It Wasn’t Just the Trolls: Early Internet Culture,“Fun,” and the Fires of Exclusionary Laughter

Abstract

When considering the extremist turn of the Trump-era internet, it is critical to interrogate the influence of subcultural trolling on and around 4chan from 2008 to 2012. The troll space isn’t the only space worth interrogating, however. During this same period, there was a marked overlap between subcultural trolling and the nebulous, discursive category known colloquially as “internet culture.” Both were swiftly absorbed into broader popular culture. Both were characterized by overwhelming irony and detached, fetishized laughter. That participants in these early internet culture spaces (which included but were not limited to “classic” subcultural trolling) were overwhelmingly white, middle class, and felt comfortable enough in their subject positions to respond to the world with a blanket “lol” speaks to much deeper problems than the obvious problems. Pressingly, the things that were—and that for some people, still are—fun and funny and apparently harmless online need more careful unpacking. Fun and funny and apparently harmless things have a way of obscuring weapons that privileged people cannot see, because they do not have to see them. They also have a way of establishing precedent and a step-by-step media manipulation guide that is easily hijacked by those looking to do harm, whose actions often fly under the radar—because those actions look familiar, because they look like the things that used to be fun.

I used to believe that the internet used to be fun. Obviously the internet isn’t fun now. Now, keywords in internet studies—certainly, keywords in my own internet studies—include far-right extremism, media manipulation, information pollution, deep state conspiracy theorizing, and a range of vexations stemming from the ethics of amplification.

Until fairly recently, I would sigh and say, remember when memes were funny? When the stakes weren’t so high? I wish it was like that still. I was not alone in these lamentations; when I would find myself musing such things, it was often in the company of other internet researchers, or reporters covering the technology and digital culture beat. Boy oh boy oh boy, we would say. What we wouldn’t do to go back then. It was a simpler time.

A collection of several hundred late-2000s internet memes posted to image sharing site Imgur, and subsequently linked to on Reddit, provides a perfect example (“Late 2000s imagedump (352 images),” 2019; “Late 2000s imagedump,” 2019). Appropriately, the first comment reads, “A more simple time.” Ha ha ha, here’s a grainy photo of two photoshopped cows. “Moo,” one cow’s dialogue box says. “You bastard, I was going to say that!” says the second. Here’s a guy with his mouth photoshopped over both his eyes. Here’s two cats photoshopped to look like they’re playing a handheld videogame console. “LET ME SHOW YOU MY POKEMONS!” the cat says. This image is ensconced in an additional text frame, which at the top reads “Pokemons,” and at the bottom, “Let me show you them.” Here’s a bear running onto a golf course. The top caption indicates that this is golf course rule enforcement bear. The bottom caption concludes that you are fucked now. Here’s some kittens making sassy faces at each other.

Like I said: a simpler time, but oh right, also, the thread begins with a lighthearted meme about Hitler. And continues with dehumanizing mockery of a child with disabilities. And more sneering mockery of an old man hooked up to an oxygen tank. And date rape. And violence against animals. And fat shaming. And homophobia. And racism. And pedophilia. And how hilarious 9/11 was. And women as unfeeling, inanimate sex objects. With multiple examples of the last seven.

If this were a collection, specifically, of 4chan memes, that flagged itself as representing early trolling subculture, many would nod and say, yes, they really were pieces of shit back then. Those trolls! They helped elect Donald Trump you know. ¹

But this was not a collection, specifically, of 4chan memes. This was a sampling—and as a person who has studied such things for the better part of a decade, I can attest that it is a representative sampling—of what was often described as “internet culture,” or simply “meme culture,” from about 2008 to 2012. Such a broad framing belies the fact that internet/meme culture was a discursive category, one that aligned with and reproduced the norms of whiteness, maleness, middle-classness, and the various tech/geek interests stereotypically associated with middle-class white dudes. ² In other words: this wasn’t internet culture in the infrastructural sense, that is, anything created on or circulated through the networks of networks that constitute the thing we call The Internet. Nor was it meme culture in the broad contemporary sense, which, as articulated by An Xaio Mina (2019), refers to processes of collaborative creation, regardless of the specific objects that are created. This was a particular culture of a particular demographic, who universalized their experiences on the internet as the internet, and their memes as what memes were. ³

