Reasons I love C&W: I can come here brain-dead after qualifying exams, and everyone I talk to has advice to help me better position myself between rhetoric, especially classical rhetoric, and media studies. My presentation ran a little long, about which I was slightly irritated at myself, and it wasn’t my usual posse in the audience—rather, people who may have been less familiar with 4chan and hence less understanding of the in-jokes—but the few comments I did receive were phenomenal. Someone even told me he felt that he’d witnessed his own life and experience as a 4channer narrated back to him, which is a pretty significant compliment.
Access copy of my talk below.
Autonomy in the Hivemind: 4chan’s archival economy and archaeology of memory
Vyshali Manivannan, Rutgers University School of Communication and Information
Computers & Writing, Washington State University, Pullman, WA
June 5, 2014
In an episode of Seinfeld, George Costanza explains the basics of baseball to Derek Jeter. When Jeter dismisses him by saying, “I won the world series,” Costanza conceitedly notes, “Yeah, in six games.” In early 2011, a screenshot of Costanza’s smirk appeared on the sports discussion board of the imageboard 4chan as visual shorthand mocking participants whose sarcasm was similarly foolishly misplaced. The image was initially disseminated to other 4chan boards as Costanza.jpg, frequently paired with the phrase, “I seriously hope you guys don’t do this,” often shortened to the acronym “ISHYGDDT” or the phonetic abbreviation “I shiggy diggy.” By June 2012, the file was circulating as IShiggyDiggy.jpg on 4chan as well as more mainstream sites such as Tumblr and Facebook. By July, the association between those filenames and Costanza’s smirk had become valorized to such an extent that the image became extraneous; simply writing “IShiggyDiggy.jpg” on any board on 4chan signaled the image, its history, and its connotation, effectively structuring comprehension of discourse and other images to which it was later applied, but only for viewers in the know.
In 4chan’s unique archival economy—Derrida’s term for the system of erasures, disclosures, and classifications resulting from the desire to conserve in the face of destruction—files are algorithmically renamed to a UNIX timestamp on download and the preservation of filenames requires extra effort on the part of downloaders. Thus, the collective retention and reification of particular filenames such as IShiggyDiggy.jpg suggest a desire for a standardized classification system. Given 4chan’s frequent refreshing, deletion of content, automatic renaming of files, and relative lack of information infrastructure, this classification system can only be constructed and upheld by individual 4channers who preserve and recirculate their personal filenames in the hopes that others do the same.
Significantly, this organizational system begins at the individual level despite 4chan’s insistence on anonymity. Within the “hivemind” exists a subset of transiently identifiable valuable users who possess and disseminate cultural capital to new users to sustain shared memory and subcultural integrity. While these users remain anonymous, traces of individual autonomy are apparent in their contributions, which represent both 4chan’s culture and the poster’s own creativity and classificatory biases. This can be extended to include archival impulses on the Internet as a whole, where shared memory is founded as much on individual-collective tensions around naming and metadata as on the dissemination of artifacts that replicate both collective culture and diverse personal mediations of otherwise perishable materials with historical import.
I will foreground this presentation with a discussion of the archive, mnemonic labor, and systems of classification. Subsequently, using 4chan as my case study, I will examine the filename as a discursive practice that enriches the material reproduction of memory online by compressing into a single word, phrase, and file extension diverse layers of historical, social, and visual meaning on both the individual and collective levels. As it is anonymous, ephemeral, and lacking an official archive and information infrastructure, 4chan allows unique insight into the bottom-up invention and implementation of organizational memory practices that double as discursive practices and subcultural boundary-policing mechanisms.
According to Derrida, the archive relies on hypomnemata, or technical, external memory substitutes consisting of writing, photography, and other supplements to internal memory. Adopted from Plato, hypomnesis runs counter to anamnesis, or direct recollection without external memory aids. However, it is hypomnemata that permit rememoration and consignation, the impulse to “coordinate a single corpus, in a system or a synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration.” This archival impulse is inherently predicated on a Foucauldian culture of self, as the material supplement to memory enables later re-reading and meditation and thus automatically initiates a reflective relationship with the self, the implicit goal being perfect government of the self by the self. The archive also enables remediation, as individuals subconsciously draw on personal reserves of “living” internal memory and previously witnessed hypomnemata to form new, personal texts. In short, the archive produces as much as it records, continually refocusing individual and group identity.
