#good news: MWA has not sent me any new asks since the last one lmao

[frostiifae]

I remember - recently enough to be a vivid memory but much longer than I’d think - I remember a time when the Internet was a place where we all collectively laughed at “those assholes who get mad over nothing”. You know, the self-centered pricks with no perspective, whether it was about politics, friendships, fandom, you name it; the people that had some kind of Problem and just wouldn’t shut up about it until you made them. 

I was never one to go after people, to seek out insecure folks on the internet for thrills - doing that just makes you the asshole, after all! - but seeing those people throw a fit only to get mocked into obscurity always came with a sense of morbid satisfaction. It was cathartic to encounter a bad actor, someone whose only motivation was to control or overpower others, and to collectively disarm them and put them to the side. 

As you get older, you get better at spotting these people. You start to learn their playbooks, the tactics they’ll use, the words they’ll hide behind, desperate to get you to take them seriously. And you learn how to twist these deceptions inside-out and to reveal their true natures. This was, I feel, the true artform of trolling - a sort of emotional judo, taking someone’s incoming self-righteous ego and deftly flipping it on them, demonstrating the futility of that ego, forcing them to choose between embarrassing themselves further or publicly admitting defeat. Some tried to use this power only in self-defense; others, blinded to its true potential and its dangers, used it to entertain themselves, and gave the rest of us a bad name. But that was fine. That was the way of things, sometimes; it didn’t need to bother us.

But it’s been a good few years since the golden age. Things have changed. On the one hand, “trolls” have regressed. What was once an elegant, if also crude, form of verbal combat has now just turned into outright violence. Social media has turned small communities into huge shouting matches, and it’s become so incredibly easy to just ignore voices that don’t agree with you... which is sometimes good, and often very bad. The old ways have lost refinement; there’s rarely any need for a one-to-one argument, so trolling has lost its purpose, and the cultural identity of the internet has been reduced to its hateful vocal few and a bunch of people who either don’t know better, or are too desperate to belong, or both.

On the other, though, trolling served a very important purpose online: it was a social trial by fire. If you wanted to make friends on the internet, you needed to learn how to engage with other people, and if you didn’t learn quickly, you’d be ripped apart - forced to find a new community, or at the very least, to start over with a new name (and hope you aren’t seen through). With the old arts being lost to the sands of time, it’s become easier and easier to simply assert your presence online, refuse to acknowledge your own interpersonal flaws, and to just... be here, because no one can tell you no. 

There are so many people I’ve encountered on tumblr that would be bullied out of their communities entirely about a decade or so ago - not because they’re weak, not because their communities are cruel, but because they themselves are assholes. Because we had quickly realized that the only sure way to deal with an idiot is to openly humiliate them, no tip-toeing, no sugarcoating. Because you were entitled to no one’s attention - no one was obligated to host you or to tolerate your bad manners. You could do anything you wanted on the internet... but so could everyone else. If you weren’t the sort of person other people liked having around, then you would find yourself alone, and you would either learn... or you wouldn’t. 

Things are different now, but I don’t think it’s as different as it seems. Culturally, sure, we’re a bit different. A lot of us, even the younger ones, are more responsible. We’ve learned a lot as an online culture, and grown more tolerant. And a lot of us want to put the warring behind us; it was petty and childish and we’d like to be remembered as better than that, or at the very least just to be left alone. And I think that’s all well and good. But I don’t think these people by themselves have dissolved the Internet-as-a-crucible. I think it’s largely the way sites are designed now. Online communities used to be user-driven, which meant that even large sites were run by people whose primary focus was building and serving that community; it was in their best interests, as hosts, to enforce a certain amount of order, and to curate people who weren’t willing to play by the rules, for one reason or another. 

But then Web 2.0 happened, and now all that really matters is that people are talking. It doesn’t matter what they’re talking about, or whether two people in a conversation are even talking about the same thing, or why those two people are talking to each other in the first place; all that matters is getting as many people talking as possible, as often as possible, and it turns out that contriving conflict and making resolution difficult makes conversation happen a lot. 

We - or at least I - like to call the old days of the internet the “Wild West”, in that we were self-governing, that there was no sense of law and order except the rules we agreed to abide by on our own. But the Internet back then was so civil by comparison. Nowadays it really is “everyone for themselves”. If some asshole comes into your tag and starts spreading hate, what options do you even have? There’s no moderators or administrators to turn to, to say “hey, this person’s making our experience miserable, please remove them”; god forbid you try to actually report them to Tumblr, as if Tumblr gives a shit. Your only form of collective action is having everybody block that person, and that’s the best you’ve got - hoping that they can’t find anybody else to harass, and feeling powerless to actually... y’know... stop them from being an asshole. Maybe, just maybe, if you’re brave, you can try to help other people understand what’s going on... 

...But it’s so easy to misunderstand or misinterpret a wayward message, especially on Web 2.0 sites that are designed to remove you from context as much as possible. Even this post, as I read it with older and wiser eyes, has its flaws. What’s the difference between “trolling” and “hazing”? Where’s the line supposed to be drawn? Ironically, because we have to fend for ourselves so openly now, we’re so acutely aware of how the vulnerable can be affected when people aren’t careful. Depending on how old a person is, a scolding and mocking tone may be exactly appropriate, or completely uncalled for; depending on their background it maybe proper to rip into them for a misleading or unrealistic portrayal of a group’s struggle, or it might turn out you’re the asshole for policing someone’s way of coping. And even if you are in the right, what happens when the other person cries foul, finds or fabricates some kind of offense you’ve made, and passes it around to bystanders with no other stakes in the conversation? Now what? Do you just decide you don’t care what the general public thinks? It’s much harder than it used to be to just ignore people, after all. The only way you can protect yourself is not to play, but you can’t call it a winning move. There are no winning moves anymore.

It’s just so funny to me to look at all of the snobbish, entitled white adults in American society - and worldwide, I’m sure - and to draw connections between them, and the bratty upstart children on the internet that, anymore, we’re powerless to do anything about and just have to ignore and hope they grow up. Because they probably won’t. They will probably grow up to be the assholes we’re seeing on TV, protesting masks during a pandemic, demanding other people take them seriously, without a trace of self-awareness. Just a good few years ago, just for a little while, we as an online society were empowered to deal with those people; we couldn’t fix them, but we could prevent them from harming us, and a lot of the time we could even reform them and help them grow.

And then the big money came along and Capitalized the internet, and wouldn’t you know it, those people have gone back to being protected and enabled by the system.