As far as he was concerned, it was their fault for being stupid: trolling was a kind of toughening pedagogy. Interviewed by the New York Times in 2008, he said trolling was ‘like a pitcher telling a batter to put on his helmet by beaning him from the mound’.19 In the same way, Fortuny claimed, people needed to get over being hurt by words. Deciding to be hurt made one complicit. About his own trolling, he pleaded: ‘Am I the bad guy?. . . No! This is life. Welcome to life. Everyone goes through it.’ What, the journalist wondered, did he go through? Sexual abuse. The five-year-old Fortuny had been sexually assaulted by his grandfather, and a number of other relatives, and was estranged from his family. He knew all about sexual humiliation.

The supposed detachment of RIP trolls looks suspiciously like emotional involvement. They are laughing in the face of death, as if they have mastered it. Their mirth resembles what Hobbes called the ‘sudden glory’ of the laughing animal, the pleasure you get when you abruptly and unexpectedly perceive your superiority. Yet you have to ‘get’ pain in order to know how best to inflict it.21 If RIP trolls are magnetically drawn to grief, it might be because they can already imagine how they might feel about loss, how grief might affect them. If they have been compared to ‘grief tourists’, it is because they can’t stay away from the cemetery. The ferocious aggression directed towards mourners is implicitly, pre-emptively directed at the one who trolls. Waging war on mourners is a way of rebelling against one’s own susceptibility.

Further, campaigns like that against Dawson make the troll look a lot like a closeted moralist, or a vigilante. To put it another way, the troll tries to have it both ways, claiming to be both magnificently indifferent to social norms, which he transgresses for the lulz, and often at the same time a vengeful punisher: in his fantasies, both the Joker and Batman.

It would be literally impossible to disaggregate this toxic combination of banter, punitive spite, misinformed outrage and sheer glee at someone being ‘taken down’. On the Twittering Machine, they quickly become indistinguishable. And this ambiguity, this family resemblance between trolling and witch-hunting, is part of what makes it so viral, and so deadly as weapon.

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But ‘irony’ isn’t as subversive as this implies. Irony made Rick Astley’s records start selling again. It handed a popular icon to the alt-right. Irony makes unappetizing ideologies digestible. And while it offers an easy rationalization for trolls engaging in sexist or racist attacks – ‘I did it for the lulz’ – the effect of these attacks is the same as if they were sincere.

Gamergate empowered sadists and sexist provocateurs. It became a defining moment in the emergence of a new subcultural style of right-wing activism predicated on male resentment fused with trolling culture. Joining other subcultural streams, from ‘pick-up artists’ to ‘incels’ (the ‘involuntary celibate’), and adopting a reboot of 1970s anti-feminist activism, many Gamergaters became Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs). It is the MRAs, more than anyone else, who have taken their trolling into the real world with bloody consequences. Trolling, having been filtered through the machine, entered meatspace with a vengeance.

Incels, a subculture within a subculture, a bleak fraction of MRAs, share with their confederates a Planet of the Apes vision of female sexuality in which women have evolved to prefer physically dominant men. They think their unwilling celibacy, far from being a normal state of affairs, is a special punishment inflicted by fate. That their sexual frustration derives from genetic deficit.

Chad and Stacy are football jock and cheerleader, an American success story: and the success story is a superego ideal which taunts the incel. Worse, for incels it’s a form of sexual despotism in which they are an oppressed caste. Their equivalent of the ‘oppressive Tawaghit’ of Islamic State propaganda. A fantasy image superimposed on layers of agonized self-loathing, anguished world- and women-hatred, sadism, masochism and death drive.

And yet, perhaps the most chilling aspect of Minassian’s actions was the way he chose to announce his ‘rebellion’. His post, written in the stylized, ironic jargon of trolling, implied a frightening degree of detachment. If one didn’t know that the author was on the brink of mass murder, it would seem like a joke. It was as though the ironic folds had unravelled, revealing an ouroboros in which the ‘literal’ and ‘ironic’ existed on the same plane. He was a troll, in meatspace, and in the same move a vigilante murderer.

Trolling irony was never what it appeared to be. Never detached, irony was just a container for ambivalence. The core of irony is almost always a passionate commitment which can’t be expressed in any other way. To ironize about it, to make fun of it, is to allow it to be expressed while also reproaching it. In the case of the incels, irony tips over into passion, without losing the sense of self-reproach, or self-hatred.