Academic Foundations: Theoretical Grounding for The Fires of History

Research Compilation for Chapters 2-3 (Taxonomy and Paradox) and Chapter 10 (Comedy)

Overview

This document provides the scholarly backbone for the book’s central argument: that high-effort trolling is a feature of civilization, not a bug. The thinkers assembled here – from internet culture scholars to early twentieth-century philosophers – provide the theoretical framework for understanding trolling as a necessary social mechanism. Whitney Phillips demonstrates that trolls mirror mainstream culture. Gabriella Coleman shows that Anonymous operates in the tradition of the trickster. Ryan Milner connects memes to Bakhtinian polyvocality. Bakhtin himself provides the master framework: trolling is digital carnival, and carnival is socially necessary. Bergson explains the mechanism: laughter targets rigidity, and the troll is laughter’s agent.

SECTION 1: Academic Trolling Scholars

1.1 Whitney Phillips

Key Work: This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. (MIT Press)

Core Thesis: Trolling as Cultural Mirror

Phillips’ central argument is that trolling is not aberrant – it reflects mainstream cultural values back at the culture that produced it. Her book, based on years of fieldwork involving in-depth observation of and interviews with self-identified trolls, demonstrates that what we call “trolling” sits comfortably within the contemporary media landscape. Her conclusion is blunt: “We don’t just have a trolling problem. We have a culture problem.”

The relationship she maps between trolls and sensationalist corporate media is the book’s most incisive contribution. Phillips points out that for trolls, exploitation is a leisure activity; for mainstream media, it is a business strategy. Both traffic in the same currencies – spectacle, outrage, dehumanization, the monetization of suffering – but only the trolls get called deviant. The media does the same thing at industrial scale and calls it news.

The “Trickle-Up” Dynamic

Phillips describes what can be understood as a “trickle-up” dynamic: trolling behaviors do not originate in some dark subcultural fringe. They originate in mainstream culture – in sensationalist journalism, in reality television, in the commodification of human suffering for ratings and clicks – and are amplified and distilled online. Trolls are not inventing new forms of cruelty. They are taking the cruelty that already pervades mainstream culture and performing it with self-awareness. The troll holds up a mirror; the culture does not like what it sees.

Relevance to the Book’s Thesis

Phillips provides direct scholarly support for the book’s argument that trolling is a diagnostic tool. If trolls reflect the culture, then eliminating trolls does not eliminate the problem – it eliminates the symptom while leaving the disease untouched. This maps onto the book’s distinction between high-effort trolling (which forces confrontation with uncomfortable truths) and low-effort trolling (which is merely cruel). Phillips’ trolls are, at their best, performing a function the culture needs but does not want.

Later Work: The Oxygen of Amplification

Phillips, Whitney. The Oxygen of Amplification: Better Practices for Reporting on Extremists, Antagonists, and Manipulators Online. New York: Data & Society Research Institute, 2018. (Data & Society)

In this report, based on fifty interviews primarily with journalists, Phillips examines how news media was hijacked between 2016 and 2018 to amplify the messages of hate groups. The report documents “information laundering” – the process by which radical and racist messages are sanitized through press coverage and presented as legitimate debate. Phillips uses journalists’ own words to describe an industry caught between the pressure to deliver page views, the impulse to cover manipulators and trolls, and the revulsion at accidentally propagating extremist ideology.

This work extends her earlier thesis into the territory of institutional complicity: the media does not merely resemble trolling – it actively enables it.

Phillips and Milner Collaboration

Phillips, Whitney, and Ryan M. Milner. You Are Here: A Field Guide for Navigating Polarized Speech, Conspiracy Theories, and Our Polluted Media Landscape. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021. (MIT Press)

Phillips and Milner use ecological metaphors to explain how the poisoned media landscape came into being, beginning with the Satanic Panics of the 1980s and 1990s and proceeding through the emergence of trolling culture and the rise of the reactionary far right during and after the 2016 election. The book argues that old media literacy solutions fail to solve new media literacy problems and proposes a “network ethics” that looks beyond individual messages and messengers to investigate toxic information’s downstream effects.