Now, there is much to say about the degree to which “mainstream” internet culture—at least, what was described as internet culture by its mostly white participants—overlapped with trolling subculture on and around 4chan’s /b/ board, where the subcultural sense of the term “trolling” first emerged in 2003. My co-author Ryan Milner and I are, as I type, writing a book chapter about that very relationship (Phillips and Milner, 2020), and is something I have addressed elsewhere (see Phillips, 2018b); the intertwine between 4chan and “internet culture” is so deep that you cannot, and you should not, talk about one without talking about the other. However, while trolling has—rightly—been resoundingly condemned for the better part of a decade, the discursive category known as internet culture has, for just as long, been fawned over by advertisers and other entertainment media. The more jagged, trollish edges of “internet culture” may have been sanded off for family-friendly consumption, but the overall category and its distinctive esthetic—one that hinges on irony, remix, and absurd juxtaposition—has in many ways fused with mainstream popular culture.

But I (somewhat) digress.

The fact that so many identity-based antagonisms, so many normative race and gender assumptions, and generally so much ugliness was nestled alongside all those harmless and fun and funny images drills right to the root of the problem with internet culture nostalgia. A lot of “internet culture” was harmless and fun and funny. But it came with a very high price of entry. To enjoy the fun and funny memes, you had to be willing—you had to be able—to deal with all the ugly ones. When faced with this bargain, many people simply laughed at both. It was hard to take Nazi memes all that seriously when they were sandwiched between sassy cats and golf course enforcement bears, and so, fun and ugly, ugly and fun, all were flattened into morally equivalent images in a flip book. Others selectively ignored the most upsetting images, or at least found ways to cordon them off as being “just” a joke, or more frequently, “just” trolling, on “just” the internet.

Of course, only certain kinds of people, with certain kinds of experiences, would be able and willing to affect such indiscriminate mirth. Similarly, only certain kinds of people, with certain kinds of experiences, would be able and willing to say, “ok, yes, I know that image is hateful and dehumanizing, so I will blink and not engage with it, or you know, maybe chuckle a little to myself, but I won’t save it, and I won’t post anything in response, and instead will wait patiently until something that’s ok for me to laugh at shows up.”

In both cases, the bodies of those doing the laughing, or merely the blinking and ignoring, are paramount. Simply put, it is very easy to laugh ironically and it is very easy to approach ugly and fun, fun and ugly, as morally equivalent images in a flip book, when your particular body is not in danger. When you can walk away when you want. When you can blink and ignore when you want.

The ability to disconnect from consequence, from specificity, from anything but one’s own desire to remain amused forever, kept the ugliness that was always tucked into the folds of internet culture nebulous. At best, it kept the nastiest bits “just”-ed away—at least for the people who got to pick and choose what got to be fun. For those whose identities were targeted and corroded by all that ironic, arm’s length laughter, or whose personal and professional lives were under constant threat, often for the sin of not being a white man in public, the ugliness of the forest wasn’t so easily obscured by the fun of the trees. People tend to see the things that have the potential to harm them.

There were precisely the points of myopia I encountered in a recent ethnographic project exploring journalism practices during the 2016 US presidential election (Phillips, 2018b). This was also when my understanding of the “fun” of early internet culture fundamentally shifted.

In this project, I was looking to construct a guide for reporting on bigots, abusers, and manipulators online. To do so, I talked to dozens of reporters about the ethics of amplification and other structural issues within the institution.

Very quickly, I realized that many of the young reporters who initially helped amplify the white nationalist “alt right” by pointing and laughing at them, had all come up in and around internet culture-type circles. They may not have been trolls themselves, but their familiarity with trolling subculture, and experience with precisely the kind of discordant swirl featured in the aforementioned early-2000s image dump, perfectly prepped them for pro-Trump shitposting. They knew what this was. This was just trolls being trolls. This was just 4chan being 4chan. This was just the internet. Those Swastikas didn’t mean anything. They recognized the clothes the wolf was wearing, I argued, and so they didn’t recognize the wolf.

This was how the wolf operated: by exploiting the fact that so many (white) people have been trained not to take the things that happen on the internet very seriously. They operated by laundering hate into the mainstream through “ironically” racist memes, then using all that laughter as a radicalization and recruitment tool. They operated by drawing from the media manipulation strategies of the subcultural trolls who came before, back when these behaviors were, to some anyway, still pretty funny.

