The Troll Project was created by Ruth Diaz, who has a doctorate in clinical psychology and focuses on XR community design, in order to explore the root causes of trolling, but also tackling the issue head on within social VR spaces with some community-driven solutions that she has experimented with. She’s recorded a number of ethnographic interviews with existing trolls, former trolls, and community managers to get a better idea behind the root causes that are leading people to troll others online. And she’s put her theories into practice when trolls have interrupted her group discussions on different social VR platforms.
Diaz has developed a conflict resiliency framework called The D.O.T. Model, which stands for “Deepen. Orient. Transform.” The core idea is that there are polarities between the villain archetypes of the troll who fights versus the victim archetype of the target whose response is flight, and then another polarity axis between the vicarious bystander archetype who freezes vs the hero archetype who takes action to fix the situation and become the victor.
The D.O.T. framework helps people navigate between these archetypal polarities while dealing with trolls. She writes, “It is designed so we learn how to re-center without using anything on the outside changing to fit our needs. It is a re-orienting “compass” that identifies polarizing relationships patterns, the non-verbals and emotions that accompany these reactive dances, and where one fits in those polarities. Using a catchy visual and simple recipe for each polarity/archetype we embody in negative interactions; it teaches us how to get back to the humanness of heart and reconnect to those around us in a meaningful way. “
Diaz was teaching these conflict resiliency methods in public social VR spaces where the group would get trolled, but then they would apply these principles as a group intervention that would actually sometimes result in a transformative experience for the troll. She then started doing ethnographic interviews on different social VR platforms that could potentially lead towards a more formalized community-driven intervention framework for how to deal with trolling.
I had a chance to speak with Diaz a couple of weeks ago in order to get more context into some of her ideas about moving beyond the technological solutions of blocking and banning to more holistically address some of the root causes of trolling with more of a community-driven solution. She’s presenting today at the Augmented World Expo in a session titled “Resilient XR Environments: Building & Navigating Conflict-Resilient Spaces”, and is ultimately hoping that The Troll Project can “contribute to understanding the complex interplay between human behavior, online identity (in 2d and 3d), and social dynamics, facilitating the development of strategies to mitigate negative behaviors and enhance transformative experiences in online communities.”
Part of a technological solutionism mindset to to expect that technological architectures can solve human problems, but there’s limits to the existing technological mitigating strategies and The Troll Project is a welcomed venture into digging deeper into this problem. Trolling is obviously a huge issue that is unlikely to ever be fully eradicated, but Diaz has seen some of the transformative potential of her process by converting trolls into former trolls, and it’s worth exploring these types of community-based alternatives to get to the root of the problem.
The Troll Project is looking for funding and collaborations to take it to the next level, and so be sure to check out their Join & Contribute section to get more details for how to get involved.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So in today's episode, we're going to be diving into the dynamics of trolling with the Troll Project by Ruth Diaz. This is one part ethnographic study where she's doing interviews with people who were existing trolls, former trolls, community managers, trying to understand the dynamics of trolling within virtual reality spaces. And she also talks about her own direct experience of facilitating these conflict resiliency meetings within the context of VR, who would end up getting trolled, but then they would, as a group process, directly engage with the trolls and have these transformative experiences. So she's trying to think about what are the models beyond just blocking and banning? Can we start to deal with this type of trolling behavior in a more community-centric, holistic way? She's recorded 20, 30 to more hours worth of ethnographic interviews and published around 10 of those or so, so far on her website, thetrollproject.com. I just wanted to get a sense of this project, how it came about, and some of the insights of what she's learned so far about the trolling behaviors within the context of virtual reality. So that's what we're coming on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Ruth happened on Monday, June 3rd, 2024. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:35.311] Ruth Diaz: I am Ruth Diaz. I have a doctorate in clinical psychology and I work in environmental and community design. And I also lately have been As part of that, studying community by immersing myself in social VR and learning about trolling behavior from inside the instances where that's happening.
[00:02:03.164] Kent Bye: Maybe give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into working with VR.
[00:02:08.226] Ruth Diaz: Yeah. So I discovered virtual reality because of a conflict resiliency model that I teach called the Deepen, Orient, Transform model. And it teaches us to not look at conflict as something to solve, but as something that transforms us and makes us better and more resilient as human beings. And what I realized with this model that I developed at the end of my doctorate is that it was more three-dimensional than two-dimensional. And I was struggling using whiteboards and PowerPoints to teach it. And I wanted to interact with it in a more three-dimensional realm. So my initial dive into VR was not about the social aspect. It was just about playing with the art tools and being able to walk around this model that's on a X, Y, Z axis and just look at the different relationships from different perspectives. And as I did that, to some degree, it got lonely. And I wanted to see if it was as interesting to people in VR as it was to people outside of VR. So that's how I started to engage in communities online. and really found some fascinating cross-cultural responses to it where people who didn't even speak the language that I was speaking could still recognize these archetypal emojis or stick figures and see their conflicts on this model. And so as COVID happened and I was living in on my own and had a lot of time on my hands, especially in the evenings, I got more ingrained in different social VR apps and started to build communities off of these principles of conflict resiliency.