To be intelligible to an entire community, the archive presupposes standardized classifications, which provide shared memory referents that permit individual re-writings that possess the potential to be widely recirculated and adopted. For Bowker & Star, classifications are both material and symbolic, expressing topographies of lived experience that are only accessible through classification. The subsequent nomenclatures contain invisible narratives of conflict and compromise between subject and sovereign, individual voices and artifacts and the archons, the gatekeepers and guardians of the archive. The continual calibrations of memory that transpire between individual, collective, and archive may be understood as mnemonic labor, which Ashuri defines as the transmission of shared memory from individual to individual through mnemonic devices and institutions. Unlike common memory, which concerns the anamnestic recollection of an event directly experienced by a large group of people, shared memory is calibrated through the various perspectives of individuals with diverse, possibly vicarious experiences of the event. These rememorations are integrated and homogenized in a collective standardization process, so that members absent from the event may recall it via descriptive hypomnemata rather than by direct experience. Mnemonic labor thus relies on the active presentation and re-presentation of hypomnemata to the community to allow members to reformulate “dead” memory in relation to a “living” counterpart. By its very nature, mnemonic labor relies on standardized classification such that individually described hypomnemata may be made accessible to the community as a whole.
In spaces that lack memory and centralized authority, these classification processes become increasingly pressing and complex, challenging present notions of the archive and its role in discursive practice. Just such a space, 4chan is decentralized, nonhierarchical, and consists of approximately fifty topically themed boards, each denoted by letters within backslashes, such as Random – /b/, its most notorious board. These boards are organized into five broad categories with five to twelve boards each, which is the extent of externally imposed categorical infrastructure. Its interface resembles that of a text-only bulletin board system supplemented with image posting, consisting of only Name, Email, Comment, and File fields. Although it lacks even the option of registration, over 90% of 4channers leave the Name field blank according to Bernstein et al, resulting in the default, multiple-use Anonymous username. 4channers who adopt pseudonyms are disparaged for eliding the fundamental experience of anonymity. The Comment and File fields form the basis of substantive discourse; users compose text within the former and upload images from personal devices using the latter. On upload, personal filenames are revealed in the upper right on mouseover, requiring an attentional form that disrupts typical reading, and are converted on download to UNIX timestamps. Content is extremely ephemeral, vanishing in as little as six seconds on /b/, and once deleted may be lost forever. 4chan’s “archive” is thus scattered in a constellation of personal archives, small online repositories, and paratexts.
This interface simultaneously decouples identity from any analogical relation to the embodied user and embeds these anonymous users in a radically ephemeral environment where history is made and conserved through the circulation of hypomnemata. On 4chan this largely comprises images, image macros, and screenshots of threads. Although all discourse potentially constitutes hypomnemata worthy of preservation, only material that perpetuates or forecasts cultural tendencies is deemed valuable. In the absence of strong identity and centralized authority, this “value” is determined in a meritocratic system seeking two qualities: the reflection of 4chan’s culture of offense, suspicion, and unreality—what Auerbach terms Anonymous or “A-culture”—and the ability to maintain subcultural integrity. 4channers perceive their subcultural integrity as constantly under attack given 4chan’s lack of conventional barriers to entry and its mainstreamification following 2007 with the rickroll and the formation of the political group Anonymous. The ensuing influx of new, casual users threw into question existing divisions and practices of mnemonic labor in the valuation of hypomnemata and the construction of 4channers’ shared memory. Additionally, 4chan’s mainstreamification catalyzed the creation of sanitized, accessible encyclopedias such as Know Your Meme and Oh Internet, robbing 4chan of its formerly intimate cultural knowledge and commuting valuable hypomnemata to general memetic currency. For instance, an image like beecock, a flaccid penis covered in bees used on Something Awful and as a 404 image for 4chan’s defunct /z/, is now easily locatable on *chan-friendly wikis. However, its filename “!beecock.jpg” is less easily locatable, and its discursive uses are more inscrutable, carrying meaning mostly for veterans who recognize it through common memory and for users who understand it via shared memory. While an image requires little effort to circulate, facilitating mainstreamification, its filename emerges out of community-specific individual-collective tensions, requires nontrivial effort to be noticed and preserved, and thus remains more opaque.
