[p2p-research] Malwebolence - the dark side of internet culture (and p2p?)

[Michel Bauwens]

Thanks, very interesting,

Michel

On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 5:56 PM, Zbigniew Lukasiak <zzbbyy at gmail.com> wrote:

> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03trolls-t.html
>
> Published: August 3, 2008
>
> One afternoon in the spring of 2006, for reasons unknown to those who
> knew him, Mitchell Henderson, a seventh grader from Rochester, Minn.,
> took a .22-caliber rifle down from a shelf in his parents' bedroom
> closet and shot himself in the head. The next morning, Mitchell's
> school assembled in the gym to begin mourning. His classmates created
> a virtual memorial on MySpace and garlanded it with remembrances. One
> wrote that Mitchell was "an hero to take that shot, to leave us all
> behind. God do we wish we could take it back. . . . " Someone e-mailed
> a clipping of Mitchell's newspaper obituary to MyDeathSpace.com, a Web
> site that links to the MySpace pages of the dead. From MyDeathSpace,
> Mitchell's page came to the attention of an Internet message board
> known as /b/ and the "trolls," as they have come to be called, who
> dwell there.
>
> /b/ is the designated "random" board of 4chan.org, a group of message
> boards that draws more than 200 million page views a month. A post
> consists of an image and a few lines of text. Almost everyone posts as
> "anonymous." In effect, this makes /b/ a panopticon in reverse —
> nobody can see anybody, and everybody can claim to speak from the
> center. The anonymous denizens of 4chan's other boards — devoted to
> travel, fitness and several genres of pornography — refer to the
> /b/-dwellers as "/b/tards."
>
> Measured in terms of depravity, insularity and traffic-driven
> turnover, the culture of /b/ has little precedent. /b/ reads like the
> inside of a high-school bathroom stall, or an obscene telephone party
> line, or a blog with no posts and all comments filled with slang that
> you are too old to understand.
>
> Something about Mitchell Henderson struck the denizens of /b/ as
> funny. They were especially amused by a reference on his MySpace page
> to a lost iPod. Mitchell Henderson, /b/ decided, had killed himself
> over a lost iPod. The "an hero" meme was born. Within hours, the
> anonymous multitudes were wrapping the tragedy of Mitchell's death in
> absurdity.
>
> Someone hacked Henderson's MySpace page and gave him the face of a
> zombie. Someone placed an iPod on Henderson's grave, took a picture
> and posted it to /b/. Henderson's face was appended to dancing iPods,
> spinning iPods, hardcore porn scenes. A dramatic re-enactment of
> Henderson's demise appeared on YouTube, complete with shattered iPod.
> The phone began ringing at Mitchell's parents' home. "It sounded like
> kids," remembers Mitchell's father, Mark Henderson, a 44-year-old I.T.
> executive. "They'd say, 'Hi, this is Mitchell, I'm at the cemetery.'
> 'Hi, I've got Mitchell's iPod.' 'Hi, I'm Mitchell's ghost, the front
> door is locked. Can you come down and let me in?' " He sighed. "It
> really got to my wife." The calls continued for a year and a half.
>
> In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word "troll" to denote
> someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. Early trolling
> was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small, single-topic
> Usenet groups. The trolls employed what the M.I.T. professor Judith
> Donath calls a "pseudo-naïve" tactic, asking stupid questions and
> seeing who would rise to the bait. The game was to find out who would
> see through this stereotypical newbie behavior, and who would fall for
> it. As one guide to trolldom puts it, "If you don't fall for the joke,
> you get to be in on it."
>
> Today the Internet is much more than esoteric discussion forums. It is
> a mass medium for defining who we are to ourselves and to others.
> Teenagers groom their MySpace profiles as intensely as their hair;
> escapists clock 50-hour weeks in virtual worlds, accumulating gold for
> their online avatars. Anyone seeking work or love can expect to be
> Googled. As our emotional investment in the Internet has grown, the
> stakes for trolling — for provoking strangers online — have risen.
> Trolling has evolved from ironic solo skit to vicious group hunt.
