Confessions of a Troll - master-slave dialectic in the times of Facebook

1. Self-profiling.

A few days ago a friend of mine wrote to me: "I heard that you had a Facebook fight with ****, a rising star of Italian journalism. Be careful, it might be dangerous for your career."

My friend was right.  I don’t know how many times I told myself: be more cautious, post a comment only when necessary. Click "like" only when it's not compromising. Avoid acid and polemical language.

It never worked. Most often, compulsion prevailed.

My only cold comfort is to know that I am not the only one afflicted by this weak spot.  Another friend of mine once confessed: "When I read most online newspapers I get a surge of anger... Sometimes I can't help to speak out my mind, to do sharing, sometimes to insult. But for my job it's embarrassing. Sometimes I create fake profiles. Or I keep myself anonymous."

The very structure of social media, and more generally of the Internet 2.0 is based on the human tendency to share feelings and information, on our inability to self-control, on our lack of inner discipline. The problem is that social media are making our lives more and more transparent in a cultural system where social development depends on a myriad of signs, details and exams over which it is easy to stumble. Such a deeply massified but also insecure society makes us victims of our own technological addictions.

The first victim of this new panopticon jail, where everybody is controlled and controller at the same time, is the troll. The troll, an almost universally hated figure, that here I would like to defend. The word troll is used by today's biggest names in journalism in the same manner as politicians use the word terrorist: to stigmatize in the public eye any disturber of the system. The only way to avoid self-profiling is simple: respecting netiquette, becoming a fair and obedient Citizen of the Web, a fan of some trending guru, etc. In this case you’ll become a number, and it’s fine. But if you fall victim of the drug you are given (“How's it going, Paolo?”. Er, do you really want to know?), you can end up on someone else's black list.

A fellow correspondent once shamelessly described, from the eighth floor of her UWS apartment, the “I have never loved you more” speech of President Obama as if it was the Gospel of Christ on Earth. She asked me to share her article. Of course: according to the introjected, automatized logic of self-promotion, I, a living number, was needed. But I allowed myself to disagree. With some caustic but still polite irony, I decided to publicly make fun of her.

Her reaction was utterly predictable: she unfriended me and blocked me on Facebook.

We didn’t stop seeing each other, though, and we continued to meet several times for lunch or coffee. In a private message, she wrote to me: "You know I live on this job. What I post on Twitter or Facebook is what feeds me. If you ridicule it, with your silly jokes, why should I keep you in my friends’ list?”

She was right. In times of crisis, there’s no room for nuisance or controversies among the marginal. How many real-life friends have I lost, because of my online commentary? The depressive mood of this decade makes us accept any kind of judgement from our little bosses at work, as we are forced into the boxcars of the system. We only allow ourselves to explode and to become intolerant with our own potential comrades, with those with whom we could have a nice chat and, why not, even some fruitful quarrelling. For that, as always, “there’s no time”. And the time we spare from alienation in office cubicles and in the circus of consumption must be split between family and... the ubiquitous memes.

2. The Dialectic.

Getting past my personal, irrelevant example, it might be interesting to try to update the famous Hegel’s master-slave dialectic for our times of trolls and Very Important Persons. The VIP/master (be it a journalist, an artist, an academic, a theorist, etc.), exposing himself, renouncing to his own unthouchability to assert his own truth, has achieved his primary purpose: elevating himself over what has become his now troll/servant. The main feature of the latter is being just a number, an entity which doesn’t really count. Yet, the troll/servant becomes important for the VIP/master, as the maintenance in visibility of the VIP depends on the anonymous workings of the troll. The troll/servant, by reading a page, clicking, sharing, critiquing in his own ways, inflaming the debates, gives the VIP what s/her needs. The VIP can no longer live without the troll.

The subordination is also reversed: the VIP, yielding to a pathological need to "communicate", becomes a troll, as it’s closely linked to the activity of the latter. Conversely, the troll, with his petty, constant work, somehow becomes “master” of the VIP. In short, in this dialectic the apparent superiority of the VIP does not ensure his control over the world that so tenaciously he tried to conquer.

Trolls have a precise function in the pathological universe where they move: they are an antidote to respectability, that can be as poisonous as clear-cut vulgarity.

Some of us just want to float over throbbing disputes, discuss only with the composure of gentlemen, but there are times when something is clearly, terribly wrong. That is when one feels the distinctive thrill of addiction: when something is clearly, terribly wrong, and I'm not talking about a Oh-he-mispelled-Gandhi’s-firstname, I must admit to experience a certain pleasure in witnessing the shredding of another human being’s arguments into pieces – and in this spectacle I also grow a personal, refreshing prejudice.

