Know Your Troll

Imagine, if you will, the following scenario:  

You’re on YouTube looking for a song by your favorite singer (for the sake of this story, your favorite singer is Adele).  You click on Adele’s music video and, once it starts playing, start to sift through the comments below.  Although most of the comments seem normal, you notice a lot of people are replying to one particular user: Trollolol123.

Trollolol123’s comment reads, “This song would be much better if, instead of singing, Adele cooked and cleaned. Y’know, like bitches are supposed to do. And Blacks too.”

Enraged at the absurdity of such ignorance, you immediately jump on the bandwagon and reply to Trollolol123. You tell your friends and, later on, question how someone could be so awful.  It unsettles you.

Unwittingly, you have just played into the hands of a troll, a new generation of technological troublemaker.

You’ve become another casualty of this guy:

the Troll.

In her 2012 essay “Phreaks, Hackers, and Trolls: The Politics of Transgression and Spectacle” anthropologist Gabriella Coleman writes on the spectacle created by the actions of our generation’s iteration of a hacker: the internet troll. She defines them as “a class of geeks who . . . cause the Internet grief, hell, and misery”(110) for no reason other than the “lulz”, an easier way of saying what Wired Magazine's Quinn Norton referred to as schadenfreude.  Similar to phreaks and hackers of 80s and 90s, a troll thrives on using their knowledge of technology to create chaos. Sometimes the chaos appears in the form of a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) and other times trolls will document trace (Dox) their targets, a technique that complies and then displays a person’s personal information for everyone to see.  But, perhaps more commonly, being trolled is mostly seen as someone provoking groups of people into emotional responses (see: intro).  In her examination of the politics of hacker culture, Coleman is critical of the ecosystem being created by the multitude of trolls online and, because of dissimilarities from the traditional hacker, questions “[if] trolls even deserve a place in the historical halls of hacking?”(114) A question that I will briefly explore and discuss in this entry.

Trolls can be seen as the [un]fortunate result of the digital age; a counterculture ushered in through the same door that was held open for Facebook, Yahoo!, and Lolcats.  The phrase “Faustian bargain” comes to mind when describing our current situation: we quickly embraced the Internet’s appealing offer (“everything for free*!!!”) with little regard for the fine print accompanying the asterisk.  Trolls are the unforeseen result of openly and unquestioningly adopting the Internet; they’re seen as the byproduct of an ever-present interconnectivity—the unintentional (if not unavoidable) result of putting millions of people together with almost complete anonymity.  When viewed through the “trickster”(115) title that Coleman uses to describe hackers and phreaks, the new generation can be viewed as almost similar to their morally questionable predecessors, all of them wanting nothing more than to unsettle something. However, unlike their predecessors, trolls place immense value on “pranking and offensiveness for the pleasure it affords”(112) and rarely stop to reflect on the morality of their actions which, in turn, gives most of them the agency to behave devoid of ethical code.

However, before you ring the town bell and raise a pitchfork, it needs to be said that not all trolling is entirely bad and not all trolls are purely bad guys — some, like activist group Anonymous, fall under the trope chaotic good because of their willingness to publicly troll on a massive scale in order to raise awareness to social issues.  Coleman refers to Anonymous as a “group of trolls”(110), which ends up lumping their actions together and with the previously described version of internet troll. Today, while still trolling the public to a much lesser extent, Anonymous has evolved into a decentralized and autonomous hacker organization that has moved on to more pressing matters like political activism and social injustice.  Similar to hackers of old, Anonymous has made waves throughout media outlets around the world by using its collective power to try and do good, albeit through morally questionable means.  The aforementioned chaotic good tagline comes from their willingness to champion vigilantism in order to promote good, something that has brought them both praise and scorn.

The question still remains: do trolls deserve a place in the halls of hacking history?  Why shouldn’t they?  The hacking culture that exists today is an evolution of its earlier iteration, one that existed within the primitive Internet of the late 80s and early 90s.  Even though she quotes the infamous hacker UNIX Terrorist as saying “the end is —ing nigh” with regards to hacking culture, it's something I’d ultimately disagree with.  Just like some hackers and phreaks, some trolls are a menace to society, pushing the patience (and sanity) of individuals and organizations to the breaking point.  But, on the other side, trolls have also shown the ability to organize groups of otherwise disconnected individuals in order to work towards the betterment of society and promote issues that would (otherwise) be ignored.  Why shouldn't we give them a spot within the historical halls of hacking?

