The Dark Net (3 page)

Anonymous said:
I feel kinda bad for her. She was hot and shit, also cute. Too bad she was dumb enough to leak her name and whatnot. Oh, well. Shit happens.

Anonymous replied:
If was clever she would have g[ot] t[he] f[uck] o[ut] she didnt, therefore she deserves the consequences

Anonymous replied:
I don’t give a shit what happens either. Bitch was camwhoring while she had a boyfriend.

The operation took under an hour. Soon, the thread had vanished, and Sarah was forgotten.

Doxing camgirls is only one of a growing number of ways that people abuse, intimidate, provoke, anger or ‘troll’ others online. Celebrities, journalists, politicians, sportspeople, academics – indeed, almost anyone in the public eye, or with a large following online – regularly receive insults, inflammatory comments and threats from complete strangers. In 2011, Sean Duffy was imprisoned after making offensive remarks on Facebook, including a post mocking a fifteen-year-old who’d committed suicide. When journalist Caroline Criado-Perez and others succeeded in a campaign to get Jane Austen featured on the new ten-pound note in 2013, she
was bombarded with abusive messages from anonymous Twitter users, culminating in bomb and death threats deemed serious enough for the police to advise she move to a safe house. After appearing on BBC’s
Question Time
, the University of Cambridge classicist Mary Beard received ‘online menaces’ of sexual assault. In June 2014, the author J. K. Rowling was viciously attacked online for donating £1 million to the ‘Better Together’ campaign to oppose Scottish independence.

Some form of trolling takes place on almost every online space. YouTube, Facebook and Twitter all have their own species of troll, each evolved to fit their environment, like Darwin’s finches. MySpace trolls have a register and tone perfectly adapted to upset aspiring teenage musicians. Amateur pornography websites are populated with trolls who know precisely how to offend exhibitionists. The ‘comment’ sections on reputable news sites are routinely bursting with insults.

Over the last five years, there seems to have been a dramatic increase in this type of behaviour. In 2007, 498 people in England and Wales were convicted of using an electronic device to send messages that were ‘grossly offensive, indecent, obscene or of a menacing character’. By 2012, that number had risen to 1,423. Almost one in three eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds in Britain knows someone who has been a victim of anonymous online abuse. In a poll of almost 2,000 British adults on the subject, 2 per cent said that they had insulted someone, in some form, online – which, when extrapolated, would amount to some one million trolls in the UK alone.

‘Trolling’ has today become shorthand for any nasty or threatening behaviour online. But there is much more to trolling than abuse. Zack is in his early thirties, and speaks with a soft Thames Estuary accent. He has been trolling for over a decade. ‘Trolling is
not
about
bullying people,’ he insists, ‘it is all about unlocking. Unlocking situations, creating new scenarios, pushing boundaries, trying ideas out, calculating the best way to provoke a reaction. Threatening to rape someone on Twitter is not trolling: that’s just threatening to rape someone.’

Zack has spent years refining his trolling tactics. His favourite technique, he tells me, is to join a forum, intentionally make basic grammatical or spelling mistakes, wait for someone to insult his writing, and then lock them into an argument about politics. He showed me one recent example that he’d saved on his laptop. Zack had posted what appeared to be an innocuous, poorly written comment on a popular right-wing website, complaining that right-wingers wouldn’t be right wing if they read more. An incensed user responded, and then posted a nude picture that Zack had uploaded to an obscure forum using the same pseudonym some time before.

The bait had been taken. Zack hit back immediately:

You shouldn’t deny yourself. If looking at the pics makes you want to touch your penis then just do it . . . if you want I can probably find you some more pictures of my penis – or maybe you’d like some of my ass also? Or if you want we could talk about why regressive ideologies are a bad idea in general and why people who adopt them are likely to have a much harder time in understanding the world than someone who’s accepting of progress and social development?

Zack then began posting a series of videos of his penis in various states of arousal interspersed with insults about right-wingers and
quotes from Shakespeare and Cervantes. ‘Prepare to be surprised!’ Zack said mischievously, before he showed me the posts.

For Zack, this was a clear win. His critic was silenced by the deluge, which occupied the comments section of the website for several hours. ‘He was so incapable of a coherent response that he resorted to digging into my posting history for things he thought might shame me – but I’m not easily shamed.’