Award: This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things won the Association of Internet Researchers’ Nancy Baym Best Book Award. (MIT Press)

1.2 Gabriella Coleman

Key Work: Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous. London: Verso Books, 2014. (Verso Books)

The Anthropologist Inside Anonymous

Gabriella Coleman, who holds the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University (McGill Reporter) and is now a full professor at Harvard (Harvard Anthropology), is a cultural anthropologist who spent over half a decade embedded in Anonymous – not as a distant observer but as a confidante, interpreter, and occasionally an unwitting mouthpiece. The tricky story of her inside-outside status forms one of the book’s central tensions: how does an ethnographer maintain scholarly distance from a community that operates through secrecy, illegality, and radical unpredictability?

Her methodology was groundbreaking and perilous. Working with hackers challenged conventional anthropological practice. As Coleman noted, “the toughest part here was dealing with the illegal element” and “the fact that I couldn’t meet people very easily” because “this is a secret society.” She had to protect her data not only from academic scrutiny but from law enforcement. The result is one of the most intimate accounts of a digital subculture ever produced.

The Lulz as Cultural Value

Coleman’s treatment of “the lulz” is essential for the book’s taxonomy (Chapter 2). She defines lulz as “a spirited but malevolent brand of humor etymologically derived” from “lol” (laugh out loud). More precisely, she describes lulz as “a deviant style of humor and quasi-mystical state of being.” The lulz functions as what folklorists call argot – “specialized and esoteric terminology used by a subcultural group” that “functions to enact secrecy or, at minimum, erect some very stiff social boundaries.”

Critically, Coleman acknowledges the darkness inherent in the lulz: “Lulz are darker [than lols]: acquired most often at someone’s expense, prone to misfiring and, occasionally, bordering on disturbing or hateful speech.” This maps directly onto the book’s spectrum from high-effort trolling (where the lulz serve a diagnostic or truth-telling function) to low-effort trolling (where the lulz are merely cruel).

The Trickster Framework

Coleman’s most important theoretical contribution is framing Anonymous through the archetype of the trickster. She invokes Loki, Coyote, and Eshu – figures from Norse, Native American, and Yoruba mythology respectively – tying the irreverent and disruptive spirit of Anonymous to a historical lineage of those who dismantle convention from liminal positions. These trickster figures “may edify us with liberating or terrifying perspectives, function as a positive force toward renewal, or act as distorting and confusing shadows.” They are “never strictly noble or completely malicious, wholly honest or totally untruthful, perfectly sincere or entirely joking.”

This ambiguity is the point. Anonymous, like the trickster, is not reducible to hero or villain. It operates in the space between – and that liminal position is precisely what gives it power. Coleman argues that tricksters “are well positioned to impart lessons – regardless of their intent.”

Relevance to the Book’s Thesis

Coleman provides the anthropological grounding for the book’s argument that trolling exists in an ancient tradition of sanctioned disruption. If Anonymous is the latest manifestation of the trickster archetype, then trolling is not a product of the internet – it is a human constant that the internet has merely given new tools.

Award: Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy won the 2015 American Anthropological Association’s Diana Forsythe Prize. (Harvard Anthropology)

1.3 Ryan Milner

Key Work: The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016. (MIT Press)

Memes as Public Discourse

Milner’s central argument is that memes are not trivial – they are shaping public conversation. He analyzes internet memes as linguistic, image, audio, and video texts “created, circulated, and transformed by countless cultural participants across vast networks and collectives.” He identifies five basic logics that structure memetic media: multimodality, reappropriation, resonance, collectivism, and spread.

Polyvocality and Bakhtin

Milner’s most important theoretical move is connecting memetic culture to Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony. Bakhtin describes discourse as inherently “polyphonic” – comprising “many sounds” created by “multivocal and always unfinished texts overlapping.” Milner adopts this framework to argue that memes stimulate a dynamic of polyvocality: multiple voices compete for the hegemonic narrative, creating “too much noise to discern the information.”

This connection is critical for the book. If memes are polyvocal – carrying multiple, often contradictory meanings simultaneously – then they are inherently carnivalesque in Bakhtin’s sense. The meme, like the carnival, is a space where official and unofficial voices collide, where hierarchies are temporarily suspended, where meaning is contested rather than fixed.

