Hackers on Steroids (7 page)

And Malcolm wasn’t anything but deadly serious either. He wasn’t trolling, or doing it for a joke. He never is with this stuff. Malcolm, bless his poor wee heart, really was going to take down the British government and take power ‘for the people.’ He may even have went so far to have made himself Prime Minister and then those SS security guards who had to remove those shrieking nincompoops from that shopping arcade in Birmingham could have been brought up to answer charges of war crimes. Of course, some might say that Malcolm and his fellow survivors from the Battle of the Bullring couldn’t have done a worse job than most governments in most places in the world are doing at any given time, but let us not get into that here.

In the end only 100 turned up for the march, were quickly rerouted by the police, and David Cameron awoke the next day still PM of Britain. Personally myself, I blame the giant lizardmen from space for foiling Mal’s plans. It’s always the giant lizardmen from space who are to blame when things like this fail. One Anon on Facebook did though in all seriousness theorise that all those millions of Anons who didn’t turn up for the revolution were the victims of a government-induced flu sent out to kill the insurrection before it could begin. Perhaps Mad Mal made a strategic mistake in giving forewarning of his plans?

Have I mentioned yet that Malcolm is in his 40s? I think I may have, but I did it again there just to be sure.

But that’s the delusions of grandeur which being part of the Anonymous craze can give to some mad, mad, mad little beings like Malcolm Blackman. The Anonymous brand allows any tragic mentalist like Malcolm to delude themselves into believing that they are part of some global network of the elite, and they begin to play out their infantile fantasies both on and off the Net. Blackman, who sometimes likes to wear scarves over his face when faced with a camera so that he can pretend to himself that he is some sort of urban guerrilla, speaks in terms of ‘Anonymous cells’ and ‘ground activists,’ and he calls things like the Battle of the Bullring ‘ground ops.’ Only problem is, Anonymous ain’t going to be able to help out some poor kid facing 20 years in jail for being part of one of its stupid and ultimately meaningless computer attacks. There are many, I suppose, ‘in’ Anonymous who make their utterings tongue-in-cheek, but it is clear that there are also far too many like Mad Malcolm Blackman who are embarrassingly earnest in all which they utter. Sitting in their bedrooms thinking in robotic voices, pretending that they are a cog in a cold, efficient machine which spans the entire length of the globe and beyond (some Anons have talked of getting an Anonymous satellite into orbit). How far gone in a fantasy of power that some connected with Anonymous are is illustrated perfectly by a 2011 incident in which some Anons started talking openly of taking on the mass-murdering Mexican drug cartel the Zetas. Anonymous threatened to name names and then backed down when the real gangster movement that is the Zetas promised to murder 10 people for every member named online. Pretend bedroom mafias aren’t really going to come out of a confrontation with the real thing looking too healthy. 

It is the nature of the ‘organisation’ that any oul group of fuckwits can get together and style themselves as being ‘Anonymous,’ and as we have seen with Mad Mal and his fellow Bullring survivors, any oul group of fuckwits often do. Saying that, Anonymous on the face of it is still quite a powerful idea and it will continue to generate news and some small and relative excitement, most especially by its leaking of secret and damaging corporate files like, for example, those hacked from the computers of the right-wing global political analysis group Stratfor and which show that the company worked with American law enforcement to infiltrate climate protest groups (okay, this doesn't excite me but I'm sure that it excites some others). It obviously won’t bring down the system but the whole trend is something to watch anyway. It’s all mildly interesting in some small ways, just not anywhere near as interesting and dangerous as its adherents – and a mainly hysterical and quite clueless media – seem to think it to be. Who knows, though: Anonymous hackers could end up finding top secret files that expose a global conspiracy to keep alien abductions secret - although perhaps that would only be if Malcolm Blackman hacked into his own computer. What is a very loosely affiliated ‘underground’ culture filled with all types from the intelligent and talented to the utterly moronic, from those just sick in the head to desperately sad and needy crackhead, crackpot fantasists ready to go off at any time, ‘Anonymous’ is a boiling pot of ideas, lunacy, decency, thuggery, general paranoia, and brilliantly mad conspiracy theories. One writer has described Anonymous as being a handful of geniuses surrounded by a legion of idiots. Me, whenever I watch one of their ludicrous videos with the computer-generated voices and the juvenile fantasies of world revolution, I just think: ‘What an awful pack of silly little fannies. I hope the bigger, badder boys round where they live don’t find out that they prance about their bedrooms in Guy Fawkes masks while pretending that they’re taking on The Man, because they’ll probably get some severe kickings from them then.’