>
> "Lulz" is how trolls keep score. A corruption of "LOL" or "laugh out
> loud," "lulz" means the joy of disrupting another's emotional
> equilibrium. "Lulz is watching someone lose their mind at their
> computer 2,000 miles away while you chat with friends and laugh," said
> one ex-troll who, like many people I contacted, refused to disclose
> his legal identity.
>
> Another troll explained the lulz as a quasi-thermodynamic exchange
> between the sensitive and the cruel: "You look for someone who is full
> of it, a real blowhard. Then you exploit their insecurities to get an
> insane amount of drama, laughs and lulz. Rules would be simple: 1. Do
> whatever it takes to get lulz. 2. Make sure the lulz is widely
> distributed. This will allow for more lulz to be made. 3. The game is
> never over until all the lulz have been had."
>
> /b/ is not all bad. 4chan has tried (with limited success) to police
> itself, using moderators to purge child porn and eliminate calls to
> disrupt other sites. Among /b/'s more interesting spawn is Anonymous,
> a group of masked pranksters who organized protests at Church of
> Scientology branches around the world.
>
> But the logic of lulz extends far beyond /b/ to the anonymous message
> boards that seem to be springing up everywhere. Two female Yale Law
> School students have filed a suit against pseudonymous users who
> posted violent fantasies about them on AutoAdmit, a college-admissions
> message board. In China, anonymous nationalists are posting death
> threats against pro-Tibet activists, along with their names and home
> addresses. Technology, apparently, does more than harness the wisdom
> of the crowd. It can intensify its hatred as well.
>
> Jason Fortuny might be the closest thing this movement of anonymous
> provocateurs has to a spokesman. Thirty-two years old, he works
> "typical Clark Kent I.T." freelance jobs — Web design, programming —
> but his passion is trolling, "pushing peoples' buttons." Fortuny
> frames his acts of trolling as "experiments," sociological inquiries
> into human behavior. In the fall of 2006, he posted a hoax ad on
> Craigslist, posing as a woman seeking a "str8 brutal dom muscular
> male." More than 100 men responded. Fortuny posted their names,
> pictures, e-mail and phone numbers to his blog, dubbing the exposé
> "the Craigslist Experiment." This made Fortuny the most prominent
> Internet villain in America until November 2007, when his fame was
> eclipsed by the Megan Meier MySpace suicide. Meier, a 13-year-old
> Missouri girl, hanged herself with a belt after receiving cruel
> messages from a boy she'd been flirting with on MySpace. The boy was
> not a real boy, investigators say, but the fictional creation of Lori
> Drew, the mother of one of Megan's former friends. Drew later said she
> hoped to find out whether Megan was gossiping about her daughter. The
> story — respectable suburban wife uses Internet to torment teenage
> girl — was a media sensation.
>
> Fortuny's Craigslist Experiment deprived its subjects of more than
> just privacy. Two of them, he says, lost their jobs, and at least one,
> for a time, lost his girlfriend. Another has filed an
> invasion-of-privacy lawsuit against Fortuny in an Illinois court.
> After receiving death threats, Fortuny meticulously scrubbed his real
> address and phone number from the Internet. "Anyone who knows who and
> where you are is a security hole," he told me. "I own a gun. I have an
> escape route. If someone comes, I'm ready."
>
> While reporting this article, I did everything I could to verify the
> trolls' stories and identities, but I could never be certain. After
> all, I was examining a subculture that is built on deception and
> delights in playing with the media. If I had doubts about whether
> Fortuny was who he said he was, he had the same doubts about me. I
> first contacted Fortuny by e-mail, and he called me a few days later.
> "I checked you out," he said warily. "You seem legitimate." We met in
> person on a bright spring day at his apartment, on a forested slope in
> Kirkland, Wash., near Seattle. He wore a T-shirt and sweat pants,
> looking like an amiable freelancer on a Friday afternoon. He is thin,
> with birdlike features and the etiolated complexion of one who works
> in front of a screen. He'd been chatting with an online associate
> about driving me blindfolded from the airport, he said. "We decided it
> would be too much work."