‘But what was the point?’ I asked him.

There’s a short pause. ‘I dunno, but it was fun. It doesn’t really matter if it was otherwise fruitless.’

For Zack, trolling is part art, part science, part joke, part political act, but also much more. ‘Trolling is a culture, it’s a way of thinking’ – and one, he says, that has existed since the birth of the internet. If I wanted to discover where this apparently modern problem came from, I had to go back to the very beginning.

The internet’s precursor, the Arpanet, was, until the 1980s, the preserve of a tiny academic and governmental elite. These ‘Arpanauts’, however, found that they enjoyed chatting as much as exchanging data sets. Within four years of its creation the Arpanet’s TALK function (originally designed as a small add-on to accompany the transfer of research, like a Post-It note) was responsible for three quarters of all Arpanet traffic. TALK, which later morphed into electronic mail, or ‘e’-mail, was revolutionary. Sitting at your computer terminal in your department building, you could suddenly communicate with several
people at once, in real time, without ever looking at or speaking to them. The opportunities afforded by this new technology occasionally made the small group of world-class academics behave in strange ways.

One research group, formed in 1976, was responsible for deciding what would be included in an email header. They called themselves the ‘Header People’, and created an unmoderated chat room to discuss the subject. The room became famous (or infamous) for the raucous and aggressive conversations held there. Arguments could flare up over anything. Ken Harrenstien, the academic who set up the group, would later describe them as a ‘bunch of spirited sluggers, pounding an equine cadaver to smithereens’.

In 1979, another team of academics were at work developing a function called ‘Finger’, which would allow users to know what time other users logged on or off the system. Ivor Durham from Carnegie Mellon University proposed a widget to allow users to opt out of Finger, in case they preferred to keep their online activity private. The team debated the merits of both sides, but someone leaked the (internal) discussion to the rest of the Arpanet. Durham was attacked relentlessly and mercilessly by other academics from across the US, who believed that this compromised the open, transparent nature of the Arpanet.

Most of these academics knew each other, so online arguments were tempered by the risk of bumping into your foe at the next computer science conference. Nevertheless, misunderstanding and righteous indignation spread across the Arpanet. One participant in the Finger episode thought that tongue-in-cheek comments were usually misread on a computer, and proposed that sarcastic
remarks made on the Arpanet be suffixed with a new type of punctuation to avoid readers taking them the wrong way: ;-) But even the first emoticon wasn’t enough, because users just started slotting them after a sarcastic put-down, which was somehow even more annoying. (‘The f***ing a**hole is winking at me as well?!’) Worried that the network was quickly becoming an uncivil place, Arpanauts published a ‘netiquette’ guide for newcomers. Satire and humour, it advised, was to be avoided, as ‘it is particularly hard to transmit, and sometimes comes across as rude and contemptuous’.

In 1978, Ward Christensen and Randy Suess invented the dial-up Bulletin Board System. With a modem, telephone and computer, anyone could either set up or connect to a ‘BBS’ and post messages. From the early 1980s onwards, BBS was many people’s first experience of life online.

Within a year, insulting strangers on boards became a widely acknowledged and accepted part of BBS. Finger and Header Group disputes were more often than not heated debates between academics. But here, people started joining groups and boards with the sole purpose of starting an argument. This was called ‘flaming’: provoking strangers, disrupting other groups and creating tension for the fun of it. The best ‘flames’ were well written: subtle, clever and biting. Good flamers (who would often post under a pseudonym) built a reputation; people would eagerly await their posts, and archive their
best lines. This was more than simple nastiness. For many flamers, it was an opportunity to experiment, to push boundaries, and to have their efforts read and appraised. One prominent flamer even published a guide – ‘Otto’s 1985 Guide to Flaming on BBS’ – advising potential flamers that being as controversial as possible was ‘the only way that people will read your opinions’. ‘It is very hard’, Otto wrote, ‘to ignore a board-wide or NET-wide flame war.’

