The Twittering Machine

by Richard Seymour

  It is perhaps telling that his messages so closely resembled the campaign waged by the Westboro Baptist Church against the murdered Wyoming student, Matthew Shepard. In October 1998, Shepard had been beaten, tortured and left to die. The defence claimed that his killers only intended to rob him, but were driven to homicidal rage by his making a sexual pass at them: the notorious ‘gay panic’ defence.3 Amid this controversy, the Westboro Baptist Church picketed Shepard’s funeral and set up a website gloating that Shepard was ‘burning in hell’. They continue to maintain an online ‘memorial’ to Shepard featuring a crude gif of Shepard’s head being consumed by flames, and a sound file purported to be him screaming ‘from hell’. That their cackling, sadistic, relishing of hellfire was overtly linked to a sexually repressive morality might suggest something about the origins of Duffy’s nastiness towards dead teenage girls.

  Nor was Duffy’s an isolated case.4 One of the first major exercises in RIP trolling, without any overt moral rationale, occurred in 2006. Trolls from the 4chan message board descended on a MySpace page memorializing the twelve-year-old Mitchell Henderson, who had committed suicide. It emerged that he had lost his iPod days before his death, and trolls posted messages implying that his suicide was a frivolous act driven by consumerist frustration: ‘first-world problems’. One post contained an image of the boy’s gravestone with an iPod resting against it. A year after Duffy appeared in court, the Facebook page of Matthew Kocher, a fifteen-year-old who drowned in Lake Michigan, was defaced by trolling messages, such as ‘LOL u drowned you fail at being a fish’.

  When the seventeen-year-old Chelsea King was raped and murdered in southern Chicago in 2010, King’s father was astounded to be attacked by trolls: ‘I can’t for the life of me understand why somebody would want to hurt somebody that’s so broken and so grieving.’ That brokenness is exactly what the trolls were seeking to punish. ‘We are a mass of vulnerabilities’, Jon Ronson writes in his book on public shaming, ‘and who knows what will trigger them?’5 Trolls know. They are experts on vulnerability.

  Yet members of the trolling subculture are for the most part not unusual. Academics studying trolling as a form of ‘online deviancy’ have engaged in a sophisticated form of the moral panic that pervades the press. Trolls are monstered, allegedly defined by a ‘Dark Tetrad’ of personality traits such as Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy and sadism. These stories, dull and predicate-begging, merely redescribe trolling behaviour in morally excitable language without giving any account of it. Whitney Phillips, author of This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, found that, far from being deviant, trolls tended to be quite ordinary young men – with the emphasis on young men.6 Their ‘gleeful sociopathy’, as the trolling bible Encyclopedia Dramatica calls it, was enabled by forms of emotional detachment only available in online anonymity. Wearing the ‘mask of trolling’, they could treat any complex human situation, no matter how tragic, as exploitable material for lulz.

  Their detached humour was epitomized by a blizzard of 9/11 jokes and memes, ranging from images of wrestlers demolishing the World Trade Center, to Kanye West addressing the towers with a remix of his bizarre 2009 interruption of Taylor Swift: ‘Yo al Qaeda, I’m a really happy for you, I’m a let you finish. . . but the war of 1812 was the best attack on US soil of all time!’7 But for Phillips, this pervasive detached cynicism was part of the media and political landscape. ‘Now watch this drive,’ Bush said, returning to his golf swing after delivering a sober message on resisting terrorism. ‘Stuff happens,’ Rumsfeld said with sociopathic cheer among scenes of destruction in occupied Iraq. On television, fifteen-second snippets of horror and atrocity were sandwiched into prolonged vacuity in such a way as to provoke ironic detachment. Trolls did not invent this affective gap. And just as they fed on existing cultural trends, their sensation-mongering thrives in a ‘click-based web economy’.

  As the platforms have quantified attention, trolling has broken out of its subcultural bounds. What began as a tactic in a seemingly purposeless, directionless war, purely for the lulz, has gone universal. Most trolls are not RIP trolls, lulz trolls, government sock puppets or the misogynists whom Karla Mantilla dubs ‘gendertrolls’.8 Most trolls are just average users. Everyone has an inner troll, researchers have found.9 What makes the difference is the environment the user is placed in. Those who see trolling on their feed are more likely to troll. In the recursive stimulus–response chamber of the social industry, trolling expands: the more trolling there is, the more trolling there will be. Trolling has gone mainstream. We are all practised experts in ‘triggering’ vulnerabilities.

