Chris Chan and the New World Order
June 9, 2026
It is the late 2000's. You work for a three letter agency. The new millennium has presented new challenges for your agency, whose intelligence and espionage capabilities were already decades behind the rest of the world, and now finds itself playing an even more desperate game of catch-up, not only with your geopolitical adversaries, but with the world itself. The Soviet Union, whose rivalry with the United States was the entire justification for your agency's existence, has been dead for well over a decade now. The 9/11 attacks which kicked off the new millennium, while critically exposing the rampant corruption, incompetence and ineffeciency of your agency, at least justifies its continued existence. However, this has only managed to produce clandestine, unrecognized holding facilities in foreign countries, haphazardly abducting and torturing random people based off of baseless suspicion, serving no purpose for national intelligence beyond giving bored and underskilled agents an outlet. Much to your frustration, you don't get to participate in these games. You got this job because you're a nerd, and you're stuck behind a desk in the Virginia suburbs, trying to develop intelligence strategies for the still-new internet. Sure, it may have been born only a short drive away at the Department of Defense, but the NSA got all the cool surveillance jobs while the FBI gets all the fun of tracking down drug traffickers and child pornographers, and if interdepartmental communication wasn't such a clusterfuck those four planes would've never taken off. You're lost, and even though Congress routinely gives your agency unreasonable heaps of money, you are acutely aware that it's falling behind. Your agency, already unequipped for the Cold War, seems utterly pointless in the new post-Soviet world order.
At home, like at work, you spend your days locked on a computer screen, absentmindedly wandering through various web sites looking for something, anything of interest. While browsing a certain paid-entry forum, you notice a thread about some autistic guy, sulking about Charlottesville school libraries and arcades handing out business cards, looking for a "boyfriend-free girl," as he puts it. The original post contains a link to this person's website, a crudely designed, already outdated personal web site seemingly meant to display something called Sonichu, a crudely-drawn fan comic surrounding the adventures of a hybrid Sonic-Pikachu character. The web site contains a video of this person, wearing a striped sweater in a rapturously cluttered bedroom speaking in a high-pitched, squeaky voice. You don't think much of it. Just some weird, lonely loser in Virginia. It's funny, but that's you too. You decide to keep an eye on this thread before logging off, closing out the night with some torrented Gurren Lagann.
You don't know it yet, but you are about to witness something incredible. The Sonichu story spreads from somethingawful to 4chan's /v/ board, and, only two days after the original post, a page is created on Encyclopedia Dramatica, including, surprisingly, a voyeur shot of him at the Game Place in Charlottesville. Shortly after that page is created, Chris Chan, the creator of Sonichu, gets wind of it and responds furiously. This seems to set everyone off. Quicker than you can keep up, forum users have found his address and all of his personal details. More and more voyeuristic photos show up online and begin to spread. Some users begin posing as women and catfishing Chris Chan, manipulating him into sending more personal details, intimate photos, and even his prized Sonichu medallion, the recipient of which promptly shatters it for everyone to see. At every step of the way, Chris responds with increasing rage and desperation, which only seems to set the burgeoning community of obsessives off even further. You can't believe it. Finally, you've found something worth the agency's time.
Over the next few years, entire web sites and communities will spring up around the internet solely dedicated to observing, documenting, and harrassing this one person, such that he -- or she, now -- becomes, arguably, the single most thoroughly documented human being in history. Of course, you don't care much about that anymore. You got what you needed watching the early stages, and what you learned has completely revolutionized both your agency and national intelligence itself. All it took was one loser's life being completely ruined -- and, considering your agency's history, isn't that a small price to pay?
~ ~ ~
Three things happened in 2003. In February, the Information Awareness Office, a subsidiary agency of DARPA, created the Total Information Awareness program, a truly unprecedented mass surveillance program designed to collect massive amounts of biometric and transactional data and develop a correllative network of this data in order to predict terrorist attacks before they are perpetrated. Congress removes funding from this program in May of the same year in response to public outcry. The same month that the IAO is shut down, Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel creates Palantir, a company with the explicit mission of using Paypal's fraud detection systems for counterterrorism. Upon its founding, Palantir would receive a modest donation from venture capital firm In-Q-Tel, a firm primarily funded by the CIA with the goal of developing technologies that can assist in national security. Finally, in October, 15-year old somethingawful-subforum "Anime Death Tentacle Rape Whorehouse" user moot creates 4chan, its initial userbase primarily consisting of other ADTRW users frustrated by somethingawful founder Lowtax's distaste for anime, hentai, and lolicon.
