4chan Founded

2003

Date: 1 October 2003 · Place: Westchester County, New York · christopher.poole's bedroom · Figures: Christopher Poole (moot), 15, founder · Tags: Image Board, The Engine Room 01. The Bedroom Server Christopher Poole, a 15-year-old high school sophomore in Westchester County, launches 4chan on 1 October 2003 from a server in his bedroom. The site is modeled on the Japanese imageboards 2channel and Futaba (the chan in 4chan being short for channel). Every post requires an image. Posts are anonymous by default. Boards are organized by topic: /a/ for anime, /v/ for video games, /b/ for random. /b/ becomes, for the next decade and a half, the cultural factory floor where most of the internet's image-vernacular gets made. The anonymity removes consequence; the image-required constraint forces visual literacy; the post-and-die ephemeral threading produces a culture obsessed with capturing, captioning, and circulating. 02. Where the Memes Came From If you can name an English-language meme of the 2003-2015 period, the odds favor 4chan as its origin: lolcats and image macros (industrialized on /b/), Rickroll (2007), Pedobear, Trollface, Forever Alone, Y U NO, Slowpoke, the entire rage-face genre. Pepe the Frog (originally Matt Furie's, but 4chan's adoption and politicization is what makes Pepe globally famous in 2016). Poole exits the site in January 2015 after running it for 11 years. By then the cultural function has long since shifted: 4chan stops being the place where most internet memes start; it becomes the place a smaller, more politicized subset of memes is incubated, primarily on /pol/. The engine room runs on a different fuel after about 2014. Sources • Christopher Poole, oral histories 2008-2015 • Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things (2015) • Wikipedia, 4chan