Trolls believe that nothing should be taken seriously, and therefore regard public displays of sentimentality, political conviction, and/or ideological rigidity as a call to trolling arms.

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

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

mistakes the symptom for the disease.

polysemy—he doesn’t tell the audience what to make of his actions. He acts, he leaves, and suddenly there is nothing.

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

the fact that online trolling is par for the mainstream cultural course.

trolls reveal the thin and at times nonexistent line between trolling and sensationalist corporate media.

dirt is best understood as matter out of place, and is intelligible only in relation to existing systems of cleanliness: