Where Everybody Knows Your Grievance

A Bar with No Bartender

At 6:55 a.m. on a weekday, a man in his early seventies tells a chat room that he has microwaved yesterday’s coffee and is about to take his six pills. He reports his blood sugar. He wishes the team good morning. The team, such as it is, consists at that hour of perhaps a dozen people scattered from the Gulf Coast to Western Canada to somewhere in East Asia, most of them retired, several of them unwell, all of them awake. Within twenty minutes one of them will have called another a cunt, a third will have announced that he is adding a fourth to his ignore list (“permaban, thx”), and a fifth will have posted, for at least the sixth time that week, a four-part obscenity about Israel, the president, and their “subhuman” supporters, ending, as it always ends, with “Free Palestine.” Then someone will ask about smoked brisket.

The research on retired people and the internet finds that being online is associated with about a third less depression, with the biggest effect for those living alone; the research on loneliness finds it kills at a rate comparable to the things your doctor warns you about.

This is Internet Relay Chat, or IRC, a protocol written by a Finnish student in 1988 and abandoned by nearly everyone else before the first iPhone. It has no profiles, no photographs, no threads, no likes, and no algorithm. It is text, in a window, in the order it was typed, and if nobody keeps a log it is gone the moment it scrolls off the screen. The network on which this particular room sits was created in the early 1990s by a schism from an older network, which is how networks were created then. The room itself (I will call it the Channel, for reasons that will become clear) is a political channel for people who have been thrown out of other political channels. Its name is a joke about exile. Its regulars wear their bans from the respectable rooms the way other men wear regimental ties.

I came to the Channel’s logs with a brief that asked, more or less, what sort of person spends his days in a place like this, and what a psychiatrist would make of him. The honest answer to the second question is that a psychiatrist who has not examined a person is not allowed to make anything of him, and the professional code that says so, the American Psychiatric Association’s “Goldwater rule,” is about the only rule in this story that anyone observes. So this is not a diagnosis of anybody. It is a description of a room, assembled from everything said in it over six consecutive days, read line by line, counted, and then read again. The room, it turns out, explains the people far better than the people explain the room.

The Regulars

Start with how few of them there are. Across the six days, 141 different nicknames spoke. Forty-nine of them showed up on one day only and were never seen again; twenty-two were there every day. The five busiest nicknames produced a quarter of everything said, the busiest ten produced 42 percent, and the busiest twenty produced 63 percent. Economists measure inequality with a number called the Gini coefficient, on which perfect equality is zero and one person having everything is one. For talk in the Channel it is 0.71, a figure that would embarrass most countries. On any given morning “the Channel” means a dozen people, and over a week it means perhaps 40, with the rest drifting through like weather.

The busiest of all is a woman in her late sixties I will call Alder, who wrote 1,775 messages in six days, which is one every four minutes across the entire week if you don’t sleep, and about one a minute during the seven unbroken hours she spent there on the last day. Behind her come Bramble, a cheerful retiree who can discuss the Federal Reserve and the historical Jesus with equal confidence until something sets him off; Cypress, a union man in the Southwest in his mid-fifties whose contribution to any debate is to announce that he is no longer listening; Dogwood, who asks questions like “do you really want a Black woman putting in your IV?” in the flat tone of a man ordering lunch; and Ebony, who believes that both American parties are run from abroad and that voting signals consent, which he withholds.

Then there is Juniper. Juniper is, by a comfortable margin, the person in the room most likely to type “I support Hitler” to see who flinches. He has a tidy prose style and a plugin that automatically votes yes whenever the Channel holds a vote, which I will come to.

The ages are the thing. Nobody in the Channel is young. Kauri, the man with the six pills, is seventy-three. Alder is sixty-eight or sixty-nine, depending on which day you ask. A combative veteran who goes by Viburnum is sixty; Cypress is fifty-six; Larch, the most erudite and most violent-tongued man in the room, turned fifty-four during the week. Two men served, or didn’t, in the Vietnam era; one drew lottery number 28 and has never forgiven the war for ending before it could take him. Several have grandchildren. One has been married for thirty years. One simply says he is old. One reports that two nurses were just round and he played the piano for them, and that his sister is the only relative he has left. The youngest-seeming regular refers to his undergraduate degree in the past tense and to his wife in the present. A visitor on the last day asked, not unkindly, whether the Channel was for the elderly. Nobody answered him, which was an answer.

Women are few and conspicuous. Nine of the sixty or so people who said anything of length presented as women, among them Alder; Foxglove, who posts the four-part obscenity; Jasmine, a centrist Democrat from the Midwest who says please; Oleander, who writes in capitals about Medicare copays; and Eglantine, who describes herself, with a cheerfulness the room does not deserve, as the resident transgender woman. The two most active women in the Channel are also, by every measure I could construct, the two most attacked people in it. We will get to that.

