My Time With The Founder of 8Chan

Fred Brennan taught me why to bother with humor in my writing.

“You can't have free speech if Nazis are in the room. Once Nazis start talking, everyone else stops.”

Frederick Brennan is a physically small man. This is not by accident, and it is remarkable visually. He has an illness called osteogenesis imperfecta. Which means his bones break frequently. He was raised in foster care and, like many kids, was bullied, and believed nobody would like him. One of the things he came to believe early on is that when people were kind, they were actually lying to him. There was something about the politeness that didn't feel real. He didn't trust it. Fred is wheelchair-bound for the most part, but on the early Internet, he did pretty well for himself. One of the things he noticed on some of the darker corners of the Internet, like the 4Chan image board community, is that people are brutal. He interpreted this brutal back and forth as honest. This was something he found trustworthy.

I met Frederick Brennan—in the manner of all things happening in 2020—on the Internet. I was an early adopter of the clubhouse app. It was a rapidly growing social audio platform. My wife, Carlene MacMillan, who is also a psychiatrist, joined me, and we became pretty popular in the world of niche Internet communities. 

Clubhouse was “invite only.” This meant people wanted to get on and couldn't. Getting on early was important, and it continues to be somewhat important in new, rapidly growing social networks because there is just a huge advantage when it comes to building a following to being an early member of the platform. You get more followers organically if you are a little lucky.

As Carlene and I began to have more conversations on Clubhouse, we realized something special was happening. We could see a community forming, tropes moving, morphing, changing, and it got big. 

Much like Fred, I've never been “popular.” I can go back and forth with the best of them because I'm a psychiatrist. And, at least when it comes to social audio, it means in real time, I was able to respond with sense and compassion. And this is pretty popular. People were hungry for information about mental health, and as an actual medical doctor and not some huckster coach, I had things to say that resonated with people. 

The clubhouse app announced a contest… They called it, with a complete lack of irony, the “creator first” program. The creators did not end up feeling like they were first. This led to the collapse of the platform, which is a shame because.

I have a background in both Radio and audio production, and so Carlene and I applied, to do a show. It's basically like old-time live radio at that point. And we were able to put together a pretty compelling demo. And that's how we got a show. That's how I got the name of my newsletter, The Frontier Psychiatrists. That was Carlene and I…with the help of friends to this day like @Psych Fox and Michelle Bernabe, RN. It is where I met Michael Mann , and Christina Farr .

We had to make a pilot to progress to the next round, and Carlene thought it would be pretty sassy to do what she's very good at, which is, to put it mildly, very subtle trolling of the status quo. 

Our first show would be about community on the Internet. Always ones for meta-commentary, we invited as a guest the most notorious community founder and essentially the “chief troll of the internet” for a while, Fred. This title has since been usurped. Several times over. Before thousands stormed our nation’s capital, their home was the Internet message board 8Chan—like 4Chan, but less classy.

8Chan was unbelievably toxic. This was born from a culture of disaffected males living in their mom's basement. I'm not asserting that all of the people using those image boards are people living in their mother’s basement. The culture that arose had a rejectionist vibe, infused with the essence of basements and lack of personal responsibility.

It was the kind of community Frankenstein's monster would form if he stopped trying to convince Victor Frankenstein to make him a bride, and instead became a computer programmer. Frederick Brennan was convinced he would never have sex. This is a fundamental point of consternation for many men—or was, till young men (and women) gave up entirely.

Fred, in our conversations before the episode, told us the story of his role as a moderator on WizardChan. This was a message board for guys who were not getting laid. Ever. People assumed he would never ever, ever get to have any sex. And thus, as the least likely to get laid, he was made a moderator of what is essentially an INCEL message board.  That term is worth understanding briefly because it's one of the most toxic things that has ever existed. INCEL stands for involuntary celibate. The original term was INVICEL, as documented in the remarkable Reply All episode, and it was a lesbian woman who came up with it. (If you haven’t subscribed to PJ Vogt , it is time).

The idea that one could be deprived of sex in a way that was not up to them, involuntarily celibate, is a pretty horrible place to be as a person. Wanting to feel connected was replaced with needing to get laid. This neediness displaced a more appropriate and pro-social desire. A lack of understanding of the dynamics between intimate partners is core to this ideology. People who've never had any sex at all are complaining about other people who are. The only sex they are privy to is what they imagine from pornography.

So, all of the clumsiness, intimacy, confusion, excitement, uncertainty, and any other even moderately ambiguous feelings that belong to human sexual interaction are excluded from the discourse. It's replaced with a grotesque symbolic representation of sexuality, in which women should be forced to f*ck these frustrated gentlemen. Hatred of women and hatred of men who are any good at relating to women is the standard. The way people get status in this culture may be alien to most of us, but it involves being the most sad—the most pathetic. And, of course, the most hateful.

Symbolic violence against each other, encouraging suicide, insults, threats, swatting—this is calling the FBI or police on somebody while you're playing a video game so that the swat team can bust in and arrest them in the middle of World of Warcraft. At the same time, you watch and laugh on video.

I discuss this harassment behavior in a podcast:

These are the standards that they hold each other to in the dark parts of the internet. It takes “male bonding” and makes it about the worst possible parts of the human experience. Status is assigned to the most miserable, the most brutal, the most suicidal. Normies, that's you and me, are the outgroup. And we can f*cking die. There is a rejection, wholesale, of appropriate human interaction. Compassion is denigrated. It becomes a weakness.

