I Was a Victim of the World's First Internet Troll

by jenka

As I read Emily Chang's book Brotopia, about how the boy's club of Silicon Valley was built, and how it shaped the Internet into the morass of misogyny and trolls that it is now, I felt a growing flame of rage and anger rekindled in my heart.

This rage is for the Internet that could have been, the possibilities felt by those of us who were there at the beginning of this phenomenon - and how quickly that "possible world" of unlimited potential became a place of fear and terror - at least for those of us who happened to inhabit female bodies.

I know that some girls managed to tough it out (mainly by creating online personas that were gender neutral so they were not immediately recognized as girls or women), but from my first troll (who quickly manifested into a real life predator), I found that every time I dipped my toes back into the world of coding, gaming, and hacking that I loved, I found the waters even more clouded with misogyny and hate than before.

I especially feel for women like Zoë Quinn, who became the target of so many thousands of young men's vitriol and spite for the alleged "crime" (which turned out to be completely false) of flirting with a journalist to get a good review of a game she'd designed.  This sparked the wave of anti-women hatred online that became known as "GamerGate."

Zoë had to leave her home where she was attacked and harassed, moving multiple times and having to hide out at friends' houses.  She couldn't appear in public because of the threats and harassment, which spread far and wide to target women throughout the industry, and had a chilling effect on women in tech throughout the 2010s.

But the story I have to tell about my personal Internet troll begins way before GamerGate.

The year was 1987. I was a budding young computer-obsessed geek, head of my school's Apple Pi club, and very excited about learning to code on the Apple IIe that my forwardthinking dad had purchased.  I loved playing Carmen Sandiego and carefully copying the code from the BASIC manual, then tweaking it to do things a little differently.  I wrote choose-your-own adventure games in BASIC and brought them to school on 5-1/4 inch floppies to have my friends run through them (and check for errors in my code).  In short, I was primed to blast my way into the computer science field just as the Internet was getting started.

Then middle school rolled around, I turned 13, and my dad bought a modem.  The world of green lights on a black screen that had so excited me in the sixth grade had suddenly expanded exponentially.  Now we could connect to other people's computers by dialing up on our 300 baud modem to bulletin board systems (BBSes) - the precursor to the Internet.  Yeah, I know, the ARPANET was the actual precursor to the network that became the Internet - but for those of us laypeople who had no access to that military network, BBSes were our introduction to the incredible sensation of typing into a screen and having a human being in another location somewhere else in the world respond in real-time.

At the time, BBSes were based on phone numbers, so you'd have to call the ones in your local area to avoid long distance charges.  My dad had a list of phone numbers of BBSes, so we started trying them out.  And somehow, my older sister, through a friend of a friend, got a list of some less "official" and more sneaky or subversive BBSes.  Honestly, I think a lot of these BBSes were the beginning of the shadow online world that has become known as the "dark web."

The troll that I am referring to in the title of this article used the handle "Pyromaniac."  I guess that handle maybe should have been a tip-off to the guy's creepy and sinister nature, but hey, we were all a bit naive at the time - especially me.  Remember, I was just 13.

He had a BBS called "Pyromaniac" (Pyro for short), and shared that moniker himself, as the site's superuser.  My sister, at 15, was smart enough to use a handle when she connected to the Pyro BBS, but when I connected, I used my real name.  Which was a girl's name.  And if you have read Brotopia, or been a female in the world of Internet bros, well, you know what that means: I was immediately doxxed as a female, and became the target of much obsession from the under-sexed teen boys and young adult men who made up the supermajority of the userbase of the BBS world at the time.

Connecting to the Pyro BBS, you'd see a list of categories that you could select to read posts from.  As it was mostly a bunch of pubescent boys making up these categories, they were things like: sex, drugs, crime, games, hacking...  I remember going into the crime category and seeing recipes for how to make bombs, and getting immediately scared and going back out to the main menu.  I explored all the things that had been posted, and remember the first time the green print on the screen showed up with a message directed to me, using my name, and I was a little afraid, wondering how they could do that (later on, I was an early user of Linux and got to be a superuser and send broadcast messages and direct messages to users on my own server, but at the time of the BBSes it still felt downright spooky to see the screen "talking" to you directly as a user).

Pyro would be on the BBS frequently, talking to me directly, asking about my sister...  He said inappropriate and explicit things - even though I told him I was 13.  Then he started showing up in person at our house.  He charmed my parents into allowing my sister to hang out with him. He was 18 and had another girlfriend, but he was a sleazy guy so that didn't matter to him.  He proceeded to flirt with and make out with my 15-year-old sister, and separately, made passes at me, a 13-year-old kid.  He drove me with him to the hardware store and showed the clerk a blown-out pipe.  I saw the eyes of the store clerk go wide as he directed him to the aisle where he could find a similar sized pipe, and I remember the tone of the clerk's voice as he nervously asked, "W-what happened to that pipe to make it blow out like that?" Pyro gave a sly smile and turned away from the clerk toward me as he said quietly, "That's what an exploded pipe bomb looks like."

I was scared... in awe... but mostly scared of Pyro and Albatross and Toxic Offspring and the other dudes that made up the world of the Pyro BBS and then Empire.  Empire became empire.org, one of the first websites/online communities.  As "The Well" (well.net) was the gathering place of the cultural/intellectual elite, Empire was basically a forum of would-be hackers and the anti-elite.

One day, the police came to our house and said Pyro had been arrested for making a pipe bomb and detonating it at his ex-girlfriend's house, and they needed to collect any print-outs or disks having anything to do with his BBS.

As a straight-A, gifted/talented kid who had never had anything whatsoever to do with police (I'd never even gotten in trouble at school), this frightened me so badly that I stopped coding, gaming, hacking altogether.  Pyro was charged and imprisoned, but I could not help continuing to fear him.  And not just him, but every chatroom I entered after that became a source of potential predators for me.  Was he the world's first Internet troll?  I have not heard of any earlier than him.  (I know thati trolls have been around pretty much as long as misogyny has, so... pretty damn long!)

In college, I found IRC (the Internet Relay Chat) - chatrooms by topic, filled at all hours of every day and night with people talking and responding in real time to one another.  Careful to never reveal my gender, I hung out in hacking and warez channels and learned a lot, downloaded code and tools that people shared with me, and hacked on it on my own, trying to figure things out without asking too much (RTFM was a common refrain aimed at beginners who asked simple questions - "Read The F*cking Manual").  But it was clear to me that everyone on these chats assumed that everyone else was a guy.  As soon as someone would show up who identified themselves as female (whether they were or not in real life), then all the boys on the channel would suddenly shift their focus and act like a pack of angry wolves going after their prey.  People who had been chatting with me about some technical question in just a normal tone would suddenly be messaging this female-identified person with extremely vulgar and sexually explicit imagery.

As Chang lays out in her book, this culture was promoted by the boys' club of Silicon Valley, making their workplaces toxic for women - and the products they created even more so.  It makes me wonder how many girls had experiences like mine (albeit maybe not as extreme as being trolled online and in real life by a pipe-bomb building psychopath), how many girls were sidetracked into other fields, foregoing our love for coding and hacking because of the toxic, vitriolic culture we would continuously encounter almost immediately every time we would try to get back into that world.

The saddest thing to me about all of this is imagining what I could or would have done as a coder, hacker, visionary person in the world of Silicon Valley (my head is always filled with new ideas), if the fear had not been with me.  If it had just been the wonder and excitement of seeing my code create something cool, without worrying about a predator around every corner of the Internet... what could we, the girls of the age of BBSes, have made of the Internet - if it hadn't been shut down to us by the misogynist gatekeepers that blocked off all the entryways?