Once a filename is standardized, it may be paired with multiple images or suffice as textual discourse alone, but it is meant to tacitly reference its original referent. Only a savvy user deserving of communal acceptance will recognize the filename, its original image referent, and the mythology behind it. Similarly, only these valuable users will be able to correctly utilize and perpetuate such filenames; distinguish between 4chan-appropriate filename discourse versus filenames like “dafuq.jpg” that are popular with rival sites and hence associated with newcomers; and invent and help select filenames for new content. Thus, the “hivemind” tacitly compels the valuation of individuals who are transiently distinguishable by not only the dissemination of valuable hypomnemata but also inventive, personal mediations of that material, namely in the form of the filename, which ultimately imbues it with value.
The filename’s role in discursive practice, sans visual signifiers, is not new; but it has resurfaced and intensified on 4chan given its hypomnesic environment. On early BBSes and forums, content preservation was at the mercy of users who personally saved and organized material with specific classificatory attributes that—if practical or opportunely clever—themselves became edifices of Internet culture. This was particularly true of shock media meant to preserve subcultural integrity, such as hello.jpg, dance.swf, and SWAP.avi, discursive artifacts in Internet history that function with or without their image referents. Notably, while the image referents for “hello.jpg” and “SWAP.avi” remain obtainable today, “dance.swf” has perished, such that it may only be preserved via filename. Where the filename is concerned on 4chan, the “hivemind” singles out praiseworthy users on the basis of their ability to balance individual expression with A-culture aspects that mainstreamification has endangered. 4channers compete in the naming process and, if selected, retain the personal pleasure of knowing that their filename has been collectively standardized, immortalized, and perpetuated as hypomnemata. The inexplicit, consensus-based preservation metadata that focuses group identity on 4chan reflects individual biases that are influenced by and influence the “hivemind.” The filenames are essentially descriptions of the image referents’ cultural significance, accessible and meaningful only to insiders. Thus, it is the collective standardization of such metadata that translates common memory into shared memory for culturally competent users able to grasp the filename’s significance through context and consistent presence.
While many forms of preservation metadata are memetically naturalized, few are as inscribed with historical significance as the filename. 4channers’ folder hierarchies, for instance, are typically headed with the root directory “4chan” with second-level subdirectories named after the relevant boards, such as “b” or “v,” which are frequently referenced as such in discussions. Users also discuss third-level directories that follow a nomenclature based on popular query strings, image functions, or image attributes: for instance, “cats,” “reaction faces,” “Azumanga Daioh,” “fail,” or “do not want.” Unlike tags and other metadata objects that are created and collectivized through communal discussion, however, filenames appear as individual inventions that unintentionally intervene in discourse, as 4chan’s interface exposes elements of the poster’s information infrastructure whether or not the filename was intended as a contributable artifact. Additionally, where folder hierarchies and tags are meant to further the web of interoperability underpinning the community, the filenames of valuable hypomnemata signal the recognition of the need for opacity.
Within a community where the revelation of identity factors is discouraged, the filename becomes the site for exercising individual agency in cleverly encoding historical meaning into the brief title of an image. For instance, “love-in-4chan-is-something-like-that.jpg” references a manga panel of a cute girl holding a sign saying “I will kill you and fuck the body,” encapsulating 4chan’s economies of offense and unreality; another image titled “do-you-have-any-grapes.jpg,” a historical reference to and culturally specific spin on the 2009 viral “Duck Song,” signifies a photoshopped image of a woman with her legs splayed to reveal a rubber duck in her vagina. In a 2012 request thread for “toys” on /d/, a hentai image of a nude male bedecked in numerous sex toys was posted with the filename “cunt destroyer.jpg,” an oblique inversion of a 2008 meme from /b/ where photographs of stereotypical virginal nerds are ironically captioned with the phrase. 4channers in the thread were amused by this unintentional discursive intervention and began responding with filename discourse ranging from “salvation_of_man.jpg,” a reference to an anime catchphrase, to “let_me_sing_you_the_song_of_my_people.jpg,” invoking a meme frequently used to satirize bizarre images.
