Troll Culture as State Policy

“When our hate is violent, it sinks us even below those we hate,” wrote François de La Rochefoucauld. That remark about human nature and the exercise of power belongs to the seventeenth century, but it bears the unstoppable weight of universal truths. Perhaps it is time for the “chaos engineers,” successful in an initial phase of conquest and consolidation, to review a bit how they manage their main basic input —resentment— since its sustained use and abuse over time is turning into a boomerang that promotes public fatigue, arouses antipathies, and sometimes inspires horror. The entry of Fernando Cerimedo —accused of hiring two hitmen in Bolivia to kill his partner— brought back to center the fundamental artifices that Javier Milei employed to win and govern: the use of “digital militias”—crowded with fanatics, mercenaries, and unscrupulous operators— and gigantic “troll farms” to discredit people, intimidate voices, spread fake news, and defend the indefensible. Cerimedo, who had served Bolsonaro in Brazil and who was a professional brute, later offered his repugnant technology to the Argentine outsider. A decisive meeting: hunger meeting hunger to eat, the hate mercenary facing the natural and organic hater. The word troll, which identifies them both alike, comes from a fishing technique used to bait in the rough river of the networks and also from those original monsters in Viking mythology, who National Geographic described as “brutal and greedy,” and who specialized in “terrorizing defenseless communities.” We already know the pyrrhic successes and the wreckage that this political marketing, loaded with bullying, division, demonization, and directed lies, has caused around the world, and we also know that this phenomenon was used here as a manual and governing style. Because beyond the departure of the former presidential adviser in the wake of the murky Andis affair, the truth is that Milei continued with his methods and effectively established his troll culture as a state policy. Troll, therefore, has become the great verb of his administration. That word, according to the Dictionary of the Spanish Language, means: “to publish provocative, offensive, or off-topic messages in online forums with the aim of boycotting something or someone, or obstructing a conversation.” The libertarian has not limited himself to the digital world; he has also used platforms of the analog universe and passing microphones to troll foreign leaders, as he did in Spain and Brazil, provoking serious diplomatic conflicts. He trolled esteemed economists and well-meaning ones, independent journalists, unruly artists, rigorous pollsters, and cowed entrepreneurs. Let us lump them all under one word: mere dissenters from his dogma and his praxis. In his latest public appearances he has even allowed himself to troll the very society itself, denying the evidence of its hardships and questioning its growing discontent, though committing a flagrant contradiction in the process: “The photo is still terrible,” he admitted at the Alvear Hotel and in a kind of candor, only to then claim, as supposed compensation, that “the film is the best in Argentinian history.” We are bad but we are doing well, says the filmmaker of our lives, yet it is hard to believe such a grandiose promise from someone who has lied and erred so much and so crudely, and who uses “creative accounting” to keep fooling the gullible: we do not know for certain what will happen in the future with the real economy, but we take as given his diagnosis of the present: “horrible.” It is unclear why he denies then the current downturn in activity, purchasing power, and mass consumption; the closure of thirty thousand companies in just two and a half years, the explosion of nearly six million debtors, the erosion of pensions to force fiscal balance, and the generalized discontent detected in all polls across the country. It is also astonishing to discover that, whether consciously or not, Milei does not propose merely a polarization with Kirchnerism, but against all of his “enemies,” including the dialoguing liberals with whom his political ministers attempt to weave an electoral alliance. Milei has built a clay machine with a life of its own, and does not hesitate to soil all ideological neighbors and all political lanes. Split from his own cabinet, encapsulated in Olivos, he enables his “boys” to utter racist and homophobic slurs and he himself patrols the area with increasingly dislocated and abject insults; crystallized in a strange eschatological fixation, in recent hours he called two journalists who challenged him “human waste.” He also endorsed, this same week and in the same realm of trolls, that a deputy in his circle laughed publicly at Cerimedo’s ex-partner: according to the medical report, the victim was pregnant and suffered “multiple injuries from gunfire involving the right breast, right arm, neck and left shoulder; an exposed, comminuted fracture of the right humerus and a left supraclavicular wound.” Trolling those who suffer, encouraging professional boors, and fostering and redirecting anonymous resentment is the new libertarian normal. It is known: trolling is the sport of cowards who need to see others bleed to feel alive. And it is also a breeding ground for the slick ones who, for money, provide these services to the right-wing populism, an ultramontane faction that copies the trolls’ gestures and turns them into a governance format. “The Internet gave voice to legions of idiots who used to speak only at the bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community —Umberto Eco once thought—. Now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel laureate. It is the invasion of idiots.” Let us be fair: it also gave voice to people of great intelligence and merit, but it is true that Steve Bannon and his group of reactionaries have learned more than anyone to industrialize that kind of stupidity and to turn it into heavy artillery for their purposes.