Troll culture

Yesterday I watched some TED videos (TED is a conference for important people), the two from Hans Rosling and then the exchange between Rick Warren and Daniel Dennett. I love that stuff. Rick Warren struck me in the same way that Tim Keller did, as a man out of his element. And Daniel Dennett reminded me of Richard Dawkins, a bogey not nearly so scary once he himself has to deal with actual people.

As designed, the videos inspired me to think about ideas. Here are the ideas:

• Culture makes you make culture.
  
• All culture belongs to all people.
• Everyone owns Jesus.
• Jesus belongs at the center of culture.

Now, a few days ago I happened upon the world of shock sites, the most grotesque pictures and videos that the Internet has to offer. I read up on a bunch. Every taboo is broken, as violently as possible, repeatedly, with relish. I didn't view these sites at the time (actually, one of them I had seen a long time ago). But then this morning I was woken up early, and I decided to put my ideas to the test. All culture? Jesus? So I surfed shock sites for half an hour. It made me think, later, about Jesus and taboos: who is today's Samaritan? But the immediate surprise was this: nothing shown was nearly as abhorrent as the video I watched right before bed the night before, showing abortions. The violence of war is perpetrated by governments, but abortion is interpersonal, between mother (father, doctor, nurse) and child.

The raison d'être of the Internet troll is to violently destroy our constructed cultural identities. You care about this or that? Fuck you. You're mad at me? Fuck you. You hate me? Fuck you. The troll opposes culture with the most violent anti-culture. He intends to reduce our identity to bare, and baren, existence. He forces us to submit, to not-care. Because he can. And he can, usually. But what happens when the mainstream itself embraces the most inhuman annihilation? The Samaritan question still stands, but (for better or worse) the troll ultimately loses as long as abortion is normal.