ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the impact of online anonymous communities on the visual culture of the 2010s, in particular 4Chan. These online spaces or platforms have attempted to hold onto the utopian promise of the early internet by rigorously maintaining a culture of anonymity and refusing to archive information and content posted on the site. As a result of this purported freedom (at least in contrast to mainstream corporate social media platforms), 4Chan has been credited as one of the most ‘impactful generators of online culture’. This chapter analyses the cultural forms produced on and through these platform requirements, which demonstrate a strange mutation of the hopes and dreams of cyber-utopianism into chaotic and formless expressions of irony and transgression, to a certain extent realising the postmodernist philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s enigmatic account of the ‘revenge of the social’ or ‘the evil genius of the object’. The chapter also analyses how contemporary artists - in particular, Jon Rafman - and online practitioners - in the online subculture vaporwave - have reflected and appropriated this aspect of online culture in their practice.
