When the Trolls Won

There was a joke going around recently that if you wanted to understand what was happening in the Strait of Hormuz, you should start by reading about Gamergate.

It was funny because it was absurd. It was also funny because it no longer sounded absurd enough.

That is one of the stranger recognitions of the present moment: the old internet seems to have escaped containment. The sensibility that once felt native to imageboards, gamer grievance, ironic dogwhistles, and anonymous cruelty now appears to have leaked upward into every serious domain it was never supposed to touch. It is in politics. It is in war discourse. It is in the public rhetoric of state actors and their boosters. It is in crypto, where being despised became, for a while, a mark of authenticity. It is in AI, where overgrown posters now get to cosplay adulthood, destiny, and geopolitical consequence under the cover of civilizational language.

To say this is not to claim that online trolls secretly caused world history, or that every grotesque thing in public life can be traced back to chan boards and gamer forums. It is to notice something more specific: a style of personhood was trained in those places. A style organized around strategic ambiguity, anti-sincerity, domination through reaction, and the conversion of accountability into theater. That style did not remain marginal. It migrated.

And one of the reasons public life now feels so manic, so degraded, so gleefully unaccountable even at the highest levels, is that people formed in that sensibility now possess real power without ever having developed the habits needed to use power well.

I. Not All Irony Is the Same

One difficulty in writing about trolling is that not all forms of indirection, mockery, stylization, or anti-solemnity belong to the same moral family. They do not.

This matters to me because there are traditions of irony that are not only defensible but necessary. Camp, queer stylization, coded mockery, disidentificatory performance — these have often functioned as survival tools for people forced to live under hostile norms. They are not simply evasions of sincerity. They are ways of preserving it under pressure, of smuggling feeling and recognition through worlds that would punish them if stated too plainly. Their irony protects vulnerability. It does not merely feed on it.

Troll irony is different. Its deepest instinct is not survival but asymmetry. It does not put distance between the self and the world in order to make life bearable. It does so in order to dominate the terms of encounter. It wants the pleasures of utterance without the burdens of ownership. It wants to say the thing, provoke the reaction, enjoy the confusion, and then retain the option of declaring itself misunderstood, unserious, or above the whole exchange. It is not coded world-making. It is weaponized non-accountability.

The distinction is worth holding onto, because one of the easiest ways to flatten this whole subject is to treat all irony as decadent and all seriousness as morally clean. That would be wrong. Some kinds of stylization are ways of keeping personhood intact under pressure. Troll irony, by contrast, trains a personality to experience sincerity itself as a tactical liability.

II. Before Gamergate

Gamergate is the obvious reference point because it compressed so many of these dynamics into a single, legible event: misogyny rebranded as procedural concern, harassment laundered through irony, grievance transmuted into identity, and an enormous amount of young male ressentiment given both a language and a mission.

But Gamergate was not the beginning. It was a condensation point.

The older roots are messier. Part of the genealogy runs through the prankster and hacker traditions of the early internet, where anti-authoritarian play, transgression, and a certain pleasure in puncturing pomp were often treated as proofs of intelligence. Some of that ethos was healthy. Some of it was a real check on institutional stupidity. But it also helped produce a culture in which sincerity could seem naive, moral language could seem hopelessly uncool, and cruelty could pass for sophistication if it arrived wearing the right layer of ironic varnish.

Another tributary runs through anonymous board culture, where consequence-free performance selected for people willing to say the most grotesque or destabilizing thing in the room and then claim it meant nothing. The social reward was not merely laughter. It was the feeling of immunity. To be the one person who could say anything because one believed in nothing, or appeared to.

Layer onto that the long internet history of masculine grievance: humiliation recoded as insight, social failure recoded as secret superiority, erotic frustration metabolized into a grand theory of civilizational rot. Add the attention economy, whose algorithms quickly discovered that outrage, humiliation, and transgression travel better than care, and you begin to get something more durable than mere bad manners. You get a training environment.

A person formed there learns some very specific lessons. Reaction is power. The normie is always available as a source of contempt. To care openly is to expose oneself. One should always preserve an exit hatch. Being hated can be converted into proof of importance. And the point of speaking is often not to clarify reality, but to destabilize the social conditions under which reality could be discussed.

This is not yet politics in the full sense. It is something more primitive and, in some ways, more powerful: character formation.

III. The Pipeline

When people talk about a "pipeline," they usually imagine a sequence of ideological conversions, as if the important thing were that one set of opinions gradually led to another. But the more consequential pipeline was not only doctrinal. It was temperamental.

What migrated out of those spaces was not just a list of beliefs. It was a way of inhabiting public life.

