How Boxxy brought the web to its knees
One girl and her quirky videos are taking over the internet. And if you’re confused, imagine what things will be like in 100 years…
The internet is a funny old place. I often wonder to myself about the things that future generations will uncover when they dig back through what we did during the early days of the web – a sort of digital archaeology – and witness a series of odd jokes and weird threads that leave them utterly baffled.
Most internet memes fall into that category – a mixture of context, insanity and peer pressure that creates a snowball that’s funny for a bit before becoming ubiquitous and tiresome. Rickrolling, anyone?
But sometimes memes go even further: they turn anonymous individuals into mini-celebrities for no discernable reason. Which is why the story of Boxxy, an unidentified young woman who went from being just another unknown YouTuber to causing civil war on one of the world’s biggest websites, is so bizarrely fascinating.
You’d be forgiven for missing this over the past few weeks, but if you’ve been surfing the darker corners of the web in recent weeks you might have come across Boxxy (videos about her have racked up millions of hits on YouTube) and wondered what the hell was going on.
A year ago a young, unnamed and heavily-eyelinered young woman who hung around on Gaia Online made a video. She went by the handle of Boxxy.
That’s it. Or at least it was for nearly 12 months.
At Christmas, the video – by then languishing in YouTube’s vaults – got posted to i-am-bored, and from there hit 4Chan, and in particular the site’s /b/ messageboard… the heartland for many memes (and definitely NSFW). Why? Nobody’s sure. Was Boxxy herself behind it? Or was she simply a vehicle for fans who liked her camgirl approach, apparent ADD and weirdly excitable behaviour?
Over the subsequent days and weeks, Boxxy became a topic of contention on 4Chan – with the site splitting into two groups; those who professed to love Boxxy and all she stood for and those who hated Boxxy and her fans. Every thread threaten to spill over into Boxxy spam or a flamewar, and hundreds of 4channers went hacking Boxxy’s YouTube account and other websites in search of her true identity. So far they don’t seem to have succeeded.
Things really came to a head, though, when Boxxy haters – sick of seeing so much about her on 4Chan – decided to launch a denial of service attack on the website itself, bringing it down for some hours as a protest.
Things haven’t stopped there, though. The YouTube channel Boxxybabee is the site’s most-subscribed to for the month; videos are still being made about how much people hate Boxxy, and her influence continues to spread inexplicably.
OK, yes, the whole story is extremely convoluted. But it’s the sort of thing that I saw in evidence at ROFLCon earlier this year: somebody who is entirely unknown can get picked up for basically doing nothing, but doing it in public.
So when our future digital archaeologists start looking back at our actions, they’ll come across Boxxy and look confused. How on earth do you relate that story in a way that makes sense in 100 years, given that it makes basically no sense right now? That’s partly what I love about the internet – and partly what makes my brain hurt.
