Suddenly, 4chan’s elusive creator found himself the subject of articles in two of America’s heavyweight publications: Time magazine and the Wall Street Journal, which named him as Christopher Poole, a New Yorker who was only 15 when, with the help of his mother’s credit card, he launched 4chan from his bedroom five years ago. Time hailed him as the ‘Master Of Memes’ and described 4chan as ‘the wellspring from which a lot of internet culture, and hence popular culture, bubbles’. […] Inspired by a forum in Japan, the site has an unpolished retro look, as rough and ready as a scrapbook. It is an online community at its purest and rawest, the antithesis of polished networks such as Facebook: 4chan is like a brick wall where people can daub graffiti without fear of a comeback. Child pornography is banned, but otherwise there are few rules. Some posts are gloriously childish and nonsensical. Others can be racist, homophobic and misogynistic and peppered with four-letter words. Unlike most social networks, no one has to register a name or sign in. Consequently, the community has been described as a lawless Wild West of the web, a place of uninhibited bawdiness and verbal violence. A teenager in Texas posted a photograph of hoax pipe bombs and a threat to blow up his school on the anniversary of 9/11, but another user contacted police and the teenager was arrested.

However, the free-for-all has also been liberating, turning 4chan into an ideas laboratory and unleashing a ferocious creative force. Though most of what appears soon vanishes and is forgotten, the stuff that survives can easily jump to the wider web community and ‘go viral’, passing from person to person across the world.