The NYT mag had a piece on trolls and trolling this past Sunday, and the spectacle of sociopathic young, and not-so-young men vandalizing peoples' lives and livelihoods with impunity, and pleasure, was unedifying. I think dreams of Utopian internet community were always compromised by the self-serving salesgeek aspects. But the entrenchment of troll culture is the kiss of death. They make the environment a litigible one of hostility and harassment, and reduce the quality of life for everyone who has to pass through the neighborhood. I think the only solution is Giuliani's -- get all of them off the sidewalk, zero tolerance for subway turnstile jumping, and so on, but this isn't going to be possible any time soon.
I think they fall under the rubric which Tom Friedman, I think it is, has shrewdly winkled out of the many jihadis that he, like a good reporter, has talked to. They are young men, says Friedman, who feel like dwarves.
Gotcha.
The recent arrest of an alleged "good kid" in the Suzy Creamcheese suburbs here, a teenager with an arsenal of AK 47s and other assault rifles, bought for him by his father, a retired Air Force officer who works for the Feds, plus 50 pounds of bomb making materials and a map of Camp David again makes the point that the upper middle class is incubating a generation of dwarves. Just to drive the point home, this is how Dylan Klebold got his stockpile, his videos, his website and his plan together -- in a suburban garage, in his teen boy bedroom, completely unsupervised.
I think both girls and boys of the middle classes lead completely unsupervised lives these days, although according to the sociological research I do watching Supernanny a minority of these young sociopaths are unsupervised while being totally micromanaged by ambitious and completely amoral tiger moms. They beat, with closed fists, their little sisters while tightly bound in car seats in the back of the silver Mercedes SUV, on their way to their many after-school appointments.
And the passive-aggressive mother justs nods and smiles. (One of the most electrifying revelations of All God's Children, an electrifying book about the most violent prisoner in the history of the state of New York, whose father was the first Phi Beta Kappa to be inducted in prison, and also the last, is the pleasure the boy's mother took in watching him be aggressive.) I think this is one of the secrets of the very entwining relations between mothers and sons, and if penis envy exists, which I don't think it does, it does in the agency a woman gains through the aggression of her son.
There is, of course, the billions, and the creepy messianism Fred Turner so brilliantly reports on the morphing of the Whole Earth Catalog toolie culture into Silicon Valley, a book recommended to me by the perspicaceous <lj user = "bing_crosby">, who, with the Intelligent Craftafarian, is one of the only two people I know who is studying materialism through crafts -- and toolies. The problem with a materialist, to paraphrase the famous comment on atheists, is not that they believe in nothing. It is that they'll believe anything.
The trolls are geeks, and children's time with video games and online is almost completely unsupervised. Time after time Supernanny walks into a half-a-million-dollar 5,000 square foot suburban house to find tiny children screaming obscenities and acting out killing games they learn playing adult video games. Over which the smiling mutti has, oh my goodness, no control.
When they're not playing video games, they're on the computer -- girls seeking sexual experience -- also completely unsupervised.
No social skills, no negotiation skills, no table manners (there are no family meals) or the bare rudiments of how to meet somebody's eye in the elevator, much less get a job and enjoy life in a world whose values are composed to make life human-scaled and livable by all humans in community. No lessons on how to be seen, the pleasures of the sidewalk, and how not to be invisible.
One result is this idea that STOP signs are the intrusion of the man into your libertarian Utopia rather than, for example, the illustration of the idea that God is love for your fellow drivers' right to live.
Another is the conflation of computer skills, values, and internet information with anti-authoritarianism, democracy or mastery. All three are meatspace skills, as the flowering of the geek ubermensch ethos on the nets, and nowhere else, where, indeed, the defeat of the lone wolf/ubermensch/hero by the armies of capitalism is pretty much one of the themes of modernity since the age of enlightenment, illustrates. There can be no counterculture without a culture in which one participates successfully while passing for normal. There is no revolution without mastery of the laws of society, community and so on. And unless you are -- oh, let's say, redistributing to the poor the wealth, or disarming nuclear terrorists with your hacker skills -- by posing as an outlaw you're really just another hipster. Without the style. Or a scorpion in a bottle: limbic, deadly, ignorant and like all mental illness, malicious but excruciatingly boring.
There was another interesting piece in the NYT mag which I've had occasion to think of often. And that was on Bill Gates, and the principle of unintended consequence (in this case, of his billions for global charity). He said he harnessed his hardsell talents to a self-serving kind of Utopianism -- that every starving child in the world should have a computer -- until he was in Soweto one day. He noticed there was, perhaps, one electrical socket for every 600 people, and that it didn't work every day all day.
Welcome to my world, little man.
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