All of this, from winking racist memes to winking radicalization efforts through exposure to those memes to winking journalistic baiting using, you guessed it, memes, was on full, grotesque display during the Christchurch, New Zealand mosque shootings, which left 50 peaceful worshippers dead. ⁴ As the cruelty and horror of the attacks reverberated around the globe, many reporters and influencers declared that this was an internet terror attack. It wasn’t. It was a terror attack born of violent and pervasive white supremacy. Internet culture was a filter through which that violent and pervasive white supremacy had percolated. It wasn’t the only filter; Islamophobia is a mainstream, everyday injustice that millions of Muslim people around the globe are forced to endure. What internet culture did, on the fringes and within the mainstream, was keep that violent and pervasive white supremacy looking like a joke for far too long, with far too many people.

As all these precedents were being set, from around 2008 to 2012, I was researching the worst elements of trolling subculture. Beyond that, I was embedded, both professionally and personally, within “internet culture” circles, which included academics, journalists and bloggers, and high-profile content creators. It makes me cringe to admit, but there was a lot I blinked at and ignored then, a lot I made excuses for then, a lot I laughed at then that simply wasn’t funny. I was part of the problem.

In an essay ultimately published in Zizi Papacharissi’s A Networked Self and Love (Phillips, 2018a), I began to try and unpack why. Smack in the middle of that same timeframe, I’d been under the thrall of an abuser, a man I loved, who tormented me physically, emotionally, and sexually for the better part of a year. As it often is, it was a slow lead-up to his worst violence in 2010. As I descended, inch by inch, into very dark places, I stopped feeling anything about anyone, least of all myself. Lulz made perfect sense to me, in the dark. Trolling made perfect sense. The more those things made sense to me online, the less I resisted when my offline abuser—who would borrow language from my research to justify his abuse; he was, of course, just trolling—would taunt me, belittle me, gaslight me, harangue me, then smiling, laughing, punch me in the bruises he gave me. Because lulz, for fuck’s sake. I was numb to all of it. I needed to be numb to do my work. I needed to be numb to get through my day.

My trauma only explains my numbness, though. It doesn’t fully explain my laughter. To get to the bottom of that, I’ve needed to look deeper into my whiteness and my privilege and all the ways my whiteness and my privilege have made me, at times, an asshole.

I’ve also needed to look deeper into the water I was swimming in. My laughter wasn’t ok; I should have known better. And it was hardly anomalous. This sort of laughter, and the arm’s-length irony that prefigured it, was the defining characteristic of “internet culture”—which didn’t just have its tentacles in trolling circles, but was pervasive within academic institutions and news and entertainment outlets as well. Its underlying message, beamed in from all the channels I was tuned to (and bad on me for not having a more diverse set of channels), was that there are no consequences, it’s just the internet, nothing is real. Lol.

As the last 2 years of our perpetual political hellscape has illustrated, this attitude is dangerous. Privileged people, who are mostly white, who haven’t yet reckoned with their laughter then or even their laughter now, must earnestly contend with these patterns and the assumptions embedded within them.

Most foundationally, shaking your head disapprovingly at the obvious villains—the obvious manipulators, the obvious abusers, the obvious fascists—isn’t enough. Abusers, manipulators, and fascists on the internet (or anywhere) certainly warrant disapproving head shakes, and worse. But so does a whole lot else. ⁵ Pressingly, the things that were—and that for some people, still are—fun and funny and apparently harmless need more careful unpacking. Fun and funny and apparently harmless things have a way of obscuring weapons that privileged people cannot see, because they do not have to see them. Fun and funny and apparently harmless things also have a way of establishing precedent and a step-by-step media manipulation guide that is easily hijacked by those looking to do harm, whose actions often fly under the radar—because those actions look familiar, because they look like the things that used to be fun.

The takeaway is this: so much of what so many of us thought was fun, was actually a trap. So much of what so many of us thought was fun, brought us here. The more nostalgia we affix to those memories, the longer we delay in taking full, unflinching inventory of the things we got wrong, the less equipped we will be to even begin pushing back against the fires that have, make no mistake, already arrived at our front door.