Power Trolling is a way of eliminating discourse.
Trolls exist. And the worst trolls of them all claim they don't. Elon Musk, for example, recently exclaimed, "Where is all this Russian propaganda I hear about?" on his Twitter site, which, since he took over, has been a haven for Russian propaganda.
Of course, a lot of people can't see propaganda, because they think it would be along the lines of "Russia Best! Putin is Genius! Yay Russia!" But of course, the people at the Russian Internet Research Agency are not that stupidly obvious. What they are trying to do is sow discontent in their adversaries, through a number of means.
One way is to just get everyone upset and on edge (and you can see that it is working, right?). Tell men they are "Kings" and should take a "red pill" and view women as sexbots and baby-makers. Tell women that men are no damn good, and all they want to do is "neg" them to get them into bed. Divide the sexes - sow discontent. Create strife. It isn't along political lines - not all the time.
You can also tell people in the wealthiest country in the world that their life sucks. No one has a good job, inflation is out of control (tell that to an Argentinian, they would laugh - they have experienced real inflation over the years - in the hundreds of percent! Per month!) and life in general sucks. No one has health care and if you get sick you go bankrupt.
Of course, there is a nugget of truth to all of these things. There are men who subscribe to "red pill" thinking. There are people stuck at shit jobs (and always have been) who cannot pay off their student loan debt for their degree in philosophy. There are people who refused to get Obamacare - which can be free or very inexpensive - and end up with staggering medical bills. There are folks who get into intractable credit card debt, yet have a new iPhone 15 and are covered with tattoos.
It isn't hard to tell Americans they have it so hard, and on the Internet, it seems like "everyone" is going through hard times. And that's because the people who aren't, aren't spending all day online saying how shitty their lives are. The smart phone is rapidly replacing the television as the new depression box.
And this drives away normal people. Normal people see the sewage online and say, "I want none of this!" or are cowed by folks who attack them for, well, being normal. The conspiracy theorists and Trump supporters online are even quite frank about this - calling people who disagree with them, "normies" - an admission they are abnormal themselves. Others, such as fans of these bogus stock pump-and-dumps or crypto schemes, call themselves "degens" (degenerates) or "apes" - excluding themselves from the mainstream of society. When they lose all their money, they use this as an excuse to further remove themselves from the norm. It is a feedback loop.
This is all part of the plan of trolling. No, it is not a carefully laid-out map of operations, but just a form of anarchy. Throw a Molotov cocktail into the Internet and watch it all burn! Create chaos, strife, bad feelings, and ill-will. It is terrorism by keyboard.
I recounted before how a friend of mine went to Afghanistan as some sort of secret squirrel. He came back with a full-blown Al Qaeda beard and some insights into what was going on. I asked him why the "insurgents" were blowing up public markets and often killing their own people. How did they hope to win the "hearts and minds" of the Afghani people? It made no sense to me.
"Chaos works in their favor," he explained, "By causing society to collapse, they can take power." And indeed, the Taliban did just that, back when the Russians left, and after we left as well. When Russia withdrew from Afghanistan, there was a power vacuum and "warlords" were indiscriminately shelling major cities. People got sick of chaos and when the Taliban showed up, they thought, "Well, at least I don't have to worry about being blown up in my own back yard!" 30 years or so later, they do the same thing when we left.
You create chaos, disruption, and societal breakdown, and people will latch onto the first strongman who "gets things done." It was Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany. The street brawls and economic disruption caused ordinary people to think that maybe Democracy was over-rated, and what was needed was someone to restore "law and order."
Sound familiar? Fox News gleefully reports every instance of street crime or shoplifting sprees. Another example of how Democracy fails, particularly in "Blue States!" You wouldn't want to try that in a small town! (Of course, in a small town, such as the one I live near, methamphetamine and petty crime are rampant - and yea, this is a Republican stronghold. But that doesn't fit the narrative, so you can ignore data that doesn't fit the theory, right?).
The trolls have done their work, perhaps a little too well. Conspiracy theories have gone off the rails, with everything from UFOs to Anti-Vaxxers, to 5G, to flat-earthers, and beyond. People have shown themselves to be particularly vulnerable to nonsense, and perhaps Americans are more susceptible than others, or perhaps we have been targeted more.
Again, we see that the disruption isn't "Russia Good, USA Bad!" or anything as ham-handed as that. No, it is just sowing the seeds of discontent. The flat-earth thing (and denial that space travel ever happened or exists!) is a matter of small genius on their part. Landing on the Moon and winning the space race was one of the greatest accomplishments of the US and the largest failure of Russia. What better way to get revenge that to convince Americans none of that ever happened?
Or perhaps, just convince Americans that a large number of people actually believe that.
Therein lies the rub. You see, the Internet tends to amplify extremism. That doesn't mean more and more people are becoming extremist wackos, only that they tend to dominate the conversation online, because everyone loves to click on rage-bait and click-bait. It has gotten to the point where whenever I see another online posting about Trump or Musk, I have to just not click on it. Because in most cases, the story is just bullshit (Newsweek, for example, loves to run Trump rage-bait articles that amount to nothing). And by clicking on these things, well, the system feeds back and gives you more of it. Just send me an e-mail when Trump is in jail - don't bother me with the details!
If you just looked at life based on what is online, you would think half of America is homeless. An online article, for example, exhorts that "Half of all Americans can't afford a median-priced house!" which sounds alarming, until you realize what median means. Did you know that half of all students in school are reading below the median reading level! What can we do to correct this?
Funny thing is, you get offline and get out of the house you notice that Americans are driving a lot of fancy cars and trucks and SUVs and living in pretty nice houses and condos and apartments. Not just a few of them, but millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people. Life, it turns out, ain't so bad after all.
But you never hear from such folks. They have jobs and a real life and don't spend 18 hours a day on conspiracy theory sites. They are not trolls or "useful idiots" spreading falsehoods and fantastic stories. And the few who do go online and try to refute this nonsense (a futile task!) end up being shouted down, so they go offline and you never hear from the "normies" as a result.
We are being manipulated. And you are being manipulated if you believe in conspiracy theories or any of this other nonsense spread online. Ask yourself, if you are following Qanon or whatever, how is this making your life better? And the answer is, of course, it ain't.
And that was the point - to sow chaos and make people upset.
