Is 4chan Malicious or Misguided? ‘The Antisocial Network’ Sees Both Sides
Growing up in the mid-aughts, when posting and/or lurking on internet forums became a veritable hobby, I found that the forums I’d read—often about pop culture, video games, or anime—would parrot a similar line: Everything on the internet originated in their communities. The belief was that even something as niche as a forum about Nintendo Wii games or Cartoon Network could take credit for a widely shared meme, if its community members believed they said it, saw it, or shared it first. It made the internet, so vast and unknowable, feel so much more intimate, small, and private. And at the same time, it felt empowering: We smallest of people, we nerdiest of nerds, could make some impact, even if it was just seeing random people on Facebook share a goofy drawing of a Pokémon that we believed to have made and shared first.
I thought of all this while watching The Antisocial Network, an engrossing documentary that premiered March 10 at SXSW Film Festival. (It will stream on Netflix in April.) Tracking the explosive rise of 4chan, the film spotlights the best-known example of an internet forum bleeding out beyond its own bounds and into real life. And 4chan did much more than generate memes and even a new form of speaking online, both of which it did infinite times: It made a tangible, real-world impact, one that became shockingly political, criminal, and unstoppable.
The Antisocial Network marks the second sociological study of the internet from co-directors Giorgio Angelini and Arthur Jones, following 2020’s Feels Good Man. Like that film, which followed the bizarre evolution of the Pepe the Frog meme from innocuous comic to alt-right calling card, this doc threads the needle between appealing to those viewers well-versed in all things internet and those who know 4chan best as the birthplace of QAnon. It’s both nostalgic and illuminating to recall the image board’s more humble beginnings in 2003, as a lo-fi image board for anime fans to share fan art and talk about their favorite shows. Journalists and actual power users of the forum tell 4chan’s story from a personal standpoint, waxing nostalgic about how exciting it was to have a place where they could anonymously—a keyword here!—create personas for themselves, ones that were “an inverse of how I was in real life,” as a user who goes by Fuxnet explains.