The site is where hackers deposited nude celebrity photos over the summer. The site was born in , a year before Facebook, as an image and message board in the style of a similar Japanese board called 2chan, or Futaba. Poole wanted to create a version on 2chan for American audiences to share his fascination with Japanese comics and television shows, the Journal said. Soon, the site grew well beyond anime and manga, thanks in large part to the fact that it allows users to be anonymous.
It became a place for people to share images and discuss common interests, from TV shows to computer science to pornography. I do not want to reduce the various inter- disciplinary connections and diverse undertakings that are subsumed under the label of the material turn to a set of shared qualities. I will briefly discuss the methodological challenges that they imply and highlight some of the differences in the approaches in order to explain which approach informs my work here.
The perspective focusing on the relations of online architectures and their affective potential will then allow to grasp the processes of mediation within which circular reactions create a new collectivity such as the online swarm. In the end I aim to outline to what extent understanding affective infrastructures can help to grasp online swarming in its diverse manifestations and thus might help to distinguish between swarms for example as parts of marketing strategies or swarms that rather work as subversive elements within current forms of capitalism.
Utopian visions accompanied the development of the Internet from its beginning, especially in the euphorically speculative period of the s, when the Internet only started to become a part of everyday life. In concepts of social media involving participation, grassroots democracy, free access for all, and nonhierarchical communities, an instrumental understanding of the media again either reduces technology to the provision of secondary technical tools or completely dismisses it.
The instrumental understanding of media infrastructures on which these approaches often rest is tied to notions of subjectivity and sovereignty that allow for an idea of emancipation in the modernist sense. This theoretical opposition expresses a notion of sovereignty and conscience in the Marxist sense that is not shared by post- structuralist or neo-materialist approaches, some of which employ the swarm metaphor but in a completely different way.
Eugene Thacker, for example, in his article on Networks, Swarms, Multitudes , focuses on examples of mutations in the contemporary body politic and develops a notion of the swarm that is part of a concept which exceeds given paradigms of intentional subjects. Like Stalder, Thacker describes the swarm as decentralized, self-organizing, and spontaneous. The concept of affect, derived from Spinoza, does not imply any notion of intention or conscience or the reason and motivations of individual actors; as a prepersonal phenomenon it is opposed to feeling and emotion.
Within this Spinozian perspective, affections between human and nonhuman bodies or materialities emerge and operate beyond human perception.
Focusing on one example, Anonymous the example that Stalder also chooses 17 , and one specific case, the creation of the LOLcats meme, exemplifies how the concept of affect can help to explain digital swarming. Within the creation of the LOLcats, Anonymous corresponds to the basic definition of swarms directional force without centralized control, more than the sum of its parts.
More and more users uploaded new cat pictures, and others commented and called these pictures LOLcats. Within a few hours, there were hundreds of LOLcats on 4chan, and these pictures then spread to the whole Internet. There is already some academic research on LOLcats that qualifies the phenomenon as a meme, even as the most popular Internet meme. That is, within the emergence of the meme a swarm is at work, and the output of this swarm or these swarms is the meme; in the case of the LOLcats phenomenon, the meme are the cat pictures superimposed with various statements and slogans that then go viral.
They only emerged in the interaction of diverse actors on 4chan who did not know each other or realize what the output would be, who did not even intend to create something. That is where processes of affection occur. The something bigger is perceivable only after these processes have taken place. The LOLcats became the LOLcats when people started to reflect on what had happened and to speak about the output: they then gave this phenomenon the name LOLcats and later identified it as a meme.
It was only in the nonintended, unregulated, and ungoverned interaction of the users based on processes of affection that the swarm directed force without centralized control, more than the sum of its parts and then the meme emerged. In contrast to forms of suggestion and imitation from body to body, as described in crowd and collective-behavior theory, 20 in the case of the LOLcats the affective processes do not produce contagious forces but raise the potential of the affected bodies to act and thus are a creative force that has a modifying effect.
Furthermore, the affectively inspired interactions have to be situated in relation to a specific online site. In order to understand the specific quality of 4chan that inspires the emergence of swarms and memes, I want to analyze it with a new materialist approach. Within the new theoretical movement that affirms the vibrant dynamics and unique capacities of nonhumans, there are strong differences that are expressed in different labels: new materialism, speculative materialism, object-oriented ontology, and actor-network theory.
How can I approach the infrastructure? Informed by postmodern approaches and theories after the crisis of representation , I would concentrate on the discursive level and deconstruct the representations. But can I also approach the infrastructure more directly?
In opposition to these postmodern approaches, Meillassoux, one of the most prominent figures associated with speculative realism, tries to find ways to surpass the limits of what we take to be the human standpoint — i. Neither will I continue to deepen the epistemological discussion on accessing reality. New materialist methodology can thus focus on relations that surround us, that have material effects that can be traced within human perception, that affect the world which one encounters as a researcher, rather than wondering whether it is possible to approach preexisting matter.
Given that the concept of mediators implies the processes of mediation between persons, artifacts, and symbols, it already points to the model of occurent relations within which mediators emerge and work. But much more than Latour, Deleuzian-inspired thinkers such as Massumi stress the concept of relationality. As described above, the concept of affect can be helpful in explaining the formation of a swarm that creates a meme like the LOLcats. While the concept of the mediators seems important to approach the infrastructural elements at work during the creation of an online swarm, complementing this approach with a notion of affect allows to concentrate more on the relations and thus to focus on what happens within the processes of mediation.
