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Lulz

The New York Times has a long article on trolls,
"The Trolls Among Us", by Mattathias Schwartz.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/
03trolls-t.html?em=&pagewanted=all

<<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.”>>

<<All vigorous debates shade into trolling at the
perimeter; it is next to impossible to excise the trolling
without snuffing out the debate.>>

What we have here on these boards, boys and girls, is a
nearly unrestricted forum for people to say what they
want. Physical threats are illegal, but practically
everything else is allowed. If you play biggies and
meanies, especially if you claim "full enlightenment" or
some such, people will try to get lulz from you, as many
as possible, year after year, and if you deliver them, year
after year, you must like the situation (you must be in on
it). If you play nice and little, people are unlikely to try
to pull lulz on you, and if they do, it will tend to be brief
and mild, and even you will laugh along. But the huge
and spectacular lulz can be had only if you invest in
them and expend your energy to flip yourself, mere
words on the screen being only the ocasions for that
internal cycle. If you practice Buddhism -- non-attachment
to words and to self -- you have nothing to fear from mere
words on the screen. They can teach you something or
entertain you, or alternatively bore you, but can do you no
harm, as harm can come only if you perpetrate it (harm)
on yourself, in closed circle. We are all adults and we are
all responsible for ourselves (and those who are not should
not be here). If you attach to words and to self, people
will try to pull lulz from you. Remember, it is mere words
on the screen.

Get over yourself and have fun.

Tang Huyen

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