The Dark Net Read Online Free
Author: Jamie Bartlett
ideas out, calculating the best way to provoke a reaction. Threatening to rape someone on Twitter is not trolling: that’s just threatening to rape someone.’
Zack has spent years refining his trolling tactics. His favourite technique, he tells me, is to join a forum, intentionally make basic grammatical or spelling mistakes, wait for someone to insult his writing, and then lock them into an argument about politics. He showed me one recent example that he’d saved on his laptop. Zack had posted what appeared to be an innocuous, poorly written comment on a popular right-wing website, complaining that right-wingers wouldn’t be right wing if they read more. An incensed user responded, and then posted a nude picture that Zack had uploaded to an obscure forum using the same pseudonym some time before.
The bait had been taken. Zack hit back immediately:
You shouldn’t deny yourself. If looking at the pics makes you want to touch your penis then just do it . . . if you want I can probably find you some more pictures of my penis – or maybe you’d like some of my ass also? Or if you want we could talk about why regressive ideologies are a bad idea in general and why people who adopt them are likely to have a much harder time in understanding the world than someone who’s accepting of progress and social development?
Zack then began posting a series of videos of his penis in various states of arousal interspersed with insults about right-wingers andquotes from Shakespeare and Cervantes. ‘Prepare to be surprised!’ Zack said mischievously, before he showed me the posts.
For Zack, this was a clear win. His critic was silenced by the deluge, which occupied the comments section of the website for several hours. ‘He was so incapable of a coherent response that he resorted to digging into my posting history for things he thought might shame me – but I’m not easily shamed.’
‘But what was the point?’ I asked him.
There’s a short pause. ‘I dunno, but it was fun. It doesn’t really matter if it was otherwise fruitless.’
For Zack, trolling is part art, part science, part joke, part political act, but also much more. ‘Trolling is a culture, it’s a way of thinking’ – and one, he says, that has existed since the birth of the internet. If I wanted to discover where this apparently modern problem came from, I had to go back to the very beginning.
Finger
The internet’s precursor, the Arpanet, was, until the 1980s, the preserve of a tiny academic and governmental elite. These ‘Arpanauts’, however, found that they enjoyed chatting as much as exchanging data sets. Within four years of its creation the Arpanet’s TALK function (originally designed as a small add-on to accompany the transfer of research, like a Post-It note) was responsible for three quarters of all Arpanet traffic. TALK, which later morphed into electronic mail, or ‘e’-mail, was revolutionary. Sitting at your computer terminal in your department building, you could suddenly communicate with severalpeople at once, in real time, without ever looking at or speaking to them. The opportunities afforded by this new technology occasionally made the small group of world-class academics behave in strange ways.
One research group, formed in 1976, was responsible for deciding what would be included in an email header. They called themselves the ‘Header People’, and created an unmoderated chat room to discuss the subject. The room became famous (or infamous) for the raucous and aggressive conversations held there. Arguments could flare up over anything. Ken Harrenstien, the academic who set up the group, would later describe them as a ‘bunch of spirited sluggers, pounding an equine cadaver to smithereens’.
In 1979, another team of academics were at work developing a function called ‘Finger’, which would allow users to know what time other users logged on or off the system. Ivor Durham from Carnegie Mellon University proposed a
Zack has spent years refining his trolling tactics. His favourite technique, he tells me, is to join a forum, intentionally make basic grammatical or spelling mistakes, wait for someone to insult his writing, and then lock them into an argument about politics. He showed me one recent example that he’d saved on his laptop. Zack had posted what appeared to be an innocuous, poorly written comment on a popular right-wing website, complaining that right-wingers wouldn’t be right wing if they read more. An incensed user responded, and then posted a nude picture that Zack had uploaded to an obscure forum using the same pseudonym some time before.
The bait had been taken. Zack hit back immediately:
You shouldn’t deny yourself. If looking at the pics makes you want to touch your penis then just do it . . . if you want I can probably find you some more pictures of my penis – or maybe you’d like some of my ass also? Or if you want we could talk about why regressive ideologies are a bad idea in general and why people who adopt them are likely to have a much harder time in understanding the world than someone who’s accepting of progress and social development?
Zack then began posting a series of videos of his penis in various states of arousal interspersed with insults about right-wingers andquotes from Shakespeare and Cervantes. ‘Prepare to be surprised!’ Zack said mischievously, before he showed me the posts.
For Zack, this was a clear win. His critic was silenced by the deluge, which occupied the comments section of the website for several hours. ‘He was so incapable of a coherent response that he resorted to digging into my posting history for things he thought might shame me – but I’m not easily shamed.’
‘But what was the point?’ I asked him.
There’s a short pause. ‘I dunno, but it was fun. It doesn’t really matter if it was otherwise fruitless.’
For Zack, trolling is part art, part science, part joke, part political act, but also much more. ‘Trolling is a culture, it’s a way of thinking’ – and one, he says, that has existed since the birth of the internet. If I wanted to discover where this apparently modern problem came from, I had to go back to the very beginning.
Finger
The internet’s precursor, the Arpanet, was, until the 1980s, the preserve of a tiny academic and governmental elite. These ‘Arpanauts’, however, found that they enjoyed chatting as much as exchanging data sets. Within four years of its creation the Arpanet’s TALK function (originally designed as a small add-on to accompany the transfer of research, like a Post-It note) was responsible for three quarters of all Arpanet traffic. TALK, which later morphed into electronic mail, or ‘e’-mail, was revolutionary. Sitting at your computer terminal in your department building, you could suddenly communicate with severalpeople at once, in real time, without ever looking at or speaking to them. The opportunities afforded by this new technology occasionally made the small group of world-class academics behave in strange ways.
One research group, formed in 1976, was responsible for deciding what would be included in an email header. They called themselves the ‘Header People’, and created an unmoderated chat room to discuss the subject. The room became famous (or infamous) for the raucous and aggressive conversations held there. Arguments could flare up over anything. Ken Harrenstien, the academic who set up the group, would later describe them as a ‘bunch of spirited sluggers, pounding an equine cadaver to smithereens’.
In 1979, another team of academics were at work developing a function called ‘Finger’, which would allow users to know what time other users logged on or off the system. Ivor Durham from Carnegie Mellon University proposed a
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