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http://time-blog.com/nerd_world/2008/07/now_in_papervision_the_4chan_g.html
Now in Paper-Vision: The 4chan Guy
Posted by Lev Grossman | Comments (15) | Permalink | Trackbacks (0) | Email This
This week’s Time has my profile of moot, the 20-year-old founder of 4chan. I first became aware of 4chan when I failed to credit them as the creators of lolcats, and they got in touch en masse to point that out. Now I see their influence everywhere — 4chan is like a black hole, invisible to the naked eye, but its gravity field is enormous. It’s also like a black hole in that it’s kind of scary.
Towards the end of the piece I mention moot’s real name: Christopher Poole. I figure there’s about a 5% chance that Christopher Poole is in fact not moot’s real name but some incredibly filthy 4chan inside joke. I took the chance because in person moot/Poole comes across as a really nice guy, and if he was playing me he was doing a hell of a good job. But it turns out the Wall Street Journal has the same story — had it shortly before we did, I think — so if we’re going down, at least we’re all going down together.
Anyway my real achievement in this piece was to persuade Time’s copy editors not to capitalize ‘moot.’ So my work is done.