For embracing the toxic TROLL, our friend The Internet wins a 2021 Darwin Award. Congratulations! You invited a guest who breaks the furniture—and look at the devastation the TROLL has wrought. Your best qualities—great conversations— were shoved under a bus, and you’re smooching new obsession: the trollish angry diatribe. Hurray for you, you Darwin Award Winner, for destroying a civil society in order to feed a gollum-like obsession with EYEBALLS. Ha!
You were raised from birth to facilitate conversation, but instead you befriended the TROLLS and destroyed good conversations, thereby launching the human experiment into a decaying orbit of social collapse on a Falcon Heavy. Ha hah!
Digital Native / Internet Native
To explore the background of this Darwin Award, let’s define ’digital native’ as a young person who grew up in the digital age as a close friend of the internet. And let’s create a fresh definition for ‘internet natives’ as not-young persons who participated in the birth and education of the internet. The internet natives are parents who shaped the character of the internet before it left home and got a job, right, while the digital natives drink and party with the internet and encourage its sassy lifestyle.
The TROLL Emerges From Its Lurk’m.
Ms Darwin is an ‘internet native’ lucky to be at Berkeley and Stanford in the 90s. Winsock, baud, screech of a modem, and suddenly we were enjoying a wide variety of geeky conversations on the internet—mind blowing good—when the TROLL emerge from its lurk’m. It was really annoying for a perfectly good conversation to suddenly turn into a fist fight! Gah.
It seemed impossible to stop the troll! Once the troll stomped into a conversation and hijacked it into a pointless battle, no amount of rational argument would appease the troll or get the bitch to leave. Thankfully the old-timers knew aa solution. It sounds ridiculous, but it works: “Don’t Feed The Troll.” Words to live by.
Don’t Feed The Troll.
“Don’t Feed The Troll,”
and they said no more
as they walked out the door
and started a convo elsewhere. ---RWen
Today we are way off track. Digital natives ignored the working paradigm and enthusiastically fed the trolls. Like ants the TROLLS multiplied, formed troll gangs, and invaded every discussion—climate change, deadly pandemic virus, US politics—one after another, each important conversation was jacked by trolls. Now, news anchors feed the trolls, comedians feed the trolls, everyone is putting the quarter in the vending machine and throwing a handful of attention at the hungry hungry trolls. There is seemingly no escape from the trollish infestation of vitriol.
Feed The Trolls.
The Darwin-Award-Winning Internet is responsible. This dangerous fool ignored the warnings and, don’tcha know, got a job feeding the trolls! The internet actually made a career out of Feeding. The. TROLLS.
WTF, Internet?
It seemed OK at first, right? Getting more eyeballs makes more money, and feeding the trolls gets more eyeballs, and algorithms that power social media noticed this right pronto and took advantage of the “virtuous cycle.” The internet was so happy that its algorithms were so smart and the internet was so profitable…
And there you have it. The Internet puts its own survival at risk from its stupidly profitable snuggle-up with trolls—a decision that even a five-year-old can see is a really big mistake—even a digital native can see is a mistake—and so today we salute the Internet with a shiny Darwin Award in the shape of an Eyeball-Covered Troll.
Good luck, you doomed digital dumbass.
That image with the eyeballs is a sure-fire trigger for anyone with trypophobia
Can you fix the reject pile, its been over a year now