Build a Bridge and Get Under it - Community as Troll Fiction

Here's a premise for some speculative fiction:  Imagine a world in which the Internet was just another way for idle monkeys like us to sling shit at one another and tell entertaining stories about it.

I know that the Internet has other eminently valuable uses: sharing cat photos, running porn sites, facilitating the rapid distribution of cultural products (piracy,) astroturfing and corporate advertising.

Slinging shit and telling stories is something humans are going to do in any communication medium because those activities are fundamental to our formation of community.  Communities only form when monkeys like us can stake out a territory (by slinging shit) and they only persist by representing the community as having values (by telling stories.)  We all carry important messages, like Kilgore Trout's character Zog, and like Zog, we are all brained with a golf club by the head of the house.  So it goes.

Recently some really good shit-fights and stories have arisen.

There was the story of Gamer Gate, where the GamerGaterHaters and the Social Justice Warriors were only interested in truth in journalism, or only protecting the interests of the vulnerable and oppressed.

Then there's Award of the Rings, in which the peaceful and happy folk of Science Fiction Fandom are being invaded by evil troll spawn who are attempting to awaken the evil talisman which has long slumbered harmlessly in their bosom.  Fortunately the true and righteous bearers of the Award, who represent all the positive aspects of humanity, are able to spirit this avatar away before it can be reunited with its maker, the embodiment and source of evil in the world. SPOILER ALERT: in the end the good guys get a free ride on some giant eagles and get made into a 3-part mega-movie.

This story is compelling and rich: it stings the nostrils (in a good way.)

What's vexing to the reader is that the same narrative is being projected from both sides of the conflict!  I propose to consolidate and resolve the narrative conflict in the fictional character RequiresHate, the least fixed point in this DAG of he-said-she-said

RequiresHate was a fan and sometime reviewer who used to flame Science Fiction authors who were women of color for not being serious enough in their condemnations of heteronormative patriarchal oppression.  In doing so, she is alleged to have threatened one FWoC with dog-rape (truth be told, she didn't, she merely wished it upon her - you stay classy, SF Fandom.)

RequiresHate was identified ('outed', though not 'doxed' as far as I can tell) as a Science Fiction Author who was also a Woman of Color (so many capitals) called Benjanun Sriduangkaew.

RH/BS was simultaneously a SF Author, and a SF Fan.  She was at various times a candidate for a Hugo for SF fandom and for a Hugo for SF authorship.  She was simultaneously berating people for ignoring the plight of the oppressed while using the weapons of the patriarchy to make her point.  Perhaps in this she believed V.I. Lenin's "The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them."  Or perhaps she wanted to destroy competitors in the lucrative corner of SF she wished to dominate.

I don't know.  I don't even care.

• The truth is that RH/BS is a white male living in a basement.
• The truth is that RH/BS is a shrill firebrand feminazi seeking to take SF away from its owners.
• The truth is that RH/BS is a talking dog who sneaks onto its owners' laptop at night to post.
• The truth is that RH/BS is an AI derived from lobster neurons beaming its posts into the net via a pink "laser" from its orbiting platform.

No.  The truth is that the Internet is a medium, and the medium is a game, and the game is collaborative fiction.  The truth is that most people playing this game have no idea that the child they're talking to is an FBI agent and the FBI agent they're talking to is a child, the 20-something hottie they're making a play for on the internet dating site is a 40-something man in his undies, the wise old man they're talking to is a young woman who (rightly enough) would rather not have that known, 'cos it cramps her style.

The Hugo pugilists and the GamerGaters and the SJWs are all playing one game - its name is "The Internet: Serious Business."  There's another game, I'll call it "All for the LULZ."

The internet is the only story left and only the Trolls are writing it.  The internet is a game where the game is not to admit it's a game, because heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter. "What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? / What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? / What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?"

The Trolls go to encounter for the millionth time the unreality of Internet and to forge in the smithy of their posts the uncreated conscience of their race.

The Trolls are the Aaron Spellings of the new millennium, writing the pointless but entertaining stories, dragging you happily down to their level, dancing outside themselves: Dionysian revellers whose intoxicant of choice is digital nihilism.

Your pretence, your privilege, your overarching delusion, is that anything we say or do here matters, while we're all Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.