This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things Plot Summary

Introduction

Digital antagonism has become a pervasive feature of online spaces, yet its underlying mechanisms and cultural significance remain widely misunderstood. Far from being random acts of malice, trolling behaviors follow specific patterns that reflect and amplify broader cultural logics. These patterns reveal how digital antagonism serves as a mirror to mainstream values, exposing uncomfortable truths about power, privilege, and the architecture of online discourse. By examining trolling through the lens of cultural analysis rather than individual psychology, we gain crucial insights into how digital antagonism functions as both symptom and critique of contemporary media environments. This approach challenges simplistic narratives that frame trolls as aberrant outsiders, instead revealing how their behaviors are deeply embedded in and enabled by mainstream cultural systems. Through careful examination of specific case studies, rhetorical strategies, and historical contexts, we can better understand not just what trolling is, but what it reveals about the societies that produce it and how these insights might inform more effective responses to harmful online behaviors.

Chapter 1: Trolling as Cultural Digestion: Scavenging the Media Landscape

Trolling represents a complex form of cultural digestion rather than mere online deviance. Trolls function as cultural scavengers who actively consume, process, and repurpose elements from the mainstream media environment. This digestive process involves identifying exploitable content, transforming it through memetic manipulation, and then deploying it in ways that generate maximum emotional response. Through this process, trolls reveal significant patterns within our shared cultural landscape. What makes trolling particularly significant is not just its disruptive nature, but how it mirrors and magnifies existing cultural tendencies. When trolls appropriate media narratives or exploit emotional vulnerabilities, they aren't creating entirely new behaviors but rather intensifying and making visible the exploitative patterns already present in mainstream culture. Their actions serve as a grotesque pantomime of normalized media practices, particularly those involving sensationalism, emotional manipulation, and profit-driven engagement with tragedy. The cultural digestive function of trolling creates a unique form of social commentary that operates without explicit editorial intent. Unlike traditional critique that clearly states its position, trolling reveals cultural contradictions through action rather than analysis. When trolls target certain groups or fixate on particular cultural flashpoints, they inadvertently map the contours of societal anxieties, biases, and power dynamics. Their behaviors highlight which emotional triggers generate the strongest responses and which cultural boundaries remain most sensitive. This perspective challenges us to look beyond individual trolling incidents to examine the broader cultural conditions that make such behaviors possible and even predictable. Rather than viewing trolls as aberrant outsiders disrupting an otherwise healthy online ecosystem, we might better understand them as symptomatic of existing cultural pathologies. The real significance of trolling may lie not in what it introduces to our cultural environment but in what it exposes about what was already there.

Chapter 2: Lulz Logic: The Emotional Architecture of Trolling Behavior

The concept of "lulz" forms the emotional foundation of trolling culture. Unlike conventional humor that might seek mutual enjoyment, lulz specifically describes amusement derived from another person's distress or anger. This emotional architecture creates a fundamental asymmetry between troll and target - the troll remains emotionally detached while deliberately provoking intense emotional responses in others. This asymmetry is not incidental but central to how trolling functions as a cultural practice. Lulz operates through a process of emotional fetishism that bears striking similarities to Marx's concept of commodity fetishism. Just as commodity fetishism obscures the social relations behind products, lulz fetishism obscures the human context behind emotional reactions. When trolls target grieving families or vulnerable individuals, they deliberately focus on isolated, exploitable details while ignoring the broader emotional context. This fetishistic gaze allows trolls to transform human suffering into abstract content for consumption and entertainment. The pursuit of lulz also serves important community-building functions within trolling subcultures. Shared laughter at a successful trolling operation creates bonds between participants who may never meet in person. The more outrageous or transgressive the trolling action, the stronger these bonds become. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle where increasingly extreme actions are required to maintain group cohesion and identity. The magnetism of lulz pulls participants deeper into the subculture while simultaneously pushing boundaries of acceptable behavior. What distinguishes trolling from other forms of online antagonism is the deliberate adoption of what might be called "the mask of trolling." This mask establishes a play frame that is fundamentally one-sided - only the troll can claim to be "just playing" or "just trolling." The target must take the interaction seriously for trolling to succeed. If the target recognizes the play frame and refuses to engage emotionally, the troll has failed. This creates a paradoxical situation where trolls simultaneously deny the significance of their actions while depending on others to take those actions very seriously. The emotional architecture of trolling reveals something important about digital interaction more broadly. The same emotional distance that enables trolling - the ability to affect others without being affected oneself - is built into many online platforms and encouraged by contemporary media consumption patterns. Trolls may simply be taking to an extreme the emotional detachment that digital media increasingly normalizes for all users.

