Identity
Christopher Poole's actual name (previously known only as moot) was revealed on July 9, 2008, in The Wall Street Journal. The same day, Lev Grossman of Time published an interview describing Poole's influence as a non-visible administrator as "one of the most " on the evolution of content collaboration. Although Grossman's article began with the confession that "I don't even know his real name," he claimed to identify moot as Christopher Poole. Later, on July 10, Grossman admitted that there was an outside chance that Christopher Poole was not moot's real name, rather an obscure reference to a 4chan inside joke. The Washington Post concurred that "Christopher Poole" could be "all a big hoax, a 'gotcha.' It would be just what you'd expect from the creator of 4chan." In March 2009, Time backpedaled somewhat on the issue by placing the moot persona on the 2009 Time 100 finalists list. Prior to the Wall Street Journal and Time interviews, moot deliberately kept his real identity separate from 4chan. He told Grossman, "my personal private life is very separate from my Internet life ... There's a firewall in between." As moot, he has spoken at conferences at Yale University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A 2008 article in The Observer had him down as "the most influential web entrepreneur you've never heard of," though he has since been described in more limited terms such as "benefactor."
In February 2009, The Washington Post reported that Poole had attended Virginia Commonwealth University for a few semesters before dropping out. It reported that Poole was living with his mother while looking for a way to make money from owning 4chan.
Read more about this topic: Christopher Poole
Famous quotes containing the word identity:
“Unlike Boswell, whose Journals record a long and unrewarded search for a self, Johnson possessed a formidable one. His life in London—he arrived twenty-five years earlier than Boswell—turned out to be a long defense of the values of Augustan humanism against the pressures of other possibilities. In contrast to Boswell, Johnson possesses an identity not because he has gone in search of one, but because of his allegiance to a set of assumptions that he regards as objectively true.”
—Jeffrey Hart (b. 1930)
“Adultery is the vice of equivocation.
It is not marriage but a mockery of it, a merging that mixes love and dread together like jackstraws. There is no understanding of contentment in adultery.... You belong to each other in what together you’ve made of a third identity that almost immediately cancels your own. There is a law in art that proves it. Two colors are proven complimentary only when forming that most desolate of all colors—neutral gray.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)
“There is a terrible blindness in the love that wants only to accommodate. It’s not only to do with omissions and half-truths. It implants a lack of being in the speaker and robs the self of an identity without which it is impossible for one to grow close to another.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)