In his earlier work, “Pop Polyvocality: Internet Memes, Public Participation, and the Occupy Wall Street Movement” (International Journal of Communication, 2013), Milner applies this framework (International Journal of Communication) directly to political activism, showing how memetic media enable “the participation of many voices even in the midst of persistent inequality.”

Relevance to the Book’s Thesis

Milner provides the bridge between Bakhtin’s historical analysis of carnival and the contemporary internet. Memes are the vehicle through which carnivalesque inversion now operates. The troll who deploys a meme is participating in the same tradition as the medieval fool who mocked the king – but with networked amplification.

1.4 Other Key Scholars

Limor Shifman

Shifman, Limor. Memes in Digital Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. (MIT Press)

Shifman’s contribution is definitional. She defines internet memes not as individual artifacts but as “a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form and/or stance” – items “created with awareness of each other and circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the Internet by many users.” Memes are not texts but practices. Shifman situates memes as a form of “(post)modern folklore” and argues they represent a new mode of civic participation, allowing citizens to “express political opinions and participate in important debates.” Her concept of “networked individualism” – where “people use memes to simultaneously express both their uniqueness and connectivity” – captures the paradox of meme culture: it is simultaneously individual and collective, personal and political.

Adrienne Massanari

Massanari, Adrienne. “#Gamergate and The Fappening: How Reddit’s Algorithm, Governance, and Culture Support Toxic Technocultures.” New Media & Society 19, no. 3 (2017): 329-346. (SAGE Journals)

Massanari’s research examines how Reddit’s design – its karma system, subreddit structure, governance model, and policies around offensive content – creates fertile ground for what she terms “toxic technocultures.” Her long-term participant-observation study, grounded in actor-network theory, shows how platform architecture is not neutral: it actively shapes the kinds of communities that form. Massanari asserts that gamer controversies, including Gamergate, “paved the way for far-right and alt-right activism.” Her later book, Gaming Democracy, extends this analysis. For the book, Massanari represents the opposing position: the argument that platforms enable harmful trolling cultures through structural design choices. This is the steelman case against the book’s thesis, and engaging with it honestly strengthens the argument.

Angela Nagle

Nagle, Angela. Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. Winchester: Zero Books, 2017. (Zer0 Books)

Nagle’s central thesis is that “transgression” – a value historically cherished by the left since the 1960s – has been appropriated by the alt-right and its anonymous online operatives. She describes the alt-right as a counterculture of young men who reject taboos on race and gender, noting that while many started as trolls, the movement developed into something far more serious. Nagle offers a left-wing critique of contemporary social liberalism, arguing that performative progressivism – “performative wokeness” involving censorship and pile-ons against dissenters – inadvertently fueled the alt-right’s rise. The book received polarized reviews: praised for capturing the phenomenon by columnists at the New York Times, criticized for sloppy sourcing by The Daily Beast.

For the book, Nagle’s work represents the critical inflection point: the moment when trolling culture was captured and weaponized by political movements. This is the dark side of the carnival – the point at which transgression stops being diagnostic and starts being destructive.

danah boyd

boyd, danah. It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. (Yale University Press)

danah boyd (stylized in lowercase), a partner researcher at Microsoft Research and founder of the Data & Society Research Institute, has spent her career studying how young people navigate online spaces. Her work challenges moral panics about youth internet culture, arguing that social media provides teenagers with spaces for identity expression and social development. Her research on online threats (“Online Threats to Youth: Solicitation, Harassment, and Problematic Content,” co-authored with Andrew Schrock for the Internet Safety Technical Task Force) nuances the distinction between genuine harm and the kind of rough social negotiation that has always characterized adolescence. For the book, boyd’s work provides context for understanding how trolling culture develops generationally and how moral panics about online behavior often miss the nuance of what is actually happening.

SECTION 2: Etymology of “Troll”

2.1 The Fishing Metaphor: The True Origin

The internet usage of “trolling” derives from a fishing technique, not from Norse mythology. This is the etymological fact that most people get wrong, and the confusion is itself instructive.