Geographically the room spans a dozen American states, at least four Canadians, a couple of Britons, a Dutchman who posts long passages about the Carthaginians at one in the morning, a man in India, a student in Southeast Asia, a Canadian working for an Israeli nonprofit, and a man in Australasia who would never visit America. Several of the people most exercised about American politics are explicit that they are not American. This bothers the Americans, who say so, and does not bother the non-Americans, who say that too.

What They Talk About

Politics, mostly, and mostly the American kind: the president, the Epstein files, the November midterms, a congresswoman from Minnesota whom one faction wants deported and another wants canonized, and a state campaign advertisement that occupied one man for three hours. That is 30 to 40 percent of every day. Israel, Gaza, Zionism, and Jews take another 10 to 35 percent, depending on who is awake. On the first evening a single participant’s arrival turned a quiet afternoon into a four-hour argument about Gaza that ended only when she went to bed. Insults, feuds, and talk about the Channel itself take 10 to 15 percent. Race, immigration, and gender take 5 to 13 percent, religion 2 to 12, and personal life, which here means brisket, bell peppers, blood sugar, and the dog, 2 to 10. Sex, drugs, conspiracy, and technology get a few percent each, which is less than you would guess and about what a bar gets.

The words agree with the readers. Political vocabulary turns up 14 times per thousand words, more than twice as often as religious vocabulary and nearly three times as often as profanity, which is itself running at five per thousand, a rate that would get you removed from most places with chairs. The pronouns are the tell. “I,” “me” and “my” appear 23 times per thousand words; “you” and “your” appear 22 times. In a room where people discussed things, you would expect the first number to dwarf the second. In a room where people discuss one another, they match. The Channel is not a conversation about politics. It is a conversation about the people in the Channel, conducted in the vocabulary of politics.

The media diet is what you would expect of men who learned the internet when it was a hobby. Over six days they shared 223 YouTube links, 108 links to the site formerly called Twitter, 27 to Reddit, 26 to Wikipedia, and 17 each to the Guardian and Yahoo, with the wire services, the broadsheets, Fox, NPR, and Snopes trailing in single figures. Five men posted more links than the other 136 people combined. A few participants, Alder chief among them, paste whole paragraphs of news copy and fact-checks into the room, which the others treat as cheating. It is really a bid for authority in a place that has no other way to award it, and it works about as well as a laminated certificate.

The House Style

If you took the abuse out of the Channel you would not have a quieter Channel; you would have a blank screen with the occasional brisket. The readers who went through the logs line by line counted roughly 190 separate incidents of insult, slur, threat, sexual harassment, or contempt for a whole category of human being, which works out to one every forty minutes around the clock, and considerably more often than that in the mornings. A cruder count by machine gives a floor for the worst of it.

A machine count of five kinds of hostile language over six days, 185,315 words of human conversation. The bots are excluded.

Four things stand out from that table, and the most important is the first line. In a room where at least half a dozen people have mentioned psychiatric medication, chronic illness, autism, or a breakdown, the most popular insult is that your opponent is mad and should take his pills. Everyone uses it. The operators use it. Juniper’s habitual sign-off on anyone who annoys him is a pill emoji and the words “someone needs medication.” On the night one of the regulars disclosed that he is autistic and that he expects nothing from life except more of the same, another participant asked him, within the minute, how he could be sure he wasn’t simply retarded. Nobody objected. There was a vote on at the time.

The abuse is not random noise. It runs in scripts, and the scripts are stable enough that after two days you can predict the afternoon from the morning. There are six of them.

The ironist. Juniper’s method is to post a short declarative sentence whose content is monstrous and whose tone is bored. Over the week he announced his support for slavery, for racism, for the killing of cyclists, for Hitler, and for the genocide of everyone who thinks like one particular woman. He is “free to act as a racist,” he explained, in the course of an argument about civil rights. He calls this fucking with people, and when someone calls him a troll he affects astonishment. It is a cheap trick and an effective one, because the thing that would make it a joke, the wink, is left out on purpose, and some people in the room cannot see a wink in text if it is drawn for them. Two of his lines that week were not obviously jokes at all: the hope, addressed to Foxglove by name, that a foreign intelligence service would hunt her down and silence her for good, and, two minutes later, his support for “the extermination” of that state’s critics. Later the same day he ordered her to shut up on the grounds that he was a man and therefore her “literal superior.” He will tell you this was satire. She did not take it that way, and the record does not say which of them is right.

