The Art of the Troll

by aestetix

A preface: The moniker "Internet troll" has acquired a bad reputation, due to mean-spirited comments on "social" media and other antics.

I think it's important to show that a well crafted troll, rather than simply spitting out racial slurs and other nonsense, can be powerful, and indeed, a method of bringing positive change.

Trolling has been around for a long time.

In ancient Greece, the birthplace of tragedy and comedy, the playwright Aristophanes was a brilliant troll.  Consider his 423 B.C. play The Clouds, in which he mocks Socrates, the famous philosopher.  A man named Strepsiades has fallen into debt and decides to enroll in the Thinkery, the school Socrates runs.  After all, he reasons, if Socrates is able to use his magic logical "reasoning" to piss off the ruling class, surely he could teach Strepsiades how to trick his creditors into forgiving all his debts.  The entire play serves as a massive lampoon on the emerging school of philosophy for which ancient Greece is now so famous.  It also shows us an example of how trolling can be done well.

Let's break down the "art of trolling" into a few short and simple rules.  First, troll concepts, not people.  Second, when we create a troll, make sure the point is clear.  Third, our troll needs to be credible, or at least within the realm of possibility.  Finally, know the limit, and don't go past it.

One of my favorite trolls, Mark Twain, was a master of using dark comedy to further political ideas, including hitting on topics that might otherwise be taboo.  While most are familiar with the famous "white-washing the fence" scene, in which Tom Sawyer tricks his friends into doing his chores for him, one of my favorite trolls comes from his first novel, The Gilded Age.  The book, published in 1873 at the dawn of an age in American politics where corporations like Standard Oil ruled over Congress, was so impactful that we have since borrowed the book's title to describe that era.  One character from the book comes to mind: Colonel Sellers, who is described as an eternal optimist, but in reality is a hustling serial entrepreneur.  In one scene, where the narrator encounters the colonel with his family, desperately poor after yet another failed get-rich-quick scheme and left with nothing to eat but turnips, the colonel preaches about how lucky they are to have these fantastic turnips and how great turnips are for the health.  I'm sure readers can see a faint resemblance to a certain recent American politician.

Twain was able to examine obvious failures in the political system of the time, nail down the precise problem (in this case, corrupt politicians), and create a perfect caricature of the "ideal" corrupt politician, while placing him in increasingly ridiculous situations that the audience would find hilariously absurd.  Twain makes no direct personal attacks and uses pointed humor so well that even the target(s) of his jokes would be hard pressed not to laugh.

Sometimes a troll is crafted to clearly show why a rule or policy is bad.

In 2016, filmmaker Charlie Lyne was upset that the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) was serving as an effective censor against films they considered "controversial" or "indecorous."  This mattered because a film could not be released in British cinema without a BBFC certificate, which costs around £1000.

To protest against this, Lyne created a Kickstarter to produce a "film" that was literally watching paint dry.  Every new pledge to the Kickstarter added time to the final movie.  By the end of the Kickstarter, the film grew to ten hours and seven minutes, and the BBFC censors were forced to watch the entire thing.  Because Lyne considered the BBFC a bad organization with a bad policy, he pushed their policies to the extreme to demonstrate his point, at the same time making a mockery of the process.  For those curious, the film obtained an "U" rating, for "unlikely to offend or harm."

While a good troll will clearly be humorous and designed to mock, their points should also be within the realm of possibility.

At its top form, the troll should begin with a reasonable premise, and then turn a corner that makes the reader start to ask questions.  One of my favorite examples of this in recent years is LulzSec.  Formed in 2011, one of their first targets was PBS.  They hacked into the website, and added a fake news story that Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls were still alive and living in New Zealand.  While this is clearly absurd, it's also hilarious, and just sufficiently within reason that many people had to check other news sources to verify.  If the story were posted on a less credible outlet, it would not have been nearly as effective.

Finally, everything has a line, and we should never cross it.

A master troll will create a scenario that makes people uncomfortable (but doesn't hurt anyone), and forces hard questions into the public discussion.  Two very different examples come to mind.  The first is a classic story within the art world: Marcel Duchamp, a French artist, was upset at the snobbery and elitism within the art community in New York City.

So in 1917 he created a unique exhibit: he took a Bedfordshire urinal, turned it on its side, and wrote the phrase "R. Mutt" on it.  He then entered it as an art piece called "Fountain" in an exhibition.  As expected, it created a schism in the community, half the people saying it was a joke and should be thrown out of the show, and half the community pointing out that there was no clear standard that separated this toilet from other "art" pieces.  The impact was so powerful that it prompted an entire movement, Dadaism, in the art world, and it continues to inspire today.

A more contemporary troll, one of the masters of stand-up comedy, is Dave Chappelle.

He is an expert at taking complex, heated topics in American culture (such as race relations), and presenting them with a framing that forces us to ask difficult, often uncomfortable questions, while couching it in brilliant humor that helps to soften the blow.  Like Duchamp, his work splits communities, because he comes so close to the line of what is socially acceptable that the line becomes blurry.  With both Chappelle and Duchamp, their success lies in the fact that when someone claims they have gone too far, they can't point to a specific reason why.  The reality is that they came up to the line, and it feels like they went too far, but they simply expanded the scope of what is open for discussion.

To summarize, trolling can be quite powerful and effective if there is a method to the madness.

While the ease of access to the Internet allows amateurish banter to flourish in forums like YouTube commenters, a deeper art, when properly understood and exercised, can be harnessed to a more sophisticated effect.

With well calibrated goals, means to these goals, and clarity of purpose, trolling can be the best, and sometimes only, way to further the conversation.