The Fishing Technique

Trolling, in fishing, is the method of dragging a baited line or lure through the water behind a slowly moving boat. The angler does not target a specific fish – the technique covers large areas of water, trailing bait through likely spots, waiting for something to bite. The key elements are: (1) the bait is deliberately enticing, (2) it is dragged through territory where targets are likely to be, (3) the angler waits patiently for a response, and (4) the target bites of its own volition. Nobody forces the fish onto the hook. Britannica defines it simply: trolling is “the method of angling in which one or more lines, each having a lure trailed behind a moving boat, are drawn through the water.” (Britannica)

First Internet Usage

The earliest documented internet usage appeared on Usenet in the early 1990s, specifically in the newsgroup alt.folklore.urban (AFU). The phrase was “trolling for newbies” – veteran users would post obviously false or provocative claims (overdone topics, absurd urban legends) and wait for newcomers to take the bait. It was, in its original form, an inside joke: a gentle initiation ritual that simultaneously tested newcomers and entertained regulars.

The earliest attestation recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary dates to 1992. (Oxford English Dictionary) Eric S. Raymond’s The New Hacker’s Dictionary (1996 edition) (MIT Press) defines the term precisely: “[From the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban] To utter a posting on Usenet designed to attract predictable responses or flames,” deriving from “trolling for newbies,” which itself derives from “mainstream ’trolling,’ a style of fishing in which one trails bait through a likely spot hoping for a bite.”

Pre-Internet Usage

The fishing metaphor had earlier slang applications. By 1972, US Navy pilots in Vietnam were documented using the phrase “trolling for MiGs” – flying provocatively through enemy airspace to draw out fighters. (Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum) The metaphor is identical: present yourself as bait, wait for a response, then exploit the response.

2.2 The Norse Creature: The Monster That Came Second

Old Norse Origins

The Old Norse nouns troll and troll (variously meaning “fiend, demon, werewolf, jotunn”) possibly developed from the Proto-Germanic neuter noun trullan. The original meaning may have been “supernatural” or “magical” with overtones of “malignant” and “perilous.” Another suggested etymology is “someone who behaves violently.”

In Scandinavian folklore, trolls dwell in isolated rocks, mountains, or caves, living in small family units and rarely being helpful to human beings. They are vulnerable to sunlight (bursting or turning to stone upon exposure) and are frightened by lightning – possibly a late reflection of Thor’s mythological role in fighting such creatures. The bridge troll – demanding payment or posing riddles to travelers – is the most culturally persistent variant, immortalized in “Three Billy Goats Gruff” and countless retellings.

The Creature Association Came Second

Crucially, internet “trolling” was established as a fishing metaphor before the Norse creature association attached itself. The creature meaning was a later folk etymology – a retroactive reinterpretation that stuck because the monster image was more vivid and emotionally satisfying than the fisherman image. People would rather imagine a hulking beast under a bridge than a patient angler trailing bait.

2.3 The Convergence: A Word That Trolls You

The dual etymology creates a productive ambiguity that is itself a kind of troll. Consider the phrase “Don’t feed the trolls,” which emerged in Usenet communities in the 1990s and early 2000s. Which troll are we talking about?

• If the fishing troll: “Don’t take the bait.” The troll is a fisherman, and you are the fish. Your response is what the troll wants. Refuse to bite and the line goes slack.
• If the monster troll: “Don’t give it attention.” The troll is a creature that grows stronger when fed. Starve it and it withers.

Both interpretations lead to the same practical advice (ignore the troll), but they frame the troll’s agency differently. The fisherman troll is clever – a strategist deploying bait. The monster troll is hungry – a beast that feeds on attention. The fisherman metaphor grants the troll intelligence and intentionality; the monster metaphor reduces the troll to appetite.

For the book’s purposes, the fishing metaphor is more useful and more accurate. The high-effort troll is a fisherman: selecting bait carefully, choosing where to cast, reading the water. The low-effort troll is closer to the monster: all appetite, no craft.

The etymological confusion itself enacts the troll’s function. The word “troll” trolls people about its own meaning – and most people, confronted with the ambiguity, reach for the wrong (monster) interpretation because it is simpler and more satisfying. This is exactly how trolling works: it exploits the human preference for simple, emotionally satisfying narratives over complex, accurate ones.