>
> A flat-screen HDTV dominated Fortuny's living room, across from a
> futon prepped with neatly folded blankets. This was where I would
> sleep for the next few nights. As Fortuny picked up his cat and
> settled into an Eames-style chair, I asked whether trolling hurt
> people. "I'm not going to sit here and say, 'Oh, God, please forgive
> me!' so someone can feel better," Fortuny said, his calm voice
> momentarily rising. The cat lay purring in his lap. "Am I the bad guy?
> Am I the big horrible person who shattered someone's life with some
> information? No! This is life. Welcome to life. Everyone goes through
> it. I've been through horrible stuff, too."
>
> "Like what?" I asked. Sexual abuse, Fortuny said. When Jason was 5, he
> said, he was molested by his grandfather and three other relatives.
> Jason's mother later told me, too, that he was molested by his
> grandfather. The last she heard from Jason was a letter telling her to
> kill herself. "Jason is a young man in a great deal of emotional
> pain," she said, crying as she spoke. "Don't be too harsh. He's still
> my son."
>
> In the days after the Megan Meier story became public, Lori Drew and
> her family found themselves in the trolls' crosshairs. Their personal
> information — e-mail addresses, satellite images of their home, phone
> numbers — spread across the Internet. One of the numbers led to a
> voice-mail greeting with the gleeful words "I did it for the lulz."
> Anonymous malefactors made death threats and hurled a brick through
> the kitchen window. Then came the Megan Had It Coming blog. Supposedly
> written by one of Megan's classmates, the blog called Megan a "drama
> queen," so unstable that Drew could not be blamed for her death.
> "Killing yourself over a MySpace boy? Come on!!! I mean yeah your fat
> so you have to take what you can get but still nobody should kill
> themselves over it." In the third post the author revealed herself as
> Lori Drew.
>
> This post received more than 3,600 comments. Fox and CNN debated its
> authenticity. But the Drew identity was another mask. In fact, Megan
> Had It Coming was another Jason Fortuny experiment. He, not Lori Drew,
> Fortuny told me, was the blog's author. After watching him log onto
> the site and add a post, I believed him. The blog was intended, he
> says, to question the public's hunger for remorse and to challenge the
> enforceability of cyberharassment laws like the one passed by Megan's
> town after her death. Fortuny concluded that they were unenforceable.
> The county sheriff's department announced it was investigating the
> identity of the fake Lori Drew, but it never found Fortuny, who is not
> especially worried about coming out now. "What's he going to sue me
> for?" he asked. "Leading on confused people? Why don't people
> fact-check who this stuff is coming from? Why do they assume it's
> true?"
>
> Fortuny calls himself "a normal person who does insane things on the
> Internet," and the scene at dinner later on the first day we spent
> together was exceedingly normal, with Fortuny, his roommate Charles
> and his longtime friend Zach trading stories at a sushi restaurant
> nearby over sake and happy-hour gyoza. Fortuny flirted with our
> waitress, showing her a cellphone picture of his cat. "He commands you
> to kill!" he cackled. "Do you know how many I've killed at his
> command?" Everyone laughed.
>
> Fortuny spent most of the weekend in his bedroom juggling several
> windows on his monitor. One displayed a chat room run by Encyclopedia
> Dramatica, an online compendium of troll humor and troll lore. It was
> buzzing with news of an attack against the Epilepsy Foundation's Web
> site. Trolls had flooded the site's forums with flashing images and
> links to animated color fields, leading at least one photosensitive
> user to claim that she had a seizure.
>
> WEEV: the whole posting flashing images to epileptics thing? over the line.
>
> HEPKITTEN: can someone plz tell me how doing something the admins
> intentionally left enabled is hacking?
>
> WEEV: it's hacking peoples unpatched brains. we have to draw a moral
> line somewhere.
>
> Fortuny disagreed. In his mind, subjecting epileptic users to flashing
> lights was justified. "Hacks like this tell you to watch out by
> hitting you with a baseball bat," he told me. "Demonstrating these
> kinds of exploits is usually the only way to get them fixed."
>
> "So the message is 'buy a helmet,' and the medium is a bat to the
> head?" I asked.
>
> "No, it's like a pitcher telling a batter to put on his helmet by
> beaning him from the mound. If you have this disease and you're on the
> Internet, you need to take precautions." A few days later, he wrote
> and posted a guide to safe Web surfing for epileptics.