Virtually every day comes with its fair share of writers of some repute, young and older journalists, academics or thinkers complaining about the amount of rancour received for their publications. But is really the cost of increasingly rude online commentators so unbearable? It might be better to simply admit that decency in disagreement died when the Internet was born: we all know that type of troll which, hiding behind anonymity, comes to threaten and offend without restraint, posting pornographic or shocking images, mocking family grieves, physical defects and tragedies.   

Nevertheless, whether we talk shit about soldiers killed in Afghanistan, cruelly mock someone’s death, or we let a writer know he’s clearly, terribly wrong, the trolling phenomenon is not only inevitable, but essentially healthy. The liberating power of a crude comment doesn’t go beyond or above many other illnesses of our capitalism – in fact, it is a deceptive power – but has the merit to uncover the emptiness of “education”. If one of the most popular mantra among the "educated" is: do not write online what you would never say in real life, we should answer that never, in the history of mankind, we have been flooded by so many opinions, jokes, puns, points of view, dropped from above and multiplied by the media. Perhaps there’s nothing natural, or gracious, about trolling. But there's really nothing natural even about the bombastic reproduction of intellectualism, today.

The truth is that, in a certain way, we are at war. A war beyond words. It’s a war that has to do with immigration, religion, politics at a ground level. Our whole life is about sitting back and letting others get away with everything. Allowing our bosses to judge us, allowing ads to judge us, making them think that we are not important, that we are stupid rather than unique, that we belong to this or that - never to ourselves. We see them snigger. But some of us have realized the true meaning behind their smiles, behind their good manners and their etiquette, behind their pronouncements. An imaginary troll manifesto would begin with the words: "If this is your game, we’ll get into it with our rules and our barbarity”.

3. Self-consciousness.

The VIP tries to dominate the world in which s/he exerts his/her fame by demanding compliance, education and composure from his/her readers, on the premise of their supposed equality. But this is a misleading premise: readers don't publish, at the most they posts a comment, and their commentary undergoes a filter. Even when readers turn trolls, as we have seen before, and the dialectic with the VIP goes so far as to make one dependent on the other, the distance between the two is never completely dissolved. Readers, whether they maintain their good manners or not, will always remain marginal. Even a simple nuisance can end up trapped by the Compulsory Comment Disorder (instigated by social media), while the VIP is standing on a pile of protections, contracts and alliances.

Trolls have my full solidarity. But what are the side effects of trolling? Funnily enough, the troll should perform a cost-benefit analysis. Some utterances, although intelligent, acute and precise, can have no other effect than damaging their authors. Paradoxically, the main mistake of trolls is often that of saying things too weakly and too strongly at the same time: too weakly to change anything, too strongly not to cost them dearly in terms of exclusion.

What to choose then? The co-optation in system of robotic-but-not risky participation? What Hegel called the “rise of Stoicism” or the "unhappy consciousness" of the servant? That feeling of exciting albeit only virtual emancipation, the awareness of living a life at the margins of the debate. This is where the obsessive clicking, the indignant sharing of conspiracy sites come from: a pretty gloomy way out.

Perhaps a better solution would be to exit the assembly line of online resentment through our control of our own desires. Through a type of work that would contain discipline instead of dissipation. Creating structured blogs and manifestos, organizing trolling actions without forgetting efficacy. A work that can have an enduring impact instead of getting lost in oblivion. As trolls/slaves create more and more products with greater and greater sophistication through their own creativity, they should begin to see themselves reflected in the products they created, and they should realise that the world around them is not only the one dominated by the VIP. They should produce a self-consciousness of their condition of social significance at the times of Facebook. A self-consciousness that can only be reached if we compare our particular existence with the existence of others. Sometimes, the melody that derives from this exercise is not a beautiful exchange of loving opinions, but a fierce confrontation.

Some of us are not afraid to challenge social death – that is, today, the end of one’s career, the exclusion from educated world – because we choose not to surrender to the media power of VIP. But the question is: is it still worth, in a society where everything is networking and careful balance between consent and assent, afflicting the comfortable ones rather than comforting the afflicted? Despite the temptation to have a more strategic approach to life and come to terms with educated society, I think that, yes, it’s still worth it. Perhaps we will never reach certain audiences or we will never be asked to give lectures, and more than one of our friends will get angry at us. But we will still have a good laugh among us, a few to a few, in our little tribe of not-totally-alienated people.