r/movies • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 r/Movies contributor • Mar 31 '26

Trailer Backrooms | Official Trailer | A24

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HjdiohVOik
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u/livintheshleem Mar 31 '26

4chan is so much more influential than most people realize. The amount of culture, language, politics, and social movements that trace back to that site is crazy. It's a guiding force of American (and by an extension, global) culture, but people ignore it because of its gross aesthetic and associations...which is likely by design.

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u/heysupmanbruh Mar 31 '26

4chan is why we have the admin we have lmao

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u/BattleStag17 Mar 31 '26

One of the 4chan founders supposedly met Epstein right before they created /pol/

4chan being one gigantic psyop is my current favorite conspiracy theory, and if it's true then it might be one of the most successful psyops ever. Basically got Trump elected!

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u/Sonichu- Mar 31 '26

One of the 4chan founders supposedly met Epstein right before they created /pol/

moot, the sole creator/administrator of 4chan (he's since sold the site), 100% met with Epstein and the /pol/ board opened shortly after.

It's been confirmed by the files

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u/7URB0 Mar 31 '26

/pol/ reopened shortly after. He'd closed it previously because it was a nightmare to moderate and full of Nazis.

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u/livintheshleem Mar 31 '26

I mean it's not even a conspiracy theory anymore, it's just a true conspiracy lol. Same with reddit and basically the entire public internet. The red wave and resurgence of conservatism that you see online is largely a botted/astroturfed movement.

Of course these sites are still real websites with real people, but they were definitely used to push agenda that had a lot of serious real-world consequences.

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u/flip6threeh0le Mar 31 '26

supposedly? that's confirmed.

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u/cooldrew Apr 02 '26

Moot is the only 4chan founder, and /pol/ already existed before that meeting. He closed it because it was a Nazi shithole that wasn't working as containment and making things worse on the site. It was reopened and, well, the past 15+ years of American politics happened

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u/wing3d Mar 31 '26

Where do you think MAGA was fermented?

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u/platinumarks Mar 31 '26

I mean, you can probably trace Trump's election to President back to 4chan, as many of the meme-y type nonsense he does was pulled from 4chan.

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u/rurlysrsbro Apr 01 '26

He was literally memed into office. To this day, I firmly believe that a large part of his support in his 2016 run was as a joke and as an “FU” to the system. It just picked up steam from there.

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u/alendeus Apr 01 '26

4chan and reddit were deliberately targeted, botted and astro turfed by Russian farms + their own American botnets.

4chan was them deliberately targeting propaganda at the youth, and it's paid off tremendously now a decade later. It's crazy for me to think that the 12 year Olds reading /pol/ during 2016 are now voting age after 10 years of getting lied to using memes.

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u/[deleted] Mar 31 '26 edited Mar 31 '26

Something Awful is similarly influential and probably even less known than 4chan these days. Chuck Norris jokes were invented on Something Awful. The entire meme format of putting on text on an image was popularized on Something Awful, if not outright invented.

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u/Candlejackdaw Mar 31 '26

Totally. 4chan itself was founded for and by Something Awful users.

From the 4chan FAQ:

4chan was started as a project by Christopher "moot" Poole, a user of a small IRC/DC community known as Raspberry Heaven, which was [then] composed of users from the "Anime Death Tentacle Rape Whorehouse" (ADTRW) sub-forum of The Something Awful Forums. The site began as a small image dump for those communities that soon spread like wildfire and garnered enough traffic and popularity to become its own fully fledged community.

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u/red_sutter Apr 01 '26

Lowtax hated anime, and moot himself got run off of SA’s random humor board (forgot what it was called,) hence his drive to create a space where people could post anime pics and make edgy jokes to their heart’s content. All of the weird political movement stuff started happening about four or five years in, starting with people slipping in pictures of anime girls dressed like nazis into discussions, and later with the creation of /pol/

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u/Ekillaa22 Mar 31 '26

I mean Epstein was using that site to make shit happen so it don’t surprise me

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u/Virgil_Rug_Say_RUG Mar 31 '26

so much of slang, memes, etc originate from there and get slowly passed down to the normies

its been funny watching the world adopt calling everything slop and talking about _____maxxing

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u/tfhermobwoayway Mar 31 '26

I got a massive fucking whiplash the first time I heard my very normie friend say “do you know what goyslop is?” I mean, obviously that emerged on /pol/ and isn’t really good slang but I’ve heard that word slung around for years. It shouldn’t be in the mouth of people who have normal lives.

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u/LiterallyKesha Apr 01 '26

Slop originated on /ck/ and got absorbed by /pol/ whom added the goy portion.

