troll world

There was a time when “trolling” was considered a bad thing. You’d go out there and deliberately chum the waters of a discussion space – web forum, chat room, what have you – with some kind of bait intended to get a rise out of people. It was considered anti-social, despicable behavior, and “griefers” and the like were routinely excoriated and mechanisms built to suppress them. Consider Slashdot, which was as potentially vile a cesspit as could have existed online – but it had a community moderation system (checked by meta-moderation) and you could ratchet up the filter level. I read at 3 and almost always got either useful insight or genuine wit. Had I read at 5, I probably wouldn’t have missed much.

And then came Facebook, which created a walled garden and pulled the walls down without ever being held to account. And then Twitter close behind. And both began to optimize for whatever would produce the most growth. And trolling did it. And so Facebook and Twitter looked the other way on bots, looked the other way on artificial content, looked the other way for the sake of whatever grew the MAU and DAU numbers and generated the most “impressions” and basically built what has been so frequently cited as “a honeypot for assholes.”

The problem is, we have one political party that has completely rebuilt itself around trolling for the last decade. The entire function of the GOP at this point is to “own the libs” irrespective of what that means in terms of policy, national security or even what the party itself believed in thirty minutes ago. It really started in earnest with Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber, but for eight years of the Obama administration, all the Republican Party really cared about was reflexive opposition to what Democrats wanted, updated daily, and ginning up outrage.

And so a party of trolls met an industry that built trolling engines, and an electoral base that cared only about trolling did just that, and that’s how you end up filling the Oval Office with a senescent buffoon with a Russian lien on his balls. And it’s going to be difficult to do anything about it, because half his party is committed to trolling above all else and the other half makes sorrowful noises and goes right along with it in hopes it’ll get them over 50% on Election Day. I honestly don’t know whether the monkeys or their enablers are worse, but I’m out of patience with both.

But what can you do? Shut down Facebook? I would shed not one tear if a pocket nuke leveled the eastern edge of Menlo Park at 11 AM on a Tuesday. Shut down Twitter? I’d love to see Jack Dorsey in Gitmo with all his developers, and let them figure out which one gets ground up for meatloaf first. But that doesn’t undo the mechanism. 24 hour cable news makes it worse. Endless email forwards makes it worse. There is not a technological solution to the mess we have found ourselves in. The solution requires a stronger political culture, something that we’ve gone to endless lengths to tear down and denigrate over the years because of some notion that politics is inherently bad, inherently divisive, that it’s some kind of alien thing that we have to move beyond. That’s like saying we all need to saw off our legs because there’s a better way of getting around than walking.

I shouldn’t have to explain this, but the alternative to politics is not everyone around the campfire singing Kumbaya and holding hands. The alternative to politics is Somalia. Or Syria. It’s bullets and bombs and the state of nature. We have a process for how society should make decisions and direct itself, and our neglect and abuse of that process has brought us to our current state. The choice is to repair it, or else brace yourself for what comes after.

You won’t like it.

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