In this article, I will outline some reflections that emerged during a year of research on performativity within the 4chan website. My thesis is presented from the perspective of a performance scholar and designer. Open questions regarding the potential of the body's absence in performative gestures will be addressed to the reader. I will try to look at the definition of performativity as a tool for studying behaviors and the interaction mechanisms of 4chan users. I will analyze some performative gestures that may have been decisive in constructing the political identity of 4chan and the /pol/ (Politically Incorrect) board. By showcasing these gestures, we will see some reflections with the potential to influence and invent the perception of one's "enemy".
In this article, I will focus on "/pol/", the board that most represents the political identity of the 4chan community. It is impossible to be certain of the true political stance of the people who frequent the forum due to the thick layer of irony that covers every post. Moreover, not all 4chan users identify with the posts being published. We can state that it is a chaotic, desecrating, and ideological meeting place where most posts can be traced back to alt-right ideas and the manosphere.
4chan is an imageboard, a text- and image-based forum. Every user is completely anonymous; there are no profiles or likes. There is no timeline or archive (that is an integral part of the site), and there is no way to track user interactions. Unlike mainstream social media platforms, the post is emphasized over the user. A newly published post is brought to the top and is pushed back to the homepage only if another user interacts by commenting. If no one comments, the post entirely disappears from the platform after a few minutes. To give an idea of a post's lifespan, consider that an average popular discussion with about 50-100 comments lasts only a few hours. We will later address the ephemeral aspect of posts combined with user anonymity; for now, suffice it to note that 4chan lacks algorithms, establishing a stark distance from other social networks.
Launched on October 1, 2003, 4chan initially gathered anime enthusiasts, eventually becoming a landmark for online culture. 4chan is the place where most memes are invented and where the most famous conspiracy theories are born. The site began as a utopia, a place to freely express oneself thanks to anonymity, avoiding prejudice and censorship. Over time, a new anti-establishment sensibility emerged on the site, resting on the DIY culture of ideological open source (Nagle A., 2018). It is a worldview in which the internet is a place to be free from society's superstructures, transforming this freedom into a desecrating, anti-Semitic, anti-feminist, and racist dark humor. At first glance, it appears as a rarefied place due to its ephemerality, and superficial due to an end-in-itself transgressive irony.
The description provided by many researchers, including A. Nagle, is accurate, but I feel the need to supplement this description with what I have observed in recent months. Conducting this type of research is complex without factual data due to the aforementioned ephemeral aspect. Furthermore, years later, 4chan has changed; it is no longer as populated as it once was and does not generate as much media noise as it did a decade ago. When describing these types of platforms, one can only add descriptions without negating others because every moment spent on 4chan is directly tied to one's presence on the site. From this aspect, we can already begin to see a parallel with the performative event. Since posts last for a limited time, ranging from minutes to hours[1], the experience is always different and unrepeatable. I would like to contribute to the (ever-evolving) description of 4chan by presenting it as a "meeting place." The key function I want to highlight in this article is the participatory performative space generated by users, where the spectator/performer dichotomy is overcome. The 4chan community loves to show its desecrating side, but (perhaps) one of the reasons this community remains united and highly frequented is the community itself. The need for aggregation in a physical space is an essential trait of live performance, a dynamic that also finds correspondence among 4chan users.
On the /pol/ board, where the most violence-infused posts are concentrated, posts are published that support the thesis that this is a place where one can feel heard. Even if the word "listen" may seem ambitious when placed in a context where users frequently exchange insults, I still believe it is the right word. When an ideological clash occurs, the interacting group of users presupposes the existence of every participant in the discussion.
Every user takes every comment into consideration without prejudice, facilitating the expression of one's values. When participating in a debate, the 4chan user generates a sense of presence that is difficult to experience outside the site. The user's post in the image (Image 1) demonstrates how 4chan can be a place to find attention, suggesting that a feeling of loneliness emerges outside the site. A sincere tenderness also shines through among other users who perhaps empathize with the fragility of the original poster. This strong sense of belonging to something difficult to define[2] places the user in a space they have the potential to imagine. A place where many value clashes occur, where one can form their own identity, and where topics close to the individual's condition are discussed. A condition that, for some users, can be encapsulated in the "N.E.E.T." manifesto (Image 2).