>
> On Sunday, Fortuny showed me an office building that once housed
> Google programmers, and a low-slung modernist structure where
> programmers wrote Halo 3, the best-selling video game. We ate muffins
> at Terra Bite, a coffee shop founded by a Google employee where
> customers pay whatever price they feel like. Kirkland seemed to pulse
> with the easy money and optimism of the Internet, unaware of the
> machinations of the troll on the hill.
>
> We walked on, to Starbucks. At the next table, middle-schoolers with
> punk-rock haircuts feasted noisily on energy drinks and whipped cream.
> Fortuny sipped a white-chocolate mocha. He proceeded to demonstrate
> his personal cure for trolling, the Theory of the Green Hair.
>
> "You have green hair," he told me. "Did you know that?"
>
> "No," I said.
>
> "Why not?"
>
> "I look in the mirror. I see my hair is black."
>
> "That's uh, interesting. I guess you understand that you have green
> hair about as well as you understand that you're a terrible reporter."
>
> "What do you mean? What did I do?"
>
> "That's a very interesting reaction," Fortuny said. "Why didn't you
> get so defensive when I said you had green hair?" If I were certain
> that I wasn't a terrible reporter, he explained, I would have laughed
> the suggestion off just as easily. The willingness of trolling
> "victims" to be hurt by words, he argued, makes them complicit, and
> trolling will end as soon as we all get over it.
>
> On Monday we drove to the mall. I asked Fortuny how he could troll me
> if he so chose. He took out his cellphone. On the screen was a picture
> of my debit card with the numbers clearly legible. I had left it in
> plain view beside my laptop. "I took this while you were out," he
> said. He pressed a button. The picture disappeared. "See? I just
> deleted it."
>
> The Craigslist Experiment, Fortuny reiterated, brought him troll fame
> by accident. He was pleased with how the Megan Had It Coming blog
> succeeded by design. As he described the intricacies of his plan —
> adding sympathetic touches to the fake classmate, making fake Lori
> Drew a fierce defender of her own daughter, calibrating every detail
> to the emotional register of his audience — he sounded not so much a
> sociologist as a playwright workshopping a set of characters.
>
> "You seem to know exactly how much you can get away with, and you
> troll right up to that line," I said. "Is there anything that can be
> done on the Internet that shouldn't be done?"
>
> Fortuny was silent. In four days of conversation, this was the first
> time he did not have an answer ready.
>
> "I don't know," he said. "I have to think about it."
>
> Sherrod DeGrippo, a 28-year-old Atlanta native who goes by the name
> Girlvinyl, runs Encyclopedia Dramatica, the online troll archive. In
> 2006, DeGrippo received an e-mail message from a well-known band of
> trolls, demanding that she edit the entry about them on the
> Encyclopedia Dramatica site. She refused. Within hours, the aggrieved
> trolls hit the phones, bombarding her apartment with taxis, pizzas,
> escorts and threats of rape and violent death. DeGrippo, alone and
> terrified, sought counsel from a powerful friend. She called Weev.
>
> Weev, the troll who thought hacking the epilepsy site was immoral, is
> legendary among trolls. He is said to have jammed the cellphones of
> daughters of C.E.O.'s and demanded ransom from their fathers; he is
> also said to have trashed his enemies' credit ratings. Better
> documented are his repeated assaults on LiveJournal, an online diary
> site where he himself maintains a personal blog. Working with a group
> of fellow hackers and trolls, he once obtained access to thousands of
> user accounts.
>
> I first met Weev in an online chat room that I visited while staying
> at Fortuny's house. "I hack, I ruin, I make piles of money," he
> boasted. "I make people afraid for their lives." On the phone that
> night, Weev displayed a misanthropy far harsher than Fortuny's.
> "Trolling is basically Internet eugenics," he said, his voice pitching
> up like a jet engine on the runway. "I want everyone off the Internet.
> Bloggers are filth. They need to be destroyed. Blogging gives the
> illusion of participation to a bunch of retards. . . . We need to put
> these people in the oven!"
