This is not a conspiracy theory.

I feel compelled to say this because while much of it might sound wild to anyone who’s not a heavy, active gamer or immersed in the internet and internet lore it may sound like it. What it is, is a timeline and history of events that began when someone with the handle LowTax banned Hentai on the Something Awful message forums and how that began a domino chain of events that cascaded and culminated with the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol building in Washington, D.C.

It’s the equivalent of Arch Duke Ferdinand of Serbia’s assassination kicking of World War One. Or as Jason Pargin, former editor of Cracked wrote on Twitter: “It would take forever to explain how this decision would eventually lead to the storming of the capital on 1/6. I am by no means joking about that. Somebody will write a book about it if they haven’t already.”

It was in response to @synoisia writing:  “Lowtax banning hentai on the SA forums was a real assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand moment and understanding this will haunt me forever.”

It would take forever to explain how this decision would eventually lead to the storming of the capital on 1/6. I am by no means joking about that. Somebody will write a book about it if they haven’t already. https://t.co/q8CQMrqitt

— Jason Pargin, author of John Dies at the End, etc (@JohnDiesattheEn) November 11, 2021

So, here’s the chain of events: The Something Awful forum banned hentai. In response to this 4chan was founded. 4chan gave rise to Occupy and the hacker group Anonymous, placing gaming and politics in the same digital space. 4chan posts ignited gamergate. Steve Bannon took notice and immediate tried to radicalize the participants. 4chan shut down the gamergate sub forum. 8chan was created in response. 8chan is where pizza gate and QAnon started.

So the fall of Western civilization can be directly traced to kids not being able to fap to their waifus. It’s a little sensitive because Lowtax, the guy who actually banned the hentai and started this mess committed suicide last week

Over the past few weeks you might’ve seen some tweets and memes going around proposing a direct link between the banning of hentai (anime porn) on a once prominent, but now largely disused, internet forum called Somethingawful.com (SA for short) leading to the capitol insurrection. It has this elegant butterfly effect quality to it which is equal parts funny and terrifying. After the initial laugh you might start to wonder if it’s true. That’s a little more complicated. In broad strokes, yes, it’s true, but like all things it’s a nuanced convergence of factors. The question isn’t so much if it happened as how it happened and what we can learn from that process.

STAGE 1

Let’s lay some groundwork by going back to, ironically, the year 1984. This is the year that Stewart Brand, a futurist entrepreneur with a heavy influence on modern computing, is said to have stood before a hacker conference and uttered the now famous phrase, “information wants to be free.” That sentence, spoken a generation before the mainstreaming of the internet, has come to define the central conflict between social platforms and the communities that utilize them. All you need to do is look on any Facebook group and I’m certain that within moments you’ll see some disgruntled person talking about censorship and how they’re leaving for greener pastures on some less moderated alternative. A large-scale version of this was seen when most major platforms banned disgraced former president Donald Trump and legions of his more devoted followers fled to places like Parler or Telegram. The idea of a platform with fewer restrictions, on the surface, sounds like a good idea, but in execution it’s not always easy to draw the line on what should or shouldn’t be allowed. I say this as someone with multiple Facebook bans on my account for posting far-left content and art pieces which depict adult nudity, so regulating what’s harmful and not is obviously an on-going conversation. All of that in mind, this is a story of digital diaspora… mass virtual migrations of users looking for freedom and finding an escalating series of toxic and exploitable platforms which have carried us to the brink of a real world societal collapse. 

This brings us back to Something Awful. Founded in 1999 by programmer and self-described comedian Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, SA is a forum that initially presented itself as a kind of outlaw alternative to spaces like AOL, which was highly commercial and perceived as over-moderated. The only barrier to entry on SA was a small activation fee. The allure of a “free speech” zone attracted a rebellious mix of users who would continually strive to outdo themselves with pranks and posts designed to be offensive. SA was where practices like doxing began and eventually became part of its accepted forum culture. For a while this expanding enclave of “Lost Boys” was happy to exist under the rules of Lowtax’s “Peter Pan”. This all changed in 2003 when SA banned hentai. The reasons for this ban are disputed, ranging from rumors of serious legal threats to Lowtax just finding those forum users annoying. Regardless of the reasoning, that hentai ban gave rise to 4Chan in October of that same year.