[00:03:59.710] Kent Bye: Okay, and so I guess as I've been looking at this project you're calling the Troll Project, it seems like it's one part anthropological ethnographic study, but other part applied psychology, really diving into this deep and orient transform dot model. So maybe you could give a bit more context for at what point did you decide to transform some of these social VR explorations into a proper troll project that's diving deep into a deep inquiry into trolling behaviors?
[00:04:29.122] Ruth Diaz: Yeah. So one of the event cycles that I did was in alt space, rest in peace. And I was doing a weekly event called human on purpose there, where I was hosting a circle where people came to practice talking about and understanding and deepening into one uncomfortable emotion per week that was decided on at the beginning by whoever showed up first with me. It was a great challenge for me because it was a little bit like target practice of sorts, you know, people throwing these zingers and stories and even struggling sometimes with language and understanding what those emotions were. So we had to learn how to mimic these emotions with sounds and with role plays to convey what we were talking about to people who didn't understand. And it was a very simple concept, but I would have up to 40 people attending per week. And what I noticed is that the specific environment that I designed and built for this conversation that I didn't want to be in a hierarchy where I was on a stage above everyone else. Or everybody was feeling like they were students sitting in chairs. I created this circle where I would start out in the center of the circle to announce and set the container. And then I would move to the side of the circle and people would stand around and share. But there was no identifiable leader for the majority of those events. And what I noticed is when trolls came in, because this was a public event, they would circle the circle like wolves to a pack. They would be listening and kind of trying to be disruptive. And eventually, there was this very tempting space in the middle of the circle. They would jump into the center and just take up all that space. But because everybody had been practicing being with their uncomfortable emotions like a gymnasium, people would see that person as the embodiment of that uncomfortable emotion, whether it be rage or anxiety or sadness, and they would really compassionately and curiously embrace that person and listen and ask questions. And that was a little bit like throwing any of us into a frying pan. Trolls would immediately jump out of that center and run off to the outskirts and try to recover from this very counter culture response they'd had. Multiple people who came in this way actually eventually ended up joining the circles. and would come back repeatedly week after week and start to share their stories. That was an accidental finding for me. But I learned from that and I built a very similar space in Horizon Worlds to that one because I realized I had stumbled upon some interesting design concepts that I then sought out some confirmation and understanding from some of my design mentors on and It made me really start to think about the missing link in a lot of communities in social VR is understanding how to evolve beyond a punitive justice framework, which is just block and ban. And that led me to when the community that I was growing in Horizon Worlds faded out and closed down, I started to really ask the questions like, what are the unexplored corners here? And another accident of sorts happened where I was exploring worlds on my own and VR chat. And I happened upon a group of what seemed like trolls who were using racial slurs and misogynistic terms towards each other, but they were doing it in a fawning way. They were actually affectionately saying really harmful things to each other. I was so dismayed, but also deeply curious by this and to protect myself because I was concerned they might turned that language onto me, I went up and said, hello, I'm a social scientist and I'm trying to understand social dynamics and virtual reality. May I record and ask you some questions? And that was how the Troll Project started.
[00:08:33.583] Kent Bye: Okay. Wow. So that's quite a journey and evolution of really finding ways that you could create a context that could actually provide an opportunity for transformation for some of these trolls And so obviously there's a lot of codes of conduct, but also like tools that are built into these platforms in order to provide people with some sort of baseline of safety. And I feel like that there is this front line of people who are marginalized communities face harm and they need to have some way to protect themselves and that it shouldn't be their role to be responsible for rejuvenating people And there's a lot of emotional labor that's involved there. And so I can understand why in a long scale of things, we want to have some sort of like restorative justice rather than just a punitive way. But I also understand that there needs to be some ways for people to protect themselves. So how do you resolve that tension with aspirations for this pathway towards trying to restore people versus people who just are not interested in being in relationship at all and just trying to be disruptive and people need to have the tools to protect themselves?
[00:09:38.519] Ruth Diaz: Yeah, great questions. And thank you for bringing up that piece of who does the burden fall on when this disruptive behavior is happening in these public spaces of who's going to negotiate emotionally and personally to help deescalate whatever is happening and build more of a community connection with whoever is being disruptive. It can fall to the emotional laborers and the under-recognized or marginalized groups The tool project is not about removing the block ban feature. It's about increasing and experimenting with a variety of community-led tools and interventions to build a variety of solutions to this that have never been really addressed before. That social VR has some overlap with social media and content moderation, where these tools originally come from, block and ban. But social VR has so much more potential to transform ourselves as humans. And so I think about the Troll Project as kind of like an eye-catching doorway. It's a doorway to a conversation that we've all been avoiding having because the nature of this technology has been built on entertainment and pleasure and escapism. And so the idea of having somebody come in and go through an uncomfortable experience and lean in and build community to do better the next time that shows up, it's a hard sell. But considering that I think all of us have a prankster inside of us, a class clown, so to speak, and In the most generalizable way for a lot of these people who are considered trolling, what I'm finding is that's where it starts for most of them. They are not necessarily initially trying to provoke a negative reaction. They're just trying to provoke any reaction. There's a loss of identity, I think, going on here for some people. And it can be perceived internally that people outside of them are almost intruding on their experience or space because they seem to be embodying through volume or avatar choice or what they're saying, they're embodying more diversity and more identity than that person has. And so there's this almost projective approach that these trolls are taking. This is not about rescuing the trolls or justifying what they're doing. It's incredibly destructive and harmful community behavior that I think has unfortunately led to some harmful decisions by the applications that are hosting these spaces to actually like not own these public spaces because they're so hard to moderate and control. But I don't think that that's the answer for communities. Block and ban is an individual solution. It's not a community solution. And this project is about starting that bridge and that conversation to say, how do we be a community together, both as developers and users of these systems, and build a metaverse that doesn't just throw people away?