Chapter 3: Mirroring the Mainstream: Trolls and Media's Symbiotic Relationship

The relationship between trolls and mainstream media represents a complex symbiosis rather than simple opposition. Media outlets that express the most outrage about trolling behaviors often employ strikingly similar tactics in their own content production. Both trolls and sensationalist media profit from emotional exploitation, though in different currencies - trolls seek lulz while media organizations seek advertising revenue and engagement metrics. This parallel reveals uncomfortable truths about how emotional distress is commodified in contemporary culture. Media coverage of trolling incidents follows predictable amplification cycles that benefit both parties. When trolls target vulnerable individuals or communities, media outlets provide extensive, often sensationalized coverage that simultaneously condemns the behavior while spreading its impact to much larger audiences. This coverage generates significant traffic and engagement for media platforms while providing trolls with exactly the attention and reaction they seek. Each side feeds the other in an escalating cycle of outrage and provocation. The case of memorial page trolling on Facebook demonstrates this symbiosis with particular clarity. When trolls posted offensive content on memorial pages for deceased teenagers, media outlets responded with breathless coverage that often republished the most shocking examples of trolling content. This coverage not only amplified the original harm but created templates for future trolling operations. Meanwhile, the same media outlets profited from the emotional intensity of the story while positioning themselves as defenders of decency. What makes this relationship particularly significant is how it blurs the boundaries between trolling and mainstream media practices. Both engage in what might be called "emotional arbitrage" - identifying and exploiting gaps in emotional regulation for profit. When media outlets cover tragedies with lingering close-ups of grieving families or sensationalized details of violent deaths, they employ the same emotional exploitation tactics they condemn in trolls. The difference lies primarily in the institutional legitimacy that shields one form of exploitation while exposing the other to criticism. This mirroring effect extends to the production of spectacle. Both trolls and media organizations understand that spectacle drives engagement, whether measured in lulz or page views. The more outrageous or emotionally provocative the content, the more successful it becomes in the attention economy. This shared logic reveals trolling not as an aberration within digital culture but as an extreme manifestation of its underlying incentive structures.

Chapter 4: Race, Rhetoric and Deniability: Comparing Trolls with Corporate Pundits

Racist expression within trolling communities reveals striking parallels with mainstream media rhetoric, particularly in conservative punditry. While trolls engage in overtly racist language and imagery, corporate media figures often employ what cultural theorist Stuart Hall calls "inferential racism" - coded language and dog whistles that maintain plausible deniability while communicating racist ideas. Comparing these approaches illuminates how racism functions across different cultural spaces with varying levels of social acceptability. During the early Obama presidency, trolls created and circulated explicitly racist memes depicting the president in dehumanizing ways. Simultaneously, certain media outlets, particularly Fox News, engaged in persistent questioning of Obama's citizenship, religious affiliation, and American identity. Though employing different rhetorical strategies, both approaches worked to mark Obama as fundamentally "other" and potentially dangerous. The trolls' explicit racism and pundits' inferential racism ultimately conveyed similar messages about racial hierarchy and belonging. What distinguishes these approaches is not necessarily their intent or impact but their relationship to accountability. Trolls operate with the shield of anonymity and the defense that they're "just trolling," allowing them to express explicitly racist views without personal consequences. Corporate pundits maintain the shield of "just asking questions" or "reporting concerns," allowing them to activate racist anxieties while maintaining professional legitimacy. Both strategies create systems of deniability that insulate racist expression from criticism. The comparison becomes particularly revealing when examining specific cases like the "Obama as Socialist Joker" poster controversy. This image, which originated in trolling communities before spreading to mainstream discourse, demonstrates how easily content moves between these supposedly separate spheres. Conservative pundits who would never use explicit racial slurs nevertheless embraced imagery with clear racial undertones, revealing the permeable boundary between "extreme" trolling rhetoric and "acceptable" political discourse. Perhaps most significantly, corporate media racism operates with institutional backing and reaches much larger audiences than trolling communities. When media figures employ coded racist language, they normalize these perspectives for millions of viewers while simultaneously condemning the more explicit racism of anonymous internet trolls. This creates a situation where the most socially damaging forms of racism may not be the most visible or condemned ones.

