The Real Has Consumed the Wired

The transition to Web2.0

The recent hack on 4chan has triggered a lot of discussion over the imageboard’s “final death blow” and also of the fact that in actuality it has been dead in some sense for many years now. People hail the virtues of anonymous posting, swarm operations and the old school web - not in forum posts but in tweets and Substack essays of course - and hope to return to the good days, perhaps a new forum website will be what it takes, perhaps we find a new point of convergence and finally leave X/Discord/Substack.

Although references to the 2nd law of thermodynamics have become trendy lately and its parallels to analysis of societal change has been pointed out, I have still not seen it discussed in regards to the process irreversibility in the subject of internet culture and platforms and their rise and fall. I don’t care specifically for the impossibility of going upwards through the energy gradient here, rather I want to consider that maybe this change from forums/imageboards to the newer platforms and forms of engagement with the Wired was inevitable, has happened for a good reason and might not be reversible. Then some general thoughts about the state of the internet today.

I.

Twitter has prevailed over forums/imageboards for the simple reason that the user follow mechanism allows for selectivity, to curate to a large degree what you see. 4chan was also sufficiently “selective” even though it didn’t have such mechanism - everyone sees what others see - because its userbase at that point of the internet had specific characteristics. The general online population was smaller (and this translates to better in the case of the internet, with average IQ obviously steadily decreasing with time), the population of the very online people that would be attracted to such a site was smaller in absolute terms, and 4chan’s fame and popularity was also smaller on relative terms compared to other websites. This means that the subset you would have interacted with on 4chan then would be a good approximation of the subset of people you are mutuals with on Twitter now. At some point around mid 2010’s, this did not apply anymore. If I mention IQ too many times it’s because the problem is absolutely connected to general intelligence, or at least one of its subsets that has to do with countering despotism, socially approved lies and hypersocialization.

Notice that no single point of demise can be designated. Sure, people getting banned from Reddit in 2016 was unfortunate for 4chan, but it only hastened an inevitable process. There’s no amount of moderation or gatekeeping that can remedy this. Mods can ban or posters can scare away outright cancerous newfags (but then again how much gore should one endure posting before the gatekeeping is not worth it anymore?), but “cancer” really is subtle and slow death (much like the actual disease), it’s a gradual lowering of average IQ, posts getting slightly more and more stupid for no discernible reason, some new people in, some old people out, until the ship of Theseus is no more. This is all built-in in a platform where everyone sees the same board, not in one where you sniff out IQ from a profile and choose to follow or not, other people do the same and you form powerful intersubjectively-verified spheres of high info-density.

This paints a negative impression on 4chan only because I’m writing about its mathematically determined death, but I have not mentioned its also mathematically determined birth and ascent. Twitter could not achieve its present function from the start, without an initial pool of relevant users to kickstart the sphere, rather a culture had to be cultivated in 4chan first. The 4chan phase then seems to have been an extremely important stepping stone to the serious online world, a pirate cove that everyone dissatisfied with the mainstream would leave for. Then that culture would make its exodus when the conditions were right. Much like the steppe invasion of Europe really.

I mention Twitter and 4chan as placeholders to some degree, as the same points apply to other similar sites on both cases, but Twitter has 1st mover advantage → network effect, and 4chan is the largest and most archetypal imageboard/forum. Discord and Substack share Twitter’s selective mechanisms—server invites, curated feeds, and so on.

There is the issue that an imageboard with its no-registration anon posting does not scale with popularity. Any site that becomes an important enough point of convergence on the internet will have to host an enormous amount of users. You can see this problem now on 4chan where you need to wait for 5 days and solve a dozen ultra-hard captchas and then re-do this a few time rewriting your post to pass strict auto filters or whatever. Or pay money to skip this process or something. And the posts that make it through this are still trash.

Points of convergence matter a lot because community divisions are extremely costly when you don’t have the time to lurk different sites to keep up with everyone. And if what you have to say matters, you want the most people to see it. Or rather the most important people, if you’re not an egalitarian or a mass marketer.

Speaking of egalitarianism: that everyone’s posts have the same gravity in a chan/forum was an important feature initially and conditionally, it cultivates the culture of disagreeableness and anarchism that undermines a-priori authorities, but imagine now if we flattened all twitter posts and the 5 follower reply guy that replies with gifs has the same relevancy as people you actually care about?

II.