Such a focus on the dynamic and constitutive relations between bodies or objects, between diverse materialities as suggested by Massumi, implies to take physical bodies into account, both human and nonhuman — not as a priori, as something already given, but as being constituted within these processes of circular affection. In the following, I will therefore try to approach the elements of the Internet infrastructure as potential mediators in the process of constituting collectivity like the online swarm.
Compared to studies on Facebook and other Web 2. The main difference between 4chan and other Web 2. The site and its information architecture is copied from available forum software; it is composed of boards, threads, and posts.
Each board is themed e. Posts starting a thread have to include an image, while images in replies are optional. As there is no registration and no login necessary to start posting, from a technical point of view accessing the site and participating seems as easy as it can be. Unlike on other sites, where being anonymous usually means not to register under a real name or identity but creating a pseudonym and sometimes also an account with this pseudonym, on 4chan there are no accounts.
All information is entered on a per-post basis. Furthermore, creating a nickname does not guarantee individuality, as the same nickname is not blocked for other users. If a user claims a pseudonym, any other user can claim it for herself in any following posting. And if a user, as a consequence, refuses to create a nickname, 4chan automatically gives him or her the name anonymous. As an effect, if all users are represented as anonymous , nobody will know who has been talking.
The peculiar thing about the Scientology protest was how little 4chan cared about Scientology. Scientology had removed a funny video featuring Tom Cruise rambling incoherently about Scientology. There was a moral component to their protest, but it was tangential at best. Anonymous attacked corporations like Paypal and American Express, not because of their corporateness, but because they had frozen the assets of Julian Assange who had similar beliefs about the freedom to distribute information on the internet.
At Occupy Wall Street, 4channers were a distinct minority. Now and again someone in a Guy Fawkes mask would voice libertarian ideas among a group of radical leftists discussing socialism.
However, despite not being on the left, Anonymous is often conflated or confused with the leftist Occupy movement. For example, in the T. The hackers in Mr. That is to say, they have the agenda of Occupy Wall Street. Emulating fiction from TV and comic books, 4chan forum go-ers pretended to be an international cabal of powerful hackers. Then almost a decade later, a T.
By the end of , 4chan had finally been outed. Subsequently, the group splintered in a sense; anyone could and did pick up the banner of Anonymous. But philanthropic and anti-corporate hacking was not at the heart of what 4chan was about. Perhaps there was a moment when it could have been something else, a shining possibility that emerged on the horizon in one of those magical revolutionary moments in which all things are possible, like Occupy Wall Street itself.
But, it was not to be. At least, not yet. The press often lamented how, like Occupy Wall Street, they could not define Anonymous. No one person represented it. But this same reasoning could also be used to make the opposite point.
If no definition existed for Anonymous, why were millions of people identifying as one of the group? It was still united by a common culture and set of values, fuzzy around the edges, but solid at the core. And what was this solid core that defined it?
The same thing it had always been. This was where most or all of their interaction, social or otherwise, took place. The real world, by contrast, was a place they did not succeed, perhaps a place they did not fundamentally understand. This, of course, did not describe everyone, but it was the bulk of the bell curve. Sometimes, while meeting virtually to commiserate about the problem, 4chan sought to fix it.
The advice was so basic, it could be endearing. There were professionals and successful people on 4chan who used it only for amusement. And there were hackers who did indeed use their knowledge of virtual worlds to effect substantive change in the real one.
But the core of the culture remained more or less unchanged. In fact, it was such a big deal for them because, after all their groping for a prank that might become a cause 4chan cared about, they finally hit on one that expressed their strange, unique complaints. The mind tends to discard such things as nonsense. Nonetheless, there was a beginning. In , a jilted lover claimed his ex-girlfriend had been unfaithful to him. He tried to prove to the internet that he was wronged in an embarrassing and incoherent blog post.
The target of his post, his ex, happened to be a female game developer. Soon 4chan and other like minded men who felt wronged by women, took up the rallying cry.
Again, we have to acknowledge this group as largely made up of people who have failed at the real world and have checked out of it, entering the fantasy worlds of internet forums and videos games. These are men without jobs, without prospects, and by extension so they declaimed without girlfriends. Their only recourse, the only place they feel effective, is the safe, perfectly cultivated worlds of the games they enter. By consequence of their defeat, the distant, abstract concept of women in the flesh makes them feel humiliated and rejected.
Yet, in the one space they feel they can escape the realities of this, the world of the video game, here to them, it seems women want to assert their presence and power.
Yiannopoulos rose to prominence via Gamergate. Likewise the mainstream press sometimes describes him as troll as a way of capturing his vague association with 4chan. This term, too, is inaccurate. As an openly gay man, he argues that men no longer need be interested in women, and that they can and should walk away from the female sex en masse. In a long, incoherent set of bullet points on feminism he states:.
The rise of feminism has fatally coincided with the rise of video games, internet porn, and, sometime in the near future, sex robots. With all these options available, and the growing perils of real-world relationships, men are simply walking away.
Here Yiannopoulos has inverted what has actually happened to make his audience feel good. Men who have retreated to video games and internet porn can now characterize their helpless flight as an empowered conscious choice to reject women for something else. In other words, it justifies a lifestyle which in their hearts they previously regarded helplessly as a mark of shame. The job is no better than any of the others, except for one important difference: It ends early enough for Chinaski and another worker, Manny, to race to the track for the last bet of the day.
Soon the other workers in the warehouse hear of the scheme and ask Hank to put down their bets, too. At first Hank objects. But Manny has a different idea. They always pick the wrong horse. They have a way of always picking the wrong horse.
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