[00:12:51.215] Kent Bye: So in looking at your YouTube channel, you're doing a lot of these one-on-one interviews within the context of VRChat, talking to people, either talking about their own experiences of trolling or maybe some people who were former trolls or some people who may have even trolled you in a certain context. And so as you're diving into this and doing these different interviews, have you looked at to see if there's any existing research or literature in other contexts with virtual worlds in terms of harassment and trolling? Or do you feel like that there's enough new emerging culture that is deviating from the existing body of literature of what existing scholars have understood about the nature of trolling?
[00:13:28.561] Ruth Diaz: I think a little bit of both. I think that to answer the second question, I think COVID changed the culture. And I also think that the access to virtual reality technology has increased with the lowered barriers to buying headsets. So the culture itself has had a huge influx of people who are not early adopter technologists that are really into building fascinating and complex things. But then In conjunction to the research out there, what I found is for the researchers who have looked at things like harassment and bullying in virtual spaces, they weren't actually in the virtual spaces. They were taking lists of people who were blocked and banned and interviewing them outside. They were sending surveys to these people. Rarely were there any interactions or direct observations. Since I started this project, there is one researching group. who has gone in and done these interviews. But as far as I can tell, it still wasn't initiated off of the trolling behavior itself. It was something like word of mouth reporting or whatever else, which I'm also doing as part of my sampling. So I think that there's something too, if we frame this behavior as a disinhibited temporary state of insanity or destructive behavior, catching it when it's happening and actually like talking to the people about what their awareness levels are of what they're doing and talking to the community around them that are either laughing, participating, blocking, like what is everybody actually doing or not doing to increase this or ignore it? And my broad expectation here was that going into these public spaces, I would maybe encounter three out of 10 trolls of sorts that would be willing to talk to me. And then those other seven times I might be crashed in my headset, I might be attacked or just ignored or blocked. It's been surprising to learn that it's more like eight or nine out of 10 that are willing to stop what they're doing, almost like they're taking a break at work. And have a real talk conversation about their destructive behavior. Many times not seeing it as that. Many times with very simplistic frames of I'm just having fun. And that there's some kind of misunderstanding, a deep misunderstanding of what social VR apps are versus all the other games that people signed into this technology utilize. They're literally called games. Horizon Worlds, Rec Room, VRChat are called games, but there's no way to win these games. And so then they're going in there with this kind of zero-sum mindset of I have to win and somebody else has to lose for me to feel a sense of accomplishment. And when they don't find those pathways, they become really destructive and bond with each other off of that.
[00:16:28.168] Kent Bye: Well, it sounds like your background and credentials makes you uniquely qualified to be able to stand in the face of a troll and apply some sort of like clinical psychology therapist intervention. And so maybe you give a bit more context as to your like background and your training in clinical psychology and like what you do for a day job or if this is your day job and like just give a sense of how are the other parts of what you're bringing in into these virtual spaces that you're able to apply in the context of these conversations.
[00:16:59.068] Ruth Diaz: Yeah. So the background in clinical psychology had a variety of different trainings, including working in inpatient psychiatric settings where there were several instances where large objects like chairs were thrown in my direction. So I think giving that as context of saying, you know, I've been to physical reality war of sorts where my job was not to throw a chair back. My job was to step aside and really as calmly as possible respond with curiosity and also new boundaries and see what that setting needed to be for those individuals for them to feel safe and functional as human beings around other human beings. So that's a little background where despite incredibly painful attacks and experiences I've had in social VR. not on the clock, so to speak, even though, no, this is not my day job. I have been able to always reference those moments and go, this is not a physical reality thing happening to me. Just very quickly, my brain feels the whoosh of the chair and knocking into the glass and hearing a crack or whatever. And I'm just like, that is not happening right now. Not a lot of people have that experience to be able to reference and not go into a trauma response as much. So that does help. I also think this conflict resiliency model where I have learned how to organize my emotions and track them so that I can very subtly and constantly deescalate people and not polarize in those conversations to where they perceive me as judging them, which then can create those kind of rage destructive responses does help a lot with this. I do this part time and I have a small group of part time volunteers. And part of what those volunteers are doing with me is, A, they're learning off of these videos if they want to do some of these interviews eventually also. And secondly, they're helping think about how to share this information with the public in an ethical and humane way. Most of the footage that we've gathered has not been released. There's a lot of footage that unfortunately could be so, let's say, clickbait, but also possibly damaging to the applications that I've done these interviews in that it has not served the common good to really think about how those should ever be released. They might be teaching tools someday with a lot of NDAs and qualifiers and maybe some good documentarians, but most of what we're releasing right now has been community leaders who are seeing the importance of these conversations and also some ex-trolls with some moderator history in their belt who can actually explain their experiences very insightfully of how they moved from that destructive mindset into a constructive place. So the context of what I do to actually like pay the rent, et cetera, I do cancel culture coaching. I do leadership coaching. I facilitate workshops on conflict resiliency, also on an environmental design that has become one of my loves in the last four years is making spaces that intuitively delight people, but also teach them something they might not normally want to learn. I'd love to invite you on a WorldHop sometime in Horizon, if you can stomach that, so I can show you some of our work.
