Trolling Ourselves to Death

Almost forty years ago, Neil Postman argued that television had brought about a fundamental transformation to democracy. By turning entertainment into our supreme ideology, television had recreated public discourse in its image and converted democracy into show business. In Trolling Ourselves to Death, Jason Hannan builds on Postman’s classic thesis, arguing that we are now not so much amusing, as trolling ourselves to death.

Contrary to the popular view of the troll as an exclusively anonymous online prankster, Hannan asserts that trolls have emerged from the cave, so to speak. Trolls now include politicians, performers, patriots, and protesters. What was once a mysterious phenomenon limited to the darker corners of the Internet has since gone mainstream, eroding our public culture and changing the rules of democratic politics.

Synthesizing media ecology with historical materialism, Hannan explores the disturbing rise of political unreason in the form of mass trolling and sheds light on the proliferation of disinformation, conspiracy theory, “cancel culture,” and digital violence. Taking inspiration from Robert Brandom’s innovative reading of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Trolling Ourselves to Death makes a case for building “a spirit of trust” to curb the epidemic of mass distrust that feeds the plague of political trolling.