Before starting to blog on DailyKos in about July, I kept a general-themed personal blog, which, on an exceptional day, might have attracted .2% of the readers that DailyKos does. My personal blog started out on the Salon.com server, and there was a noteworthy culture of goodwill among Salon bloggers and readers. If you disagreed with someone--even hotly and emotionally--you did it very civilly, with the aim of furthering discussion and achieving mutual understanding. If somebody's post or comments annoyed you, unless there was a mutually edifying discussion to be had about the matter, you kept your reaction private. There are still corners of the world where you don't need to lock your door; likewise, there was not a recognition of the phenomenon of "trolling" in the self-contained Salon.com blogging universe, because none seemed to be needed.
DailyKos is the first online forum I've paid attention to, where I've encountered user comments that are hostile and inflammatory because, well, they're intended that way. For the first time, I've read posts, or "diaries," here that make me smart with indignation, that strike me as lacking the potential of furthering sincere discussion, and, apparently, similarly irritate the rest of the community. My introduction to the phenomenon of "trolling" has marked an adulthood "loss of innocence" for me--as the fact of crime in big cities, or diseases in undeveloped countries, might have done for you.
Leaving aside the issue of diaries that are obnoxious by community standards, I fear I often haven't done very well at responding to rude comments. I've risen to the bait of a few commenters, who seemed only to be out for attention. I've ignored others, who would hijack a whole discussion thread, unchecked, with their irrelevant hostilities.
Some trolls are simply lonely little people, loose on the internet, intent only on spoiling discussions at venues like DailyKos. Other DailyKos trolls, if they are uncivil and disrespectful, are also at least sincere. The latter kind of troll interests me more than the former, I suspect they are much more numerous. They are probably also some of my friends and neighbors off-line. I'll admit it: in my time as a Kossack, I have BEEN an attack troll--or nearly so.
I grasped the motivation to troll in a personal way, while reading somebody's diary about healthcare. This was maybe a month or two ago. Generally, I pride myself on furthering what I see as the best in the liberal tradition--the appreciation of "shades of gray" in any argument, the thoughtful refining of one's own position, by assimilating conscientious views very different from one's own. Anyway, as open-minded as I feel, concerning many solutions to pressing American and world problems, the issue of healthcare reform strikes me as having a well-defined solution: We must abolish for-profit health insurance and institute a single, publicly accountable government agency, or "single payer," to fund all healthcare. Period. You could say I'm uncharacteristically certain here.
Back to this healthcare diary I was reading. Actually, it was the comments to the diary. I came across one comment that had the nerve to suggest that the high cost of American healthcare "might not be a factor" in Americans not seeking timely healthcare, and dying at disproportionate rates in the industrialized world. I lack for healthcare, myself, being without an employer who offers it, and having a "pre-existing condition" that makes the purchase of affordable health insurance all but impossible for me. I encounter these horrible stories about people who die because they can't afford healthcare, who don't get themselves to a doctor in time, or whose lives are drastically altered by sub-standard Medicaid-funded care they receive.
Here I was, facing down the well-funded insurance lobby. I about had a fit, reading this inane thing. In response, I hurriedly composed a flame that started out: "Are you a sociopath because your mother dropped you on your head?..." I previewed my comment, and, at the fateful moment I moved to click the "Post" button, I backed down.
I wouldn't have been furthering the conversation, at all. No matter how ignorant the other commenter had struck me, my response was an offensive personal attack on someone who, after all, may simply have never thought through the issue of American healthcare reform before, and was trying to learn what s/he could. My posting my heated response would have amounted to attack trolling.
I've just illustrated the psychology that I believe originates most attack trolling. It's an edgy desperation, a certainty that one is right about a life-or-death matter--but that one's position is not being adequately understood or embraced. Others' writings, if they represent an opposing view, or if they strike a desperate commenter as being potentially sympathetic to an anathemic view, are perceived as mortally threatening.
Attack trolling on DailyKos appears chiefly in comments following diaries. "Concern" trolling tends to find its full flower in diaries themselves. To understand what concern trolling is, what motivates it, and why it's offensive, you have to step back and look at the cultural context of DailyKos, itself.
For more than two decades, with few exceptions, all we progressives could do was stand by and watch as the Christian Right racked up one political coup after another. With the advent of online organizing, grassroots progressives have inexorably started to win real, measurable victories against the powerful elite. The winds are slowly shifting for us.
The concern-troll diary professes abiding sympathy for the progressive cause, while spreading global pessimism about current grassroots political action. It offers no substantive information or analysis. Frequently, the concern troll distorts fact to achieve his or her dark view, or uses discredited analyses. In a forum dedicated to political self-help by every-day people, against moneyed interests, troll diaries don't suggest realistic remedies to the menacing obstacles they describe; they are fatalistic.
I regret that I have no links to actual troll diaries, so all I can do is to suggest a composite example on a popular recent theme, that of a diarist seeing doom for Democrats at the midterm election, because of a supposed Republican resurgence in popularity since the 9/11 anniversary.
I believe most whose diaries fit my "concern troll" criteria are sincere. They are written by progressives who are themselves demoralized, and why not? The going is still difficult. A lot of us really thought Kerry was going to win in '04, and in general, we're reminded constantly these days how determined the elite is to hang on to power. We're rattled and scared.
I don't know about you, but I get so mad every time I'm sucked into reading a pointless diary. If the comments following such a questionable contribution are any indication, other Kossacks are as surely offended. Why is concern trolling so painful to us?
Our collective sense of vulnerability makes us abhor these diaries. When we're feeling tentatively optimistic, we dislike being confronted with another's sense of helplessness. Despair, itself, as the feminist Sonia Johnson noted, is a tool those in power wield against potential insurgents, consciously, to block them: "You'll never get anywhere." Kossacks' offense at concern trolling, voiced in comment after comment following a diary on a fatalistic theme, is a tacit community acknowledgment that such diaries are not merely impolite, when we have hard work ahead of us, they're subversive.
What gives me hope? Will we ever take our government back from the political and corporate interests that have hijacked it? Why do I get up in the morning, when the enemy is so formidable, and there's so much despair, variously conceived and promulgated, among progressives?
I remind myself that, by any measure, we're proving to be damn difficult for the elites in power to bring to heel. Americans are a vibrant lot with an entrenched tradition of popular reform. The clumsy official machinery often doesn't match the savvy, nimble grassroots force that springs up to check those who would deny us our rights. The abolition of slavery by popular revolt was real, so was women's suffrage, so has been the inexorable march of queer advancement, to name a few successful people-powered movements.
As acknowledged in the expression "the reality-based community," neocons traffic in hysteria. More than anything, these people hate clear talk. Clear talk is what the netroots, at its best, has to offer the general discourse on human and civil rights, the environment, and the economy. It's discussion about difficult, shared realities, and practicalities of change.
To those who respond to concern trolls, I'd say, criticize, but keep your compassion and your respect. To those who have flamed me and others because our analyses seemed uncannily close to those of the Enemy, please calm down. We are probably not worth your breath. Or your frenzied typing, as the case may be. Each of us is a single voice, as it were, a lone atom in this huge thing. By "this huge thing," I mean the online grassroots movement that has sprung up to address the horrible political situation in which Americans find themselves. This community continuously creates the standards of "clear talk," meaningful conversation about change, through comments, Recommended Diaries, and the like. If you believe in your own progressive convictions, then don't despair, or allow yourself to feel desperate. You probably won't find yourself alone in this forum, or not for long. The netroots discourse will buoy you along like a river.