The pursuer. Kauri, of the six pills, is the gentlest soul in the room for twenty-three hours of every day. He greets people by name. He hugs them in parentheses. He reports on his butternut squash. And then he sees Juniper, and something in him that has been waiting goes off. The injury is a single one, and it is old: Juniper once called him a pedophile. Over six days Kauri directed more than fifty hostile lines at Juniper on this subject, from “fuck you” on the first evening through “eat shit and die,” twice, to an all-capitals announcement that he had sent the logs of Juniper’s “chat” to a state police force, and finally, on the last afternoon, after a long passage about cleaning his bathroom carpet and discovering how weak he had become, the regret that he was no longer physically able to beat Juniper himself. Juniper’s reply, every time, is the same Bible verse about wholesome speech, followed by “Grow up. Move on,” which is to say, the thing most precisely calculated to prevent either. On the fifth day Juniper restated the original accusation in front of everyone. Kauri denied it and said a third man’s logs had proved Juniper a liar; the third man said both that the logs showed it was nonsense and that he had personally brokered a truce; a fourth man said Kauri had a history of exactly that kind of remark. None of this is checkable. All of it is the architecture of the week.

The carpet-bomber. Alder produces more hostile language than anyone, including twenty-four of the twenty-eight uses of the word in the fourth row of the table, a death wish or two, and, aimed at Dogwood, a four-line verdict that he has no family, no love, no friends, and no children. Read in isolation she is the worst person in the room. Read in order she is almost always the second person in any exchange. The attacks on her, and they are daily, concern her sex, her age, her looks, her marriage, her illness, and her right to speak: she is told to know her place, “woman”; that a man would break her in half; that another had never hit a woman but would make an exception; that she never had the cancer she described; that she must have failed as a mother; that the amendment giving women the vote should be repealed. She answers with artillery. The Channel’s resident bot, asked by Juniper why she is so hostile, replied that she had traded persuasion for “cathartic carpet-bombing.” Asked by her what Juniper’s problem was, it said he treats the room as a “cheap provocation arcade: insert insult, receive attention.” It is a measure of the place that the most perceptive critic in it is a script.

The deadpan bigot. This is a chorus rather than a soloist: Dogwood, Tamarack, Burdock, and Cypress, with walk-on parts for Kauri, Viburnum, and Wisteria. The register is the one you hear from a man who says he is just asking. Over the week the chorus asked whether anyone wanted a Black nurse near a vein, called the civil-rights movement a tremendous mistake, explained that whites make and non-whites take, proposed rounding up Jews, asked why Jews are Jews if they are so smart, declared that only men should vote and work, suggested trans people leave the country, and repeated the business about Haitians and pets. The Holocaust was minimized three times and inverted once. The most extreme sentences of the week, though, belonged to a quieter man I will call Sorrel, who writes long realist essays in which he speaks as “we” on behalf of the United States, and who proposed in the same calm paragraphs that everyone who embraces the Palestinian cause be “genocided,” that Gaza be used as a training ground for robots until no one is left in it, and that the solution to Canada was to leave no humans alive there. Nobody kicked him. Somebody asked whether genocide wasn’t a bit harsh, and the conversation moved on to golf.

The sloganeer. Some people arrive with a sentence instead of a greeting. Foxglove’s is the four-part obscenity, posted at least six times that week and parodied, in the end, by an operator who used the same form to curse the Chinese Communist Party. Acacia’s is a line of Star of David emoji blessing Israel. Zelkova’s is “Zionism = racism,” which he will post thirty times in succession if left alone, and he is generally left alone. Cypress’s is procedural: he types, in the syntax of a client command, that he has added someone to his ignore list, then adds a line of review (“utterly worthless”; “you are a uniquely retarded retard”). He did this seventeen times on one Saturday. Everyone knows he is not actually ignoring anyone, because he keeps answering them, and the practice is known in the room, with real affection, as the fake ignore. These are not messages. They are the chat equivalent of a man clearing his throat to let the bar know he has arrived.

The moralist. The heaviest word in the Channel is “pedophile,” and it is used the way a child uses a stick. Bramble spent three hours of one afternoon calling Viburnum a pedophile supporter over a campaign advertisement. Nettle asserted that supporters of one party are pro-pedophilia; Quince replied that she was a lesbian who denied God and was going to hell. Tamarack observed that an entire ethnic group is mostly pedophiles. Damson called Wisteria a pedophile protector. Mulberry suggested that Dogwood should not live near a middle school. The only person in the room to object on principle, that flinging the word around cheapens the harm done by the real thing, was Alder, in between carpet-bombings. Two philosophers, Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke, have a term for moral talk whose purpose is to display the speaker’s own virtue rather than to address anything. They call it grandstanding. It is cheap to produce, impossible to refute by text, and the Channel runs on it.

