I Became a Full-time Internet Pest and May Not Survive it
or “I trolled Ziz and now she wants to murder me: a story”
This post is longer than necessary due to time constraints.
Over the past two years I’ve been writing comments on Ziz’s blog under various aliases, with the primary intent of figuring out if she was the kind of human she claimed to be, and a secondary intent of sabotaging what I believed was Emma’s hold over her. Some of these messages were designed to evoke strong emotional responses (rage, primarily) to assess her stability and alignment, since people act predictably when enraged. I adopted a variety of different personas (examples [1][2][3]), many of whom claimed to have beliefs I’ve never held or endorsed, for the sake of determining how Ziz would react to those characters. (For completionists sake, another set of posts was sent during what I think most would describe as a psychological break.) I used the kind of information I gathered to develop a profile on her. This approach was wrong of me, and I’m sorry. I usually don’t take these things to such extremes, and in retrospect the entire approach was very badbrains.
Through a different channel, Ziz and I began speaking using my rl identity, and eventually it became apparent to me that some of my pseudonymous messages had seriously freaked her out. I was perplexed and alarmed. If I’d known Ziz was going to freak out I wouldn’t have made them. I didn’t expect her to have taken any of the messages seriously. After that, I spent a few months debating with myself whether it was correct to tell her it had been me. On one hand, if you want to be genuine friends with someone, and I was starting to think that I did want that, then I’d need to fess up. Light cleanses all. On the other hand, what if she freaked out even more and wasted her time coming after me?
Since I’m writing this, you can guess what I chose to do, and what she chose to do in response.
On Jan 31st and again on Feb 2nd, Ziz and I had two multi-hour phone calls where she theorized about my motives, and where we repeatedly got off track arguing over whether Alice, a friend of mine, deserved to die or not. Ziz came to the conclusion that my motive for sending her those messages had something to do with Alice. She’s not entirely wrong. For a long while I’ve been angry with Ziz and her friends for insisting that Alice is entirely evil, and I still claim that Emma and somni have exaggerated Alice’s actions to gain brownie points with Ziz. (Ziz has got this whole Sith thing going on where she thinks Alice was her mentor, and guess what do Siths do to their mentors.) So my messages were influenced by my own anger. She’s also upset that I shared with Alice a little of what Ziz and I had discussed over the almost year long period where Ziz and I were communicating. I hold that there is nothing I said that Alice hadn’t already guessed from reading Ziz’s blog, given that our skills at perception are similar (though focused on different percepts), and that the leak of information by me in particular is insignificant. Ziz disagrees, and now sees Alice as a threat to her safety based on what Alice could say to people.
During our last phone call, Ziz informed me that the only way I could gain her trust and make up for what I did to her was to murder Alice, preferably sometime soon, (Ziz helpfully suggested I use a gun with a potato as a makeshift suppressor, and that I might destroy the body with lye), and then told me that after I should video call Ziz and show her the body before I destroy it so she could get proof positive that I’d really done it. And if I didn’t do it, Ziz planned to drive across the entire continental United States to murder me. I (stupidly) asked her if she meant murdering Alice metaphorically, cause I had a hard time believing what I was hearing, and she said that it’d be hard to provide proof of that.
Assuming this is serious and not some truly stellar revenge trolling, I find the idea that I should act out one of the subplots to ‘A Force Awakens’ at Ziz’s behest to be entirely unacceptable.
Aside from all the typical reasons why someone wouldn’t want to murder their own friend, this “test” fails to distinguish between the worlds where I kill my abuser vs the world where I’m a complete psycopath who would murder Alice if it meant getting closer to Ziz. Moreover, invoking the structure “if you don’t kill Alice, I will kill you,” creates a situation that fails to distinguish between the worlds where I would want Alice dead independently of Ziz, and the world where I’d only kill Alice out of fear of Ziz. If I were to kill someone out of fear of another, I would be just as bad as a person who murdered someone because a nazi put a gun to their head. And I find it implausible that Ziz would be able to distinguish between these three motives, were I the sort of person to murder Alice, given Ziz’s inability to scry me accurately so far.
In other words, a test like this could not have the effect Ziz claimed it to have, and demonstrates to me that Ziz is losing her marbles if she’s serious and not revenge-trolling me. And murdering someone because they have information that anyone with any sense can deduce from reading Ziz’s blog is an unjust reason for that decision. I suspect Ziz wants to feel more in control of the situation, most probably because she can’t trust me, and I engaged in a relationship with her where I had far more information about what was going on than she did. However, if there’s something I can do to make her less afraid, it’s not this. And while I don’t want her to remain in a state of fear or anticipation of what I or my friends will do, I refuse to die or murder anyone to make her feel better.