Everybody knows the connections between early forums, imageboards and social media, national security and intelligence, venture capital, and the rise of the global far right by now. In 2004, Peter Thiel became Facebook's first outside investor, just one year after the creation of Palantir. In 2007, the same year that as Brietbart's founding, Steve Bannon becomes CEO of Affinity Media, formerly Internet Gaming Entertainment, a company which scraped World of Warcraft for gold and rare items to be resold for real money, after convincing Goldman-Sachs to invest in 2006. In 2011, just days after a meeting with controversial New York financier Jeffery Epstein, moot creates /pol/, only ten months after removing /new/ for increasingly reactionary content. In 2014, former somethingawful moderator Eliot Higgins, fka Brown Moses, creates OSINT group Bellingcat after his investigations into the Syrian Civil War. That same year, vindictive posts on somethingawful, 4chan, and so on by Depression Quest creator Zoe Quinn's ex-boyfriend kicks off gamergate, a reactionary explosion quickly capitalized on by Steve Bannon protege Milo Yiannopoulos, among others. Facebook incites a genocide in Myanmar. The alt-right, originating from /pol/, announces itself publicly in Charlottesville's Unite the Right rally, spearheaded both by former game heroes and future January 6th organizers. These details, and more, everybody already knows.
Up until now I have told you two seemingly imcompatible stories about the early internet's role in the growth of the security state and contemporary fascism. On the one hand, we have a story about national security and intelligence, venture capital and political agitators deliberately manipulating the early internet into a machine for political weaponization and intelligence gathering. On the other hand, we have a story about a sclerotic, failing intelligence state reacting to an organic harassment campaign as a new paradigm for intelligence gathering and political agitation -- and, beyond that, I haven't even told you what that sclerotic intelligence state was meant to have learned from the Chris Chan phenomenon.
At this point, I need to put forward a claim that will seem insane at first: gangstalking is real. As is typical of most conspiracy theory-adjacent beliefs, it is not strictly correct, the exact claims made are not exactly true, but the base phenomena described are real phenomena. The instinctual feeling motivating the perception that one is being gangstalked, that one is followed at all times by shadowy agents, every move observed and recorded for purposes unknown and entirely out of the observed's control, is correct. You are being followed at all times, your every move observed and recorded for purposes unknown to you and entirely out of your control. The error with gangstalking is twofold. First, the paranoiac aspect of gangstalking beliefs necessarily implicates that gangstalking is a particular phenomenon, certain individuals selected for any given reason for gangstalking surveillance, while in reality, gangstalking is a universal phenomenon. We are all gangstalked. Secondly, and more importantly, the paranoiac aspect of gangstalking beliefs implies a level of individual surveillance on the part of the surveilled -- individual actors deliberately and nefariously tracking others in concert, typically at the direct behest of some higher state or cryptocratic authority. In truth, however, contemporary surveillance does not require this level of direct, personal engagement. The truest refutation of somebody who believes that they are being tracked by shadowy figures at all times is not to simply claim that it isn't happening -- you won't convince them anyways -- but to point out that they don't need agents to track you anymore. National intelligence, surveillance and espionage are so thoroughly tied to and incorporated into the modern internet that you can be tracked, observed, and documented at all moments of the day without anybody ever needing to know anything about you. Everything about you has been documented, somewhere, even if nobody knows anything about you. This same naivety lies at the heart of "glowie" paranoia on some spaces of the internet. You don't need to worry about members of any three-letter agencies infiltrating your spaces, monitoring your activity and producing psyops: the space is the infiltration, your activity is the monitoring, and your speech, both its medium and content, is the psyop.
