The troll understands this. He may think of himself as a kind of communicative guerrillero, finding “libtards” in their safe spaces and triggering them. But there’s another aspect to trolling: the sense that it isn’t so much sand in the gears of the machine as sand in the spirit of those gears. There is an Edgar Allan Poe story called “The Imp of the Perverse,” which is Poe’s description of the part of us that, when we peer into an abyss, fantasizes about what it would be like to fall into it; that, when we are pressed for time on a task, finds itself obsessed with every show on Netflix; that, when we engage in pleasantries, wonders what it would be like to withhold them. Such moments, Poe proposes, are not a matter of our individual psychology. “The speaker is aware that he displeases; he has every intention to please.” But something else takes over, something objective, almost physical. There is something of that imp in every troll: If I don’t post this, the troll thinks, someone else will step in and fulfill the exact same function. One way or the other, it will be posted.
And there is something of that imp in all of us. Have you ever looked at a rote, overly earnest conversation on social media and suddenly thought of the most absurd, digressive, inappropriate thing you could post? You might have chuckled at it, might have experienced a moment’s temptation, but in most instances, you would never post it. It’s almost as though the potential of trolling is out there, objectively if spectrally, even if you aren’t the one who seizes it, even if no one does. Unlike you, using your real name in a conversation on Facebook, the troll is usually anonymous. So while Poe’s imp is about moments when we are impelled toward acts of self-destruction, the troll provides all the destruction without all the self.
In gaming terms, trolling is an exploit. While they are looking to trigger you emotionally, the trolls are triggered mechanistically, almost like an alarm. You tweet with a certain hashtag, share a particular article, are a particular gender, use a specific phrase, and there they are. The automatism of it, the lack of specificity in their attack, is part of the power play. It’s the sense of compulsion encapsulated in the infamous phrase “well, actually”: they literally can’t help themselves. When the journalist Sarah Jeong joined The New York Times’s editorial board in the summer of 2018, right-wing trolls dug up some old tweets of hers and reposted them out of context. Since then, almost every single one of Jeong’s tweets is responded to with variations of tweets calling her racist, claiming she hates white people, and so forth. As one troll put it in February 2019 (and I’m picking this example out of a large and very gross hat): “You should have been fired but since you weren’t we are going to have to sentence you to life in the prison of Twitter trolls.”
If there is something automatic about the way in which the same disproved canards attach to Jeong’s tweets, it may well be because the replies are automated. But the more interesting fact about them is probably this: an aggrieved white guy who has set up an alert for when Sarah Jeong tweets and then huddles over his phone to make some claim about racism and Roseanne using jagged grammar and vertiginous logic is functionally indistinguishable from a bot having been set up to do the same thing. Call it a reverse Turing test. And this is part of the “sentence” the trolls have imposed on Jeong: the “prison of Twitter trolls” is made of people deliberately behaving like algorithms.
As Ralph Hartley, one of the pioneers of information theory in the 1920s, argued, the amount of information carried by a system of communication is a direct result of freedom of choice: a signal that by necessity must follow another signal can carry no new information; it is redundant. The troll is the ultimate sender of redundant messages. The imagination behind the act of trolling consists partly in thinking you’re the Rebel Alliance sticking it to the power structure, and partly in thinking you’re the Death Star. The sense that you are the ghost in the machine. You are the power structure, disembodied, deindividualized.
In her 1975 essay “Fascinating Fascism,” Susan Sontag claimed that “fascist art glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death.” Fascist aesthetics identified what fascism understood to be all-powerful forces in nature and society, then made proud common cause with those forces. These aesthetics identified with the aggressor. Sontag had in mind Freud’s notion of the death drive—the idea that human aggression frequently flows from an unconscious desire to become inanimate, that there is pleasure to be had in ceasing to be a subject. Whenever we go online, we are faced with the objectivity of algorithms that we cannot understand. The troll gets to fancy himself the black box.
The Spanish fascists had the absurd rallying cry Viva la muerte, “Long live death.” The troll follows a similar idea, destroying the self and any pretense of sending an actual message. We are often told that everything lives forever online. We warn young people against posting embarrassing pictures to their social media accounts. Victims of trolling like Sarah Jeong are finding that the opposite can also be true—if, that is, people fully divest from what they put online. The
