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‘The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem’ Review: A Netflix Doc Smartly Tells an Internet Hate Story: When 4Chan Met QAnon
4Chan was like the original TikTok, and it spawned QAnon as a goof. What ruled it all was the lust for eyeballs.
Pizzagate, which was the origin story of the QAnon concept of a pedophile cabal, was spread with a chuckle by 4Chan users and was based on the interpretation of bizarre codes (like the idea that cheese pizza, with the initials CP, stood for “child pornography”). And once the mysterious entity known as Q entered the picture, and began to spread his gnomic bread crumbs about sinister government actions, the programmers of 4Chan whipped up interest in it, because that had always been their reason to exist: to fan the flames of transgressive mishegas, the weirder and wilder the better, and to make it all go viral. Yet as directed by Giorgio Angelini and Arthur Jones, with plenty of virtual image-blitz montages, “The Antisocial Network” is a lively lesson in digital history, one that leaves you with the disquieting feeling that some of the most influential outgrowths of Internet culture, like QAnon, were essentially flukes.
Or read this on Variety