Join the new world

eRepublik, and especially the eUK, is infamous for its trolling. It has become an integral part of the eRep experience - as shit as that experience may be. The "game" simply wouldn't be the same without it (so perhaps it's time it stopped). I'm not writing to discuss the attributes of trolling, however, I am writing to discuss why trolling? What is its cause? Why does it happen? The answer, as always when talking about the behaviour of individuals on the Internet, lies not in the realms of the cyber-reality, but in what is colloquially (and rather inaccurately) described as the "Real Life".

Dr. Gabe Maté, physician and author of Scattere😛 How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It and In the Realms of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, speaking on Democracy Now!:

"If your spouse or partner came home from work and didn't give you the time of day and immediately got on the phone and started talking and texting with other people, your friends would would not say, "Your partner has a behavioural problem. You should try tough love." They would say you've got a relationship problem. But when children act in these ways, many parents think their children have a behavioural problem and they try to control those behaviours. In fact, what our children are showing us - my children showed me this, as well - is that we have a relationship problem with them. They weren't connected enough with me and were too connected to their peer group.

"The child peer world is so dangerous. It is fraught with bullying, ostracisation, "dissing," exclusion and negative talk. How do children protect themselves with all that negativity in their peer world? They are not committed to each others' unconditional loving acceptance. Even adults have a hard time giving that. Children can't do it. So those children become very insecure. To protect themselves emotionally, they shut down. They become hardened. They become cool. Nothing matters. Cool is the ethic. You see that in the rock videos. It's all about cool. It's all about aggression and cool and no real emotion."

Trolling is a symptom of ill-adjustment to an inherently ill world. The roots of trolling lie in addiction and trouble forming relationships, with communicating with people. The sick irony of a world where telecommunications has developed beyond previously imaginable limits, where we are closer to each other in terms of capacity to communicate than ever before, is that we have lost the capability to communicate, we are further away from each other than ever before.

Trolling, deliberately seeking to enrage others, is fundamentally a hostile act. It is done with no regard for the emotional consequences on the target or the troll's self. People, mostly children and those of stunted emotional development largely brought on by addiction to new forms of communication, troll not because they hate others and want to ostracise them and themselves, but because they do not know how to communicate in any other way. In many respects it is a defence mechanism against the hostility of others.

Trolling is just another symptom of the social and mental health crisis being created by the raising of a new generation of children in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently. Hopefully, the illness can be cured. Ultimately there is only one solution, that of revolution and liberation of all humanity from capital, commodities and the Spectacle. But in the meantime, there is self-liberation - detox.

Long live communication, down with telecommunication!