The Trolls Among Us -- NYT Magazine piece

Ho.Lee.Shit.

I think my head just exploded.

 

One thing I think you have to ask when you read the piece is whether the entire thing is a huge troll. I mean, are we really to believe these net hackers and pranksters are behind a shadow organization that has $10 million coming to them every year?

I think another interesting question that it raises is just how much we go on-line to be something that, in reality, we cannot quite live up to. When I think sometimes about banning myself from SportsJournalists.com for a period of time, it's because I worry that sometimes I'm trying to seem smarter, funnier, more talented and more wise than I am in real life. And instead of channeling that energy into my profession and my art, I make a bunch of people laugh on SportsJournalists.com because it brings validation that newspaper writing cannot. I'm not going to sit here and pretend that I'm at least marginally talented as a writer; I think that I am. But I also feel like there is a false sense of confidence, at times, instilled by my on-line persona.

The future of communication and relationships is going to be a strange place. The less responsible we are for our actions, the more we let our id make decisions for us. People start craving that false reality because on-line, they can smarter, handsomer, braver and more successful than they really are.

Technology keeps exploding, communication becomes less personal. At some point, does our on-line reality become the more dominant reality?

It sounds like I got stoned and watched The Matrix again, but it's sort of interesting to think about.

 

DD, to address your first part, I do not believe that they are raking in $10mm each year. I’m sure there are some that are able to obtain money illegally through hacking, but I doubt that the money comes in via trolling.

In terms of having them as an organization, I will point out that Maxim magazine did an article addressing the very same message board (Article Link). Their subject matter was that this group of anonymous posters came together to try and take on Scientology.

To that end, there is definitely some sort of community involved. The same goes for here. By and large many individuals post here and communicate here via PM. However, many individuals on here have also met each other off-line as well and continue to communicate on here.

 

I've pondered this question at length given the amount of time I spend online and the amount of time I witness others spending online. I think for a lot of people online-reality has already become more dominant, and as time passes more and more people are going to be sucked into living their lives on the internet. Right after college, I was briefly "addicted" to an online game called Everquest, which is just another universe where you get to be a fantasy hero and slay dragons with other geeks who like to do the same. It was escapism for me at the time, and it quickly turned into my reality.

The internet is still a baby and it is shaping our culture big-time. The government is going to eventually get involved with online addictions. Rightly or wrongly, you'll be hearing a lot more about the ways that the internet is destroying society.

I don't have quite the pessimism over its impact that others do, though I'm interested to see how our culture continues to evolve, especially given that those who are entering adulthood now have had internet their entire life.

 

I think for a younger generation, the online identity is more important than their real-life identity.
And, to a degree, you have always had a certain sub-culture evolve around something. It might be comic books, it might be sports, it might Dungeons and Dragons.
It seems to me that what the Internet has done is create a validity to that sub-culture that didn't exist before.
Yeah, you could have played D&D when you were with some friends, but that was a small circle of people that you knew, but you still created another identity for the purposes of the game.
Now you can play D&D with the world and that creates an illusion of something that it isn't.

 

I always suspected this was the alter ego of another poster - who, I have no idea. Now I am convinced.

 

Absolutely. And the first time I've ever gotten a sig line from someone on the Button Which Mustn't Be Named.

 

Obviously I don't post on here a lot, main reason being I'm not 100 percent comfortable with the idea of anonymously engaging in debate with random strangers. I always have a gut sense that there's something vaguely ... I guess artificial is the word I would use, something artificial about using this forum for debate. I think message boards are more useful for soliciting advice and sharing information than they are for discussing issues.

Why is that? I think most of the reasons are pretty intuitive and have been discussed already - under the guise of an anonymous handle, people can spout whatever bullshit they want without having to defend it, so a lot more stupidity finds its way into the debate. And people who are cowards in face-to-face situations find an outlet for bullying assholishness. So, you get a disproportionate number of debaters who lack knowledge and social skills, so the whole thing bears no resemblance to an intelligent discussion folks would have in the real world. Throw in the trolls who are stirring shit up on purpose, and, well, you've got most of the debates on these boards. I just don't think it's worth the emotional energy to get in a heated debate with a troll on a message board, so I steer clear, as I'm sure many others do. It's a shame really.

 

Highly disturbing piece, really, of Hitleresque misfits embracing a "there are no rules" mindset for their "ruin" behavior. It's sad to read this kind of heartlessness. One, because you know it's the end result of a rotten culture and environment. Two, because when you're that far down the line in terms of rationalizing your actions, it's very hard to come back.

 

I agree. The scariest people are the ones who are willing to attack others just for kicks.

 

Just wondering, but was anyone else troubled by the fact that the author of story never knew the real identity of who he was dealing with? And how did that fit with existing Times' policy? Part of me ended up thinking the whole thing was just a big scam, that the "trolls" highly inflated everything they did and might just be uber-nerds with delusions of grandeur. The fact that they got the author's SS#, which was supposed to be some kind of proof of their ability, took almost a month. Any good PI, or anyone with a credit card, can get that info in a couple days, at most.

 

The story doesn't say it took these guys a month to get the number. They just sent it to the author a month later. It might have taken them minutes, nothing more.