GOD DEFINITELY EXISTS FOR SURE
Trolling and Bullshit
This brief post examines the difference between the internet phenomenon of trolling and the separate but related phenomenon of bullshit as defined and discussed by Harry G. Frankfurt in his famous essay On Bullshit.
In that essay, Frankfurt distinguishes bullshit from lying. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it. The bullshitter does not care whether what they say is true or false. Bullshit, for Frankfurt, is speech produced with indifference to truth, motivated instead by the management of a particular impression that is trying to be made.
It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. Frankfurt
The danger of bullshit, Frankfurt warns, lies in its subtlety: it erodes the value of truth itself by making sincerity or style a substitute for truthfulness.
The internet phenomenon of trolling can be seen as a category of bullshit - but bullshit on steroids. While Frankfurts analysis illuminates speech motivated by indifference to truth, trolling reveals a related but more performative form of indifference, one not driven by self-promotion, but by disruption, irony, and the pursuit of affect rather than understanding.
A troll is someone who speaks bullshit but explicitly invites, in fact, compels, the viewer to react against it. The visceral disgust we feel toward bullshit is part of the trolls game - but unlike the bullshitter, the troll wants us to notice and care that what is being said is, or may be, false.
My child likes to play a game where she points her finger at me, almost touching my face, but stops just an inch away, saying, Im not touching you, Im not touching you. This is trolling. By contrast, when she sits in the back seat arguing with her brother, and I tell them to stop, she might protest, Im not touching him. That is bullshit. The latter feigns innocence for the sake of impression management. The former goes beyond this and delights in provoking a reaction.
We no longer live in an age of bullshit, but of something beyond it - an age of trolling.
Recently on X, President Trump posted an AI-generated video of himself flying a fighter jet and dumping a mass of fecal matter on No Kings protesters below. This is an example par excellence of trolling.
Trolling shares bullshits key danger of eroding the value of truth by substituting style and performance for sincerity, but it goes further. In trolling, the value of truth is no longer merely eroded as a side effect - it is deliberately targeted.
Thus, trolling shares bullshits indifference to truth but adds an element of nihilism. Truth and falsehood are no longer mixed unintentionally, as in bullshit; both are wielded deliberately as tools for generating chaos. Trolling signifies not mere indifference to truth, but contempt for it. It doesnt just transform speech into sophistry - it weaponizes it.
If the prevailing mode of bullshit in our society is advertising, then trolling represents what happens when that mode becomes self-aware. Advertising teaches us to value attention over truth; trolling celebrates that condition. It marks the point at which we are no longer merely susceptible to manipulation - we have become addicted to it, fascinated by the power of provocation itself.
If bullshit ignores truth for the sake of impression management, trolling ignores truth for the sake of spectacle. The trolls goal is not to appear credible or admirable, but to elicit a reaction, often at the expense of any meaningful communication.
If bullshit marks a disregard for truth, trolling marks a disregard for dialogue itself - a symptom of a digital culture that values power more than understanding.
This brief post examines the difference between the internet phenomenon of trolling and the separate but related phenomenon of bullshit as defined and discussed by Harry G. Frankfurt in his famous essay On Bullshit.
In that essay, Frankfurt distinguishes bullshit from lying. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it. The bullshitter does not care whether what they say is true or false. Bullshit, for Frankfurt, is speech produced with indifference to truth, motivated instead by the management of a particular impression that is trying to be made.
It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. Frankfurt
The danger of bullshit, Frankfurt warns, lies in its subtlety: it erodes the value of truth itself by making sincerity or style a substitute for truthfulness.
The internet phenomenon of trolling can be seen as a category of bullshit - but bullshit on steroids. While Frankfurts analysis illuminates speech motivated by indifference to truth, trolling reveals a related but more performative form of indifference, one not driven by self-promotion, but by disruption, irony, and the pursuit of affect rather than understanding.
A troll is someone who speaks bullshit but explicitly invites, in fact, compels, the viewer to react against it. The visceral disgust we feel toward bullshit is part of the trolls game - but unlike the bullshitter, the troll wants us to notice and care that what is being said is, or may be, false.
