Trolling on the internet looks and feels like a new phenomenon. Abuse can rain down on a target instantly and from everywhere, in quantities never before seen. But as David Rudrum’s engaging book on the history of trolling shows, the desire to hurt or distract another with words goes back a very long way. The internet is a powerful new medium, but ancient messages travel on it.
The legendary first satirist Archilochus is said to have wandered between the cities of pre-classical Greece, asking for food and accommodation. If a king was hospitable, the poet would sing a song of praise about his virtues. If he was turned away, Archilochus would go to the next place and sing a song so abusive of the spurning king that he is supposed to have actually killed at least one of his victims.
This is just-so story territory, somewhere in Greece in the first half of the 7th century BCE. Did anyone really die of shame because of Archilochus’s barbed words? I rather hope not, but the mythic power of the story rings down the ages. The Old English word for “story” was “spell” (hence “gospel,” which is OE gōd spel, good story). It only took on the sense of magic spell in the early Modern period.
Trolling aspires to the status of magic spell, hoping to silence an opponent through shame and ridicule, rather than cogent argument. Usually it is no more than noisy and irritating — but sometimes it takes flight, and a troll can change the world. It is likely to be vexatious, but if deployed in a just cause, it can sometimes be a good thing. As with anything that claims to be “just a joke,” context matters.
SLEDGING IN BEOWULF
Rudrum brings order to this melange of rhetoric, wit and malice with a handy working definition of trolling: “Trolling is to defame, insult, or humiliate an opponent in public, or else to make a public statement of views that are not sincerely held, but aim instead to cause controversy, or to be provocative and vexatious, sometimes with legal consequences.”
This is a lumpy and inclusive definition, the best kind because it provides a way into the trolling text-acts rather than an endless (and to my mind arid) line-drawing between items that are either in or out.
Trolling is a human phenomenon. Like nearly everything in cultural theory, from tragedy to deconstruction, it is really a fuzzy category. Thus, Rudrum sensibly suggests no single ingredient of his definition is needed to label a text trolling, as long as enough of the others are apparent.
He then, rather brilliantly, uses words from his lumpy definition for the titles of his seven chapters. He also proceeds chronologically in his tour through trolling in literature, starting with Unferth, the abusive Dane in Hrothgar’s Hall, who engages Beowulf in a combat of words called “flyting.”
This ritual of insults is immediately recognizable to Australians as sledging, the unsubtle art of trying to get your opponent to crack under insult, as a substitute or supplement for physical battle.
Unferth’s barb about Beowulf not even being able to win a swimming race with a mate would scarcely make the grade in the Australian cricket team, but Beowulf has to take the challenge seriously. Heroes cannot afford to lose face.
PATRIARCHAL UTTERANCES
Trolling, like satire and many elements of humor, is a shaming mechanism, more about destroying self-respect than about literal meaning. As Rudrum’s examples overwhelmingly indicate, it is a predominantly male-coded form of agonistic rhetoric. Women are often the targets of trolling, as are other disempowered groups, and rarely the provocateurs.
Like satire, trolling works with the CAD (Contempt, Anger, Disgust) triad of emotions, and the social license to express these publicly belongs historically to the patriarchs. This is a deep and troubling bias Rudrum gestures towards regularly, without making it a core focus of his critique.
His focus is on how it has worked in the centuries before the digital age, as a prior exploration to the question of how, or whether, it should work.
Trolling is a peculiarly vandalistic kind of public utterance. It provokes a target to “lose it,” and only by a precisely calibrated response can you hope to defuse or deflect it. It causes offence irresponsibly and perhaps there should be a law against it.
On balance, this would be both impossible and not always a good idea. Rudrum’s literary trolls are instructive — gadflies and polemicists who annoyed the pompous and sometimes even brought change to corrupt regimes. His main examples are Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, Martin Luther, Oscar Wilde, Wyndham Lewis and Emile Zola.
The serial offender Lewis can descend into oblivion for all I care, but who would wish Wilde’s ironic trolling aphorisms, such as this one, undone?
“I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square.”
Even the most earnest teacher can afford to worry about the implications of Lady Bracknell’s brutal sledge. And which of us can resist the furtive joy of witnessing a good bit of trolling, at least when it happens to someone else?
More seriously, Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” and Zola’s “J’Accuse” are justly defended as a satire and a polemic. They maliciously attack and belittle corrupt and complacent establishments in 18th century Ireland and 19th century France with potent moral justification. When power refuses to listen to truth, speaking insolence instead certainly feels good and can, when the circumstances so conspire, even do good.