Performative Gestures and Manipulations
If 4chan is a performative space and threads are performances, then comments and interactions are performative gestures. We have largely moved past the spectator and performer dichotomy; here, everyone is a performer and everyone is a spectator, there is no difference (just as I believe the two roles do not strictly exist in live performances either). The autopoietic feedback loop[3] is present, akin to the concept of a temporary community so widely reported in performance studies research.
In a 2020 study by Colley and Moore, a user identified as "pwex5ur4," during a specific thread published 14 videos in rapid succession with extensive commentary. This technique allowed the user to single-handedly influence almost a quarter of the entire discussion, diverting attention toward white supremacy and racial hatred. The videos were posted so quickly that there was no time to search for, download, and re-upload them. This leads us to deduce that those materials were already on the user's computer and that there was, therefore, a deliberate intention to distract attention from the thread's topic toward generating hate. The materials published by user "pwex5ur4" are nothing more than a performative gesture grafted into the dramaturgy of the discussion. Studying the dynamics of these communities means studying the manipulation mechanisms applied by certain users. Unveiling how it is possible to influence a discussion in online environments helps us understand how certain information is hijacked and how a collective conspiracy can take shape.
QAnon became a conspiracy movement, born on 4chan. This conspiracy theory fueled the events leading to the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021. It all started with an anonymous user who posted the first "drop" on October 28, 2017, signing as "Q", like the eponymous novel by the Italian progressive art collective Project Luther Blissett. The novel is set during the Reformation and tells the story of a secret agent who spreads messages of disinformation under the name "Q" and, just like the Q of "QAnon", claims to have access to ultimate political power and secret information. In the novel, Q's letters convince Thomas Müntzer's Protestant peasant warriors to fight a battle in Thuringia to permanently expel aristocrats and bishops. This battle, however, turns out to be a death trap. The "Q" of QAnon plagiarizes this as well, stating that the "storm" of a final battle is imminent, wherein Trump will free the United States from the "Deep State" and liberal elites. (Cramer & Wu Ming, 2020)
The article A God-Tier LARP? QAnon as Conspiracy Fictioning (Zeeuw & Gekker, 2023) illustrates how it is possible to compare the QAnon phenomenon to a LARP (Live Action Role-Playing). According to this theory, users are merely playing at believing in conspiracy theories. We have already seen how the 4chan platform itself emphasizes gamification through the publication of controversial posts to generate interactions and prolong the post's survival as much as possible. Role-playing is simply the interpretation of a role within a fictional narrative that the players themselves can influence. In other words, the LARP taking place on 4chan is nothing but a participatory performance made of interactions, constantly redrawing the dramaturgy. Participation occurs through speculation in a context where truth mixes with irony, producing unintentional manipulation. When QAnon reaches Facebook and Instagram, its reception and adoption are shaped by vastly different platform cultures and demographics. Already on 8chan and subsequently on 8kun, specialized QAnon research forums take the basic authenticity of the Q-drops for granted, which in turn are indexed and archived by dedicated websites like qanon.pub for easy future reference. On YouTube and Instagram, right-wing influencers see an opportunity to monetize QAnon content, while on Twitter, right-wing pundits end up harboring a vested political interest in its reality. Consequently, the dynamics surrounding QAnon shift from a potential LARP to a conspiratorial dogma, reflecting a qualitative shift in quantity. This process, through which a narrative or conspiracy idea like QAnon transcends its original context—where its fictional qualities (or at least its obscure origins) can still be recognized and contested—to arrive in a context that treats it as an accepted dogma, is part of what we call its fictional and hyperstitional dynamics (Zeeuw & Gekker, 2023). Once QAnon lands on mainstream social media, /pol/ users change their stance regarding the perception of the phenomenon. The new audience engaging with the "Q-drops" was demographically different, so much so that it was despised by 4chan users. "Boomers" or "normies" embraced QAnon as a dogmatic revelation rather than considering them pieces of a speculative puzzle. Within the forum, the phenomenon was progressively debunked and labeled as a government or Zionist psyop (psychological operation) designed to distract and sedate the true right, or as an elaborate grift (scam) intended to sell merchandise to gullible users. Most likely, those who read the "Q-drops" seriously in those years did not even know 4chan existed, and consequently were unaware of the ironic and nihilistic fog surrounding the forum. QAnon was a LARP that got out of hand, taken seriously by those who were not literate in online dynamics.