My child likes to play a game where she points her finger at me, almost touching my face, but stops just an inch away, saying, Im not touching you, Im not touching you. This is trolling. By contrast, when she sits in the back seat arguing with her brother, and I tell them to stop, she might protest, Im not touching him. That is bullshit. The latter feigns innocence for the sake of impression management. The former goes beyond this and delights in provoking a reaction.
We no longer live in an age of bullshit, but of something beyond it - an age of trolling.
Recently on X, President Trump posted an AI-generated video of himself flying a fighter jet and dumping a mass of fecal matter on No Kings protesters below. This is an example par excellence of trolling.
Trolling shares bullshits key danger of eroding the value of truth by substituting style and performance for sincerity, but it goes further. In trolling, the value of truth is no longer merely eroded as a side effect - it is deliberately targeted.
Thus, trolling shares bullshits indifference to truth but adds an element of nihilism. Truth and falsehood are no longer mixed unintentionally, as in bullshit; both are wielded deliberately as tools for generating chaos. Trolling signifies not mere indifference to truth, but contempt for it. It doesnt just transform speech into sophistry - it weaponizes it.
If the prevailing mode of bullshit in our society is advertising, then trolling represents what happens when that mode becomes self-aware. Advertising teaches us to value attention over truth; trolling celebrates that condition. It marks the point at which we are no longer merely susceptible to manipulation - we have become addicted to it, fascinated by the power of provocation itself.
If bullshit ignores truth for the sake of impression management, trolling ignores truth for the sake of spectacle. The trolls goal is not to appear credible or admirable, but to elicit a reaction, often at the expense of any meaningful communication.
If bullshit marks a disregard for truth, trolling marks a disregard for dialogue itself - a symptom of a digital culture that values power more than understanding.
Comments (29)
I would counter that your post confuses cause with symptom by positing the motive for bullshit and trolling as the valuing of arbitrary power for its own sake. You dont seem to allow that lying, bullshit and trolling may not be primarily intended to cause breakdown in understanding, but may arise as adaptive coping responses to such breakdown. The problem then would not be lying but the deterioration of trust that makes one believe lying is the only recourse. I find the accusation of trolling to be most often used as a dismissive weapon to delegitimize the reasoning and justifications of those who we disagree with.
This was very funny, especially the dry serious way you conveyed it.
I would say if it weren't for Plato rethorics would be considered the 'natural' way of using speech. And Protagoras would consider appeal to truth just another form of sophistry.
Bullshitting then is perhaps a more honest self-conscious way of using speech in that it recognizes and plays with the inherent rethorical nature of speech. And trolling would be a way to actively undermine the force of the rethorical game the sophists that appeal to truth play.
If rethorics was the name of the game in pre-socratic Greece, than there is nothing essentially nihilistic about it.
It may be that we cannot finally determine the motivation for a speech act without the aid of psychology. For all we know Trump's X tweet may be a cry for help.
But while motive can diverge from the effect of a speech act, the cultural consequences of these behaviors remain ethically and socially significant.
Even if the origin of trolling is not malicious, it results in a breakdown in trust and in cynicism.
Yes, in recognizing that all speech is strategic, self-interested, and contextual, the bullshitter or troll unmasks the illusion that language could ever really escape the play of rhetoric.
In that sense, bullshitting can be a more authentic stance than a pious appeal to truth, which often disguises its own rhetorical posture.
The nihilism only enters once Plato posits a transcendent realm of Truth. Speech must forever be measured and found wanting against that "Truth".
So the irony is the Platonic cure for sophistry creates the very disease of skepticism it wanted to prevent.
In a way Plato himself thereby invents the problem of bullshit.
Quoting Colo Millz
Im just skeptical about the idea that we can define trolling as a thing, apart from the intersubjective dynamics between the alleged troller and the annoyed accuser. One persons trolling is anothers critique. From one vantage, it is the troll which produces breakdown in trust and in cynicism. From another vantage, the troll
is merely an adaptive response to breakdown in trust and in cynicism.
Tell someone cares.
Rather, it's the other way around. The breakdown of trust and the cynicism can lead to various socially unacceptable behaviors. Tellingly, the breakdown of trust and the cynicism are not considered socially unacceptable, but reacting to them in a negative way is.
I did
Quoting baker
Maybe it is like a feedback loop, to use a favorite concept from cognitive science. I.e. the environment shapes the behavior, the subsequent behavior feeds back into the environment.
Totally agree with this. Often expressed as, 'You're either lying or a troll..."
I'm not quite sure what your plans for this OP were. I've never taken much interest in lying or in bullshit.
From what I see, the world is primarily about marketing a perspective. For some, this is lies; for others, Frankfurts bullshit; and for others still, it is truth.
Are you arguing that the world lacks trust and has become cynical because of trolling and bullshit? Is this a factor in the West's meaning crisis?
I'm not sure I know yet what a "meaning crisis" is, but it seems to resonate with my weariness with post-Enlightenment culture, yes.
It seems to me that when the President of the United States posts a video of himself on X defecating on his opponents, then our culture has crossed over some kind of event horizon.
We might say in fact that this is the first Trolling President in our history.
The OP is an attempt to explore this event horizon.
So yes, trolling, whether it is a symptom or a cause of the culture, is very much central to my cynicism.
Got ya.
Perhaps we need to consider Trump as a maverick and a new way of inhabiting the role. He's simply behaving like any other grubby mainstream media figure.
My quesion is has the paradigm been changed - is this US politics from now on, or is it unique to Trump's style?
Is the cause of all this the anger sparked by neoliberal reforms in America, which have hollowed out communities, industries, and infrastructure, or is it the backlash against woke culture, or is it simply the inevitable descent of all culture into a form of showbiz?
The op distinguishes between lying and bullshit. The thread is about bullshitting, the title is about lying.
I'm going to have to think about how to respond well to all of those questions but for now:
The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
- Guy Debord
What I think this author was getting at in that book is that capitalism accumulates wealth until it becomes itself a spectacle.
These days the "spectacle" has a very, very small life cycle. Trump's video on X was only a couple of seconds long. The communication process has collapsed into milliseconds.
The genealogy of Trump's video may be the political cartoons of the 19th century.
But there is something about modern media (TV and then social media) that has atomized the attention spans of their users.
The "messages" of the original political cartoons now have to be transmitted and absorbed within mere seconds, or the viewer will simply turn to something else.
Therefore the cartoons of yesteryear have become "tweets" - messages that again, have to be absorbed in tiny, micro-second long increments. Each message must be hyper-condensed and hypercharged.
Because of this, the power structures of such messages have to become even more extreme than before, otherwise the atomized attention spans of the viewers will simply move on.
Therefore the social messages that exist today are tiny but nuclear powered - they are like micro-arguments on crack. There is no longer time to hold the viewer's attention for a real argument - these days what is required is a powerful "sound bite" with "punch".
In other words, the argument, and old political cartoon, have become, in Debord's sense, a spectacle.
Trolling would not have been possible even 30 years ago. These days, given the fact that argumentation needs to be presented and digested in micro-periods of time, it is inevitable.
Strip it all back and what it's down to, probably, is tribalism being marketed thorough emotion.
The question for me in all this is where do we go from here?
From the guidelines a decent title that accurately and concisely describes the content of your OP.
The title of the thread is intended to be a humorous illustration of what the thread is about - trolling.
In providing a title that turns out to have been nothing but clickbait, I was trying to directly link the title with the substance of the OP - and make a joke at the same time.
I understand what youre doing. That doesnt change my comment. We can leave it at that.
One of my favorite authors is Philip K Dick.
In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? the author introduces the idea of the "empathy box".
The protagonist Deckard and his wife periodically plug themselves into this empathy box, like many millions of other users round the world.
The Empathy Box connects users to the televised figure of Wilbur Mercer, a Christ-like prophet engaged in an endless uphill struggle.
When a person merges with Mercer through the box, they literally feel the sensations of climbing the hill and being struck by stones - a kind of communal, simulated martyrdom.
