Original subtitles

[somber music playing]

[mouse clicking and scrolling]

[man 1] You can fix code.

You can't fix people.

I always like to say that the weakest part of any system

is the people that put it together.

Fifteen years ago,

we were just dumbass kids having a good time

- sharing jokes and memes on the internet. - [sound distorting]

Do we even know? Who is this 4chan person or website?

[Alex Trebek] 4chan.org is a collaborative community

known for posting these on the net. Tom?

- What are photographs? - [Trebek] Yes.

[man 1] We were using subversive humor to make fun of the world.

[newscaster 1] Their name comes from their secret website.

[man 1] Not understanding that the jokes we made

would turn into conspiracy theories.

[creepy, distorted music]

[man 1] And next thing you know, the entire world

turned into this disinformation-pumping gigantic chanosphere.

[newscaster 2] Conspiracy theories saturate the internet.

[newscaster 3] This misinformation has reshaped our society.

[man 1] We started something and never intended for it to end up this way.

[people shouting]

[protestors chanting] USA!

[man 1] And now I'm just trying to clean up what I see as my old mistakes.

[music ends]

[digital distortion rises and fades out]

[wind gusting]

[purring]

[man 2] I was about ten years old when I first got into computers.

- [pensive synthesizer music playing] - I would start playing sick at home

to get out of school.

The only phone line in the house was in the living room,

but my computer was upstairs.

I would take one of my parent's checks,

open up an AOL account, and go online on AOL all day.

[modem dialing, staticky burst]

And then an hour before my mom and dad were gonna be coming home from work,

I would get on the phone with AOL to cancel the account.

[staticky burst]

[Fuxnet] I felt like the coolest criminal child in the world.

I think I was 12 when we first got the internet.

I definitely was super curious,

looking up stuff I probably should not have been.

I specifically remember one instance,

my stepdad approached me after dinner one night.

He's like, "Why did you look up sex.com?" [laughing]

- And I got in so much trouble. - [erotic moaning]

I wasn't allowed online for like a week after that. [chuckles]

[cell door slamming]

From my perspective, as a kid, you know, there was always just internet.

- Chat rooms, forums, bulletin boards. - [pensive synthesizer music continues]

Having an online persona as a way to get outside myself.

Kirtaner is loud, brash, take-no-prisoners.

It was an inverse of how I was in real life.

[crying echoing]

[Fuxnet] I didn't understand that I had anxiety, but I knew that I felt

strange being in groups of people.

So, the internet became a place for me to

be comfortable.

I would just go online, see what other people were talking about,

attempt to join in.

There was this whole other world of people that I could talk to.

[upbeat synthesizer music]

I would talk to people about video games, anime.

At the time, Japanese anime was blowing up in a big way.

American children's entertainment, it's pretty lame for the most part.

The Japanese stuff was just cooler than all the other stuff on TV at the time.

[all] Power Rangers!

[Kirtaner] Throughout the '90s, it felt like Japanese culture

was taking over the world.

- [crowd cheering faintly] - [music fades out]

[passersby chattering]

[man] I'd always wanted to live in Japan.

To us Gen-Xers,

Japan was the place that made all the cool stuff that we so desperately wanted.

- [ambient digital music playing] - In the '90s and early 2000s,

Japan was a Petri dish for all sorts of technological innovations.

[crowd cheering]

[Alt] Most Japanese accessed the internet not off of PCs,

but on cell phones, which had really limited bandwidth.

It starts to create strange new systems for communication, like the emoji.

And 2channel was yet another example of this.

2channel is an anonymous bulletin board system.

Being totally anonymous gave young people

the opportunity to vent their thoughts and opinions

without fear of being judged for it.

It was pretty primitive looking,

but, you know, connecting people,

being able to find your tribe, it was absolutely revolutionary.

[high-pitched tinkling]

[Alt] And it was instantly popular with otaku.

Otaku are adults who had no interest

in any of the traditional trappings of adulthood.

2channel let them dive deeper into their fantasy lives.

The visual aspect also made it a lot easier for Westerners to access.

One of them was a mysterious figure who went by the handle "moot."

[ominous synth music playing]

[Alt] He downloaded a copy of 2chan's software

and then he launched it under the name 4chan.

4chan.net,

an English version of 2chan.net.

[distorted digital burst]

[Kirtaner] First time I saw 4chan was the first day it was online.

- [lighter flicking, bong bubbling] - [Kirtaner] If I'm remembering correctly.

[giggling, coughing]

It was like a hodgepodge of anything you could think of.

[meowing]

[Amanda] Things that you would not see anywhere else online except for there.

There was definitely a lot of stuff that was... super edgy.

[straw sucking]

[Fuxnet] To my young brain...

- [8-bit video game sounds] - ...it was really cool. [chuckling]

[Kirtaner] You could say whatever you want and it was not associated with you.

Nobody knew who you were, you were anonymous.

[8-bit video game music playing]

Being able to post things anonymously,

with an image, didn't exist anywhere else on the internet.

During the summer of 2004,

a friend hits me up and is like,

"Hey, do you want to come on as a programmer?"

And I'm like, "Okay." I like programming. So, why not?

Moot was very mysterious.

No one knew what he looked like.

No one knew his real name, or where he lived.

But he created something we all wanted.

Like, this is what the internet should be.

You can communicate with anyone all over the world, in any way you want.

[upbeat music playing]

[Kirtaner] It was a glorious time, those early first few years.

Like, we ate, breathed, slept that shit.

We formed our own language, our own lingo.

[dog barking]

Most of it, not exactly culturally acceptable in this day and age.

- [mouse clicking] - [chiming]

[The Fonz, distorted] Ey.

4chan loved making these inside jokes

that people outside the community wouldn't get.

"For the Lulz" was a term.

[Fuxnet] "The lulz" is a bastardization of "laugh out loud."

You would make a funny meme,

post it, you refresh, all of a sudden, you've got 100 replies.

Everybody's laughing, joking, modifying it.

You've got that dopamine rush.

You just wanted another hit, another taste.

Viral imagery blasting in your eyeballs.

You didn't want the party to stop.

[chaotic overlapping sounds]

The site worked in this Darwinian way,

where the most interesting posts, the posts that got the most replies,

would be bumped to the top of the site,

and all the other ones would fall away and die.

[man screaming]

[Beran] The game was to post something interesting,

that was funny, that people would reply to,

that would essentially survive on the site more than a second.

[Fuxnet] You're constantly getting new content, and it just keeps you hooked.

That was the beginning of the format of what became social media nowadays,

what they call the endless scroll.

[digital whooshing]

[Kirtaner] We were just watching this thing grow and evolve

and slowly take over all of our minds.

[dark, distorted music playing]

[Alt] What the 4chan users didn't know

was that 2channel's effect on Japanese society was profound.

2channel spawned all sorts of extreme behavior.

[dark music continues]

[Alt] Like the Neomugicha incident,

where a kid who had been egged on by 2channel users

hijacked a city bus,

and he actually killed one of the passengers with a knife.

It sparked a whole lot of debate

about the impact of having a totally anonymous website.

[speaking Japanese] Undoubtedly, the internet is a hotbed of crimes.

People are posting irresponsible comments because it's anonymous.

[Alt, in English] The things that we saw happening in Japan

were about to come to the West,

but we just didn't know it yet at the time.

- [upbeat music playing] - [crowd cheering]

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, otaku of all ages,

welcome to the 2005 Otakon show.

[crowd cheering]

[man 1] Otakon is an anime convention that started in Baltimore.

At the time, it was one of the largest in the country,

and where the very first official 4chan panel happened.