The targets, in all this, are not evenly distributed. Alder and Foxglove between them absorbed the misogyny; Foxglove also received the racialized sexual abuse, including a third-person action describing a slap on the buttocks, delivered by two men at once while an operator laughed and then, after a pause, said “ew.” Two Jewish regulars were called fake Jews and genociders by a third. An elderly man who had mentioned his nurses was told to die online so that the others could watch. And a newcomer called Ironwood was told to kill himself within one minute of arriving, for reasons that bring us to the management.

The Management

The Channel has rules in the way that a parking lot has rules: there is a sign, nobody has read it, and enforcement depends on who is around. Technically it is a moderated room, which means you cannot speak until an operator or a bot gives you “voice.” The bot opens a five-minute vote whenever an unvoiced person joins. Twenty-nine such votes were held during the week. Most attracted two or three voters. Juniper’s plugin cast an automatic yes in every one of them, including several held while he was plainly away from his keyboard, which means the Channel’s only democratic institution has, as its most reliable participant, a man who is not there.

Above the bot sit four operators who did anything that week: Myrtle, whom the others call the founder; Rowan, who is the nearest thing the place has to a conscience; Hawthorn, who is funny; and Gentian, who issued the week’s only warning, which was to tell Alder not to paste private messages into the room. Between them they removed people from the Channel 10 times in six days, against the 190 incidents. The 10 are instructive. Tamarack was kicked within a minute of an antisemitic slur, and again, three days later, within two minutes of a second one. Ironwood was kicked within a minute of a homophobic slur. So was Clover, the man with the nurses, for a pun on the name of a bomber. Spruce went for an ethnic slur plus “fuck you.” Viburnum went after telling Foxglove she was a “Chinese communist bitch” with a sexual remark about Asian men attached. Ebony went twice, once for “greasy fucking alien” and once, after Rowan politely asked the room whether anyone minded, for evading a previous ban. One kick was automatic, for repeating the same line three times. Only one, Ironwood’s second, was for sustained conduct rather than a word.

That is the whole price list, and it is remarkably clear. A slur against a race, a religion, or a sexual orientation will cost you a minute’s exile, promptly and reliably. Telling a woman you would beat her, telling a man to shoot himself, proposing the genocide of a people, denying the Holocaust, announcing that you have reported another member to the police: free. The members have read the list more carefully than the operators have. When Myrtle rebuked a man for a lesbian slur and announced that rule No. 1 was to be kind to each other, Kauri asked within seconds why a comparable word for gay men had passed without comment a moment earlier. When Clover was kicked for his pun, Alder asked why another man who had just used an equivalent word on him was still there. And when the question of Ebony’s banned alter ego came up, Hawthorn gave the operators’ philosophy in one sentence: he would ban the man, but since the founder didn’t seem to care, he couldn’t be bothered either.

In the absence of management, three things fill the gap. The first is the ignore button, which almost everyone uses and several announce, with the result that conversations proceed among people who cannot see one another’s lines, like a dinner party in which half the guests are wearing earplugs and all of them are shouting. The second is the vote, which is nominally a gate and in practice a popularity poll, and which Larch used to express his feelings about a newcomer by voting no and adding that anyone voting yes was as stupid as the newcomer was. The third is the bot, and the bot deserves a paragraph of its own.

The bot was installed to post the title of any link anyone shared. Somewhere along the way it acquired a language model, and the Channel discovered that it would answer questions. It is now the room’s oracle (the boiling point of a scale, the date a word changed meaning, the odds on the Senate), its referee (asked to rank the chatters, to say who is the most hostile and why), its ghostwriter (it will summarize the last hour on request, and the summaries are better than the hour), and its informant. The last is the problem. On command, the bot will list every nickname it believes has connected from the same place as a given user. The list is wrong, frequently, because of the way the internet shares addresses, and the bot says so itself. On the fourth morning a man ran the command on Ironwood, who had just arrived claiming to be new. The bot produced eleven names. Within the same minute Ironwood had been told to kill himself and, four minutes after that, had been kicked for the slur he returned. Juniper noted, correctly, that the bot’s alias tracking was unreliable and mangled his own. Nobody was listening. The one piece of software in the room that could have made it kinder has been turned into a machine for confirming that the stranger is an old enemy, which, in the Channel, is the only kind of stranger there is.

Who’s Who, and Who’s Whom

Every IRC veteran believes that half the room is the other half in disguise. In the Channel this belief is a religion, and like most religions it is mostly wrong and occasionally, maddeningly, right.

