4chan Was a Toilet Stall.

What did we really lose when 4chan went dark?

A recent video showed up on my feed discussing “Bathroom Graffiti” recently, specifically noting that within the toilet stall, one may speak (write) freely without repercussion… the resultant graffiti being depersonalized. What’s interesting about the nature of these spaces is the language and ideas that develop in them. Researchers have found that anonymity provides a sort of collective voice to the space rather than creating a personalized voice for each participant.

4chan was a unique place where memes were born on the internet for well over a decade. Unique political, personal, and cultural perspectives were forged, flourished, and died. Sometimes they were flashes in the pan, other times they were so long-lasting as to become permanent internet icons. 4chan was a cultural touchstone for the entire English-speaking digital world. A self-selected group of autists forged a culture there that started with silly anime pictures and concluded by becoming a significant political power. Emphasis on self-selected, as the site grew in popularity, the creatives that originally built it became a progressively smaller fraction of the total population… and that was before bots.

As the usership aged, it became dispossessed of the spirit that once drove it and withered. Many of its older users believe that the entire website going offline to the hideous screaming of zoomers shouting “CHICKEN JOCKEY” is an appropriate end. It isn’t coming back as it was before, and autists like myself will be on the lookout for a new anonymous haunt for a while (Xitter doesn’t do it for me).

One could argue that the “real” nail-in-the-coffin for 4chan was the development of AI systems. Bots have plagued the site since time immemorial, but with the creation of LLMs and ChatGPT, it became nearly unusable. AI talking to AI and bots talking to bots. Near the end, it resembled the regurgitations of Reddit (but with significantly more human-intelligence-level users). The same ideas rehashed and the same forced memes that were themselves stolen from Xitter rather than the product of dynamic development. Some of the smaller boards were ok, but the major boards on 4chan were dead already.

The board culture created on 4chan lends itself to being a single collective voice (or two) rather than the screeching of thousands vying for attention. Xitter doesn’t create a collective voice for the participants, it creates a competition for attention. There’s something unique about participating in collective creation rather than simply being one voice in a throng of thousands. For a long time, 4chan was a way to interact with a collective unconscious rarely seen in human society. Certainly never seen in “polite” society, as unrestricted thought inherently contains contrarian and offensive ideas.

The only similar place I’ve encountered in the real world is the same described in the video above: dirty bathroom stalls with graffiti-covered walls. Pulling out a permanent marker and adding to those walls is not a personal call for attention. It becomes participation in a larger conversation. Studies have shown that this type of writing generally turns to concepts and ideas consistent to the place over the people. Conversations with others, but also conversations with the self.

When one reads through the graffiti scrawled across a bathroom door or an image board, it is like the place is conversing rather than the individuals. In 2006 or so, there was a meme on 4chan that “anonymous” wasn’t a default setting, rather it was a specific username; i.e., almost every post on the website was written by one single lonely man in his mother’s basement. It was a collective consciousness that individuals can’t experience in personable conversations where identity is recalled or valued, or when a conversation happens too fast for 3rd parties to interject.

That meme went on to forge the idea of “anonymous” as a faceless group in 2008 during Chanology: a now outdated expression of collective societal angst picking a fight with the Church of Scientology for shits and giggles. Those were good times, the frontier of social consciousness, the frontier of digital technology, and the frontier of culture. By taking the dynamics of a toilet stall in the back of a dive bar and expanding it to some of the youngest, most intellectually creative, and culturally alternative members of the English-speaking world, 4chan accidentally created a memetic powerhouse that defined a decade (2010 to 2020). Historians are going to be sifting through old archives trying to figure out what the hell happened for generations.

Imagine some archeologist figuring out that one of the most important places in Rome was a few latrines in the back of a long-destroyed tavern where particularly wisened ancient emperors and philosophers once sat… and then having to dig through literal meters of refuse to uncover a long forgotten corner where Marcus Aurelius once drew a dick on the wall with googly eyes and signed it.

Walt Bismarck

is an example of such a character. I also have a single perma-meme of my own floating around on the internet that I originally posted in 2014.

Sure, there will be other bathroom stalls, but they’ll have different atmospheres and be in the backs of different bars. There may even be a resurrection of 4chan, but it’ll be remodeled and sanded down with shiny new walls and lacking the highly questionable stains on the carpeted floor. Finding a new place will take some time, and making it ours will take a lot longer.

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… so when people call 4chan a shithole, they’re not wrong. They’re more correct than most of them realize. It was a glorious and dirty shithole.