Dedicated groups started to appear to discuss how to most effectively flame others. In 1987, one BBS user called Joe Talmadge posted another guide, the ‘12 Commandments of Flaming’, to help flamers old and new develop their style:

Commandment 12: When in doubt, insult. If you forget the other 11 rules, remember this one. At some point during your wonderful career as a Flamer you will undoubtedly end up in a flame war with someone who is better than you . . . At this point, there’s only one thing to do: INSULT THE DIRTBAG!!! ‘Oh yeah? Well, your mother does strange things with vegetables.’

BBS groups were controlled by a systems operator (sysop), who had the power to invite or ban users, and delete flames before they reached the victim. Often labelled censorsops, they were themselves the targets of a nasty strand of flaming called ‘abusing’. Abusers would torment the sysop with insults, spam or anything else they could think of. Sometimes abusers and flamers would ‘crash’ a board with bugs, or post links to Trojan viruses disguised as pirated arcade games for unsuspecting users to download. Another trick was to
upload messages referring to pirating, in order to direct snooping authorities towards the unsuspecting sysop.

Around the same time that the BBS was invented, two academics at Duke University set themselves an even more ambitious task. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis were aggrieved that the Arpanet was elite and expensive – access cost approximately $100,000 per year – so in 1979 they set up a new network called ‘Usenet’, which, they hoped, anyone could access and use. (Anyone, that is, who had a computer connected to the operating system UNIX, which amounted to very few people.)

Usenet, it can be argued, is the birthplace of the modern troll. Usenetters – a small clutch of academics, students, Arpanauts and computer nerds – would take a pseudonym and join a ‘newsgroup’ full of strangers. Like BBS, anyone could start a Usenet group, but unlike BBS the administrators – the people who ran the whole network – had some control over which groups they would allow. The hope of harmony reigning was dashed almost immediately. Usenetters clashed with the haughty Arpanauts over How Things Should Be Done in this new space, with the Arpanauts declaring the new Usenet ‘trash’ to be ignorant and inexperienced. One simple spelling mistake would often instigate a chain reaction, resulting in months of users trading insults and picking apart each other’s posts.

Usenetters were a rebellious bunch. In 1987, Usenet administrators
forced what became known as the ‘Great Renaming’, categorising all the haphazard groups into seven ‘hierarchies’. These were:
comp.*
(computing),
misc.*
(miscellaneous),
news.*
,
rec.*
(recreation),
sci.*
(science),
soc.*
(social) and
talk.*
– under which users could start their own relevant subgroups. To name the group, you took the main hierarchy name, and then added further categories.
^fn2
* John Gilmore, who would go on to co-found the cypherpunk movement with Tim May and Eric Hughes in 1992, wanted to start a group about drugs, called rec.drugs. His request was turned down by the administrators.

So Gilmore and two experienced Usenetters created their own hierarchy, which would be free of censorship. They called it
alt
.*, short for alternative (it was also thought to stand for ‘anarchists, lunatics and terrorists’). Flaming became extremely popular on
alt.*
, and flamers would take pleasure in being cruel to other users in as creative and imaginative a way as possible. A 1990s Usenet troll called Macon used to respond to flames by posting a single, 1,500-word epic mash-up of creative insults he’d written over the years: ‘You are the unholy spawn of a bandy-legged hobo and a syphilitic camel. You wear strangely mismatched clothing with oddly placed stains . . .’ When, in 1993, a user named Moby asked the group alt.tasteless for advice about how to deal with a pair of cats on heat who were ruining his love life, he received an explosion of maniacal solutions, each more ludicrous than the last: do-it-yourself spaying, execution by handgun, incineration and, perhaps inevitably, sex with the cats.

On both Usenet and BBS new idioms, rules and norms were
being created. But it was a world that was about to be inundated. The early 1990s saw the number of internet users grow exponentially. And many new users would beeline straight for one of the most active and interesting places online:
alt.*
. Usenetters, irate at the sudden influx of immigrants, attempted to flush them out. In 1992, in the group alt.folklore.urban, a new type of flaming was mentioned for the first time, targeted at the recent arrivals: trolling. The idea was to ‘troll for newbies’
^fn3
*
: an experienced user would post an urban myth or legend about Usenet in the hope of eliciting a surprised reaction from anyone new, thereby exposing their status. Caught you! The responder would thereafter be mercilessly mocked.