Popularization of the Outsider

From Usenet to Discord to Yacht Clubs

Outsiders are a demographic, and a very specific one at that. Foot soldiers of history used as crash test dummies for the future, their moves are mapped into larger templates that serve as blueprints for product development. The boom of Web3, now being referred to as the decentralized web, is the latest example of outsider culture bleeding into the mainstream. 

Tracing the evolution of the web in its infantile state to this recent explosion, it is undeniable that there are specific patterns that have appeared in each iteration of the web, regardless of which generation holds tickets to the peep show. From text-based strategy games to low-fi social networks to alternative message board culture, the online universe has a history of gathering outsiders into communities that evolve into the fabric of mainstream technology.

Is calling the latest decentralized madness “Web3” sufficient in making sense of this new chaos and its millions of intersecting nodes? How did we get from Usenet to Discord to Bored Ape Yacht Club? Who are the users and what are our experiences? Let’s investigate. 

A Brief History of the (Anti)social Web

Starting with Text

The Internet was initially text-based, and you would need to head over your local library to access it unless you were some kind of government contractor. Naturally, this was how outsiders started to find each other across the world and set the stage for digital history. The Internet, first read-only (Web1) was small and secretive and profoundly uncool. With the exception of psychedelic gurus like Timothy Leary and cyberpunk authors like William Gibson, few people understood how this tool was on the way to becoming the standard operating protocol of the future. 

AOL was soon to bust onto the scene, and much like early online service Prodigy (no resemblance to the industrial-metal MTV band yet founded around the same time, interestingly enough) it produced a flashy yet simple walled garden that upgraded the text-based Web1 experience into the beginning of Web2. Read/write. You’ve got mail.

Rise of the Old School Hackers

In between Web1 (read) and Web2, (read/write) there was a period that could be viewed through the lens of a director creating an action sequence that marked the transition from Web1 to Web2 tres official. Think of early Nine Inch Nails playing in the background with a David Lynch cast of characters in perpetual motion. Rather than calling it Web1.5 and becoming the subject of a hate campaign, let me go ahead and call it the Rise of the Old School Hackers so everyone else who was online this early will understand what is being referenced. Here, I speak of 90’s message board culture, where many of us were exposed to the digital environment for the first time. During this era, pretty much everyone who used the Internet was a troll or a sociopath, and you’d be sure to find someone who would claim that this was the entire point of the Internet. Bug-as-feature.

During the Rise of the Old School Hackers, you could hang out on text-based forums like alt.sex and alt.drugs and alt.magic, all of which all started on Usenet. There was an alt for everything, as Usenet was was a decentralized conglomeration of news servers that acted as portals to information outside the mainstream narrative. Blockchain technology had yet to become official, yet decentralization was already taking shape. This was the beginning of the web transforming into an interactive medium. 

What if decentralization was the friends we made back in the day?

It wasn’t just that everyone was a troll or sociopath during this era. Everyone was an influencer, because during the Rise of the Old Schools Hackers, so few people were online to begin with. Most users resembled video game characters that would only pop up during the final boss levels. All users were participating in some way another, as you had to be nerdy and weird enough to understand how this iteration of the social web even worked. Either you owned a domain (this was not as easy as registering one on GoDaddy) or hosted a BBS. Everyone was on stage.

A Bulletin Board System was a hub of online activity in which people would chat about their specialized interests in ASCII text. Many refer to this period as “the BBS days” with a fair amount of nostalgia, speaking about it much like they talk about the “old days” of IRL hacker conference Defcon. Mirroring these Usenet servers that attracted outsiders from across the world to congregate, BBSes had the same flock-of-outsiders dynamic. They later evolved into colorful forums called Ultimate Bulletin Boards, which were coded in notepad HTML with a tiny drop of CSS. Despite UBBs getting a low-fi high-af style upgrade from BBSes, the scene of these forums remained one of rebels and loners. Literal cyberpunk.

