Trolls are like ghosts

On the one hand, trolling messages contribute no meaningful content, being merely tediously predictable responses to certain situations. But on the other hand they are designed to provoke a certain effect - to harass and intimidate.

@adriandaub makes the interesting suggestion that trolls are like ghosts (WTCT p96). Or perhaps automatons.

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.

WTCT p94

Although he complains that practitioners of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) take the notion of programming literally (WTCT pp 144-5), the automatic response described by Professor Daub seems to involve a form of conditioning that might be regarded as functionally indistinguishable from programming. (As a computer scientist myself, it is not for me to argue with a professor of literature whether it is the practitioners of NLP or its critics who take the notion of programming literally.)

As I think I've stated elsewhere, I regard NLP as a syncretic collection of interesting ideas (strongly influenced by Bateson and others) and dubious snakeoil. Although the snakeoil elements are generally regarded as pseudoscience, I wouldn't want to lose the ideas. Daub mentions two important ones, which Bandler and Grinder didn't invent but did much to popularize - reframing and feedback.

In communication there are no mistakes - everything is feedback

WTCT p 145

Many years ago, I invoked a similar idea (the meaning of a communication is its effect) in a discussion on the signal/noise ratio with the blogger Ernie the Attorney, who had complained that What we have here is a failure to communicate.

In his chapter on Communication, drawing on earlier theorists including John Durham Peters, Daub argues not only that communication often falls short of its potential, but sometimes occupies a space of preordained, deliberately engineered disappointment (WTCT p 89). It's as if the troll actively wants to be misunderstood.

Or even to cease to be a subject. Daub mentions Sontag's interpretation of Freud: human aggression frequently flows from an unconscious desire to become inanimate (WTCT p95).

As I pointed out in an earlier post (November 2018), many of the speech acts that pollute the internet are not propositions but other rhetorical gestures. And even if the trolling message appears to be coded as a proposition, the metacommunication is otherwise. In his 2019 article for Logic Magazine, Peters notes that the aim of trolling is to goad someone else into getting upset, an act known as triggering, and describes the outgoing US president as an absolute master at metacommunicative messing. And of course framing/reframing.

Furthermore, the troll's targets often include the medium itself, as the cultural theorist Mark Fisher once observed.

The elementary Troll gesture is the disavowal of cyberspace itself. In a typical gesture of flailing impotence that nevertheless has effects — of energy-drain and demoralisation — the Troll spends a great deal of time on the web saying how debased, how unsophisticated, the web is.

Andrew Iliadis explains the information theory of Gilbert Simondon in terms that can be linked to the notion of reframing: 

Information is that that which, depending on the way that it comes into contact with another abstraction of itself, unlocks or clicks into another form of reality.

Reality, fiction functioning as truth, or just lulz?

To be a game, the participants have to agree on the frame that this is play. The anthropologist Gregory Bateson once made this point brilliantly. Hazing rituals, he said, were governed by the frame is this play? Trolls like to claim the prerogative to define an interaction as play when their conduct makes that frame completely unclear.

Peters 2019

 

The play's the thing, someone once suggested, wherein to catch the conscience of the King. But what if the king has no conscience, no soul?

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Rachel Barney [Aristotle], On Trolling (Journal of the American Philosophical Association 2 (2):193-195, 2016)

Adrian Daub, What Tech Calls Thinking (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2020) 

Mark Fisher, Fans, Vampires, Trolls, Masters (k-punk, 12 June 2009) 

Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Boston: Northeastern Press, 1974)

Andrew Iliadis, A New Individuation: Deleuze's Simondon Connection (MediaTropes Vol IV, No 1, 2013)

John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air (Chicago University Press, 1999) 

John Durham Peters, U-Mad (Logic Issue 6, 1 January 2019)

Susan Sontag, Fascinating Fascism (New York Review of Books, 6 February 1975)

Related posts: Failure to Communicate (July 2004), Good Ideas from Flaky Sources (December 2009), Ethical Communication in a Digital Age (November 2018), Can predictions create their own reality (August 2021)