Field Research Methodology
As clarified earlier, conducting netnographic research on 4chan is no simple task. With the absence of a database to analyze systematically, the necessary reference points to build these are missing. The methodology I adopted aims to trace some elements of ethnographic participant observation. The 4chan community has indeed developed a certain distrust towards this kind of investigation and academic research in general; they consider researchers to be "cuckademics", snobs, and pseudo-intellectuals. For this reason, it was necessary to study the language used in the posts to prevent the intervention from being considered external to the platform.
One of the most common ways to start a discussion on the /pol/ board is to ask a question on an issue that might divide and create conflict. Most of the posts I read during that period exhibited this format. I was struck by the fact that many of these posts revolved around the concept of the "enemy"; many anti-Semitic, misogynistic, and racist posts shared this common element. One of my first posts served to uncover what kind of relationship this community (however stratified and diverse) has towards the "enemy" (Image 2). Original poster (the author): ">How do you build an enemy? At uni they asked me to write about the concept of "enemy", how it is formed in us etc… someone to some idea. Can anyone help me? What should I write?".
It would not have been possible to ask a question clearly on 4chan: users would have felt attacked or focused more on insulting and making ironic remarks about the topic. I observed this behavior in other academic-flavored posts that led to hostile comments, thereby skewing the research objective. To avoid directly asking where this obsession with the "enemy" came from, I tried to transform this question into a plea for help. I attempted to make users empathize with the figure of a university student struggling with an assignment; by doing so, the research would yield answers more consistent with the request's subject. To quote on 4chan, the ">" symbol is used at the beginning of a sentence. This demonstrated my belonging to the community[4] and attempted to shift the authorship of the question from the post's creator to the university.
In the upcoming sections of the article, I will reflect on the comments received, highlighting the performative aspects of the response from the group of users who participated in the discussion. The comments reported below are not in chronological order but have been divided into blocks to highlight patterns useful for the analysis.
Rhythm and Repetition
In the performing arts, repetition is a central element that underpins the infrastructure of time [5]. Repeating an action over time creates hierarchies in the dramaturgy, shifting focus from the signified to the signifier, bringing forth the materiality of the gesture. In response to the published post, one of the comments was this (Image 3):
(comment number: 8) BW2uynRC: "What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I’m the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your “life”. You’re fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “clever” comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You’re fucking dead, kiddo."
(comment number: 14) tKdq/c/3: "This guy fucks"
(comment number: 15) IWrgljhn: "what was your BUDS graduation number?"
(comment number: 8) is not a common response from an anonymous 4chan user but rather a previously written text that was copied and pasted into the discussion. This is a copypasta named "Navy Seal Copypasta", a textual meme periodically reshared by some users. Looking at the message's content, there is a strong element mocking violence and shows of force. In the original post, the user claims to be a former US military Marine with experience and a past as an expert soldier. This caricature highlights the ignorance of these types of users; one of the most famous passages is the use of the term "gorilla warfare" instead of the correct "guerrilla warfare".
Fischer-Lichte explains how, when a performative element is obsessively repeated, it appears de-semanticized. It stops communicating something, leaving room for the sheer plasticity of the gesture (Fischer-Lichte E., 2008). A repeatedly pasted text loses its informative function to acquire the presence of matter. It is not necessary to grasp the content of the comment; rather, we should notice what this object does in the digital space of the post. First of all, it takes up space—it is the longest comment in the post—attracts attention, disturbs with its language, creates a short circuit, and causes the discussion to branch out. The practice of copypasta can be viewed as an act of presence aimed at shaking the spectator through provocation. Copying an identical text generates shifts in discussions that are influenced by the contexts in which the publication occurs. This "repetition with deviation" interrupts the discussion and, just like a sudden silence or a disturbing sound in a performance, generates a suspension and a sense of alienation in the consumer.
