

Is 4chan the Future of Human Consciousness? - EvilTrout
http://hplusmagazine.com/articles/art-entertainment/lost-filth-simulacrum

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omgsean
No, it's just a place where those weird, greasy high school kids post their
nonsense for the world to see and try to gross each other out. Every
generation had 4channers, they just didn't have 4chan.

~~~
ovi256
And somehow, in the process, they generate the memes, jokes and stories
everybody will be obsessed with one year later. That is the crux of the story,
and one you have missed. The despicable part is true, and all too obvious. The
idea generation is harder to explain.

~~~
omgsean
Did you ever actually sit down and talk to those kids in high school? Beneath
their greasy veneer and scatological obsessions, a lot of them were pretty
damn funny.

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petercooper
_And they are the ones furthest ahead of the pack, leading us._

If posting child porn up in unrelated forums or in the middle of otherwise
innocent looking YouTube videos is where we're headed, I'd rather be a
Luddite.

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whatajoke
_The brave pioneers of 4chan are the Magellans of media desensitization, who
abandon the grim reality of their parents' basements to wallow in infinite,
recursively self-referential filth._

So when My friends and I talked incoherently while bing drinking, year after
year of college, we wallowed in "infinite, recursively self-referential
filth."? Wow, I didn't know my generation was that unique.

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astine
_What is happening here? The escape from the constraints of the flesh? The
escape from the constraints of being human? The inevitable purge following the
collective unconscious' information binge? With the Internet we can now erase
space and time, erase the restraints placed on the mind by matter._

And just a few paragraphs before hand, he accuses Fox News of overstating the
matter.

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kinghajj
Sure, 4chan can be like the Great Link of the Changelings in "Star Trek: Deep
Space Nine." Humans will develop a hive mind via 4chan and basically exist as
a single unit, but just made up of many individual parts. Hopefully we'll use
this newfound transhuman existence for something other than silly memes and
pictures of cats.

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ErrantX
_They say the children are our future. But if 4chan is any indication of what
they have in store for us, we are in for a very rough time indeed._

Huh? They lost me at the title really - but I clicked through for fun and was
greeted with that.

Hmmmmm.

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mgrouchy
I hope not.

~~~
dasil003
It's funny how, given a ridiculous enough title, a Reddit-style zinger _can_
garner a positive reputation here.

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pwnstigator
Troll culture (4chan, Autoadmit) has a sort of "secret society" flavor to it--
catchy memes and in-jokes, plus new words, much of which spreads out into the
mainstream. (Pwn, "over 9000", Final Fantasy fetishism). It's a guilty
pleasure and mostly harmless, but its creepiest 0.1% gets a lot of press.

I know a therapist who deals with trolling addicts (yes, this is a real
problem for some surprisingly smart/high-functioning people) and believes
troll culture is a casual sex replacement; that the sublimated, transgressive,
and self-destructive energies that used to lead to casual sex are now being
directed into troll culture. It's as good an explanation as any. That should
be comforting, because as bad as 4chan is, it's a lot less destructive than
casual sex.

~~~
ovi256
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu, so that's where my energy is going.

Okay, I'm stopping. Found it appropriate to make 4chan style jokes in a thread
about 4chan.

That hypothesis is very interesting actually, as it concerns me personally.
I've gone through a trolling phase not late ago :( and I fit well in the
target demographic (male, young, won't comment on the smart part).

