The Antisocial Network Review - IGN (2024)

From directors Arthur Jones and Giorgio Angelini, The Antisocial Network paints a chilling portrait of how the internet bleeds over into real life and real politics. Chronicling an era when online spaces serve as both escape hatch and a mechanism for control, , the documentary convincingly claims that it’s not only possible to draw a straight line from 4chan sh*tposts to the January 6 insurrection, but prudent.

Funny and haunting in equal measure, the film follows Jones and Angelini's previous documentary Feels Good Man (which Jones directed and Angelini produced), which traces Pepe the Frog’s arc from guileless web-comic character to innocuous meme to coded hate symbol. With The Antisocial Network, the duo magnifies this concept through their macro approach, charting a course between early web forums and modern mobs fueled by conspiracies.

It begins with images of January 6, before introducing its primary subjects: numerous hackers and former 4chan users who came of age on anonymous image boards. These people witnessed, partook in, and in some ways even shaped the information age, for better or worse, though they don't look back at their journeys through rose-tinted glasses.

Jones and Angelini conduct their interviews largely in their subjects' cramped personal spaces, in which they're surrounded by modern tech, with dim neon lighting that both draws the eye and hammers home a sense of futuristic possibility. However, the optimism in their recollections of frequenting Japanese-style "chan" boards in the 2000s turns quickly to regret. Their voices betray a sense of hesitance.

From edgy in-jokes in bad taste to self-righteous mobilization against bad actors that gave rise to hacktivist groups like Anonymous, The Antisocial Network creates a detailed retrospective of how the web began spilling into real life, and the emotional forces behind it. The subjects display self-awareness, but the editing by Jones, Drew Blatman, Devin Concannon, and David Osit fills in the gaps between their cringing. It weaves each thread together with archival footage, old 4chan posts, and even news stories about the site's antics, in order to immediately, rhythmically, and amusingly connect these individual perspectives to their wider ripple effects. Sometimes a joke is just a joke, but sometimes it dovetails into a group Sieg Heil at an anime convention.

The Antisocial Network is a two-way mirror of discomfort: The viewer flinches at images that are barely 10 to 15 years old while the interviewees express embarrassment at their tacit or active participation in chan culture. However, the saga is made digestible through some eye-popping, often abstract animated sequences. These begin with individuals at their computers, but slowly morph in imaginative ways, as Sims-like cartoon people don V for Vendetta masks (à la Anonymous) but remain tethered, by dark tendrils, to a digital dimension just beyond reach. It’s as though they’re doing the bidding of collective "big tech" by stoking outrage and fear.

Both algorithms and people take center stage, often at the same time, as the movie skips rapidly forward through the years. But The Antisocial Network never divorces itself from the United States' political trajectory: From GamerGate to Trumpism to QAnon and beyond, each modern online movement with broader implications finds itself not just mentioned, but linked to one another – the same beast in different forms.

What’s most incisive about The Antisocial Network is how it remains thoroughly funny while essentially holding its audience to account. A key thread follows the way well-meaning vigilante justice can go off the rails and cause harm, even when its motivation involves broken systems that refuse to self-correct. The impulse to fix the world is one everyone shares across all political stripes. It's often a response to helplessness and misguided youth, but tragically, it can also result in breaking the world open even further from within, revealing a dark core that grants itself permission to be "edgy" and flout social norms without a thought for the implications.

With carnivalesque music by Martin Crane, The Antisocial Network maps the evolution of the digital water cooler into an arcade, with gamified interactions and a quickly shifting, easily mimicked vernacular that results in true cultural transformation. The film gets right into the middle of this process, and allows the audience to get swept up in some of its raunchy, taboo dopamine hits from time to time, before yanking us back to the contemporary reality left in its wake. The answer to the question "How did we get here?" has rarely been presented with such absurdity and clarity.