Fredrick Brennan

Fredrick Robert Brennan (born February 21, 1994) is an American software developer and type designer who founded the imageboard website 8chan in 2013, before going on to repudiate it in 2019.

Fredrick Brennan was born on February 21, 1994, in Albany, New York.

He was born with osteogenesis imperfecta, commonly known as brittle bone disease, which stunted his growth and requires him to use a wheelchair.

He estimates he had broken bones 120 times by the time he was 19.

Brennan comes from a multi-generational family with osteogenesis imperfecta, and his mother has the same condition.

His parents divorced when Brennan was five years old.

He and his siblings were in his father's custody until Brennan was 14, when they were placed into the New York State foster care system, where Brennan remained until he was 16 while his mother went through the legal proceedings to regain custody.

He then lived with his mother until he was 18.

After graduating high school, he chose not to attend college.

Brennan was active in Internet culture from an early age, and was a regular 4chan user since 2006, when he was 12 years old.

Brennan began doing freelance work immediately after graduating from high school.

Brennan in the early 2010s identified himself as a libertarian; however, he became increasingly critical of the ideology, arguing that the libertarian approach to 8chan resulted in the creation of a system of feudalism.

He started by doing tasks on Amazon Mechanical Turk, making $5,000 ($ in dollars) in 2012 through the platform.

He later became a "requester" (employer) for the service, which earned him enough money to move from his mother's home in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to Brooklyn, New York.

There, he worked building websites as head of programming for RazorClicks, which does small business web marketing.

The company paid the rent for his apartment and he worked a second job, remotely, for a Canadian company to pay for expenses.

In 2012, he joined Wizardchan, an Internet community for male virgins.

Also in 2012, Brennan voted for Ron Paul in the 2012 United States presidential election.

According to Brennan, he bought Wizardchan from the original administrator in March 2013 and owned it until September 2013, when he resigned after losing his virginity.

In October 2013, Brennan launched 8chan, also called "Infinitechan" or "Infinitychan", after a month of raising pledges on Patreon.

It started with a small but loyal following.

Brennan initially ran the site anonymously, known only as "copypaste", the username he used in IRC chatrooms.

Following 8chan's surge in popularity in 2014, largely due to many Gamergate proponents migrating to the site from 4chan, Brennan moved to the Philippines to work for Jim Watkins, who provided hosting services to 8chan and later became the site's owner.

In January 2014, Brennan was robbed of almost $5,000 that he was saving up for a new wheelchair.

When the suspect was arrested, Brennan went to the police station for a lineup, but when a bus did not come on the way back, he was left stranded in the snow and later had to be treated for hypothermia.

He received a personal apology from New York City Police Commissioner, William J. Bratton.

RazorClicks began a donation campaign to help gather the remaining funds for a new wheelchair; $15,000 USD ($ in dollars) was raised in two months.

Brennan wrote an article in 2014 supporting the voluntary sterilization of people with similar severe inheritable genetic conditions.

In the article, Brennan states that only The Daily Stormer, a white supremacist and neo-Nazi website, would agree to publish it.

In May 2014, he was doxxed, and he decided to start putting his real name behind his work on 8chan.

Brennan cut ties with 8chan in 2016 and with Watkins in 2018.

Brennan has since become an outspoken critic of both 8chan and Watkins, and has actively battled to try to take 8chan offline.

Brennan is also an outspoken critic of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which centers on 8chan posts by an anonymous figure named "Q", and Brennan has researched who may be behind the Q identity.

In 2016, he supported Bernie Sanders for president.

Brennan developed a hatred of his parents for his life of constant pain, stating in an interview for Tortoise Media in 2019, "I don't want to speak for everybody with a disability, but I hate being disabled and I always have".

Brennan later became a Christian and ceased to believe in encouraging sterilization.

In 2019, he considered having a child with his wife but maintained that he still believed in genetic testing for prospective parents with disabilities.

In August 2019, Brennan said he was studying Tagalog.

Brennan's disability restricted his play activities during his childhood, so he became "hooked" on his first computer at the age of six.

Brennan taught himself to code, and wrote his first independent computer program at the age of 13.