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10 Former Internet Trolls Explain Why They Quit Being Jerks
Back in ‘09, when io9 ran an article about the RLSH [real-life superhero] movement, commenter Garrison Dean jokingly stated his intent to start a villainous organization, ROACH (the Ruthless Organization Against Citizen Heroes) in retaliation. I was immediately on board with the idea and signed up, creating a villainous persona and a blog.
What followed was over a year of me playing a clumsy game of cat and mouse with the RLSH community, eventually settling on three of them as my archnemeses.
My arsenal consisted of blogs, photoshop, even editing their podcasts to make them look crazy. Did it matter to me that they had doxxed me? Not in the slightest. I didn’t think I really had anything they could threaten as I sought to drive them crazy.
Thing is, I think the ‘they’re crazy’ tactic stuck on at least one of them, because he made a phone call all the way from Florida to California to tell my local police that I was a danger to myself and others. In the grand tradition of the Internet Troll, I Deleted Fucking Everything, announced that I had died suddenly in the night, and slunk into the shadows.
Well, two years, multiple blogs and at least three fake Facebook profiles later (we call it stress testing for a reason, Zuckerberg,) *I* was the one going insane. The different lives I was leading were making me start to lose my grip on my own sanity, and after making some even more spectacularly terrible decisions online, I suffered the actual breakdown. I was about a hair’s breadth from being committed. I remember there were days when I couldn’t physically drag myself out of bed due to the crippling depression and inability to turn the crazy thoughts off, and there are chunks of time missing altogether from my memory, chunks I probably don’t want back.
Finally, I started to recover mentally. Sadly, the insane shit I did to cope with what I had been through, in my online, professional and personal lives, was all out there in the public eye, thanks to a complete breakdown of all personal boundaries and barriers during my breakdown stage and an Internet connection. I knew that the only way to come back was to just put the past behind me, to learn the hard lessons from my experiences and to not ever take up a cause through trolling ever again.
When I look back on that time, I’m glad of a few of the friendships I made. I’m ashamed at the ways I acted, but I accept that I was fucked up, that I had let myself get too sucked in to the fantasy and lost sight of where the line between reality and delusion really were.
After all; isn’t that what really makes a supervillain what he is?
The funniest part of this whole sordid, tragic embarrassment was how good I got at it. I made missteps and mistakes aplenty over the first year, but by the end, I had learned how to flawlessly create an untraceable identity wholecloth. I could, if I wished, pluck a personality from thin air, spin it into fully realized existence, complete with a past, unique way of speaking, skillset, and even different sex or race. I could. I *did.*
It’s a scary skill to develop, simply because of how easy it is to become lost inside your own labyrinth.
What followed was over a year of me playing a clumsy game of cat and mouse with the RLSH community, eventually settling on three of them as my archnemeses.
My arsenal consisted of blogs, photoshop, even editing their podcasts to make them look crazy. Did it matter to me that they had doxxed me? Not in the slightest. I didn’t think I really had anything they could threaten as I sought to drive them crazy.
Thing is, I think the ‘they’re crazy’ tactic stuck on at least one of them, because he made a phone call all the way from Florida to California to tell my local police that I was a danger to myself and others. In the grand tradition of the Internet Troll, I Deleted Fucking Everything, announced that I had died suddenly in the night, and slunk into the shadows.
Well, two years, multiple blogs and at least three fake Facebook profiles later (we call it stress testing for a reason, Zuckerberg,) *I* was the one going insane. The different lives I was leading were making me start to lose my grip on my own sanity, and after making some even more spectacularly terrible decisions online, I suffered the actual breakdown. I was about a hair’s breadth from being committed. I remember there were days when I couldn’t physically drag myself out of bed due to the crippling depression and inability to turn the crazy thoughts off, and there are chunks of time missing altogether from my memory, chunks I probably don’t want back.
Finally, I started to recover mentally. Sadly, the insane shit I did to cope with what I had been through, in my online, professional and personal lives, was all out there in the public eye, thanks to a complete breakdown of all personal boundaries and barriers during my breakdown stage and an Internet connection. I knew that the only way to come back was to just put the past behind me, to learn the hard lessons from my experiences and to not ever take up a cause through trolling ever again.
When I look back on that time, I’m glad of a few of the friendships I made. I’m ashamed at the ways I acted, but I accept that I was fucked up, that I had let myself get too sucked in to the fantasy and lost sight of where the line between reality and delusion really were.
After all; isn’t that what really makes a supervillain what he is?
The funniest part of this whole sordid, tragic embarrassment was how good I got at it. I made missteps and mistakes aplenty over the first year, but by the end, I had learned how to flawlessly create an untraceable identity wholecloth. I could, if I wished, pluck a personality from thin air, spin it into fully realized existence, complete with a past, unique way of speaking, skillset, and even different sex or race. I could. I *did.*
It’s a scary skill to develop, simply because of how easy it is to become lost inside your own labyrinth.
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