[Archive] Growing up online in the age of the Alt-Right
Samantha Carter grew up online. Here's a story about her.
[I wrote this piece for a third-year features class. I actually lost it after a hard-drive failure, and only just got it back recently.]
In the early 2000s, Samantha Carter and her best friend Paul spent a lot of their time with the video game: Sonic Adventure 2: Battle. The two were particularly fascinated with a level in the game called the Chao Garden, which allowed the player to use items they had found in the main game to raise pretty basic virtual pets called Chao and make them compete against each other.
Paul and Sam became obsessed with these virtual pets, giving them their own personalities and - when they weren’t playing the game itself - drawing short comics where their Chao went on adventures together. When the two decided to share those comics, an internet in the heat of its formative years turned up a Chao Garden fan forum called Chao Island.
At that time, Sam lived in rural Connecticut, a long ways away from the next nearest house, Paul eventually drifted away, and Sam started making all of her friends online.
Over the next 15 years, Sam started to garner a following from all the wrong places; the isolation of living in the middle of nowhere and the academic expectations of middle-class Connecticut pushing Sam further into the internet. The deeper she went, the darker the internet seemed to get.
According to Spencer Hawtin - a digital media professor - the internet has an incredible way of pulling like-minded people together, for better or worse. Unfortunately, the best people for lonely, socially stunted pre-teens to hang around with are not lonely, socially stunted adults, and that’s exactly the kind of crowd Sam fell in with.
Dr. James Neilson, a professor of digital culture, says that the infrastructure of the internet in its early years was created without regulation. Even in Chao Island’s infancy, you could download a few more of the original game’s files than the copyright holders would have liked.
The internet at large had a way of resisting regulation: famously, AOL refused to shut down child pornography rings on their chat service, and piracy databases that existed when Sam was no older than 10 continue to thrive to this day. Neilson says the internet was designed for communication at first. Then, spurred on by anonymity and the lack of concern from its topmost owners, was built on wild-west style by those with no need or want to be civilized.
Chao-Island.com was bought in 2006 by a travel agency. While it was eventually bought back by its original owners, Sam had already moved on. Her father tried to scare her away from the internet with stories of kids like her being dragged off by predators. Pushing 13, a rebel without a cause, this only encouraged her.
Sam’s art. With permission. (via Twitter)
Craving something with a sharper edge, Sam eventually found herself a temporary home on 4chan.
4chan describes itself as “a simple image-based bulletin board where anyone can post comments and share images.” Over the course of its existence, it has earned a reputation as one of the worst places on the internet. At the time of writing this, the most popular thread on their most popular board: ‘/b/’ is dedicated to sharing women’s nudes without their consent. The recent mosque shooting in Christchurch, NZ, was first posted about on 4chan’s extremist sister site: 8chan. While professors Hawtin and Neilson agree that the internet isn’t evil by nature, looking at /b/, you wouldn’t know it.
According to Sam, if anything 4chan has only gotten tamer since she was a regular user. She found the imageboard through its wiki: Encyclopedia Dramatica. Sam remembers E.D. mostly for its article on the term ‘offended’: a page that begins with the caption:
After six harmless images of cute animals, the page devolves into closeup photos of corpses and videos of people killing animals.
Sam wasn’t turned away because, as a teenager, this is what felt like counter-culture to her. She felt that she had been sold a false bill of goods. “I really didn’t feel like the world that I was living in was the same as the people around me. Connecticut has always been really segregated, and I was always aware of that as a young kid. I think a lot of kids my age were becoming aware of the fact that there was a lot of horror out there in the world that we couldn’t get away from, and I was a dumb teenager, and I was like ‘no, fuck you. I wanna see.’”
Sam had grown up on a steady diet of American dream. She - like just about everyone in Connecticut - was always told that if she worked hard in school she would be guaranteed to settle down into a comfortable, upper-middle-class life. When she found 4chan,just as she was beginning to find out that this dream likely wouldn’t come true. She felt like she had found the gritty real world that the adults in her life were trying to keep her from her. “If these guys were pissing people off, if they’re attracting the attention of the police, they had to be doing something kinda cool, and I wanted to be a part of it.”
It’s important to note that Sam was exposed to graphic content like this on the very fringes of the 4chan community. She very rarely posted, and when she did, it was usually to show off her art on the Pokemon board. She only read other boards from the shadows (called ‘Lurking’ in 4chan parlance), almost never getting involved but continuing to suck up the hateful rhetoric. “Part of me knew that if I actually talked to people and made friends in this community that would be bad.”
Hawtin says that 4chan is like this because of the filter bubble that exists to varying degrees in all online communities. Opinions and ideas that fit with the pack mentality are accepted, while those with contradictory opinions are bullied either out of the community or into submission. On big blue websites like Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr, the filter usually aligns with what is socially acceptable: the kind of thing you’re taught in grade school. The filter bubble on 4chan, however, incentivizes the opposite. If you say that anything that would normally be frowned upon, should be frowned upon, you are counter to 4chan’s culture.
Sam’s drawings started to get popular. They were pretty easy to recognize thanks to her distinctive style. She was given a registered tripcode: a password encrypted set of characters to attach to her posts so people would be able to identify imposters, and for a while, and she was relatively comfortable at the top of her personal trash-heap. She had become desensitized to the horrible things that surrounded her. When Gamergate started, Sam found herself quietly agreeing with the people who were complaining that Anita Sarkeesian - a feminist game critic - was being paid all too much for her reporting. Sam sought out threads on Sarkeesian. As a gamer and one of the very few women on 4chan, she felt like she had something to contribute. As is the etiquette on 4chan, she lurked before posting, and in a sudden moment of clarity noticed something between the lines. While many of the posts were legitimate criticism of the ethical structure of games journalism, others still bore 4chan’s signature brand of ironically detached ‘jokes’. Most of the posts about Sarkeesian specifically took on on an anti-Semitic spin. That - Sam thought - coloured the rest of the commentary.
