marquee moon
Banhammer'd
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http://computer.howstuffworks.com/troll5.htm
But the trolls that seem to be the most puzzling are those who have no personal agenda or vendetta against anyone. For them, trolling is an end unto itself. The goal is just to frustrate people and to build the troll's reputation as a troublemaker. Or could there be more?
http://www.neptunuslex.com/2007/08/08/psychoanalyzing-the-internet-troll/
The first and most easily dispensed with is the juvenile troll. This is a person who, if he had any actual skill or even a modicum of intelligence and drive, would become one of those virus-spinning hackers that are the bane of Windows-based email inboxes. A trifling step up from those who torture small animals, these are the equivalent of arsonists and vandals, people who get an almost sexual thrill – the real thing being denied them, apart from whatever solitary pleasures are found in the fields of Onan – of seeing it all come down, whatever “it” might be. It’s probably best for society that such people choose the Internet as their playground rather than meatspace, although it’s also probably true that it is the very anonymity of the online environment which enables their angry marginalia. Real vandalism, whatever else you may say about it, does require at least an analytically measurable amount of physical courage – after all, part of the thrill is the knowledge that one might get caught, and (having been caught) suffer personal or professional injury.
Having no fixed ideas of their own and eventually boring even themselves with the manifest evidence of their own inadequacies, most of these people will grow up, get a job, leave their mother’s basement and even form a kind of personal attachment, usually at the working end of a moist and fetid keyboard, exchanging IRC with a 15-year old boy from Cleveland masquerading as a 22-year old female exchange student from Sweden.
But some few will graduate to the next level, and often – rather than sprinkle their efforts about randomly – graduate to stalker status. They will pick a site, gender or genre of Usenet newsgroup, email list or weblog and parasitically affix themselves with terrible – sometimes even frightening – intensity. Walking out on a limb here, I imagine that the primary distinguishing characteristic of the fully mature Internet troll is a sense of overweening Narcissistic grandiosity.
But the trolls that seem to be the most puzzling are those who have no personal agenda or vendetta against anyone. For them, trolling is an end unto itself. The goal is just to frustrate people and to build the troll's reputation as a troublemaker. Or could there be more?
http://www.neptunuslex.com/2007/08/08/psychoanalyzing-the-internet-troll/
The first and most easily dispensed with is the juvenile troll. This is a person who, if he had any actual skill or even a modicum of intelligence and drive, would become one of those virus-spinning hackers that are the bane of Windows-based email inboxes. A trifling step up from those who torture small animals, these are the equivalent of arsonists and vandals, people who get an almost sexual thrill – the real thing being denied them, apart from whatever solitary pleasures are found in the fields of Onan – of seeing it all come down, whatever “it” might be. It’s probably best for society that such people choose the Internet as their playground rather than meatspace, although it’s also probably true that it is the very anonymity of the online environment which enables their angry marginalia. Real vandalism, whatever else you may say about it, does require at least an analytically measurable amount of physical courage – after all, part of the thrill is the knowledge that one might get caught, and (having been caught) suffer personal or professional injury.
Having no fixed ideas of their own and eventually boring even themselves with the manifest evidence of their own inadequacies, most of these people will grow up, get a job, leave their mother’s basement and even form a kind of personal attachment, usually at the working end of a moist and fetid keyboard, exchanging IRC with a 15-year old boy from Cleveland masquerading as a 22-year old female exchange student from Sweden.
But some few will graduate to the next level, and often – rather than sprinkle their efforts about randomly – graduate to stalker status. They will pick a site, gender or genre of Usenet newsgroup, email list or weblog and parasitically affix themselves with terrible – sometimes even frightening – intensity. Walking out on a limb here, I imagine that the primary distinguishing characteristic of the fully mature Internet troll is a sense of overweening Narcissistic grandiosity.