Going from spending so much time on 4chan

to being in a physical space with thousands of people was pretty surreal.

Growing up, I lived a very sheltered life.

I was bullied in grade school, my parents weren't supportive,

no one cared about what I was interested in and what I was into.

And I'm just like, I gotta find some way of dealing with this.

And so, going into the anime scene was kind of an escape for me.

I can drop the pretense. I don't have to pretend. I can be who I am.

[crowd cheering]

[Will] And I actually did this whole comedy skit,

but as soon as it was over, walked all the way downstairs,

and I sat in the front row of the first 4chan panel in 2005.

[man 2] This will be on BitTorrent tomorrow.

[man 3 laughing]

[Alt] Up at the front of the room you have the 4chan guys,

who are giving this PowerPoint presentation, or trying to...

about this new website that they'd made.

[Amanda] Despite everyone being completely anonymous,

it felt like there were these people that were kind of celebrities.

It was funny because we hadn't even posted our photos before,

no one knew what we looked like.

People didn't really think moot was actually a person.

Come up here.

Moot is in this room, and he's coming up on stage right now.

Oh my God!

[man 4] That's not moot.

Bullshit.

Hi. I'm known as moot.

- [crowd cheering] - [man 4 boos]

[Snacks] Moot was this teenage boy wearing a blue Polo shirt, with chubby cheeks,

and a New York Yankees hat.

I don't know what I was expecting,

but moot definitely wasn't what anyone was expecting.

[upbeat synthesizer music playing]

[Fuxnet] There was a little bit of a celebrity to it, you know?

This was moot, the guy who created 4chan.

And then we browsed over three million pages a day, and that's a lot of porn.

- [crowd laughing] - [moot] Elsewhere...

[Snacks] I think the most exciting thing about doing a panel with our users

was realizing that this is bigger than we thought it was.

- [crowd chattering] - [man 5] Wrong way!

You can see thousands of posts per day from all over the world,

but not realize how you are affecting these people.

We weren't really seeing ourselves as anything special.

We were just a bunch of kids having fun

that somehow made something that was bigger than us.

[distorted laughter]

[Beran] 4chan establishes itself as this goofy, creative place,

and these jokes they're creating,

they start to make their way outside of 4chan.

An early popular meme was linked to something someone really wanted to see.

["Never Gonna Give You Up" playing]

And instead, it would link to Rick Astley singing "Never Gonna Give You Up."

- People got "Rickrolled." - [song distorting, ending]

[newscaster] A friend sends you a link,

but when you click on the link, up pops this instead.

["Never Gonna Give You Up" playing]

You've been Rickrolled.

[whimsical music playing]

[Fuxnet] We were essentially trolling people.

Trolling is like performance art.

The idea is to digitally pants someone and have everyone point and laugh.

At least, that's the fun spirit of it.

[creepy laughter]

So, they got together and wanted to do these collective pranks,

and they would all say, "Let's go mess with this person."

"Let's go and ruin other websites."

[whimsical music continues]

[Fuxnet] Habbo Hotel was an online browser-based game.

It was a chatroom essentially,

but you could go to different virtual spaces.

There was a rumor that Habbo Hotel

was removing users who were using Black avatars.

The 4chan users decided,

hey, we're going to create Black characters with Afros and suits,

and we're going to go en masse

onto Habbo Hotel and just block access to entire areas.

[Kirtaner] We were blocking the entrances to the pool.

The infamous phrase "Pool is closed due to AIDS."

Other hijinks. We would take all of our characters and form a swastika.

- Yeah, I know. We were dumb kids. - [music ends]

Maybe, looking back on it, it probably was not as innocent as

people catching onto it might have assumed,

but it didn't feel like that.

It felt like people were just being stupid.

But then it did start to shift to people actually, like, trolling in real life.

[woman] My six-year-old and eight-year-old half-Black grandchildren

are not welcome in my subdivision's pool.

[newscaster] Some try to explain it away as part of an internet phenomenon,

and those who don't know of it are left out of the joke.

Didn't feel inherently mean.

It just felt like, okay, everyone's doing this. This is funny.

[somber music playing]

[woman] A joke is when two people laugh.

I'm not laughing.

[newscaster] During our interview,

Altorfer learned of a second flyer at the pool.

It's a picture of me with an afro?

And I tell myself it's just a bunch of racist, homophobic geeks.

[Fuxnet] People started recreating Habbo Hotel in person

and this culture spawned out of it.

We were growing up online together,

figuring things out.

We didn't know necessarily what was right or wrong.

We didn't know what kind of culture we were building.

We weren't really aware of those things, but we were building them.

[somber music continues]

[Fuxnet] And that became a problem for the people who ran 4chan.

So moot banned raids.

[Kirtaner] We were all having so much fun, and

it got clamped down on really quickly.

And we weren't having any of that.

[Snacks] I think the Otakon meetup really inspired moot

to try and make 4chan more of a social thing,

like Facebook or something,

than like the anonymous culture that he began with.

I disagreed,

we argued about it, and then I did have my server access removed by moot.

That was that. I was gone.

Moot ain't the boss of us.

We want to do what we want, and we're going to have some fun.

And in that moment an identity started to form.

We all collectively started referring to ourselves,

and our merry band of chaos-stirrers...

Anonymous.

[ominous music playing]

It coalesced into an identity, ironically.

You know, you think "anonymous," you don't think of an identity,

but an identity formed around this one single word.

[ominous music continues, overlaid with distorted digital sounds]

[creepy high-pitched giggling]

[childlike voice] Ah-ahh.

[screaming]

[digital distortion effects]

[echoing, distorted laughter]

[music fades out]

[Kirtaner] Habbo Hotel showed that you could enact retribution

towards someone or something that we felt deserved it.

And this obviously attracted people that wanted to join in the fun and chaos.

The big breakout raid.

There was a neo-Nazi radio show host. His name was Hal Turner.

- Welcome to The Hal Turner Show. - [intense music playing]

For some reason or another, all these lower cultures and lower races

are more important. And I find that disgusting.

[Kirtaner] He made himself a target just by being who he is.

He had a phone number you could call.

[Turner] Where you calling from?

[Kirtaner] We did a lot of prank calls...

[Turner] Thomas, you're on air.

[Thomas] Well, I was born and raised in West Philadelphia,

- played b-ball outside the school and all. - [Turner] Right.

[Thomas] Just one little fight and my mom got scared,

sent me to live with some relatives down in Bel-Air.

[Turner] And he's out of here too! Another asshole.

...and drove him into an absolute frenzy.

[Turner] "Hal Turner was right. I should've paid attention,

but I was too busy being a fucking moron on the radio!"

Hal Turner Show. Who are you? Where you calling from?

He would always react and escalate things.

[Turner] You sit there like a stupid motherfucking asshole...

I don't want to imply that all the people that were trolling Hal Turner

were anti-racists.

A lot of them just wanted to fuck with people.

We trolled him mercilessly for months.

- Hello, this is Kirt. I run 420chan. - [Turner] You've had a lot of fun with me.

[Kirtaner] We kept his show offline for 10 weeks.

[Turner] You are not going to kick me off my own server.

We hacked into his email account, found emails between him and his FBI handler,

outed him as an informant.

He got ostracized from the white supremacist community,

- his wife filed for divorce... - [intense music ends]

...and in the end he was the one that went to jail.

[Turner] I'm in Essex County jail. Internet tough guy and all,

but I got to tell you, I am not cut out for where I am.

[music restarts]

If something drew the ire of Anonymous, it suffered.

