Moot, 4chan Founder, Takes Time 100 Poll

The Wall Street Journal
April 27

The twentysomething founder of 4chan.org won Time’s title of “World’s Most Influential Person” despite accusations that the meme site’s fans hacked the online poll.

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Rick Warren, who came in No. 3 on Time’s “World’s Most Influential People” list.

The founder, Christopher Poole, also known as “moot,” received 16.8 million votes. Malaysian politician Anwar Ibrahim was a distant runner up, with 2.3 million votes, followed by evangelist Rick Warren with 1.9 million. The rest of the top 10 included Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, Google.org head Larry Brilliant, Attorney General Eric Holder, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, basketball star Kobe Bryant and Bolivian president Evo Morales.

While 4chan is one of the most popular sites for kick-starting viral videos and online trends like Rickrolling, with a self-proclaimed 3 million unique visitors a month, it’s unlikely that Mr. Poole tops the list of influential people in the lives of 16 million Time magazine readers.

It seems that 4chan fans managed to hack Time’s poll, as described by Paul Lamere, who writes software for Apple and was evidently invited to participate in a scheme to stuff the ballot box with millions of autovotes.

Time.com editor Josh Tyrangiel says the hack quickly became obvious, and while they tried to thwart it by removing illegitimate votes and using a captcha system, the autovoting persisted. “Which proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that [moot] is the most influential person in the world,” he jokes.

More than 100 comments arrived in response to Mr. Lamere’s blog post about the hack. “This is utterly artistic. While I certianly [sic] would not have voted for moot before this, I will be doing so now. Repeatedly,” wrote user GBM. “4chan really does own the internet,” wrote John.

Another commenter, xhurricane, had a more cynical take. “TIME.com probably doesn’t have a vested interest in canceling those bot votes - since they are now counting that as user activity and will be able to justify higher ad rates to their adverts. Maybe, just maybe, TIME.com got the upper hand in this one and leveraged the power of the rabid fans to artificially increase their value!”

Mr. Tyrangiel says people have asked him if he’s angry about the poll getting hacked, but he thinks it’s a testament to what the Web is all about — that is, who has the most influence or motivation to get so many votes. “As it turns out, Vladimir Putin’s people weren’t as motivated, even though he has more of them, and he probably has greater sway,” he says.

Last year’s poll is an indication of how scientific the results are: Political satirist Stephen Colbert and Korean pop singer Rain topped the list. They may not be as influential as world leaders, but both have hordes of enthusiastic followers.

“We’ll try to secure it as best we can,” Mr. Tyrangiel says of future Time polls, though he adds that he and his staff only have a limited amount of time to isolate bots. In the case of hackers, he says, “it appears that there’s no limit to how much leisure time some people have.”

In fact, yes, he won. The problem is with those who take such polls as granted and even more, shape their value systems according to such evaluations.

How to spend our time (mostly with ourselves)

Having very demanding and busy professional lives, we use to complain often - if not all the time, perhaps as an excuse for not being able to find other topic to address with other fellow humans, apparently eager to see - we don't have time, social life, beyond our scheduled devoted, at least 5 days the week, to the life in our offices.

But, when it's possible to meet other people, not sharing the same "fantastic" life targets - based, guess !, on our very demanding jobs - we cannot do anything else than to checking nervously our complicate cell phones or to send short messages. Because, in these tormented times, more than ever, we have to fight for our salary. Instead to enjoy a different conversation and pleasant presences or, simply, a different environment, we are keeping tight our connections exclusively with our offices.

During my last vacations, I'd observed (too) many young couples spending a wonderful time abroad fighting and arguing each other. Normal. It was the only time they were able to share together and they discovered the lack of any kind of communication.

I'm fully aware our daily lives these days are by far three times more complicated than it was 15 years ago. In order to survive, you need to be always ready, stubborn, strong enough to cope with stress and intellectual pollution. Also, than not all of us are doing the job they dreamed to since they were children and getting a secure salary is almost all they want before going retired. The other side of the story is that we don't have any excuse to unlearn the social language and to enjoy, even for one minute but for a one full minute, the other people's presence. Against the broad accepted image of the workaholic, I'm more and more convinced that outperforming individuals are those who have the sense of their time and could see, at a glance, what's worthy or not to focus your attention and those subjects could be not-at-all professionally related. If somebody is telling me he/she's not having time to do anything else than the office life, I'll be extremely reluctant to deal with, because the resources are limited and the lack of social imagination and intelligence are good predictors that, sooner or late this person will be a very devoted robot, but an extremely limited human.

Denying the present

“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden”. (…)
Excerpt from T.S. Eliot, “No. 1 of 'Four Quartets'”

I don’t remember exactly when I’ve read this poetry for the first time. I don’t purposely learn verses by heart, since I finished the primary school. But in this case, everything fit automatically into my mind. It sounds so natural, in a way: in fact, both present and past are reorganized and projected permanently into an unknown future, only to diminish this uncertainty. We are present, physically, but in fact we are almost all the time absent. Sometimes, I think we are fully enjoying the present while sleeping, because only then we are out of the normative time. We wake up thinking what we’ll have to do; we finish our day thinking what we’ve done. We start our lives as a plan – of the others, mainly our family; when we grow up we are able ourselves to manage our escape from the present. I haven’t yet fully evaluated the percentage, but mostly we spend our lives in an antechamber: waiting to grow up, to have our “future”, to accomplish our “dreams”, to have a family, to help our children to be themselves, to dye. Some are desperately hoping/believing in an after-life, but as the continuation of the same mechanical waiting lines.