Chapter 5: The Adversary Method: Trolling's Philosophical Foundations

Trolling behavior exhibits striking parallels with traditional Western philosophical methods, particularly what feminist philosopher Janice Moulton calls "the adversary method." This approach to intellectual engagement privileges confrontation, emotional detachment, and dominance as the primary means of establishing truth. By examining these parallels, we can understand trolling not as a radical departure from established norms but as an extreme application of deeply embedded cultural values. Trolls explicitly embrace Socratic dialogue as a philosophical ancestor to their approach. The Encyclopedia Dramatica entry on Socrates describes him as "a famous IRL troll" who invented "the first recorded trolling technique." This connection is not merely rhetorical posturing. The Socratic method, with its emphasis on exposing contradictions in an opponent's position through relentless questioning, shares fundamental similarities with trolling tactics. Both approaches privilege the questioner, who remains uncommitted to any position while forcing the respondent to defend increasingly untenable ground. The adversary method that dominates Western philosophical tradition is fundamentally gendered in ways that illuminate trolling's gender dynamics. This method privileges traits traditionally coded as masculine (rationality, aggression, emotional detachment) while devaluing traits coded as feminine (empathy, cooperation, emotional engagement). Trolls take this gendering to its logical extreme, explicitly celebrating the "raep" of targets with logic and mocking emotional responses as evidence of weakness. Their frequent targeting of feminist spaces and female-identified users extends this philosophical gendering into direct harassment. Trolling also reflects Western philosophy's preoccupation with universalism and abstraction. Just as traditional philosophy often claims to speak from a neutral, universal position while actually privileging specific perspectives, trolls claim to target everyone equally while demonstrating clear patterns of focusing on marginalized groups. The claim that "nothing should be taken seriously" functions as a universalizing principle that actually works to protect existing power structures by delegitimizing emotional responses to harm. What makes trolling particularly revealing is how it strips away the polite veneer that normally disguises these philosophical tendencies. When trolls celebrate dominance through "raeping with logic" or mock targets for emotional responses, they make explicit the values that often remain implicit in more respectable intellectual discourse. Their behaviors reveal uncomfortable truths about the adversarial foundations of Western intellectual traditions and the ways these traditions can function to silence certain voices.

Chapter 6: From Subculture to Mainstream: Tracing Trolling's Evolution

Trolling has undergone a remarkable evolution from niche subculture to mainstream cultural phenomenon. This transition reveals important patterns in how digital cultures develop, spread, and transform as they encounter broader audiences and institutional forces. Examining this evolution provides insight into both the changing nature of trolling itself and the shifting landscape of online participation more broadly. The early trolling subculture that coalesced around sites like 4chan's /b/ board in the mid-2000s was characterized by distinctive linguistic practices, shared references, and a strong sense of insider identity. Trolls developed elaborate codes and memes that served as cultural markers, allowing them to recognize fellow participants while excluding outsiders. This period saw the development of foundational concepts like "lulz" and the establishment of Anonymous as a collective identity. The subcultural boundaries were maintained through both technological factors (the ephemerality of 4chan posts) and social practices (aggressive responses to perceived "newfags"). A significant shift occurred between 2008 and 2011 as trolling gained increased media attention and its cultural productions began spreading beyond subcultural boundaries. Sites like Know Your Meme made previously obscure references accessible to mainstream audiences, while corporate entities began appropriating trolling aesthetics for marketing purposes. This period saw increasing tension between "oldfags" who valued trolling's transgressive, anonymous roots and newcomers attracted by its growing visibility. The emergence of meme generator platforms further democratized participation by removing technical barriers. The most dramatic transformation came with the political evolution of Anonymous. What began as a chaotic collective dedicated to "doing it for the lulz" gradually split into distinct branches - one maintaining the original trolling ethos and another embracing political activism. Operations targeting the Church of Scientology, supporting WikiLeaks, and participating in the Arab Spring and Occupy movements transformed Anonymous in public perception from an "Internet Hate Machine" to a progressive political force. This shift created fundamental tensions within trolling culture about its purpose and identity. By 2012-2015, trolling had become so diffuse that the term itself began losing coherent meaning. Media outlets applied the label to virtually any antagonistic online behavior, while platforms from Twitter to Tumblr hosted trolling behaviors that bore little resemblance to the original subculture. Corporate entities successfully monetized many aspects of meme culture that originated in trolling communities, while the Guy Fawkes mask transformed from an insider joke to a global symbol of resistance. These changes prompted intense debates about authenticity and ownership among early participants. This evolution demonstrates how digital subcultures follow trajectories similar to offline counterparts - moving from transgressive origins to mainstream incorporation. However, the speed and scale of this transition in digital contexts creates unique dynamics, particularly regarding how subcultural elements are commodified and repurposed. Trolling's evolution reveals the tension between the democratizing potential of digital participation and the tendency for distinctive cultural practices to be absorbed into commercial and institutional frameworks.

