Internet Beasts: Trolls, Golems, and Gremlins, Oh My

Welcome to the data mines

Your smartphone buzzes.

It’s not your usual screen. Neon green pixels swirl into a whirlwind that bursts from the phone. You try to run, but no one escapes the internet.

It swallows you.

A waterfall of code cascades into… you. Welcome to the data mines. The earthen walls churn as if alive, constantly updating, responding to your gaze. Threads of bioluminescent circuit traces provide harsh ambient light. There is no way out, so you move forward. You feel observed. Tracked. Quantified.

You step into a domed chamber. There are three doors: politics, health and food, and gender and sex.

You smirk. You know it’s a trap. Whichever door you choose, you’ll have to face the first beast in the internet’s bestiary: trolls. If you want to bait them, gender, sex, politics, diet, or vaccines are excellent choices¹.

Beast one: the internet troll

The internet troll is the first beast we’ll meet. Thank goodness you know a biologist. Imagine the rest of this post in my David Attenborough voice.

We are now in the data mines of the internet with churning walls of dirt and angular lines of light on the ceiling. The tunnel grows wider and higher. Can you hear it? The metronome rumble of beasts moving. There, in the fog of the internet’s tunnels, we spy the large shadows of trolls. They communicate in a monotonous grunt grunt grunt. Their simple semantics lack nuance and eloquence. Don’t use big words; you’ll confuse them.

Forest Troll by Theodor Kittelsen (~1906)

Internet trolls are motivated by recreation and reward, and - poor things - they are measurably deficient in cognitive empathy. They score high on sadism and psychopathy and derive satisfaction from causing emotional suffering, including in everyday life. Trolls may not have the largest population, but they produce a disproportionate amount of noise (only 3% of active social media users are ‘toxic’, but they produce 33% of content²). The trolls are even trying to escape the data mines and go mainstream — we are, communication researcher Jason Hannan would say, ‘trolling ourselves to death’³. Trolls are mostly loud, pointless noise and they thrive on the fear and frustration they cause.

We start walking through the fog, between the hulking shapes. GRUNT GRUNT GRUNT. They snarl and heavy, viscous spit hits you. Don’t let them get to you. Block them out. Easier said than done, but you got this — we’re in this thing together.

We’re almost there. Walk on. Just noise.

When we reach the door, the trolls behind us whine in defeat.

Beast two: the platform golem

The narrow corridor we step into has pristine white walls so bright it hurts our eyes. On both sides, we see door after door of colored, translucent plastic. Things move behind the doors, but the details remain obscure. Above each door, a compound eye of cameras tracks our every step. Did you notice our shadows on the walls despite the light? Don’t they respond a bit… slow?

Suddenly, the first shadow jumps at us with a sickly wet slap. It’s like being hit by a rainstorm of glue. Ugh, the mess. Slap slap slap. Shadow after shadow splats onto us, turning us into grotesque golems.

Reproduction of the infamous Prague golem, made in the late 16th century by rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel.

In the (highly recommended) book Doppelganger, Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein identifies digital golems as,

… the doubles that countless machines create with the data trails we leave behind every time we click, or view, or fail to disable location tracking, or ask a “smart” device for anything at all. Every data point scraped from our online life makes our double more vivid, more complex, more able to nudge our behavior in the real world.

This machine-made doppelganger—or perhaps we should call it a digital golem since it is cobbled together from bits of inanimate data—is not made by us.

Every site we visit, every click, every ‘accept’ helps the platforms behind the plastic doors make an image of us; clay figurines they breathe life into. Golems.

It takes 300 clicks for the platform formerly known as Facebook to know you better than your spouse. And that was a while ago. Virtual golem building has advanced. Language models can predict your ‘Big Five’ personality traits with around 86.2 - 88.5% accuracy based on social media posts and those predictions can be used to tailor political ads that ‘micro-target’ you. This is the price we pay for a not-really-free profile: our data.

Our shadows have covered us. We are golems, creatures of mud, distorted images of ourselves. But how do we escape ourselves? Simple, we run.

I have an idea. Here. A cookie. Trust me. Crumble it.

Look… our shadows leap for the cookie crumbles. Of course! All these platforms want our cookies! The compound camera eyes are watching, though, and the corridor remains an endless repetition of the same.

Screw it. We pick a random door.

Beast three: the digital gremlin

We slip onto a slide that drops us unceremoniously into a… mining cart? By the time we’re right side up, we’re barreling through the internet’s dark and damp data mines. The wheels of the cart squeak. No, wait… is that... laughter?

We peer over the sides. Nothing here. Let’s try your side.

A gremlin. Small, lithe, big-eared, and wielding a spanner the size of its body. It looks at us and its elfish face almost splits in half with a large grin. Squeak squeak squeak. Like the mad laughter of an evil dolphin.

A gremlin painted on the nose of a Rockwell B-1 Lancer aircraft.

Gremlins only evolved at the start of the 20th century. Little, mischievous creatures that were blamed for otherwise inexplicable malfunctions in aircraft. They are nothing if not adaptable, though. Today, we have digital gremlins.

Digital gremlins are the brainchild of Dutch ‘technophilosoper’ Rens van der Vorst. And you can be one too! A digital gremlin, according to van der Vorst, is someone who understands the true motive of the plastic door platforms that want to turn us into golems and undertakes small, harmless revolutionary actions against them. A digital gremlin is someone who takes a black marker to a restaurant where you can only order with a QR code to mess up the codes so that people actually have to talk (gasp) to the staff. A digital gremlin knows that personalized isn’t personal and uses a fake name for each webshop — when spam arrives later, the gremlin knows which webshop was hacked or sold the data.

These little revolutionaries are not against technology, but they question its use, and, especially, they are aware of what the companies behind it extract from us. Unlike the older gremlins who took down planes, digital gremlins don’t obstruct or harm other users. They are middle fingers to the platforms.

Which leaves us rumbling in a mining cart through the internet tunnels with a mad gremlin dismantling the side of our vehicle. The gremlin groans as it shimmies our cart to the left when approaching a junction. We barrel onto a track that is too wide in some places and too narrow in others. Metal wheels grind against metal tracks and sparks fly; so many sparks it’s blinding.

Cover your eyes.

You open your eyes and are back home, holding your smartphone. The pixels have settled down. You’re reading Subtle Sparks.

Thanks for joining the trip. See you next time.

To survive the data mines, this post could use a trail of breadcrumbs. Or, better, an Ariadne’s thread. This is a fancy way of saying, “Click hearts and buttons if you liked it.”

1. Or just being a woman — gendertrolling has become a trolling genre in itself.

2. Definition of toxic by Perspective API, a classifier for automatically detecting toxic speech: “a rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable comment likely to make someone leave a discussion.”

3. I might just call real-life trolling populist politics, but my mom says I should try not to be a cynical bastard all the time (though she knows I’m a romantic at heart — I can be multiple things). Annoyingly, Bertrand Russell probably would have agreed with her.