“HE WILL NOT DIVIDE US” Fiasco or How 4chan Will Always Prevail.
This story is inspired by a TAU teacher Dr. Carmel L Vaisman’s lecture on meme culture on the Internet. Get your dank memes and MAGA hats on, we’re going deep.
On January 20th, 2017 a well know A-list celebrity and a regular triggered man Shia LaBeouf decided to Livestream an art protest on YouTube whilst Donald Trump’s inauguration was going on. The plan was to shout a “HE WILL NOT DIVIDE US” mantra on camera for four years while Trump is holding the office.
HOWEVER…
The Ol’ Shia did not expect the warm internet welcome his project had accumulated with infamous trolls of 4chan board. IRL board members started flooding to the Livestream to troll and provoke a “liberal snowflake” Shia and his peers. Shia’s project started to turn to a reality show of epic proportions. As TMZ and other yellow paper media had shown us, Mr. LaBeouf does not respond to overwhelming pressure kindly, so he got himself arrested on supposed assault charges, once again 4chan got what it wanted. Maybe in an ugly kinda way.
After the arrest, the Livestream was moved from Queens to Albuquerque in part to get away from “tough” 4chan crowd to a more relaxed and laid back location but even then, the art piece was vandalized and stormed by anon protestors who were “just doing it for the lols”. When guns started to get involved, Shia had to bail elsewhere.
Finally, the project became more secretive in terms of its location, and Livestream provided only a sky backdrop to a white flag, flapping proudly in the wind with the project’s motto written on it.
THIS IS WHEN THINGS GOT INTERESTING. RADICALLY INTERESTING.
Since Mr. LaBeouf did not provide the location to his art thingy, 4chan detectives got on the case. And they got on it hard. Board divided itself into different groups of specialties, one that was going after social media post spotting Shia in certain areas to find out a relative area of search, others were tracking airplanes that were spotted far away in the sky on Livestream to match them with an actual airplane trajectory chart, some even were going for whether reports to match the clouds. After an intensive 36 and some hours, one of many great internet warriors found himself beeping his horn around the flag’s location whilst the whole board was responding live whether or not his beeping was getting closer to the actual spot. And oh boy they did it. The infamous flag got taken down, while the MAGA hat and Pepe the Frog T-Shirt got up instead.
Internet won. People won. They won it just because they could. Whether or not it was just for the sake of it, memes, lols or whatever. The important part is if a bunch of misfits on 4chan managed to organize themselves to partake in basically “the hostage holding piece of paper on camera FBI level type job” and did in gloriously in 36 stunning hours. The whole historic moment only begs the question, what else can we as people accomplish, and is there a limit, especially when the motivation is just to have fun, whilst maybe pissing a few folks off.
