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EPISODE 0: The First Recording. 4Chan Files.
163 Plays1 year ago
This is the first audio edit I've ever made. It's my part of an interview I gave to someone who was researching the origins of Something Awful and 4chan.
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Transcript
Origins and Humor of 4chan
00:00:17
Speaker
oh you know that 4chan itself is a is a offshoot of the ADTRW forums on something awful anime death tentacle rape whorehouse and you know or do you not know that
00:00:32
Speaker
I'll tell you the true history of this thing.
Formation of Raspberry Heaven
00:00:34
Speaker
So the ADTRW Forum on Something Awful has a bunch of people on it and they were kind of in a love-hate relationship with the rest of the forums. Goons love to hate each other. So they have an offshoot called, it's like a coding collective. The Raspberries have them coding collective.
00:00:53
Speaker
And so they created this group of people. They have names. I can rattle them off later. Nobody would care about them at this point. Created it as a collective project.
00:01:07
Speaker
These guys created it as a collective project and only at the very kind of handoff stages near the end did moot reign supreme.
Leadership and Management Shifts
00:01:16
Speaker
So it originally started out with, you know, it's basically like a rotating team of five or so people, myself, a money guy who is man of wax on the forums. I know his real name is actually he was a editor in chief of a liberal review magazine that I was familiar with and Jewish.
00:01:38
Speaker
There was another guy, da da da da da. I said that it was a rotating team because when I came on board it was like two of the people were open pedophiles. That was their reason for starting the forums because they wanted to share pictures of Lolicon. Yeah, when I got in there that was one of the two were like providing the server infrastructure for the website. That's how that person got to be on the team.
00:02:06
Speaker
I was going to law school at the time, and I was a 1L when I was writing that awful roommate story, and it was basically just a fact pattern exercise that I was writing out on the forums as something that actually happened, and then people started getting really into it. So that's my most popular thread on the forums.
00:02:24
Speaker
being a law student. I was the closest thing on that team to a lawyer and had some idea of what was going on and so it was off to the races. We have a little secret internet club.
00:02:43
Speaker
So when I was going to McGeorge, when I got brought on to the 4chan project, and I was brought on, at that point it was a coding collective,
Moot as a Figurehead
00:02:52
Speaker
right? Moot wasn't in charge. I'm going to emphasize this. Moot did not make 4chan. 4chan was a collective project of the Raspberry Heaven coding collective.
00:03:02
Speaker
And the only reason Moot got left with it is because he's a bag holder. He was a miner at the time that all of this stuff went down. Some of us had professional careers that were very promising that we could go to. He was the only one among us that didn't really have
00:03:18
Speaker
anything going on so i wrote one of his letters one of his two letters of recommendation to columbia because i will repeat this kid is like a basement kid he has had nothing going on except for holding the bag he he was 14 he couldn't he couldn't even rent a server space when we decided to go free from that pedophile's uh server space you know i was like okay no we can't do this anymore we got rid of the lolicon reward
00:03:47
Speaker
And like he wasn't old enough to have a credit card or sign a contract. And so somebody else on the team was doing that. Right. If you look at the logical components of this, somebody else was involved at every step.
00:04:02
Speaker
And it was a series of projects. I mean, simultaneously, while the collective was working on that, they were working on different forms of image boards, like the Danburu style, or I think it's called the Buru style. I know I had a friend in there as well. We were experimenting with hub style chans. Like, we just made 4chan and then we just kept on going. And 4chan itself was just an imitation of something that already existed. It was just a project.
Law School and Legal Involvement
00:04:27
Speaker
You saddle it with this guy.
00:04:29
Speaker
After I got on board with 4chan, I transferred out of McGeorge School of Law, which is now known as University of Pacific McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento, transferred to NYU School of Law, and made face-to-face contact with Moot and other people involved in this stuff. And we'd go to Bubble Tea, or Shabu Shabu.
00:04:52
Speaker
and we'd discuss the things that were wrong or right with the site or I'd correspond with them over email. There's a very healthy trail of correspondence between him and I that will substantiate everything that I claim here. So let's see, I go to New York. I'm at NYU.
Pranks on Hal Turner
00:05:08
Speaker
I become a clerk for the
00:05:13
Speaker
AUSA, that's Federal Prosecutor's Office, SDNY, Southern District of New York. Major crimes of narcotics. I'm sitting in the law library. We've got our first couple of legit federal threats cases. I'm sitting there in this law library and looking up Scientology. That's where I got experience with.
00:05:33
Speaker
that the AUSA Law Library is reading up everything they have in Scientology. It's like project terminology exists. At the time, we were also kind of creating anonymous. We created it, like, first step was forced to nod on the board. And then the next step was to try to see, OK, can't use these people as our personal army. What can we do? And so it comes as no surprise that somebody like me and other people who are mods on that place would get some faculty with
00:06:02
Speaker
manipulating large groups of people without the benefit of a username. You have to learn to do it both so that you can kind of like contain tantalizing self-identifying information and also so that it's something that's provocative enough that it'll cater responses so that it will survive in the board. It's like an evolutionary chamber that things can crawl out of and if they aren't very fit, they die very quickly.
00:06:30
Speaker
Yeah, I'm sitting at the AUSA's office doing this and that at the same time, and I was the one that was causing us to go to war with Hal Turner. I don't know if you know anything about that. I'll give you a quick sketch on that guy. He's a white supremacist shortwave radio host in the Bergen area of Jersey City in my town. He lived like a couple blocks. I ended up casing his house before deciding to do this operation, but
00:06:58
Speaker
We went for Hal Turner and started pranking him, just making people aware of him. Like the very first things that we did was social justice related. And that's why it was, you know, it was good at one point, even though it was tremendously offensive. We chose our targets. So Hal Turner was one of them. And once, you know, here's how we got Turner.
