An amusing, troubling documentary about the contemporary web
Upgraded:
Apr 5, 2024 9:58 pm
Published:
Apr 5, 2024 9:56 pm
From directors Arthur Jones and Giorgio Angelini, The Antisocial Network paints a chilling picture of how the web bleeds over into reality and genuine politics. Narrating an age when online areas work as both escape hatch and a system for control,, the documentary convincingly declares that it’s not just possible to draw a straight line from 4chan shitposts to the January 6 insurrection, however sensible.
Amusing and haunting in equivalent step, the movie follows Jones and Angelini’s previous documentary Feels Good Man (which Jones directed and Angelini produced), which traces Pepe the Frog’s arc from guileless web-comic character to harmless meme to coded hate sign. With The Antisocial Network, the duo amplifies this principle through their macro technique, charting a course in between early web online forums and contemporary mobs sustained by conspiracies.
It starts with pictures of January 6, before presenting its main topics: many hackers and previous 4chan users who matured on confidential image boards. These individuals experienced, partook in, and in some methods even formed the info age, for much better or even worse, though they do not recall at their journeys through rose-tinted glasses.
Jones and Angelini perform their interviews mostly in their topics’ confined individual areas, in which they’re surrounded by modern-day tech, with dim neon lighting that both draws the eye and hammers home a sense of futuristic possibility. The optimism in their recollections of often visiting Japanese-style “chan” boards in the 2000s turns rapidly to be sorry for. Their voices betray a sense of resistance.
From edgy in-jokes in bad taste to self-righteous mobilization versus bad stars that generated hacktivist groups like Anonymous, The Antisocial Network develops a comprehensive retrospective of how the web started spilling into reality, and the psychological forces behind it. The topics show self-awareness, however the modifying by Jones, Drew Blatman, Devin Concannon, and David Osit fills out the spaces in between their cringing. It weaves each thread together with archival video footage, old 4chan posts, and even newspaper article about the website’s shenanigans, in order to instantly, rhythmically, and amusingly link these specific point of views to their broader causal sequences. Often a joke is simply a joke, however in some cases it dovetails into a group Sieg Heil at an anime convention.
The Antisocial Network is a two-way mirror of pain: The audience flinches at images that are hardly 10 to 15 years of ages while the interviewees reveal humiliation at their indirect or active involvement in chan culture. The legend is made absorbable through some eye-popping, typically abstract animated series. These start with people at their computer systems, however gradually change in creative methods, as Sims-like animation individuals wear V for Vendetta masks (à la Anonymous) however stay connected, by dark tendrils, to a digital measurement simply beyond reach.