  II.

  We are all trolls. The internet may have inflamed cultural tendencies already in gestation. From the first trolls on the Arpanet ‘TALK’ system used by university employees in the 1980s, to the message boards launched on the commercialized web of the late 1990s, it may have enabled new subcultures and magnified their consequences.10 But we were all trolling before trolling was ‘a thing’.

  The controlled cruelty of the wind-up is familiar fun, from Bart Simpson prank-calling bartender Moe, to Tom Green or Ashton Kutcher duping hapless members of the public. If trolls are ‘gleefully sociopathic’, delighting in deceiving, taunting and playing games with their foils, they aren’t unlike a lot of pop culture heroes, from Eric Cartman to Dr House. On YouTube, prank videos – often grim or verging on sociopathic – have monetized trolling. This includes a skit by YouTuber Sam Pepper, in which he kidnapped a young man and forced him to watch as a masked man set about ‘murdering’ his friend.11 No one was killed in the production. Michael and Heather Martin repeatedly trolled their children by yelling at them or breaking their toys until they went bright red and erupted into sobs, racking up millions of views. As Heather Martin later mournfully admitted, they ‘would get excited’ when they got ‘a lot of views’.

  Trolling is popular entertainment, even if it sometimes runs afoul of barely legible cultural thresholds. The bafflement and ungovernable rages of the victim are always funny, and there is always sadistic detachment in the humour. When internet users are ‘rickrolled’iii the reactions are often funny. When 4chan trolls called video game stores to enquire about the non-existent sequel to an outdated game, the explosions of exasperated fury were funny. When a hapless internet troll went on Fox News representing the bogus group Forsake the Troops, Sean Hannity’s credulous outrage was funny. Most people, at some time or other, have been trolls.

  But the widespread popular appeal of trolling begs one to ask, what is so funny about it? ‘Every joke’, Freud wrote, ‘calls for a public of its own and laughing at the same jokes is evidence of far-reaching psychical conformity.’12 For Henri Bergson, comedy ‘dreams. . . but it conjures up, in its dreams, visions that are at once accepted and understood by the whole of a social group’.13 To understand a joke, to ‘get it’, is to be part of a culture, to share in a dream. And since jokes are usually tendentious, at someone’s expense, to enjoy a joke is to take sides. If trolls are archetypal jokers, whose side are we taking when we see the funny side? Whose side are we on, when the joke is that someone’s weaknesses make them pathetic and worthy of punishment? As Adam Kotsko has written, the popular fascination with the sociopath rests on a fantasy of social mastery.14 If I was a sociopath, I wouldn’t be so awkward, so gullible, so inhibitively moral: in a word, so vulnerable.

  There is also something enjoyably nihilistic about trolling. Trolls, inhabiting a culture that is as illogical as it is cruel, delight in nonsense and detritus: calculated unreason, deliberate misspellings, the ironic recycling of cultural nostalgia and the effluent of celebrity, the sedimented layers of opaque references and in-jokes, id-streams of racism, misogyny, gore and outlandish porn. Trolling, to borrow a phrase from Phillips, is the ‘latrinalia’ of popular culture: the writing on the toilet wall.15 It’s the coprolalia of End Times.

  André Breton, who invented the term ‘black humour’, defined the ‘simplest Surrealist act’ as
‘dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd’.16 Trolls, modern surrealists, take joy in the sheer random illogicality of their attacks, the nonsense they alight on for lulz, the pointlessness of the suffering they inflict. But they aren’t firing as blindly as they like to think.

  III.

  Trolls are even more attention-hungry than their celebrity counterparts. An early guide to flaming (the practice of saying things to make other users upset) on the Arpanet ‘Bulletin Board System’ contended that it was the only way that ‘people will read your opinions’, since a net-wide flame war is impossible to ignore.17 Yet, over the years, especially once the internet was commercialized, trolls became attention-shy. They form a community of sadists, but only on the condition that it consists of people with no identifying characteristics: from ‘anons’ to sock puppets.

