The Antisocial Network, directed by Arthur Jones and Giorgio Angelini, is a chilling film about how the internet affects real life and politics. During a period where online spaces served as both an escape from reality and a means of control over it, the documentary argues convincingly that there’s not only a straight line between 4chan shitposting and the January 6 insurrection but also common sense.
It begins with images of January 6th before introducing its main characters: countless hackers and former users of 4chan who grew up on anonymous image boards. These people lived through, participated in, sometimes even shaped the information age — for better or worse — but they don’t remember it fondly.
Jones and Angelini shoot most of their interviews in their subjects’ cramped bedrooms or basements or workspaces, surrounded by modern tech under dim neon lights that glow like eyes and suggest futurity. But what seemed like optimism in their memories of hanging out on Japanese-style “chan” boards in the early oughts curdles fast. Their voices waver.
From edgy inside-jokes-in-bad-taste to self-righteous mobilization-against-bad-actors that gave rise to hacktivist groups like Anonymous, The Antisocial Network does a lot of emotional work to explain how the web started spilling into real life. The subjects are self-aware enough — though Jones’s editing (with Devin Concannon, Drew Blatman, David Osit) fills in some blanks between cringes. It stitches each personal thread together with archival footage, old 4chan posts, even news stories about this or that convention-center Nazi-salute happening to quickly/rhythmically/amusingly tie these individuals’ points-of-view to wider ripple-effects: Sometimes a joke is just a joke; other times it segues into a group Sieg Heil at an anime convention.
The Antisocial Network is like a two-way mirror of cringe: The viewer flinches at images that are barely 10, maybe 15 years old while the interviewees blush at their own tacit or active complicity in chan culture. But it’s made digestible through some eye-popping animated sequences, often abstract. These start with people sitting at computers but slowly morph in weird ways until they’re cartoon figures straight outta The Sims donning V for Vendetta masks (à la Anonymous), still connected — by dark vine-tentacles — to some digital dimension just offscreen. It’s almost as if they were doing the bidding of collective “big tech” by stoking outrage and fear.
Both algorithms and people take center stage here, together, as the movie fast-forwards through the years dizzyingly. Yet The Antisocial Network never detaches itself from the United States’ political arc: From GamerGate to Trumpism to QAnon and beyond, each modern online movement with broader implications gets not just a shoutout but a nod — because same beast diff forms.
The Antisocial Network remains funny while making people responsible for themselves. A common theme is how good-hearted vigilantism can sometimes do more harm than good even when it stems from systems that fail to correct themselves. Across all political spectrums, the desire to fix things is universal because it often comes from a place of hopelessness or youthful naivety; but tragically this can also mean breaking apart the very world you want to save — one which then opens itself up further internally, revealing a self-righteous dark heart that likes being radical just for fun without caring about consequences.
Martin Crane’s carnivalesque music sets the scene as The Antisocial Network shows how digital water cooler conversations evolved into a game room where everything’s up for grabs and cultures change fast through easily copied slang and structures. What the movie does right is putting us at ground zero in this process so we can have our own dirty dopamine highs before waking back up into today’s reality. Few answers give “how did we get here?” less sense than with such ridiculousness.
Verdict
A chilling story told with amusing verve, The Antisocial Network charts the evolution of turn-of-the-century image boards into the conspiracy movements of today. With evocative animation and interviews with self-aware subjects who recognize their role in this sea-change, the documentary captures the scale and implications of an un-moderated internet spilling into real life.
