Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web Hardcover – September 1, 2011

Good background and overview on this world. Thought the detail of the various websites was helpful. Been curious about anon for a while and enjoyed this eye-opening look.

It was interesting and I have to do at least twenty words to get this review accepted, sorry about that.

From a book titled Epic Win for Anonymous, I found very little in this book about Anonymous. Most of this book is about meme generation, which may nor may not involve Anon and may or may not involved 4chan. The book discusses various social sites like Fark (I'm a Farker), Reddit (I'm a redditor), Digg, ICHC, ED, LiveJournal and so on and probably spends about as much time on those sites combined as it does on 4chan. Anonymous itself rates really about a chapter or two and all of there more famous exploits are crammed into those chapters.If you are looking for a history of Internet memes and 4chan culture, you might enjoy this book. If you are looking for a more in-depth discussion of Anonymous, this book is not an epic win.

I've lurked on /b/ for years, so I thought I was very familiar with the subject matter of this book. I was surprised at how much I learned about the site, its history, and the greater context in which it exists. Along the path to explaining 4chan's powerful and news making "hacktivism", the author gives indispensable background on the history of 4chan and how it became the idea-creation powerhouse it is today.At the same time, the book covers much more than just 4chan. 4chan is a useful case study, but the themes discussed in this book are applicable to the greater phenomenon of internet culture. The author discusses many of the other sites where this type of cultural sharing is occurring, putting the actions of Anonymous into the context of internet activism as a whole.If you're still wondering what 4chan is, the chapter "4chan in a day" is the best introduction to it that I have ever seen. Instead of trying to describe 4chan (the fact that it is almost impossible to describe it is a big part of what makes 4chan awesome), he lets it speak for itself, conveying actual content from "just another day on 4chan." This chapter has come in handy several times already when friends and relatives have asked what 4chan is.I think this book is perfect for people who have been part of "the internet" for years, but it's also perfectly accessible to those who are just starting to notice things "from the internet", or news reports about "Anonymous", and want to learn what it means and where it is coming from. If you are part of the latter group, after reading this book you'll find yourself being able to join in with everyone else who is ROFL-ing every time they see a news report about 4chan and Anonymous.

I liked it. I learned a lot about the internet, which I hear is going to be pretty big someday.

This book was very interesting and satisfying. I too sometimes go online and wonder what everybody is talking about but I knew what most of them meant. He just showed me the small gaps that I missed knowing about the anons but I knew about 80% of what was on the book. I got this book off of his AMA on reddit and it seemed interesting. It is a good, fun, and hilarious read. I recommend it for everybody. It is a good book for those who wants to know more about the internet or so.

The author works as an online journalist and he decides to break Rules 1 and 2 and talk about what goes on at 4chan. I have to think that the title is an attempt at placating the denizens, or to grab attention. First he proceeds through a list of the boards and explains that mostly they are for images, with additions, prank alterations and captions. Such as Japanese anime cartoons, cats, autopsy slides, gross diseases and cartoon sex between men. We are later assured that child porn may crop up but is swiftly removed and reported. /b/ is called the random topic board and many people, /b/tards, contribute anonymously. Insults are commonplace as is strong language and seemingly abusive talk. But if everyone including the poster is being called a bad name, how bad is it really?Then we get a potted history of the boards, from 2chan a Japanese anime board which inspired 15 year old Christopher Poole, calling himself moot, to start his own board called 4chan because he didn't speak Japanese. He invited everyone to join in and there would be no rules. Later he started an art site called Canvas.We are told that many memes, cultural gimmicks, get started on 4chan as bright or bored people kid around with images and captions in spare time. Here the author makes the mistake of thinking that everyone uses the social media he does. Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, whatever, no, I don't use any of them. So much of what he was saying, however nicely explained, was wasted on me. He makes one brief reference to AOL boards in the early days, detailing that those days were slow and expensive due to dial-up modems at home, pay subscription and pay for time. I used CompuServe from mid-nineties and there is no mention. We had similarly separate chat boards with mods.We get a mention that women are sometimes insulted or instructed to show images of themselves stripping on 4chan. If they do more fool them. This is a laddish chattery abuse-slinging culture. More recently than publication, a young woman was doxxed after stripping with, as requested, a bottle of her medication, all the lads needed to find out who she was. Her images were sent to her family and friends. Some /b/tards had spoken against doing this, but with no consequences to the doers, they proceeded.At the end we get a look at how some members working together formed Anonymous and carried out DDoS attacks, mixed with other attacks, on Scientology and other groups they disliked. They managed to hack into a major security company. To read what I consider a better look at this hacking see 'This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Hacktivists, and Cypherpunks Are Freeing the World's Information' by Andy Greenberg. However Greenberg, another journalist, did not appear to have been able to get anyone in Anonymous to talk to him whereas Stryker being already on 4chan got quotes from members of both. Neither man tells us that some women took part in the protests against Scientology.Pages 286 - 304 contain references and an index. I counted 16 names which I could be sure were female.This is an unbiased review.Postscript: I review this book on 5th July, and on 6th July I get a phishing e-mail allegedly from Blockchain saying in the headline that my access to a Bitcoin purse has been blocked.

I had zero first-hand knowledge of 4Chan before reading Epic Win. The book was educating, funny, insightful, and well-written. I recommend it for anyone with an interest in internet culture and politics. Or scatalogical humor.

This is definitely one of the most fascinating books I have read in many years, and I learned a huge amount from this book. Although I work in an Internet and web career, I have always felt that I have missed out on some of the more back-street aspects of the social web. Facebook and LinkedIn are all very nice, but they feel manufactured. This book exposes that organic and raw side of the social Internet.I think this book can best be described as a biography of Internet culture, and in that respect it is exceptionally exhaustive, going right back to The Well and before. It charts the development of social activity on the Internet from long before it became mainstream, alongside a strong focus on the development of memes. Even with such exhaustive coverage, it barely scratches the surface of all that is out there I suspect.The use of 4chan as a framework for presenting this culture is interesting, and provides a central theme to the book. Without as such, I suspect it would be impossible to draw the sprawling collective of ideas together. However this is not just a book about 4chan, and merely uses 4chan as a case study. As others have commented, the actual coverage of "Anonymous" is relegated to a final chapter, but to me that seems necessary, as the background is of such critical importance. Trying to appreciate Anonymous without understanding its history and influences would be doomed to failure.It is important to note that this book has received many negative reviews, but I suspect those are people objecting to the very nature and concept of the book rather than the content. This is not surprising since much of this culture being explored prides itself on being covert and non-mainstream; a biography akin to a Lonely Planet Guide must be an abhorrence. So objections that the book is "full of mistakes and lies" I think reflects more on the displeasure of the critic rather than the standard of the author's writing. I found the writing style easy and entertaining. For those who are inquisitive, I noticed that many of the negative reviewers had only one or two other reviews, often for a particular seemingly unrelated t-shirt with a picture of wolves and the moon on it. An explanation is found within the book as it turns out.But despite the fears, I don't think that this book will result in a flood of "newfags" to 4chan's boards, at least not if the reader digests the book properly. Far from coming away from this book feeling that I understood 4chan and Anonymous, I came away with a huge respect for a culture which I now admire without claiming to fully understand; to claim to understand it would be arrogant and ignorant. I also came away with renewed fascination in mass-culture and the intrinsic social interest of huge groups of otherwise unconnected people.