On September 12, 2009, Poole gave a talk on why 4chan has a reputation as a "Meme Factory" at the "Paraflows Symposium" in Vienna, Austria, which was part of the Paraflows 09 festival, themed Urban Hacking. In this talk, Poole mainly attributed this to the anonymous system, and to the lack of data retention on the site ("The site has no memory"). His talk was published in the academic reader "Mind and Matter: Comparative Approaches towards Complexity" (edited by Günther Friesinger, Johannes Grenzfurthner, Thomas Ballhausen).