Fredrick Brennan is a vivid dreamer, and toward the end of his time running the notorious website 8chan, one sequence would play out in his mind night after night as he slept.
Brennan, wheelchair-bound from a genetic disorder, dreamed that he was being hauled away by police and locked behind bars while dressed in an orange jumpsuit. “In my waking life, I could rationalize that that would never happen,” he says. But at night, in his dreams, denying the risks of operating the site he built and obsessively defended for years through a combination of slippery deflections, free-speech absolutism, and personal attacks was “getting harder and harder.”
Brennan, 25, is telling me about the days he spent running 8chan while living in a small studio apartment some 20 stories above the sprawl of Manila, far from New York where he began building the site as he came down from a psychedelic mushroom trip in 2013.
Brennan was born with osteogenesis imperfecta, more commonly referred to as brittle bone disease. His arms and legs are severely bowed from the condition, which, he says, also afflicts his mother and younger brother. He has, by his own tally, suffered dozens of broken bones over his life.
Brennan, photographed in New City in 2014.
Todd Heisler/The New York Times/Redux
Many of the photos of Brennan found online are screenshots pulled from a documentary made about him, a portion of which was filmed when he was 19 at his then-home while he was dressed in bright blue and red Super Mario pajamas. A lava lamp and a stuffed Mario mushroom in the background, he appears considerably younger, barely a teenager.
But when Brennan’s wife opens the door to his apartment on a ..
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