The Antisocial Network sounds like a feel-good movie about how anime fans and nerdy outsiders came together to build an online community. But it’s really about how “we did it for the lulz” is the new “we were only following orders.”
In the Netflix documentary, which debuted at South by Southwest this weekend, directors Giorgio Angelini and Arthur Jones cut to a depressing and increasingly terrifying fact: that the dominating philosophy of the modern internet is not the democratizing optimism of founding figures like Tim Berners-Lee, but the giggling idiocy of kids with screen names like Fuxnet and Kirtaner. More especially, it’s about how the notorious 4Chan messaging board has infested online life. It may seem like an extreme thesis to say there’s a direct line from Goatsie to January 6, but they make a distressingly strong argument that a combination of shitposters, clickbait, and those eager to buy into any unhinged conspiracy theory that makes them feel secure in their victimhood, have become an existential threat.
It’s an interesting thought experiment to contemplate how that Panglossian portrait artist of internet activism, Alex Winter, would handle this story. It’s hard not to imagine him still wanting to portray the protagonists as goofy amateurs whose foolish pranks had an outsize influence for good and ill. By contrast, Angelini and Jones are desperately pointing out that the virtual house is on fire, and the flames have spread into the real world.
What’s somehow most disturbing is the underlying thesis that 4Chan, Anonymous, and QAnon weren’t simply cut from the same reckless cloth but run by the same group of people. The question increasingly becomes about who involved has the common sense to get out, and who doubles down because, ya know, it’s fun to be a troll.
Moreover, Angelini and Jones make it clear that all these catastrophic consequences were a feature, not a bug (a metaphor re-enforced by meme-influenced animation overseen by animation director Tommy Rodricks). When a preppy-looking teenager nicknamed Moot stole the original code from Japanese board 2Chan, he also unwittingly imported the vile political discontent that simmered in its posts and finally spilled out into the real world. End result: insurrection for the lulz. The only similarity between billionaire Trump and his followers is a firm belief that they live in a world without consequences, in which they are the victim. The main ingredient of the red pill, it is clear, is brain worms, and the original 4Chaners cultivated that worm farm well. The only question is which of these culture jammers realize that they weren’t the heroes after all, but the worst of the black hat hackers.
The Antisocial Network
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This article appears in March 8 • 2024.