The more important issue is that The Wired has consumed The Real proverb is completely inverted, The Real has consumed The Wired, not vice versa as prophecized, and this is an important change to understand the transitions from Web1.0.

This transition mentioned in the previous section occurred while broader digitalization has consumed society and there’s many parts to it. Example: it has been said that the change from 4chan anonymity to twitter pseudonymity is not substantial, given avatarfags, tripfags, recognizable posters in the same threads, etc. and the pseudonyms could be hollow masks abandoned any day. This is true, but there’s more to it, because our overall mode of interaction has changed, such that this pseudonymity is not the same it used to be in e.g. early forums.

When the world was still offline, there’s a lot of separation between a person and their accounts (which are mostly forum registrations, but early social media apply too). In earlier days of the internet, one would log on just to make a few posts in threads and then return to meatspace, where all personal/social/professional life was still happening. They were detached from their accounts they used just for fun or insightful posting, they had the benefits that have been written about before, with egoless posting and unlimited devil’s advocacy, etc. So whatever online identities - not just anon but even pseudonymous - were a very small mindshare of the user.

And there was a lot of optimism in the 00’s about the infinite possibilities of the internet and how it would connect us all. People could broadcast their interests and passions on what was a whole new world, completely different from the physical space they inhabit. The discussions around walled gardens and enshitification since Web 2.0 are not incorrect but they ignore the important fact that, with everyone connected 24/7, the internet cannot be what it used to be.

As the percentage of the population that gets chronically online increases, the state of both the real and the Wired is in perturbation, and they converge on each other.

You can be very online and still not have your identity consumed by the real, but that’s mostly temporary. While the novelty of discovering new rabbitholes is still in tact, as you learn new things on every corner of the web, or if you use the internet as escapism from an unsatisfying life, or whatever other activity that allows you to forget yourself keeps you going. But I think they all come to an end at some point.

In the long term, no one is truly pseudonymous, and they don’t act with detachment towards their accounts: they ARE their accounts, they post what their immediate self¹ desires to post and would post similarly in their real Facebook accounts, even though pseudonymity disrupts the process of the “self” slightly they don’t practice any form of disassociation from their avatars which would affirm this. In fact, almost every "anon” account with sufficient work or time put into it is even doxxed to a lot of their closer online friends, and might have met up with them in real life. Pseudonymity then is virtual: it acts as a thin layer of protection against strangers, a last resort for deniability, yet acquaintances know the real identity of the account. You might be a based anon with an anime avatar, but often you’re just a LinkedIn account with extra steps.

And this is all predictable, because the more time and energy you involve into an online ghost, the more this ghost becomes you. It’s still possible to conjure a lot of specters, and the internet is filled with fascinating cyber-vapor, but that’s the exception.

When most life happens online, your online presence is not something minor you can ignore. Your cyber-vapor gains fame, friends, relationships, money and business opportunities, and all of these would be thrown away until you decide to absorb them into your real life, and in the process you absorb your avatar with them. This ties back to the discussion about Web1.0 forums: one wouldn’t care to invest time to write an effortful post on 4chan, I often saw people that did this as saints giving out wisdom for free. But eventually they get tired of their posts being lost in the void, they want to concentrate them under their accounts, broadcast them for more people to see, gain followers. I still can’t not romanticize when someone spends an hour writing a post in a 10th page thread for 5 lurkers to read before it’s lost forever.

This is not an “own” of any kind and I’m not even saying that this progression is bad, I am just analyzing what I see. It follows necessarily from the conditions. It’s a good thing that people are empowered by a global network to improve their lives, find acquaintances, opportunities, learn new things etc. I keep seeing mentions that X being better for finding jobs than LinkedIn, that it’s a better dating site than actual dating sites, in both cases because its a general space that allows more complex emergent interaction than specialist sites. For sure I’d rather pick my friends by judging their personality and virtue than their geographical proximity.

But this provides a negative outlook for the Lain fans, the adherents of forms of cybergnosticism and other ideologies of escape into the Wired, when those are actual ideologies and not just aesthetic ideals. The Wired is not a virtual realm anymore, it is a shimmering haze diffused over meatspace. Maybe one can ride the high of technoshamanist cyberdreamwalking for a while, but the fog clears out eventually. The flesh can never be abandoned.

1. As we know, the “self” is a mobile and ethereal concept which cannot be defined precisely and its turbulence increases further when augmented by digital avatars. I’m using the term conventionally and ignoring all of this.