>
> I listened for a few more minutes as Weev held forth on the Federal
> Reserve and about Jews. Unlike Fortuny, he made no attempt to
> reconcile his trolling with conventional social norms. Two days later,
> I flew to Los Angeles and met Weev at a train station in Fullerton, a
> sleepy bungalow town folded into the vast Orange County grid. He is in
> his early 20s with full lips, darting eyes and a nest of hair falling
> back from his temples. He has a way of leaning in as he makes a point,
> inviting you to share what might or might not be a joke.
>
> As we walked through Fullerton's downtown, Weev told me about his day
> — he'd lost $10,000 on the commodities market, he claimed — and
> summarized his philosophy of "global ruin." "We are headed for a
> Malthusian crisis," he said, with professorial confidence. "Plankton
> levels are dropping. Bees are dying. There are tortilla riots in
> Mexico, the highest wheat prices in 30-odd years." He paused. "The
> question we have to answer is: How do we kill four of the world's six
> billion people in the most just way possible?" He seemed excited to
> have said this aloud.
>
> Ideas like these bring trouble. Almost a year ago, while in the midst
> of an LSD-and-methamphetamine bender, a longer-haired, wilder-eyed
> Weev gave a talk called "Internet Crime" at a San Diego hacker
> convention. He expounded on diverse topics like hacking the Firefox
> browser, online trade in illegal weaponry and assassination markets —
> untraceable online betting pools that pay whoever predicts the exact
> date of a political leader's demise. The talk led to two uncomfortable
> interviews with federal agents and the decision to shed his legal
> identity altogether. Weev now espouses "the ruin lifestyle" — moving
> from condo to condo, living out of three bags, no name, no
> possessions, all assets held offshore. As a member of a group of
> hackers called "the organization," which, he says, bring in upward of
> $10 million annually, he says he can wreak ruin from anywhere.
>
> We arrived at a strip mall. Out of the darkness, the coffinlike snout
> of a new Rolls Royce Phantom materialized. A flying lady winked on the
> hood. "Your bag, sir?" said the driver, a blond kid in a suit and tie.
>
> "This is my car," Weev said. "Get in."
>
> And it was, for that night and the next, at least. The car's plush
> chamber accentuated the boyishness of Weev, who wore sneakers and
> jeans and hung from a leather strap like a subway rider. In the front
> seat sat Claudia, a pretty college-age girl.
>
> I asked about the status of Weev's campaign against humanity. Things
> seemed rather stable, I said, even with all this talk of trolling and
> hacking.
>
> "We're waiting," Weev said. "We need someone to show us the way. The
> messiah."
>
> "How do you know it's not you?" I asked.
>
> "If it were me, I would know," he said. "I would receive a sign."
>
> Zeno of Elea, Socrates and Jesus, Weev said, are his all-time favorite
> trolls. He also identifies with Coyote and Loki, the trickster gods,
> and especially with Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction. "Loki was
> a hacker. The other gods feared him, but they needed his tools."
>
> "I was just thinking of Kali!" Claudia said with a giggle.
>
> Over a candlelit dinner of tuna sashimi, Weev asked if I would
> attribute his comments to Memphis Two, the handle he used to troll
> Kathy Sierra, a blogger. Inspired by her touchy response to online
> commenters, Weev said he "dropped docs" on Sierra, posting a
> fabricated narrative of her career alongside her real Social Security
> number and address. This was part of a larger trolling campaign
> against Sierra, one that culminated in death threats. Weev says he has
> access to hundreds of thousands of Social Security numbers. About a
> month later, he sent me mine.
>
> Weev, Claudia and I hung out in Fullerton for two more nights, always
> meeting and saying goodbye at the train station. I met their friend
> Kate, who has been repeatedly banned from playing XBox Live for racist
> slurs, which she also enjoys screaming at white pedestrians. Kate
> checked my head for lice and kept calling me "Jew." Relations have
> since warmed. She now e-mails me puppy pictures and wants the names of
> fun places for her coming visit to New York. On the last night, Weev
> offered to take me to his apartment if I wore a blindfold and left my
> cellphone behind. I was in, but Claudia vetoed the idea. I think it
> was her apartment.