  Trolling anonymity has its roots in the way the 4chan message board, on which the trolling subculture germinated, was set up. Founder Christopher Poole ensured that each user would have a default identity of ‘anon’ because, as he told Rolling Stone, it ‘enables people to share things they wouldn’t otherwise do’.18 And it was on the site’s ‘/b/’ message board that the trolls, calling themselves ‘/b/tards’, gathered. The site deleted child porn and criminal material, including photographs of a murder victim posted by the killer. However, of course, this left in place a cornucopia of grotesquery, from stretched anuses to anti-Semitic jokes. Trolls took anonymity to another level. They were not simply evading surveillance. A troll who gave away personal information, or let slip a private conviction, would risk being trolled by the community. The only way to get by as a troll was to identify fully with the collective, and its value of detachment. The laughter of the individual troll was secondary to that of the hive mind. ‘None of us’, their motto had it, ‘is as cruel as all of us.’

  In this sense, trolls appear to be the only social industry users who are genuinely liberated from the constraints of identity, enacting in their perverse way the utopian promise of the internet. The mask they don is not so much an identity as an anti-identity. The idea of a mask that liberates someone from their prohibitions is culturally resonant. In the Jim Carrey film, The Mask, we are given a version of this story in which the hero is transformed from a neurotic loner into a charismatic trickster and acquires the power to turn reality into a cartoon at will. In this way he thwarts his enemies, who invariably take themselves too seriously. The ‘mask of trolling’ does something similar. Seeing the world through the mask, Phillips remarks, obscures the real lives and personal struggles behind every story, so that all one sees are the ‘absurd, exploitable details’. Reality becomes a cartoon.

  On the face of it, then, trolling is different from everyday wind-ups because trolls recognize no limitation, no criterion other than the lulz. As the ‘Rules of the Internet’ on 4chan’s notorious ‘/b/’ message board state, ‘nothing is to be taken seriously’, there are ‘no real limits of any kind’ and ‘nothing is sacred’. This makes trolls profoundly antisocial. For community to exist, at some point the joke has to stop and the victim let in on the laughter. Otherwise, the fear of ridicule tends to make people clam up. Trolls don’t care. Their only community is an anonymous, networked swarm. They check their identity at the door when they login, and with it their normal ethics. Their only attachment is to detachment.

  The case of Jason Fortuny, one of the most well-known internet trolls of the 2000s, shows that this detachment is not as straightforward as it seems. He first made his name by sexually humiliating random men. He lured strangers with a fake Craigslist ad in which he pretended to be a woman looking for a ‘str8 brutal dom muscular male’. He was inundated with queries, revealing messages, contact details, even photographs – all of which he posted on his blog, causing chaos and even job losses for his victims.

  As far as he was concerned, it was their fault for being stupid: trolling was a kind of toughening pedagogy. Interviewed by the New York Times in 2008, he said trolling was ‘like a pitcher telling a batter to put on his helmet by beaning him from the mound’.19 In the same way, Fortuny claimed, people needed to get over being hurt by words. Deciding to be hurt made one complicit. About his own trolling, he pleaded: ‘Am I the bad guy?. . . No! This is life. Welcome to life. Everyone goes through it.’ What, the journalist wondered, did he go through? Sexual abuse. The five-year-old Fortuny had been sexually assaulted by his grandfather, and a number of other relatives, and was estranged from his family. He knew all about sexual humiliation.

  Detachment is a survival strategy in a world where one can expect to be abused. Trolls, having ostensibly purged themselves of attachment, express disgust at the attachments of their victims. RIP trolls are most aroused and incensed by the suicides of seemingly privileged white people, which they mock as self-indulgent. Public displays of grief are regarded as a facade for, as one troll put it, ‘boredom and a pathological need for attention’.20 Yet if they were as detached as all that, their repetitiveness would be hard to explain. Duffy’s campaigns, for example, despite their malicious inventiveness, were weirdly determined to make the point that dead teenagers were idiots, useless, burning in hell and, if female, sluts and whores. It was as if he was telling the same joke over and over. And a joke repeated too many times starts to look like an obsession, an empty, shell-shocked ritual, or repetition compulsion. It reeks of circling around the void.