SECTION 3: Mikhail Bakhtin – Rabelais and His World (1965)

Full Citation

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968. (Original Russian edition: 1965; based on a dissertation completed in 1940 but suppressed under Stalin.) (MIT Press)

3.1 Carnival Theory

The Medieval Carnival

Bakhtin’s analysis begins with the medieval carnival – not as a quaint historical curiosity but as a fundamental mechanism of social regulation. During carnival, the social order was temporarily and officially inverted. Fools became kings. Kings became fools. The sacred was profaned. The profane was celebrated. Hierarchies dissolved. As Bakhtin writes: “All were considered equal during carnival. Here, in the town square, a special form of free and familiar contact reigned among people who were usually divided by the barriers of caste, property, profession, and age.”

Carnival was not a performance watched by an audience. It was lived: “Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people.” This is a critical distinction. Carnival is participatory, universal, immersive. There is no fourth wall.

The Carnivalesque

Bakhtin identifies several key features of the carnivalesque:

1. Social inversion: Hierarchies are overturned. Authority is mocked. The lowly are elevated. The mighty are brought down.
2. Grotesque realism: Emphasis on the body – particularly the “lower stratum” (the belly, the genitals, the anus). “The essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation, the lowering of all that is abstract, spiritual, noble, and ideal to the material level.”
3. Ambivalent laughter: Carnival laughter is “gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies, it buries and revives.” It is “directed at all and everyone, including the carnival’s participants.”
4. Regeneration through degradation: “To degrade is to bury, to sow, and to kill simultaneously, in order to bring forth something more and better. Degradation digs a bodily grave for a new birth: it has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one.”

The Safety Valve Function

The carnival served what scholars have termed a “safety valve” function. As early as 1444, a circular letter of the Paris School of Theology justified the Feast of Fools by arguing that a “gay diversion is necessary so that foolishness, which is our second nature and seems to be inherent in man might freely spend itself at least once a year.” The logic is structural: without sanctioned periods of inversion and release, social pressure builds until it explodes destructively.

Bakhtin argues that carnival laughter achieves what seriousness cannot: “The principle of laughter and the carnival spirit on which the grotesque is based destroys this limited seriousness and all pretense of an extratemporal meaning and unconditional value of necessity. It frees human consciousness, thought, and imagination for new potentialities.” Carnival laughter is “above all an assertion of freedom; its function is to bring about a ’temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order.'”

Critiques of the Safety Valve Theory

It is important to note that the “safety valve” reading of Bakhtin has been challenged. Historian Natalie Zemon Davis argued that carnival is more complex than mere release: “it can reinforce the existing order, but it can also criticise it and sometimes underpin rebellion, depending on the circumstances.” John Scott highlights that Bakhtin’s framing “risks confusing the intentions of elites with the results they are able to achieve.” These critiques do not undermine the book’s argument – they strengthen it, because they show that carnival (and by extension, trolling) is not merely a containment mechanism but a genuinely destabilizing force that can produce real social change.

3.2 The Trolling Connection

Trolling as Digital Carnival

The parallels between Bakhtin’s carnival and internet trolling are structural, not merely metaphorical:

The Fool Who Speaks Truth

Bakhtin focuses on the “feast of fools” (festa stultorum) as central to carnival. The fool – the clown, the licensed jester – is permitted to say what the serious person cannot. The spirit of carnival is embodied in figures who operate under a kind of diplomatic immunity from the norms of official culture. This maps directly onto the troll: the anonymous provocateur who, precisely because they are not bound by the conventions of identity and reputation, can articulate truths that no “serious” person would dare speak.

The Establishment’s Error

The book’s argument follows directly from Bakhtin: the attempt to eliminate trolling from public discourse is equivalent to eliminating carnival. And Bakhtin is clear about what happens when carnival is suppressed – the social order becomes brittle. “All that was frightening in ordinary life [is] turned into amusing or ludicrous monstrosities” during carnival. Remove that transformation, and the frightening remains frightening, with no outlet, no mechanism for processing and defusing it. A society that cannot laugh at itself is a society that will eventually break.

