I haven’t been paying particularly close attention so I could be wrong, but it seems like 4chan has also made real contributions toward raising public awareness about the Church of Scientology and its crimes.
That’s the impression that I got too—does anyone have figures? Is recruitment down, or did the church have to spend a significant amount of money on damage control?
Scientology met its Vietnam (to quote a former CoS public relations officer who had by then escaped) in 1995 when it took on alt.religion.scientology. By 1997, it came out when they were suing Grady Ward that their income in 1997 was a quarter what it was in 1995. It was at that stage they’d already lost—the momentum against them was only going to increase (and this is indeed what happened) - and the rest was mopup.
tl;dr: they have taken such a hit from the Internet over the past fifteen years that their current income is a shadow of what it once was. However, they have enough reserves—Hubbard was very big on reserves—to keep all ther offices open for years and possibly decades if they wanted to.
No one’s done a definite estimate of the impacts, but “Project Chanology” did attract thousands of protestors and a lot of mainstream media attention. I didn’t mean to argue that 4chan has never accomplished anything positive, or even that there isn’t a lot of creative activity there—I just don’t see any of it as having advanced the frontiers of human understanding in any meaningful sense.
I haven’t been paying particularly close attention so I could be wrong, but it seems like 4chan has also made real contributions toward raising public awareness about the Church of Scientology and its crimes.
That’s the impression that I got too—does anyone have figures? Is recruitment down, or did the church have to spend a significant amount of money on damage control?
Scientology met its Vietnam (to quote a former CoS public relations officer who had by then escaped) in 1995 when it took on alt.religion.scientology. By 1997, it came out when they were suing Grady Ward that their income in 1997 was a quarter what it was in 1995. It was at that stage they’d already lost—the momentum against them was only going to increase (and this is indeed what happened) - and the rest was mopup.
tl;dr: they have taken such a hit from the Internet over the past fifteen years that their current income is a shadow of what it once was. However, they have enough reserves—Hubbard was very big on reserves—to keep all ther offices open for years and possibly decades if they wanted to.
No one’s done a definite estimate of the impacts, but “Project Chanology” did attract thousands of protestors and a lot of mainstream media attention. I didn’t mean to argue that 4chan has never accomplished anything positive, or even that there isn’t a lot of creative activity there—I just don’t see any of it as having advanced the frontiers of human understanding in any meaningful sense.