[00:20:28.623] Kent Bye: Yeah, yeah. That'd be great to check out some of the spaces and group dynamics. And are you still holding regular meetings like you were in Altspace?
[00:20:37.687] Ruth Diaz: No, no. Mostly they're spontaneous moments where people start bugging me for a WorldHop or to learn something specific, like a conflict model, and then I'll schedule those events. But yeah, haven't been doing the regular events for a while.
[00:20:52.432] Kent Bye: Okay. And so this deepen, orient, transform model, maybe you could just give a bit more context for if this is something that you had developed or if this is something that has come across your radar from your research of frameworks for understanding how to navigate conflict.
[00:21:09.857] Ruth Diaz: Ah, the answer to those questions is yes, and I will expand. Okay. It's yes to both, actually. So conflict is an uncomfortable word for most of us, including me. And usually by the time we're saying it or consciously identifying, it's gotten to a point where it's more destructive than constructive. And we're feeling that gripping fear of loss and or need to boundary and distance. I've been studying conflict for probably two decades now just because of my own social work training background before I went in clinical psychology and just understanding what are the patterns of us as humans, but also as social creatures. that we can actually see at multiple levels between us one-on-one, between us in a group, and even between us as societies and governments. What are the same kinds of behaviors? That's just been fascinating for me personally. So there are some different models that this model was born from. One of them is a well-researched concept and frame called the drama triangle, which a lot of conflict resolution specialists and teachers use. And it takes three archetypes of conflict, which is the villain, the victim, and the hero. And it says all of these roles in conflict actually need each other to coexist in their extremes for conflict to kind of complete all the way and break everybody apart. And what I realized with that drama triangle and the different ways it's been used by different organizations is I always felt really frozen, like there was something missing and I was attracted to it, but I also didn't know where I was in all of that. Working in inpatient psychiatry with children actually kind of jarred me out of that place. And I realized that the fourth archetype, the fourth role of conflict, which kind of intuitively makes sense, and hopefully there will be more and more evidence to verify this, is the bystander, that the bystander actually anchors the conflict by their inactivity. And that that role unlocked so many different things for me when I started to recognize that that frozenness was contributing to conflict by not necessarily looking away, but not doing anything. And so this model was developed to include all four archetypes. And from that place, emotional synchronicities or polarities was identified. So the idea that when the villain archetype, that role of I am the destructor, I'm this pot stirrer, I am the one who's going to break what's happening. When that is initiated inside of me, the first emotion is not necessarily gonna be rage. It's actually a much smaller emotion, something that I feel many times per day, like frustration. I just wanna get bigger and louder and be like, ugh, you're not listening to me. And what I'd never understood, there was evidence for, but I'd never really plugged it all together, was that our emotions are communicated to each other through our nonverbals. And those nonverbals are the majority of how we are absorbing information from each other, not the actual words we're saying. And so those nonverbals are actually like this dance that we're doing. So when I'm frustrated and I'm like, Ken, you're not getting this, you might actually feel irritated and be like, whoa there, Ruth. Like, I'm just here to listen. And that's an uncomfortable infinity loop on that villain-victim axis. So then I might go to concern, which is another smaller emotion that happens many times. So being like, I think there's a problem here, Kent. Something's wrong. And then you might go into confusion to counter that. So concern is the hero kind of activating. And confusion is the bystander being like, I don't know what's going on here. I'm just going to back away. And so when I started to see how we dance with those emotions and jump between them, it kind of just activated so many different pieces of knowledge I'd learned over the two decades of higher education I'd been in. And I started to understand that this theory had never been completely gelled before, but it needed to exist, this eye-catching tool where people could start to hold on to non-dual thinking and in really adrenaline rush, fearful situations.
[00:25:30.327] Kent Bye: So the deep and orient transform, it implies that there's a process that's unfolding across these four archetypes that are on this two axes of, on one axis, you have the fixture, the hero, the victor on the other side, the vicarious bystander who's frozen. And then the other axis, you have the villain who's fighting and who's the billy versus the fight or flight polarity, which is the victim and the target.
[00:25:55.588] Ruth Diaz: Yes.
[00:25:55.928] Kent Bye: So you have these four different archetypes, these different polarities that are played out on this quadrature relationship, these two axes. So how does the deepen orient transform play back into these four archetypes?
