I’ve kind of been of the opinion for a while that there are maybe a couple different ideas of “free speech”. If you have total “free speech”, right, everyone is allowed to talk and say whatever they want, much like the public square yadda yadda. You won’t get nazis, you’ll get spam, something which is obviously bad to anyone with half a brain (increasingly a smaller and smaller amount of the population). Spam is “free speech”, technically, as, someone is making the most of their ability to scream at the top of their lungs, maximum volume, they’re taking up all of the airwaves as much as is possible, and since these are usually the people with the most resources, it generally falls into the same kind of capitalist maximum usage of a resource in the most efficient way possible, with the minor caveat that nobody sane ever wanted that resource to be used in that way. Everyone needed a little bit of inefficiency in order to grease the wheels of conversation.

Of course, over time, we realize spam becomes less effective than subtly prodding at the collective consciousness, and running a twitter account with snarky remarks. We basically just have to understand here that it’s still spam, it’s just that the distinction has been moved from maximum volume, to bad faith. Which, is something that isn’t necessarily the role of a corporation, just like spam doesn’t necessarily have to be a corporation. Spam can also be people that are just scammers. Instead of selling products, these sorts of spammers and scammers try to win you over, drive the discourse in a different direction, engage in a bad faith manner. It fills the same role as spam being the maximum volume in the amphitheater, drowning out any other communications, but this is more insidious, harder to catch, and doesn’t necessarily come from a place of malice or like, actual bad faith. If you were an alien listening to the airwaves, you might just hear something resembling a regular discussion, with the distinction that maybe you’d be getting a larger percentage of people getting mad and storming off as they talk to what are basically ideological zombies, or maybe robots.

I can get a bad faith discussion out of taking two people that are temporarily mad, or passionate, invested, about the same thing in different ways, and then controlling the debate in a certain kind of way, say, over a text medium where neither side can communicate effectively. And those are people that should’ve been able to relate over a shared passion, ideally. I can get a bad faith discussion out of two people that do not speak the same language, out of two people that can communicate just well enough that what’s being said sounds sensible, but doesn’t actually translate to either side. And of course, I can get a bad faith discussion out of just simple trolling. I mean, that’s what trolling is, at a basic level, just taking a devil’s advocate nonsense stance super seriously, until other people also do that, basically on the premise that you’re someone to talk to. We sort of approach an event horizon with communication, where the closer two people are to actual communication, the more potential for frustration and misunderstanding there is, sort of like the hedgehog’s dilemma. So of course you get bad actors who lean into that, and who propagate that behavior and their own sorts of separate language and thought terminating cliches, in order to basically be spam, without being spam. They create bad faith conversations.

And then, of course, I kind of fear the role that AI might take in the coming years, with all of this. Especially if analog computing hardware starts taking off again and people have easy access to building their own actually sensible chatbots resembling some mid-level internet discourse, instead of stuff that resembles what are really smart toddler might write. Then we’re gonna see this all play out all over again, with the spam, except in a way that’s much harder to detect, and in a way where you don’t have to recruit human labor to do any of it. Dead internet theory, but real, basically. I dunno of a real way to counteract any of this, en masse.

I think the biggest thing is that people, generally, just have to put more thought into why specifically they want to leave a comment. Who are you doing this for? It can’t really be for the person on the other side of the screen, you know, because the miscommunication is going to be inevitable given enough time, there’s nothing you can do to counteract it. I think, inevitably, we all must realize, that the only reason to post online is, because you wanted to.

And so we all become trolls, in a way. But then, as is the ancient wisdom of the trolls, it becomes boring to just inhabit a shallow perspective, to spout nonsense. It’s like playing a game with all the cheats enabled. It’s fun for a while, probably too long actually, if you’re insecure and have a chip on your shoulder, but it’s not fulfilling long term. You can get plenty of people to do this regularly, clock in and clock out, be passionless, play the game with cheats for 3-4 hours with no real investment and then walk away. But if you’re serious, you have to disable the cheats, to start inhabiting perspectives with real depth, you have to start inhabiting worldviews that aren’t your own, but are still fully internally consistent. Ones that just stem from maybe other starting values. Or maybe they are all the same perspective, just given different easily malleable information landscapes. And if that’s the case, then you’re not really trolling anymore. You’re just doing the socrates shit, where socrates invents a fake guy to challenge himself and others. Was that socrates? I dunno, who gives a fuck.

Tl;dr We are/all must become trolls! Memes are the DNA of the soul!