4Chan - from /. to /b/ - the cycle of geek life

Danah Boyd on the attraction of /b/ (aka 4chan) to intellectuals and digital pundits:

Journalists and academics are clamoring to discuss and analyze 4chan. At first, it was all about discussing whether or not this community of 9.5 million mostly young mostly male internet people was evil or brilliant. Lately, the obsession focuses on anonymity, signaling that Chris’ TED talk set the frame for public discourse about 4chan.

If one were a tad cynical one would reflect that its only since its recent mainstream popularity that there has been a clamour, its been going for at least 5 years to my knowledge .

In addition, by the way, the convention on the site is you do not talk about it - fat chance now that Time has featured it

Boyd's view is that 4Chan is hacking the attention economy like earlier generations of hackers hacked The Man of their days (phones, secure systems etc) - 4Chan just carries on the tradition of (mainly) young males left to their own infernal devices:

As with security hackers, the attention hackers that are popping up today are a mixed bag. It’s easy to love the cultural ethos and despise some of the individuals or the individual acts. In recognizing the cultural power of the community represented by 4chan, I don’t mean to justify some of the truly hateful things that some individuals have done. But I am willing to laugh off some of the stupidity and find humor in the antics while also rejecting certain acts. I’m willing to lament the fact that it’s been 20 years and underground hacking culture is still mostly white and mostly male while also being stoked to see a new underground subculture emerge. Of course, it doesn’t look like it’ll be underground for long… And I can’t say that I’m too thrilled for every mom and pop and average teen to know about 4chan (which is precisely why I haven’t blogged about it before). But I do think that there’s something important about those invested in hacking the attention economy. And I do hope that we always have people around us reminding us to never take the internets too seriously.

At the end of the day its just another geek countercultural outlet, like the altnet was in the days Before Web, like /. (slashdot) was in Web 1.0, but its been officially name as this generation's counterculture (Sez Time magazine) so no doubt there will soon be a raft of books and blogs written about it.....

But it has one very useful principle - it is arguing strongly for anomymity and non persistence on the 'Net, which is (in my view) a key componenet of privacy - and makes 4Chan well worth supporting. I have embedded the talk (by 4Chan founder "moot") from TED above.