sky > sky's Quotes

“trollish play with tragedy is what happens when current events become content, a term frequently (and cynically) used in the blogosphere to describe the various bits of digital stuff that may be shared, remixed, and of course monetized through advertisements.”
― Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture

“It should go without saying that picking and choosing online, not to mention being picked and chosen for, is an enormous privilege, one that risks normalizing selective emotional attachment. Trolls take this privilege to the extreme, choosing to engage with only the content they find amusing and ignoring everything they deem irrelevant to their interests (e.g., their target’s feelings).”
― Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture

“Not only is trolling predicated on the “adversary method,” Western philosophy’s dominant paradigm,24 it is characterized by a profound sense of technological entitlement born of normalized expansionist and colonialist ideologies.”
― Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture

“while trolls and trolling behaviors are condemned as aberrational, similarly antagonistic—and highly gendered—rhetorical methods are presumed to be something to which every eighteen-year-old should aspire. This is, to say the very least, a curious double standard.”
― Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture

“Barlow’s utopian and decidedly libertarian message thus functioned not just as a Declaration of Independence, but also as Manifest Destiny version 2.0.”
― Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture

“To these early adopters—the vast majority of whom were white males—the Internet was a land of endless opportunity, something to harness and explore, something to claim.”
― Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture

“Just as Barlow declares independence from the tyrannies of corporate and governmental encroachment, trolls regard the Internet as their personal playground and birthright; as such, no one, not lawmakers, not the media, and certainly not other Internet users, should be able to dictate their behavior.”
― Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture

“while trolling behaviors are regarded as inherently problematic, the cultural tropes with which trolls’ behaviors are aligned are either celebrated or, more frequently, rendered invisible, as if expansionism were as natural as the air Americans breathe.”
― Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture

“In response to coordinated attacks against the parents of recent teenage suicides, say, I can’t think of a less convincing justification than “free speech.”
― Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture

“Regardless of how unlikely the connection between trolling and free speech might appear, however, and regardless of what message they intend to send by embracing such a cherished American ideal, trolls’ more extreme actions call attention to the ugly side of free speech, which so often is cited by people whose speech has always been the most free—namely straight white cisgendered men (i.e., men whose gender identity aligns with cultural expectations for their biological sex)—to justify hateful behavior towards marginalized groups.”
― Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture

“Just as it places assumptions about free speech in a new and perhaps uncomfortable light, trolling also reveals the destructive implications of freedom and liberty, which, when taken to their selfish extreme, can best be understood as “freedom for me,” liberty for me,” with little to no concern about how these actions might infringe on others’ freedoms.”
― Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture

“The idea that a person has a right, and perhaps an obligation, to take advantage of others for their own personal gain is the American dream at its ugliest—and is exactly the dynamic the most offensive forms of trolling replicate.”
― Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture

“Previously framed by the media as the Internet Hate Machine, post–Wikileaks Anonymous has become synonymous with so-called hactivism and is frequently lauded as a progressive force for good. Or if not a force for “good,” then a force for something—that is, some political position or ideal.”
― Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture

“Anonymous was credited with turning a “fledgling movement” into a “meme,”30 and was lauded for transforming the Occupy protests into a “distinctive new movement,”31 with little acknowledgment paid to the other groups and individuals propelling the movement forward, both off- and online.”
― Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture

“The ubiquitous Guy Fawkes mask, once a symbol of failure (the mask was first worn by “Epic Fail Guy”) and then a symbol of lulz, had undergone yet another transformation—it was now a rallying cry for social justice.”
― Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture

“In 2014, one is as likely to encounter trollish behavior on Tumblr or reddit or Twitter as on 4chan, some of which flags itself as such via subtle memetic references and some of which does not. Some self-identifying trolls don’t even bother trolling anonymously.”
― Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture

“a practical response to the so-called troll problem, the summary of which could be understood thus: at bottom, the troll problem isn’t a troll problem at all. It’s a culture problem, immediately complicating any solution that mistakes the symptom for the disease.”
― Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture

“a basic definitional criterion is needed, even if its primary use is to demarcate the subcultural variety of trolling from the effects-based variety. Hastily conceived interventions designed to thwart trolling—especially when the term “trolling” is bandied about as a haphazard buzzword, don’t help anyone, least of all the targets of antagonistic online behaviors. The question is, which solutions are the best solutions?”
― Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture

