Silhouettes and Sophistry
The dark mind behind the admittedly darker avatar
The internet is not becoming a better place. This is the sad truth we have to admit to ourselves in 2020. It would be wonderful if social media were safe, news were accurate, and there was a woman in the White House, but unfortunately we got bumped into the Bad Timeline and have to find our way back to the good one through painful trial and error. So it should not be surprising that some of the things to come out of the internet in the past few years are… lacking, shall we say, the inspiring message we wish we could carry forward for our children.
This is Ostav Nadezhdu (or Оставь Надежду, or Abandon Hope, or Hopeful Abandon — yes, this is complicated), an anonymous internet troll who appeared some time in early 2019, although he claims to have been active online before that under other names. In many ways Ostav is representative of the kind of dangerous personality endemic to social media — concern trolling, provacative, and always acting in bad faith, which he straight up admits to on his Twitter account:
I will never pretend to be arguing in good faith — let no one call me a liar! I will insult, attack, degrade, provoke, harass, scathe and shame, and the only favor I will ever do an enemy of mine is to openly say so. — Apr 24, 2020
This kind of bombastic, antagonistic language is par for the course for this man (or possibly underaged boy), who has no problem attacking, mocking and harassing anyone who he disagrees with. He portrays this as a kind of performance art, that by viciously maligning random people on Twitter, often by “quote-tweeting” them, a dogpiling tactic where the troll sicks his followers onto the victim until they are forced to shut down their account, he is somehow making a statement about the way people interact with each other on social media. Of course the irony of him complaining about a behavior while continuing to encourage and engage in it is totally lost on him. But this is not the most problematic behavior Ostav has engaged in, not by a long shot.
On February 1st he published an unhinged polemic against New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino on Medium, a website similar to Blogger. The article is full of misinformation and libelous claims, but even more egregious is the blatant bigotry on display: “Hipsters would fellate Tolentino if she had a dick” is a choice quote (icky transphobia!), but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The entire rant is full of sexist slights against Tolentino’s writing, her style, implications that her supporters are ingenuine, and worst of all a condescending, patronizing attitude that acts like it’s somehow extra unique and special for a woman to be a popular literary writer.
It’s unclear what motivated Ostav to attack a successful, young feminist who writes for one of the greatest literary institutions in the country (and has a captivating book published which I have read cover to cover no less than three times). Perhaps it was insecurity at seeing a woman of color succeed while his own juvenile fiction rightfully languishes in obscurity. Jia, for her part, has not spoken publicly about the harassment she has received, presumably in an attempt to shield herself from further attack — a dynamic women are all too familiar with. It has done little to further his own scattershot career as a writer — his dry science fiction short stories have received virtually no attention and his greatest claim to fame is that [billionaire Marc Andreessen] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen)followed him on social media once. But, of course, that’s not the point. Hate is never about building someone up, or creating something new. Its only goal is to destroy things, hurt people, and further inequality. And, so far, these appear to be the only things Ostav has accomplished.
Ostav has ties to numerous politically incorrect people. He promotes the work of Mencius Moldbug, a Silicon Valley fascist Brahmin who invites monarchy and social collapse. He has indicated ties to Red Scare, a fascist-adjacent podcast, and The Perfume Nationalist, an outright fascist podcast. His “Likes” tab on Twitter is a minefield of bigotry and hate, some of which is just confusing: “our tower of babel is disgusting favela, break it up,” reads one. “I haven’t jerked it in over a year and still no telekinesis to report, nor has my foreskin grown back. I think I’ve been meme’d,” says another. He promotes the manosphere blog “The Last Psychiatrist”, a now-defunct website by a bitter and lonely man, with much the same subject matter and tone as Ostav’s own writing. He seems to take influence from the worst parts of the pseudointellectual “neoreactionary” movement that makes up the far right. He has written diatribes against liberal democracy, against sex work, and — bizarrely — against education reform.
It might be tempting to dismiss this figure— after all, he seems to have no coherent target, nor really any coherent morals except the steady stream of vitriol he spews onto the internet, and he doesn’t have a huge following or commit any legal crimes. But, as my mother used to say, no bad deed ought to go unpunished. The only way we can start to take back the internet and make the future a safer place for everyone is if we start here, start now, with the anonymous troll and the angry, sexless male blogger. These people need to be pushed back first, so that we can push back against the bigger, more powerful people who they support (remember that White House?). I hope you will all join me in condemning this kind of behavior, and in ensuring that I — I mean, that Ostav never reaches the kind of audience he so obviously wants: one that will enable his senseless hate, or worse yet legitimize his overal dickishness. Let’s put this troll back under the bridge where he belongs.