The Artisanal Troll

A society should really only be judged on the quality of its trolling. Some trolls are obvious, some are subtle, some are dumb. (Some are all three.) But some trollery approaches pure critique, is made of the finest digital intervention, and only performed for a limited audience. It’s artisanal trolling! Hand-roll troll! (Is it really trolling if you’re not chasing a huge audience? Hmm!) Here’s Greg Allen going in on Twitter with the Cambridge University’s Digital Library’s… let’s say “ironically orientalist” take on a very beautiful 16th century Islamic manuscript version of Zakariya Qazvini’s cosmography.

Some trolling is successful even!

@gregorg @vhfscott brilliant! Now I see that this is clearly the correct interpretation

— CambridgeDigitalLib (@CamDigLib) May 15, 2014