Feature Moot vs. Gamergate

Why driving Christopher Poole away from 4chan might be Gamergate's greatest achievement.

Published March 16, 2015 1:15 PM PST

By Liana Kerzner @redlianak

Love it or hate it, Gamergate has had a profound, lasting impact on video game and Internet culture. But nothing they've done might resonate at such a subtly profound level than the captain of 4chan abandoning his sinking ship.

At least, if the Rolling Stone article claiming that Christopher Poole (aka moot) is considering a future that doesn't involve the Internet is accurate. Rolling Stone's reliability is iffy these days.

The monster to Poole's Frankenstein, 4chan, radically altered the concept of online anonymity. Poole, with his nonsensically privileged rambling, turned the concept of Internet anonymity from a tool into a philosophy, and that, I believe, is the rot at the heart of 4chan. Unlike Something Awful's Lowtax and 8chan's Hotwheels who used online handles as pseudonyms, Poole professed a belief in "prismatic" online identity, implying a philosophical underpinning to the practice of sock puppeting. This is, of course, creating a transhuman moral justification for a lack of personal accountability, something I'm not sure moot was, himself, completely aware of. Poole has a tendency toward hyperbole, and instead of resisting the idea that Facebook embodies -- that your family can see a lot of stuff about you they probably shouldn't -- he went for the pretentious metaphor that revealed more than he intended.

There's a big difference between "watch your mouth around your mom" and being a completely different person depending on the social setting. Trust me, when I used to host a raunchy late night show, my mother's friends sent her "helpful" reports about her daughter's antics. My mother got a look at a very different side of me -- which was, in fairness, an improvised performance -- but I never felt like I was a totally different person around my mother than I was at work. Identity is undeniably multi-faceted, but the idea that it actually splits like white light becoming a rainbow through a prism was the message that Poole pushed.

This one small shift could be linked to the Internet morphing from the Wild West to the Salem witch trials. Raids from Something Awful that got out of control ended with the FBI paying Lowtax a visit. Poole, on the other hand, played the mystery man card for years: a glamour formed around him during the period his identity was not confirmed. Anonymity stopped being a tool an individual used to express an unpopular opinion or interest. Poole turned "anon" into a pop culture identity.

The thing that Poole claims drove him out of his own website was a demand for accountability using the tactics and terms of the language 4chan helped popularize: Gamergate."

Unlike 8chan founder Hot Wheels, who is an unabashed free speech advocate, moot's personal drivers are murkier. Like many spoiled hipsters, moot seems unwilling to own and embrace the power he wields on the Internet, because that comes with a responsibility he seems unwilling to accept. His complaints that 4chan was impossible to monetize are silly in light of the fact that Something Awful simply introduced a one-time membership fee for all goons. Something Awful's goons saw the inherent value in this, coughed up the ten bucks, and Lowtax owns a very nice house. It's such a brilliantly simple system that it's almost criminal that moot couldn't figure out a way to similarly monetize 4chan, even on a donation-based system.

The other absurd statement that moot made in the Rolling Stone article was that no one under 18 was allowed on 4chan... a site that never verifies a user's identity. Go to any Anime convention populated by a plurality of minors and it's abundantly clear this rule is nonsense. But that's okay in Pooleville, because he can't be a liar: his "prismatic identity" is a legitimate philosophical choice. Lying just oversimplifies the concept of the right to be multiple online selves at once.

Poole, in his armchair philosophy, conflates online avatars and online identity, and they're not the same thing at all. An avatar is a tool you use. An identity is something you are. Fragmentation of personal identity is an element of numerous psychological disorders. Draw from that what you will.

The identity of a 4chan anon is an odd mix of a fragmented... oops, I mean prismatic... personal identity and an Asian-style collective identity. "Anon" has meaning online these days. It conveys a message. The identity that matters is that of 4chan. Anons themselves will tell you that, individually, they are nobodies.

When I started hearing that from multiple anons, I became extremely concerned about the loss of self that 4chan encourages.