Philosopher Oliver Thorn calls this a dog-whistle in his video essay: The Philosophy of Antifa. Those people who are bold-faced in their anti-Semitism are actually tipping their hand. Those who post on 4chan and then take that rhetoric to other websites may or may not actually believe it. If it’s a joke, it doesn’t have to be funny, because it is instead designed to subtly recruit others with similar beliefs. Thorn says it doesn’t matter to a white nationalist whether or not what they’re saying is true or valid, because their real goal is to have their dog whistles amplified by the mainstream media.
In hindsight, attacks like the shooting in Christchurch, NZ just seem like a natural evolution to Sam: “These communities naturally had to build themselves around ironic rhetorical modes to freely discuss their repugnant ideas without being able to be criticized,” Sam elaborates, saying the shooting is a “confirmation of what a lot of people have been saying for awhile now, that these kids aren't joking, that the joking plays an important part in the radicalization process.”
“I really thought that everyone was on the same page as me. I thought that everyone knew that games were sexist,” Sam says. “But once the Gamergate controversy sort of ignited I saw a lot of the sort of voice - the collective unconscious of imageboard culture - turn more and more towards open sexism, anti-Semitism - not everyone was on the same page as me. There were a lot of people who were critical of Anita Sarkeesian because they were anti-Semitic and didn’t like women.”
So, after several years on 4chan, unconsciously taking in the rhetoric of woman-hating white supremacists, Sam left.
Sam’s art. With permission (via Twitter)
Sam started an account on Twitter because she wanted to be held accountable for her actions. On 4chan, even having a tripcode and being identifiable didn’t mean anyone was motivated to make your screw-ups follow you. What did follow her however was the detached ironic rhetoric she had become used to on 4chan. She found it permeated through the rest of the internet, spreading out from the imageboard through sister sites of sister sites and digging itself into everything.
“The word for it at the time was ‘weird Twitter’,” Sam says ‘weird Twitter’ was started by former members of the SomethingAwful.com forums: an online community of comedians who are probably best known for creating Slender-Man. Weird Twitter “either got bullied off of SomethingAwful or were under the impression that their ‘humorist skills’ that they had trained off of SomethingAwful were good enough that they could transfer them to Twitter.” While Sam thought that these ‘weird Twitter’ people were different from the 4chan crowd, she says they weren’t in the ways that mattered. She fell in with this group and was immediately hazed. She was barred from entering any kind of conversation for months after being invited to their Skype chat. Some members even went so far as to acknowledge her messages only by saying: ‘Everyone ignore what Sam just said. Let’s move on.’ You’re only allowed to participate once everyone feels that you’ve been established as ironically detached enough. Where 4chan bullies proudly wore a mask of bigotry, weird Twitter disguised themselves with diet-woke, Fight Club-style rhetoric.
“Any kind of attempt at sincerity or virtue was seen as ulterior, right? If we saw someone - I remember a big thing on Twitter at the time was positivity accounts, there were a lot of people like ‘positive cloud!’ and it would be a picture of a cloud that said something like: ‘remember to take your meds today!’ and we loved to make fun of that.”
Still, this was better than the alternative. At the very least, Sam would be called out when she let bigotry slip back into her conversations; one of Sam’s earliest Twitter memories was being called out for using homophobic slurs that were perfectly acceptable on 4chan.
“I followed @dogboner because I saw my favourite band talking to @dogboner, and then one day @dogboner did a tweet, and I replied to @dogboner with some kind of jokey reply using a homophobic slur,” Sam says. “And his reply was ‘Hey. You can’t talk like that’. That was a really foundational moment in my life, was having this adult man who used this website and was making goofy, dumb jokes, but when I used a slur he was like ‘hey, we don’t do that here.’
I immediately felt the guilt. I had just been living in these sheltered communities for so long where it was just so commonplace to use horrible language like that that I had almost forgotten that it had this real, horrible context. And to be reminded of it I felt like: ‘oh shit, I gotta shape up.’”
Epilogue
Sam still lives in Connecticut with her mother. She hopes to eventually move in with her partner Elia, whom she also met through Twitter. Online, she’s fallen in with a group of people who aren’t quite so afraid of being genuine. People like Cate Wurtz, who has a story similar to Sam’s: same innocent online childhood, same deep drudge through 4chan, and the same re-emergence. Despite all this, Cate believes that this is all par for the course; that participating in online communities paints a target on the back of everyone who does it.
“When I’m really struggling with depression, and when I’m in a really depressive mood, the voice that that takes on in my head is that of, like, a 4chan poster. Always. All the time.” When she feels like she hates herself, it’s her own voice from years ago that does the bullying. “It feels very… kind of pathetic? To say: ‘I have imageboard PTSD’ but when I feel really terrible and my view of the world gets really bad I remember the things I saw people say and I remember the things that I saw on those forums. I think the reason you see so many people adopt a kind of ironic and detached stance on the world online is that it’s one of the easiest ways to cope.”
Sam is stepping back from the internet, trying to be more sincere where she can. She says that - if she’s learned anything - it’s that nobody online has any idea what they’re doing. She’s started doing some activism. Nothing major just yet, but she’s pushing back against the kind of person she used to be.
“I want to back away, minimize my input until I’ve figured out a way that I can use- what is this, what am I at right now- Jesus Christ: 7,056 [followers]. That's a lot of people. I want to figure out if there’s any way that I can use what social capital I’ve accumulated on here for good.”
Sam’s art. With permission (via Twitter)