Trolling

Last week I spoke about the insight my linguistics research had given me. It was into the idea underlying our words for turning and for right: TR, and its reversal, RT.

In the Indo-European world rightness became moralised. Not in the first Indo-European world, the Hittites. They moralised the fit. A good king was someone who behaved appropriately, did appropriate things, and was proper. That was the fit. In the Indo-European concept of governance it became the tracing of the rod. Notice the D in rod. T and D exchange with each other through sound shifts, between German and English, for instance.

They traced the straight rod, the straight road. That RT again, the RT in straight. When they were inaugurated, they drove a chariot in a straight line. DR, TR, drove. The charioteer drove them. That is the whole idea of straightness and rightness. It is embedded in our social organisation, and in almost every sentence we speak. And then someone comes along and does the turning.

But before all of that, immanent in all of it, is movement.

A word that moves

Emotion means to move from. That is what the Latin says, and it is what the word still does. Fear, sadness, disgust, amusement and anger are the names we give to the movers of body, speech and mind. Each one names the moment before a movement.

We feel fear, and then we move. We feel sadness, and then we move. We feel disgust, and then we move. We are amused, and we move. We are angry, and we move. The person provoking that fear is moving us through the fear.

We are moved, and then we act. The acting is the emotion made visible. A state of rest is not stillness. Like a dancer standing on one foot, it takes work.

Trolling, TR again, is the activity that moves those movers. That is the whole idea. It is what I set out to understand. What does Trump do when he uses Twitter to move hundreds of millions of minds, and now billions? What is the nature of what he does? What is trolling? That was my research question in the autumn of 2019.

I came to it the slow way. I read every use of the words troll and trolling in Factiva, the Dow Jones database of some 35,000 sources. It went back to years before the internet existed. I wanted to see how the words had been used and how far their meaning had travelled. One definition covered nearly every use.

Trolling is emotion-moving activity of body, speech or mind.

So when I say I’m Decoding Trolls, that is the subject matter. It is the definition I came to after several years of research. There is movement in all three of its words: emotion, moving, activity.

The dictionaries had told me the same thing without meaning to. In 2020 I collected every entry round the word troll. To troll was to stroll and to roll. It was to quest. It was to draw a bait along in the water. It was to sing out in a carefree way. Every sense is a movement. Every one of them moves something else along with it. A fish. A listener. A mind.

The kidnapping course

I did not learn it online. It began on a course that put me through a faked kidnapping.

When I was preparing to go to Ukraine, I had to do a course with the Austrian army. It put us under stress and taught us how to react if we were kidnapped. It was a week of training on an Austrian army base in a snowy forest near Vienna. I went there in January 2015, before I was posted to Ukraine.

The instructors worked on all of us with noise and disorientation. Shouting. Fear. Confusion. Distraction. Exhaustion. Games. Discomfort. Isolation.

Anyone who grew up watching daytime TV as a child knows the Second World War films where the German is always the enemy, with the German accent. End up on an Austrian army base where they are shouting at you all the time, and it really does sound a bit like being in a Second World War movie.

They provoked tension among us on purpose. They watched what we did, and what it did to us. Out of that came a confusion. Inside the confusion came an intimation that everything I was looking at was connected. Trolling. War. Buddhism. What I had just been through with my old boss. A nightmare I had. My own emotions troll me. I use them to troll others. Others troll me, and I react.

The police officer who interviews a suspect is asking one question of the emotional shell in front of them. What is it telling me?

A hostage may pretend to be sick, or act mad, or soil themselves, to be left alone. They are using their own body to move their captor. One of the things I learned on my hostile environment awareness training was that everything you see in the films, with some smart-arse kidnap victim, is exactly how you should not behave. You should make them your friends. You should make it hard for them to kill you or torture you.

That is trolling too. It is not necessarily positive trolling or negative trolling.

One act, every emotion in the room

Until I created positive trolling in February 2020, and registered Positive Trolls and positive trolling as trade marks in the European Union, all of these things were seen, analysed and answered as if they were different.

Take the anatomy of an ISIS troll. ISIS pushes a gay man from a roof. They film it.

The man is the direct victim. Nearly everyone who watches the film is moved by the two most powerful emotions there are, anger and disgust, which present as outrage. Other gay men in the places ISIS holds are moved to fear. The groomed supporters are moved to amusement at the outrage of the West, at the hypocrisy of the West. Some of them feel pride, and a hunger to take part in the barbarity. One act, and every emotion in the room moved by it, depending on your standpoint and your position in relation to ISIS or the victim.

There is barely a line in the literature that calls that trolling. But it is trolling. It was content created for the internet, and it was used on YouTube. It is a lot more complex than what we felt trolling was at that time, when you just wrote a tweet. Now, of course, we see Donald trolling into war, and trolling towards his own doom, and thousands of people die because of a tweet.

But then it was quite hard to see, and to get others to see, the relationship between the writing of a tweet or the posting of an ISIS video and the internet phenomenon of trolling.

Take a shop worker in Queensland. She was one of the first people in world history to be prosecuted for what was called, in 2008 and 2009, funeral trolling on Facebook. She discovered that by provoking outrage on Facebook she could matter. Nothing about her had changed. The internet had not altered her. She had found a playbook.

Take the senior adviser to Boris Johnson whose lockdown trip to the north of England provoked a furious backlash that his justification could not quiet. Take the contrarians that current affairs programmes invite on to wind up their audiences, with no regard to whether anything they say is news. Take a president who trolled the World Health Organisation for weeks in the middle of a pandemic, and then withdrew his country from it. Take a memorial page defaced so that the whole world would feel the same outrage at once.

Each of these is one thing. An activity that moves the emotions of everyone it touches. And everyone gets energy back from that movement, in one form or another.

The physics of trolling

The psychologists went looking for the troll. Trolling correlates, according to the conventional literature, with psychopathy, with Machiavellianism, and with sadism most strongly of all.

I just saw that the Ruschists released a video of their destruction of a school in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, and of humanitarian posts. They are creating archetypal Disinfolklore. Who is to say the attack itself was not done simply to create that online content, and that sense of outrage in people’s minds?

One study called trolling an internet manifestation of everyday sadism. Another gave it four characteristics: aggression, success (which is the bite), disruption and deception. A third described the bait, a comment designed to upset, and the sarc…