circles. One troll sneaked into the fountain area, saw a fresh postmortal walking out of her cure ceremony, and threw lye right in her eyes, blinding her. The entire time security personnel were wrangling him and making him eat pavement, he was giggling like a madman.
It’s not the pro-death insurgents we fear while working here. We have tight enough security to make sure guns and bombs are kept out. It’s the trolls that are the big problem. Because they aren’t looking to kill people. They just want to ruin lives. If you stay here, you always have to keep your eyes out for them. Or else, boom! A handful of lye.
—DanBenjaminsACheapskate
I’m glad I read that after I finished my stay, or else I’d have fled from the hotel like a terrified schoolboy. Then there’s this profile of a troll that P. J. Matson wrote last month for New York . I needed to take a shower after reading it.
Under the Terra Troll Bridge
By P. J. Matson
XMN doesn’t like people.
“I mostly keep to myself, because other people are annoying.” He tells me this as we sit together in a burrito shop near his home in San Jose, California. The crowd at the shop is relatively sparse this afternoon, but XMN’s mannerisms indicate that he feels anxious, even a bit claustrophobic. His eyes dart back and forth. He never once looks at our waitress while ordering. He scratches his face constantly, though he doesn’t appear to have any bites or scrapes that would need relief.
“When I found out about the cure being legalized, I was crushed. Because the idea that there would be more people walking around, sucking in air like a bunch of fucking mouth breathers . . . I couldn’t handle the idea. I always subscribed to the theory that hell is other people. Well, here come more other people! I get sick just thinking about it.”
I ask XMN why he dislikes people so much. “Because none of them have ever been nice to me,” he says.
At the time of legalization, XMN (pronounced “examine”) was part of a large online subculture of people known as “trolls,” cyberanarchists who enjoy wreaking as much havoc online as they possibly can—on message boards, blogs, feeds, everywhere. XMN claims to have once hacked into the e-mail account of a famous politician and deleted its entire contents. “The news was never made public, but in the days after you could see it in his eyes. He looked like he hadn’t slept for seventy-two hours,” the troll boasts. XMN also cites multiple occasions when he found the ping feeds of family members of the doctors killed in the New York and Oregon bombings and sent them hateful messages, some in the voice of their deceased loved ones. “I sent one to Sarah Otto. It said, ‘Hey, honey. I can’t talk right now. Some kids are roasting marshmallows over my burning carcass. Love, Graham.’ I laughed for days.”
But soon XMN grew to find simple online trolling unfulfilling. “You have to put out a lot of bait just to catch one fish,” he tells me. “And each day it’s harder and harder to shock and offend people, even if I send out a photo of a boy being castrated or something like that. They’ve seen it all before, or they know not to click. It’s easy to become desensitized to that kind of stuff online. But it’s nowhere near as easy to ignore it if happens to you for real.”
So on the message board he calls home, an enormous trolling site called SiPhallus, XMN exchanged private messages with a group of fellow trolls and decided it would be more fun to wreak their havoc live and in person. He refuses to go into exact details about what he has done, fearing it will lead to his arrest. He suggests that I try to guess.
Vandalism? “Yes.”
Bomb threats? “Yes.”
Blinding people? “Just once, but I’d like to do more.”
Keying cars? “Yes.”
Killing pets? “Yes. Or blinding them.”
Arson? “No, but only because it’s hard to get away with.”
Draining bank accounts? “Yes.”
I ask XMN
It’s not the pro-death insurgents we fear while working here. We have tight enough security to make sure guns and bombs are kept out. It’s the trolls that are the big problem. Because they aren’t looking to kill people. They just want to ruin lives. If you stay here, you always have to keep your eyes out for them. Or else, boom! A handful of lye.
—DanBenjaminsACheapskate
I’m glad I read that after I finished my stay, or else I’d have fled from the hotel like a terrified schoolboy. Then there’s this profile of a troll that P. J. Matson wrote last month for New York . I needed to take a shower after reading it.
Under the Terra Troll Bridge
By P. J. Matson
XMN doesn’t like people.
“I mostly keep to myself, because other people are annoying.” He tells me this as we sit together in a burrito shop near his home in San Jose, California. The crowd at the shop is relatively sparse this afternoon, but XMN’s mannerisms indicate that he feels anxious, even a bit claustrophobic. His eyes dart back and forth. He never once looks at our waitress while ordering. He scratches his face constantly, though he doesn’t appear to have any bites or scrapes that would need relief.
“When I found out about the cure being legalized, I was crushed. Because the idea that there would be more people walking around, sucking in air like a bunch of fucking mouth breathers . . . I couldn’t handle the idea. I always subscribed to the theory that hell is other people. Well, here come more other people! I get sick just thinking about it.”
I ask XMN why he dislikes people so much. “Because none of them have ever been nice to me,” he says.
At the time of legalization, XMN (pronounced “examine”) was part of a large online subculture of people known as “trolls,” cyberanarchists who enjoy wreaking as much havoc online as they possibly can—on message boards, blogs, feeds, everywhere. XMN claims to have once hacked into the e-mail account of a famous politician and deleted its entire contents. “The news was never made public, but in the days after you could see it in his eyes. He looked like he hadn’t slept for seventy-two hours,” the troll boasts. XMN also cites multiple occasions when he found the ping feeds of family members of the doctors killed in the New York and Oregon bombings and sent them hateful messages, some in the voice of their deceased loved ones. “I sent one to Sarah Otto. It said, ‘Hey, honey. I can’t talk right now. Some kids are roasting marshmallows over my burning carcass. Love, Graham.’ I laughed for days.”
But soon XMN grew to find simple online trolling unfulfilling. “You have to put out a lot of bait just to catch one fish,” he tells me. “And each day it’s harder and harder to shock and offend people, even if I send out a photo of a boy being castrated or something like that. They’ve seen it all before, or they know not to click. It’s easy to become desensitized to that kind of stuff online. But it’s nowhere near as easy to ignore it if happens to you for real.”
So on the message board he calls home, an enormous trolling site called SiPhallus, XMN exchanged private messages with a group of fellow trolls and decided it would be more fun to wreak their havoc live and in person. He refuses to go into exact details about what he has done, fearing it will lead to his arrest. He suggests that I try to guess.
Vandalism? “Yes.”
Bomb threats? “Yes.”
Blinding people? “Just once, but I’d like to do more.”
Keying cars? “Yes.”
Killing pets? “Yes. Or blinding them.”
Arson? “No, but only because it’s hard to get away with.”
Draining bank accounts? “Yes.”
I ask XMN
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