With this action sequence film bit in motion, social architects were now setting the stage for MUDs, aka. Multi User Domains, where game developers produced and played text-based strategy games that moonlighted as alternative universes hidden in far out corners of the web. As digitally immersive RPGs, they carried the torch for gamers who followed in their footsteps, both online and off. The social web was beginning to onboard new users, and most of them had nobody to socialize with IRL.

4Chan/Trolling/Chilling IRL

A few years later, a wild 4chan appeared, becoming the designated seat at the opposition table. Founded by Christopher Poole in 2003 and taking much of its ideas from Usenet/the BBS days/MUDs; 4chan was an anything-goes platform that resembled the Wild West before digital black market Silk Road came into being. It marked the dawn of a new turning, in which old school hackers were beginning to notice a crude migration onto their territory.

4chan was additionally an image board that acted strictly as a home to user-generated content, which included crass and vulgar explorations of everything from far-right ideologies to anime porn. This policy of total user freedom was also what made 4chan a vehicle for far-left activism and raids against the power elite of its time. Anti-Scientology protests that originated on 4chan began making their way onto major news networks like CNN.

Transforming into an IRL subculture in which people could match faces to (fake) names, 4chan marked a distinct point in time where the digital and physical were merging into a hybrid prototype. The online world and “real life” were being mixed like songs on a pirated MP3 player, and DJs were everywhere.

There were now hackers meeting up at the Defcon conference in Las Vegas while 4chan raids were hitting the streets of major cities. You could go to a 4chan protest IRL and protest the incarceration of rockstar whistleblowers, or simply to smoke a joint and talk shit with a schizophrenic moderator. People would wear Guy Fawkes masks and hold up signs that read “I am from the Internet.” It was a theater of the absurd and the surreal, beckoning to Antonin Artaud. Nerds were taking over the streets of hip urban centers.

4chan was, in all its grotesque self-expression, the zeitgeist in action. The outsider was becoming a little more popular by the day, which compelled the founders of Web2 to start corporations that served as safe spaces for outsiders seeking to get inside the gates. You are the product. Giving birth to early social networking outfits such as LiveJournal and Myspace, this phenomena would herald in the centralized monoliths that are today known as FaceBook/Meta and Twitter. Following this same trajectory, Silk Road would lead to IRL events such as Blockchain Expo and Crypto Basel.

The Future of the Digital Outside

Hubs and Squads and Cults and Private Access 

Let us now flash forward to the modern day in which Discord has become a popular tool of communication. Online culture has shifted onto this anarchic piece of gaming software, which has been recently adopted by the finance community. While Discord started out with a small group of gamers just doing their thing, it is also a playground for budding investors and venture capitalists. VC firm a16z invested billions into crypto, and started their own DAO Initiative. Digital Autonomous Organizations are what’s hot, and propose to be the evolution of communities themselves; democratic forms of governance based on digital ownership, social tokens, and voting. Discord is the primary hub in which DAOs are formed. It is also a center point for squads to congregate, collaborate, and conspire.

The IRL to online pipeline is strong here. Anyone who attended the tech-influenced/tech-influencer Burning Man festival remembers how tokens and pendants were awarded to members of theme camps. You could participate in numerous theme camps while holding all of their tokens at once, symbolizing your membership in these fun little fringe groups. You could create tokens for your theme camp and hand them out to your curated friends list, giving them a social stake in your fantasy-come-to-life. While the technology of communities may have changed, the underlying structure in which they have evolved remains. Access is the key to the castle, and access is everything. 

You are Here

With record numbers of people currently heading over Discord to participate in the DAO rush or simply to keep up with their friends across the world, we are witnessing the popularization of the outsider yet again. This concept initially seems oxymoronic, like Zarathustra going to the marketplace in order to seek approval, yet the happening is nothing more than the way things work on a cultural level. Every small group on the Internet becomes populated with a new force that completely takes it over, catapulting it into the mainstream. The masses are coming! The masses are coming!  Politics are not only downstream from culture, but coming from inside the house. “The culture industry,” a term popularized by critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, is not just postmodern hyperbole. You’re living in it, Neo. 

