Is 4chan the Future of Human Consciousness?

No, it's just a place where those weird, greasy high school kids post their nonsense for the world to see and try to gross each other out. Every generation had 4channers, they just didn't have 4chan.

<i>And they are the ones furthest ahead of the pack, leading us.</i><p>If posting child porn up in unrelated forums or in the middle of otherwise innocent looking YouTube videos is where we're headed, I'd rather be a Luddite.

<i>The brave pioneers of 4chan are the Magellans of media desensitization, who abandon the grim reality of their parents' basements to wallow in infinite, recursively self-referential filth.</i><p>So when My friends and I talked incoherently while bing drinking, year after year of college, we wallowed in "infinite, recursively self-referential filth."? Wow, I didn't know my generation was that unique.

<i>What is happening here? The escape from the constraints of the flesh? The escape from the constraints of being human? The inevitable purge following the collective unconscious' information binge? With the Internet we can now erase space and time, erase the restraints placed on the mind by matter.</i><p>And just a few paragraphs before hand, he accuses Fox News of overstating the matter.

Sure, 4chan can be like the Great Link of the Changelings in "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine." Humans will develop a hive mind via 4chan and basically exist as a single unit, but just made up of many individual parts. Hopefully we'll use this newfound transhuman existence for something other than silly memes and pictures of cats.

<i>They say the children are our future. But if 4chan is any indication of what they have in store for us, we are in for a very rough time indeed.</i><p>Huh? They lost me at the title really - but I clicked through for fun and was greeted with that.<p>Hmmmmm.

I hope not.

Troll culture (4chan, Autoadmit) has a sort of "secret society" flavor to it-- catchy memes and in-jokes, plus new words, much of which spreads out into the mainstream. (Pwn, "over 9000", Final Fantasy fetishism). It's a guilty pleasure and mostly harmless, but its creepiest 0.1% gets a lot of press.<p>I know a therapist who deals with trolling addicts (yes, this is a real problem for some surprisingly smart/high-functioning people) and believes troll culture is a casual sex replacement; that the sublimated, transgressive, and self-destructive energies that used to lead to casual sex are now being directed into troll culture. It's as good an explanation as any. That should be comforting, because as bad as 4chan is, it's a lot less destructive than casual sex.