The Master Of Memes
By Lev Grossman
moot doesn't give out much in the way of personal info. I don't even know his real name. He's 20 years old and skinny; he could pass for 16. He grew up in New York City and is currently in college somewhere. He is pleasant and very serious. "When people meet me and I'm generally pretty sociable and I meet some definition of normal, they're almost surprised," he says. "And simultaneously disappointed." We talk in a coffee shop in downtown Manhattan. He orders a lemonade.
moot is the founder of an online community called 4chan, located at 4chan.org. You may not realize it, but 4chan has probably touched your life. Possibly inappropriately. 4chan is unusual in several ways. It's extremely large and active; it gets 8.5 million page views a day and 3.3 million visitors a month. Since moot started it in 2003, those visitors have put up 145 million posts. By some metrics, 4chan is the fourth largest bulletin board on the Net.
4chan is also very profane. A phrase from Star Wars comes to mind: It's a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Spammers don't even bother to spam 4chan; Google started searching it only six months ago. But it is the wellspring from which a lot of Internet culture, and hence popular culture, bubbles. In his way, moot is one of the most powerful people on the Web.
moot founded 4chan when he was 15 as a space where he and his friends could talk about manga and anime; it's based on a popular Japanese site called 2channel. Like 2channel, 4chan is an imageboard: you're supposed to post pictures--snapshots, found images, original artwork, altered or defaced photos--rather than words. 4chan is divided into 43 different boards, ranging from video games to origami to food to "random." The most popular board on 4chan, by far, is random.
There are few rules on 4chan. Child pornography is off limits, but not much else is. Unlike most boards, 4chan doesn't require posters to register, which means they can post anonymously, which leads to a lot of uninhibited behavior. If you're looking for obscenity, blasphemy, homophobia, misogyny and racial insults, you don't have to dig too deep. Shortly after midnight on Sept. 11, 2007, a teenager in Pflugerville, Texas, posted a photo of some pipe bombs and announced that he was going to shoot up his school in the morning. A reader in Arizona called the Pflugerville police, who arrested the teenager. (So that's another thing that's against the rules.)
You can see why moot keeps his real name to himself. "My personal private life is very separate from my Internet life," he says. "There's a firewall in between."
Like a lot of unsanitary places, 4chan is gloriously fertile. What grows there is memes--ideas and jokes and fads that spread across the Net. Here's an example: there used to be a tradition on 4chan that every Saturday people would post pictures of cats. It was called Caturday. People added captions representing what the cat would say if cats could talk. One day somebody posted a shot of a fat gray cat looking at the camera and saying, "I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?"
Somehow that picture escaped 4chan onto the wider Web. Without knowing where it came from, somebody saw it and liked it enough to start a blog about it: icanhascheezburger.com. Soon other people were making their own Caturday-style pictures and calling them "lolcats." Now you can buy lolcat T shirts and lolcat buttons and lolcat fridge magnets. Last September investors bought icanhascheezburger.com for about $2 million.
Coarse as it is, 4chan has no rival as a hothouse for memes; they're bred and refined, and then they can escape and run amuck through the culture at large. For better or for worse, this is what the counterculture looks like today: raw, sarcastic, bare of any social or political agenda but frequently funny as hell.
moot doesn't see any of that sweet lolcat money, by the way. Not that he's bitter. He has met the owners of icanhascheezburger.com. "They seem like nice people," he says. "You can't blame them for taking something and capitalizing on it. I don't." But he's barely covering costs. moot runs ads on 4chan, but the site needs massive amounts of bandwidth, and corporations are leery of associating their products with 4chan's content. "It's been a pretty uphill battle getting advertisers to take us seriously and appreciate the community and the power it wields," he says.
But if 4chan's memes can cross into the mainstream, maybe moot can too. This year he spoke at conferences at Yale and MIT. He's even ready to reveal his real name: it's Christopher Poole, he tells me. He wouldn't be above cashing out for the right price, which is $580 million, which is what Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. paid for MySpace in 2005. "I try to work Murdoch into any interview I give," he says. "Rupert Murdoch? moot@4chan.org."