Vanity Fair profiles moot

This month's issue of Vanity Fair hits it out of the park! In addition to the Stuxnet article that I was reading over the weekend, there's a short article about Jack Dorsey, formerly of Twitter and now of Square.

And, then, tucked in-between a memoir from JFK Jr's ex-girlfriend and a memoir from William Styron's daughter, we find this: 4chan's Chaos Theory, all about moot, a.k.a. Christopher Poole, and his creation: 4chan.

Covering 4chan is venturing far, far afield for Vanity Fair, which usually prefers to discuss subjects such as celebrities, politics, or fashion (ideally, all three, c.f. the article on JFK Jr mentioned above).

But here, in the pages of stately Vanity Fair, we find an article containing phrases such as:

Don't feed the troll.

/b/

IRL

Low-orbit ion cannon.

rick-rolling

Rule 1. Rule 2. and Rule 3.

This is strange and alien stuff for Vanity Fair to be covering, indeed! I'll venture that I'm one of a very short list of VF subscribers who even knew what these things were prior to taking this issue.

But it's interesting and topical stuff, covering issues of the day such as Wikileaks, the attack on Gawker, Anonymous vs. HBGary, and so on. The dark side of the Internet has finally met up with modern society; everyone has a Facebook nowadays and we're all part of whatever thing this is that the online world has become. In every society there are a range of participants, from boring citizens like me to the pranksters, clowns, cut-ups and out-right dissenters and rebels. Bravo to Vanity Fair for dipping a toe into the chilly waters of 2011; what wonders will occur next?