- [clicking] - [music ends]

[keyboard clacking]

[dog barking in distance]

[man] A lot of times when you do something groundbreaking,

you only know it was groundbreaking when you look back at it.

But while you're doing it, it's just the thing that's happening.

[gentle music playing]

[man] During the Hal Turner raids, I did some of the phone calls.

The content of them, I'm not proud of anymore,

but at the end of the raid, you look back, and you start questioning.

We put a white nationalist in jail.

Well, that was a good thing. What... What else can we do?

[Beran] So, they looked for someone they can test their strength against,

and they settle on the Church of Scientology.

[distorted digital effects]

[Fuxnet] Scientology was a relatively new religion.

It was started by a science fiction author, L. Ron Hubbard.

And they used celebrities to make the church into a global powerhouse.

[mysterious music playing]

[Fuxnet] There was an internal Church of Scientology video

that leaked to the internet of Tom Cruise being over-the-top.

[laser blast effects]

[narrator] There is a worldwide arena

where the game is played for the fate of whole populations,

but there's someone advancing Scientology on a fully epic scale.

[in increasingly dramatic voice] He is IAS Freedom Medal of Valor winner Tom Cruise!

[electronic music playing]

There's nothing part of the way for me.

- [laughing] - [rock music playing]

It's just... [mimicking blast off]

[music fades out]

Watching this video, it's hilarious how crazy he sounds.

It was supposed to only exist in a way where it gets shown to Scientologists.

So, it's internal, and they do not want the world to see it.

[Fuxnet] And then, all of a sudden,

the Church of Scientology got it removed from all over the internet.

Oh, they're trying to control the flow of information on the internet?

Oh, we can't have that.

[mysterious music playing]

[Housh] But Scientology was not an easy target.

Back in, I believe, 1991,

they sued Time magazine for a article that was titled "Cult of Greed."

And so most media were not talking about Scientology,

no matter what Scientology did wrong.

[Fuxnet] There were rumors of people leaving the church

who were then being harassed,

or mysteriously committing suicide.

Secrecy surrounded Scientology.

[Housh] So, what if we, as a group,

could make this so outlandish and so large of a thing

that the media would have no choice but to cover it?

That would be a win.

[music ends]

[distorted electronic voice speaking]

[Housh] So, we uploaded the message onto YouTube,

and went to sleep not expecting it to do too terribly much.

[phone ringing]

[Housh] I wake up the next morning to a phone call from my girlfriend,

and she's like, "It's on CNN."

So, I turn on the damn TV, and they play the video twice while I'm watching.

[distorted electronic voice] We are Anonymous. We are legion.

We do not forgive. We do not forget.

[Housh] Suddenly, everyone online was expecting direction.

[rhythmic electronica playing]

[Housh] We came up with the name Operation Chanology.

The idea was, they've got buildings in every major city on this planet,

hundreds of them, so what would the internet look like if it went outside?

[Kirtaner] But we also needed an image that sticks with people.

[in robotic voice] This goddamn guy.

[wheezing laughter]

[in regular voice] V for Vendetta was a hot film at the time.

These masks were everywhere.

The aesthetic that was defined by the Habbo Hotel raids,

the suit and the tie, and the afro,

then melded with the Guy Fawkes mask.

[rhythmic electronica rising]

We assumed that worldwide 200 people would show up outside.

We start watching Sydney, the first city to go live.

And within an hour, there's 200 people on the ground there.

Then Perth and Adelaide and Melbourne, and all them start going.

We thought, 'cause they were smaller than Sydney, we would end up with 20 people.

No, they all get hundreds.

By the time we get to Germany, we're up over like 4,000 people.

So, we're just losing our minds.

We're here with a protester. He's known as...

Anonymous.

A web-based group called Anonymous has been picketing and protesting

in front of the Church of Scientology in Boston and elsewhere.

[newscaster] The virtual protest came to life in cities around the world.

And today, dozens of those people put on masks in downtown Toronto

in an unusual standoff.

Their goal is to shut down what they call a cult of misinformation and greed.

We are Anonymous. We are legion. Expect us!

- [protestors] Expect us! - [rhythmic electronica continues]

[Housh] By the end of the day, we're counting somewhere near 10,000 people

have shown up worldwide to our protests.

[protestors] ♪ Never gonna give you up ♪

♪ Never gonna let you down ♪

[Kirtaner] Anonymous was, from that point forward,

a globally recognized force for good.

[mysterious music playing]

[Beran] That's absurd, right?

Like, this weird anime website that kind of morphs into this other thing

decided to have a semi-ironic street protest against, like,

a celebrity science-fiction cult.

Chanology really showed an entire generation of people that

you could organize something anonymously

that would have a real-world effect.

[dark, distorted effects]

[Kirtaner] Putting forward an idea online,

having it manifest in the world,

- it's a powerful feeling. - [creepy distorted laughter]

[Kirtaner] You start to enjoy the feeling

of inflicting that pain that you feel on others.

It's a way to escape it, to take control of it.

It's ultimately harmful to everyone.

- [dark, distorted effects end] - Things started out very centralized,

and then after Chanology

it became a formless, shapeless beast.

For a while, in the invasion community,

I was perhaps one of the only voices who would chime in every now and then and go...

[reading]

[Kirtaner] We were just trying to have fun, have our kicks.

All these rah-rah good guys and stuff. No, we are not good fucking people.

We are goddamn monsters...

[reading]

So, at the same time that they're doing these very earnest protests,

they're still spinning these crazy nihilistic pranks on the world.

They post on Oprah's message board.

Let me read you something that was posted on our message boards

from someone who claims to be a member of a known pedophile network.

Oprah reads that to her entire audience of seven million moms.

He doesn't forgive.

He does not forget.

His group has over 9,000 penises, and they're all raping children.

[Beran] It's grotesque, right?

[Fuxnet] People were just being shitty, being mean,

just for the fun of it,

and trying to take it to its limits.

I will readily admit I was one of those people.

[growling]

[Kirtaner] It's just jokes. It's just edgy, subversive humor.

[electronic warbling]

If you were in on the joke, you were just laughing your ass off.

[Beran] So, Anonymous really kind of splits in these two directions.

Half the group goes off and becomes genuine activists,

and the irony melts away there.

And there's a section of Anonymous that wants to be trolls still.

["Never Gonna Give You Up" playing on car stereo]

- [driver] Ooh. - [singing] ♪ Give you up ♪

[Amanda] Otakon felt so different.

The community was so much bigger.

- [woman 1] The best day of my life. - [woman 2] Look at all these costumes.

[Beran] Instead of anime characters, you had people dressed up as memes from 4chan.

[man 1] 4chan's where it's at, man.

[all] Fuck you!

[Will] I was asked to host a panel.

I'm friends with moot. I just was folded into the entourage.

- [Will] Any last words? - We're gonna have a great time today.

- All right, we'll take another question. - [man 2] Hi, come on up here.

I'm looking around, and I'm like, yeah, these are my people,

but there's something wrong with this.

["1st of May" by Der Blaue Reiter playing]

[woman 3] Aw!

[scattered laughter]

[music fades out]

[Housh] Kids literally started throwing Sig Heils, like, in real life.

For the most part, we just kind of brushed it off.

These are the few.

Maybe, they don't necessarily represent all of us.

[somber music playing]

People felt more comfortable doing or saying stuff than they had previously.

Saying racially charged things, just incredibly offensive stuff.

Because they feel comfortable with their little group,

they feel like maybe there's no consequence.

[crowd chanting]

[Beran] If I could go back in time, and if you had told me that,

"You're walking through this anime convention,

and this is a pivot point upon which history will turn."

