{"id":20228,"date":"2015-07-30T08:48:21","date_gmt":"2015-07-30T12:48:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=20228"},"modified":"2016-03-18T11:30:15","modified_gmt":"2016-03-18T15:30:15","slug":"a-cynical-rant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2015\/07\/30\/a-cynical-rant\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump Troll"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Screen<\/a>
\u201cPoliticians are all talk\u201d -Trump, in the nytimes<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Buzzfeed asked<\/a> Donald Trump\u00a0if he knew what trolling is. Trump didn\u2019t know the term, so Buzzfeed explained it,<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s basically saying or doing things just to provoke people,\u201d I said, explaining that there were many who considered him a troll because \u201cprovocation is your ultimate goal.\u201d Trump bristled at the characterization. \u201cThat\u2019s not my ultimate goal,\u201d he protested. \u201cMy ultimate goal is to make this country great again!\u201d But then, he thought about it for a moment. \u201cI do love provoking people,\u201d he conceded. \u201cThere is truth to that.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The news media –especially those who report on, rely<\/em> on, presidential electoral politics– are quick to call Donald Trump a \u201ctroll.\u201d In this exchange, look at the word \u201cjust\u201d in the\u00a0definition, \u201csaying or doing things just<\/strong> to provoke people\u201d, that Trump isn\u2019t really a candidate running a real election, he\u2019s not politics as normal, but just<\/strong> going for attention. In the current media feeding frenzy over Trump, from\u00a0Time<\/a>, The Washington Post<\/a>, MSNBC<\/a>, and so many<\/a> others, there is an emerging and necessary narrative that he\u2019s a \u201ctroll.\u201d<\/p>\n

Classifying Trump as a \u201ctroll\u201d is centrally about saving the rest of the election coverage as real and authentic. The narrative that Trump is trolling assumes and reinforces the notion that the rest of the coverage is in good faith, something news organizations\u00a0desperately need to sell.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not interested in convincing anyone of the falseness of electoral politics in a blog post, my point here, at best, holds to the extent you already agree with that. It seems almost too obvious to type that the presidential electoral process and its coverage are not politics in good faith, that nearly every facet is performative, the interviews largely staged, the \u201cdebates\u201d not debates at all but many pre-planned little speeches, and so on. For the past\u00a0year, news sites and Sunday morning television programs have been dissecting opinion polls in ways they know are misleading, sometimes saying so on air, something like polls at this stage usually don\u2019t mean much, but let\u2019s now debate these polls as if they do<\/em>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s of no surprise that Nate Silver, the famous\u00a0statistician of the 2012 presidential election, has already run a piece about Trump as a troll<\/a>. During the 2012 presidential election, Silver\u2019s 538 blog at the New York Times captured\u00a0presidential politics as a massive game, like sports, an ongoing drama of a news event designed to perpetuate itself under the guise of actual politics. He was the best at keeping score, predicting outcomes based on every poll and news cycle twist. The blog spun off into a whole website that’s poised to indulge in presenting the fiction of the 2016 campaign as fact. In declaring Trump a troll, Silver cites Wikipedia,<\/p>\n

\u201cA troll,\u201d according to one definition, \u201cis a person who sows discord \u2026 by starting arguments or upsetting people \u2026 with the deliberate intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He goes on,<\/p>\n

Trolls thrive in communities that are open and democratic (they wouldn\u2019t be invited into a discussion otherwise) and which operate in presumed good faith (there need to be some standards of decorum to offend)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

By calling Trump a troll under this definition, Silver, like many political journalists, are implicitly saying that the rest of the campaigns and their coverage are \u201con topic\u201d and are discussion \u201cin good faith\u201d. Similar to this, the Huffington Post decided to label Trump’s campaign \u201centertainment\u201d<\/a> instead of \u201cpolitics\u201d, which implicitly means that presidential campaign politics are something other than entertainment. Journalism professor Jay Rosen is right<\/a>, Huffington Post labeling Trump as \u201centertainment\u201d won\u2019t really change how or how much they actually cover and profit from Trump. The move is wanting it both ways, to continue to mine Trump’s\u00a0political\u00a0entertainment for clicks while falsely branding the rest of their election coverage\u00a0as something different and more real than mere entertainment.<\/p>\n

News organizations know the election is a money-maker for them, they get ratings and clicks\u00a0and\u00a0something to incessantly talk about for the next year. It’s existential. The news organizations, from 24 hour television to online content farms, have more space to fill than content, more incentive to speak than things to say. A massive reality show with sports-like scorekeeping is too entertaining to remain political.<\/p>\n

Trump is called a troll because he\u2019s said to not be a real candidate running a real campaign, that he’s not playing by the standard rules and not engaging in politics and democracy in good faith. But this is what makes Trump like<\/em> the rest of the candidates and campaigns. That Trump is gaming the election coverage isn\u2019t some kind of unsolvable problem but what such coverage asks for. As the Diana Christensen character says in the film Network <\/em>(1976),\u00a0<\/em>“If you’re going to hustle, at least do it right.” The \u201cTrump problem\u201d for journalists is solved the moment we stop presupposing that the rest of the candidates and news coverage is real and in good faith.<\/p>\n

That Trump is putting on a media event in order to accomplish goals that may or may not have anything to do with the White House makes him like<\/em>, not unlike, the rest of the campaigns. He\u2019s not trolling but perfectly adhering to the rules of horse-race presidential politics coverage. Trump isn\u2019t running a reality show but participating in a larger one.<\/p>\n

You don’t\u00a0troll a conversation not being done in good faith by participating in the lie. The only way to troll a conversation already a spectacle is by calling it out as such. To Troll fiction with a little fact. As Benjamin said, “A clock that is working will always be a disturbance on the stage.” A famous and equally as fictional example of this is from the film\u00a0Election <\/em>(1999), when one candidate trolls the equally silly school election by screaming from the podium, [the embedding is buggy, here’s a link to the video<\/a>]<\/p>\n\"YouTube<\/a><\/span><\/span>\n

We all know it doesn’t matter who gets elected president of Carver. […]\u00a0The same pathetic charade happens every year\u00a0[…]\u00a0So vote for me. Because I don’t even want to go to college, and I don’t care. […]\u00a0Or don’t vote for me! Who cares? Don’t vote at all!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Or sometimes “troll” is just a lazy term for someone who is being mean, as the DailyDot does in their piece<\/a> comparing him to\u00a0Gamergate because he\u2019s willing to be mean to get attention. I don\u2019t like defining a “troll” as someone who is\u00a0mean, bigoted, and harassing because it precludes the possibility of good trolling, those who disrupt to punch up rather than down. Also, it\u2019s a tricky way of just not calling bigotry when it happens online bigotry. Let\u2019s stop calling Trump a \u201ctroll\u201d but instead a bigot: He\u2019s says shitty things that hurt people. It\u2019s not pretend or virtual or make believe but real, quite unlike the horse race presidential campaign\u00a0the news media will troll us with over the next year.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re being trolled, not by Trump, but by those mislabeling his campaign in an effort to sell us the fiction of this\u00a0election as something genuine.<\/p>\n

nathan is on twitter<\/a> and tumblr<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The “Trump is trolling” narrative is really about news organizations trying desperately to sell the fiction of the rest of the presidential race as authentic politics. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":559,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967],"tags":[36393,36395,2578,36391,736,129,36394,3521,36392],"class_list":["post-20228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","tag-36393","tag-2016-election","tag-debord","tag-donald-trump","tag-election","tag-media","tag-new","tag-spectacle","tag-trump"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/559"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20228"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20228\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21077,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20228\/revisions\/21077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}