[00:26:08.032] Ruth Diaz: Yeah. Thank you. It's great to have your mind on a model like this for just a moment. So deepening is about growing roots in the scarcity. So scarcity is a cognitive state we go into when we feel fear. And what we want to do is get away from the scarcity. We want to go towards the abundance, towards that sense of safety. And what this model is teaching is to actually like root into that moment and spread our awareness that we are not just the villain in that moment or the victim. We actually have identities and memories and history of being all four archetypes in our lives if we spend time thinking about it. And so by orienting to those different directions and those identities, it can put us back in the central place, which is human, is that center spot. So I'm deepening into that awareness of I have been a part of conflict in ways I'm not proud of, in ways I am proud of, in ways that I never resolved, and in ways it really had nothing to do with me and I was just watching. So those four statements of sorts. And I'm deepening into that awareness of I'm a human being in between all of these. I'm orienting to the other humans in the room and holding that frame on them to recognize this present moment and recognize that we are all making choices in every way we interact. We move towards each other and away from each other that can bridge healthier and more resilient connection. So orienting to that opportunity. And then finally using that transformation frame of abundance, just basically ripping off the name tag of that villain and being like, you're not my villain. You're my challenger. And as a challenger, you're trying to help me get back to the middle. And I'm going to help you do that. You're not my victim. You're my creator. And you are trying to offer something really diverse that maybe feels chaotic to me. And I get to make space for that and also give you feedback when it just seems like too much. And so that reframing of those scarcity archetypes is part of that transformation that brings me back into a place of presence and willingness to engage with what might be characterized as bad actors or unpleasant people for most people. Because basically I'm offering an asynchronous behavior set to people who are targeting or attacking or being really malicious and just holding on to, they can center in their human also and how quickly trolls and many different kinds of people will go off mute. VRChat specifically has a lot of people in it who don't speak and they type instead of speak. But there's a large amount of these people that especially when in spaces alone will just turn their mic on and just start talking to me rapidly because they're not being perceived by me as somebody who doesn't speak. And they're also really excited by the things they're hearing. And it's helping them transcend that fear of how their voice tone or gender might be perceived. So that's a way it gets used is it helps me stay very, very present and also metabolize emotional information from people that could be conflicting and confusing for most people who haven't seen this model.
[00:29:27.881] Kent Bye: Yeah, as you're speaking about it and as we're talking about it, it reminds me a lot of Carl Jung and his depth psychological approach, also looking at ideas like shadow projection, but also he talks about like holding the tension of the opposites until you have a reconciling third, which usually means that there's like a paradoxical situation where you have two immovable objects they're facing each other. And what ends up having to happen is that you have to, you know, as Ken Wilber talks about, transcend and include. So you have to transcend limitations of your own perspective, but include the insights from the other perspective. And sometimes, given that we live in such a polarized society, sometimes it just feels like that's an impossible situation when you have the Popper's paradox of intolerance where the other side is not willing to give any. So you end up being tolerant with something that's actually quite destructive. And so there's limits for that type of tolerance. And so I'm wondering how you navigate that holding the tension of the opposites there, but also recognizing Popper's insight where you can't actually be tolerant of folks who are completely intolerant.
[00:30:27.846] Ruth Diaz: Yeah. Well, I would say that the projection of seeing somebody as intolerant is a type of intolerance, right? And so there's the patterns that scientists and clever people have noticed of what the average people do. And then there's the moment we're in right now and how much common ground we can build in every interaction. There's a lot of nonverbal information that most of us are not trained or have actually been trained to ignore. And that data that is continually feeding us could be more conscious and then new outcomes and new mind states that are more inclusive of that best capacities of our shared common interests and needs can overlap more. So I think that these theories have helped us explain our suffering, but they haven't necessarily given us bridges to solutions, including boundaries for those bridges. So one of the goals of the Troll Project in the third phase, post-funding and actually like mobilizing partnerships and really getting activated and integrated with the applications themselves that these interventions want to exist in, would be to enact some type of reconciliation and repair pathways where people who are behaving in destructive ways, first of all, are not necessarily going to have direct access to public spaces in the beginning. They're going to have peripheral access with trained volunteers and even app employees. who are doing assessments with them and making sure that they're ready to enter a more free space socially. And then secondly, for those who still get in and start to become destructive in some way, either towards themselves and putting everyone in that bystander position or towards others, those people will be allowed to return with boundaries and conditions and be given pathways to explore in an edutainment concept of learning social skills and learning self-reflection, including about psychologists like Carl Jung and this exploration of the inner shadow, that they will be given skill sets and enrichment that they can change themselves and transform in order to get access to that thing that maybe made them too excited and they lost their sense of self.
[00:33:00.307] Kent Bye: Yeah, there was a clip that you were talking to Puzzle Child, one of your interviewees, and you were in this place of receiving trolling but also recognizing that there was some sort of hidden aspect of what was being revealed that was maybe a reflection of a broader culture where you actually went from being harmed from the experience of it, but also eventually grateful for recognizing that there was a larger sociological cultural function of what that drawing was trying to teach you about how to fit in with the normative standards of that environment. So I'm wondering if you can maybe elaborate on what you see as the role of trolls in terms of trying to flesh out the bounds of the taboos of the culture.
[00:33:42.710] Ruth Diaz: Yeah. Thank you. What a great summary. I'm glad that video worked for you. I think most people at shock value are like, what? You turned into a My Little Pony and then got inside of a jar full of unpleasant substances. Why would you do that? However, that was quite a journey with Puzzle and I to build a bridge through that harmful experience initially for me where It was one thing to be trolled by a majority male population. This was the first female who had ever plotted and successfully accomplished trolling me in a way that made me shaken and my self-awareness and feeling very out of place. Like, I really don't get this. However, it was a hard and important initiation for me to understand and dig deeper into meme culture. And I've been actually comparing meme culture to Carl Jung's philosophies of archetypes lately. And that memes in some respects are an exploration of our inner shadow and saying those taboo things, but not saying them, showing them. And they're not from me. I'm just spreading the joke. It's these kind of ways we excuse poor behavior or sometimes even dangerous concepts and spread them. And so, yeah, I think that there's all kinds of stories about how we can grow through wounding moments. And my journey with Puzzle was to understand why a woman would perpetuate a meme like that that had to do with, like... male semen. I mean, it's one of the most unpleasant things I've ever seen. But I think that as I've thought about it over time, I've realized that that is such an embodiment of the despair of this generation that is taking up most of the space in these social apps. And that sense of nihilism and that their creativity as a metaphor is captured, it's confined, and their innocence is drowning in that lack of path. And so while that initial interaction socially was really uncomfortable and I felt pretty ashamed, as I leaned into that out of my value of not marginalizing or vilifying, especially a female in tech, I realized that there was something to learn there, that I had some responsibility as a social science doing an ethnographic study to actually learn that culture that I wouldn't necessarily ever seek out myself, you know, that started that particular meme on 4chan, as many did, and how much those are just completely everywhere in these spaces and part of the language of how people talk to each other. And while they are uncomfortable for me and my generation, it doesn't mean they don't have wisdom and value to explain the pain and also the possibility of how we can kind of find a new dream and vision together.
[00:36:36.964] Kent Bye: Yeah. I also heard you speaking to one of the interviewees that you were talking to and mentioned about your own experience of going through an experience of being canceled. And then you had mentioned that you're also a cancel culture consultant. And so maybe you can maybe elaborate on what that means.
[00:36:53.772] Ruth Diaz: Yeah. Yeah. So this cancel experience was in social VR and it was specifically around anti-racism work that I've been doing for years. And I think that I was able to anticipate and predict the first layers of how that might look. And I did have some crisis management and contingency plans. for that. But I think it's the ripples of how quickly we know that cancel culture and social media can spread very fast. But I think in social VR, it's a different level, especially when the containers around them are encouraging things like competitions and zero sum mindset and how communities are relating to each other and it becomes more of an influencer culture and less about activism and more about pleasure and reward. So I think those were some of the overarching ingredients that set that up that definitely has brought me into that curious place around more of these realms that we don't want to look at and how those realms could be part of the solution to building stable and healthy and inclusive communities. in social VR. And so part of humanizing myself sometimes when I'm talking to people who are seeing me as this expert or maybe analyst and fearful that I'm objectifying them is to share some of those stories of personally relating to that sense of pain. I think the nature of the archetype of the troll is that they have been canceled somewhere and they're reenacting that trauma in this other place and sometimes starting to benefit and grow a sense of identity and connection off of it. And so I look at trolls almost like the white blood cells of our communities and If they don't have a pathway and a clear purpose, then they go from guards to vigilantes of sorts with no moral compass and no principles and just start to destroy. And when given purpose and given their humanity back, they get very invested in participating in healthy ways.
[00:38:57.128] Kent Bye: Yeah, it reminds me of an interview that I did with Van Jones back at an Institute of Noetic Sciences conference, 2005, where he was talking about how there's punitive justice when you send people to jail, but yet, or how they're in relationship to the community around them, it's all managed by the state and that they're not really put into relationship to the community. And that the restorative justice model is trying to ensure that you have some way that there can maintain that type of relationality in a way that is maybe even have different methods of healing or addressing the harms that have been done that don't involve exiling people off to prison or jail certainly i think there is a need for that in society that there's going to be limits to these types of restorative justice types of techniques and sometimes you do need to have that function of exile that has been a part of communities and cultures for a long time Which I think when you speak of like the banning and the blocking starts to have that type of exile. And so I'm really curious to hear some of your thoughts on this restorative justice model that's trying to either maintain the relationality, but rather than having the equivalent of the state in this context would be these platform companies, these big tech companies like Meta, Apple, whoever else that can manage these terms of service where if they have a code of conduct violation in one of the software programs, they could lose access to their entire VR headset because their terms of service are such that they could revoke access to your hardware at that point. So it's kind of setting up the situation where your behaviors in a certain context, if you mess up, you could lose access to not only the hardware, but also entire communities and experiences that are made available because they may be only available through these hardware platforms. And so I see on the long term, we need to figure out something that goes beyond just this kind of exile model, but also the emotional labor may need to be done by a community-driven effort like you're doing, rather than expecting it to be managed by something like these big multinational corporations. Love to hear some of your reflections on exile as a mechanism of the block and ban. And how do you maintain the relationality or put people back into right relationship through your approach or in the long term of what is needed to really address these problems holistically?