“there is no guarantee that an anonymity-free Internet would be a kinder, gentler Internet.”
― Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture

“Banning anonymous expression would therefore have little impact on groups already steeped in violence and abuse, and would risk stifling much more than online aggression—a high price to pay, especially when one considers the overwhelming political and social benefits of a free and open Internet.”
― Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture

“From my perspective, the best criteria for helping guide these responses are the persistence and relative searchability of data. Simply put, do the offending behaviors affix themselves to a target’s name? Are they Google search–indexed? Do they threaten a person’s private or professional reputation?”
― Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture

“the best practices for dealing with ephemeral, one-off interactions are not necessarily the best practices for dealing with persistent (i.e., searchable) harassment.”
― Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture

“in cases where a person’s reputation is not threatened, and where data disappears or at least doesn’t “stick” to its target, site- and community-specific interventions are often the best avenues for remediation. These interventions can include amended Terms of Use agreements, efficient comment moderation protocols, and of course liberal use of the banhammer”
― Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture

“the establishment of a basic categorical distinction between ephemeral and persistent abuse would allow lawmakers and site administrators to respond thoughtfully and efficaciously to all forms of aggressive online behaviors.”
― Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture

“This, ultimately, should be the goal—to maximize effectiveness and minimize lockdown.”
― Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture

“so long as mainstream institutions are steered by people who behave like trolls, there will always be an audience of trolls primed to maximize mainstream ugliness.”
― Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture

“until the conversation is directed toward those who engage in behaviors similar or identical to those of trolls, until sensationalist, exploitative media practices are no longer rewarded with page views and ad revenue—in short, until the mainstream is willing to step in front of the funhouse mirror and consider the contours of its own distorted reflection—the most aggressive forms of trolling will always have an outlet, and an audience. And so long as it does, these behaviors will implicate far more people than the trolls themselves. They will also, and just as damningly, implicate those who pick and choose when to affect outrage and when to shrug noncommittally. Or worse, when to sit back and chuckle cynically.”
― Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture

“trolling rhetoric is an extremely effective countertrolling strategy. This strategy—of actively trolling trolls—runs directly counter to the common imperative “don’t feed the trolls,” a statement predicated on the logic that trolls can only troll if their targets allow themselves to be trolled. Given that the fun of trolling inheres in the game of trolling—a game only the troll can win, and whose rules only the troll can modify—this is sound advice. If the target doesn’t react, then neither can the troll. But even this decision buys into the trolls’ game. The troll still sets the terms of their target’s engagement; the troll still controls the timeline and the outcome. The dynamic shifts considerably if the target counters with a second game, one that collapses the boundary between target and troll. In this new game, the troll can lose and, by taking umbrage at the possibility, falls victim to his or her own rigid rules. After all, it’s emotion—particularly frustration or distress—that trips the troll’s wire. In most cases, the troll’s shame over having lost, or merely the possibility that he or she could lose, will often send the troll searching for more exploitable pastures.”
― Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture

“However effective trolling rhetoric might be, particularly when dealing with unwanted trolling attention, the act of trolling is heavy with ideological baggage. No matter what purpose the act is meant to serve, it is and will always be predicated on some degree of antagonism. Ryan Milner argues that there is an important distinction between antagonism that facilitates robust dialogue—as was the outcome of SAFE’s proposed book burning party—and antagonism that silences, marginalizes, and denigrates.”
― Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture

“what happens when trolling rhetoric is harnessed for explicitly feminist purposes? Is there, or could there be, such a thing as a feminist troll? In an article posted to Fembot, an online feminist research collective, digital media and gender studies scholar Amanda Phillips considers the potential lessons of trolls and other online harassers (referred to collectively as “fucknecks”) and insists that there is indeed a place for trolling rhetoric within feminist discourse. Wherever a person might go, she argues, whether online or even to an academic conference, there will be trolls. “Let’s call it what it is,” she argues, “and learn more effective strategies of provocation and deflection—to troll better, and to smash better those who troll us.”28 Given how culturally pervasive trolling has become, Phillips’ point is well taken. If feminists don’t find a way to harness existing trollish energy, it will be used against them.”
― Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture