The Internet Troll As The Trickster Archetype
Author and Source:
http://www.drewspeak.com/“The troll comes to the door of a new forum and sets down his bag of tricks. If he has a grudge against the people inside discussing and debating their passions with a certain degree of amicability, peacability and decorum, he does not show them. He has the cracked, stoic smile of Robin Goodfellow, a Puck with the simple desire to disrupt peace itself. He loves chaos; his bag is full of golden apples he can lob to set the masses squabbling. He has also many masks, smoke bombs, straw men, cloaks, puppets, matches, ethanol, knives, dust, sand, and magicks of the most arcane sort. He knows what he is about - causing trouble. Why? This is the troll’s darkest mystery - if any one knew his secret, he would die. For all trolls, their motive power is this: without contraries, they cannot progress.”
I composed this in my notebook a while back; it seemed an exciting way to portray the rapidly-shifting identities and nuisance/amusement factors of these all-too familiar faces in all my old Usenet haunts. I do not deny that a certain nostalgia colours this imagery: the truth is, I was once an Internet troll, “back in the day” when I was an angry, atheist teenager on an AOL account. You know the type, I’m sure. Let me tell you: I trolled pretty hard. That’s all behind me, of course, and I don’t regret having outgrown the adrenaline rush of just rolling out and pissing off some Christian group, a WebTV board or a wrestling forum. It had its thrill at the time, but I eventually just figured out I would probably piss more people off writing my own blog than I would trolling anyone else’s. I offer no apologies for this. I imagine a sizable percentage of regular Internet posters have some small, guilty history of trolling - it’s been a common phase among a lot of the posters I’ve come in contact with over the years.
I do not necessarily wish to excessively extol the virtues and powers of the Internet troll; these persons are typically not quite so epic as they are a nuisance. They are readily the bane of many close-knit Internet communities, descending like a swarm of ethereal locusts from cursed heaven - a fantasy plague of boors eradicating established social orders with malice and confusion.
An article printed in the Washington Post entitled ominously “Female bloggers harassed, menaced” depicts the unfortunate story of Kathy Sierra, a blogger and software developer who had a horrifying ordeal with anonymous trolls: someone apparently posted images of her with a noose around her neck, someone made numerous threats and crafted images involving her being suffocated, her throat being slit, her being ejaculated on, etc., all presumably laden with a psychotically-creepy-murderous inflection. The woman eventually canceled a speaking arrangement at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference and went “underground” and blogged under a pseudonym, after announcing on her website: ““I have canceled all speaking engagements, I am afraid to leave my yard, I will never feel the same. I will never be the same.” Horrifying, sociopath behavior like this constitutes one of the potentialities of the troll: the individual who is truly vicious, twisted, obsessed and angry, an ugly, anonymous, dark-minded person with a hellbound will to do you pain. I imagine this image might stir some atavistic archetype: is this not the type of creature nightmares are made of? This, certainly, should be seen as an aspect of the devil.
Dear reader, I understand I’m relying heavily on phantasmal and fantastic imagery to examine this phenomenon: I believe it is crucial, then, when attempting to diagram the complex sociology of the Internet community, one recognize the mythical, virtual qualities of the medium. I hope that we can forgive this elevated language, or perhaps even accept it and play around with it, to see what ideas can emerge when viewing these “obvious” trends in Internet sociology through the painfully anachronistic context of old pagan gremlins.
The landscape which surrounds the Internet troll shimmers with the potentiality of violence, the unspoken simmering of anger and resentment towards the harasser as things get furiously heated. The shooter at the Case Western rampage, a 65-year old with confirmed “severe personality disorder” named Biswanath Halder was apparently motivated by this post from an anonymous troll to his website’s guestbook (
http://web.archive.org/web/200312150535 ... halder.ws/) : “Bizzy Halder is a moron. This guy makes a living out of creeping people out. From his fake hair, to his fake teeth, his whitey tighty shorts and pants, to his ---- stained sweaters this guy is a LOON. He’s been kicked out of every lab on campus and everyone makes fun of him. So let’s not even talk about credibility. Don’t listen to a word this guy says.” Shortly afterwards, he opened fire on Case Western with an automatic weapon, apparently attempting to target the troll, a co-worker he suspected of having hacked his website in the past. Neither the man he killed nor the others wounded were the troll. The delusional Indian man had been, quite literally, swinging at spirits, or in this case, shooting at spirits.
Internet trolls can have real power. They can alter your emotional landscape, insert their presence very tangibly into your life. Being trolled can be a harrowing experience. Because of the implicit anonymity built into Internet dialogue, the user often has no clear idea who is harassing him/her - they are confronted only by an adversary who might be represented only by an alphanumeric “name” and a barrage of abuse. There is often little recourse against the offending party. Back in the day when I trolled Usenet, many persons tried to report me as violating my ISP’s Terms of Service to no avail. I received not one single piece of mail from my Internet provider asking me to stop being such a pain in the ---, despite the fact that I was very obviously flooding newsgroups with flames and nonsense, enough to render legitimate conversation impossible. In the instances where physical threats and the like are leveled, there is a venue for law enforcement to get involved, and rightfully so, but rarely are trolls ever quite that vicious. Most of the time, flames will fall within the bounds of protected, free speech: one can no more muzzle a blatant troll than he can any other dissenting view.
A classic rule of thumb has ever been: do not feed the trolls, and many a new user has been regaled with this adage in the face of an inflammatory poster; the problem is, few persons are willing to heed this familiar warning. One might note similarities in this attitude to that of Americans in the aftermath of the 9/11 World Trade Center and Pentagon; when confronted with the premise of ideological terrorism, it is the typical human response to fight fire with fire, trade blow for blow. In mediums of the ideological, textual, and memetic, however, fighting back against malicious phantasms is unproductive. When one is literally “swinging at spirits”, these spirits gain power and substance they hitherto do not possess. It is through opposition and response that they gain validity, become “real” enough to cause the stir and scenes they aim to make.
Moderation features are often nearly useless against these guys: erasing a post makes a troll only more determined to write the same sort of message again, and banning a troll practically guarantees he will darken your doorstep again with a vengeance. I read an account of a Slashdot troll once who claimed to have scripts constantly fishing for proxy servers and free e-mail accounts so that he could consistently hold hundreds of accounts simultaneously in order to vote himself to whatever position he pleased via the meta-moderation system; while I cannot guarantee the veracity of this man’s account, it nonetheless demonstrates the level of effort a troll is willing to exert into making his point. And while I would imagine that each individual troll has his own agenda, this all begs the question - what, exactly, is the point of trolling?
Chaos, discord, controversy, argument; the troll often serves as the Erisian element, capable of galvanizing and polarizing unsuspecting groups with his tricks. What’s the point? Maybe it’s fun to push the limits, to agitate people, to vent one’s hostile emotions at unsuspecting, real persons under the mask of anonymity. Maybe it’s an outlet for real cruelty and vehemence, maybe it’s a hobby, anything could be driving the motivated troll.
There are troublemakers in all sorts of settings, in all sorts of mythologies - a troll can be equated to Loki or Anansi just as easily as they could a vitriolic bigot. Who knows? All I understand is that the Internet troll exists by the grace of those who give him a voice; without that, he is nothing.