Re: the "trolling" scandal

Web: jakedavis.org
Twitter: @DoubleJake
Email: DoubleJake@London.com

* This is not a piece of serious writing, just a longer tweet that will be read by about 4 followers. Go away.

What constitutes a "troll", mainstream media? The sources you're quoting sound like normal people that have just realized they can use the Internet to be a little bit nasty, and their immediate reaction - as the sheer, blinding misogynists they are in real life - is to insult women. This is something I'm entirely against, but let's not start throwing around the word "troll". A troll doesn't care if you're a man or a woman. A troll doesn't care if you're black or white or rich or poor. A troll will approach you unconditionally for any apparent reason, or possibly no reason at all.

Let's stop taking these pseudo-abusers seriously. They're either harmless kids or serial killers with Facebook accounts. These people are nothing, they're no one. Serious rapists aren't going to post "it's rape time" online just as serious bank robbers aren't going to GPS-tweet the sandwich they're eating across the street from their target. Rapes are happening, right now, in the real world, and you're throwing around pointless words about how catastrophic the unregulated Internet is. Blame Zuckerberg, don't blame those behind real online culture. They didn't do anything. I'm not saying Mark Zuckerberg is a global rapist facilitator, but I'm sure thinking it pretty loudly. Facebook is the death of humanity, the destroyer of families, the hunter of small children. It's an unimaginative, self-parodying lifeless hellhole that only benefits paedophiles and greedy corporations. Letting your children use it is like sending them into a dark alleyway with keys to an unmarked grey van in their back pocket.

Also, as someone that has been legally banned from the Internet for two years (yes, I'm aware I peddle this line a lot), I'm really noticing the jump in our definition of "trolling". Trolling doesn't imply harm at all, trolling is throwing around a few dozen in-jokes in the face of a serious debate, trolling is making your audience scrunch their brows with such confusion at the absurdity that you've just dashed at them that they begin to question the very nature of the universe itself. It's not "ha, ha, let's post pictures of dead cats on a memorial page" - that's not trolling, that's just blatant idiocy.

Now I know you love to explain the Internet through the medium of buses, so here we go: a woman gets onto a bus and a man shouts a 140-character obscenity at her, is this trolling? No, the trolls are sitting at the top of the bus playing flutes made of unicorns' souls and the shrapnel of a million binary stars. They're singing a song about Kanye West oscillating a pigeon. They don't have time to chauvinistically comment on how someone's breasts look in a 256 x 256 avatar, and neither should you. Simple.

No more throwing the rage blanket over cyber culture just because psychopaths have learned how to type.

P.S. "meme" is not an image with a caption