3.3 How This Frames the Book

Bakhtin provides the master theoretical framework for the entire argument:

• Chapter 2 (Taxonomy): The distinction between high-effort and low-effort trolling maps onto Bakhtin’s distinction between carnival and mere violence. Carnival is structured, communal, regenerative. Violence is unstructured, individual, destructive. High-effort trolling is carnival: it inverts, mocks, and regenerates. Low-effort trolling is cruelty without carnival’s redemptive function.
• Chapter 3 (Paradox): The paradox of trolling – that it is simultaneously destructive and necessary – is Bakhtin’s paradox of carnival. “To degrade is to bury, to sow, and to kill simultaneously, in order to bring forth something more and better.”
• Chapter 10 (Comedy): Comedians are professional trolls operating within the carnivalesque tradition. Stand-up comedy is a formalized, commercialized version of the carnival fool’s function – speaking truths that official culture cannot.

SECTION 4: Henri Bergson – Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900)

Full Citation

Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Translated by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. New York: Macmillan, 1911. (Original French edition: Le Rire: Essai sur la signification du comique, 1900.) Available freely via Project Gutenberg. (Project Gutenberg)

4.1 Bergson’s Key Arguments

The Central Formula

Bergson’s theory of comedy rests on a single, elegant formulation: “The attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine.” More broadly: we laugh at “something mechanical encrusted on the living.” The comic arises when a living being displays the characteristics of a mechanism – rigidity, repetition, automatism – where we expect flexibility, spontaneity, life.

This connects to Bergson’s broader philosophy of the elan vital, the vital force that underlies all living things. Life is characterized by perpetual movement, flexibility, and agility. The mechanical is its opposite: fixed, rigid, predictable. When the living becomes mechanical – when a person gets stuck in a rut, when an institution ossifies, when a mind closes – that is when laughter strikes.

Laughter as Social Corrective

Bergson argues that laughter serves a specifically social function. It is not an individual response but a collective one: “The comic will come into being, it appears, whenever a group of men concentrate their attention on one of their number, imposing silence on their emotions and calling into play nothing but their intelligence.”

Laughter punishes rigidity:

“Beyond actions and attitudes that are automatically punished by their natural consequences, there remains a certain inflexibility of the body, of the mind and of the character that society would like to eliminate to obtain a greater elasticity and a better sociability of its members. This inflexibility is the comic, laughter is the punishment.”

Laughter is society’s mechanism for enforcing adaptability. It targets the person who cannot bend, the mind that cannot change, the institution that cannot evolve.

The Anesthesia of the Heart

Bergson identifies a crucial precondition for laughter: emotional detachment. “To produce the whole of its effect, the comic demands something like a momentary anesthesia of the heart. Its appeal is to intelligence, pure and simple.” Laughter and emotion are incompatible: “It seems as though the comic could not produce its disturbing effect unless it fell, so to say, on the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm and unruffled. Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion.”

This means that to find something funny, we must temporarily suspend our empathy. “Step aside, look upon life as a disinterested spectator: many a drama will turn into a comedy.” The shift from empathy to observation – from feeling with to looking at – is what transforms tragedy into comedy.

4.2 The Trolling Connection

The Troll Targets Rigidity

Bergson explains why trolling works. The troll’s natural target is rigidity: the person who cannot question their assumptions, the institution that cannot bend, the ideology that cannot accommodate contradiction. The troll probes for mechanical behavior in the living – for automated responses, for reflexive outrage, for predictable reactions – and then exposes that rigidity through provocation.

Consider the classic troll technique: post something designed to trigger an automatic response. If the target responds mechanically – with scripted outrage, boilerplate denunciations, predictable talking points – the troll has succeeded. The target has revealed their rigidity. They have behaved like a machine when they should have behaved like a thinking being.

Detachment: The Line Between Trolling and Bullying

Bergson’s “anesthesia of the heart” maps directly onto the psychological stance of the troll. The troll observes; the bully attacks. The troll maintains the detachment that Bergson identifies as necessary for the comic; the bully is motivated by emotion – by anger, resentment, hatred. This distinction is critical for the book’s taxonomy:

• High-effort trolling operates from Bergsonian detachment: the troll identifies rigidity, constructs a provocation that exposes it, and observes the result with the dispassion of a researcher. The goal is diagnostic, not destructive.
• Low-effort trolling / bullying operates from emotion: the troll (who is really a bully in disguise) attacks from anger or cruelty. There is no “anesthesia of the heart” – there is too much heart, all of it malicious.