Now, looking back at it, it feels like a premonition.

[Fuxnet] It was very stark contrast to all the goodness that you saw,

the community, the friendship you saw at the convention.

It made it more apparent that there was some bad things happening

and it was leaking over into the real world.

On the first day,

- moot created 4chan... - [crowd whooping]

...and said, "Lo, this is 4chan, bringer of pain."

[woman 4] Hallelujah!

[crowd cheering]

On the second day, moot created Anonymous.

[crowd cheering]

[Will] I had to make a decision as to whether I was going to participate or not.

And me being part of this is endorsing it, it's making it okay,

and I don't want it to be okay.

Thank you, Will.

[man 3] I stopped going to conventions. I stopped cosplaying.

The long and short of this is that I had to grow up.

[Amanda] There was a huge shift in, like, the greater part of the community

felt more like it was...

just trolling.

Rape train! Rape train!

It started to kind of outweigh the funny stuff.

It was kind of scary, honestly.

[keyboard clacking]

[Fuxnet] The older I got, the more mature I got,

I became interested in disturbing the balance of power.

You know, my hope was that

this force would be able to be wielded

for good.

[distorted digital droning]

[ambient music playing]

[Beran] As this sort of decentralized, anti-establishment collective is growing,

the political landscape is changing.

Obama came in promising hope and change,

but he didn't really deliver on that.

So, that expectation that wars would end,

that Wall Street would get punished,

that something would happen, melts into resentment.

That's the moment people say, "Now we have to go outside the system."

[ripping]

[Fuxnet] You started to see a lot more people support the idea

of vigilante justice online.

[Housh] We could actually get some change done if we wanted it.

We had a hand to play in this.

[shattering]

[creepy digital warbling]

[Housh] The hand we thought we had was destructive.

We thought we were going to just start laying waste to the things that existed

in order to force them to build something else up in the ruins.

[Fuxnet] And Occupy Wall Street seemed like a vehicle for that.

[music fades out]

Occupy Wall Street was being pushed by a group out of New York,

and it wasn't going anywhere.

They were gathering in Zuccotti Park to protest.

They wanted to take on the financial industry,

and get some of these people arrested who deserved it.

We stepped up with the large megaphone that we had and said

Anonymous is standing behind these people.

We started putting out material for it.

The media were like, "Great, Anonymous is involved. Now we'll talk about it."

We begin this morning with the protest movement that began near Wall Street

- and is gaining strength. - [newscaster 1] Anonymous.

Now, they're evolving into this movement of social change.

A real driving force behind the Wall Street occupiers.

- [man] Tell me what democracy looks like! - [all] This is what democracy looks like!

[Fuxnet] Right off the rip, Occupy Wall Street was a big hit with Anonymous.

It was regular people occupying public space.

[mysterious music playing]

It's an attractive story for the media to see a vigilante group

that can't be identified, can't be tracked down,

but anyone can be in Anonymous.

[man 2] People have had it.

They know that their country is headed in the wrong direction.

[Beran] It felt like there was no way to say what Occupy Wall Street was saying.

That these big power structures that are over people's heads,

that no one really likes, there are actually ways to attack them.

Maybe there's ways to dismantle them. Anonymous was part of that.

[newscaster 2] Today thousands of union workers marched in solidarity.

[newscaster 3] It's in every US state and more than 100 cities.

It was a global effort, and a lot of people were riding that wave.

[protestors chanting] We are the 99%!

I was watching the live streams constantly.

Tax the rich!

[Fuxnet] The energy around Occupy

definitely made people feel like a change could be around the corner.

[distant police sirens]

And the response by the state was as aggressive as possible.

[protestors chanting] Shame on you! Shame on you! Shame on you!

If you refuse to leave the park, you'll be subject to arrest.

[Beran] The state felt they had to destroy them,

and really rip apart that idea, which they perceived as a threat.

They're treating us like we're some kind of violent people.

- This is so sad. This is America. - [protestors screaming]

[somber music playing]

[man] It was a period of time when I think the world was in uproar.

I'd heard about it and the things Anonymous had done.

And so I wanted to be there to offer my experience and skills.

But I was just kind of attracted to hacking 'cause it was anti-authoritarian,

and those ideals kind of spoke to me.

[people clamoring]

Because the police brutally repressed these protest movements in the streets,

I escalated things a little bit by going after the police and government.

A group of online pranksters has embarked on a type of hacking payback.

[newscaster 4] Retaliation for what it called brutality

against Occupy Wall Street protesters.

[Hammond] To be honest, there's a point in time when I had

more targets than the time to work with.

[reporter 5] Hacking the Baldwin County Sheriff's Office...

DPS breached by a group of hackers...

A notorious hacking group has targeted Rupert Murdoch's newspapers.

They were just having a good time doing these high-profile crimes.

The CIA's website, for the US Senate's website...

[newscaster 6] Law enforcement websites in Birmingham, Boston, were also hacked.

[Hammond] There was kind of, like, "I have nothing to lose."

They were able to take down FBI.gov for a brief period of time.

[newscaster 7] Now Anonymous is taking a victory lap.

I was hacking at night, and then waking up and going to work and school.

We had the momentum and the power.

We were in control.

[newscaster 8] The agents didn't know there was a third party on the line.

The target of the call, Anonymous, was listening in.

[Housh] I would be happy taking down the entire system.

Burn it all to the ground.

It seems that a week doesn't go by

without a significant story about hacking or cyberattacks.

And the Pentagon is now singling out Anonymous

as an example of the serious new cyber threats facing the country.

[Fuxnet] This one night, it's like 3:00 in the morning.

[suspenseful music playing]

[Fuxnet] And all of a sudden, I got a private message...

from an alias of Jeremy Hammond.

He had a sense of urgency.

He needed help with hacks

and was literally giving me specific targets to go after

and giving me all the information I needed to compromise those targets.

Which is kind of unheard of.

It's like somebody giving you the keys to a car

and saying, "Hey, can you steal this car for me?"

[car tires screeching in distance]

[Fuxnet] It was unlike any kind of conversation that we had

prior to this point.

That left me feeling very uneasy.

[suspenseful music continues]

[Fuxnet] The next morning,

I had an opening shift at my job,

and I get a text message from a friend of mine.

A news story had just dropped.

[newscaster 1] Some members of the computer-hacking organization

known as Anonymous are no longer anonymous.

[newscaster 2] Jeremy Hammond is one of five suspected hackers

arrested by the FBI.

[camera clicking]

They had been watching me, like, come and go out of my apartment.

[camera clicking]

[newscaster 3] Hammond was arrested at his Bridgeport home.

He remembers smoking marijuana with friends

when heavily armed federal agents tossed in a flashbang grenade.

[man shouting]

They are already in the front door. They were also busting in my window.

The cops were definitely looking for my laptop.

They wanted to seize my laptop while it was running,

and I had it set up to where if you close the lid of the laptop,

it would require a password.

So that would deter them from being

able to recover the contents of my hard drive.

So, I walked two steps towards my computer and shut the laptop just in time.

[Fuxnet] I was scared for myself.

I realized that it wasn't Jeremy that was messaging me,

it was the FBI, and they were trying to entrap me.

[sirens sounding]

[Fuxnet] When I got home, I immediately started wiping all of my hard drives.

And left the next day.

[Kirtaner] I have nothing to do with any of this, but I freaked out,

and anything that I could find on the first five to ten pages of Google,

I blew it all away.

If there was a Wiki article that named me, I wiped it.

That's the moment that I made myself disappear.

Tried to bury the past as much as I could.

Just completely exited that world.

For a long, long, long time.

