But here’s the thing: James Damore is fairly typical in his occupying and weaponizing that space of preordained, deliberately engineered disappointment. We have all been there. We all send this missive, we all know the joy of being disappointed, at least some of the time. It’s the feeling of having tried to communicate honestly but the other side is just too darn ideological to genuinely engage. I don’t mean to suggest that this feeling is never correct or appropriate—rather that we over-rely on it and are falsely deferential to it, even when it isn’t correct or appropriate. After all, some version of this feeling is inherent in all trolling: I tried to engage with this question in good faith, and my opponents decided to be uncivil.
Or think of the species known as the “reply-guy”—someone who replies to a tweet or a Facebook post that seemed to require no reply, and who then invariably expresses disappointment when the original poster tells him so. The original poster shares an experience, and the reply-guy tries to suggest that the original poster might not actually have experienced what he or she experienced. Maybe the racism you encountered wasn’t really racism? Maybe you need a dude in your mentions to explain your own terms to you? Maybe bringing this back to all lives mattering would help the discussion?
One thing that both troll and reply-guy cannot usually explain is what result their intervention was supposedly intended to elicit. They know only that the actual result of their intervention is deeply disappointing to them and flies in the face of the good faith effort they made in responding to the original post. The Google memo is caught in this same ambiguity: How did Damore think Google should respond to his memo? What was the reception he was hoping for, in comparison with which its actual reception was so brutally disappointing? These are questions that really should be part of any communication one initiates. But it is noticeable that when one renders absolute the value of communication as such, particular questions like these can become obscured.
The problem is not that promises of communication are overly idealistic. It’s that the thinking about communication gets to hide behind its own idealism—gets to hide how we make meaning and what we communicate when we do communicate. As Peters points out, this stance is easy to confuse with modes of interrogation that have come to define what Europeans and Americans have traditionally thought of as solid argumentation: parrhesia, speaking truth to power, the Socratic method, the test by ridicule. But trolling abandons both the shared purpose of a communication (to convince one another, to engage in dialogue) and the shared audience to which both you and the person challenging you want to appeal. What remains is the cynical subject, as Peters describes it: “cool, aloof, and self-contained.” The troll is in control of when you lose control.
The philosopher Peter Sloterdijk once described modern cynicism as enlightened false consciousness: we are able to get by acting as though we believe in things we don’t. Painting the troll as the ultimate cynic, as Peters does, or as heir to a long line of heretics, as the journalist Angela Nagle does in her book Kill All Normies (2017), is both accurate and perhaps a bit too generous. Peters and Nagle certainly capture one aspect of what trolling is, but in central respects the troll is a cynic who represses the fact that he is a cynic. The cynics of antiquity were the natural foes of the authority of tradition. The supposed traditions their postmodern heirs delight in attacking are women writing in traditionally masculine domains, political correctness, trans people being treated as people. The somewhat older traditions of white supremacy, androcentrism, and eurocentrism they are content to leave standing. And the supposed traditions and orthodoxies they like to pick on do not enjoy broad legitimacy across the West, let alone the world. One could be forgiven, in other words, for suspecting the trolls of 4chan and Reddit of making a fairly clear argument. Our ironists, it turns out, are faithful people.
Nagle’s Kill All Normies expresses profound bafflement as to how “the culture of 4chan, Anonymous etc., in the pre-gamergate days” eventually came to be characterized “by a particularly dark preoccupation with thwarted or failed white Western masculinity.” Nagle insists that it “could have gone another way.” But in a sense, troll culture didn’t really hijack the revolutionary potential inherent in social media culture. Rather than ripping the fabric, troll culture astutely followed the seams and stitching to where they logically led.
The ideology of any social media platform makes it easy to misunderstand what one is doing as being highly individualized, and to forget that the platform is set up to enable and disable certain communicative maneuvers. As Nick Srnicek, a researcher of digital capitalism, has put it, the great commercial platforms may present themselves “as an empty vessel for market forces,” but in truth they shape “the appearance of a market.” The same is true for the great communication platforms. The troll represents a double exploitation of this state of affairs: He exploits the fact that the platform doesn’t just passively reflect a “marketplace of ideas” (if there were such a thing) but rather shapes what kind of content can be transported. And he exploits the fact that the companies running the platform can’t really acknowledge this fact.
It’s not that certain platforms (ahem, Twitter.com) tend