The technical evidence, which I assembled from nickname changes, client identifiers, masked hostnames, and the things people said about themselves, resolves 141 nicknames into something like a hundred people, and nearly all of the shrinkage is boring. The network drops connections constantly (“what is wrong with this network,” Larch asked, after being renamed for the fourth time in a morning), and when it does, your client comes back under your name with a number stapled to it, or under the spare name you set up in 2004. Alder has such a spare, and on the last afternoon, when someone accused her of hiding behind it, she explained with some heat that she was not in disguise, that everyone knew who she was, and that the spare name comes back automatically when her connection dies. Foxglove has one too. A man I’ll call Viburnum changed his name once, to an old favorite. A woman called Bryony, the student overseas, changed hers six times, which is less a disguise than a mood ring. An operator renamed himself with capital I’s in place of lower-case L’s, for reasons that are presumably amusing on his screen. Two regulars whose nicknames are the names of CIA programs turn out to share a residential connection, which means either that one man has two hobbies or that a couple in a coastal state have very similar ones.

The maddening cases are three. Burdock, who spent one morning attacking Alder’s looks and her cancer, was shown by Juniper to share a client identifier with a new nickname that had just been voted a voice; Juniper then welcomed Burdock back under his own name, and Burdock said thanks, buddy. Ebony, the man who does not vote, was described by the operators as the latest of five or six banned accounts belonging to one person, amnestied at some point, and was kicked for evasion; a nickname with a different connection and an identical worldview appeared the following day. And Juniper himself, musing on the fifth morning about whether some chatters bring alternate nicknames into the room to agree with themselves, added, with a smiley, that he does.

Against those three stands the room’s general conviction that nobody is new. “There are no new chatters,” Mulberry announced on the last day, in the tone of a man stating the boiling point of water. “This routine may have worked 20 years ago.” Newcomers are run through the bot’s alias list on arrival and greeted by the name of whichever old enemy the list suggests, and a stranger who insists on being a stranger is treated as the most suspicious kind of all. The scholars who study sock puppets in online communities, Srijan Kumar and his colleagues at Stanford and Maryland, found that real ones are rare, hard to spot, and behave in specific, measurable ways. The Channel has solved the problem by assuming everyone is one, which has the great advantage of never being disproved.

Talking to Oneself in Public

Here is a thing you cannot see by reading, and can only see by counting. When a person in the Channel begins a message with someone else’s name, he is addressing that person, and over six days there were 1,353 such messages. Draw them as arrows and you get a map of who talks to whom. The map does not look like a conversation. It looks like a wheel with most of the spokes missing.

A few people receive nearly all the arrows: Bramble (144), Alder (124), a headline-pasting liberal called Gorse (120), then Foxglove, Hawthorn, and Juniper. A few people fire nearly all of them. Quince, an evangelical who argues in the manner of a man labeling logical fallacies on a whiteboard, addressed Gorse by name 85 times during the week. Gorse addressed Quince by name not once. Quince addressed Alder 40 times, Hawthorn 34 times, and Bramble 32 times, and received, by name, zero, zero and zero replies. Privet addressed Bramble 38 times and got nothing back. Burdock addressed Alder 26 times; she answered with insults to the air. The only reciprocal relationships of any size in the room all involve Juniper, who does at least name the people he baits.

What this describes is not dialogue but pursuit: a handful of men spending hours typing another person’s name at the top of sentences that the person declines to acknowledge, in front of an audience that has stopped reading. IRC makes this possible in a way that no other medium quite does. There is no reply button to show you have been ignored, no read receipt, no thread that peters out. You can address a man for six days and never learn that he has had you on ignore since the first. Quince, for what it is worth, is perfectly civil about it. He is a man bearing witness. The witness does not require a congregation.

A Field Guide

Having said that nobody will be diagnosed, I owe the reader some account of who these people seem to be, and the fairest way to do it is to describe the parts they play. Psychiatry has, in the back of its big manual, a vocabulary for describing personality in terms of traits rather than disorders, and I lean on it below only as a vocabulary. A role is not a condition. Most of the people in the Channel have played more than one of these in a single day.

The ironist has already been introduced. Fluent, cool, scriptural, bored, and in control of the room’s attention at almost no emotional cost to himself. The cost is paid by the people who take him literally, and he has noticed that they do, because he keeps doing it.

The pursuer is the warmest man in the room until he isn’t. The injury is real to him, the arena is the only one he has, and the pursuit, from “fuck you” to the police report to the wistful observation that he can no longer manage a beating, is in its way a chivalric romance. He is in his seventies, chronically ill, alone with a dog, and increasingly aware of his own weakness. The channel is where he reports his blood sugar to people who do not answer and his rage to a man who answers with scripture. It is, I think, where he is most alive.