  The supposed detachment of RIP trolls looks suspiciously like emotional involvement. They are laughing in the face of death, as if they have mastered it. Their mirth resembles what Hobbes called the ‘sudden glory’ of the laughing animal, the pleasure you get when you abruptly and unexpectedly perceive your superiority. Yet you have to ‘get’ pain in order to know how best to inflict it.21 If RIP trolls are magnetically drawn to grief, it might be because they can already imagine how they might feel about loss, how grief might affect them. If they have been compared to ‘grief tourists’, it is because they can’t stay away from the cemetery. The ferocious aggression directed towards mourners is implicitly, pre-emptively directed at the one who trolls. Waging war on mourners is a way of rebelling against one’s own susceptibility.

  IV.

  In August 2012, the Australian television host Charlotte Dawson tweeted what she thought would be her last words: ‘You win x’.22

  A campaign of trolling had exhorted her to ‘hang yourself’ and ‘kill yourself you fucking whore’. The hashtags of the trolling campaign included #diecharlotte and #9gagarmy in reference to a meme site, 9GAG, where trolls congregated. Dawson, a judge on Australia’s Next Top Model, swallowed a handful of pills.

  Just months before, Dawson had been the victim of online paranoia, put at the centre of a media storm for jokingly calling for someone to ‘please kill’ the Filipino fashion blogger Bryan Grey Yambao, and pouring scabrous insults on a few others. Dawson’s joke was in questionable taste. But, with precious piety and a great deal of faux naivety, many users took it as a literal death threat. Dawson laughed it off. But one day in August, she was subjected to abuse by a random Twitter user, apparently displeased with her television persona, who exhorted her to ‘please GO HANG YOURSELF!!!’.

  Dawson did not take it as a joke. Unable to identify her interlocutor, she tracked down someone else on the ensuing thread, and wrote to her employer, Monash University. The woman, Tanya Heti, was suspended. This infuriated trolls, who portrayed it as an attack on free speech. From Project Chanology, wherein 4chan users targeted the Church of Scientology, to the trolling of the US National Security Agency, trolls tend to be exercised by the abuse and suppression of information.23 And as far as they were concerned, Dawson was a hypocrite and a bully. This was enough to justify days of ferocious misogyny and incitements to suicide, all the more alarming given that Dawson had been openly struggling with depression for years.

  Dawson survived, after being sped to an emergency ward, and subsequently received psychia
tric treatment. Rather than take the well-intentioned advice that she should not feed the trolls, she embarked on a campaign of vigilantism. Just as before her suicide attempt, when she had retweeted her trolls in an effort to expose them, she decided to ‘out’ her trolls and publicly confront them. She became an anti-bullying campaigner. Trolling was just one particularly toxic aspect of her celebrity that Dawson found difficult to bear. Two years later, amid the glare of publicity as her ex-husband was interviewed on 60 Minutes, she experienced a breakdown, and was found dead, hanged in her home. How much of her depression and ultimate death can be attributed to trolling is not clear: indeed, it could never be clear. What is clear is that the trolls either relished Dawson’s agony, or didn’t particularly care.

  This puts a different perspective on the lauded amorality of trolls. They were not, in this case, doing it for the lulz. Their punishment had a purpose. Many analysts identify trolls as subversive ‘tricksters’, waging indiscriminate war on social norms. The troll is a ‘self-appointed cultural critic’, as Benjamin Radford puts it. Gabriella Coleman, basing her analysis on Lewis Hyde’s classic analysis of the trickster as a ‘boundary crosser’ and spirit of ‘mischief’, sees trolls as embodying the archetype.24 Even the white-supremacist incitements of the neo-Nazi troll Andrew Auernheimer, known as ‘weev’, are of the same transgressive type. Whitney Phillips is more critical, but still sees the troll as someone who is out to destroy good and evil as a set of ontological premises. She describes the troll’s mission as being to ‘subvert, or at the very least tinker with, the existing moral order’ – as if the difference between collapsing the moral order, subverting it and tinkering with it was not very great. Trolls like this image of themselves. It allows them to claim that, even if they’re sociopaths, they are at least refreshingly free of hypocrisy. They may never tell the truth, but they are more honest than the culture that produced them.