[music fades out]

[digital distortion effects]

[Beran] The FBI effectively broke up that group.

And when they did that, the Anonymous bubble collapsed.

[dot-matrix printer printing]

[Hammond] Unfortunately, they brute forced the password to my laptop.

It took them six months.

My password was named after my cat. Chewy12345. It was at least 10 characters.

[cell door closing]

[Hammond] In the end, I was sentenced to 10 years, the statutory maximum.

Those who wrote letters, visited, attended court dates,

- I appreciate you. - [melancholy music playing]

[Fuxnet] There was definitely this feeling of disappointment.

You know? I mean, I think a lot of us had high hopes for Anonymous

and what could come next.

I spent the next months, uh, on trains,

Greyhound buses,

taxis going all over the country.

I was afraid to talk to my friends and family because that might lead to me

being compromised in some way.

It was one of the loneliest experiences I've had in my life.

[melancholy music continues]

After Anonymous left 4chan,

the people who were left there

were a great deal of young people who were more despairing than ever.

[distorted digital burst]

[man] 4chan was appealing because I was very angry at my living situation.

It was a place where there were a lot of very angry kids, for many reasons,

and angry adults too.

And the board became, like, depression central.

We're all kind of losers, right?

- [pensive music playing] - That doesn't have to be such a bad thing

and you can kind of make a community out of that.

You started to see users one-upping each other

in terms of who has it worse in life.

I felt like I could usually win those, even though I was pretty young,

because I have this crippling disease.

[whooshing]

[Beran] That feeling of powerlessness that launched Occupy Wall Street,

that didn't go away.

It just sunk into this new, dark,

nihilistic place.

[ominous music playing]

[music fades out]

One of the things that I really liked about going on 4chan was that

I was not supposed to be there.

Both culturally, it was sort of designed to repel me,

and, literally, they said there were no women there.

[apprehensive music playing]

[Alexander] 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.

At the time, I was a full-time journalist writing about the world of video games.

A game developer called Zoë Quinn

had made an independent game on living with depression.

Depression Quest.

It was a text-based game that didn't have conventional production values.

The game made Zoë controversial as a developer because Zoë was, like,

bringing new voices and new subject matter to the world of video games.

A little while later, Zoë had a disgruntled ex-boyfriend

publish a blog post

about Zoë having a relationship with a games journalist.

I thought that can't possibly be controversial.

But some gamers seized on this blog post

as evidence of a conspiracy that women and gender minorities

were ruining the video games industry.

[man] Depression Quest. [laughing]

It's developed by some dumb bitch named Zoë Quinn,

who had to fuck five guys in gaming media to get positive reviews.

Hey, there's plenty of stupid bitches like her.

[Alexander] That games journalist had never covered Zoë's work.

This conspiracy became a harassment campaign against Zoë,

against female video games journalists,

and against anyone who spoke out against the harassment.

They said, you know, "It's about ethics in video games journalism,"

and it wasn't.

They were just trying to find a rationale that explains their disenfranchisement.

Zoë Quinn, you are the stupidest person alive.

[Alexander] There was this sentiment that women are coming to take our toys away.

This one place where it's supposed to be safe to be a dork,

is now under attack by women.

GamerGate. It's a story about sexism in the world of video gaming.

[newscaster 1] Bomb threats, rape threats, even death threats.

It was nothing but trying to get me to kill myself.

Trying to get people to hurt me.

GamerGate is a war on women in this industry.

[journalist] Ethics in journalism is not what's happening in any way.

It's actually men going after women in really hostile, aggressive ways.

That's what GamerGate is about.

GamerGate established 4chan as this place of extreme and misogynistic behavior.

And moot was obviously very troubled by this.

He had sort of evolved from that kid with the baseball cap

hiding behind his laptop at Otakon,

into a sort of internet celebrity.

[man] You still live at home, right?

I actually moved out recently.

That's very cool.

[Beran] Once GamerGate occurred on the chans, moot decided to ban it.

Moot said to the GamerGate coalition,

"You're not allowed to talk about this here."

[music ends]

[Brennan] Having seen the Scientology movement,

movements that grow out of chan boards tend to be right in the end.

It was like this infallible belief that I had.

So, when GamerGate happened...

I was definitely a sympathetic audience.

[pensive music playing]

[Brennan] So, after Chris Poole banned GamerGate,

there were a bunch of users that wanted to still talk about it.

They searched on Google "alternatives to 4chan."

They eventually got to, like, page three, which had...

[reading]

8chan, before GamerGate, only had like 100 posts a day.

But after, we had some days where we were getting 7,000 posts in an hour.

[interviewer] Fredrick, you and 8chan are being likened to a hate group.

How do you answer to that?

[Brennan] Someone made a GamerGate board on 8chan,

but it was not founded for the purpose of GamerGate,

and it will be around long after GamerGate is over.

[Brennan] The only sources that were taking GamerGate seriously

were very far right sources. Like Breitbart.

[newscaster] Breitbart News,

a bomb-throwing site favored by the so-called alt-right.

A mixture of conservatives and populists, white supremacists, and anti-Semites.

[Brennan] Milo Yiannopoulos wrote a whole bunch of articles about GamerGate.

[Milo] Every community on the internet,

4chan, Reddit, or whatever, has a dog in the fight in GamerGate.

Conservatives have missed a huge cultural opportunity.

He knew he was writing this stuff to, like, a 4chan audience.

[Alexander] These gamers were being courted.

Like, "Yes, you are disenfranchised and, yes, women are taking your toys away."

"And, you know, that's happening to us at all levels of government as well."

[Beran] Steve Bannon, the owner and publisher of Breitbart,

who later became part of the Trump administration,

now understands this group of young, disenfranchised men,

who are angry, who are unhappy,

and he says, "They come in through GamerGate,

then we get them turned on to Trump." That was his idea.

[crowd cheering]

I will never let you be the forgotten people again.

We're the forgotten people.

[crowd cheering]

I will never let you down.

I promise. I will never ever let you down.

[ominous distortion plays and fades out]

What would America look like with an ascendant alt-right?

With a Trump in the White House

and a Mr. Bannon as the chief of staff, and...?

[Milo] It would be so much more fun.

It would be full of joy and mischief and laughter and memes.

More spontaneous.

[Alt] Steve Bannon knew a good thing when he saw it.

And by activating what he called the "rootless white males,"

in his own words, of 4chan,

he turned them into a political force to be reckoned with.

It played out this way in Japan back in 2002,

with these politicized 2channel users known as the Net Right,

who felt that their own country wasn't doing enough to make Japan great again.

[Beran] What are 4chan and 8chan doing to promote Trump?

They're doing the same thing Anonymous was doing.

Mass pranks, spinning misinformation into the news cycle,

like rumors that Hillary Clinton is sick.

And they're making memes.

[mysterious synthesizer music playing]

[Beran] Which then spread off the chans into the mainstream narrative.

These radicalized young men know that they can poison that well

and spread all this stuff downstream in the culture.

That's what 4chan was always doing,

but now it was getting more toxic than ever.

[growling]

While this is happening, what is happening on the rest of the internet?

Everyone's experience on the internet

is a monetized corporate form of 4chan.

But it's more dangerous than 4chan

because these newer sites are better at boosting whatever content

will make people stay on the site longer.

[Brennan] What drives user-base numbers and revenue is anger.

- [digital whooshing] - [creepy giggling]

[Beran] So, Facebook or Twitter is making more money

as users are getting angrier and becoming glued to the screen.

And so, as the internet gets 4chan-ified, it's easier than ever

to make really dark, disgusting or screwed up things,

and they can let it spawn in that environment until it spreads everywhere.