>
> Does free speech tend to move toward the truth or away from it? When
> does it evolve into a better collective understanding? When does it
> collapse into the Babel of trolling, the pointless and eristic game of
> talking the other guy into crying "uncle"? Is the effort to control
> what's said always a form of censorship, or might certain rules be
> compatible with our notions of free speech?
>
> One promising answer comes from the computer scientist Jon Postel, now
> known as "god of the Internet" for the influence he exercised over the
> emerging network. In 1981, he formulated what's known as Postel's Law:
> "Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from
> others." Originally intended to foster "interoperability," the ability
> of multiple computer systems to understand one another, Postel's Law
> is now recognized as having wider applications. To build a robust
> global network with no central authority, engineers were encouraged to
> write code that could "speak" as clearly as possible yet "listen" to
> the widest possible range of other speakers, including those who do
> not conform perfectly to the rules of the road. The human equivalent
> of this robustness is a combination of eloquence and tolerance — the
> spirit of good conversation. Trolls embody the opposite principle.
> They are liberal in what they do and conservative in what they
> construe as acceptable behavior from others. You, the troll says, are
> not worthy of my understanding; I, therefore, will do everything I can
> to confound you.
>
> Why inflict anguish on a helpless stranger? It's tempting to blame
> technology, which increases the range of our communications while
> dehumanizing the recipients. Cases like An Hero and Megan Meier
> presumably wouldn't happen if the perpetrators had to deliver their
> messages in person. But while technology reduces the social barriers
> that keep us from bedeviling strangers, it does not explain the
> initial trolling impulse. This seems to spring from something ugly — a
> destructive human urge that many feel but few act upon, the ambient
> misanthropy that's a frequent ingredient of art, politics and, most of
> all, jokes. There's a lot of hate out there, and a lot to hate as
> well.
>
> So far, despite all this discord, the Internet's system of civil
> machines has proved more resilient than anyone imagined. As early as
> 1994, the head of the Internet Society warned that spam "will destroy
> the network." The news media continually present the online world as a
> Wild West infested with villainous hackers, spammers and pedophiles.
> And yet the Internet is doing very well for a frontier town on the
> brink of anarchy. Its traffic is expected to quadruple by 2012. To say
> that trolls pose a threat to the Internet at this point is like saying
> that crows pose a threat to farming.
>
> That the Internet is now capacious enough to host an entire subculture
> of users who enjoy undermining its founding values is yet another
> symptom of its phenomenal success. It may not be a bad thing that the
> least-mature users have built remote ghettos of anonymity where the
> malice is usually intramural. But how do we deal with cases like An
> Hero, epilepsy hacks and the possibility of real harm being inflicted
> on strangers?
>
> Several state legislators have recently proposed cyberbullying
> measures. At the federal level, Representative Linda Sánchez, a
> Democrat from California, has introduced the Megan Meier Cyberbullying
> Prevention Act, which would make it a federal crime to send any
> communications with intent to cause "substantial emotional distress."
> In June, Lori Drew pleaded not guilty to charges that she violated
> federal fraud laws by creating a false identity "to torment, harass,
> humiliate and embarrass" another user, and by violating MySpace's
> terms of service. But hardly anyone bothers to read terms of service,
> and millions create false identities. "While Drew's conduct is
> immoral, it is a very big stretch to call it illegal," wrote the
> online-privacy expert Prof. Daniel J. Solove on the blog Concurring
> Opinions.
>
> Many trolling practices, like prank-calling the Hendersons and
> intimidating Kathy Sierra, violate existing laws against harassment
> and threats. The difficulty is tracking down the perpetrators. In
> order to prosecute, investigators must subpoena sites and Internet
> service providers to learn the original author's IP address, and from
> there, his legal identity. Local police departments generally don't
> have the means to follow this digital trail, and federal investigators
> have their hands full with spam, terrorism, fraud and child
> pornography. But even if we had the resources to aggressively
> prosecute trolls, would we want to? Are we ready for an Internet where
> law enforcement keeps watch over every vituperative blog and
> backbiting comments section, ready to spring at the first hint of
> violence? Probably not. All vigorous debates shade into trolling at
> the perimeter; it is next to impossible to excise the trolling without
> snuffing out the debate.
