A while back I wrote about a contentious local land use issue that had pitted residents of my county against each other in a particularly vicious way.
Election results are in: The mean people lost, big time.
After a nasty, aggressive campaign in which a small number of very loud proponents attempted to scare others from speaking their minds, the voters rejected the idea in a 3-1 vote.
I can’t tell you whether the rejection was due to people’s opinions about the issue, people’s opinions about the nasty behavior of the proponents, or a mixture of both. I know that for me, it was a mixture. Even if I’d thought that their idea was a good one, I don’t vote for the nasty people.
Here we are post-election, though, and some on the losing side just can’t seem to stop. They are leaving nastygrams on very civil posts about the vote and writing letters to local publications, asserting that people who don’t agree with them:
- Didn’t understand what they were voting for,
- Just voted for the status quo because they were lazy, or
- Are really, deeply stupid
It’s an addiction
Modern brain research has shown that addiction is more complex than we used to think. The original definition of addiction was that the substance had to be physically addictive, like opium. But then people started to notice that you can get addicted to gambling, which is an action, not a substance, as well as developing addictions to substances that are not in themselves addictive.
The evidence is now clear: you can get addicted to all sorts of behaviors, and I believe that our contentious local issue is a great example. Just like the Trumpists who were so pumped up after the election that they couldn’t stop fighting, our local nasties are now so used to the behavior they simply can’t stop.
I don’t personally know most of them, thank goodness, but I do personally know that some of them are not usually nasty to their neighbors. They are people who have families, who love the outdoors, who do good work in our community. This behavior has really been shocking to see precisely because these people didn’t start as trolls.
But trolling—like gambling, like all sorts of other seemingly benign behaviors—is addictive. When we do something to piss people off, there’s this initial dopamine hit: What a thrill! They got upset! And our digital world allows us not to experience the effects of our behavior past that dopamine hit. We just get to move on, do it over and over, and come to like it more and more.
Digital exacerbation
In the analog-based world, communities fought over land use issues. They would go to meetings and get mighty upset when their neighbors had differing opinions. But they would have to speak face-to-face to those neighbors. Then they’d go home and still have to deal with those neighbors. The guy to their left who disagreed with them was their mailman. The woman to their right who they were sure was hysterical was their kid’s teacher. Sure, some people enjoyed being trolls face-to-face, but they had to live with the social consequences.
In the digital world, there are no consequences like this. When I unfollow a friend who’s become a troll, that friend doesn’t even know that I’ve unfollowed them. If I confront them in digital form, it’s likely to ramp up the ugliness. Since what they did was not at a public meeting, to my face, I would have to be the one to initiate bringing up their behavior in real life, and that’s darn awkward.
It’s time to detox
Are you a troll? I know I’m not, though I also know that I struggle to stop myself from getting addicted to that “gotcha” feeling of a witty comeback online. So I can’t offer any advice from personal experience.
But I do know what the experts say: In order to break an addiction, you really have to break it. You have to make some big changes that take you away from the addicting behavior and your fellow addicts (unless you can support each other in breaking the habit).
Our local trolls need to do what Al Gore told us all to do when he lost a bitter fight: Learn to move on. If you need to go to Tennessee, grow a beard, and pound in fenceposts, well, do it. I suspect whatever you need to do, it will be in the analog world.
The digital world is poison for some people, as strong as heroin, and just as destructive.
Excellent essay. Right on!