The movie poster for George Russell’s documentary “Troll Inc.” shares the line “destroying civilization one meme at a time.” However, the documentary is not about the thrill of trolling, specifically what it is, or even taking sides in the nobility of this practice. What it is, frankly, is a look at one hacker/troll named Andrew Aurnheimer, a hack he performed against a giant company, and the ramifications on his personal life this transgression fostered. “Troll Inc.” is both an auspicious look at online trolling from Aurnheimer’s account and a cautionary tale on free speech in America. It’s both savage and sad, featuring looks at things we’re not usually accustomed to seeing and presenting viewpoints we don’t always agree with, but can at least understand.
To understand what kind of person the film’s protagonist, Andrew Aurnheimer is – who goes by the handle ‘weev’ in his online double life – you have to look at both some of the things he has done and his intentions. It’s hard to like weev at the film’s onset. He engages in practices like hacking an algorithm on Amazon’s website to discourage any gay friendly titles from showing up in the search results, though he is not anti-gay, and holding a sign at an Occupy Wall Street rally that reads: “Zionist Pigs Rob Us All,” though he is not an anti-semite. It’s the art of trolling – of offending people professionally, of offending people for a purpose – to upset the status quo.
What Russell does successfully here is to create a film that doesn’t glamorize trolling but doesn’t really demonize it either. Due to the nature of the film – which details quite specifically with the 380 odd days that Aurenheimer spent in jail for one of his crimes – most of the production takes place within interviews with friends of weev, his lawyer, and weev himself as members of the FBI, law enforcement, etc., declined interview requests for the movie. This does do the film a disadvantage, as it would be beneficial to get these people’s point of view, but alas we are left with a somewhat one-sided approach to a film about a touchy subject matter. Computer crimes are an illusory concept to many; it would have been nice for the film to explain just what exactly the status quo thinks that weev did besides ‘upset people’ in its presentation.
Of course what weev did is now well documented in the annals of penal history, involving a ‘hack’ into AT&T during the release of Apple’s iPad 3G, in which thousands of high profile user email addresses were released to the public by weev in an attempt to show how easy it was for him to hack into a public URL and get the information. Of course, some backstory on the creation of this glitch in the iPad’s history is important to understand, especially the fact that AT&T may have known about the glitch and thought it less user friendly to highly secure the information – which would have involved making users retype in their email address instead of simply prepopulating it.
Saying that weev has a very cavalier attitude is undercutting it, and there’s no saying from the documentary how much of an effect this had on his arrest and sentencing. At one point in the film weev states his desire to go into the courtroom with ‘no remorse’ for what he’s done, remarking with oddly detached emotion that he ‘may in fact get the full 10 years’ for his crime. He in fact got 4 – a stringent sentence when, as the film shows, a rapist who terrorized a community got less time. It’s in this way that the documentary brings to light the nature of trolling – something that has become quite more prolific in society since the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump.
“Troll Inc.” takes this possibly over the head concept and breaks it down into terms we can all understand. We get, from watching it, that trolling may in fact be more than just a number of angry people trying to offend people for the sake of offending people, but may be spearheaded by people who have an agenda. Wether that agenda is benign or toxic remains to be seen.
One of the many successes of “Troll Inc.” is that it takes weev, quite grandiose and somewhat offensive in his delivery, and makes him someone we can understand and empathize with. The film doesn’t mean to clear trolling of any wrongdoing or make it seem okay, but it does want us to understand weev; by the film’s end we are capable of doing just that, a testament to the stories that the film is able to capture and due to the pristine directing by Russell himself.
At the end of the day, “Troll Inc.” is a solidly made and competent documentary. It’s a bit short at 80 minutes, and a little more detail in the purposes behind weev’s mechanisms may have gone a long way, but it’s all forgivable. The film takes an often unheard of and illusory concept and makes it something that you can grab onto. Some computer knowledge going into the film will certainly go a long way, and while it’s clear the film is made for those with a grasp on trolling, “Troll Inc.” will both make you question the need for this practice as well as the stringent punishments aimed at its perpetrators.
-by Mark Ziobro
1 Comment
Trolling doesn’t seem like a new phenomenon, more like the media and government’s tactics being turned against them.