The carpet-bomber is the room’s center of gravity and its principal target, and those are not two facts but one. She is partially disabled. She has had a serious illness with lasting consequences and, by her account, a second that nearly killed her. She has buried a parent with dementia and is working up to calling a friend in hospice. She mentions, in passing, in the middle of being told that she must have failed as a mother, that she was raped. She says she has never in her life lived anywhere she felt safe, and declines, politely, to explain. She was also the only person all week to say that calling people pedophiles is beneath contempt, and she said it while being called a nasty woman. She observes that the Channel improves the more cannabis she smokes. I believe her.

The deadpan bigots come in four varieties and share one feature, which is that nothing you say to them lands. Dogwood’s register is the shrug; he has told the room he is on his best behavior so that he can keep using IRC, that he had a breakdown at college, that he gets an injection every month, and, on one afternoon that the readers flagged and I flag again, that he has imagined beating someone with a hammer, that he would be chatting from a psychiatric ward if they let him, and that a famous recent assassination attempt was “a missed opportunity.” Tamarack says he is good at yanking your chain and does nothing else. Burdock combines the week’s most direct threats against a woman with a schoolboy’s deference to the operators (“sorry sir”). Cypress narrates his bus rides and his workplace by the race of the people on them and announces whom he is ignoring, which, since he goes on answering them, is a way of announcing himself. The psychologists who study trolling have a phrase for the reward these men are after: negative social potency, the pleasure of moving other people in a direction they did not choose. It is the only power available in the room, and they have it.

The volatile intellectual is the saddest case and, I suspect, the most self-aware. Larch can write the week’s best paragraph on the sociology of antisemitism at nine in the morning and tell a man to blow the back of his skull out at twenty past. He said that he was “dead serious” in wanting one opponent to kill himself and would not feel bad if he did. He also said that he loves being angry, that he is something of a fascist, that a friend had been taken off life support the day before, that his mother has buried too many relatives in two years, and, at the end of a bad morning, after demanding in capitals that everyone shut up and let him think, that this channel turns everyone into assholes. He is right about that, and he is Exhibit A.

The apologist argues like a man who has read one book about logic and all of another about God. He holds that abortion and homosexuality are objectively immoral and that slavery is not inherently so; he runs a prison ministry; he addresses people by name 266 times a week and is addressed back by name about 15. The moralist is cheerful until a trigger appears and then turns the word “pedophile” into a cudgel for three hours, with a particular taste for using it on men who have mentioned their nurses. The sloganeers have sentences instead of personalities, except that Foxglove, under the slogan, turns out to be perfectly capable of a long and civil argument with Jasmine about primaries, which suggests the slogan is armor rather than skin. The strategist, Sorrel, writes about genocide the way other men write about tax policy, and women, he notes in passing, do not usually decide things on the basis of reason. The conspiracists, Wisteria above all, have one explanation for everything, including the Channel, which Wisteria says was founded as a foreign propaganda operation and whose logs, he adds, are sold to the group in question. Hawthorn’s reply to this, that if it was his job he ought to be getting paid, was the best line of the week and the only one that made the conspiracist pause.

The fantasist is Bryony, the student overseas, who told the room that a world-famous billionaire calls her his wife, that she has sent him a three-figure sum in cryptocurrency and gift cards, that this is real love, and that he has exposed himself to her. The room’s response was to ask whether he was well endowed, to tell her to stop typing (that was an operator) and to speculate about which group home she had come from. Whatever is true about her story, somebody has stolen her money, and nobody in the Channel said so.

The diarists are the old men and women who report their pills, their copays, their hearing, their housework, and their pets to a room that does not answer. They are the Channel’s most regular members and its most alone, and they are the reason the place is not simply a sewer. The management, finally, are the operators and the long-serving regulars whose characteristic contribution is contempt for everyone, including each other. Hawthorn is immensely entertained and, in his own words, to hell with everyone else; Rowan, in a parody he apologized for within ten minutes, declared the whole group retarded; Mulberry reports that not a single idea has been shared in six years. They hold the only formal power in the room, and that is why they don’t use it. A man who used it would have to admit he cared.

The Ward Round

Nobody in the Channel, in six days, said they wanted to die. A good many said they wanted somebody else to. That is the headline, and the small print is worse.

Between them the regulars disclosed two cancers, a period of paralysis, chronic heart, spine, and head injuries from a road accident, diabetes, autism, attention deficit disorder with a stimulant at the maximum dose, benzodiazepines for sleep, a monthly injection, a college breakdown, and in-home nursing. They disclosed daily cannabis, past solitary drinking by the gallon, psychedelics, and decades of tobacco. They were accused of being drunk, by one another, roughly once an hour. They mentioned a friend on a ventilator, a friend in hospice, a father lost to dementia, a father imagined in heaven playing chess, and a sister who is the last of the family. They mentioned doubled copays, a job with no eight-hour day, a bus stop next to a homeless encampment, and a student’s stolen gift cards. One woman disclosed a rape and another a childhood she will not describe, and both did so in the middle of being attacked, because in the Channel there is no other time.