Why the Establishment Is Vulnerable

Bergson explains not just why trolling works but why establishments are particularly vulnerable to it. Establishments are, by nature, rigid. They have fixed hierarchies, standardized procedures, official positions, institutional languages. They are, in Bergson’s terms, mechanical. And the mechanical encrusted on the living is precisely what laughter targets.

The more rigid an institution becomes – the more it insists on its own seriousness, its own authority, its own infallibility – the more vulnerable it becomes to the troll’s laughter. An institution that can laugh at itself is resilient. An institution that demands absolute solemnity is a sitting duck.

4.3 Application to Chapter 10 (Comedy)

Bergson provides the philosophical foundation for explaining why comedians are trolls. The comedian’s craft, in Bergsonian terms, is the identification and exposure of social rigidity. The stand-up comedian scans the culture for mechanical behavior – for automatic responses, unexamined assumptions, rigid conventions – and performs the exposure of that rigidity for an audience.

The audience laughs because it recognizes the rigidity. The laughter is corrective: it says, “You are being a machine. Stop it. Be alive.” This is exactly what the high-effort troll does, minus the stage and the ticket price.

The history of comedy – from Aristophanes to Jonathan Swift to Lenny Bruce to George Carlin to modern internet humor – is the history of Bergsonian laughter applied to culture. Each era’s greatest comedians are its greatest trolls: they identify what is rigid and they make it laughable.

SECTION 5: Flame Warriors Website Status

Current Status (as of February 2026)

Original Domain (flamewarriors.com): The original domain has been lost. As of the most recent reports, flamewarriors.com has been taken over by an entirely unrelated entity (a fetish fashion community website). The original Mike Reed content is no longer hosted there. This appears to be a case of a lapsed domain being purchased by a new owner.

Alternative Domain (flamewarriorsguide.com): An alternative version of the site exists at flamewarriorsguide.com. This site contains the original warrior descriptions and appears to maintain the alphabetical listing of all 80+ warrior types, with a “next Warrior” link for browsing. However, reports indicate that many of the original illustrations are missing or broken. The site is navigable but degraded.

Wayback Machine / Internet Archive: The original flamewarriors.com content is preserved in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, with snapshots from the site’s active period (roughly 2000-2015). This is likely the most complete archival source for the original text and illustrations. The Archive.org entry for the site provides access to historical snapshots of both text descriptions and Mike Reed’s original cartoon illustrations.

About Mike Reed and the Flame Warriors Project

Mike Reed is an illustrator with approximately 28 years of professional experience. His “Netizens Guide to Flame Warriors” became, in his own description, “a permanent fixture of Internet culture.” At its peak, the site received approximately two million hits per month; after about five years, traffic settled to roughly 100,000 hits per month.

The site catalogs recurring character types encountered in online flame wars – a taxonomy of forum behavior rendered in text descriptions and cartoon illustrations. Reed solicited contributions: “Sightings of Warriors not catalogued in this guide should be reported immediately to Mike Reed.” At one point, Reed indicated plans for a second edition after a multi-year hiatus, though this does not appear to have materialized.

Reed was recognized as a Corel Painter Master, and his illustration work extended beyond the Flame Warriors project.

Licensing and Permissions Considerations

• The original Flame Warriors text and illustrations are Mike Reed’s copyrighted work.
• Quoting short descriptions for purposes of criticism, commentary, and scholarship would likely fall under fair use (U.S.) / fair dealing (U.K.).
• Reproducing the cartoon illustrations in the book would require explicit permission from Mike Reed.
• Current contact information for Mike Reed is not publicly available through standard web searches. Potential avenues for contact include: the Corel Painter community, LinkedIn, or attempting communication through the flamewarriorsguide.com domain.
• If direct contact proves impossible, the book could reference the descriptions textually under fair use while directing readers to the archived site for illustrations.

Relevance to the Book

The Flame Warriors taxonomy is a direct predecessor to the book’s trolling taxonomy (Chapter 2). Reed’s project – cataloging the recurring behavioral archetypes of online conflict – is exactly what the book does at a larger cultural scale. The “Troller” entry is particularly relevant: “Troller is looking for a response… ANY response, and he will chum the waters with complaints, insults, compliments, and inflammatory tidbits hoping that someone… ANYONE, will take the bait.” Note the fishing metaphor, which Reed deploys naturally and accurately.