 

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4Chan, the now infamous image forum, was founded by Christopher “Moot” Poole, based on similar forum layouts found in Japan. 4Chan didn’t require any activation or access fees, it didn’t even require you to register an account. Unregistered users of the site were referred to as “Anonymous” or “Anon”. Hentai was again flowing freely as users poured into the free-to-use and barely moderated forum. This combination of easier access and even less restrictions started to evolve in unexpected ways. 

At this point, I think it’s important to take a short detour to discuss how ideas can have the characteristics of a communicable disease. Seth Godin, a business executive and marketer, coined a term called an “ideavirus” in the title of his 2000 book, Unleashing the Ideavirus. This concept, that a piece of information can mutate as it passes from group to group or person to person, is reinforced by the earlier publishing of Richard Dawkins. In the 1976 book The Selfish Gene Dawkins introduced the word meme, defined as a single unit of cultural information which carries more meaning than the sum of its parts. An internet meme, for example, being a mashup of images and text, conveys more symbolic meaning than the content itself… like a zip file for your brain’s neurons. Additionally, a meme changes its meaning in subtle ways as more people interact with it. Additionally, the term viral, often cited as originally marketing slang in the late 90s, entered the popular discourse in the mid-2000s and is another direct analogy we make to the contagious nature of information. Ideas infect and mutate. With 4Chan we saw the first variant arise.

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From 2003 to 2009 4Chan exploded in popularity and a strange thing occurred, radical politics began to emerge on the platform. The first major activity which I can recall from this period was the Anon vs Scientology campaign which started the deeper mainstream examination of Scientology’s practices and alleged human rights violations. From this, doxing started becoming weaponized against animal abusers and other perceived bad actors, and from that the hacker group Anonymous began Operation Empire State Rebellion targeting financial institutions whose wrongdoing had severely injured many everyday people in the housing crisis of 2008. This grew into the Occupy movement, which was, at the time, the largest grassroots protest in decades.

This combination of unregulated online discourse and political motivation among a younger demographic didn’t go unnoticed. It’s around this period… maybe 2009-2012, that we started to see an influx of white supremacist material on the platform; typically centered on the anime fan community. Why? What’s the connection? Groups which advocate for white supremacy fetishize Japan for two key reasons… Japan, as much as I love the country and its people, has overtones of ethno-supremacy baked into its culture. It’s homogenous and somewhat xenophobic. White nationalist groups point to Japan as an example of a successful ethno-state, despite the country’s recent push for more open immigration standards to bolster its economy and ease negative population growth. The second reason they admire Japan is the perception of strongly defined gender roles in Japanese culture, leading to the blatantly inaccurate trope of the submissive Japanese wife. This far-right association with the “idea” of Japan continues to persist. For example, Rep. Paul Gosar recently released a political attack ad using footage from the anime series Attack on Titan casting his enemies as the invading giants.

This fascist undertone of misogyny and ethno-nationalism was even present in Charlottesville when popular cosplayers were seen in the crowd of angry bigots. 

On 4Chan things took a turn for the worse during the Gamergate controversy. This coordinated attack on women in the games industry was planned and executed by 4Chan members, then quickly championed by Steve Bannon’s Breitbart outlet. Political troll Milo Yiannopoulos, before being cast aside by the right like a prostitute in the sober light of day, was the figurehead of the political side of the Gamergate movement.

The anime aesthetic permeated Gamergate. The level of harassment was even too much for 4Chan and Moot decided it was time to ban all Gamergate content from the forum. This directly led to a mass-exodus to Reddit and a newly created forum called 8Chan. 8Chan was a similar message board to 4Chan created by Fredrick Robert Brennan, known online as “copypaste,” in response to tightening moderation on Moot’s platform. Where Moot had always harbored a desire to monetize 4Chan, the brand’s toxicity made that almost impossible. 8Chan, however, didn’t have any immediate ambitions besides chaos and with this influx of Gamergate participants, chaos is what was about to ensue.

