Hackers on Steroids (31 page)

Yeah, it’s just us Philistines who don’t appreciate your acerbic talent for biting social satire that are the problem, Darren. The Nimrod Severn act is just far too advanced for most of us ignoramuses to get, and you’re really just being persecuted for your art.

But at the end of the day does it really matter as to whether they or those like them know themselves to be evil or not? A dog is still a dog even if it thinks of itself as human. Chapman and Burton are both grossly racist into the bargain, and two fine examples of the master race they are sitting at home having a nice quiet romantic night in trolling RIP pages together.

Attorney-at-law Dunn went absolutely apoplectic at the exposing of Chapman, screaming on Facebook that now I’d really done it and that myself, the journalists who wrote the article, and the editor and the owners of the Daily Mail were all going to be took up on harassment charges for picking on poor innocent Chapman, who, Dunn informed us, had been spat on in the street after being outed as an RIP troll to millions.

Yeah? Fuck ‘er!

Evans, Coss, Burton, and Chapman are going to go down in trolling history as some seriously dickwitted trolls. Though they needn’t blame me for any of it, or the BBC, or the Daily Mail. We didn’t make them seek out RIP pages to vomit the contents of their cancerous minds onto. The only one’s responsible for Evans, Coss, Burton and Chapman becoming a little bit infamous were those trolls themselves. I kinda suspect that each of them – and more – hate me with varying degrees of intensity, but the only one any of them has to blame for their misfortunes gazes back at them every time they look into a mirror. That’s the character any RIP troll needs to start having some serious words with. For as certain as it was that some of them were going to end up in jail, and as certain as it was that some of them were going to end up getting chased down by the media, it is also as certain that some of them are some day very suddenly going to find themselves in the boots of cars and being driven away to someplace out of the way. If the likes of me can find you, others who harbour very personal grudges indeed against you will be able to as well. Good luck explaining to them about the grief tourists.

Another cultural critic and social satirist who was visited by the Mail at that time is ‘Paul Baloney,’ that millionaire filmmaker and underground street-fighting champ who, funnily enough, just happened to be in his mother’s house when they called at it. When asked about his trolling, Baloney immediately slammed shut the front door on the reporter and without an admission they couldn’t include him in the story.

The ferocity of the troll is equal in measure to the pain that troll has in its mind. Of all the trolls that I have known, Baloney and Sean Duffy, both Xmas day trolls, have each made the most noise. The troll thinks that the louder it screams at everyone on the Internet then the more unlikely it is for someone to notice that they are only really screaming out in pain, never realising that only the opposite is ever true. Paul slammed the door shut that night on the reality which is slowly creeping into his life, buying himself some more time before the inevitable happens and the door just won’t shut any more. He turned to make his way back up the stairs and back to the refuge of his computer and the cyber Oz where he reigns as sovereign over his winged monkeys. His mother stood before him in the hall having overheard what the journalist had asked her 32-year-old son at the door. She questioned him on this, but Paul just looked down at the hall carpet and mumbled something about it all being a joke that someone was playing on him. His poor mother closed her eyes and the street-fighting champion slinked sheepishly past her to make his way back to the throne room of the king of trolls.

The walking horror show climbs the stairs and enters into the rancid box room where he slumbered as a child and where he slumbers still, being met by the familiar foul odour of the hell he wallows and delights in. Skype is open on his computer and some of the winged monkeys are in a group conversation. Paul joins in and he and the winged monkeys laugh about a woman they trolled earlier for having a vagina. They all really got that stupid bitch good on that, Paul agrees, still shaking but remembering now his true glory now that he is back in his realm.

Paul remembers then being knocked down by a hit-and-run driver back in 2010. He remembers being in hospital after that and receiving a message on Facebook from another troll who enquired about the rumours going around that he had been knocked down. For reasons he will not disclose to anyone else, Paul remembers that he is deeply embarrassed as to the circumstances of that hit-and-run incident and he remembers too regretting bitterly having told one of the trolls of it at the time, cursing again now that troll for blabbing about it on Facebook. Paul remembers telling the troll who messaged him that the real reason for his absence was that he had been called away for ‘filming in Wales,’ and he remembers then that same troll had his account hacked and that the private messages between him and Paul were subsequently posted up on Facebook and that everyone was laughing at him again because an anti-troll had by that time found an online newspaper story confirming the hit-and-run. Painfully he remembers how ‘Filming in Wales’ became a mocking euphemism for what the infidels call ‘troll fantasies and failings.’ Paul knows now that he will never be called away to Wales for filming, or to anywhere else for that matter. But he knows even more that it doesn’t matter anymore because the chosen few who aren’t stupid enough to disrespect him can see his genius in the videos he makes for Youtube, the videos of what the non-believers, in their incurable ignorance, say to be pieces of unspeakable shite. But that’s only because they don’t possess the esoteric knowledge of a Josh, or a Malcolm. It’s the world’s loss, not Paul’s, he reminds himself.

