YOU HAVE BEEN TROLLED

Back in olden days, when you had to buy a book to learn how to use the World Wide Web, when a 24k dialup modem was all you needed, there was an internet with no pictures, just words, called usenet. It consisted of ftp sites, where you could find and download software, and newsgroups, where people with common interests could meet and interact through written words. There was a common sport in the newsgroups called trolling, named after a fishing technique - bright whirling lures are drawn slowly through the water to entice unwise fish to bite. The simplest method of trolling was to say the most ridiculous or outrageous thing you could think of and see who had a fit over it. A victim, if carefully nurtured, could be trolled indefinitely. When an exceptionally pompous, humorless and absurd person appeared in a newsgroup and showed a susceptibility to being trolled, it was a celebration of cruelty. The object of trolling was to get the victims to make such an outrageous spectacle of their idiocy that they became forever objects of universal ridicule. The supreme ideal was to do one single thing that would cause an astounding over-reaction, a pathetic display of misguided destructive and self-humiliating emotion which the deluded victim believed was a proof of their righteousness, rectitude and intellectual superiority. When after days or weeks of prodding them into hilarious displays of idiocy one tired of this primitive entertainment, the victim was duly informed YHBT. You Have Been Trolled. They never believed it. They always thought that they had shown themselves noble and victorious, masters over all who would question their supremacy. True mastery of the art of trolling was reflected in the ratio of stimulus to response, and I have seen a master troll (Nickie Deathchick is her name, may it be revered forever), with a single brief and taunting line of text, drive a handful of fools into a frenzy of blatant stupidity which had rarely been equaled in the 20th century. This is the 21st century and the bar has been raised.