Go ahead.

[crowd cheering]

[newscaster] The Fox News decision desk has called Donald Trump

the 45th president of the United States,

winning the most surreal election we have ever seen.

[music fades out]

[Housh] With moot, I did find it really funny that when we all started to leave

and all he was left with was the Nazis... that he quit.

Having an angry mob of 25 million people

who disagree with everything you do is never very fun.

It's not even that I'm burnt out.

It's that I've probably gone through like five burnouts at this point.

[somber music playing]

[Alt] He had founded 4chan as this haven for people who loved stuff from Japan,

and who loved internet hijinks.

He wasn't in it for politics.

[Beran] Moot is exasperated,

and he announces that he's leaving the site.

His parting advice

is that you shouldn't actually be on the internet that much.

He says, go out and live your life. There's now a meme for it, "touch grass."

[moot] For people who are angry on the internet, I really, truly hope that

you one day find the beauty in not allowing strangers

and things outside your control to rile you up.

I'm sure you'll add a few extra years to your life by keeping your heart rate down.

[moaning]

[Beran] But the user base, I think, wanted to drag the site in another direction.

[somber music continues]

[Beran] After Trump wins the election,

the people on 4chan and 8chan spreading viral misinformation feel empowered.

It worked, so they keep doing it.

[man 1] After it happened and Trump became president,

I was totally shocked.

I was reading the New York Times.

They projected Hillary at 90-something-percent to win.

No one thought this could happen from the very beginning,

and it did.

At the time, I was a freshman in New York City.

I did swing left. Really far left.

They were painting Trump out

like he was going to be some second coming of Hitler.

To someone as ignorant as I was at 18, 19, believing that stuff was horrifying.

On Election Day, my friends are like, "We're doing this march."

"We're going to Trump Tower."

[protestors chanting] Fuck your wall!

[Isaac] It was all-out madness.

[protestors chanting] Fuck Donald Trump! Fuck Donald Trump!

[Isaac] People yelling and screaming.

[protestors chanting] New York hates you! New York hates you!

It was just total rage.

[man 2] Set it on fire!

[woman] Let it all burn!

[Isaac] Being in that mob, it was so hateful,

and it sort of hit me like a wrecking ball all at once,

realizing, like, hey, this isn't what I signed up for.

- [man 3] Whose streets? - [all] Our streets!

[Isaac] There was a shift, and a lot of it had to do with

just being extremely curious.

When you're that young, you want to change the world.

It's that same thing of, like, this country is corrupt

and something needs to be done about it.

With Trump, we have this new guy in charge saying,

"We're going to drain the swamp."

We're gonna drain the swamp of Washington.

We're gonna have fun doing it. We're all doing it together.

It gave people some sort of hope that the world could change.

[upbeat music playing]

A lot of Trump's mega fans felt that when he was in the White House,

he would have some kind of clandestine plan

to bring all these people to justice.

[Isaac] But that hope of a radical change

that had been promised repeatedly

never seemed to happen or come into fruition.

That's when one of the early Q posts came up on my radar.

Someone with the name Q put out a post,

and it would have the same phrase Trump would tweet ten minutes later.

Like, how did they predict President Trump's Twitter?

That's just, like, nuts.

So, it's like, "Let's just show this to people. This is crazy."

This was posted in 4chan.

So, Q posted the triple-plus,

and Donald Trump, seven minutes later, tweeted the triple-plus.

So we know for a fact that Q is real.

[Isaac] And within, you know, a day or two,

I have 20,000 views, a flood of comments that are all positive.

- And it's just this whirlwind of, like... - [music ends]

"What did I just do?"

You know? "What have I stumbled on?"

[mysterious music playing]

[Isaac] The whole idea was, like,

"There's this person on the inside who's sort of leaving us breadcrumbs."

So, he's giving us breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs.

I'm giving you all my breadcrumbs, the whole entire way.

[Isaac] And it's like, you guys aren't getting the real story.

Here's what's going on behind the scenes.

[Brennan] Trump wanted people to think that he had a plan.

He set people up to feel like this kind of person would emerge.

[Isaac on YT] This is his team here. I'm guessing Q is one of these people.

We have Kushner here, but look at all the thumbs.

All the thumbs up, they connect to make an actual Q.

So that was the first hint we got.

[Isaac] The YouTube channel was growing like wildfire.

This never happened in the history of the world,

and it's all happening because of the internet.

Share the stream, tweet it out, do whatever you want to do.

Spread the information, that's what QAnon asks us to do.

[woman 1] Q is a patriot. We know that for sure.

Many of the things that he has

given clues about and talked about on 4chan and other forums,

um, have really proven to be true.

[newscaster 1] There was a curious sight at last night's Trump rally in Tampa.

The letter Q was everywhere.

[newscaster 2] What was once a baseless conspiracy theory

has become a mainstream online cult.

Q is about getting to the truth.

[woman 2] He knows a lot of the secrets that they have,

and that's why he's such a threat to them.

The information he has given us has been extraordinary.

It was a very diverse group,

but ultimately, they're just normal people.

You know? They have jobs, they have kids, they have families.

They're... They're working people.

[Beran] When you talk to people who support QAnon,

they need some way of expressing

that they got the short end of the stick.

You have an elite group of people getting richer and richer using mainstream media

to say, "Everything's fine. Don't worry about it."

"I know life is getting tougher for you."

"That's the truth. We represent the truth."

Well, what happens is people begin to hate the truth.

And they end up doing the same thing that 4chan people did.

They start falling into the internet, falling into fantasy.

Those smart people at the top,

they're using the truth to beat me over the head.

So, I'll invent my own truth.

It doesn't have to be true, it just has to feel right.

And little by little, that quote, unquote "truth" just sounded deranged.

If you're not familiar with the conspiracy theory, it goes like this.

They think that President Trump is engaged in a secret war

against Satanic pedophiles in the Democratic Party and Hollywood.

Hillary Clinton is a Luciferian, Satanist, and so are the Rothschilds.

So are the rest of the cabal.

Open your eyes to what's really going on. Oprah Winfrey?

You really think we can trust Oprah Winfrey?

These people are trying to drink blood. Why do they do it?

It's actually a drug, it's called adrenochrome.

It gives them energy. It makes them feel a little younger, right?

So it's not like they're doing it for no reason.

This myth becomes a meme as it grows in popularity,

as people begin to believe it,

but 4chan knows that what they're doing is they're putting old 4chan jokes

in the thing that they're making up.

For example, CP, that's a code for child pornography.

So, anything that started with those letters,

cheese pizza, Christopher Poole, Captain Picard,

these were all old-school 4chan memes.

[man] Raise your hand if you're a pedophile.

- Oh, right. Yes. - [all laughing]

[Beran] It's, you know, pure adolescent nonsense

that was far removed from what they were joking about.

But it grows into this outlandish horror story

- that a lot of people believe. - [music ends]

[journalist] You are secretly saving the world

from this Satanic cult of pedophiles and cannibals.

Does that sound like something you are behind?

Well, I haven't... I haven't heard that, but, uh...

is that supposed to be a bad thing or a good thing?

New York City, do not let them normalize pedophilia.

Hollywood is trying to normalize pedophilia.

QAnon started trying to absorb the iconography, the lingo,

the messaging tactics of Anonymous.

And I took that personally.

[water bubbling]

[somber music playing]

[Kirtaner] You know? I was out of the game a couple of years at that point.

And I tried to ignore them as much as possible,

but it became a self-propagating troll.

Your great-grandma's knitting group

was all of a sudden talking about Q and saving the children.