A more detailed compilation of individual Flame Warriors character descriptions is available in the companion research file: Flame Warriors Mike Reed.

SECTION 6: Synthesis – How These Sources Frame the Book

The Argument Chain

1. Bakhtin provides the master framework: carnival is socially necessary. The inversion, mockery, and degradation of carnival are not threats to social order – they are prerequisites for a social order that can endure.

2. Bergson provides the mechanism: laughter targets rigidity. The troll’s laughter is Bergsonian laughter – it identifies mechanical behavior in the living and punishes it. This is why trolling works and why establishments are vulnerable to it.

3. Phillips provides the cultural analysis: trolls are not aberrations. They reflect the culture back at itself. The pathologies of trolling are the pathologies of the culture that produced it.

4. Coleman provides the anthropological lineage: the troll is the trickster, an archetype as old as mythology. Anonymous is Loki with a keyboard.

5. Milner provides the media theory: memes are the vehicle of digital carnival, polyvocal texts that carry carnival’s ambivalent, multi-voiced laughter into networked public discourse.

6. Nagle provides the warning: when trolling culture is captured by political movements, the carnivalesque becomes weaponized. This is the dark side the book must honestly confront.

7. Massanari provides the structural critique: platform design shapes trolling cultures. The architecture of online spaces is not neutral.

8. Shifman and boyd provide additional context: memes as digital folklore, youth internet culture as a space of both risk and development.

The Central Claim, Supported

Taken together, these scholars support the book’s central claim: high-effort trolling – deliberate provocation that forces people past their mental blocks – is a feature of civilization, not a bug. It is Bakhtin’s carnival adapted for the digital age. It targets Bergsonian rigidity. It reflects Phillips’ cultural pathologies back at the culture. It operates through Coleman’s trickster archetype. It circulates via Milner’s polyvocal memes. And when it goes wrong – when it becomes Nagle’s weaponized transgression or Massanari’s toxic technoculture – the solution is not to eliminate trolling but to distinguish between its carnivalesque and its merely cruel forms.

The book’s taxonomy (Chapter 2), paradox (Chapter 3), and comedy analysis (Chapter 10) all rest on this scholarly foundation.

Bibliography

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968.

Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Translated by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. New York: Macmillan, 1911. Available at Project Gutenberg: gutenberg.org

boyd, danah. It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014.

Coleman, Gabriella. Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous. London: Verso Books, 2014.

Coleman, Gabriella. “The Anthropological Trickster.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5, no. 2 (2015): 375-381. (University of Chicago Press)

Massanari, Adrienne. “#Gamergate and The Fappening: How Reddit’s Algorithm, Governance, and Culture Support Toxic Technocultures.” New Media & Society 19, no. 3 (2017): 329-346.

Milner, Ryan M. The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016.

Milner, Ryan M. “Pop Polyvocality: Internet Memes, Public Participation, and the Occupy Wall Street Movement.” International Journal of Communication 7 (2013): 2357-2390.

Nagle, Angela. Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. Winchester: Zero Books, 2017.

Phillips, Whitney. This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015.

Phillips, Whitney. The Oxygen of Amplification: Better Practices for Reporting on Extremists, Antagonists, and Manipulators Online. New York: Data & Society Research Institute, 2018. Available at: datasociety.net

Phillips, Whitney. “It Wasn’t Just the Trolls: Early Internet Culture, ‘Fun,’ and the Fires of Exclusionary Laughter.” Social Media + Society 5, no. 3 (2019).

Phillips, Whitney, and Ryan M. Milner. You Are Here: A Field Guide for Navigating Polarized Speech, Conspiracy Theories, and Our Polluted Media Landscape. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021.

Raymond, Eric S. The New Hacker’s Dictionary. 3rd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.

Reed, Mike. “The Netizens Guide to Flame Warriors.” flamewarriorsguide.com. Archived at web.archive.org.

Shifman, Limor. Memes in Digital Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014.

Source URLs

• Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (1965)
• Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (1938)
• Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956)
• Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things (2015)
• Gabriella Coleman, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy (2014)
• Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World (1998)