Paul remembers all of this because he feels that the world is disrespecting him again, and Paul will not be disrespected any more. Not by the anti-trolls, not by people from the papers, not by the trolls he hears in his head all the time laughing at what they falsely claim is the small size of his penis. Paul knows his penis isn’t small because of the power he has over all those stupid bitch whores on Facebook. He knows this power means that the way his penis looks in that horrible photo is a mere illusion, an illusion which only the weak of mind cannot see through. He opens up Facebook on his browser and enters into that palace of treasures and delights with its infinite dark corridors to tread, and its never-ending sights to see. Oh such sights for Paul to see.

Tonight Paul will seek out some new bitches to show his real might to; tonight he will remind the world as to the true power he wields and then the insult to that power which he just suffered at the door will begin to fade in his mind. Anti-trolls, people from the media, other trolls on the Internet who have laughed at that accursed, illusionary photograph of his penis, none of them have the mental ability to comprehend his true greatness. They see him and his power dazzles them and makes them feel uneasy because they know that they are in the presence of something too stupendous to comprehend. And, not understanding yet knowing that he is far superior than they, they try to bring him down. As the apostate Peter Partyvan once said, before he was seduced into treachery by that tramp, people are just jealous of Paul because he is all that they want to be. None of these people can bring themselves to admit this though, not to themselves especially. It is only the Select who can feel comfortable allowing themselves to even begin to try and comprehend his greatness; only the elite like his young underlings, none of whom fear to speak of the greatness of Paul. Only the chosen few.

Some people like to go on to the Internet to act out the fantasies they have. Some of these people become military generals, sitting on forums night after night winning wars long ago lost but which would have turned out differently had only they been in charge. Some like to sit with Wikipedia open and become great professors and founts of all knowledge, knowledge which they will readily share with folk in chat rooms. Paul likes to play at being a child abuser. Tonight he will find some stupid whore of a mother on Facebook and make sexual taunts at her about her children. That bitch of a woman – who Paul thinks may just look a little like that woman he is sometimes forced to call ‘mother,’ the one who stood before him just now in the hall - will run in fear from his might and this will remind the world of how powerful Paul is. That slut especially though, that stupid whore, she will know all of what too many of the others do their best to deny. Oh she will know it all. She will pay the price for anti-trolls, and journalists, and those who laughed at his penis. The wilfully blind and stupid.

From his throne Paul seeks out the stupid slut who will soon know some of the eternal night that makes up all of his days. And when he is finished with that bitch he might even find a few more to show his might to, and then maybe a few more too after that. Paul thinks now that he will treat himself to another all-night and all-day trolling session; another night on the Facebook town, another day in paradise.

All hail the king of trolls.

If you gaze for long into the Internet, the Internet gazes also into you.

Nietzsche

Welcome trolls to the Hotel Facebook; such a lovely place, such a lovely disgrace, you can change your face. Living it up at the Hotel Facebook; you can dry that tear, make it all disappear. Plenty of room for trolls at the Hotel Facebook; you can find it here, any type of fear, you can stay all year. There stands in the hallway the Hunter Mell, and you are thinking to yourself this could be heaven or this could be hell. Yes, here in the Hotel Facebook we have lots of pretty, pretty trolls that you’ll meet yet; some troll to remember - but most troll to forget. And oh what tangled interwebs in the Hotel Facebook we do weave; you can check out any time you like – but you can never leave. Such a lovely place, s
uch a lovely place, oh Paul such a lovely face.

Angel Mello
Barry is a whitenight, Edward. He posted liek the most famous trolls details around, which he only gained not by hard work, but by sicking up to a traitor! U trolls value loyalty and if you break that trust, you will go down. Also, he fucked with the highest troll family, big mistake. HUGE!

‘Angel Mello,’ so taken with Hunter of the highest, most famous troll family (the one that, liek, it’s a big – no, HUGE! - mistake to mess with) that she became his cyberlover for a while; well, she turned out to be an Australian mother of three in her 30s. Dear god, there are even ‘trolling families,’ trolls who come from a long line of respected trolls, the troll father passing his trolling knowledge down to his apprentice troll son. It would make you weep, if you couldn’t laugh.

