At this point in our Brave New World, we can no longer ignore or simply put off the very real impacts that the Internet poses to popular culture. There is an intricate interaction between the online realm and "real life". At the root of many of the more negative aspects of the online world lies 4Chan, a forum site that is entirely anonymous; any user can post essentially anything (that isn’t child pornography) and be safe from scrutiny. This is a site where one might randomly witness a video of a murder taking place or any number of unspeakable images. There are a variety of boards one may post to, anywhere from anime to physical fitness, but the most obscure, and coincidentally the most strangely fascinating, is "/b," the random board.
In fairness, it must be stated that this site provides an important safe haven for those among us who are by nature too overwhelmed by social anxiety or any number of disorders to be able to flourish in an open community. For them, it is harmless and there are parts of 4Chan that hold redeeming qualities. I imagine it provides an all-too-necessary escape for people who are put under the heel of our current hyperactive culture. We must, however, consider the more extreme cases, as their influence is greater than one might think.
In some of his works, such as “On the Genealogy of Morals,” Friedrich Nietzsche proposes that cultural value-standards arise from a certain sort of resentment. He will use it in the French ressentiment, but essentially it is a cultural re-valuing from the bottom to the top. The example he uses is the Jewish priest class, who, after suffering at the harsh and exclusive values of the old “Warrior Aristocracy,” sought to incorporate what would become more merciful cultural values. The manner in which Nietzsche presents his claim strongly suggests that most of our cultural values are essentially derived over time from the negative under-belly of society. Taking this perspective into account, one may easily see the process of this re-valuing taking place at least in part from the depths of the web, 4Chan being a meeting place, under the protection of anonymity, for the expression of these values.
For instance, the colloquial phrase “You mad bro?” originates from 4Chan, despite the fact that it is now used as a common saying outside of the web. It began as an ironic term, used by “beta” males to assign a negative value to those “alphas” whom we might consider in terms of high school hierarchical classes such as jocks, popular kids, etc. Basically the term is taken from something a so-called “alpha” might say to the “beta,” a victim of their teasing, first tormenting the victim, then adding insult to injury by mockingly asking “you mad bro?” The term, as we see, is turned around and re-valued against those who use it.
In 4Chan, deep in the bowels of the Internet, far from the reach of authoritative intervention, these negative values are expressed in a vast community (now capable of incredibly efficient communication thanks to modern technology). Here the process begins; terms are repeated, standardized and put into stories. These stories, or “green-texts” as they are referred to in the 4Chan community, are actually quite inventive at times, but ultimately they express these negative values in a similar manner as folk tales were once used.
Eventually these expressions trickle upward like salmon upstream toward more spotlighted Internet communities such as Reddit. From there, they find their way into common speech, and finally one can hear the “alphas,” the very people that originally began the “beta’s” resentment, using these terms, profoundly unaware of the deeper irony.
It might be easy to jump to the conclusion that this is a bad cultural phenomenon. However, the conditions that allow for this process of resentment to occur are also the same conditions that are now allowing women to express themselves more fully, for the homosexual community to have an organized voice, and for cross-cultural dialogue to occur.
Obviously a significant amount of bullying takes place online, but perhaps this re-valuing process will allow for greater awareness of the issues of bullying, and lead to a decrease in bullying online and off. Nietzsche suggests that this re-valuing process leads society to becoming generally more merciful, and that, he hopes, eventually it will not originate from the weaker or deemed “lesser” classes, but from a more open and forward-thinking society.
