At some point in the future, people will be studying and analyzing 4chan trolling the way they analyzed British political satire rags of the 1800s.
It is a new form of writing, though. Satire, today, is thought of as something that is known to be false, while trolling seems to be characterized by a sort of "stochastic truth" where the author is purposely ambiguous about whether they believe it or not. It lets the author of a piece of trolling say things that are clearly over the line, and mean it. It lets the author walk back the statements if they are unpopular and lean in if they are popular.
I do wonder if original pieces of satire and parody from hundreds of years ago were written with the intention of the same ambiguity of truth.
Political satire being taken as truth[0] comes with the territory. In fact, that's kind of the implicit joke. We laugh at every politician that reads an Onion article and thinks they need to rally the wagons to stop the $8bn Planned Parenthood Abortionplex. It is a rhetorical prank on the rich and powerful.
The problem with 4chan political trolling is that they always use the same fucking joke and there's no underlying satire to pick up upon. "Here's some people who don't fit in to the default social mold, now laugh and mock." This isn't satire, there's no rhetorical prank. This is just pissing in an ocean of piss. Even treating the board as a whole performative art piece is just running the OneJoke recursively against a large swath of probably-white, possibly-poor, definitely autistic people.
There is no ambiguity of truth. The people who treated /pol/ as satire up and left decades ago. The only people who remain are true believers interested in hurting people, including themselves.
How does this fit together?:
"Here's some people who don't fit in to the default social mold, now laugh and mock."
“a large swath of probably-white, possibly-poor, definitely autistic people.”
Also, Wikipedia says 4chan launched in 2003. 19 years ago. Which I doesn’t count as decades.
…waaait a minute… has my autism just eaten your onion? Layers upon layers to this satire thing haha