I have told you two contradictory stories, but not two incompatible stories, because it is this exact contradiction between nefarious top-down infiltration and cooptation on the one hand and organic, bottom-up, collective agitation which characterizes the contemporary surveillance state. Look at the creation of /pol/ from one angle, and you will see a wealthy sex trafficker with suspicious ties to American and Israeli intelligence convincing the creator of 4chan to make a space for the spread of extreme, violent reactionary politics. Look at it from another angle, and you will see this same politics developing sporadically, organically on /new/, and a wealthy sex trafficker with suspicious ties to American and Israeli intelligence catching wind of this and convincing moot to create a space for it to grow after the space where it originated had already been closed down. For every Peter Thiel picking up where the IAO had left off, creating a private surveillance and intelligence infrastructure for predictive policing, there are a hundred million users logging on every day, willingly surrendering the contents of their lives to these same intelligence systems without ever having been forced to do so.
This brings us, finally, back to Chris Chan. It is one thing to look at social media, smartphones, all the endless "free" digital conveniences where you are the commodity and see that internet users are willingly contributing to the content of the contemporary surveillance state. With Chris Chan, we see internet users, with no connections to intelligence, no coordination, and no prompting, spontaneously producing the contemporary surveillance state on their own. Nobody told them to do it, no three-letter agencies or venture capital firms paid them to do it, there was no clear incentive at all. They just did it. Just days after an offhand somethingawful thread about, frankly, some guy in Charlottesville with a webcomic and a creepy dating strategy (the first reply in which stated that Sonichu didn't even deserve its own thread), the foundations were laid for an improvized, ad-hoc approximation of the Total Information Awareness program directed exclusively towards one person. Chris Chan was the first victim of improvized, grassroots gangstalking, and every lolcow since then has followed in her conmdened footsteps.
~ ~ ~
You're sitting at your desk in Virginia. After monitoring the spread of the Sonichu phenomenon for a while, you are preparing a report on the potential utility of this phenomenon for national intelligence purposes. Racking your brain for days over how to distill this, admittedly, very stupid event into an initial experiment for your agency's future strategies, you manage to distill it into three core lessons:
- Surveillance is not your domain anymore. On the one hand, Chris Chan's participation in the formation of an improvized public panopticon, while heavily manipulated, was never explicitly coerced. Make no mistake, her participation in the channers' intelligence efforts were not strictly consensual, spurred on by a collection of stunningly dishonest and nefarious tactics on the part of the channers, but at every turn, from the publication of the Encyclopedia Dramatica page to today, Chris Chan made the choice to punch back, and in the provess to reveal more of herself, to give her tormenters more to work with. Every single one of these choices was the wrong choice, but can you blame her? The essence of the internet, the immediate publicization of the private, the immediate, universal and direct access to an individual life, incentivizes not wisely shrinking away from the spotlight, protecting yourself from further harm while cutting yourself off from a rapidly diversifying world and giving the tormentors the last laugh, but self-defense, protecting your newly found public persona, standing proudly in the line of fire as endless volleys reduce you to scraps. On the other hand, Chris Chan's tormentors created, by themselves, an apparatus for observation and documentation which, while always disorganized, chaotic and directionless, would eventually rival and even surpass the comprehensiveness of your agency's own efforts. Intelligence, surveillance and documentation, once the exclusive property of your little Langley clique, is now a public asset, both constructed by and targeting everyone and anyone.
