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“It should go without saying that picking and choosing online, not to mention being picked and chosen for, is an enormous privilege, one that risks normalizing selective emotional attachment. Trolls take this privilege to the extreme, choosing to engage with only the content they find amusing and ignoring everything they deem irrelevant to their interests (e.g., their target’s feelings).”
― Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture

“Barlow’s utopian and decidedly libertarian message thus functioned not just as a Declaration of Independence, but also as Manifest Destiny version 2.0.”
― Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture

“while trolls and trolling behaviors are condemned as aberrational, similarly antagonistic—and highly gendered—rhetorical methods are presumed to be something to which every eighteen-year-old should aspire. This is, to say the very least, a curious double standard.”
― Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture

“Not only is trolling predicated on the “adversary method,” Western philosophy’s dominant paradigm,24 it is characterized by a profound sense of technological entitlement born of normalized expansionist and colonialist ideologies.”
― Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture