Christopher Poole is 22 years old, and as is often true for men his age, his mental life has been punctuated by a series of passing enthusiasms: video games, online chat rooms, Japanese animation. Currently he seems to be going through a Robert Moses phase. On the nightstand in his New York City apartment is a copy of The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, a 1,300-page biography of the mid-20th-century urban planner who, in pursuing his vision of a modernized New York, destroyed one neighborhood after another. A book of photos on Poole's coffee table documents the Moses-era demolition of midtown Manhattan's vast and graceful old Penn Station. ("Gut-wrenching," says Poole.) And on a recent Thursday afternoon, as he walked to work past Washington Square Park and observed the sweeping renovations under way there--a controversial relandscaping imposed by current city planners in the face of heavy local opposition--he saw parallels with the old autocrat's imperious approach to such projects. "Robert Moses is probably smiling," he said. "Like, 'Fuck the people--what do they know!' "

Like many people, Poole thinks there are better ways than Moses's to manage the tangled social, cultural, and infrastructural needs of a community of millions. But unlike most people--let alone most 22-year-olds--he actually has some experience doing just that. Seven years ago, Poole created the website 4chan, an online community that now has nearly 11 million monthly users and is, in some respects, as unruly as any metropolis. The site is what's known as an image board, a type of online message forum that encourages users to post both images and text, and its users now contribute more than a million messages a day, their content tending in the aggregate toward a unique mix of humor, pornography, offensiveness, and, at times, borderline legality. It has long been one of the largest message forums in the world, but Poole, the only owner 4chan has ever had, continues to run it as he has always done: in his spare time, with a little help from online volunteers and just enough advertising revenue to cover bandwidth costs.