No matter where you go on the Internet, there’s a type of user who plays by a different set of rules. These people—somewhere in there, behind the proxy servers and dummy accounts, they are still people—live only to bother others, to waste their time and hurt their feelings. They’re always in search of the worst juxtapositions of images and ideas in the world, and unsuspecting outsiders to fling them at. They sabotage honest, open expression wherever it can be found. Where did all these trolls come from? And, more importantly, how do we make them go back there?

THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS: MAPPING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ONLINE TROLLING AND MAINSTREAM CULTURE by Whitney Phillips The MIT Press, 251 pp., $24.95

When folklore scholar Whitney Phillips started writing about trolls, it made sense to her colleagues, until they found out she meant Internet trolls. The result of her work is This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture, out in paperback in August. It’s a short but focused book that dives deep into trolling culture and their standard operating procedures. While newly politicized Anonymous has gained some measure of credibility and legitimate attention (notably Gabriella Coleman’s Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy, Phillips is more interested in the real weird, fucked-up stuff. Her focus is the nihilist line of trolling that evolved from the tease-and-be-teased survival-of-the-meanest forums like “Something Awful.”

But there’s something better than nothing when it comes to trolling: The Lulz. Phillips defines lulz as “acute amusement in the face of someone else’s distress, embarrassment, or rage.” Lulz are the object of trolling, the gold coins in the videogame of human interaction. To the troll, other people exist to taunt for lulz, to laugh along, or for both. Drawing on the Marxist idea of “commodity fetishism,” Phillips mints the term “lulz fetishism” for the trollish mindset. Just as the commodity form obscures the production process—you don’t see labor exploitation when you buy a product, you just see the iPad or whatever—lulz fetishism flattens everything into teasing. You don’t see the anguish of the person on the receiving end of the harassment or abuse.

“Through the magic of trolling,” Phillips writes, “all that remains are the absurd, exploitable details; trolls do not, and in many cases cannot, connect their object of ridicule to the emotional content out of which it arises, resulting in highly dissociative and often rabidly antagonistic laughter.” Trolls take the absolute value of social conflict and individual tragedy, converting it into one big mean-spirited joke. They’re big fans of teen suicide, racism, lazy misogyny, and calling everything fags. If society has a wound, then trolls are there to poke at it.

As part of her research, Phillips infiltrated a group of trolls that was flooding Facebook memorial pages with digital trash. Why would anyone track down grieving people just to bother them? “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,” she writes. “In this way, lulz functions as a pushback against any and all forms of attachment, a highly ironic stance given how attached trolls are to the pursuit of lulz.”