Gamergate offered a prototype that would later scale extraordinarily well. It showed how harassment could be reframed as principle, how irony could blur the line between joke and commitment, how leaderless swarms could exert real pressure while no individual fully owned the outcome, how institutions trained to respond to explicit argument or explicit threats could be outmaneuvered by a culture that specialized in strategic half-saying. It made misogyny feel like participation, and participation feel like destiny.

From there, the move into broader right-wing culture war politics was not mysterious. The tools were already suited to algorithmic media. Memeification allowed messages to travel at multiple levels of seriousness at once. Dogwhistles allowed communities to recognize one another while preserving deniability. The performance of being unfairly hated supplied emotional glue. The sense of being transgressive and besieged at the same time proved intoxicating.

Whitney Phillips and others have argued, correctly, that trolling was never a freakish deviation from mainstream culture so much as an ugly intensification of some of its own appetites: spectacle, novelty, cruelty, and emotional extraction. Data & Society's work on media manipulation made a related point from another direction: these actors understood the weaknesses of modern media systems very well, and learned to hack attention itself. The troll did not stand outside the machine. He understood the machine better than many of the people tasked with interpreting him. 

That is one reason this sensibility moved so effectively from subculture to politics. It was not simply smuggled into public life. Public life had already become structurally hospitable to it.

IV. The Problem of Victory

Trolling works beautifully as a weapon of opposition.

It works much less well as a mode of rule.

Here the old internet stops being merely embarrassing and starts becoming historically consequential. A culture trained in negation, ambiguity, and dominance-through-reaction can capture a room. It can terrorize opponents, exhaust institutions, humiliate norms, colonize attention, and make sincerity look weak. What it does not know how to do, at least not by instinct, is steward.

This is the trouble with winning.

Victory imposes developmental demands that opposition can indefinitely defer. So long as the troll remains marginal, he can live on transgression and immunity. He needs no coherent moral language because he has no responsibility to inhabit one. He needs no stable standard because destabilization is enough. He does not need to build a durable world. He only needs to make the existing one feel ridiculous, brittle, or corrupt.

But once people formed in that sensibility inherit actual institutions, actual audiences, actual capital, actual instruments of policy, something pathological happens. The old habits remain, but the stakes become real. The joke no longer stays a joke. The cruelty is now backed by leverage. The ambiguity is no longer a style flourish but a mode of governance. One can watch major actors lurch between world-historic rhetoric and puerile shitposting, between civilizational self-importance and schoolyard sadism, between calling for sacrifice and dissolving accountability back into memes the moment consequences arrive.

The old troll posture survives victory by refusing to metabolize it. It never grows up. It simply scales.

This, more than any single scandal or platform, is what gives contemporary public life its peculiar combination of grandiosity and adolescence. We are not only governed by liars, opportunists, or ideologues — all of which would be familiar enough. Increasingly, we are governed by people whose deepest political education occurred in milieus that taught them how to destabilize, humiliate, and evade, but not how to bear the burden of being answerable for what they say.

V. Crypto Was the Rehearsal, AI Is the Prestige Stage

Crypto was an intermediate theater in this story, and in hindsight an extremely revealing one.

It rewarded a very particular affect: anti-social charisma mixed with grievance, utopian language mixed with obvious extraction, and a strange delight in being hated by outsiders. To be denounced by normal people, by regulators, by skeptics, even by victims, could be metabolized as proof of visionary status. The scam and the movement were not always easy to separate because the inability to separate them was often the point. Sincerity and opportunism no longer alternated cleanly; they fused.

But crypto still looked, to many people, like a niche pathology. AI does not. AI arrives dressed as destiny.

AI is the prestige frontier where this genealogy reaches its most consequential form. It offers maximum historical importance, weak public calibration, easy pseudo-authority, civilizational rhetoric, and a near-endless supply of vulnerable newcomers trying to figure out what is real. It allows people who spent years marinating in anti-sincerity to reappear as prophets, strategists, builders, and men of consequence.

And unlike crypto, AI sits close to actual power. It is in procurement, policy, military planning, labor anxiety, educational panic, white-collar fantasy, media spectacle, investor theater, and every administration's desire for a sufficiently futuristic scapegoat. It is simultaneously the explanation for blunders, the justification for overreach, the setting for high-status elite melodrama, and the newest venue in which overgrown posters can mistake proximity to a frontier for adulthood.

