Urgent Topics: Trolling and the Ecology of Provocations

Catalog description

“Trolling” is often understood as a pathology of the digital age. Contemporary political debate appears increasingly animated by provocation, insult, and strategic outrage. Yet the practices that now circulate online, such as mockery, rumor, reputational sabotage, and calculated disruption, long predate social media. This course traces trolling from its mythological and medieval literary origins to its contemporary algorithmic manifestations. The first month is devoted to Viking cosmology and folklore, such as Völuspá, medieval texts, black magic, Satanism, and Norse fairy tales, to examine trolls as archetypes of chaos, seduction, moral testing, and boundary-crossing. We then develop a sustained typology of modern trolls, such as algorithmic giants, ideological mobs, disinformation burrowers, influencer chieftains, swarm-like followers, moral crusaders, erotic seducers, political righteousness, well-wishers, shock artists, and finally the “troll within you.” We analyze how these forms operate within contemporary media ecosystems shaped by platform capitalism, union activism, artificial intelligence, polarization, and institutional vulnerability, including the fragility of NYU and the Gallatin School. Rather than prescribing a single formula for resistance, students will critically examine existing responses and design their own context-sensitive confrontation of trolling in academic, political, and personal life.