The experience is explicitly painful and even self-sacrificial, but its seen as spiritually meaningful. It creates a sense of shared human empathy, distinguishing authentic people from the emotionless androids.
It seems to me that being trolled is kind of like being hit by one of these stones, albeit still in the medium of language.
But according to Dick what awaits us is not merely the linguistic masochism of being trolled, but a real virtual experience of masochism.
So is your focus on the function of trolling rather than following the money?
No we must all indeed follow the money ... but I need to think before responding further - certain issues are above my pay grade and your earlier questions are deep.
Quoting Joshs
That's an excellent point. It seems to me like a mix of both. Some trolls really do seem to buy into nihilism in explicit terms, and yet they often do so in ways that seem reveal a deep anger that others do not hold to "higher" ideals of justice, virtue, etc. This can manifest as anger at society, for indoctrinating the troll in such values as a sort of sham, or anger at the reality of the world.
So for instance, in the rants of spree killers often involve ironic "shit posting," and many times skew towards a sort of marketized "might makes right" ideology, and yet in a certain sense they also generally display disgust at this reality (e.g., Eliot Rodgers).
The move from the serial killer of the Baby Boomers as society's central boogieman (unrestrained hedonism and sadistic licence) to the spree killer (sheer nihilistic self-assertion) is itself interesting, and not unrelated, since the spree killer is oftentimes a troll (e.g., the Christchurch shooter's use of memes and even spouting trollish lines as he engaged in mass murder).
The troll in many cases sees themselves (not without justification perhaps) as a victim, either of society or of metaphysical realities (of truth, the truth of valuelessness oftentimes) themselves.
But there is also the celebration of transgression for transgression's sake, transgression a liberatory, that one sees in the celebration of crime more generally, as in @Astorre's new thread https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/16266/the-aestheticization-of-evil
Quoting Colo Millz
They often are cries for help, or simply cries of woe. I think we can differentiate them partially in terms of motive. The troll often acknowledges that they are trolling, and this acts as a sort of security field of irony, since to ever be serious is also to be vulnerable. There is a sort of spiritual and emotional constipation at work here.
If you loook at online forums, the way an accusation of trolling comes about, it's a pattern like this:
A community professes to hold to a particular standard, usually codified in the form of its terms of service.
The leadership of the community and the core members routinely fall short of the ToS themselves; deliberately or as a genuine failing.
Someone who is not part of the leadership or of the core members of the community points out this failing. (This could be for a number of reasons, from naivete, to having been on the receiving end of injustice by the leadership or core members.)
The leadership and/or the core members accuse this person of trolling and punish them.
It's the same process as with scapegoating. People feel the need to externalize their failing to live up to the very standards that they profess to uphold. People normally expect that they can profess a particular standard and yet not live up to it -- and that everyone needs to be okay with this, especially those to whom injustice was done in the course of others not living up to those professed standards.
Trump can't be accused of trolling, simply because he's not a minority, not an outsider. For something to be considered trolling, it has to be done by someone who doesn't belong, an outsider. Trump is definitely not that, for he was democratically elected by vote. Possibly the majority of people admire him, and are like him, even if they don't necessarily express themselves in the same way (and even if they officially oppose him).
You can see that even at a philosophy forum, the prominent members, even though they are officially against Trump, nevertheless use the same methods he does: the same patronizing, the same contempt, the same misrepresentation, the same demand for one-way respect (others need to respect them, they shouldn't have to respect others), the same dismissiveness, the same ease with which they interpret the words and actions of others in such a way as to make those others look like idiots or evil.
It's difficult to insist that that Trump is somehow rare in his ways or that he has crossed the line, when his critics are often actually doing the same things as he.
But you don't have a problem when people profess to hold a particular standard, and yet demand to be respected all the same when they don't live up to that standard?
Not without justification perhaps?
Imagine you become the one who gets scapegoated, a witch hunted. How do you cope with that?
What is a healthy way for coping with being scapegoated?
Have you noticed that accusations of trolling often occur in communities that are highly politically correct (lots of spiritual and emotional constipation at work there)?