“read Kant, JS Mill, Bentham, Singer, etc. Noobs.”

I know I'm sometimes draggin' down the party here with serious moral questions, most of them geeky in some form or fashion, but this one was just too good to pass up.

An excellent article from the NYT on a modern techo-moral topic I've thought about a lot the more time I've spent with online "communities". It concerns the practice and eithics of "Trolling", defined by Wikipedia as "someone who posts controversial and usually irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum or chat room, with the intention of baiting other users into an emotional response[1] or to generally disrupt normal on-topic discussion."

Harmless fun, or the sign that anonymity brings out the worst in human nature? And if so, why? For the lulz, of course ... but is there more to it then that?

Article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03trolls-t.html