When filenames are used in textual discourse, readers must both correctly infer the original image referent and its use in order to comprehend the discussion. When used in discourse, filenames with multiple image referents—such as “facepalm.jpg,” “why_would_you_do_that.jpg,” “umad.jpg,” or “lolwut.jpg”—refer to specific images with high in-group significance. For instance, on the more accessible end of the spectrum, the accurate attribution for “lolwut.jpg” is Ursula Vernon’s surrealist “Biting Pear of Salamanca.” The filename “look down whisper no.jpg,” a reference to Rorschach’s monologue in Watchmen, has become fixed to a pornographic image of Rorschach looking down at his own clothed erection. “Power-wrist.jpg,” a discursive response to ludicrous levels of stubbornness, refers to an entire 2006 thread in which a 4channer ranted about a friend who refused to relinquish the power wrist accessory in Secret of Mana, traveling all the way back to buy it from Potos Village—misspelled as “potatos”—once it was discarded. The filename lacks this context and as such serves as a test of veteran status. By contrast, an attempt to replace the standardized “everyone-is-gay-for-bridget.jpg” with “everyone-is-gay-for-teddie.jpg” was met with shock, horror, and derision as it threatened to replace and relegate to forgetting an important historical and discursive artifact. Users must also be able to discern incorrect uses, as in writing “Willy_Wonka.jpg” instead of “youmustbenewhere.jpg.” Finally, in a thread on /d/ marked by an increasing number of penises in each image, a 4channer remarked that there ought to be a picture of a penis with multiple penises; another 4channer both produced this image and its filename, “cockseption.jpg.” The filename reflected the creativity of a single individual but was applauded by the collective for subscribing to the economy of offense and evincing knowledge of contemporary pop culture; it became a discursive response in alternative hentai threads where the number of penises was deemed out of control, referencing its historical context more than its original image referent.
On 4chan, filenames, tags, and categories are standardized for retrieval purposes, but it is only the filename that sustains collective memory and history while simultaneously providing a panacea for the effects of mainstreamification and reassuring individual participants of their value. Where centralized substrates and their mirrors have repeatedly failed, 4channers themselves retain hard evidence of their community’s history and deploy it through the discursive filename such that it remains relatively impenetrable to outsiders. This carries the added benefit that the material artifact need not be posted until present users have proven themselves valuable by expressing comprehension through context and the experience of longtime lurking, reducing the chances of mainstream appropriation. Correct discursive use of the filename confers incontestable legitimacy within a community governed by distrust. Failure at the level of the filename implies that one is a new or casual user, suggesting that certain filenames may become standardized for discursive purposes as well, to increase exclusivity in a given thread while encapsulating shared memory for longtime users.
As integral to valuable hypomnemata, 4chan’s filenames ultimately orient the collective around individual modes of classification, such that the filename in a sense remains individuating even when collectively adopted by the “hivemind.” To extrapolate from Ashuri, the discursive filename constitutes the unique perspective of an individual interpretation of a given episode or cultural quality, permitting insiders to parse the information into viable cultural capital while reminding new users they are unwelcome. Ultimately, in a culture where little is taken seriously, the personal archive is heavily weighted as it forms the basis for future discussion, ironizing, remixing, and textual discourse itself. As other highly influential Internet subcultures begin to embrace this practice, we should continue to reflect on the role of the filename in mediating individual-collective tensions, categorical infrastructure, and the convergence of shared memory and discursive metadata online.
In conclusion, youwontseethisscreenever.jpg:
References
Bernstein, M. S., Monroy-Hernández, A., Harry, D., André, P., Panovich, K., & Vargas, G. (2011). 4chan and /b/: An analysis of anonymity and ephemerality in a large online community. Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.
Derrida, J. (1981). Dissemination. The University of Chicago Press.
Lavoie, B. & Dempsey, L. (2004). Thirteen ways of looking at…digital preservation. D-Lib Magazine, 10(7/8).
Mayer-Schönberger, V. (2009). Delete: The virtue of forgetting in the digital age. Princeton University Press.
Mieszkowski, K. (2002). The geeks who saved Usenet. Salon.
Stryker, C. (2011). Epic win for Anonymous: How 4chan’s army conquered the web. The Overlook Press.
