https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=f—rplQjysk
We could start with 4chan maybe, and maybe you could walk us through first what it is, and then what it was, and then what it is now, if it’s anything, because I did get the sense as well that this happened already. Something else is happening now, and I don’t know what it is, but whatever it was you were writing about, that’s five years ago, which is a long time in internet terms. Sure. I think right now, first of all, discussing 4chan publicly in a context like this, in some kind of studious or serious context, violates the ethos of 4chan. One of the big rules about 4chan is normies get out, re. By talking about it automatically, I’m positing myself as someone who’s an outsider. I’m not on 4chan all the time, but 4chan is emblematic of a broader section of the internet, which wasn’t literally only 4chan, but was driven by irreverency, was driven by this idea of that which is presented to us with earnestness should not be taken at face value, that this earnestness is often used as a cudgel and as a mechanism of affecting social control. Certainly you’ve been the subject of many memes I’m sure you’re familiar with. The point that they figured out, there’s an expression that they say meme magic is real. The premise being, before the new right, the idea was you’d have these organizations putting forth some kind of claim or idea, often absurd on its face, and the argument would be like, well, that’s not accurate, that’s not fair. The new approach was, why are we taking this adjit prop at face value instead of mocking it, clowning it, and basically rendering the tool impotent? That was 4chan’s poll board. You had the Donald subreddit on Reddit. Where is this, you say that it’s misunderstood by the mainstream press. I always use the term corporate press because I don’t really regard it as mainstream, but I don’t know that it’s misunderstood so much as misrepresented. Well, I think it’s probably both because it’s not easy. First of all, there’s an immense divide between people who don’t use the internet as a social mechanism, or as their primary source of information, and people who do. There’s an unbelievable divide, and maybe if you’re older than 50, you’re in the world of 1970, and if you’re younger than 40, you’re in the world of 2010. Those are really different worlds. You talk about the corporate press, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the technological impact of YouTube and podcasts. This is why I’d like to dig into the misunderstood part first before we go to the misrepresented part. What I see, what I saw popping up in your book continually was two things happening in 4chan. There’s trouble making that in some sense is there for its own sake, and I’d like to talk to you about that. Yes. There’s a political movement, but then there’s also this exploration of what is actually a technological revolution. You think about legacy media. I’ve noticed that when I’ve gone to TV stations and been interviewed by a journalist, I’ll have a discussion with the journalist in the green room, and I’m talking to a person then. But as soon as the cameras go on, I’m not talking to a person anymore. I’m talking to someone who’s an adept mouthpiece for a massive corporate organization. But that was actually a necessity, because the bandwidth for television was so expensive that it wasn’t possible to grant any individual untrammeled access to it. And so it was inevitable that a corporation was never going to allow, except in exceptional cases, any journalist to have what would truly be an individual opinion, and certainly wasn’t going to let them explore ideas in real time. Too expensive, too risky. But then now we’re in this weird situation, and the 4chan guys were playing with this to some degree, where it isn’t obvious that the corporate media platforms have any advantage whatsoever over anyone who’s technologically able. The fact that we can have this discussion, for example. I would say they have one very big advantage, which you’ve seen yourself, which is the concept of legitimacy. So your previous book, The New York Times, refused to basically acknowledge it as being printed in America. So you can’t say it’s a New York Times bestseller, even though the number it sold is just a huge amount, it’s hugely successful. So, dear reader, the book I did about North Korea, which I’m sure we’ll talk about later, I did that with Kickstarter. As a result of that, on Amazon, it looks the same. It’s going to have a page listing like another page listing. But The New York Times, all these other elements, they’re in a position… I got an hour on C-SPAN’s book TV, so that is changing in that regard. But it gives them an opportunity to pretend that this book doesn’t exist. So unless a book is being published by certain outlets that have legitimacy, basically, it’s just like… I don’t know if you watched wrestling growing up, I certainly did. The WWF, when I was a kid, they were rival organizations, and they literally acted as if these rival organizations didn’t exist. And if a wrestler came over from the NWA to the WWF, they acted like he was this new discovery, that he had no history to him. It was very odd, because all you had to do was change the channel, and they’re acting in certain other mechanisms. So that is a big advantage, because if you go to talk to Mom, and you say, where’d you hear this? I heard this on CBS. Where’d you hear this? I heard this on 4chan. It’s very clear which one Mom is going to choose. I understand it was so. I agree, but part of what the 4chan guys were doing, by your own account, to some degree, was testing these new technological platforms to see how much power they actually had. So these trolling games that you described, so you described trolling as something that’s actually quite specific in its intent, when it isn’t just being, say, adolescent foolishness. It’s something like, can we create a narrative and string along legacy media types? Some of that’s a joke, but some of it’s also a test. Does this new technological platform have enough power to bend and twist what has been the standard means of delivering the cultural narrative for decades? The answer to that frequently was yes. Oh yes. Increasingly, the legacy media outlets are suffering from delegitimization. They lose money, they lose their ability to fact check, and because they don’t have this technological advantage anymore, they have the remnants of their brand. It’s something like that. Yeah. And there’s also something, there’s a very big asymmetry between honesty and dishonesty. If you and I are good friends and I tell you one major lie, well that’s one statement out of tens of thousands, that one statement is still going to do much more damage than one honest statement because there’s an amount of trust lost. So their brand has been, and they say this explicitly, CNN had ads not that long ago