[00:41:13.288] Ruth Diaz: with me. I just wish I could talk to you all the time. You put concepts together in the way that I feel like I maintain a state of continual distraction thinking about it like this. So I want to go to an experience. I don't know if you saw my latest post on LinkedIn, but I recently last week witnessed my first suicide attempt in social VR with a gun. And That was a shocking and traumatic experience for me and everyone involved. And it really crystallized something for me around this idea of violence or destructiveness and how it was a violent and destructive thing to the community that was present. And it was also a violent and destructive thing towards that person and their own body. And if their Russian roulette game had been successful, then it would have been a permanently destructive thing. and much bigger trauma for everybody involved. And so while I wouldn't consider what happened there trolling and the classic nature of how communities frame that, I have heard people talk about trolling in a similar way. And I believe that restorative justice is one gear. Punitive justice is one gear. Transformative justice is the best solution, but the hardest one and the most longer-term investment solution. And so I don't think it's the communities have to solve this or the application platforms have to solve this. I think it's all of us that have to solve this. And that virtual reality is a unique landscape for us to practice those solutions together and switch between those gears to some degree. That initial response of you cause me pain, I'm going to exile you and cause you pain. That's natural inside of all of us. I have blocked and I have banned and I have voted to kick people out. I will continue to do that at times when I get really overwhelmed. However, I think that we have to step back and look at even these anti-cheat and AI tools that are being developed to catch these people and what they're doing wrong and what messages we're feeding these AI about our own humanity. And when do we actually start to look for and analyze the healthy relational behavior and reinforce that even in the people that maybe eight out of times are doing destructive, harmful things and start to reward them for the least harmful things and hold that harm reduction frame around these people initially instead of a catch them, boundary them, and exile them? Another point to make is a lot of these apps are starting to build and hold some accountability around if somebody is blocked or banned from their app. It's a temporary thing and there's better and better feedback coming quicker and quicker to the people on why that happened. But for users in these apps, those cues to say, hey, you blocked this person two weeks ago. Would you like to go to this world over here and learn about what the reported issue was and consider if you want to meet them for a mediated conversation or whatever else? Blocking in these apps currently is permanent by individuals. And that creates a real breakdown for community who are trying to be around each other and somebody has blocked someone else. And it creates a chaos in those situations that degrade the overall quality of that connection and make people just leave out of the awkwardness of it. So I think that from the developer end of things, this is a lot of complex solutions that don't feel like they have a lot of data behind them and feel like they have a lot of risk to experiment with and enact. And I think from the community end of it, when we're in these immersive spaces, it's a little bit like lucid dreaming. That sense of control, of being a leader, of being able to change our environments in a quick and meaningful way, or be a best version of ourselves that to some degree, many of us have failed at doing, which is why we're there in the social apps in the first place. Those are all really big barriers and kind of divides that we have to bridge through. But I go back again to the reality that like, this is a second reality. It's not the primary one we all have to connect in. We can't delete each other in physical reality for the most part. We may run into these people, you know, especially if we get really into this technology at conferences and everything else. So this idea of like, I've blocked you and now I don't have to think about you anymore is a very myopic and harmful thing in the long run. And I believe that if you think and add up all the community built content worlds and all these different social apps. And then you go into those, which I have, and you search for anything on psychoeducation, on behavior modification, on interpersonal skills training, on community design, on leadership. They don't exist. The communities have not been focusing on it. The apps have not been focusing on it. And somebody has to start this because it in many ways feels like we're building the biggest army of organized trolls unprecedented to our planet. The people who are not just exiled in physical reality, but are exiled in virtual reality. I mean, I just read, I don't remember who said it, but somebody said the most dangerous human is somebody who has nothing to lose. And I think we're making a lot of dangerous humans with these behaviors that alleviate our own sense of fear, but are not genuinely humane and are not building the future we want.
[00:47:14.480] Kent Bye: Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And one other point I wanted to dig into before we start to wrap up is, you know, you have this mapping of your two axes and four quadrants into emotional valence for each of these four archetypes. And it reminds me a lot of the Geneva wheel of emotions that has two axes of high control power versus low control power and then negative valence versus positive valence. And so there's some overlap with that, although I'd say this is a little bit of a different twist because you have the hero archetype having judgment, worry, and concern as some of the primary emotions that are kind of mapped out. And then the polarity with the vicarious bystander who's frozen is a lot more about shame, guilt, and confusion. the fighter, the villain, the bully has rage, anger, and frustration. And then for the victim flight on the polarity of that, it was the target of these attacks into terror, sadness, and irritation. So I love it if you could maybe elaborate on a little bit of these emotional valences of each of these four different archetypes.
[00:48:23.172] Ruth Diaz: Yeah. The way that I think about emotions is that they're the symptom or sometimes the bridge between what we think we know and what we feel in our bodies. Emotions can be felt in our bodies if we're practiced and conscious of that. But emotions are also just like the expression of whatever's in between that, what we think we know and then what we're feeling physically. And I was always taught that emotions are private. They are what separate us. I have my feelings, you have your feelings. I was never taught about the dance of these emotions and how we trigger them in each other, so to speak, how we amplify them, how we reinforce them in each other. In a scarcity state, when my view has gone from like really wide and open peripheral view, because I'm relaxed and I can take in more complex information. And then I'm narrowing my hands into a tunnel in front of you right now. In a scarcity state, I go into tunnel vision and I'm trying to be very simplistic and fast about my responses because I'm in a survival mind state. And so the further out that you get on those axes, the more fast paced the wiring of my brain is going to make quick decisions. And many times that means that I'm cutting you out of my awareness. I'm othering you and I'm making you separate from me as not worthy enough or vice versa. I'm making myself less worthy than you. You are the hero and I'm the bystander. I can't fix this. I'm not the expert. You're the expert. And I'm giving myself some level of permission to just not engage and look away and Well, we can think about those equations and those actions and be like, yeah, those exist. In the moment that those conflicts are happening, those decisions are being made, emotions are a really good way to track what's going on and actually start to see that our emotions are doing this dance with each other where we come together and we spark and we disagree. and we see the other side and we play the devil's advocate or whatever, and then the emotions that separate us and repel us from each other and actually lead us to make really big decisions in binary mind. If somebody's got to die, then it's me. Or if somebody's got to die, then it's you. And so these emotions We think of them as annoyances or extra things that if we just thought better, we wouldn't have to pay attention to. But I believe they're actually like the vitality of our life and when we can practice emotional fluency. in identifying how activated we are into these scarcity states and archetypes, we can actually build new perspectives together that we haven't practiced doing because it's always about who's right and who's wrong, who's good and who's bad. And so looking at something like virtual reality that isn't a 2D screen, it's an immersive space, it's an other reality, and looking at it as block or band, that is a binary frame. And that does a lot of harm. And these emotions are a way I believe virtual reality could help us practice our emotional fluency. And so when we emerge out of these technology devices, we're actually better, more well-trained to encounter the conflicts and dissonance and uncomfortable moments in our relationships.