Q was just a whole bunch of trolls who were, like,

"Look at all these fools. They believe it. They actually honestly believe this,

and, God, ain't this funny, everybody?"

[Fuxnet] And the only way that you can really get there

is if you're an asshole that wants

to make people believe that their thoughts,

their interpretations of reality are not true,

and that's harmful. [chuckling]

That's harmful to everybody.

All of us who had built the culture started seeing our work being used

by people we utterly despised.

And because we all left the chan culture, there was no one there pushing back.

[purring]

We've all participated in undermining reality

with our silly jokes and the conspiracy theories.

But we never wanted things to turn into a living cartoon.

[protestors clamoring]

And we have to understand we have awoken in the midst of a nightmare!

But we can fight this!

- [no audible dialogue] - [protestors shouting]

[Kirtaner] Unfortunately, when you are that far gone,

there's nothing really you can do.

All you can do is cross your fingers and hope that eventually

they will realize that...

"I've been conned."

[no audible dialogue]

[Isaac] I was convinced that it was a real thing.

But eventually Q started getting a couple things wrong.

[somber music continues]

There were, like, dates given, and then it would never happen.

[Isaac on YT] Like I said, QAnon, right?

He said March 9th. It's March 20th, guys. Okay?

Little things like that kept happening again and again.

We know the storm is upon us. What else do you want me to say?

These people are going to get arrested.

There was this big kind of powwow live stream with all the Q influencers,

kind of like a sales pitch.

[man 1] It doesn't matter if it's real.

It's better than Game of Thrones.

It's better than House of Cards, better than Walking Dead.

It is the most entertaining thing on the internet.

[man 2] The content he's discussing is real.

Whether Q himself is real or not,

the content he's discussing is 100% genuine.

[man 1] Yeah.

[Isaac] Eventually I learned that many of the individuals in that live stream

were actually behind the QAnon posts.

And they were just some dudes in a basement

who gained legitimacy by predicting those Trump tweets.

[Beran] Q never predicted any of Donald Trump's tweets.

Trolls simply doctored the timestamps to make it seem that way.

QAnon followers saw what they wanted to see,

and they just ran with the lie.

[overlapping digital chatter]

[Isaac] I think it really took advantage of people that

were looking for answers about themselves, about the world around them.

- [creaking] - [whooshing]

[Isaac] It just got to a point where I was like,

"Okay, I have to tell these people this is not real."

[Isaac on YT] So, today's the day that Q dies.

The group behind QAnon is a bunch of manipulative 8chan scammers.

They were using me to push the Q narrative,

and it's not good to have this false hope, and the truth needs to come out.

- [ominous music playing] - [Isaac] It wasn't well-received at all.

It was a mountain of dislikes and hate comments.

It was really like me talking to a wall. There's nothing I could have said.

Once you really realize it's phony, nothing's gonna happen,

you know, you kind of think like,

what is going to happen to these people?

[newscaster] The authorities in Nevada say a man barricaded himself

in an armored vehicle

near the Hoover Dam bridge this afternoon, demanding President Trump release reports.

Reports about what, he did not say.

[newscaster 2] The man accused of murdering reputed mob boss

Francesco "Franky Boy" Cali appearing in court today.

[newscaster 3] Comello held up his hand in court,

his palm filled with scribblings,

including a reference to a conspiracy theory.

[newscaster 4] Parker Police said she believed her child had been taken

by a Satanic pedophilia ring of Democrats.

[YouTuber] This is ridiculous. What this is, folks,

this is Douglas County getting caught being a child sex trafficking ring

and trying to go after the person that's outing them.

[Beran] Things were teetering on a precipice

and the 2020 election pushed things over the edge.

[distorted digital burst]

Joseph R. Biden, Jr. is elected the 46th president of the United States.

This is a major fraud on our nation.

We were getting ready to win this election.

Frankly, we did win this election.

[audience cheering]

[newscaster 1] President Trump appeared in public and falsely claimed

that he won the 2020 election.

He is still showing no signs of conceding any time soon.

[protestors chanting] Stop the steal! Stop the steal!

We're here to tell them that they're not stealing our republic from us!

[Beran] It was another denial of reality.

Reconciling Trump's loss

with a win by creating a fantasy that he, in fact, has won.

If we look into the way voter fraud is being conducted,

the way people are throwing away ballots,

these people are going down, you guys, because these people are cowards,

they're a bunch of child molesters.

[newscaster 2] "Stop the steal" has swept across inboxes,

Facebook pages, and Twitter like an out-of-control virus.

There was this moment that I don't see written about a lot,

leading up to January 6th,

of incredible tension.

They need to stop the steal tomorrow! Stop the steal!

[all chanting] Stop the steal!

Everyone felt it in the air. We didn't know what was going to happen.

[all chanting] Stop the steal!

[Beran] Anything could happen.

[distorted digital humming]

[horns honking]

[woman on PA] Delta Airlines is paging Fight For Trump.

Fight For Trump.

[passengers chanting] Fight for Trump! Fight for Trump! Fight for Trump!

[all cheering]

The most important day right now in modern political history is upon us.

The power is in your hands.

[protestors] One, two, three, four. USA! USA!

[Beran] It was an internet-generated event.

What's up, people? Where you guys from? Let me know. Please tag, people.

I'm gonna walk you guys...

I'm gonna walk you all the way out to the crowds.

[Beran] It's people who love Christ, people who love Trump,

people who are just conservatives, conspiracy theorists,

people who are totally deranged,

and they're all glomming together, and the radical acceptance of all of that,

because they believed in this mass delusion.

[man 1] They're storming the Capitol!

Hell yeah!

It was wild, you know?

We'd never seen anything like it.

There is no historical parallel to the storming of the US Capitol.

[protestors clamoring]

But at the time, I wasn't surprised at all.

[all shouting and cheering]

[Beran] I'm a reporter, and I was actually there.

I wandered in the crowd, like, up the Capitol Hill, to the...

part where the Capitol begins, and it's shrouded in tear gas and smoke.

[tear gas firing]

[Beran] And I go around, and I'm like,

"Excuse me, sir. Why are you invading the Capitol?"

[man 1] We all feel like, you know, it was fraud,

and with the evidence and everything...

And everyone has a little different, precious, deranged internet conspiracy.

[man 2] If you don't know what an obelisk is, do some research.

It's Satan's penis, basically. But, anyway, look it up.

Then you gotta ask yourself, "Why is it in Washington, DC?"

Each one is different.

[man 3] The Great Reset?

[Beran] Yeah.

[man 3] That's when we go

to a digital currency and a one-world government.

The next person would be totally different.

[man 4] Governor Wolf, in Pennsylvania, shuts my fucking restaurant down.

Fuck you, Governor Wolf.

And I would ask them, "What are you reading?"

[Beran] Is there a certain place where you get your information on Trump?

[man 5] Yeah, Facebook and Parler.

[Beran] There had not been a revolution like this before.

It felt new. It felt like a product of the internet.

A product of social media.

[man 6 on radio] I'm the guy with the mask on. Where are you?

Cobra, over and out.

[man 7] Break through!

[all shouting and clamoring]

[glass shattering]

- [woman] Whoo! - [protestors yelling]

- [protestors chanting] Stop the steal! - [alarm beeping]

[Brennan] Once all of these Trump people raid the building, and they're all inside,

they don't just walk over the stanchion or, like, over the velvet red rope.

They walk along it,

even though they have to go into a little line.

A lot of them were acting like tourists. They just...

"Whoa. We did it." You know?

Like, total just big-eyed deer in headlights, a lot of them.

