The Troll

I don't know exactly when forums emerged as virtual platforms, probably in the mid-nineties since the web has existed since 1990 (www =/= internet) but what is certain is that the most famous troll in history created a username around 1998 and became famous in 2000-2001 by posing as a time traveler!

Today, virtual platforms are already a well-known thing, even the villagers of the Fire Zone and the Indians of Gran Chaco have their own profiles on various networks, the trolls are unsuccessful and obvious and the members are cynical and it is unlikely that anyone would raise an uproar like the one raised by the user TimeTravel_0, later known as John Titor, on several American forums. The user started threads and chats about an apocalypse that would follow in the year 2038 due to a computer bug that would not recognize 2038 after January 19th of that year and because of that all Unix-based systems would be reset back to 1901 and with that shit would follow on planet Earth.

John Titor's original time destination was 1975 and he personally existed in 2036 and had to go back to the time of afro-haircuts and bell-ringers to find an IBM-5100 computer because only such a machine could be used to fix the bug due to the use of the APL and BASIC programming languages ​​(!?).

For personal reasons, he took a short break in 2000 (for a time traveler, it's like stopping at Straža for a cigarette and some cookies, I guess) and decided to reorganize the world for the upcoming events. And they weren't fun, a new civil war in America, a breakthrough in quantum research that would lead to the development of time machines, a shitty American election, the collapse of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, and of course the Third World War that would last a short time and start this year, 2015.

Today, it's easy to make fun of all of that, but in those innocent virtual times, John Titor was taken seriously by many, his outbursts became the subject of discussion in virtual spaces around the world, radio, television, and newspapers published stories about the `prophet`, later books appeared, and all of that made John one of the first internet celebrities in history, even before the existence of FB and YouTube. The type trolled, trolled and trolled but it was quality trolling, using a solid knowledge base about physics, history, politics and above all dystopian scenarios although it was probably inspired by movies, of course here is Terminator where we have a character returned from the future in order to protect the woman who is supposed to give birth to the leader of the resistance against the machines and of course Back to the Future because Titor claimed that the time machine is an adapted car from the 2030s, a homage to the immortal automotive flop DeLorean, the 1.21 Gigawatts and the 88 miles per hour...

But all that net-popularity brought him nothing because the `Curse of the Troll` came on the scene which means that the troll cannot overcome his troll identity and appear in public as a real person because that would eliminate everything he claimed in the form of a virtual character. Unlike later net-celebrities, Titor remained within the virtual and somewhere in March 2001 he stopped posting forever. (Or at least on the topic of `time travel`)...

It was never found out who was the character behind all this, IP, cookie and provider-based searches did not bear fruit, which testifies to the troll's fairly good IT skills. Later, an Italian TV station hired a private detective who was guided by the logic that the troll must be an IT specialist. The investigation showed the existence of a company named John Titor which appeared in 2003 in Florida but only as a registered entity without offices and employees and although without definitive evidence, the conclusion was that the troll was the brother of the company's founder, an IT specialist named John Haber who for unknown reasons started trolling the Internet.

There was no definitive evidence, but indications pointed to the identity of the troll, whose originality and creativity could not be denied. Today, there are no such trolls anymore, only retards who annoy the world and for whom it would be said that it would be better to be themselves, no matter how boring and imbecile they are, because their alter ego is idiotic and worthless, a phenomenon that not a single virtual platform that offers an incognito identity is deprived of.

(Roger Mortis, 066)