00:07:19
Speaker
He's a shortwave radio host. Like all white nationalists, he gets off on being the Ubermensch but also perpetually victimized. And so by pranking his show and claiming this big identity of Anonymous, we gave him exactly what he wanted and so he played in to what we were doing.
00:07:40
Speaker
Um, and so he would use us to raise money, you know, we'd issue a threat, then he'd react and then start pattern walling on his program. And it would be delightful because what you really want as a troll is a clapback like this. You want not only like a, not only a dipshit, like a dipshit trying to do bad drama, it was perfect. So, um, the way that I ended up getting him,
00:08:05
Speaker
was he was deep in it and then, I don't know, a server went down or something. Just something happened. This wasn't our cause at all. But then I wrote, because I was working, I was taking a lot of criminal justice classes in my law school. I was deep in this stuff. I was taking a prosecutorial seminar.
00:08:25
Speaker
I wrote a letter, a fake letter, email from him to his FBI handler, criticizing the handler for the amount of money that he's getting for the services that he's providing, serving as a honeypot and turning over the real extremist weirdos. So what I did was I had this in the bag.
00:08:49
Speaker
And then I started saying that the recent server down, I basically issued it, this is anonymous, we have taken down your, we have hacked your server, that's why it's not online. And so obligingly, Hal Turner makes an entire show about how he had to raise or has to raise $2,400 to find a new server, because anonymous trashed it. And then after the show, we release on a couple of white supremacist forums that existed at the time.
00:09:18
Speaker
we release that letter, which sunk him. And then he had to get more and more extreme until he ended up threatening a judge, who my friend was clerking for, who was in my class, my prosecutorial class. So that was the end of Hal Turner.
Career Shift to Law
00:09:34
Speaker
I was working on Wall Street for a firm called Sullivan and Cromwell, which is one of the deepest spooked firms there is. And having my experiences there is a complete naive individual witnessing everything about me.
00:09:46
Speaker
and filing it away in my head and at the time telling myself that it made a lot of sense because what else are you going to tell yourself when you're in the halls of power? I had lupus at the time and so my graduation from law school was delayed by a semester which is disastrous but I had already been guaranteed a job at Sullivan and Cromwell after
00:10:05
Speaker
forming one summer associate ship there. So I did one summer in New York and then the next summer I split between New York and Palo Alto. So I was doing fortune stuff during all this time. I actually went blind in there at one time.
00:10:25
Speaker
We got the white supremacists that we're picking on. B is coming out. It's a phenomenon. I'll drop another factoid in there that is irrefutable. The motto above B, only a fool would take this as fact. I wrote that.
00:10:43
Speaker
As I was kind of operating as a quasi lawyer for the operation at the time, we had to put that up because of what was going on, because of ongoing threats. I'll give you another example of what I did there. That's like a concrete thing. The purge policy. We keep no records, or at least we kept no records. Probably it's different now.
00:11:04
Speaker
We kept no records for longer than 24 hours as a matter of policy just so that we wouldn't have the administrative burden of having to respond to all of these subpoenas with actual records because it's easier to just not keep them as a matter of business. So that was a way that we conducted ourselves so that we would protect the people who were posting there. That was a big concern of mine.
00:11:27
Speaker
Anyway, I mentioned also the IRC channel and the coding name. You can go in there, and the records exist. These chats happened in an IRC format. And so the records of those interactions, knowing these people, the records exist. So pretty much everything that I say.
00:11:48
Speaker
can be backed up. Let's see, one of the other guys that was making 4chan with us, one of the head guys, he was working at Apple, still is. A very desirable position at the time and now still is working there. I think the finance guy that I mentioned, Manu Wax, I think he's still working in the publishing industry.
00:12:10
Speaker
Let's see, who do we have? We got Port, we got Shut, we got Coda. Coda's the guy who did most all of the coding of the website. And you'll notice what happened basically was we all had our little fun projects and then we all had other things to do. The only person that was really like there all the time was Moot.
00:12:31
Speaker
because he didn't really have much to offer. Poor bastard. I mean, he hasn't done anything since. He can probably pretty much guarantee that. Around 2006, 2007, all of the original people were moving on.
00:12:47
Speaker
and the site was now able to sustain itself. I can't remember if it was 18 by that time, but we ended up having a series of dim sum dinners. One with a guy named Anonymous Song who remembers me and helped me in hybrid guard until I explained to him what we were doing to him at the time of this very memorable dinner for him. We were putting in a new guard to just basically
00:13:11
Speaker
It's the trash team. We already did it. It's done. Who the fuck wants to do anything with this site anymore? There you go, Moot. Elect your friends. Anyway, around this time, Moot was, like, a little before this, Moot was bragging to me that he was hanging out with, um, Ahrenheimer, Weave. And I think that, I think that he was groomed by Weave, because he was a younger boy at that time.
00:13:33
Speaker
Yeah, anyway, so my history of 4chan ends with Operation Chanology. Like when that happened, I looked at my job at Sullivan and Cromwell where I'm bailing out auto industries. You know, I'm named in the Chrysler merger. Like, I'm looking at all of the personal
00:13:53
Speaker
correspondence of everybody at the highest level of finance as part of these internal investigations. So I'm reading all of the texts with their kids. I'm looking at what their lifestyles like, what their relationships with their families are like. I'm reading their divorce agreements. This is like a complete investigation of these people. And I'm looking at the 4chan situation. And I think at the time there was a, yeah. And I think, well,
00:14:19
Speaker
Okay, I'm done with that. So in 2007, there's 2008. I was like, all right, I'm out. So that's when I departed.