>
> If we can't prosecute the trolling out of online anonymity, might
> there be some way to mitigate it with technology? One solution that
> has proved effective is "disemvoweling" — having message-board
> administrators remove the vowels from trollish comments, which gives
> trolls the visibility they crave while muddying their message. A
> broader answer is persistent pseudonymity, a system of nicknames that
> stay the same across multiple sites. This could reduce anonymity's
> excesses while preserving its benefits for whistle-blowers and
> overseas dissenters. Ultimately, as Fortuny suggests, trolling will
> stop only when its audience stops taking trolls seriously. "People
> know to be deeply skeptical of what they read on the front of a
> supermarket tabloid," says Dan Gillmor, who directs the Center for
> Citizen Media. "It should be even more so with anonymous comments.
> They shouldn't start off with a credibility rating of, say, 0. It
> should be more like negative-30."
>
> Of course, none of these methods will be fail-safe as long as
> individuals like Fortuny construe human welfare the way they do. As we
> discussed the epilepsy hack, I asked Fortuny whether a person is
> obliged to give food to a starving stranger. No, Fortuny argued; no
> one is entitled to our sympathy or empathy. We can choose to give or
> withhold them as we see fit. "I can't push you into the fire," he
> explained, "but I can look at you while you're burning in the fire and
> not be required to help." Weeks later, after talking to his friend
> Zach, Fortuny began considering the deeper emotional forces that drove
> him to troll. The theory of the green hair, he said, "allows me to
> find people who do stupid things and turn them around. Zach asked if I
> thought I could turn my parents around. I almost broke down. The idea
> of them learning from their mistakes and becoming people that I could
> actually be proud of . . . it was overwhelming." He continued: "It's
> not that I do this because I hate them. I do this because I'm trying
> to save them."
>
> Weeks before my visit with Fortuny, I had lunch with "moot," the young
> man who founded 4chan. After running the site under his pseudonym for
> five years, he recently revealed his legal name to be Christopher
> Poole. At lunch, Poole was quick to distance himself from the excesses
> of /b/. "Ultimately the power lies in the community to dictate its own
> standards," he said. "All we do is provide a general framework." He
> was optimistic about Robot9000, a new 4chan board with a combination
> of human and machine moderation. Users who make "unoriginal" or "low
> content" posts are banned from Robot9000 for periods that lengthen
> with each offense.
>
> The posts on Robot9000 one morning were indeed far more substantive
> than /b/. With the cyborg moderation system silencing the trolls,
> 4chan had begun to display signs of linearity, coherence, a sense of
> collective enterprise. It was, in other words, robust. The anonymous
> hordes swapped lists of albums and novels; some had pretty good taste.
> Somebody tried to start a chess game: "I'll start, e2 to e4," which
> quickly devolved into riffage with moves like "Return to Sender,"
> "From Here to Infinity," "Death to America" and a predictably indecent
> checkmate maneuver.
>
> Shortly after 8 a.m., someone asked this:
>
> "What makes a bad person? Or a good person? How do you know if you're
> a bad person?"
>
> Which prompted this:
>
> "A good person is someone who follows the rules. A bad person is
> someone who doesn't."
>
> And this:
>
> "you're breaking my rules, you bad person"
>
> There were echoes of antiquity:
>
> "good: pleasure; bad: pain"
>
> "There is no morality. Only the right of the superior to rule over the
> inferior."
>
> And flirtations with postmodernity:
>
> "good and bad are subjective"
>
> "we're going to turn into wormchow before the rest of the universe
> even notices."
>
> Books were prescribed:
>
> "read Kant, JS Mill, Bentham, Singer, etc. Noobs."
>
> And then finally this:
>
> "I'd say empathy is probably a factor."
>
> Mattathias Schwartz last wrote for the magazine about online poker. He
> is a staff writer at Good magazine and lives in New York.
>
> --
> Zbigniew Lukasiak
> http://brudnopis.blogspot.com/
> http://perlalchemy.blogspot.com/
>
>
>
> --
> Zbigniew Lukasiak
> http://brudnopis.blogspot.com/
> http://perlalchemy.blogspot.com/
>



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