In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word “troll” to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. The trolls employed what the M.I.T. professor Judith Donath calls a “pseudo-naïve” tactic, asking stupid questions and seeing who would rise to the bait. As one guide to trolldom puts it, “If you don’t fall for the joke, you get to be in on it.”

“Hacks like this tell you to watch out by hitting you with a baseball bat,” he told me. “Demonstrating these kinds of exploits is usually the only way to get them fixed.”

“Trolling is basically Internet eugenics,” he said. “Blogging gives the illusion of participation to a bunch of retards. . . . We need to put these people in the oven!”

“We are headed for a Malthusian crisis,” he said, with professorial confidence. “The question we have to answer is: How do we kill four of the world’s six billion people in the most just way possible?”

Jon Postel, now known as “god of the Internet” for the influence he exercised over the emerging network. In 1981, he formulated what’s known as Postel’s Law: “Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others.” Trolls embody the opposite principle. They are liberal in what they do and conservative in what they construe as acceptable behavior from others. You, the troll says, are not worthy of my understanding; I, therefore, will do everything I can to confound you.

Weeks later, after talking to his friend Zach, Fortuny began considering the deeper emotional forces that drove him to troll. The theory of the green hair, he said, “allows me to find people who do stupid things and turn them around. Zach asked if I thought I could turn my parents around. I almost broke down. The idea of them learning from their mistakes and becoming people that I could actually be proud of . . . it was overwhelming.” He continued: “It’s not that I do this because I hate them. I do this because I’m trying to save them.”

What they'd like to blame it on

When Jason was 5, he said, he was molested by his grandfather and three other relatives.

We like to think we live in a society that brings wisdom to an unruly nature, and makes life safe for living.

What if it were the opposite: nature shows a reality that our society obscures with pleasant illusions?

That would mean that every day, as we repeat things we've been told, we're affirming a lie, and the people we shout down for saying unpopular things may be right -- some of them. It would also mean that our society is a freight train headed toward a slow, inconspicuous doom.

When it becomes taboo to talk about certain topics, much less tie them together in the kind of truth that saves groups from themselves, the only people who speak the truth are some outsiders (other outsiders are just loser posers). Trolls -- using anonymity, hacker technique for obscurity, and some basic psychological knowledge -- are information terrorists for the truth.

* Trolls like to deflate self-important people who have gained status in society for doing nothing of importance, or who have no status because they have no particular skills, but they want to participate, and their participation will drag things to a lowest common denominator.
* Trolls like to harm communities that do nothing but amuse themselves and create a false sense of self-importance. In a sense, trolling is war against the ego, preferring real world results beyond the individual to posturing, self-importance, and a socially-constructed consensual reality.
* Trolls like to mention the handful of awkward topics that truly are polarizing in our society and hint at socially unpopular but rational solutions.
* Trolls are trying to save society from itself passing into third-world irrelevance with "a whimper and not a bang."
* Trolls are empathic people who have transcended the individual form, and therefore are looking at our demographic future, and trying to save us by bringing up unpopular truths through denial of which we can destroy ourselves.

CORRUPT salutes all trolls and suggests new topics:

* What do we do now that our air and water and earth are showing signs of cancer-inducing poisons?
* Who stands up for culture when our children are inundated in mass media?
* Why hasn't our society produced any truly great art, music or literature for fifty years?
* Why are so many people miserable, but defensive enough about it that they justify their lifestyles?
* Has mass consumption, "freedom," et al. made us happier or less happy?
* If this society has conquered nature, why do we still have crime and illogical behavior?
* If we're all equal, why do some have IQs of 100 and others of 160? Who should serve who?
* Why do we deny that the historical precedent for both democracy and pluralism is failure, tyranny and oligarchic manipulation?

These are harder but worth exploring, as they are the taboos of a dying society. Let's just say it out loud: our civilization is dying like an organic beast, with labored breathing, brought on by the selfishness pursuit of pleasure by the individual and the consequent denial of demographic truths. Trolls counteract this. For now, to most they seem an annoyance; if future history is written, they will be heroes, "information minutemen."