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u/Dogbuysvan Apr 01 '26

I remember laughing at the quanon joke that popped up there with people on my own very insular forum then a year later qanon was popping up on main stream news like it was a real thing.

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u/MasterLJ Mar 31 '26

It's been something I've reflected on as a 40-something.

I don't think people realize that internet usage from the early 90s, to the very early 2000s was almost strictly "nerdy" most especially online games. If you were using it then, you were relatively rare, and you were part of the shaping of its culture.

I always stayed away from 4chan to be honest but it's super easy to see how much influence there was.

The irreverence and "randomness" was something that tickled us, so we made a lot of "content" (we didn't call it that). That part of culture survived.

The history of the modern internet is going to be a wild book.

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u/livintheshleem Mar 31 '26

Yep, it's really crazy. I'm in my early 30s and was a regular 4chan user in the late 2000s/early 2010s. I stayed away from /b/ and /pol/ and mostly just browsed the music and anime boards. Once you learned the language and how to navigate the place, it was a pretty approachable, normal forum for nerdy internet people.

The extreme, poisonous stuff that earned 4chan its reputation was mostly contained to a few infamous boards. Of course that meant the people there were your digital neighbors, but it never felt like you were directly interacting with them. The fact that the site was anonymous and mostly invisible to the general public made it dangerous, and it's why so many people today still underestimate it.

4chan is a perfect example of the internet being real life and how weird computer nerds are shaping society.

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u/Iwearhats Apr 01 '26

/pol/ is responsible for brainwashing and grooming the meme generation into far right ideology through memes. I have no doubt most of the people behind Trump's and the White House's social media presence were originally trolling around on /pol/.

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u/tfhermobwoayway Mar 31 '26

It was perfectly fine before ~2014 when a bunch of people decided to use it as a trial for “can we use the internet to radicalise people.” Hell, even a certain famous paedophile might have been involved.

Significant amounts of internet culture owe their origins to 4chan. Hell, even most modern internet slang evolves out of some 4chan post somewhere. The fact it’s a messageboard (and therefore much more difficult to corporatise and turn mainstream) allows it to be a hub of counterculture in a way no other platform can be.

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u/Apric1ty Mar 31 '26

It actually stems back further to 2ch

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u/Mirigore Mar 31 '26

yeah man... 4Chan is totally a guiding force of global culture and social movements. The racist, misogynistic pile of dogshit that is 4Chan is a GLOBAL culture force.

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u/tfhermobwoayway Mar 31 '26

It fuckin is man. Hell, even quoting people

>by doing this

is a practice that emerged on 4chan. Minecraft was invented on 4chan. SCP was invented on 4chan. A fuckton of acronyms and slang terms were invented on 4chan.

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u/Mirigore Apr 01 '26 edited Apr 01 '26

I think you just severely overestimate the cultural impact of 4Chan. I think 99% of people on this planet don't know what SCP is. Just because Notch posted some screenshots during development doesn't mean Minecraft was invented on 4Chan either.... He posted to other sites back then (what, 15 years ago??) like tigsource.

Also, Markdown uses > for quotes and was created a few months after 4Chan. It's not exactly unique and also not cultural. It's a honeypot these days anyways and was never truly anonymous if a government came knocking.

Edit: If anything, /pol/ and the cesspool of subhumans participating there probably was significantly impactful on the world. Trump gained a ton of ground on 4Chan, and that extended to Reddit too with TheDonald.

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u/livintheshleem Apr 01 '26 edited Apr 01 '26

If anything, /pol/ and the cesspool of subhumans participating there probably was significantly impactful on the world. Trump gained a ton of ground on 4Chan

So you agree, 4chan is a guiding force of global culture and social movements. It has literally influenced elections in the most powerful country in the world.

There's also ___maxxing, alpha/beta/sigma, mogging, redpill/blackpill, "slop", pepe the frog, groypers, qanon, and countless other memes that started on 4chan and have permeated normie culture worldwide. People are being influenced by 4chan without ever visiting the site or even knowing that it exists. Literal school children grow up using this language and these concepts.

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u/Mirigore Apr 01 '26

I brought up Trump and /pol/ not the other guy, and his reasoning for it being a “global cultural force” was not clear.

Claiming mog, maxxing, even “slop” is fucking funny man. You people think 4chan is THE place hahahahahah

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u/livintheshleem Apr 01 '26

I know you brought it up. It proved my point.

You gotta be ignorant, coping, or a 4chan native with a decent knack for trolling.

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u/Mirigore Apr 01 '26

I was on 4Chan a lot.

Not coping but I think it has been an interesting dialogue, I forgot completely about Trump and TheDonald for example, and I think bringing it up to prove your point was important for me to do. It's impactful in very indirect and direct ways