Troll Inc. Documentary: Normies’ Window to World of a Hacker

The Troll Inc. (2017) documentary is a window for normies into the world of a hacker and his know-how which forms the underbelly of this modern troll.  

There is nothing like a really good documentary film on an intriguing subject matter that one is not very familiar with, but, nonetheless, is interested in.  Troll Inc. is one of those engrossing documentary films and it makes great use of interviews while interweaving clips of media coverage.

Los Angeles based Director and Producer, George Russell, won a lawsuit against the United States federal government to get documents under a Freedom of Information Act request that the government had originally denied.  This information was integral to the making of the film which was an Official Selection of both the Carmel International Film Festival and the Santa Monica International Film Festival.

The troll who puts the troll into Troll Inc. is one Andrew ‘weev’ Auernheimer and his story is one of the less than savory side of the internet.  A modern day Jesse James or Robin Hood of cyberspace, ‘weev’ is an anti-hero whose own antics he finds hilarious or at least amusing.  Those antics are usually at the expense of the “should be more tech savvy” and have embarrassed major companies on the internet.

Recently, I have come to the rather anticlimactic conclusion that many money-making activities, contests, and things that involve “clicks” on the internet, maybe the whole internet itself, is not quite on the up and up.  And some people benefit by this.  Imagine my puritanical horror.

But, you see, I wanted to believe and sometimes that makes you a day late and a decade or two short.

It reminds me of this game I played at a carnival.  The carny overheard me saying the game was “rigged” and took mighty umbrage at the audacity of such a suggestion.  I couldn’t really spot the con, but I knew something was off.  Same with this internet thing.  Something is fishy, you can smell it, but it wriggles away and out of sight just under the glassy surface before you even get a good look.

Troll Inc. website and streaming options

Troll Inc. parts the waters quite a bit.  Maybe I’m the only one who reads the rules of these websites, their terms and conditions, but perhaps you have seen admonitions against using iframes on a website you have been working on.  I’m no threat to manipulate the internet like that, only vaguely knowing what an iframe might entail.

One of the most fascinating parts of Troll Inc. had to do with ‘weev’ allegedly (in fact, I will state now, that everything in this article as it pertains to Andrew ‘weev’ Auernheimer is a mere allegation) placing iframes on major websites that redirected clicks on those websites to manipulate votes on certain items on a different ecommerce website.  This generated massive numbers of votes in keeping with all the traffic to the major websites infected with the iframes.  To me, as a normie, this was a major “wow-factor” revelation.  So that is how they do it.

My other “wow-factor” moment in Troll Inc. was when ‘weev’ very casually mentioned he had a Bloomberg terminal.  This was followed-up with talk of stock losses, shorting stocks, a short-oriented hedge fund, an appearance on CNBC, and that, of last report in the film, ‘weev’ was somewhere near Ukraine.  More than a few thoughts crossed my mind.  I could quote C+C Music Factory here.

It has become patently obvious, over the years, that some of the young tech geniuses have very little regard for law and convention, especially in the area of intellectual property rights.  Coupled with the less than socially adroit manners of some tech wizards, it often results in things that are very irritating, invasive, or offensive to average people.  Some of these things seem to go right over the heads of these high-tech gurus, even in the most rarefied air of the biggest tech businesses.

Associate Producer, Bertie Brosnan, who also directed, wrote and starred in Con advised me, “Troll Inc. is an important and monumental film because it deals with the birth of trolling as we know it today. The main character (Andrew Auernheimer) has had awful press since the film, but Troll Inc. was never about his personal life, but more about his involvement in birthing this movement as a whole or at least spearheading the attack on the mainstream media as an authority of world news.”

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The internet has made the world a much smaller place.  Near the end of Troll Inc. I was amazed to see someone I actually “talked with” way back when, on Myspace.  She was kind-of famous for about 15 days.  One good thing about ‘weev’ in Troll Inc. is that he seems to have left the little people of the world mainly without molestation while wreaking havoc on the bigger names and businesses.  Still, caution is a good thing.  The subject matter of Troll Inc. is a tale of that caution.

There is a dark web out there, everyone says so.  But no one ever really talks much about the spiders who do the spinning.  Troll Inc. is like a shaft of sunlight falling ever so momentarily onto one of those dark corners and its highly constructed tangle of sticky silk, a trap for the unwary, and now just a part of the circle of life.