice should be leaderless. Those with the most influence should not establish themselves to the point that they can bestow favor with a single word, but rather as transient allies who make a difference by giving a critical speech or refusing to move from their bus seat. Their goal should not be to control the conversation from a place of privilege, but rather to bring all others up to their level. A true proponent of social justice should strive to create an environment where they are no more special or entitled to attention than anyone else. 

The best way to stop these leaders is to call out the ivory nosers who support them. Make people remember that they’re fighting for the ones beneath, not on top, and that supporting those who already have power and voice is the very antithesis of social justice. Stuff like #NotYourShield is a decent step in at least letting minorities stand up to the people appropriating their causes, but it’s too broad, rallying people to lash out against social justice advocacy as a whole.

Social justice doesn’t need to be destroyed, it needs to be cleaned. An economic problem needs an economic solution, and in this case I believe that entails adding a social cost/stigma to the social justice advocates who focus their efforts on pleasing those with more power. If we can call these people out, stigmatize their actions, and make it so advocacy is no longer a good deal for power-hungry bigots who just want even more ability to speak over others, we can retake social justice. It can be a movement driven by minorities and other marginalized groups, with allies who will indiscriminately hold us up to speak for ourselves, rather than speak in our name or “for our own good”. 

Chances are there will at least one reply to this like “that’s a pointless idea. Most people are fine with social justice as it is now; you’re just a minority.” To which I would like to pre-emptively reply… yes, yes I am, and the fact that that invalidates my feelings is exactly why a term like “ivory noser” is necessary. Because if you’re in social justice, you’re supposed to be looking out for the weird people like me, not the majority.