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)

What Was She Thinking?

When @emilythornberry MP saw a house draped with the flag of St George, white van parked outside, she couldn't resist tweeting a picture to her followers back in her constituency.

Emily Thornberry is the Labour MP for Islington South and Finsbury, which, as the Guardian constituency profile acidly remarks, "is routinely maligned as the natural habitat of the hypocritical, well-off, ostensibly liberal chattering classes". Perhaps as a result of this unfortunate stereotype her innocent action was widely interpreted as a snobbish reference, from a member of the North London urban elite, to the working class voters of Rochester, and she was forced to resign her position in the Shadow Cabinet.

But her constituency isn't homogeneously affluent, and she tweeted a photo of herself earlier this week, happily delivering leaflets in a housing estate. So not snobbery exactly.

So what motivated her to post the Rochester tweet in the first place, and who was its intended audience? It is now common for people to post pictures from their travels onto Facebook and Twitter, as a modern equivalent of the postcard home. So Emily Thornberry's tweet from Rochester makes it seem as if she regarded her visit to Rochester as a kind of rustication (or missus ad rusticos).

As @freedland writes, "even Thornberry’s defenders do not pretend she was trying to recruit white van drivers who fly the English flag from their homes. At best, she appeared to express the fascination of a visiting anthropologist for the natives of Rochester and Strood with their curious cultural customs." Or perhaps as @sarahditum suggests, she is drawing attention to the supposed jingoism of the Rochester and Strood electorate. How on earth could that be interpreted as class warfare?

To the extent that her thoughts and tweets are directed at the people back home in North London, she is keeping the Kentish voters at arm's length. As far as I can see, she doesn't appear in any of the photos she tweeted from Rochester and Strood, even as a tourist. Like many tourists, her tweets often lack explicit meaning, which then prompts people to project their own interpretation onto the real purpose of her communication. She casually labels everything #Rochester, although Strood has a significantly different demographic: most of the UKIP support was in Strood, while Rochester remained solidly Conservative.

Further insight into her London-centric vision can be inferred from her having retweeted a post from Buzzfeed called 27 Reasons To Fall In Love With A Londoner, which starts with the assertion that Londoners are the coolest people in the country. Yes indeed, Lady Thornberry, yes indeed.

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Adam Donald, Emily Thornberry: How one tweet led to her resignation (BBC News 21 November 2014)

Jonathan Freedland, The Emily Thornberry affair proves it: US-style culture wars have come to Britain (Guardian 21 November 2014)

Sarah Ditum, Tweeting a picture of a house is not an act of class warfare, whatever the Sun says (New Statesman 21 November 2014)


Updated 26 Nov 2014

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Out delivering Annual Report in St Peters with crack team. Kent this afternoon #labourdoorstep #whypaygymmembership? pic.twitter.com/ZQrG9Xnm6M
— Emily Thornberry MP (@EmilyThornberry) November 17, 2014

Absolutely & so many more >>27 Reasons To Fall In Love With A Londoner http://t.co/jIw7LuTTwr @FloPerry
— Emily Thornberry MP (@EmilyThornberry) November 12, 2014

Social Placebos

The theoretical psychologist Nicholas Humphrey argues that humans are genetically programmed for caution. As an example of this, he cites the curious effectiveness of placebos.

Consider what happens when the human immune system fights a disease. Suppose you have a disease that causes you to function at 90% of your usual capacity. You could struggle on for weeks at this level, feeling slightly run-down. Or your immune system could mobilize a full attack on the disease, during which you will feel terrible, you may have a raised temperature and other unpleasant symptoms, and you may be unable to carry out your normal activity for a few days. Most of the symptoms of disease are actually caused by the immune system trying to eliminate something or other.

In some situations, a full immune system response might be dangerous, as it makes you vulnerable to all sorts of environmental threats that you would be unable to protect yourself against. So instead of responding instantly to the first signs of a disease, it makes sense for the immune system to wait until the person is in a safe place to undergo this phase. For example, shelter, warmth, supply of food and water, someone else to keep the fire burning and watch out for wolves.

So what kind of signal triggers the immune system to start fighting? We can identify three possible signals. Firstly, when the person stops working hard and enters a period of relaxation. (This is why so many people get ill on holiday and at Christmas.) Secondly, when the person anticipates some future period of stressful hard work. (This is why so many people get ill before exams.) And thirdly, when the weather changes. (Which is why people get ill in the Autumn and Spring.)

According to Humphrey, the placebo acts as another signal of this kind. Especially when provided by a healthcare practitioner with the appropriate bedside manner, it indicates to the immune system that it is safe to mobilize a full response. It is as if the witch doctor is providing some level of "reassurance" to the body.


