It’s a Friday in early January and someone on 4chan has invented a new philosophical doctrine: “esoteric Kantianism”. “You must not take Kant’s words at face value,” the anonymous user warns – readers who do so will only take away shallow insights about the half-blind “normie mind”. “You must read between the lines.”
A reading revolution is taking place on this notorious message board, most famous for alt-right memes, anything-goes chatter, and large-scale coordinated pranks (several hoax bomb threats organised by the site have led to arrests and mass evacuations). Users operate under total anonymity and are subject to bare-bones moderation. Most of the ideological avenues offered in /pol/, its politics forum, would leave you estranged from polite society and banned from any conventional social media.
And yet, a new secret generation of autodidacts – frustrated with the state of modern academia and the dilution of the traditional canon – are turning to the website as an unlikely home for literary ambition. Britain’s working class used to shelter a legion of autodidacts, too: set on self-improvement, they staged Shakespeare productions and read classic literature without input from local authorities or red-brick academics. Later, in mid-century America, door-to-door salesmen shilled 54-book sets of Mortimer Adler’s Great Books of the Western World to people who wanted a classical education. This impulse hasn’t gone away. It has migrated to /lit/.
The members of /lit/, 4chan’s literary subforum, love Dostoyevsky, Joyce and Nabokov. They abhor the gatekeepers of traditional publishing and the moral pieties that beset academia in the 2010s. They’ve created their own recommendation ecosystem in the form of homemade charts, huge Jpegs which serve as visual reading guides. “Start with the Greeks,” the most famous one says, leading beginners through an annotated flowchart from modern mythological retellings to Homer and then, eventually, Aristotle. This advice is dished out to wannabe autodidacts on /lit/ so often that it has become a meme. (“I will not start with the Greeks,” says a gun-toting civilian in one image, as soldiers surround his house and order him to read Plato.)
Gen Z might be going to university at record rates. But the transformational ideals on 4chan find no equal in the English-speaking academy. And so an instinct once associated with leftish institutions like universities is migrating into the purview of the very-online right. 4chan is becoming a natural home for the ambitious reader.
Take the Atlantic article last year that revealed students at America’s most elite institutions no longer have the stamina or fluency needed to read entire novels for class. Literature classes in American schools are gradually exchanging “whole books” for short, analysable extracts, which provide a close model of the sort of reading involved in standardised testing. At the university level, lecturers are adjusting their syllabuses in turn to suit those who don’t or can’t read for long periods: one Melville specialist at Columbia has stopped teaching undergraduates Moby-Dick (voted /lit/’s favourite book in 2023). And similar omissions are filtering into the real-world intelligentsia: the editor of the New York Times’ book review section recently admitted on a podcast that he had not read George Eliot’s Middlemarch (fine, perhaps, for a normal person, but not for a literary editor at the New York Times).
When the Atlantic article was reposted on /lit/, the board’s denizens – between angry segues about mass immigration and chemsex (as is to be expected on 4chan) – seemed to agree with its claims. “I must be the only 22 year old on the planet who goes to my college library to find books by John Ruskin,” one wrote. “These are follow up indoctrination thinking schools [sic],” another said of modern universities. 4chan’s book ecosystem, with its focus on the traditional canon, seems to provide a refuge for those disillusioned by the bare-bones treatment of literature in the English-speaking academy. One user attests that English lit in 2025 “is taught basically as a technique or a social-civic tool rather than anything approximating an art”.
The inhabitants of /lit/ see themselves as the victim of anti-canon efforts, as the academy has sought to “decolonise” and expand the curriculum over the past decade. And /lit/’s reaction is hardly unreasonable: there’s a difference between great books (well-written, perhaps undiscovered) and Great Books, which stay in the accepted canon because they have had an outsized influence on influential writers. It isn’t testable and it doesn’t contribute to any sort of transferable skill – but there is revelatory joy in following a thread from one work to the next, watching as previously hidden details reveal themselves in spoken language and in popular culture.
This experience is unavailable in 2025’s version of academia, but it can be found online – on dodgy message boards and in pirated PDFs. All sorts of students hunger for great literature, but autodidact culture seems to move from one political pole to another based on the infrastructure available. In Britain, Victorian “mutual improvement societies” and 20th-century labour colleges either leaned to the left or were openly associated with communist groups. This side can blame itself for the modern political proclivities of /lit/: humanities academia shifted in the 1960s to accommodate the revolutionary likes of Foucault and Freire, but its current bar to entry – tens of thousands of pounds, plus years on a low doctoral wage – keeps any remaining benefits out of reach to the large majority. And leftists have been slow to produce any mainstream criticism of Big Tech companies, which pushed us into an accelerated state of post-literacy after making a commodity and business out of attention.
But there will always be people who want a long, consequential view of the humanities, regardless of their financial circumstances or previous educational background. This time, the online right has provided the intellectual scaffolding and infrastructure.
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2025/01/how-4chan-became-the-home-of-the-elite-reader (Archive)