The Image's Body in Becoming
As described at the beginning, 4chan is an imageboard, a forum based on images. The rhythm and repetition of content are not limited to text; indeed, images are the most repeated and handed-down element. The cult of images on 4chan is very strong and has characterized the site's fame. Many of the images published by users were republished and shared on most mainstream websites. The images I refer to are predominantly memes, satirical images that, in the absence of an avatar, become a body with which the 4chan user can show themselves. The principle of repetition and alteration is at the core of posting a meme. One of the most famous memes and perhaps the site's icon is "Pepe The Frog", an anthropomorphic frog born from Matt Furie's comic "Boy's Club" in 2005.
The peculiarity that makes the meme repeatable is its easy alteration and adaptability. The base image of Pepe provides a stable foundation useful for deviation and the malleability of its appearance. Pepe can appear sad, happy, playful, or angry, and above all, he can wear a Nazi uniform or be an anti-Semitic caricature. Every new form of Pepe is an act of creation that triggers a feedback loop with the forum community, sparking conflict, irony, or provocation. The mutability of this user's body in becoming simulates the ephemeral and transformative nature of the performative body. Every meme intrinsically expresses a state of mind and a worldview; for the 4chan user, publishing a post with an attached meme means embodying that body. The performer's body loses its physicality, making way for a corporeality applied to the situation and serving the act. This transformation is not visible; it is the performer's body that, once revealed, becomes visible to the spectator's senses. That performative body is never fixed, knows no static state, and continuously shows itself in becoming, constantly applying signifiers to all gestures produced by the performer. In other words, the meme can be compared to the 4chan user's body, generating signifiers based on the production of a comment (performative gesture).
The Enemy as a Tool
(comment number: 1) J5mRhaPB: "The answer they're likely looking for is dehumanization. You can't create an enemy without first dehumanizing that antagonistic other to the extent they're meaningfully characterized as such."
(comment number: 3) h4oke5Vg: "dehumanization is the NPC theory on enemies. If someone is destroying something you love you don't need to dehumanize them to mark them an enemy."
(comment number: 4) J5mRhaPB: "You subconsciously will regardless if they're trying to harm you. Try to think of one seriously evil person you know IRL who has attacked you that you don't consider subhuman"
(comment number: 5) /j5Y7ofv: "It may be right what you say, but isn't dehumanization a whine thing afterwards? Enemies in war are enslaved, but what generated that war? How does hatred arise towards someone who is not in our group/community?"
(comment number: 6) 27u3Bj91: ">you don't need to dehumanize them Yet the enemy is always dehumanized"
(comment number: 9) KDVLAuTg: ">How does hatred arise towards someone who is not in our group/community? The belief that they are a threat. It will always come down to how a person feels threatened. Whether it's a legitimate threat is the details that matter."
(comment number: 16) h4oke5Vg: "If i'm to love my enemies, i'd humanize them. Then, are they no longer an enemy? Or is it that i'm no longer human, for i have no enemy?"
"The enemy is also used by pacifist individuals and cannot be excluded from the civilization process. Even for groups against capitalist exploitation, it is no longer a human object but a social force. The enemy is an innate need in humanity. Ethics lies in putting oneself in the enemy's shoes and understanding them, and not pretending they don't exist. (Aeschylus with The Persians, where the tragedy lives through their eyes). We can recognize ourselves through the other, but often the other is something different from us, and confronts us with what we are not. This is why, in this conflictual individuation process, we reduce the other to an enemy." (Eco U., 2020)
In this last selection of comments, the attempt to answer the question emerges. We will avoid discussing the content of the comments because this analysis aims to highlight the behavioral pattern stemming from the debate on the question "How to build an enemy?". The question, in fact, is nothing more than a pretext to try to interpret what kind of political posture they assume towards the concept of "enemy." An enemy that must be understood as an object of conflict useful to one's own identity to refine and test one's values (Eco U., 2020).