I feel like I have been in the twilight zone for the past three years. Someday soon I will be telling a psychiatrist all about trolls, and anti-trolls, and double and triple agent trolls, and how they all actually do exist in a secret world filled with countless numbers of ugly ole trolls. The psychiatrist will just section me there and then and be done with it. I need to pack my bags and check out of my stay at the Hotel Facebook, the place where we’re all just prisoners of our own device. I knew that my stay had really gotten to me when one day I was drying myself off after a bath and realised that I hadn’t even been aware at all that I had even been taking a bath. The entire time in the tub had instead been spent immersed deep in dark caverns where the Morlocks tread. I had become as obsessed as those whom I was laughing at for being obsessed. I understand fully now what Nietzsche meant by the abyss gazing back into you. Their madnesses and their shrieking and their stupidities had all become a part of my own mind, and at times I had become horribly bloody depressed from it all. Some gaze so deeply into the Internet that they forget then that they can gaze back out from it. They become so swallowed up by the illusion that it now is to them their entire reality. Bollocks to that, I say. Life is far, far too short for that sort of carry on.

Troll hunting would only really be worth it if, as in the fantasy novels, you got to slaughter the vile beasts with a huge axe once you caught them. Imagine a wall the size of the universe and built with medium-sized bricks each one of which is inscribed with a remark ever more solipsistic or inane than the last; vacuous commentary from a culture in which ‘This woman is hot, but you say she is not. Why? Because you want the large cock of some big strong nigger deep in your Hershey highway’
*
is considered a withering putdown and the height of wit (Oscar Wilde must be glad that he’s dead). Now, imagine climbing along that wall and banging your head against each of those bricks in an attempt to create a crack somewhere in the structure so that you can peek through and see some of the builders who are working on the other side of it night and day to create their colossus of tedium. That is what trying to follow up the cybertrails which these trolls leave behind them can be like. These sorts of trolls are so banal that they will actually make your eyes bleed. No, really – they’ll make your eyes bleed and want to fall out of your poor head and just sizzle away to nothingness on the floor. Dante will need to come back to add in an horrific 10
th
level to hell, one where thousands upon thousands of the world’s most unspeakably tedious and witless 4Chan adherents all bore each other to death with their imbecilic memes over and over and over again for the whole length of eternity. Lock me forever in a room with 100 babbling lunatics who all think themselves to be Napoleon rather than make me endure the comedy stylings of just one more dark and daring trollglodyte from the Internet.

*
Actual real troll comment. Paging Dr Freud. Paging Dr Freud.

But pigs oink. That’s what pigs do. You can expect no different from such an animal, them being pigs. But why are whole hordes of grunting pig-beasts that have escaped from the farm at 4Chan being allowed to run through the Facebook and Youtube and Twitter towns oinking at all the citizens out going about their own business? Cannot the mayors of those towns build strong enough gates to keep these packs of marauding beasts from rampaging through their communities and terrifying their citizens? Keep these stinking hogs out in the wastelands of the Internet where they belong; allow them to run free in the outer reaches where no decent or even half-sane human being will ever set eyes on the foul things. Instead, 4Chan has been allowed by the powers that be to become an empire nation building colonies in places which human beings already inhabit. The invaders are going to have to be kicked out and the gates then sealed against them. As important as it is for the likes of a Duffy or a Hampson to feel the long arm of the law around their brass necks, there is no solution to the problem of organised and mass psycho-trolling in law. Some of the hydra’s heads may indeed be cut off from it, but more and more heads will only continue to grow out from it until at last the beast itself is slain; not by the law but by taking away that which feeds it: the ability of trolls to easily create an infinite number of profiles on social networks. This is the only solution.

And it’s the only solution, too, to the child pornography networks that are operating on these sites. Either people through their politicians and through the media force Facebook and others to rethink the way profiles can come into their networks, or they just accept that social networking sites are places where psychopaths and paedophiles have a free hand to openly congregate on and places whereon they can freely prey on the vulnerable. On your Facebook profile you can change your age and sex as easily as your name. That needs to stop for sure: who the hell needs to change their sex except those who have had an actual sex change?! And as there aren’t too many of those people about it wouldn’t cost Facebook too much time to look into any requests from users seeking to change what sex is displayed on their profiles, with only those who actually have had a sex change being allowed to do so. And age should definitely not ever be allowed to be changed. But all this would only really matter anyway if profiles were made harder to get into the system. If nothing changes, then on and on and on it will go.

On and on and on will go the emotional and mental torture, and the child grooming, and the identity theft, and the anonymous bullying, and the child porn swapping, and the paedophile networking, and the murders. Ever since I wrote in chapter five of the murders of Ashleigh Hall, Noma Belomesoff, and Nomfundu Tyulu, all brutally slain after being lured to their deaths via the use of fake Facebook identities, two more similar murder cases have been in the news. In England, 19-year-old Tony Bushby was jailed for 25 years for murdering Catherine Wynter, also 19, who he tricked into going out with him by creating four different fake Facebook identities, all of which he used to prey on her and convince her to date him, an outcome this psychopath only worked towards so that he would have the opportunity to inflict violence on the girl. In Texas, 30-year-old Franklin Davis admitted to police shooting dead 16-year-old Shania Gray after luring her into meeting him by posing as a teenage boy on Facebook. She was to give evidence against him in court.