In a recent article, Humphrey extends this idea to social placebos, or what he calls Placebos at Large (New Scientist, August 2013, subscription required). He suggests that social symbols and rituals perform a similar reassuring function, allowing people (individually and collectively) to take bold action.

People love mocking "health-and-safety" regulations, promoted by the much-derided "nanny state", as if these regulations hold us back from being the enterprising, rebellious souls we would otherwise be. Humphrey quotes the sociologist Frank Furedi, who says, "in a world where safety has become an end in itself, society constantly promotes symbols and rituals to transmit the need for caution".

Humphrey offers a contrarian interpretation. He believes that in many areas of our lives we humans are, by nature, cowards. Left to follow our instincts we tend to be much more cautious than we need be – indeed, more cautious than is good for us.

So we are often presented with warnings that don't tell us anything - such as packets of peanuts that solemnly announce that they "may contain nuts". By laughing at these unnecessary warnings, we are able to project our real fears of alien food onto some bureaucratic Other, and feel (irrationally) reassured in the illusion that packaged food is safe for everyone except those with weird and antisocial food allergies.

Thus the implicit message of these warnings is a paradoxical one - no need to worry, nanny will do all that nasty worrying for us. Nanny as witch-doctor.

And in the corporate world, there is a wealth of corporate signals and rituals that are used to enable corporate change, including the appeal to corporate witch-doctors, also known as consultants. People often complain that corporate placebos and platitudes don't work - but the point is that they actually do work, but in a mysterious way. Isn't this an example of what Margaret Heffernan calls Willful Blindness?

Purpose of Denial 3

The more the American mainstream media deny that President Obama is a Moslem, the more Americans choose to believe that he is.

Apparently this belief is more prevalent among college-educated Republicans than the rest of the population. How Republicans Learn That Obama Is Muslim (New Republic, 27 August 2010) This raises some intriguing questions about the relationship between education and knowledge.

Jeff Poor suggests that the media are to blame. "By consistently using questions about Obama's faith and his citizenship as fodder to demean conservatives, specifically the Tea Party movement and thereby creating a general mistrust by saying vile things, have the mainstream media perpetuated the very allegations they are abhorred by (sic)?" (Newsbusters, 19 August 2010) At least on this point, Charlie Brooker seems to agree. "Seriously, broadcasters, journalists: just give up now. Because either you're making things worse, or no one's paying attention anyway."  'Ground Zero mosque'? The reality is less provocative (Guardian 23 August 2010). Brooker complains that the terms of the debate are grossly misleading, and grudgingly admires right-wingers for their ability to create snappy-but-misleading nicknames – like fun-size chocolate bars and the Ground Zero mosque. Buzzwords for blowhards (Guardian 30 August 2010).

Jeff Poor quotes CNN political analyst James Carville, who describes himself as "flummoxed" by this result, and claims that "the quality of information to people today is exponentially higher than it was in 19th century England". Now I wouldn't necessarily expect a political journalist to know what the word "exponential" meant, but I wonder whether the quality is higher at all.

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Once upon a time, some people were bothered whether Disraeli was Christian or Jew, and some people were uncomfortable about electing Kennedy as a Catholic president. But they are now mainly remembered for what they achieved while in office, not their religious affiliation. Meanwhile, Mrs Thatcher's legacy is not feminism but Thatcherism. Obama will not be remembered for his birthplace, or the religion of his forefathers, nor even for being the first black president; he will be remembered for the successes and failures of his presidency. And perhaps one day, people will wonder why anyone cared whether he was a Moslem or not, and moderate Moslems will be as accepted in mainstream American politics as Catholics are now. (Let it not be forgotten that large sums of money were once raised from American Catholics to support Irish terrorism.)

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John T. McGreevy and R. Scott Appleby Catholics, Muslims, and the Mosque Controversy (New York Review, 27 August 2010)

Adam Serwer, Build More Mosques (American Prospect, August 26, 2010)

Papa Ratzi 6

There is some scientific evidence to support the popular view that outward hostility to homosexuality is sometimes a form of overcompensation. [Cornell University, August 2005. See also News Medical Net and Science NetLinks.]

However, even if this is not true, it is a belief commonly enough held that those who take strong positions against homosexuality may expect questions to be asked to their sexuality.

So consider the case of an unmarried elderly man who wears red Gucci shoes [Associated Press] and has a very good-looking male secretary [Daily Dish]. When this elderly man takes a strong position on homosexuality [BBC News, New Scientist], gossips around the world are not slow to see a possible connection [Olly's Onions].

Over and over again we have observed public figures taking up positions that turn out later to be jinxed. Politicians who rashly boast of their happy family lives, or celebrities who invoke the Curse of Hello [DailyMail, Guardian, Independent]. It sometimes seems as if they are unconsciously inviting attention to their secret vulnerabilities.

So shall we assume that all public statements have a secondary purpose?