Some of the sadder little wannabe mobsters may want to somehow ‘get’ me in some way for writing this book. You can observe them cyber-screaming in anger and calling for blood – ‘Saying shit about Anonymous is a mega death wish!’ warned one once - in their Facebook groups and on Youtube whenever anyone dares to slag them off, a sight so sad and wretched it would make you cry for them, while also giving the lie to their proclaimed position as the Web’s greatest defenders of Internet freedom of speech. I’ll just take it as me having hit close to the bone if they do ‘come at me.’ Most just won’t give a crap. There are far bigger targets than some mad Paddy. And besides, I have long, long since passed the stage where I would care. In all honesty, Anonymous and 4Chan can kiss my hole. What I do want to know is where do the moralfags in Anonymous stand on RIP trolling about dead children? I know that some in Anonymous have hacked the Westboro Baptist Church website but was that solely for lulz or was it something more? I once asked someone on an Anonymous UK page on Facebook and who had posted up a link about the Westboro hacking as to where they stood on the cyber version of what the Westboros do. All I got was a longwinded, angry rant about HATO, before being told that Anonymous was too busy freeing Syria to worry about RIP trolls (I wonder who that Anon could have been?).

So where do the real and proud moralfags of Anonymous stand on RIP trolling?

Don’t worry, my friends have got things under control. They’re kind of like the Mafia - only they don’t forgive and they don’t forget.

Hunter Mello

I’m not going to pretend to be a psychologist but
one does not need to be a dung beetle to recognise the odour of excrement.

In my early days of ‘troll hunting’ I did a little reading on sociopathy/psychopathy and wasn’t at all surprised to be able to then recognise in each individual memorial page troll many of the traits associated with that particular pathological disorder(s).

One in particular, that of blaming others for wrongful acts and crimes which they themselves have freely committed, is frequently manifested by many of these trolls in the so-called ‘grief tourists’ excuse. In the RIP trolling lexicon a ‘grief tourist’ is the name given to anyone who visits a memorial page for someone they didn’t know personally to offer condolences to their friends or family. The troll line is that they find the behaviour of these ‘grief tourists’ so offensive that it somehow forces them to photoshop stab wounds onto a picture of a young girl who was knifed to death and then post that picture onto what can be the digital equivalent of a real-world book of condolence. These trolls claim that their targeting of the tribute pages is not an attack on the family but an attack on what they claim is false sympathy from people who did not know the deceased. Now, there is a truth to be told in this tale about vacuous online displays of pseudo-mourning for the departed carried out by those who were unknown to the deceased, but bear in mind that the great majority of memorial pages which are attacked by trolls are made by the family or friends of the dead people in question as coping mechanisms, and most of them in turn are made by youngsters. In reality, RIP trolls are only selective in their targeting of these memorial pages in that they prefer to hit those ones which have a genuine connection to the friends and family of the dead person in question, as those are where the most ‘lulz’ are to be gained. Trolling pages which are made in the names of dead children is all about gaining an emotional response, and what bigger emotional response could be gained than by openly torturing a mother about her dead son? When it comes to those trolls whom I have witnessed blabbering on about how these grief tourists are making them do what they do, I can safely say that I have observed exactly all of the very same morons more than happy to get stuck into those who are in genuine mourning. Their excuse making is just one wretched symptom of their wretched pathology.

During police interviews after his arrest, Colm Coss, the first troll jailed in Britain for memorial page attacks, was recorded as saying: ‘The pages are flooded with “I never knew you or your family, I am devastated by your passing.” You wot? Just step back. You never knew this person? So, I found that quite provoking.’

Coss, whose trolling led to an entirely innocent woman having her life put in danger, something which he takes great pride in, was so outraged by the things that some people were saying on the tribute pages which he for some reason seemed to find himself constantly drawn to and unable to ignore, that he spent years visiting possibly hundreds of them to write out detailed sexual fantasies about the corpses of the dead people they were in memory of.