- Psyops will create themselves. In their efforts to justify what was, to any outside observer, an unprecedented form of cruelty against somebody who, in a just world, would have earned a quiet, unremarkable and quickly-forgotten life like anybody else, the Chris Chan gangstalkers enact a delightful program of self-delusion. A narrative begins to form around the condemned Sonic superfan: rather than an unremarkable, albeit rather creepy neurodivergent nerd, Chris Chan was in fact evil, immoral, a hateful, bigoted, misogynistic creep who deserved the public humiliation and torture to which she was subjected. Make no mistake, Chris Chan, before becoming a global pariah, was a bigoted, misogynistic creep, but the harassment campaign was organized on a website whose seven initial boards was a lolicon board which had to be hastily deleted after users began posting actual child pornography, and would go on to foster the growth of an international resurgent fascist movement. This self-delusion was so effective that almost all mentions of Chris Chan today will elicit the same bottled response: "yeah, the harassment was bad, but Chris Chan assaulted his [sic] mother, so it's not like he [sic] was a good person either." Let me be clear: that is a bad thing to do. At the same time, it is patently ridiculous for this action to become retroactive justification for a decades-long harassment campaign which so thoroughly destroyed its victim's psychology that she was capable of such an act. The organic, bottom-up spread of useful delusions to justify previously unthinkable acts -- in short, psyops -- can be seen everywhere nowadays. A vague post about Donald Trump signed with the letter Q appears on /pol/, and suddenly your uncle believes that the Great Solar Flash will obliterate the evil interdimensional reptilians who control the United States government, and that he must storm the United States Capitol building in order to assist it. A fabricated story of child sexual assault appears on Facebook in Myanmar, and mass genocidal violence springs out against Rohingya Muslims, sinking the country into civil war and turning Bangladesh into the home of the largest refugee camp in the world. These sorts of things have always occurred, of course, but were only ever highly localized phenomena. It was easy for rumors of a trampled cockade to end in Louis at the guillotine when all of French political power lay in an 11 mile radius of the Paris city center, but such events on a national level were restricted to the press and state organs, deliberate psyops a resource-intensive and often unsuccessful effort. Such phenomena on a gloabl scale was nearly impossible. Not only does the internet allow psyops on an unprecedented scale and ferocity, but they are public works, stemming from anyone and spreading to anyone organically, deliberate psychological operations typically linked to assisting the spread of organically produced delusions.
- Cruelty is the only motivator. The harassment of Chris Chan was not motivated by some perceived sense of justice against a bad actor. It was blind cruelty, the uncontrollable urge to not only bear witness but participate in the destruction of a person for which you will never face the consequences. The reward for participation was not payment, not a sense of justice, not the restitution of any of Chris Chan's supposed victims, but another enraged outburst, another step into insanity. This is universal. If you ask a participant in the resurgent global right why they believe what they believe, why they do what they do, you will get a handful of strange excuses: violent criminals are allowed to enter and corrupt our country, trans people and doctors are indoctrinating and mutilating children, women would rather have sex with an asshole jock instead of a nice guy like me, etc. These are all bullshit, but that doesn't matter. All of these justifications, like those for Chris Chan, are smokescreens for the true motivation of blind, nihilistic cruelty. Patriotism, justice, nature, all of these are dead. Their invocation may help the perpetrators of cruelty sleep at night, but are only tied to the truth of these claims insofar as they can justify their compulsion to exert themselves on someone, to see somebody crumble, and to get away with it.
~ ~ ~
In the reorganization of national intelligence, surveillance, and psychological operations, Chris Chan becomes both sacrificial lamb and prophet, given over to unspeakable horror to enact the new age, announcing the coming dimensional merge which, with her, has already occurred. The distinct realms of intelligence and public, of surveiller and surveilled, of psychological operative and psychologically operated, have fully passed into each other, each using the same tactics in the same medium, for, increasingly, the same purpose, the maintenance of an abominable global system of cruelty, no longer ruled by cause and effect, subject and object, enactor and enacted, but a schizophrenic, chaotic network of influence and subversion, all documented on an eternal fabric which dies quicker than anything truly alive. The world has so thoroughly molded itself to the shape of the destruction of Chris Chan, the first true victim of gangstalking, that its repetition in exact form is no longer possible, if only for the fact that Chris Chan is no longer unique. We are all Chris Chan, or at least at risk of becoming her. We are all her harassers, or at least of risk of becoming them. We are all gangstalked and gangstalker. It is no wonder that gangstalking proper occupies such a prominent place in contemporary paranoid delusion. It is real, but its reality is harder to comprehend than the hallucination. In a thoroughly atomized world, ruled by an incomprehensible, chaotic network of influence, paranoid delusion is maybe the only sense that some of us can find, and cruelty the only motivation that some of us can follow.