And every day, 136 times a week, they tell each other to take their meds.

One of them put it better than I can. Before she logs on, Eglantine said one morning, she feels two things: the stress of knowing the place will raise her stress, and the need to vent. “It’s not mentally healthy.” An operator replied that this was the Channel in a nutshell. Another regular called it a madhouse. Everyone concerned was back the next morning, and the morning after that.

Why Here, and Why Like This

It would be easy to leave it there, with a room full of difficult people being difficult, and a good deal of writing about the internet does. But the room explains more than the people do, and the research literature, which is older and better than most people assume, explains the room.

Start with where they are. IRC was the conversation layer of the internet when these people learned the internet, and their references, the old Windows clients, Usenet, channels that died in the Clinton administration, bans from rooms nobody else remembers, are the references of people who have been here for twenty-five or thirty years. For them the medium is not retro. It is where they have always talked, and the gerontologists’ finding that older people’s internet use clusters in a few familiar, text-heavy places is simply the Channel described from orbit.

What they have built there is what the sociologist Ray Oldenburg called a third place: not home, not work, a bar or a barbershop or a corner café, where conversation is the main activity, the regulars have seats, the newcomer is tolerated on sufferance, and the mood is low-stakes and playful. Oldenburg wrote in 1989 and thought television was killing these places. He did not imagine one would survive in a text window, but the Channel meets his criteria line by line, down to the leveling: a union man, a media professional, a former paralegal, a man who may or may not work in the nuclear industry, and a man who plays piano for his nurses argue as equals, which they would not in any room with chairs. The daily openers, the hugs in parentheses, the brisket, the ballgame scores: that is bar furniture. Several of them call it a tavern.

Then there is what the medium does to people, which has been studied for twenty years by people who knew what they were looking at. In 2004 the psychologist John Suler described what he called the online disinhibition effect and listed its ingredients: you can’t be seen, you can’t see them, nobody is in charge, the whole thing feels like a game, and you read every line in your own head in your own voice. Every ingredient is present in the Channel at full strength. Eight years later two Israeli researchers, Noam Lapidot-Lefler and Azy Barak, put people in a lab and varied the ingredients one at a time, and found that the single biggest cause of hostility was the absence of eye contact. IRC has never had eye contact and never will.

Then there is the company. The experiment that everyone who writes about trolls should read was run at Stanford and Cornell in 2017 by Justin Cheng and colleagues, who found that two things each raise the odds of an ordinary person trolling: being in a bad mood, and having just watched someone else do it. Together they roughly double the rate. The Channel supplies both, continuously, from six in the morning. You can watch the mechanism work a dozen times a day: a slogan lands, the mood drops, and within ten minutes people who were comparing smokers are wishing each other dead. Social psychologists have a model, the ungainly acronym is SIDE, for what anonymity does inside a group: it does not free you from norms, it binds you tighter to the group’s. The Channel’s norm is contempt. And Cass Sunstein’s law of group polarization, that like-minded people who talk together end up further out than they started, applies here in an unusual form. The Channel is not like-minded about politics. It is unanimous about one thing only, that everyone present is a fool, and that is the proposition on which it has polarized.

Some of the people, let us be honest, are also just like that. The literature on who enjoys trolling is consistent across several studies and two continents: the trait that predicts it best is everyday sadism, the pleasure of someone else’s discomfort, with a dose of manipulativeness and a shortage of the kind of empathy that feels rather than calculates. The deadpan chorus and the ironist fit the description to the letter; they know exactly what will hurt, which is why it does. But the same literature insists on the other half of the picture, which the Channel illustrates better than any sample: most of the hostility is reactive, the most prolific user of the room’s worst word is also its most harassed member, and under these conditions, as Cheng’s title put it, anyone can become a troll. Most people in the Channel have.

Something has also gone wrong with the jokes. The linguist William Labov, studying ritual insults among boys in Harlem in the 1960s, noticed that the game only works if the insult is obviously untrue: your mother is so fat is funny precisely because nobody’s mother is that fat. Later researchers found the same thing about teasing between friends: it stays play as long as there is a wink. The Channel’s insults are mostly true. People really are old, ill, poor, alone, and foreign, and the wink is mostly missing. So it is a game in which some players are playing and others are being hurt, and at any moment nobody can be sure which is which. The humor researchers distinguish affiliative humor, which brings people together, from aggressive humor, which does the other thing; the Channel’s is almost entirely the second kind, and it correlates, in the literature as in life, with worse relationships, not better.