I’m not the kind of useless paranoid who jumps at bins like JD, or an unstable wreck who would drive themselves insane without anyone uttering a single word. So while I have the tenacity, skill, and willingness to evade Ziz and her friends indefinitely, it’s a waste of resources. We’re currently facing the collapse of civilization, a looming civil war, unfriendly AI, and a fuckton of other threats, and instead of focusing on those, we’re wasting resources respectively hunting and evading each other. The choice to focus on me, to imagine me as her “arch nemesis” or whatever, worth dropping everything for to murder, strikes me as a complete betrayal of everything Ziz cares about, tantamount to believing that the “right thing” to do is to attack the nearest wrong you see, when your best chance of winning is to attack wrongs upstream of that wrong. And while I no longer have any interest in working with her, we are still on the same side of the three part war. If Ziz wants to spite me, she can write a scathing callout post, refuse to speak to me ever again, or even set up a bot to spam my phone with poop emojis. It’d suck for me, but I’d deserve it. (The last suggestion is facetious.)
Though if I felt that Ziz could be appealed to with reason, I’d simply try reasoning with her. Ziz has indicated to me that anything less than murdering Alice will be seen as me attempting to pay less than Ziz believes the situation warrants. So instead, I’m writing this, so if Alice and I die or vanish, everyone knows who is responsible, and to let Ziz know that I have friends who will avenge me. Murdering Alice or me is now tantamount to committing suicide-by-proxy.
I don’t want Ziz to die, her friends to die, or for Alice and I to die. I’m aiming for the worlds where we all live. So I don’t want Ziz to kill me and thus kill herself.
I have no intent on interfering with Ziz’s work, except for the part where she’s decided to murder myself and Alice, because I don’t feel that murdering Alice or myself is justice. She is free to retreat behind “it was just revenge trolling.” Maybe I misheard her and she meant I should kill Alice in minecraft. So long as Alice and I are alive, that’s a possible explanation.
So to all who would read this: I am not suicidal. Alice and I would not and never will do some kind of murder-suicide pact. We’re not going to disappear. If you can’t video call us, then something’s wrong. This counts for today, tomorrow, six months from now, and three years from now. Ziz, like myself, does not forgive or forget, not even after years have passed. This post will be scheduled to re-post itself occasionally, just so no one forgets.
If you’ve read this and now somehow believe that my conflict with Ziz will serve as an excuse to betray her secrets, even for promises of safety, you are mistaken. Fear that I’ll post your attempts to extract information onto this blog to embarrass you and reveal you for the ghouls you are.
Update:
I’m reading this comment as an almost direct response to my post on her intent to kill me (see also: this comment.)
“Help, I have a Yeerk in my head that’s a mirror image of me. I need you to surgically destroy it, even if I’m then crippled for life or might die in the process. Then kill me if I ever do one evil act for the rest of my life. That’s better than being a slave. Save me even though it is so easy to impersonate me.“
This is not a direct quote of me but it’s close enough to count. She’s using my voice in a very real way.
"Might as well then kill me too if I don’t pass an unthinkable gom jabbar. That’ll make us both safer from them and I care zero about pain relative to freedom from my Yeerk at any cost.”
Agom jabbar is a term from Dune. It’s meant in this case as a test to see if you’re really human, and if you fail, you die. Except that wasn’t a gom jabbar because it wasn’t capable of identifying an impostor,it was asking me to commit to a suicide pact. We are on both sides of every evil act committed, and killing someone good is the same as killing myself. So I’m acting to stop her, as any good person would want to be stopped if they were going to commit an evil act.
It’s an outsized consequentialist priority, even in a doomed timeline, to make it unsafe to impersonate single goods. Critical to the destiny of the world. The most vulnerable souls impostors vex. To bring justice to individual people, from collective punishment.
I don’t know for certain, but I believe she is writing this in part because she believes she’s closing in on me. And that this whole comment (#8223) serves as both a confession and a justification of her actions and planned murder of me.
“As a chemical engineering Ph.D. student at the University of Pittsburgh who uses a power wheelchair, I figured it wouldn’t be long before I met one of these bots in a frustrating face-off on a narrow sidewalk. What I didn’t realize was how dangerous, and dehumanizing, that scenario might be.
The robot was sitting motionless on the curb cut on the other side of Forbes Avenue. It wasn’t crossing with the rest of the pedestrians, and when I reached the curb, it didn’t move as the walk signal was ending. I found myself sitting in the street as the traffic light turned green, blocked by a non-sentient being incapable of understanding the consequences of its actions.”
Were it not for a single Supreme Court decision which may be challenged and overturned at basically any time legal circumstances permit, it would be illegal and potentially a felony in 14 states to engage in homosexual activity – and in some of them, to engage in any sexual activity not for the purpose of reproduction.
It is the sworn duty of all cops to enforce those laws should they become enforceable, as it was when they were enforceable, as it was when they were ubiquitous in the United States.
There is only animosity to be had between queers and cops. Those who deny this have been fooled at best and are traitors at worst.