Chapter 7: The Definitional Problem: Legal and Cultural Implications

The expanding definition of "trolling" creates significant legal and cultural challenges. As the term has evolved from describing a specific subcultural practice to encompassing virtually any antagonistic online behavior, it has become increasingly difficult to develop appropriate responses to harmful digital interactions. This definitional ambiguity has implications for everything from platform governance to legal regulation and cultural understanding of online communication. Media coverage has played a crucial role in this definitional expansion. Journalists frequently apply the term "trolling" to behaviors ranging from playful mischief to criminal harassment, creating a false equivalence between radically different activities. This conflation makes meaningful public discourse about online harm nearly impossible, as the same term might refer to harmless pranks or serious threats depending on context. The resulting confusion benefits neither targets of genuine harassment nor those engaged in less harmful forms of online provocation. The legal implications of this definitional problem are particularly concerning. Several jurisdictions have proposed or implemented "anti-trolling" legislation without clear definitions of what constitutes trolling. These laws often rely on subjective standards like "causing annoyance" that potentially criminalize a vast range of online expression. Without more precise terminology, such legislation risks both overreach that chills legitimate speech and ineffectiveness against the most harmful behaviors that happen to be labeled as trolling. Platform governance faces similar challenges. Social media companies attempting to moderate "trolling" must develop operational definitions that can be consistently applied across millions of interactions. The broader the definition becomes, the more difficult this task becomes. Overly broad anti-trolling policies risk removing legitimate forms of expression, while narrow definitions may miss genuinely harmful behaviors that don't fit traditional trolling patterns. This definitional problem directly impacts how digital spaces are regulated and experienced. Perhaps most significantly, the expanding definition obscures important distinctions between different types of problematic online behavior. When harassment campaigns, political activism, playful pranks, and hate speech are all labeled as "trolling," we lose the ability to address each phenomenon appropriately. This conflation can trivialize serious harm by associating it with more benign behaviors, while simultaneously exaggerating the threat posed by relatively harmless provocations. Moving forward requires developing more nuanced terminology that distinguishes between different forms of online antagonism based on intent, impact, and context. Rather than attempting to regulate "trolling" as a monolithic category, we need frameworks that recognize the vast differences between organized harassment, individual provocation, political disruption, and subcultural play. Only with this more precise understanding can we develop appropriate cultural, technical, and legal responses to the complex landscape of problematic online behavior.

Summary

The cultural embeddedness of trolling reveals a fundamental paradox: what appears as deviant online behavior actually reflects and amplifies mainstream cultural tendencies. Trolls don't introduce novel forms of exploitation or antagonism so much as they strip away the polite veneer covering existing cultural practices. Their behaviors mirror the emotional exploitation of sensationalist media, the adversarial methods of Western intellectual tradition, and the racial anxieties expressed through more respectable channels. This mirroring function makes trolling simultaneously disturbing and illuminating. The evolution of trolling from subcultural practice to mainstream phenomenon demonstrates how digital cultures develop and transform. As trolling behaviors spread beyond their original contexts, they underwent significant changes in meaning, practice, and perception. What began as a distinctive subculture with clear boundaries became increasingly diffuse, commercialized, and politically complex. This trajectory reveals broader patterns in how digital participation evolves in contemporary culture, particularly the tension between transgressive origins and institutional incorporation. Understanding trolling requires looking beyond individual behaviors to examine the cultural systems that make such behaviors possible, predictable, and even inevitable.

About Author

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Whitney Phillips

Whitney Phillips is Assistant Professor in Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University. She teaches classes in media literacy and online ethics; online discourse and controversy; folklore and digital culture; and lore surrounding monster narratives, urban legends, hoaxes, and crime. Phillips holds a Ph.D. in English with a folklore-structured emphasis (digital culture focus) from the University of Oregon (2012); an M.F.A. in creative writing (fiction) from Emerson College (2007); and a B.A. in philosophy from Humboldt State University (2004).Prior to joining Syracuse University, Phillips was a lecturer in media, culture, and communication at New York University (2012-2013), a lecturer in communication at Humboldt State University (2014-2015), and assistant professor of literary studies and writing at Mercer University (2015-2018).Phillips’ research explores antagonism and identity-based harassment online; the relationship between vernacular expression, state and corporate influences, and emerging technologies; political memes and other forms of ambivalent civic participation; and digital ethics, including journalistic ethics and the ethics of everyday social media use.She is the author of the three-part ethnographic report The Oxygen of Amplification: Better Practices for Reporting on Extremists, Antagonists, and Manipulators Online (Data & Society Media Manipulation Initiative, 2018). She has written numerous articles and book chapters on a range of media, folklore, and digital culture topics, most recently “fake news” narratives, technological play with the afterlife, and the role social and memetic media played during and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Additionally, she has published dozens of popular press pieces on digital culture and ethics in outlets like The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Slate.This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things won the Association of Internet Researchers 2015 Nancy Baym best book award. She is regularly featured as an expert commentator in national and global news outlets, and her work on the ethics of journalistic amplification has been profiled by the Columbia Journalism Review, Niemen Journalism Lab, and Knight Commission on Trust, Media, and Democracy. She is a member of the Association of Internet Researchers and the American Folklore Society.

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