Can 4chan Get a Toronto Condo Named After Their Founder?

By David Topping

At left, an illustration of the as-yet unnamed condo coming to Yonge and the Esplanade. At right, the leaderboard as of Wednesday night.

There’ve been five hundred names submitted in just a few days for the “Name Our Condo” contest, to anoint a thirty-six-storey tower being built at Yonge and the Esplanade. The winning submission gets $5,000, and each of the two runners-up, an iPad. Of those five hundred names, there’s already one clear frontrunner: m00t.
That—m00t (or moot)—is the internet handle of Christopher Poole, the founder of 4chan. 4chan, if you didn’t know already, is the Internet’s strange, dark, magical netherworld: it’s their users who do things like mobilize against Scientology, pioneer the Rickroll, and game voting systems to have Poole chosen as Time‘s “World’s Most Influential Person” or to send Justin Bieber to North Korea. Now, a small sect of 4chan-ers have turned their eyes to the Toronto waterfront.
“Am I concerned?” says Sam P. Crignano, a partner with cityzen, the condo project’s developers. “Sure, I’m concerned.”

“Who knows that their motives are? It’s difficult to guess.”
The submitted “rationale” accompanying the contest entry—filled with 4chan inside jokes—offers few answers:

Fitting to the area the Condo is located, “m00t” represents the culture of Downtown Toronto. Whether you’re in the St. Lawrence Market eating some marblecake with your pal Milhouse or doing barrel rolls all the way down to Lake Ontario, you’re not worrying about the long trek home. m00t is nearby and being home is one of the most leisurely parts of your day.

For now, Crignano is wary, but he’s not eager to intervene. “At the moment, I want it to run freely,” he says. “I want as little interference as possible, so I’m just letting it happen as it may.” Still, he says, those with vested interests in the contest’s success are “monitoring it very closely” for “anything that’s out of the ordinary,” such as multiple votes from the same person, among other things. If anything, the margin between m00t and all the others should be much wider: as of Wednesday night, m00t’s 1,716 votes put it far, but not ludicrously, ahead of Euphoria Towers (752) and Esplendor Tower (455). If 4chan’s millions of users really wanted to pull ahead, they’d have figured out a way to. They always do.
Not that Crignano doesn’t have a contingency plan. “If someone’s intentions are misguided or their intentions are—I don’t want to use the word malicious—then at that point, what option is available to us? We have to step in and try and prevent that from happening.” That’d mean, presumably, removing m00t from voting contention outright.
It may not ever need to come to that, though. After the ten names with the most votes are anointed finalists when the contest closes on August 20, the one winner isn’t chosen by the public, but by a jury (made up of consultants, marketing people, cityzen representatives, and those sorts of people). Unless they all want a m00t tower—Crignano definitely doesn’t—it won’t be long before the issue’s moot. [UPDATE, JULY 19: “m00t” won’t get a chance to make it that far: the name’s been “reported and deactivated.”]