How 4chan became the home of the elite reader
It’s a Friday in early January and someone on 4chan has invented a new philosophical doctrine: “esoteric Kantianism”. “You must not take Kant’s words at face value,” the anonymous user warns – readers who do so will only take away shallow insights about the half-blind “normie mind”. “You must read between the lines.”
A reading revolution is taking place on this notorious message board, most famous for alt-right memes; anything-goes chatter; and large-scale co-ordinated pranks (several hoax bomb threats organised by the site have lead to arrests and mass evacuations). Users operate under total anonymity and are subject to bare-bones moderation. Most of the ideological avenues offered in /pol/, its politics forum, would leave you estranged from polite society and banned from any conventional social media.
And yet, a new secret generation of autodidacts – frustrated with the state of modern academia and the dilution of the traditional cannon – are turning to the website as an unlikely home for literary ambition. Britain’s working class used to shelter a legion of autodidacts, too: set on self-improvement, they staged Shakespeare productions and read classic literature without input from local authorities or red-brick academics. Later, in mid-century America, door-to-door salesmen shilled 54-book sets of Mortimer Adler’s Great Books of the Western World to people who wanted a classical education. This impulse hasn’t gone away. It has migrated to /lit/.
