Everyone talks about it like an internet-based hellmouth that bled the influence of Satan into the real. Users committing the original sin that culminated in the present political moment because they chose to be shitheads. But the reality is that it was easily the most robust internet-site culture at the time, with the most "online" people of the period. Many if not most of them were disabled or severely mentally ill or going through really fucked up, extreme stuff. This helped inform the extreme tone, the darkness of it all. They were people who were rejected from offline life, for one reason or another. They wanted to know how much deeper things got, basically. There were a range of personalities. The users were sometimes cruel, as fucked up people sometimes are. The users were sometimes just so outside American culture that they didn't have much else. I knew multiple trans women through 4chan by the time I was 15. One of the dominant site memes was "I want to be the little girl," essentially about why people liked anime about girls. I had a bunch of gay friends through the site. And basically everyone was there because their real life had rejected them somehow. That made the site vulnerable to a series of targeted, organized campaigns of manipulation, with ties to everyone from literal fucking Stormfront to Jeffery Epstein to the FBI. Each board basically had its own culture. Very distinct atmospheres and tones and memes and shit. People started calling themselves "wizards" with less irony the closer you got to the end of the alphabet in the board list. But the largest boards each had the worst cultures. Like open sewers. That personality was sometimes present elsewhere, but it was like some gutter scum that could talk. Then more people like that started using the site. I remember when swarmfront was happening, and shit like "cultural marxism" started getting seeded, people called it out. People were talking about swarmfront and saying it was some stupid nazi bullshit. But it just kept getting worse until it reached a critical mass and the site just became radioactive because of this coordinated shit that happened, alongside a flood of new users. Gamergate was the real critical moment for that, because it opened the door to reactionary salesmen. But that was a symptom of a vulnerability in a lot of people. Angry people. Scared people. Weird suicidal people who only had video games in their lives and somebody said somebody was taking that from them. Actual losers. Victims of life in a millennial civilization that didn't want them.
There is so, so, so much context to what this whole mess was, and how it was used as a fucking testing range for actual, verifiable psyops, and how the environment afforded an amount of that very thing that was being exploited. And yeah there was shitty stuff happening. But there was so much else happening that we need to understand to come away with not only the right understanding of what it was, but why it was vulnerable to becoming what it was, and why the same thing happened basically everywhere else in American society. And everyone just prefers to make it "the bad people website" and not the largest English-speaking petri dish of the the late 00s through the "alt right" era. What took hold there was an engineered reactionary politic that could prosper in such an inhospitable and impersonal environment as that, where using a name was a faux pas. So, like a disease, it just spread through other environments too. But so much happened there. So many kinds of people ended up there. So much web culture came from it. And all the thought most vaguely left people seem to want to give it is "that's that fucked up website for freak losers/degenerates."
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