Don't Feed the Trolls: Jonathan Coulton on the Internet's Growing Pains

Ten years ago, Jonathan Coulton was the poster boy for the promise of the internet. A new kind of musician, Coulton built a following online, released all of his music for free, and succeeded without the support of a commercial music label. Fast forward to 2017, and Coulton has just released a new album, “Solid State”, with an accompanying graphic novel (written by Matt Fraction, no less, to be released in August). It tells the tale of an Artificial Intelligence that achieves consciousness, reads the internet to understand humans, realizes how horrible we are and leaves.

It’s quite a turnaround for Coulton, as he openly admits:

“It is very off-brand for me…I really owe my career to the early days of podcasting, downloadable MP3s, being able to set up your store for digital content, and blogs; without that stuff I wouldn’t be here. So it’s strange and disorienting for me to be where we’re at now: To feel like the internet has become this very crowded and sometimes very toxic place. As I was writing these songs, it was about exploring that feeling and trying to sort it out in my own head. This disillusionment, about how some time ago, it felt like we were on the edge of this glorious future, where this technology was going to bring us altogether. Now, essentially, internet trolls have taken over the White House; what happened?”

The track below, a live version of “Don’t Feed the Trolls” offers the always helpful advice: “Don’t read the comments.”

Still, in the end, Coulton remains optimistic:

Part of the message of this album is that technology itself is not going to save us and fix us. And in fact, we as humans have to continue working constantly on being better and better humans. If anything, the Internet is showing us where we fail to do that. I am hopeful that what’s happening now is: we’re going to look back and say that — this period of time — was a growing pain. That was a moment when the cultural change brought about by this technology overwhelmed us and we didn’t know how to control it, how to use it, and how to behave.

David Crotty

@davidacrotty

David Crotty is a Senior Consultant at Clarke & Esposito, a boutique management consulting firm focused on strategic issues related to professional and academic publishing and information services. Previously, David was the Editorial Director, Journals Policy for Oxford University Press. He oversaw journal policy across OUP’s journals program, drove technological innovation, and served as an information officer. David acquired and managed a suite of research society-owned journals with OUP, and before that was the Executive Editor for Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, where he created and edited new science books and journals, along with serving as a journal Editor-in-Chief. He has served on the Board of Directors for the STM Association, the Society for Scholarly Publishing and CHOR, Inc., as well as The AAP-PSP Executive Council. David received his PhD in Genetics from Columbia University and did developmental neuroscience research at Caltech before moving from the bench to publishing.