We are experiencing a moment of mass decentralization, mirroring he 90’s Internet in its chaotic infinitude, with its very own invasion-of-the-normies subplot. We went from Revenge of the Nerds to Napoleon Dynamite to Big Bang Theory. History has always been written this way, and the popularization of the outsider has been around since the beginning of time. Jesus was just some hippie philosopher who got famous. Many would call Revenge of the Nerds a type of “nerdsploitation” while Napoleon Dynamite could viewed as the Sundance version of Revenge of the Nerds. Yet compared to Big Bang Theory, wasn’t Revenge of the Nerds authentic? Is Discord Napoleon Dynamite? What software will be the next Silicon Valley?

Ethereum, the cryptocurrency powering many Digital Autonomous Organizations, evolved from the “build your own nation” culture of events like Burning Man and Ephemerisle. The Seasteading Institute, seeking to create floating ocean cities away from centralized society, was founded by Burning Man and Ephemerisle veteran Patri Friedman. Now what we have = a thousand DAOs blooming. A thousand nations forming. Virtual real estate. Digital assets. Web3. Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, has been talking a lot about crypto cities. Can this all be traced back to one time at Burning Man? One time on 4chan? One party at Defcon? One conversation on Usenet?

One Time at Burning Man

When contrasting 4chan culture with Burning Man culture, observing how nerds and outsiders meet IRL and start going popular, we witness how the early foundation of the decentralized web turned into what is now being referred to as Web3. Every town has its alienated group of rebels that can only relate to each other online, and their greatest will meet in person and build new institutions in urban hubs. Well, at least they did before COVID. Now I guess they are moving to farms and popping out fertility influencers? Anyway, these clusters of misfits that started on Usenet resemble the users of Discord crypto communities who signal their affiliations with NFT avatars. Has something been lost in translation? Ask every generation this question. 

We are witnessing an underworld of very online people who are becoming the overworld. Some of them are hedge fund managers, while others are electronic musicians in their moms basement holding millions in ETH. Get that bag. WAGMI. The old school hackers are mostly dead now, and that is just what it means to be hardcore. Christopher Poole, the founder of anti-woke 4chan, eventually became what The Right (TM) dubbed a “social justice warrior.” The irony here is tasty, especially when you observe how most social justice warriors of the Obama era are now cosplaying as reactionary trad wives after getting exiled from The Left. (TM)

Yet enough about politics. Let’s talk about science! (enthusiastic voice) People are basically just animals searching for communities in which they can find people who think like they do. Where are all the people who think like us? The answer is simple: everywhere. A digital anthropologist might even point out how some of the early incels had a lot in common with 90’s teenage girls who were posting about committing suicide online, but that is just Usenet evolving into LiveJournal, and most of us aren’t ready to have this conversation.

It’s a Crazy World Out There 

Despite this somewhat-but-not-really insider take, Discord is currently ripe for evolution and not quite user-friendly. It is still the unpolished Internet, and not everyone is able to navigate it. We are assigning moderator privileges to one another like governments in their infancy. If everybody is just forming their own community and doing their own thing, will future numerical iterations of the web be any different from one another at their core? Any subculture will become an institutional organization on a long enough timeline.

As for the people, they will literally just sit around building the infrastructure for the next generation. Maybe it’s trolls all the way down who have matured into crypto investors. The feeling of being on the outside remains, unless you are at some yacht party holding a Bored Ape. Nevertheless, the outsider feeling comes back when you notice the music on the yacht is really bad. Naked emperors are both over and under-sexualized. The outsider is the worlds most popular demographic, and the Internet magnifies this fact.

Read/Write/Own/Party

The theater of outsiders becoming the starting point for a new era is captured throughout time. By engineering the groundwork for independent weirdos to come together via intersecting nodes, the platforms of tomorrow are built. We live in a society composed of a million micro-societies competing for your attention, all waiting for the next user to join their religion/community/blockchain/cult/channel. Whether Web3 will bring ownership to creators or a new group of uncreative elites is a topic up for debate, and the answer to these sorts of questions is always why not both. The outsider drifts further and further from the outside until a new outside is formed, and the inside of the moment becomes the schelling point of a generation.