You’re probably thinking: What?! How did a social media service known for its niche and nerdy communities become the site of one of this year’s biggest national security scandals? Yet this story isn’t really so shocking. We’ve seen it before.
Jack Teixeira of the Massachusetts Air National Guard formed with his friends an invitation-only Discord clubhouse in 2020 — not so incidentally, the year covid-19 forced much of the country into isolation. The server’s eventual name, “Thug Shaker Central,” is a racist and pornographic allusion. This was fitting for a collective of mostly men and boys fond of discussing military gear, playing first-person shooter games, telling offensive jokes and, reportedly, praising God.
The difference with Teixeira, self-cast in his role as the war-gaming corps’ leader, was that he also allegedly enjoyed sharing U.S. government secrets.
The particulars of this case are new, but the basics are about as old as, well, the modern-day internet. Several weeks ago, some of the documents posted to Thug Shaker Central were shared to a public Discord server called “wow_mao,” and some quickly spread to another server focused on the popular video game Minecraft. “Here, have some leaked documents,” the user on the Minecraft server said. “Nice,” another user replied. Some of the documents eventually landed on April 5 in a thread on 4chan’s infamous Politically Incorrect (/pol/) message board.
Nice. The word, deployed in this way, captures the ethos of sites like these: casually dismissive of what any normie would consider a big deal of a file drop. Maybe the vast understatement is what’s supposed to be amusing. Or maybe the user thinks that the documents themselves could be a gag. This is how many people who live much of their lives on the internet behave. Irony suffuses each and every interaction, to the point that it’s nearly impossible to tell when something, or someone, is sincere.
In these meme-laced conversations, de-codeable only to the initiated and even then always in doubt, everything is assumed to be a joke (such as the idea very popular on these forums ahead of the 2016 election that Donald Trump should be president). Why not let loose? The stakes don’t seem that high in these little bubbles of like-minded individuals who have created a language no one in the outside world even really understands. This isn’t real life, after all. It’s only the internet.
The problem is that this attitude can allow things to go too far too fast. 4chan, where the documents eventually showed up, has for years been the place to be for disaffected young guys with vaguely reactionary sympathies. Think of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Yes, sure, “Stop the Steal” in time turned up on Facebook. But before these plans migrated to the mainstream, they thrived on Gab, and Parler, TheDonald.win and, yes, 4chan.
Or look further back to GamerGate, a years-long harassment campaign in which a cadre of angry web dwellers, under the pretext of fighting “unethical” games journalism, systematically threatened and doxed their feminist targets. The labyrinthine details aren’t worth teasing out, but the point was this: A bunch of disaffected young guys huddled in the shadowy corners of the internet, doing what’s commonly known as sh–posting, transformed into a mob as soon as someone identified at whom to shake their pitchforks.
Anything goes until it doesn’t: wisecracks on 8chan about beating a mass shooter’s “high score” by racking up a greater body count, until someone decides to go to an El Paso Walmart and actually kill people.
Now, to be fair to the Thug Shaker Central brigade, none of the members appear to have done anything violent — or, really, anything at all besides goggle at the clandestine goodies their pal was offering up. Yet the same nothing-matters mind-set that undergirds many internet communities helps explain why a low-level airman only a few years out of college has been arrested for blithely spilling the beans on the country’s Russia-Ukraine strategy to a random collective of kids.
How could Teixeira explain that the “NOFORN” stamped across the images he is accused of uploading meant they were considered too sensitive to be viewed by foreigners — aware all the while that many of his companions were themselves foreign? How could everyone else just shrug? How could they not worry about what would happen to troops on the ground, to the geopolitical order, to themselves as they witnessed so plain a violation of the law? It’s simple, when a cardinal rule of the internet is that nothing is to be taken seriously.
The lines between the animated machine gunning and grenade throwing that the members of the Thug Shaker Central Discord reveled in and the disclosures of actual war that Teixeira allegedly took it upon himself to share were too blurry to see. Stuff had become, literally, too real — but it was hard, in an echo chamber cordoned off from reality, to notice. It probably felt a whole lot like a game.