No one with an identity of value wants to split off into secondary identities online. People form secondary identities to escape the negative elements of their primary ones. Sometimes there is benefit to blending into a crowd, but most people don't start to see themselves as worthless outside that crowd. Numerous anons have told me they need anonymity to be safe, and that's lead to a culture of fear online involving revelations of personal information that used to be found in the phone book. (Incidentally, a great many recent doxxings have apparently come courtesy of information found in online white pages.)

Having one's address and phone number available publicly should not be cause for terror. The fear comes from the knowledge of what online hordes use these numbers to do. E-celebrities -- individuals who dare to believe that their identities and personalities contain inherent value -- are savaged by hordes of anonymous nobodies who have been convinced, by people like Poole, that anon culture is an inherently ethical one, and anyone else online commits the sins of hubris and greed. They are, therefore, fair game.

I think this is where the "harassment against women" angle can tie in. Women are given the option of hiding their gender online to avoid the unique harassment that comes with being female. Forgoing this, showing your imperfect face and body and having your often untrained voice heard online, is associated with unhealthy arrogance, and the perception seems to be that these stuck up women need to be demolished to teach them some humility. Anyone who attempts to be an individual -- even through ideas -- suffers the wrath of 4chan.

People form secondary identities to escape the negative elements of their primary ones."

There's a fallacy at work that anonymity allows the best ideas to flourish. That's just not true. It may be true that anonymity allows the simplest ideas to flourish. It certainly means the best-presented ideas will flourish. But that's allowing propaganda to override logic. The best ideas for women will not come from men. The best ideas for Hispanics will not come from white people. The best ideas for black people will not come from Asian people. Identity within the in-group is essential to creating solutions that validate the self.

In fact, chan-speak delights in ironic usage of the most dehumanizing language human beings have developed. If a word can't be printed on Metaleater, it's guaranteed to be all over 4chan. Again, however, the presence of moot's personal philosophy shows itself: many channers get angry when they're told to stop using chan-speak outside of 4chan, because they seem to believe that this manner of communication is inherently more honest than being polite. Poole has managed, at every turn, to make accountability and decency not just opposed to the brand of his product; he seems to have managed to convince thousands of online users that accountability and decency are things that are inherently untrustworthy.

Ironically, the thing that Poole claims drove him out of his own website was a demand for accountability using the tactics and terms of the language 4chan helped popularize: Gamergate. Gamergate revolted against Poole's sudden reversal on his laisse-faire, insidious shaping of the imageboard. Many channers are under the impression that Poole was a hands-off manager of 4chan until recently. This is not the case. Creating and allowing the /b/ board to continue was a conscious act. Allowing things to stay on the board is a conscious act. Hot Wheels understands and owns this. Poole ducks responsibility for it.

The reality is that Gamergaters were right to be confused by Poole's rejection of the tactics he popularized. I can totally understand the belief that the "Five Guys" posters were doing "nothing wrong" even though the behaviour was horrifying to anyone not familiar with 4chan norms. The one thing Poole accidentally gets right is his non-reason for leaving 4-chan: "I've come to represent an uncomfortably large single point of failure."

Note the wording. It's not "I've failed." It's not "I've had some failures." It's "I've come to represent...failure."

Poole appears inconsistent, but in fact, his modus operandi has been the same all along: as an able-bodied person with the privilege of living with his mom any time he wants, he has constructed a personal bubble that allows him to partially manipulate reality. Once a rule, a persona, or a website he's associated with becomes inconvenient to what he wants to represent at any given time, he just ditches it. When he doesn't want to be white, he hides behind an Anime character. When he doesn't want to be accountable for shaping the most unpleasant forces on the Internet, he blames Gamergate and says he's going to go hiking. If Christopher Poole wants to make money, he must first learn accountability, because no one will invest in a personal brand as spoiled and fickle as his. Accountability, however, is in his best interests. What's best for the rest of us is if Poole's most popular self-created persona finally sticks, and his story, his message, and his influence finally become moot.

Images courtesy of 4chan, CoinBuzz and Latest-Entertainments.com.