This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture

snapping its audience to attention, either by activating emotional investment or by forwarding a claim so outrageous that one cannot help but engage in a dialogue.

that trolls’ behaviors provide an implicit, and sometimes outright explicit, critique of existing media and cultural systems—

Mary Douglas’s exploration of the related concepts of dirt and taboo.

the fact that online trolling is par for the mainstream cultural course.

trolls are born of and embedded within dominant institutions and tropes,

trolls’ simultaneously symbiotic and exploitative relationship to mainstream culture,

Trolls believe that nothing should be taken seriously, and therefore regard public displays of sentimentality, political conviction, and/or ideological rigidity as a call to trolling arms.

dirt is best understood as matter out of place, and is intelligible only in relation to existing systems of cleanliness:

Like a spiteful housecat whose sole interest seems to be property damage, trolls take perverse joy in ruining complete strangers’ days.