Anonymity is both the Internet’s greatest blessing and its greatest curse. It allows the psychos and the child abusers to thrive together and to seek out prey at will; yet paradoxically it offers people on forums and blogs a strong layer of protection against violence from other users. Forum feuds can go on for years and can get very personal, with the anonymous nature of such bringing out the worst in people at times and giving rise to real hatred and bitterness. It can be hilarious to witness a debate about Palestine/Israel get so heated that it would appear as if the entire outcome of the conflict depended on one Internet argument between two men from Belfast. And some people can definitely take online arguments a bit too far. In 2006, 47-year-old Paul Gibbons travelled 40 miles from his home in London armed with a pickaxe handle and a machete-wielding friend to the house of John Jones after the two had gotten into an argument in a chat room. He cut Jones - who had dared him to come and get him - on the neck with his own knife, and was jailed for two years for it. It’s almost comical, but not, I suppose, for Jones.

But forums and blogs and the likes are the places for Internet anonymity. Not social networks. Not when we’ve seen what anonymity has brought about there. Yeah, some psycho-trolls and paedophiles will happily float about in their little online dream worlds while using their real identities, but this doesn’t apply to the great majority of them. For the great majority, it is their perceived anonymity that inspires them in their evil online deeds. And much of the problem could so easily be countered by the social networks – and Youtube, which has its own packs of organised RIP trolls and other such cyberpaths – simply creating systems that would eventually make it really hard for those who keep getting banned from their networks to constantly come back time and time again. I think my idea about each new profile having to be vouched for by three already well-established accounts would work, but I’m sure that if the owners of Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube each have in them any sort of a real desire to stop their applications being used for extremely evil purposes that they’ll find ideas of their own. No-one is asking for an anodyne Internet, but we can’t accept a dystopian one either. These are real people’s lives that are being messed with and destroyed here. If these big social networking companies feel as if there is nothing that really can be done to put a stop to all this predatory evil on their sites then they must be made to admit that they have birthed Frankenstein’s monsters which are now out of their control.

Cyberbullying of school kids by their peers – something that is reportedly now commonplace - brings pressures into areas of their lives where they would have previously felt safe. Children suffering sustained Internet campaigns against themselves may suddenly begin to see their bedrooms as an invaded space, and if that bullying is also taking place physically in school then it may seem to the victimised child that there is no real escape to be had from it all. Those who opine that all those kids have to do is to log off from their computers simply have no idea whatsoever about human psychology. If you know that someone is saying nasty and very personal things about you on the Internet then you’d have the almost insuppressible urge to look at it all again and again. And even if you could somehow stop yourself from giving into that macabre and very human curiosity which demands that you view all the bad stuff which is being said about you, then there’s the very real likelihood that, unless you have a strong mind, your imagination would begin dreaming up all sorts of horrible possibilities to fill in the blanks with and tormenting you then at all times of the day and night with them. There is no logging off from that whatever the vacuous and ignorant may say. And while most adults would find themselves strong enough to deal with this sort of thing without it getting to them too much, such things are amplified when you are a young teenager and when what is said and by whom can seem to you to mean the end of the world.

It’s not the fault of companies like Facebook – the premier choice for Internet bullies - that some people are horrible and stupid. And Facebook will take down any accounts that are reported to them as being used to harass people – but need I even mention by now that new accounts are only going to spring back up again to take their place? And for that they do need to share in the blame. But it’s not just on Facebook with its anonymously created ‘fan pages,’ a favourite tool of the cyberbully, that modern technology is being used as a weapon to inflict on people an age-old torture. And as the steady drip-drip-drip of child suicides that have been laid partially or fully at the door of cyberbullying shows, the pain all of this is causing is very, very real indeed:

Ryan Halligan, from Vermont. Committed suicide aged 13 in 2003 after being constantly tormented and humiliated online by bullies from his school. The bullying he suffered at school followed him all throughout the summer break via the medium of the Internet. He hanged himself that October.

Megan Meier, from Missouri. 13 when she committed suicide in 2006 after being targeted for bullying and humiliation by Lori Drew, a woman in her 40s and a neighbour of Megan Meier. Drew created a fake Myspace profile in the name of ‘Josh Evans,’ a fictitious 16-year-old boy, and after leading Megan on for weeks ‘Josh’ suddenly turned on the girl and took to telling her how much everyone hated her, as well as sharing their private messages with people Megan knew. ‘Everybody in O'Fallon knows who you are. You are a bad person and everybody hates you. Have a shitty rest of your life. The world would be a better place without you,’ was the last message Drew sent to Megan Meier. 21 minutes after replying to that message with: ‘You’re the kind of boy a girl would kill herself over,’ Megan Meier was found
hanging in her bedroom. She died the next day, never knowing that ‘Josh Evans’ was an evil woman 30 years her senior.