The horrible, fascinated part of me wants to pitch a session for digital marketers and social managers on “Learning from 4chan.”
Campaigns like notyourshield, endfathersday, and so on were carefully planned, coordinated, and targeted ops with tight message control.
It’s the kind of coordination that the goonsquad directed at crushing multiplayer games, and anon directed at scientology in the early days.
And now the lulz are in social ops. There’s a keen understanding of the vocabulary of social criticism. Not the tools but the vocab at least
It’s reminiscent of the era when the religious right abandoned “Moral Majority” framing and picked up “Silenced Iconocasts” almost overnight
Part of that was the deep sense of aggrieved powerlessness at the loss of hegemony. But mostly canny branding, deliberate linguistic judo.