saying this is an Apple, we only report facts. If I’m coming at you and saying that I am only reporting facts, as soon as I’m caught in one misrepresentation, even if it’s innocent, which I don’t think it is in most cases, right away that just kind of collapses the souffle because I trusted you, I relied on you, and now you’re giving me misinformation. But most importantly, and this is where I differ from more mainstream conservatives who think things have become corrupted, you’ve made mistakes, I’ve made mistakes, everyone makes mistakes all the time. It’s going to be inevitable simply from a lack of knowledge. What steps have you taken once these mistakes have been made to make amends and also put yourself in a position that you won’t make the same mistake again? And if you see with corporate media, oftentimes they’ll do things that are disingenuous, but let’s give them the benefit of doubt, let’s just say they were sloppy, but no one gets fired. There’s no mea culpa. Like, you know what? Like Tylenol is a great counter example. Back in the early 80s, I believe it was, Tylenol got some was poisoning Tylenol bottles. People I think were dying or at the very least were getting very sick. So Tylenol had this huge ad campaign that said this is the steps we’ve taken. You know, you got the childproof calf, you got the seal, you got the cotton, whatever it was. This is how you know that we are safe. You can rely on Tylenol. You don’t see that with CNN or Fox or ABC. Whenever they do these egregious things, they just pretend that they never happened all along or say that this is some kind of, you know, you can’t listen to the conspiracy theories on the Internet. So this is why there is this kind of another loss of trust, because there seems to be very little effort to maintain and foster that trusting relationship between the channels and the audience and make amends when things have gotten wrong. So let’s let’s I want to go. I want to continue with 4chan for a bit. Can you walk me through exactly like you? You said that one of the mistakes that CNN did made, for example, and also Hillary Clinton’s campaign was treating 4chan like it was actually a person and as if there was someone who could represent it and speak. Can you lay out what exactly what what it is and how it works? And then maybe we can talk about the meme culture that’s associated with it. Sure. So 4chan and there’s others, there’s 8chan, there’s the Reddit and other such their message boards. So basically, 4chan, I don’t remember how many boards they have. Some are completely innocuous. So fitness is their fitness and health board. FA is their fashion board. Guys can ask, does this do these pants look good on me? You know, what kind of hat would look good in my hair? You know, innocuous stuff. Poll, POL is their politics board. So basically, it’s anonymous and it’s not, I believe, after there’s 15 pages and after there’s no updates on a thread, the threads vanish into the netherworld wherever you can’t see them anymore. Right. So it’s got an impermanence. Correct. You can identify yourself with the flag if you want when you when you log in, but it’s there’s no usernames. It’s not like Facebook. So basically, you know, the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2015, 2016, were positing about these sites and like, how is it that this is allowed to happen? But it’s not the kind of thing where it’s like Facebook and you call Mark Zuckerberg and he bans certain users. The users are ephemeral. You don’t know who they are. It’s the posts are ephemeral. They just vanish off the board. So this claim that, you know, the comparison I had, I believe in the book, was kind of the more al-Qaeda. It’s very decentralized. You know, you can’t really take out one person and then the whole thing falls apart other than you having to take try to take out the site, which they tried to do earlier this year and in late 2020. But it’s an entirely different model. And I think people who are have that bureaucratic mindset, people have that elitist in the sense that you have this managerial elite running things, they can’t even conceive of an organization or a location or a website which is decentralized. And there’s no like, you know, big bad vampire to kill. Once you take out this vampire. Yeah, I mean, but that is part of what I thought was in some sense, you’re documenting something that’s so revolutionary that even the people using it don’t know how revolutionary it is. You know, and so because we have these massive communication technologies now and they all have slightly different rules. And just by tweaking the rules a tiny bit, you can create a whole new organization like TikTok, let’s say, which has videos of a certain length and at least to begin with, almost no other. All of a sudden, that’s a huge social network doing all sorts of things that no one has ever done before. So the rules for 4chan are really crucially important to understanding it. So it’s anonymous, decentralized and evanescent. And that’s something. Yeah, and they have no one. The two rules are no child pornography. And if there’s pornography, it has to be stick to the pornography board. But so it’s pretty much the Wild West when it comes to free speech. Right. And the fact that it’s not permanent also. So it’s anonymized and impermanent, which means you’d think, at least in part, that it would encourage a lot more risk taking because one of the things that would mitigate risk is the fact that it could be attributed to you, but also that it would be permanent. Yeah. I mean, that’s the comparison of 4chan and let’s say Twitter, where someone’s old tweets will be there. At the very least, they’re going to be archived somewhere. You’re going to have a consistent username. So even if it’s not Jordan Peterson, if you’re just going to be like Jack Smith, they’ll be able to track Jack Smith’s posts over time. You can’t really do that on a site like 4chan or 8chan. But there’s other sites like this. I mean, what they have figured out is the corporate press might decide 4chan’s the devil, 4chan’s the devil, 4chan’s the devil. You take down 4chan, well, they’ll just go to Discord or they’ll go to these other sites. So technology is what allows people, is designed in contemporary terms for people to communicate. So if you’re going to take out one location where they’re gathering and trying to communicate, it’s going to take minutes to find a new location. Now, there’s going to be a cost because you have to get the word out through other means about this is where we all are now. But it’s very, very hard when people are basically effectively teleporting. For me to go from one location to another, physically, I have to get on a plane, a car, or train, whatever. But if you go to one website to another, I have to type in a web address. So if you just ban one address, the amount of effort it takes to shift to another one could not be more minimal.