The year is 2017. Americans are losing what little power of mind they had left to the chaotic fog of political war between the Democratic and Republican Parties. The divide becomes stark and perfect and clean: bad people, baskets of deplorables who post racist slurs on 4chan, are on team Red. On team Blue, institutionalists, people who stand for order and propriety and property. The media is struggling to understand what the Boogaloo Boys are. I decide to keep my mouth shut. I decide that I will not explain this to anyone, explain the layers of irony and satire, hope and despair, anger and charity, harassment and levity that are on this site. It is too complicated. They are too normal go get it. I think, if anyone asks me, I’m going to tell them about Berardi’s idea of the infosphere. I came across it this year, and what I could understand through the dense jargon of critical theory makes sense to me. But I hold this at arm’s length, because this is not me, these are not the 4channers I knew, and it reeks of contagion.
This is the year where Pepe achieves escape velocity, where he completely escapes Matt Furie’s pull or control. Suddently, Furie is being grilled on the news, awkwardly trying to explain that the froggy dude he’s been drawing for the past decade was not ever intended to be a symbol of hatred. By the time the year has ended, everything will change for Boy’s Club. For Pepe.
When I was in high school, I wanted to be an artist. For real. I applied to art schools, was accepted, hope swelling in my heart—but my family couldn’t afford it. So I went somewhere else. But because of that hope, I remember clearly visiting the Boston Museum of Fine Arts during my college visit trip to the Museum School. We rounded the corner of a Picasso exhibition, emerging from the artist’s early figurative work to enter his Blue Period. I remember looking at one canvas, which looks to have been slashed with a razor blade. I don’t know whether or not Picasso was the one to slash the canvas, to gouge through the layers of resinous varnish and rich oil color to reveal the canvas’s muted brown. But I think part of me understands the impulse. And this part of me understands why Furie raised his pen and with a swift panel, killed Pepe. That was it. Furie drew Pepe’s funeral, showed the broken-hearted Bigfoot of the group dribbling whiskey onto the anoxic blue lips of their lifeless friend’s corpse. A philosophy professor with an axe to grind and a busy grindr account once tried to impress the singularity of humanity onto us, to get us to understand the meaning of death. He excoriated us for thinking of death in terms of goldfish or cats or aunties we didn’t know well. I wonder what he would say to me about Pepe, about Furie, about what was picked up along the way, about all that meaning turned memory.
Pepe wasn’t real, but I felt his death. But I think, on the internet, that he would keep living in a way. And I understand why he had to go, that moment in which he got up to leave—and I cannot hate him for that.
The year is 2019. 8Chan, created during the shitstorms of 2013 as an offshoot of 4chan, becomes the target of extreme scrutiny after it’s revealed that three mass shooters posted their manifestos to the site. Though the websites are completely different in character—I have no stomach for 8chan, where the posters actually seem to be serious about their viritrol—they get lumped together as examples of these strange, anonymous corners of the internet where bad things happen. Media figures begin proposing an end to anonymous websites and postings, because those websites enable these events.
On March 15, a man posted a 17-minute Facebook Live video of a shooting spree in which he attacked two mosques in Christchurch, NZ. He posted a long manifesto on 8chan before his hate-fueled murder spree shattered the city. On April 27, a man posted a message on 8chan before proceeding to attack the Poway Synagogue north of San Diego. And before the year was through, in August, another 8channer carried out a mass shooting attack in El Paso, killing 23.
I have long since taken my leave from the world of anonymous messaging boards by 2019. I had real-life friends, real-life connections, and wanted to enter a more professional phase of my life. I didn’t need or want this to be a part of my life or something I was associated with. But 2019 was destined to, itself, be a period of rupture. A year of death, violence, of the Trump presidency media cycle, of polarization—of the possibilities for 2020 and beyond, too. And in the wake of this rupture, I would find myself back again, examining the strange world of the anonymous internet more critically. I want to trace the meaning in it, tease the exquisite from the vulgar, put my hand back onto the pulse of it. I have new words for it, exciting academic terms like shitstorm and infosphere and ways of categorizing this as nonlinear history.
He didn’t mean to make you cry
With sparks that ring and bullets fly
On empty rings around your heart
The world just screams and falls apart
The year is 2021. Moot departs Google for parts or points unknown, the flower of his boy genius long since faded.