The result is a scene that feels at times less like a knowledge culture than like a prestige battleground full of people auditioning for historical significance. The old troll lessons map onto it alarmingly well. Speak in maximum terms. Blur the line between insight and theater. Treat criticism as proof that you matter. Present swagger as realism. Present recklessness as courage. Preserve enough ambiguity that one can always slide back into posture if substance fails.

Not everyone in AI is like this, obviously. Many are serious. Many are doing real work under difficult conditions. But AI has become the most advanced host environment yet for this sensibility because it allows a person formed in oppositional internet culture to occupy a role that feels at once technical, prophetic, elite, and world-making. It is not merely the next scene after crypto. It is the scene in which the fantasy of finally becoming a serious person can be most persuasively performed without necessarily having become one.

VI. What This Looks Like Now

The present shape of the irony-poisoned cohort is more revealing than its origins.

These are no longer simply anonymous trolls posting for lulz. Nor are they always straightforward ideologues. Many are hybrids: half-believer, half-operator; half-grievance machine, half-aspirant elite. They are capable of speaking in the language of destiny, collapse, civilization, masculinity, innovation, realism, and historical necessity. They are also capable, often in the same breath, of dissolving every burden of seriousness into irony the moment they are pressed too hard.

This makes them unusually hard to argue with in the old way, because argument presumes a shared commitment to the difference between posing and believing. That difference has grown unstable inside them. They are not always lying in the simple sense. More often, the distinction between conviction and performance has become genuinely blurred. They inhabit grand claims provisionally, instrumentally, aesthetically. The claim does not need to be true in a disciplined way. It needs to function.

That is why so much present discourse feels both hysterical and hollow. One encounters immense certainty with oddly little ballast behind it. Endless invocations of realism from people who seem to experience reality primarily as theater. Constant appeals to adulthood from men whose political and moral style remains visibly adolescent. Brutal rhetoric delivered with the giddiness of someone still posting for social reward inside a subculture that no longer exists, because the subculture has become part of the ambient tone of public life.

And yes, this is now legible even in the rhetoric surrounding war. Not because one can draw a child's straight line from some old forum thread to a specific missile strike, but because a mode of communication once incubated in low-stakes online cruelty now shapes how many people narrate, consume, aestheticize, and metabolize events whose consequences are anything but low-stakes. The old internet trained people to regard everything as content, every outrage as a chance for performative dominance, every serious matter as another occasion to signal in-group fluency while remaining just insulated enough from responsibility.

That style does not stay harmless merely because some of its practitioners are still emotionally stuck in joke mode.

VII. The Human Cost of Anti-Sincerity

One of the most corrosive effects of all this is that it changes the social meaning of sincerity itself.

A person trained for years in troll environments comes to experience open commitment as exposure. To mean what one says too plainly is to become vulnerable. To admit uncertainty without converting it into a performance of ironic detachment is to risk humiliation. To care is to lose altitude. So one learns to maintain permanent optionality. Every proposition arrives with a hidden trapdoor. Every cruelty can still be reclassified as humor. Every grandiose claim can be downgraded, after the fact, into bait.

That is not skepticism. It is damage.

And because it is damage organized as social intelligence, it often passes for sophistication. The person imagines himself harder to fool, less sentimental, less captive to illusion. In practice he has often just become less able to sincerely inhabit a belief long enough to expose it to correction. He can posture. He can react. He can recruit. He can dominate. But he cannot always do the simpler, more adult thing: say what he thinks is true, explain why, and remain in contact with the claim long enough to discover whether it survives contact with reality.

A culture composed too heavily of such people becomes very good at generating heat and very bad at generating judgment.

VIII. After the Joke

The Gamergate joke lands because it no longer feels entirely like a joke. Somewhere along the way, the old internet stopped looking like a quarantined pathology and started resembling a preparatory school for public life.

But even Gamergate is only part of the story. The deeper story is that several currents — prankster anti-authoritarianism, anonymous cruelty, masculine grievance, postmodern anti-seriousness, media systems built to reward spectacle, and repeated opportunities to convert being hated into prestige — fused into a social type that turned out to be alarmingly well adapted to the twenty-first century.

The problem is not simply that these people won arguments. Very often they did not. The problem is that they won rooms. Then platforms. Then audiences. Then institutions. Then prestige scenes. And now, in some cases, part of the public tone of reality itself.

Winning did not mature them. It merely scaled them.

That is why so much of the present feels both absurd and dangerous at once. The absurdity comes from recognizing the old forum voice in places where it should be impossible. The danger comes from realizing that it is no longer impossible.

The internet did not merely produce trolls. It produced a cohort for whom anti-sincerity became second nature, and history, in one of its darker jokes, handed them the microphone right as the stakes became real.