Indeed, the ‘grief tourism’ plea even has somewhat of a media champion in a certain Whitney Phillips, formerly of the University of Oregon and now a lecturer at New York University. 29-year-old Miss Phillips likes to have her voice heard regularly in the media as something of an authority on RIP trolling behaviour (which she is), and has even written a published university paper called
LOLing at tragedy: Facebook trolls, memorial pages and resistance to grief online,
and in which she very eloquently puts forward all sorts of pseudo-intellectual bollocks about why the likes of a Sean Duffy, and a Colm Coss, and the ‘people’ who spewed the filth of their minds all over those pages about little Millie Martin are really just likeable little scamps and scallywags out to make a social critique of how the media and Facebook users handle tragedy.

Whitney claims to have created for herself an alternate persona and to have then embedded herself in with the same RIP trolling web of which I have been familiar with over the years, and once again I can confirm that she isn’t lying. This, she says, was in aid of her study into ‘online transgressive humour’ in trolling. Whitney’s closest confident in the trolling fraternity – in fact they could hardly have a closer relationship when it comes to all of this - is one ‘Paulie Socash’ (named in homage to an old 4Chan meme which goes ‘Shit is so cash’), a very active RIP troll of who I have for years been familiar with and as it happens another one who likes to drone on and on in some sort of pseudo-intellectual way about how posting a picture of a headless corpse onto the tribute page of a teenager who has just died in a car smash is a work of satirical genius. Indeed, in what must have been a very interesting interview session that Whitney apparently carried out with ‘Paulie’ for the journal
Index on Censorship
, ‘Paulie’ seems to suggest that he thinks of himself and his fellow memorial page desecrators as being in some way comparable to the great satirist Dean Jonathan Swift. Some may think that ‘Paulie’ was taking the piss here by mentioning his works in the same breath as the author of Gulliver’s Travels, but re-reading this ‘Interview With A Troll’ as it is titled, I am convinced that he was not, or not intentionally so anyway. Trolls like this really are that mind-blowingly deluded and narcissistic.

‘Paulie,’ who also goes by the names ‘Leigh Hotti’ and its masculine counterpart ‘Lee Hotti’ (Paulie does have a problem with deciding which gender he is at any given moment), has had his Internet protocol (IP) addresses traced by me and others on numerous occasions to the University of Oregon and elsewhere in Eugene, Oregon, which makes me wonder if he and Whitney have ever been in the same room together. Wow, I’ll bet the odds are that that they probably have. ‘Paulie’ likes to share his satirical talents with the world by, for example, visiting a page for a 15-year-old girl who died in a house fire to tell her friends that he would still sexually assault her dead body; or by gathering up all the information he can on the family members of a woman who wrote an article critical of trolling and then trying to incite his fellow trolls to harass those people.

Oh those crazy satirists.

Phillips’s paper goes on to argue that RIP trolling is good for wider society, with the trolls, whom she paints as some kind of edgy comedy movement, subverting what she sees as the way the mass media takes advantage of tragedy. She then goes on to apportion much of the blame for the trolling on media reportage on the tribute page attacks, which she sees as being as bad - or possibly otherwise - as the trolling itself.

Phillips is buffoonery made flesh, a character who is quite ironically way beyond satire herself while also being confused – maybe deliberately so on occasion - on a great many points. For one, she believes that mass RIP trolling first reared its hideous head in the February of 2010, although that is probably only because that was when Paulie told her about it all, that being the time he himself arrived on the scene. She also seems to make the startling, but to me and others quite amusing, claim that us ‘anti-trolls’ started off ourselves as Facebook RIP trolls, but her paper is worth Googling just to get an insight into the mind of someone so dead inside that they will attempt to attach highbrowed ideals as to why lowlife cretins choose to post photographs of corpses being anally desecrated onto a tribute page visited by the family of a child who has just died.

