'The Antisocial Network' Is Here to Answer All Your Questions about 4chan

By Diana Helmuth | Film | March 28, 2024 |

By Diana Helmuth | Film | March 28, 2024 |

The Antisocial Network is a documentary that manages to thread a very difficult needle: explaining the website 4chan — whose goal is to offend all who witness it — in sympathetic terms.

Filmmakers Georgio Angelini and Arthur Jones describe it as something of a sequel to their 2020 documentary Feels Good Man, which detailed the story of the Pepe the Frog meme and its creator’s struggle to reclaim it from online communities of white supremacists. The Antisocial Network goes much broader than one meme, however. Angelini and Jones are here to explain how the subversive internet joke culture on 4chan transformed into conspiracy theory culture that ultimately helped feed the country’s alt-right and foment the January 6 insurgency.

Although this is the advertised thesis in the trailer, in reality, it sells the movie a bit short. The Antisocial Network is really a documentary about the power of internet trolls and how edgelording can be weaponized in the real world for a variety of political causes.

The film doesn’t use the voyeuristic narrative pattern that so many other storytellers fall prey to when they examine underbelly internet communities. This is not Jane Goodall watching chimps. Here, the examined subjects have mics and are talking about their experiences with mild contrition, nostalgia, and clear-eyed candor. We hear from a series of professional journalists and authors of early internet culture, but also early 2000s 4chan stars, forum founders, and hackers under active FBI investigation. Getting these folks to talk on camera is not an easy feat, and Angelini and Jones had to do no amount of favor pulling and coaxing. The resulting narrative feels authentic and balanced and is full of audience treats. Such as, seeing forefront members of Anonymous with their masks off.

The entire first half of the film is a journey back into the early 2000s internet, a time when you had to monopolize your entire household’s phone line just to check your email, and teenagers became de facto computer hardware experts in the pursuit of gigabyte-sized hits of dopamine. It’s not exactly a love letter to early internet culture, but it’s an honest portrayal that will make you nostalgic if you were there. Jones added motion graphics to a series of ancient memes, making them jump (sometimes painfully) back to life.

As the film goes on, we are taken through a history lesson of how Japanese message board 2chan beget 4chan beget Anonymous, and from there, how GamerGate begets 8Chan, and ultimately, with some not-so-secret help from Steve Bannon, how it progressed to QAnon. I’ve known these groups were interconnected for some time, but will confess to never having understood the full family tree. I had several friends (who would today consider themselves left-leaning) who spent many a happy evening hanging out on 4chan in the early 2000s. How did teenagers on an edgy anime message board come to be associated with a group that stormed the capital in the name of America’s first would-be dictator? This documentary answers that question, following the threads of the different groups that were born out of 4chan, including how they began to disagree over what, exactly, shouldn’t be laughed at.

This film does as good a job as I think is humanly possible to explain how jokes like “there are no girls on the internet,” “the rape train has no breaks” and “pool is closed due to AIDS” were somehow funny in the early 2000s to a large group of people who would today call themselves liberals, antiracists, and feminists. It’s debatable if these jokes were funny back in 2004, but the point of the documentary is to elucidate how they thrived. 4 chan was a community built on mutual shock and one-upmanship. In the Q&A after the screening, Angelini and Jones confessed that Netflix had pushed back on the movie’s inclusion of the Habbo Hotel stunt —- when Anonymous staged an antiracist takeover of the online game Habbo Hotel that ended up being more racist than the racism it was supposedly combatting. Jones and Angelini had to explain to Netflix why the narrative of the film simply would not make sense without going into the layered irony of this stunt and all stunts like it.

Because that’s what this doc is really about exploring what happens when a community of unsupervised teenage edgelords, who just wanted to one-up each other on message boards with increasingly offensive jokes, took their “don’t tell me what I can’t laugh at” energy into the real world. Sometimes the results of this were what my liberal leanings would call “good” (supporting Occupy Wall Street, taking down neo-Nazi radio host Hal Turner), and sometimes they were “bad” (trying to convince the world Hillary Clinton was a pedophile, breaking into the capitol on January 6th). Angelini and Jones illustrate that the key motivation tying all of these apparently disparate events together was not politics, per se. It was the desire to simply get a rise out of those who thought they were in charge. “We did it because we wanted to fuck with people,” says one early 4chan user. “Not because of our political beliefs.”

There are several other historical moments that were conceived in 4chan that I wish the doc would have explored. Such as how, during the 2016 election, 4chan users said they would vote either for anti-establishment Bernie or Trump, but never Hillary. I can only assume there were heaps of tangents like this left on the cutting room floor. As it is, Angelini and Jones have created a surprisingly tight and cohesive story out of a massive chunk of internet history. If anything, I wish this had been a mini-series instead of a single film, so they could get more into the weeds.

A background animation motif plays through the film, featuring dead-eyed, cartoon bodies suspended in midair by (what else?) a series of tubes. Occasionally, an angry human figure rises up and punches through his pixelated neon sky, tumbling into our world. This animation is splendidly done by Chromosphere Studio, and the metaphor is clear: dopamine addicts get sucked into an online world that robs them of clear thought, then break back into our world with disastrous consequences. The connection between 8chan, QAnon and Jan 6th appears only in the last quarter of the movie, and feels a touch rushed. As the doc comes to a close, it gently pushes the point that the secret to undoing all the conspiracy theory damage resulting from 4chan and 8chan is for people to get offline and go touch grass. These are the parting words of Moot, the kid who invented 4chan and now wants nothing to do with it. The film gently tells internet addicts: “You can graduate from that darkness.”

I’ll confess this struck me as a trite conclusion; we’re hearing a variant of this statement a lot lately, and we know none of us are actually going to do it. Angelini and Jones do a great job explaining how an online anime message board became kindling for domestic terrorism, and how this group of people whose sole motivation in life was fucking up anyone who tried to tell them what they couldn’t laugh at got soundly duped into undermining democracy (quite specifically, by Steve Bannon). But I can’t help but also notice that half the documentary involuntarily proves that people coming together online is not the actual problem. Anonymous, despite their trollish motivations, pulled off feats many liberals still consider admirable. Furthermore, people coming together online have brought about the Arab Spring, BLM, and efforts toward unionization. The trailer of this doc seems to want to blame internet addiction for the violence of January 6. It makes this point, but it makes several other more interesting points, too. I left the theater comparing 4chan users to a chainsaw. They can be used for good or bad, depending on the goal. Perhaps the real point is simply that — despite how they might fancy themselves — they can be used.

I would be curious if anyone on the alt-right would have their minds changed by this documentary. If you are a Democrat, wondering how, exactly, QAnon is connected to Cheese Pizza, Anime and Rick Astley, you will find answers here. If you grew up on the early internet, you’ll have a chance to appreciate how far your sense of humor has come (or not). Either way, this is an important and strangely entertaining movie for understanding the origins of the online conspiracy theories that propped up Donald Trump and led to the violence of January 6. However, it also reveals how the contrarian energy of online trolls can be channeled en masse towards various causes. It even ends on something of a hopeful note, which is itself rather remarkable.

‘The Antisocial Network’ screened at the 2024 SXSW Film and TV Festival. It is streaming on Netflix April 5th, 2024.