Among users, the negotiation over what defines an enemy turns into a discursive power struggle, in which each user tries to impose their own interpretive frame on the others. When user "h4oke5Vg" refers back to the previous comment by "J5mRhaPB," defining it as an "NPC"[6] definition, they are using a derogatory term to highlight a hierarchy between those who understand reality and those who are merely extras. The perception of holding the truth and knowing the real mechanisms of the world has a clear definition within the 4chan community: "redpilling." The redpill is an ideological concept born online, particularly on the /pol/ board; it is the process of converting new users or observers (otherwise defined as "normies") to one's worldview. Users believe the site has the unique power to "wake" people up to how "the world really works."
The use of this language generates irony for 4chan users, as it creates a parallel between the gaming world and reality. It also establishes a linguistic and political distance from those who do not know the meaning of "NPC". In other words, this irony is intrinsically political because its rhetorical function acts to unite or divide groups of people based on shared values and beliefs. It does not merely convey a message but creates a "community of believers" sharing a superior and secret vision of the truth. A mechanism of complicity is triggered between the author and the reader, and a coded message, a hidden meaning, is shared, leaving out those who do not grasp the game. This process of inclusion and exclusion is a power dynamic that can be perceived as elitist.
In the essay The Aesthetics of the Performative, Erika Fischer-Lichte explains how the feedback loop is the central element that allows the performance to constitute itself as an autopoietic system, that is, a system capable of generating itself autonomously through interaction (Fischer-Lichte E., 2008). The feedback is a self-organizing mechanism creating a circular system that receives and integrates new, unplanned, and unpredictable elements that can emerge from both performers and spectators. In the case of 4chan, the feedback is clear: after the discussion starts, the discourse branches out without conditions of control by the post's creator. Users interact and alter the initial question, shifting the subject to dehumanization, down to the final comment, where a new question is reformulated that will never be given a new answer.
In conclusion, looking at this platform through the lens of performance studies means stopping treating it as a simple container of digital deviance. It means admitting that we are faced with an autopoietic dramaturgical laboratory, where radicalization is consumed first and foremost as an aesthetic gesture and a real-time role-playing game. At first glance, 4chan gives the impression of a desecrating and violent agora, and in part it actually is, but it is also a meeting place where a generation (or more than one) finds comfort and an audience to listen. Analyzing 4chan allows us to see a unique collective shadow, generated by mechanisms now vanished from the common use of social networks.
Notes
- There are exceptions, some posts last even months, but these are posts that function as update boards (such as the progress of the war in Ukraine). Even though these are still discussions, these few posts do not change the ephemeral perception of the site.↩︎
- It is impossible to describe 4chan as a monolithic community; the most extreme and violent discussions are full of clashes, and it is not a movement with a structured manifesto of fixed values.↩︎
- The autopoietic feedback loop is a system that self-organizes thanks to the interaction between performers and spectators. Performance is not a fixed product created solely by the artist, but an event generated by reciprocal response: every reaction of the audience (laughter, silence, movements) influences the intensity and direction of the performers' actions, and vice versa (Fischer-Lichte E., 2008).↩︎
- As well explained in Pneumatic Materials: Digital Pseudepigraphy, the ephemeral and the anonymous envelop the screenshots of old posts with a sort of aura, granting that content a 'status of tradition'. Probably, the greentext (when the '>' symbol is used at the beginning of the sentence, the text turns green) citing a concept on 4chan presupposes, for some users, an intrinsic authority in the message (Do Not Research, 2022). Using this type of symbol presupposes knowledge of this "tradition".↩︎
- Often, time itself is the material of performing art, such as in durational performances.↩︎
- NPC is an acronym of "non-playable character," meaning any character in a game that is not controlled by the player. The term originated from pen-and-ink roleplaying games, and got adopted in video game development as early as the 1990s. NPC has been a term commonly used by gamers to refer to video game characters since that time.↩︎
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