‘THE FARTING DONKEY AT ROME’
But it is the image of the 16th century German theologian Martin Luther as troll that is most arresting. By trolling the Catholic church through the new medium of print, in German rather than the learned language of Latin, Luther drove on one of the greatest revolutions in European history, namely the Protestant reformation. He was profuse, abusive, and very scatological in his writings. The Ninety Five theses, which he pinned on the church door in Wittenberg, are an angry listicle of the problems attendant on turning a religion based in poverty and humility into a multinational business.
His reformation surged through Europe because people “got” the basic criticism, much as people “get” a joke. Others built the detailed theological architecture of Protestantism, but Luther went viral with a New Testament he translated in 10 hot months and descriptions of the pope as “the Farting Donkey at Rome.”
There are two messages here for our present moment in the history of trolling.
One is that the message is most volatile when the medium is new and uncontrolled by established conventions. Flyting competitions and sledging in sport and politics are contained by understood rituals of rhetorical combat. “Because I want to do you slowly,” Paul Keating once said to John Hewson across the despatch box in 1992, before going on to win the 1993 election.
It is when the rules of the game are fluid that big effects, for good and ill, can explode uncontrollably, leaving targets confused about how to respond, if at all. Should you just refuse to feed the trolls?
Donald Trump’s use of Twitter’s speed and ubiquity last decade to disrupt the mass-media conventions of politics is another trolling revolution, with consequences that are still playing out.
And this leads to the second message, the one we will always have with us even when we have worked out how to live with (anti-)social media. As Rudrum puts it: “Someone who trolls may be ‘just trolling,’ but they’re not ‘just a troll’ if they can successfully portray themselves as trolling in a noble cause.”
Recently I wrote about why I did not think that the benefits of labeling satire online outweighed the costs. It’s impractical — people can avoid labels in bad faith. And it treats the public as helplessly in need of protection by a group (or even an algorithm) of guardians who protect us from making mistakes when presented with satire, irony, sarcasm, and the rest.
If an algorithm for trolling could be devised, I would briefly be tempted to turn it on. On reflection, I’d resist the mechanical fix. It probably wouldn’t work reliably anyway. If it did, however, that might one day be worse.
If the history of censorship is anything to go by, the definition of trolling will expand to include a lot that is better described as robust critique.
Zola was a great novelist who chronicled late 19th century French society in rich detail. In “J’Accuse,” by contrast, he deliberately and disruptively used newspapers to break the law. His brief and explosive foray into journalism exposed the cover-up of the corrupt military trial and imprisonment of Alfred Dreyfus, wrongly fitted up for treason because he was Jewish. We should, I think, be prepared to put up with a fair bit of malicious nonsense to avoid having this kind provocation silenced as “trolling” before it can reach the public.
WHAT MAKE OF THIS?
So what does this tour through the literature of the literature of provocation tell you about the raucous world we inhabit? That provocation, when harnessed to a coherent cause, can change the world (as with Luther or Zola), or at least irritate and expose the self-flattering exploiters (as with Swift and Wilde).
However, when not anchored to a clear ethical cause, trolling is a dangerous weapon for bullshit, in the late philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s technical sense. Bullshitters may or may not lie deliberately. The crucial thing is that they speak recklessly, whatever suits their purpose. They don’t care if it’s true or not as long as it has the effect they are after. This is the essence of trolling and a worrying phenomenon in the “post-truth” world.
In this sense, Trump seems to be the troll-in-chief, closely followed in the rankings by Elon Musk, the first buddy. To be fair, politicians and other public figures, abetted by their media and marketing departments, have been chipping away at the convention that they should tell a direct version of the truth for a very long time, but public discourse by trolling (turn Gaza into a beach resort, anyone?) is a step change, perhaps a revolution.
Like Luther’s pamphlets, this depends on a technological change in the speed and ubiquity of communication people have not digested yet.
Great things, but also much chaos flowed from the Reformation (and if you count the consequences of the Protestant missionary effort in later centuries, a whole lot of chaos). My guess is that the present assault on received views and standards about the way government should work will be less consequential, but I have been wrong about a few things lately.
All I have to recommend in the present time of instant and near universal trolling is the thin reed of our personal and civic responsibility as readers.
If it smells of cruelty, malice, or bullshit, doubt it. If it perfectly fits your prejudices, pause and reflect. All the systems and platforms tend to bend to power and wealth. They cannot be trusted to serve democratic interests alone. So, the mere citizen’s least worst protection is, as it has always been, caveat lector: let the reader beware.
Robert Phiddian is a professor of English at Flinders University. He receives funding from the ARC for the Cartoon Nation Discovery Project.
