Discover GOP Opprobrium

[teapeebubbles]

Time magazine reported on Monday, with a palpable air of embarrassment:

In a stunning result, the winner of the third annual TIME 100 poll, and new owner of the title world's most influential person, is Moot. The 21-year-old college student and founder of the online community 4chan.org, whose real name is Christopher Poole, received 16,794,368 votes and an average influence rating of 90 (out of a possible 100) to handily beat the likes of Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin and Oprah Winfrey. To put the magnitude of the upset in perspective, it's worth noting that everyone Moot beat out actually has a job.

Since Moot launched 4chan.org in 2003, the site has given birth to Internet memes as diverse as Lolcats and Rickrolling. 4chan averages 13 million page views a day and 5.6 million visitors a month; by some estimates it is the second largest bulletin board in the world.
Although Time was clearly attempting to put a good face on the matter by pointing to the undeniable influence of moot's invention, it quickly became clear that the magazine's understanding of just how badly they'd been gamed was as out of touch as that capital "M" they attacked to moot's name.

As Stan Schroeder pointed out at mashable.com:

One can easily argue that 4chan is one of the most influential sites on the Internet; in the world of odd memes, obscure anime images and bizarre photoshops - and these make a very large and important portion of the entity we refer to as “the Internet” - moot is king.

However, the results of the vote have nothing to do with influence. If you think that this is the result of a fair vote, think again. The entire first 21 results, as noted days ago, are the result of an elaborate hack done by 4chan users.

It’s surprising, thus, that Time pretends that everything is alright. From their article about the results:

“Moot denies knowing about any concerted plan by his followers to influence the poll, though TIME.com’s technical team did detect and extinguish several attempts to hack the vote.“

Erm, extinguish? The vote is obviously hacked. Time’s attempts to fix the damage came too late, and the 4chan folks managed to put the encrypted message back into order (if you read the first letters of the first 21 names on the list, the message reads “Marblecake also the game”).
The secret of how the epic hack was accomplished is explained -- in great technical detail -- at the Music Machinery blog. To make a long story very short, it seems that the denizens of 4chan started out by merely creating "autovoters" to put moot at the top of the list, but soon discovered a way to vote any nominee up or down with complete precision.

Zombocom, the creator of this ultimate hack, told Music Machinery that the point of the mysterious "Marblecake" message spelled out by the winners' names was to add his own signature to the joke:

Marblecake was an irc channel where the “Message to Scientology” video originated. Many believe we are “dead” or only doing hugraids etc, so I thought it would also be a way of saying : we’re still around and we don’t just do only “moralfag” stuff.
Does Zombocom's hack foretell a future where both political and moral influence will be superseded by the internet's seeming ability to reality at will? We can only wait and find out.