I’ll finish by quoting Quinn Norton from her 2011 piece “Anonymous 101: Introduction to the Lulz,”  where she says “you're never quite sure if Anonymous is the hero or antihero. The trickster is attracted to change and the need for change, and that's where Anonymous goes.”

An Artistic Remix

Paul “DJ Spooky” Miller, in his TEDxAustin talk, wants to help redefine traditional methods of creation and art for the digital age.  According to Miller, creation, and the formula behind it, is in the midst of a paradigm shift and has been for quite some time.  He proposes that this shift reflects widespread changes from an outdated model of mass production to a more modern one which he terms “mass customization.”  His idea behind mass customization stems from the availability of digital copies, something that reflects changes in the way artistic expression is approached and works are created — in his case, changes in the creation of music.  Having digital copies from countless different mediums, available at any given time, has changed the way that artists conceptualize creation and this, as a result, has popularized what many academics call the “remix culture”: an entire generation of emerging and established artists that create art by reworking older, established works and making them their own. However, to some this raises an important question: can something that borrows from something else, something that is remixed, still be original? Can it still be art? Before attempting to answer those questions, it’s helpful to understand what is meant by the word remix.

A remix, as explored by Lessig in his TED Talks “Reexamining the Remix,” is, at its essence, something that borrows from something older to create something new.  Contrary to my former understanding, a remix is not something limited strictly to music; remixes can be found almost everywhere. For example: in his talk, Lessig uses Walt Disney’s 1928 cartoon Steamboat Willie as an example of a remix, and shows us that the concept was originally from the silent film Steamboat Bill but had been reimagined using animation. Steamboat Willie is the first ever Mickey Mouse cartoon, without question a piece of art that introduced one of the most recognizable characters in the world—it was a remix. Lessig goes on to show a handful of Disney creations that follow this same method with equally successful results: taking a familiar concept and reworking it to create something new.  So, with a working definition of a remix in place (again: something created by borrowing from other sources), it’s now time to address the question of originality.

The idea of originality in artistic expression has turned into something of a target for my jaded generation, one that apathetically cries out on their collective Tumblr “why bother trying? Nothing is original anymore!” To an extent, they're correct: very few things are original; however, as Lessig points out, it’s not an isolated incident. Earlier in this entry I touched on Miller’s theory that our society is moving away from a culture of mass production, a cultural model, as Miller explains, which gave rise to Picasso, Andy Warhol, and other recognizable artists.  In this past model, the title of artist was given to the exalted few with enough talent to do a particular something (ie. paint, write, compose) well enough that people wanted to pay for it.  The rise of digital media has changed that.  Miller’s culture of mass customization is the proverbial nod to people that can create by “analyzing existing structures” and exploring them on a deeper level in an attempt to create an entirely new structure that can exist on its own.  The structures Miller refers to are creative works.  He’s saying that, within the current creative movement, artists are effectively exploring different ways to remix works and thus manage to create brilliant new works that still have a “trace or memory” of the previous, recognizable work.

It’s about time the definitions of creativity, originality, and art caught up to the current movement happening all around us.  If something so obviously remixed as Steamboat Willie can be called art, why can’t something a DJ engineers to be original be placed on the same pedestal? Why can't a videogame be considered art?  The idea of “scarcity versus ubiquity,” where a work's cultural value is defined by people’s access to it, is one that is losing traction as more people discover and accept the emerging mediums.  Older art will always be considered as such, but the digital generation needs to make sure that new  interpretations and forms of expression are always encouraged.

To conclude this blog post on a musical note, here is mashup artist Girl Talk who, in this clip, combines digital samples of Michael Jackson's 1992 hit "Remember The Time" with Daft Punk's 2013 song "Get Lucky":

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqY-6IBV1YM&w=560&h=315]

—Goodnight, folks!