Needless to say, the very idea that the intentions of these trolls are not to upset the people most affected by the deaths they are mocking is as pathetic and worthless as the likes of Colm Coss and Paulie Socash are themselves. They compete with each other to see who can cause the most psychological and emotional damage to those suffering bereavement, and from that they can gain admiration from their online friends - admiration which they clearly would not get otherwise in their lives. They build their online reputations on how much hurt they can inflict, and some of them begin to feel that they have obtained something like a celebrity status in the ranks whenever their notoriety begins to rise among the rest of the trolls. When they are hurting and terrifying people and are seen to be doing so then they have become someone of importance at last. These RIP trolls will as a general rule outright target the families and friends if those people are within their reach, many of them taking the opportunity to horrify the parents of deceased youngsters by creating profiles bearing their dead child’s name and photograph and then privately messaging them from those accounts. Clearly, this gives them a feeling of being significant, of being able to control people’s emotions as well as their minds; which is another indicator of true psychopathy and has nothing whatsoever to do with humour. Many of them are too dead inside to know true humour, humour to them is just an idea that they think they understand. A subculture such as RIP trolling is what happens when a bunch of dead-inside little psychopaths with neither real charm nor any soul get the idea that they’re funny.

Their need to feel powerful is why they pick on the easiest and most vulnerable targets that they can find, and these same trolls like to hit pages set up to make appeals to find missing people, or pages where women who have suffered stillbirths can congregate on and give each other support; along with other likewise easy targets. The easier the target and the more emotion involved in it, these trolls will invariably go after it. They are scavengers who are attracted to already wounded targets, the hyenas of the Internet.

There is too something of a tradition among them to display screencaps of the private messages traumatised friends or relatives of the deceased send them, this so that the other trolls can know of their glory and give them that much-needed adulation and acceptance for it. And enough media reports have conveyed the deep distress suffered by the people whose relatives’ memorial pages have been targeted by trollers for it to be well known to anyone by now as to just what all of this is doing to people going through what is already their darkest time. Whatever they do, it’s always the families that suffer because of it, and this they know all too well. Phillips in her paper even admits that it leaves a devastating effect on the families, but it doesn’t stop her from thinking that RIP trolls are the greatest and most interesting ‘people’ in the history of the world (bizarrely, she also seems to think that RIP trolls are somehow ‘more’ noticeably human than non-RIP trolls; while I myself fail to see why they should be even granted human status at all). If these individuals weren’t interested in hurting the grieving they’d choose some other subject to troll about. There are thousands of subjects to troll about but they choose this, specifically to play on the rawest of emotions.

Are we really supposed to believe that these psychological vultures with their insatiable appetite for dead children see the families they traumatise as collateral damage, unfortunate but necessary victims of the trolls’ noble efforts to change how the media and others deal with death? In my experience, all of these trolls revel in the hurt they cause to those in grief. They certainly feel no guilt over it or else they wouldn’t continue to do it! And a great many of these trolls do like to think of themselves as normal, decent people (they do say that the truly mad never know that they are so afflicted). Some may enjoy indulging themselves by ascribing intellectual or, as we have seen in the previous chapter, even moral reasons as to their behaviour so as to stop themselves having to face the fact that they have fallen down to the lowest depths of so-called humanity; others might, on some sort of level, genuinely believe that it is the people-who-write-nice-things who are really responsible for all of the hurt, and that they are just along to enjoy the ride.

But the simple fact of the matter is that you only do what they do if you are a rotten being. Anyone even remotely sane knows this; it shouldn’t even have to be said. All the lamentable excuses and false reasoning as to just why you want to create a photoshop image of a dead one-year-old boy with blood all over him are just some of the mad little voices in your damaged little mind. If you RIP troll you do what you do because there is something really, really wrong inside of you. Ghoulish behaviour on memorial pages is just an outer manifestation – and a screamingly salient one - of the stinking, hellish creature that lives inside of you. I know it, the world knows it, and somewhere in that horror show which you call a mind, you probably know it too. Seek help for your compulsions before someone you will hurt online then tracks you down in real life and makes a cultural critique of your trolling by rightfully knocking your fucking nut in. 

So I do prefer it – if prefer is the correct word - when any member of the species just knows and admits what it is out for. See this from one relatively infamous, and in that particular Facebook trolling community (see how Phillips gushes over him in her paper), very highly thought of troll; who despite looking like an inbred pig-botherer and having the lack of wit to match that appearance has thought to bestow on himself the handle of ‘Pro Fessor’:

if anybody needs me, i’ll be trolling some rip page. because that’s what I do best. ruin family, friends, and grief tourists view of a dead person. hopefully some brit just died of a chronic disease and she is well known so it will be even more lulzy.