About
The Author
Ian Gorrie has been on the internet since before it had pictures. Gopher before the browser, Usenet before Eternal September, IRC before it was an attack vector, 4chan before it was a newspaper headline.
He has spent three decades on both sides of every firewall — building the infrastructure, taking it apart, and writing the compliance report that let everyone agree the problem was solved. He is the person organizations call when something is already on fire, and the person they stop calling the moment he names who lit the match.
He wrote The Fires of History because everyone gets the internet wrong — the journalists, the academics, the platforms — and nobody who was actually in the room was going to correct the record. He wrote Evil Robots because the same thing is happening with AI, faster, and the people building the safety theater already know it isn’t load-bearing.
The Author’s Own File
He profiled every great troll in history — the philosophers, the heretics, the satirists, the hackers — and then, in a lapse of discipline, ran the file on himself. It is the one entry in the archive the archivist would not complete.
THE ARCHIVIST — Catalogues the trolls. Classification of self: withheld. Troll score: PENDING.
Read the archivist’s own dossier →
The Series
The Fires of History traces trolling from ancient philosophy through the Scientific Revolution — proving the impulse to provoke, subvert, and expose hypocrisy is as old as civilization itself.
The Hidden Fire follows the heretics, occultists, and secret societies who carried the flame through the centuries when saying the wrong thing could get you killed — and often did.
Lurk More corrects the record on internet culture — BBS boards to 4chan to AI-generated content — from a digital native, not an outsider’s survey.
Contact
Online, the fastest way to reach me is X — @gorrie. That is where the arguing happens.
- Personal: gorrie.org
- Consulting: locked.net
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