This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture

Mary Douglas’s exploration of the related concepts of dirt and taboo.

trolls are born of and embedded within dominant institutions and tropes,

Similarly, cultural aberration is only intelligible in the context of an existing social system.

snapping its audience to attention, either by activating emotional investment or by forwarding a claim so outrageous that one cannot help but engage in a dialogue.

that trolls’ behaviors provide an implicit, and sometimes outright explicit, critique of existing media and cultural systems—

Like a spiteful housecat whose sole interest seems to be property damage, trolls take perverse joy in ruining complete strangers’ days.

an “indignant correction” was the ultimate goal of these so-called trollers.

trickster] is not the declarative speaker of traditional prophecy, but an erasing angel who cancels what humans have so carefully built, then cancels himself.”

trolls’ simultaneously symbiotic and exploitative relationship to mainstream culture,