Tony L
Administrator
Dog whistles and faux concern put a post in the later category. One of the foulest trolls I recall was a fellow, full of faux concern, questioning a parapalegic person about the use of mechanical devices to evacuate feces from his bowels. The goal was totally to embarrass the guy, but just going by the bare words of the text, you couldn't exactly prove it. A reasonable but admittedly subjective standard must be applied, to find the post was in bad faith and eligible for removal.
The depths of some internet troll culture is just beyond comprehension. The mechanism you describe is very real and hit absolutely mind-bending levels of cruelty and persecution with the whole ‘Chris Chan’ thing. It is referred to as ‘milking a LOLcow’. I’m reluctant to link to anything aside from ContraPoints’ Cringe video on that one as it is just incomprehensibly nasty and the scale extraordinary.
Here’s the Contrapoints video. I’ve linked to it before as it is a hell of an eye opener to modern culture, and as ever Natalie navigates her way through it with remarkable intellect and empathy along with much humour. Highly recommended, as is all of her stuff (this is one of the best IMHO). The ‘Chris Chan’ thing is around 25 minutes in IIRC.
There are definitely things our generation need to know. So much of the stuff we see all around us today stems from a culture so much of the middle-aged and older mainstream is entirely ignorant about, e.g. one can track the rise of Trump, and the alt-right back via QAnon, Breitbart, all the vile Andrew Tate types etc, to ‘gamergate’, and I bet some folk here are barely aware what that was (it largely passed me by too). I’m not suggesting it was the whole thing by any means, but it was certainly a factor and launched some very destructive attitudes that are going nowhere. When the history books are written for our time that one will certainly be a chapter, or at least a very substantive footnote.
PS I’m not attacking internet culture as for all the horrendous gamergate, 4chan, Chris Chan, Libs Of Tiktok persecution type stuff it has also launched many of the most intelligent documentary makers and political commentators I’ve ever seen. I’m certainly of the view a substantial percentage of the best stuff being produced today in all fields is on YouTube and often made by people less than half my age, though every now and again the mainstream knocks one right out of the park such as the wonderful Ken Burns USA And The Holocaust documentary. There really is some absolutely amazing stuff at present. It is just, like the modern music scene, not coming up from where one might expect.