This was the milieu in which a young Fred Brennan was operating. It's here that he encountered brutal racism, Nazis, fascists, and this hate sounded real. It wasn't polite. It was raw. And, here is a fundamental concept: if you hate yourself, someone telling you they hate you sounds more believable than something nice.

This may be the most crucial concept of this article. There are people who hate themselves. They are myriad. They are legion. They are miserable. Some people think they are badness incarnate—and hearing information from others that would conflict with that internal narrative? That is a lie. And how dare those f*cking Normies lie to you. F*ck them. F*ck their bullshit. Free speech. They're never going to understand you. They're just going to lie. I hope you f*cking die. Maybe we should f*cking kill them all. Et Cetera.

This is the kind of horrific nightmare conversation that becomes normative. It became normative for Fred. Predators took advantage of this milieu and mistrust. 

Demagogues recognize the mistrustful, like most of us realize the smell of apple pie. “Nobody understands you, not like I do.”

“The Normies are lying to you!”

“Aren't you sick of being lied to you?”

This becomes a siren song to the disaffected, disconnected, and lied to. That was Frederick. He's not like that anymore, from what I can tell.

Mostly, it's because he was able to change his mind. The abridged version of how that happened is he got a girlfriend. She was into guys who were crippled. He was in a wheelchair. That counted. She wanted to have sex with them, and they used psilocybin mushrooms and had sex, and that changed everything.

King of the Incels? He gets kicked off the throne once he's gotten laid. Fred was deposed as a WizardChan moderator. He had become a Brad—incel Termanology for guys to get to have sex—and had to start thinking about the world he had created with a mind made more changeable by psychedelics, perhaps.

I won't get deep into what else happened, but we all know about January 6 and QAnon, and that was born in the same toxic soup on 8Chan online. Fred rejected it.

And, after a whole HBO documentary on the topic, he joined us in the clubhouse to discuss it. When you let haters talk in the community, bad things happen. You don't get what free speech advocates imagine. The town Square, where everyone can have their say, and the best idea will win? When demagogues have their way, this is not what happens. Because free speech doesn't communicate ideas if people aren't listening, and people can't listen if they're under threat. And, to be clear, some people are very much under threat—vulnerable people. People who are trans, people of color, these individuals learn very quickly to shut the f- up and get out of the room when someone starts screaming at them. Or at least, they did historically. I'm doing some foreshadowing here. Thank you for putting up with it.

But there is no “free speech” when people fear for their lives. Or at least not the goal of free speech. There is no free exchange of ideas. There is only hatred. They were expecting the free exchange of ideas and the best idea to win works about as well online as the planet Alderaan would fare in a conversation with the Death Star. It's just not what happens. 

So the people who like a free exchange of information, feelings, or understanding, if Nazis are talking, they let themselves out of the room. They might not even tell you that's what's happening. The most free exchange of ideas occurs only in the context of trust.

You have to have Goodwill. Ideas aren't perfect little Lego blocks that you accept and fit interchangeably with every other Lego block. You need to trust that the person handing you the idea isn't handing you a grenade. Because if they're going to laugh at you and it blows up in your hand, well, we know what that looks like. It looks like Twitter. It seems like a Chan. It looks like QAnon. It looks like school shootings and assaults on the capital and more dead children from bullets than any other cause.

If you let Nazis talk, quieter voices don't. Hatred shut down other ideas. It shuts down vulnerability. It's an infection for a community, in the same way, bacteria in the blood will poison a human. It can't be allowed in biological organisms. And hate leads to septic shock in the community. If we understand how the human system of trust functions and sometimes misfires, we can understand what an appropriate immune response might look like.  I write about this concept often, called Mentalizing.

It would be best if you didn't trust infections. If you ignore an infection, you'll get sicker and die. The same thing happens to communities that allow toxic ideas in. Poisonous. Infectious. Those that are the most successful evade our defenses. The most successful haters I have learned how to navigate the trust and trust of other humans to avoid detection long enough to replicate their poison and move on.

The wrong defense mechanisms kill communities. Just like the wrong immune responses kill humans. Autoimmune diseases are your immune system attacking your own body by accident. The same thing can happen in communities with reactions to threats. 

So, this newsletter regularly addresses how our social immune system works. That is why I write with a humorous tone. It helps get through the mistrust! We are evaluating ideas as communities and individuals and trying to identify threats. Thus, I try to be silly and get my readers to let their guard down and feel less threatened. In biology, we refer to those threats as antigens. Antigens are proteins, usually presented outside of cells, that the immune system uses to identify something as either self or other. In social interactions, we also have antigen identification. We identify swastikas as immediately threatening. Nobody lets a swastika in.

Except for some people. Other equally horrible ideologies, ideas, and interactions come in more beguiling forms. These social antigens can be more complex to identify. The word “just” tends to show up a lot. Like, “I'm just asking questions.”

We have a well-refined system as humans to identify bullshit. But it's not perfect. The immune system has to learn to build immunity through exposure to dangerous things. Social systems need to learn also. And the online social systems are navigating now, which are new to us. We are not as well tuned to interact with thousands to millions of people as we are with one-on-one or small groups because we do not. But we can learn to do it. We need to learn to do it. We're learning to do it right now. And that's what this newsletter is about, in a way.

What is the best way I can see to build that trust? Let’s laugh together. If we both laugh together, we are more likely to be safe. Hateful people can’t take a joke. They can be cruel, but they don’t laugh at themselves. Thus, I am making fun of me and inviting you, my readers, to join me.