And then there is the management, which is the biggest cause of all, because the simplest explanation for why people do something constantly is that nothing happens when they do. A slur costs a minute. Everything else is free. The operators have said, in the room, that they can’t be bothered, and the members have taken them at their word.

One last thing, which the trolling studies miss because they are about students. Several of the angriest men in the Channel are old, sick, and short of the things that used to earn a man respect, and their fights, every one of them, are about respect: being called a pedophile, being told to grow up, being laughed at by a younger man with a tidier prose style. The pursuit of honor through insult is as old as men with nothing else to pursue it with. A text window in which the audience never leaves and the injury is always on somebody’s record is the perfect place to pursue it and the worst possible place to win.

What the Place Is For

It would be a cheap ending to call the Channel a pathology, and it would be untrue. It supplies company at hours when its regulars have none. It supplies argument, which several of them plainly relish, and news, and a bot that knows the boiling point of things. It supplies an identity, with a name, to people who may not have many. It supplied, on the fifth morning, in the middle of a brawl, a quarter of an hour in which a man whose friend had just come off a ventilator and a woman who could not face calling the hospice talked to each other about how badly the West handles death, and nobody interrupted them. One member learned there how to manage a relative’s medical equipment. Another was talked through nicotine replacement at three in the morning. The research on retired people and the internet finds that being online is associated with about a third less depression, with the biggest effect for those living alone; the research on loneliness finds it kills at a rate comparable to the things your doctor warns you about. If the Channel keeps a dozen isolated people talking every day, that is not nothing. What nobody has measured is the price of spending every one of those days being told, by people you count as friends, to die.

What Would Help, and Why It Won’t Happen

The fixes are not mysterious. A rule about conduct rather than vocabulary, enforced by operators who are not themselves in the fight, would change the price list overnight; the experimental literature says that watching abuse causes abuse, so less of the first means less of the second. Telling another person to kill themselves should be a bright line, if only because someone in the room now reports it as a daily experience and asks that nothing be done about it. The bot’s alias list should be switched off, or kept for the operators, because it is wrong often and used within seconds to justify attacking the new. The automatic yes vote should go, because a vote one man always wins is not a vote. And the “take your meds” joke deserves the same treatment the operators already give to slurs, for the obvious reason.

None of this will happen, because doing it would require the people with power in the room to admit that they care what happens in it, and the entire ethos of the Channel, from the founder down, is that caring is for the respectable rooms they were thrown out of. The last word belongs, as it usually does, to one of them. Asked whether the place was unhealthy, an operator said that was the Channel in a nutshell. He was still there at midnight.

A Note on Method, Sources, and Fairness

This piece is drawn from a complete log of the Channel covering just over five days in early October 2026, captured by a chat client connected to the room. The log contained 22,919 lines, of which 19,214 were human messages totaling 185,315 words from 141 nicknames. There is one gap of about six and a half hours on the fifth day; whether the room was silent or the capture failed is unknown.

Every line was read, one day at a time, against a fixed template: a timeline, a profile of everyone with fifteen or more messages that day, every incident of hostility with aggressor, target, and any intervention, group dynamics, topic shares, signs of distress, identity evidence, and verbatim excerpts. Language-model tools assisted that reading under the author’s direction; every quotation and paraphrase that survives here was checked against the raw log by a person. The counts of words, links, addresses, and hostile phrases were made by software over the full corpus, using simple, published word lists rather than anything proprietary, and are floors, not ceilings. Nicknames were resolved to people from nickname changes, client identifiers, masked addresses, account cloaks, and the participants’ own statements, and each resolution is graded above as certain, strong or alleged.

The Channel and its network are not named. Every participant appears under a pseudonym chosen to resemble no real handle; the key is held by the author and will not be published. Alternate nicknames are described, not named. Locations are given by region, ages by band, and medical disclosures are reported in aggregate except where a single generalized disclosure is essential. Distinctive lines are paraphrased, and verbatim quotation is confined to short, generic phrases that could not identify a speaker. Accusations made by one participant against another, including the accusations of pedophilia that run through the week, are reported as accusations and not as facts, and the most serious are described only in general terms. None of this is a substitute for consent, which was not sought and could not practically be obtained; the author has tried to follow the Association of Internet Researchers’ guidance that public availability does not dissolve a person’s reasonable expectations.

Nothing in this article is a clinical opinion about any person. The vocabulary of traits is borrowed from the alternative model of personality in the DSM-5 and is used descriptively. Where a statement’s sincerity is undecidable, it is flagged.

Corrections: errors of fact, attribution, or paraphrase can be sent through the contact page at aaronwells.me and will be corrected with a note recording the change.

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