Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem’ on Netflix, A Doc That Presents 4Chan As The Patient Zero Of Today’s Diet Of Disinformation

The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem (Netflix) really floods the zone between those two “M” words in the title. Co-directed by Giorgio Angelini and Arhtur Jones, the doc explores how early internet mischief-making on sites like 4Chan spawned an entire universe of “to” prepositions, leading to everything from aggressive hacking raids and online vigilante justice to the Occupy movement, Anonymous, 8Chan, Gamergate, MAGA-fied social media, and closed loop fantasies of the aggrieved propagated by QAnon conspiracy theories. Interviews with founding-era 4Channers are included here, plus hackers who caught the FBI’s attention, and people who hoped to reclaim the internet as a forum for community, but found the whole thing too far gone for recovery. “All of us who had built the culture started seeing our work being used by people we literally despised…”     

THE ANTISOCIAL NETWORK – MEMES TO MAYHEM: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: They go by handles, not names. “Fuxnet.” “Kirtaner.” “CardCaptor Will.” They sit for interviews either before crowded banks of terminals, hard drives, and monitors or beside footage of their lives as cosplayers or message board conventioneers. And their collective experience with the internet beast brings The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem from AOL hangouts and the earliest sprouts of meme farming all the way to the toxic toil and trouble of today’s social media landscape. There’s an overused meme that still expresses it best: “it’s all connected.” And Antisocial shows its work.

4Chan, set up by Christoper “moot” Poole in 2003, was itself a riff on the Japanese-language message board 2Chan. And in its infancy, users like Fuxnet, Kirtaner, and “Amanda” say, 4Chan was a place for the like minded to share subversive humor as a means of laughing at the larger world. Memes, .gifs, emojis – nowadays, these are all just accepted as tools of communication. But their use is rooted in the spread of 4Chan, which by the mid-aughts had become a platform for the rise of trolling, the planning and execution of IRL “raids” on targeted companies, the birth of cyberattack-happy movement Anonymous, and a schism within Anonymous that put rogue hacktivists on one side and a faction that still found humor in aggressive rabble-rousing on the other. The spread continued, with no sign of stopping, and while the Occupy movement’s messaging found support through Anonymous, 4Chan itself began to mutate into a haven for hate speech and other, often purposely offensive behavior. 

By the time Frederick Brennan founded 8Chan in 2013, there was a steady supply of gas for the fire. The feelings of powerlessness that informed Occupy, journalist Dale Beran says, those were still active. “It just sunk into this new, dark, nihilistic place.” Over a visual flurry of superimposition, banner ad splatter, message board scroll, animation, and context-free memes, Antisocial tracks the rise of hostile internet corners populated by men with a host of perceived wrongs, the “rootless white males” Steve Bannon helped indoctrinate into MAGA and convert into votes for Donald Trump in 2016. Anger was now recognized as social media’s ultimate money maker. And with Trump’s election, the tools of disinformation established by the earliest 4Chan users got twisted into kindling for fueling QAnon conspiracies. There were retaliatory moves; Kirtaner hacked government websites, and even claims to have discovered Trump’s Twitter password. But the dream of community, or what began as a simple love for online hijinks, had truly traveled from meme to mayhem. Antisocial shows how social media has Rick Rolled swaths of society into mass delusion mode.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? The visual aesthetic of Antisocial Network resembles the very meme farms and message boards full of gobbledygook that the doc discusses, which is also a tack taken by the Max docuseries Gaming Wall Street. (Just like the 4Chan folks and hacker types of Antisocial, Very Online people pushed the GameStop Stock revolution, too, people who were later portrayed by movie stars in the 2024 film Dumb Money.) And Antisocial isn’t the first doc to explore the insidiousness of social media: see The Social Dilemma, After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News, and Alex Gibney’s 2013 doc We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks.

Performance Worth Watching: The observations of writer Leigh Alexander are pivotal to The Antisocial Network as the doc moves into 2014, the emerging factions of aggrieved males online, and the rise of Gamergate. “These young men were experiencing this profound mass alienation, and coping with it through extreme humor and sexual and violent imagery. It became really clear that there was a desire to cultivate a space that was hostile to women.”  

Memorable Dialogue: Once Antisocial connects the dots between the how it started of 4Chan and the how it’s going of our current online malaise, journalist Dale Beran makes a frightening summation. “Everyone’s experience on the internet is a monetized, corporate form of 4Chan,” Beran says, but it’s even worse because of wider social media’s stronger strength of signal. “We’re building elaborate, grotesque fantasies out of our own unhappiness.”    

Sex and Skin: Nothing direct, but since the internet’s constant flicker drives this doc’s visuals, suggestive or outright offensive memes surface alongside footage of simulated sex, as well as many ugly examples of the toxic takes spewed on message boards and in Zoom meetups dedicated to QAnon crazy. 

Our Take: The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem makes a pretty strong case for blaming the social media rot that pervades our society entirely on 4Chan. The doc is populated by images pulled from the site, and collectively, they indeed resemble a vision board for what we consider today to be tools of online communication – body switching bits, bizarre juxtapositions, random stills transformed into single panel jokes –  while the language used on the message board – cryptic abbreviations, reconfigured curse words, and cuttingly sarcastic invective – is no longer the province of one internet silo. It’s been codified and commoditized. Which is exactly the point. The stuff “spinning off the Chans into mainstream media,” to quote one of the 4Channers interviewed in Antisocial, is now just the stuff everyday gripes are made of, whether you’re posting a TikTok, going off in the group chat, or spouting brainworm nonsense on cable news. 

Antisocial doesn’t really offer solutions for any of this. By the end of the doc, the 4Chan originators interviewed are mostly backing away slowly, admitting that their relatively innocent interest in trading memes and building a community is now completely corrupted. (Maybe they’re off building, like, 36Chan now or something to talk with each other; who knows.) But what Antisocial does do so effectively is build connectivity between all of the social media-fueled movements that have dominated the previous two decades of increasingly broken discourse.      

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem constructs a startling timeline that connects the insular online jocularity of 25 years ago with the many, many forms of hostility that fuel the internet today. Where pranks used to be kept inside clicks, now the Rickrolls are coming from outside society’s house. And we’re never gonna give it up.  

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.