[unsettling music playing]

[Beran] They were surprised themselves. It was as if

they were wanderers in a dream.

And to me, that spoke to their...

deep delusion.

They were enacting something that was a fantasy on the internet.

And that it was far removed from the reality of what they were doing.

They were filming themselves. Putting themselves back on the internet

as they were doing this from this closed loop. [chuckling]

Can I speak to Pelosi?

Yeah? We're coming, bitch!

[cameraman] Whose office is this?

Is it on the door? [laughing]

Oh, my God.

[unsettling music rising]

[music ends abruptly]

[mouse clicking]

[Fuxnet] Some of us who started this whole long unfortunate series of events

had to sit there and watch it happen.

"No. This is where this needs to fucking stop."

[protestors chanting] USA!

[man] Fuck yeah!

[Kirtaner] All these people that were emboldened in the moment,

they all tried to scrub what they could from the internet.

[whirring]

[newscaster] The FBI spent the past week trying to identify

and locate the people involved in last week's violence and unrest.

So far, more than 70 people are facing federal charges,

but many more walking around,

blending into our communities and evading charges.

The FBI needs your help to find them.

[pensive music playing]

The first time I heard that Kirt might be coming back,

my first thought was just... It was utter joy.

This guy is an outright old-school troll

with the skill set needed to cause some trouble.

[Kirtaner] So, myself and a few other people got to work.

Parler was a social network that was used during January 6th.

We were able to download the entirety of all media that was posted that day.

And on top of that, who they were communicating with,

where they went after the fact, where they came from.

All of it was right there, ripe for the taking,

and we pulled it all down and released it to the public.

[digital whirring]

[Kirtaner] Anonymous de-anonymized everybody.

[music fades out]

[Kirtaner] It was poetry in motion.

This is the environment that I thrive in. I'm just like, who's next, right?

The hacking group Anonymous stole tons of data

from a site that hosts extremist and racist groups.

[Kirtaner] Epik hosting,

their client base includes InfoWars,

the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys.

- It's a who's who of hate groups. - [mysterious music playing]

[Kirtaner] All of their customer data, their credit card numbers,

personal information,

was all released by Anonymous.

It was one of the biggest hacks that people had seen in a decade.

Law enforcement's involved,

and we're going to find exactly how it was moved.

No, I'm not in a state of denial. Come on, bro.

[Kirtaner] When you get on a good win streak,

you know, you're riding high, you know,

you kind of get carried away.

There's kind of an intoxicating aspect

to the attention that you can get from hacking.

It can trick you into thinking you're fighting for good.

But in reality, you're just high off the feeling of having power.

[ominous music playing]

[Kirtaner] When you're behind a screen,

you could wake up one day and say, "You know what?"

"Today, I'm gonna be the asshole."

And you can just go out there,

and you could get it out of your fucking system,

and see what happens.

[Fuxnet] It happened with the FBI raids.

It happened with QAnon.

You can still see it today.

I did indeed discover Donald Trump's Twitter password,

which was Maga2020 with an exclamation mark.

And he changed a single digit to Maga2024.

That was the password for realDonaldTrump.

I had that shit.

I only know that was his Twitter password.

I don't know if it's his password anywhere else. I did not go to check...

I would never, ever encourage people to go do anything,

but minor variations on that password work in a lot of places.

[Stephen Colbert] Former President Trump just launched his new social media app,

Truth Social.

The site was briefly accessible to the public last night

and was immediately overrun by trolls

that posted a photo of a pig defecating on its own scrotum.

[audience laughing]

It's pretty funny. We got piggy poop balls on The Colbert Show.

[Fuxnet] Throughout the years,

there have been countless people who tried to take the reins of Anonymous,

but they have not learned from the mistakes that we made in the past.

Activism should come from a place of understanding

more so than just anger or fear

or especially self-aggrandization.

We actually haven't heard Anonymous in a while, to tell you the truth,

but what can you tell us about this hack?

[Fuxnet] Because of the attention you can gain

through these tactics, it can have a way of corrupting people.

[shouting] I am literally in every mainstream media publication

for the things that I do!

I'm not an unknown actor!

I'm literally a famous fucking cyberterrorist!

And you think that you could scare me?

What are you gonna do? What are you gonna do to me, huh?

[birds chirping]

[approaching footsteps]

[chatter on police radio]

[honking]

[Kirtaner] It was around 11:00 in the morning.

Couple of cops come around the corner.

They served me a warrant.

And, "We're here to search your premises."

"We're from the, uh, Ontario Police Cyber Crimes Division."

I wasn't charged, I wasn't detained, but now I'm being investigated for...

some alleged online activities.

[ominous music playing]

They're hauling out my computers, any hard drive storage devices they can find.

And then towards the end, they're like, "Does he have a Guy Fawkes mask in there?"

"Yeah." "Oh, yeah. He's got a Guy Fawkes mask."

I am in a very similar situation as Jeremy Hammond was.

And that's absolutely fucking terrifying

because, well, Hammond went to prison for a decade.

[Fuxnet] What's ironic about 4chan, or any of these digital spaces,

is that people went there to feel less alone,

but these spaces only simulate community.

[unsettling music playing]

[Fuxnet] It feels like you're fulfilling your wildest fantasies, but in fact,

you're just experiencing less and less of life.

You feel like you have it all, when, in fact, you have nothing.

[thumping]

You're just alone together.

[roaring]

[melancholy music playing]

[music fades out]

[insects chittering]

[Fuxnet] This is the kind of place where, like, you're walking around people,

they'll make eye contact with you. They want that, "How you doing?"

[Hatesec] Yeah, that's nice.

[Fuxnet] As far as the FBI stuff went,

I got out of it unscathed, with no charges or anything like that.

The people that I was staying with when I was on my trip around the country

were people that I've known since the '90s,

that I met in anime chat rooms,

and had not met them at all until I left on the run.

Anonymous was never this mythical unicorn

of an organization that could fix all of our problems.

People just believed that it was.

[all singing] ♪ Never gonna run around And desert you ♪

♪ Never gonna make you cry ♪

[Fuxnet] I think I have an understanding of how some of our actions in the past,

whether we like it or not, have affected

the reality of things today.

[newscaster 1] Police say he posted a document showing

support for racist conspiracy theories.

[newscaster 2] The Guardian reports 4chan has inspired

at least three other mass casualty attacks,

including a shooting in D.C. just last month.

[man 1] There has been a string of fake mass shootings with crisis actors...

[man 2] The Jews want to replace white people because they hate us.

[man 3] Do your own research and find out for yourself.

[woman 1] Leaders shape-shift into reptiles.

[woman 2] They're always eating these children.

[woman 3] Of course it's not fake, okay?

[mystical music playing]

[Beran] We now know that if you spend a lot of time on the screen,

you can create a mass delusion,

that reality parts from where you are,

and you can create something elaborate in your mind

that is delicate and complicated,

and it can be this really fascinating thing,

and you can spend all day obsessing about it with other people.

It can feel real as anything else.

- [mystical music continues] - [door slamming]

[Beran] But what we're doing is building these elaborate grotesque fantasies

out of our own unhappiness.

[Alt] Our current moment is really about us as humans.

And how we're only just starting to learn the effects

of these tools that we all use.

We didn't evolve to be online all the time.

This is an absolutely new moment for the human animal.

- [unsettling digital effects] - [distorted laughter]

[Alt] And figuring out how we use these tools,

that's the question of the next century.

[bubbling]

[unsettling music playing]

[music distorting]

[music fades out]

[somber music playing]

[upbeat music playing]

[music fades out]