Beyond trolling to child-level Nietzsche; behind trolling, sociopathy

The real hard-core trolls of the Internet get a more-than-sympathetic look from The New York Times Magazine.

First note – if dead trees are migrating to electrons for the purpose of more and more articles like this, well, then, contrary to defenders of the Net as the greatest thing since sliced Gutenburg Bibles, it’s more of the same, spread thinner, with a different pastiche, that’s all.

That said, it’s said that übertroller Jason Fortuny has this horrendous past:

“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.”

And still hasn’t learned empathy. Maybe, he hasn’t even learned much in the way of self-empathy.

That said, Fortuny is wrong on page 6, when he claims the solution to trolling is to stop giving trolls attention. “Amateur-level” trolls will move on, to be sure. But, I think the Fortunys of the world will simply pump up the troll volume in an escalation of their demands for attention. I have no doubt Fortuny would do that himself. And get scarier as he did so, sort of acting out all the abusiveness he suffered himself.

Author Schwartz himself notes that “None of these methods (for controlling trolling) will be fail-safe as long as individuals like Fortuny construe human welfare the way they do.”

Also in the story is Weev; his child-level “Nietzschean” (for lack of a better term) pseudointellectual riffs on the world are on his LiveJournal.

“Deeply veiled gnosis.” What a load of crap.

Not-so-deeply-veiled narcissism would be more accurate. What a putz. But, behind the putz, I suspect is someone who also has a history of an abusive childhood. For one thing, I don’t think his racism came out of the blue.