On Reddit forums like /kotakuinaction were the more mainstream and public faces of Gamergate, but what was established was a Reddit to 8Chan pipeline of radicalization with the major doxing and swatting efforts along with blatant misogynistic and violent posts living on 8Chan as the Reddit community talked in coded language about “journalistic ethics”. As the political stakes increased, Reddit became a hotbed for right-wing activity through forums like /the_donald using similar language around corrupt journalists and secret elites controlling the media narrative. These are mostly recycled claims from white supremacy’s history of anti-semitic conspiracy theories, but upgraded for a new era. Reddit started to take notice and began quarantining the more toxic communities. 

As Trump was elected and a horde of ultra right-wing personalities started coming out of the shadows, a small-time businessman / pig farmer / ex-army recruiter named Jim Watkins made an unexpected offer to buy 8chan from Brennan. Brennan would subsequently move to the Philippines to work full-time for Watkins and his son. Not long after, a mysterious online figure named “Q” (or “QAnon”… when combining with the standard unregistered moniker of ‘Chan users) would suddenly begin using 8Chan to weave a story about a secret cabal of child-eating elites and how Trump was the only person in government fighting this secret war. The coded language of Q intersected with terms popularized on Breitbart, like “The Deep State”. The QAnon conspiracy leaked back into Reddit on /The_Donald and /GreatAwakening, leading Reddit to disband those communities. Refugees from those forums then filtered out to 8Chan in greater numbers, as well as to the newly established patriot.win and greatawakening.win, where some aspects of the Capitol riots were promoted, if not directly planned. 

The motives of Q, whom many believe to be a name shared by Watkins himself and a small group of close associates, are still unclear, but what formed around Q’s posts became nothing short of a religious movement. The striking image of a shirtless face-painted man wearing a horned headdress standing on the floor of congress during the chaos of the Capitol Insurrection is one of the most enduring images of that day, and this man, Jacob Chansley the “QAnon Shaman,” was sentenced to 41 months behind bars because of it.

So that’s the direct connection between the banning of hentai and the near destruction of the US electoral process, but what can we learn from this? There are three stages of a digital community being co-opted by bad actors. The first stage is a perception of persecution. If the community feels that their freedom to operate is in peril, a subset of that community will seek less regulated spaces. This also happened in the physical world with things like desert raves and warehouse punk shows, it’s a human behavior, not something inherent to the virtual. 

STAGE 2

The second stage is bad actors attaching to an aesthetic within the community experiencing perceived pressure. Again, there are physical world examples of this with varying degrees of success. For example, biker culture being saturated in violent nationalist behavior is a good reference point for a successful overtaking of a subculture. Neo-Nazis trying to co-opt Punk Rock, however, is an example of a failed attempt to subvert a community and this gave rise to the modern tactics of the Antifa movement. An active battleground is the current neo-pagan / neo-folk movement where white supremacists are using nordic iconography to co-opt communities. The musical acts Heilung and Wardruna are two bands whose tours have come into conflict with neo-Nazis seeking to recruit their fans. If your community is suddenly being flooded with images in its own distinct cultural style, but with an uncomfortable ideology attached to it, then your space is under siege. 

STAGE 3

The third stage is a call to action against a perceived enemy. In the case of Gamergate this was female professional gamers, fans, critics, journalists, and female game developers. In the case of QAnon it was journalists, Hollywood, and Democrats. When a critical mass is reached and an enemy is identified, that’s when your community has fully become part of an ideology and you have two choices… leave or become an active antagonist. It’s a hard thing to imagine some kid just wants to see cartoon breasts and ends up smashing open the heads of capitol police while trying to overthrow the US government, but here we are… welcome to the now.

There are deeper lessons to learn about the fine touch needed to moderate a digital community and, frankly,  no one has completely figured out how to make this work yet. Digital platforms facilitate the existence of these virtual city-states which exist parallel to our physical world, and as such they need to be treated with the same care we give laws and government. Although Facebook takes the brunt of the outrage for their moderation practices, in truth, no platform has been untouched by these issues. Twitter was a conduit for QAnon and Gamergate. Reddit absolutely played its part too. We, as a society, need to recognize these digital mass migrations and understand the flow of users in the same way we examine physical human migrations between nation states. We need to make sense of why and where people are flowing if we want to develop any effective tools to manage the needs of our changing society without more bloodshed.

Dekker Dreyer is #GayNrd’s Arts and Technology editor.