[00:51:57.773] Kent Bye: Reminds me a lot of the work of Carla McLaren, who has done a lot of work on the language of emotions and how the emotions are pointing you to some of these deeper needs. I'm not sure if that's an influence on that at all.
[00:52:07.941] Ruth Diaz: Yeah, she's a core influence. I've had conversations with her and just so appreciate, especially her background, not being in psychology and how she was able to make digestible emotions that I had never even seen or understood in psychology, the way she explains them.
[00:52:25.882] Kent Bye: Yeah, there's a Sounds True audiobook version of her book that is really great that I listened to. I highly recommend checking that out for anyone who's interested in diving deep into your emotions and what they might be telling you.
[00:52:37.110] Ruth Diaz: Yeah, wonderful. I love that she gets to be the last piece to this. Carla's amazing.
[00:52:43.255] Kent Bye: Awesome. And now finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality might be and what it might be able to enable?
[00:52:50.717] Ruth Diaz: Yeah, I think right now we've got this, you know, people who like the idea but don't spend any time in it and then people who love it and spend too much time in it. And I think over time, My hope would be that we all have access more and more to this technology and we use it as a reset and rewire device, semi-matrix style, but not so I'm gonna inject a rod into your head, so to speak. You know, that we go in there to recalibrate ourselves and use this technology to rebalance our emotional states with delight, with fun, but also with that emotional gymnasium of growing insight into the places that are just suffering for us. I think one of the biggest problems with humans is that we are deeply emotionally constipated. And so we live in a binary mind state. We don't think in a systems frame with multiple options and stay curious with each other. We listen to respond instead of listen to learn. And I believe virtual reality is an incredible ticket to solve new problems and old problems in new ways. And learning how to become emotionally intelligent and fluid is a huge part of creating that complexity and organizing our minds so we can really hear each other and be solutions together instead of winning or losing or being right or wrong.
[00:54:21.921] Kent Bye: So I know that you've launched the Troll Project website. You've got a YouTube channel that has a lot of these different ethnographic clips and interviews. You're also going to be speaking at Augmented World Expo. So just curious to hear a little bit about what's next for the Troll Project.
[00:54:36.226] Ruth Diaz: Yeah, we are seeking funding. It is actually a pretty high-risk project with troll groups who organize and gamify doxing and hacking, et cetera. So it's unclear how long, now that this has gone public a couple of weeks ago, how long this project will maintain. Everybody in these videos have been given informed consent and have signed paperwork but i also see this it's a community project and so if people become afraid and they pull their interviews then we don't have a troll project anymore for the most part so we're definitely putting the word out there to try to get the support we need so we can make this a long-term thing and the thing i'm really excited about is with funding then being able to take some of the spaces and worlds that i've already built and tested with communities in horizon worlds And bringing those into other social apps and eventually designing applications and games off of this model and teaching conflict resiliency to people who are getting blocked and banned in games. And that part of their return to those games can be some psychoeducation and learning, even in very familiar settings to what they enjoy. where they maybe overdid it and did something really destructive. So funding, partnerships, advisory, we're looking for all the help we can get. And also interviews. I think the population we have the least on right now is actually people who have been affected by trolling. And so we're looking for creative ideas on how to ethically represent those stories and find them and give a voice to the people who have been harmed.
[00:56:18.905] Kent Bye: Right. Is there anything else that's slipped and said that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:56:23.866] Ruth Diaz: I think I just hope that anybody who listens to this or you included that we really start to look at virtual reality as a transformational tool that evolves beyond escapism and avoidance and becomes something that genuinely helps us survive as humans longer than this next generation. I think there's a lot of potential here. We just have to reframe and reprioritize where we're putting our funds and attention.
[00:56:52.113] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I think the exciting thing for me is that there's a lot of skeuomorphic, you know, taking the design patterns of things like social media and just copying and pasting them into VR. And like you were saying, sometimes that won't necessarily work in the long run. And so I think with VR, there's, new problems to solve for these challenges, but also new opportunities to evolve and grow and do something completely different with this community-led type of project is something that sounds fairly unique that you could do within VR and really have that kind of embodied face-to-face interactions and really dive deep into some of these issues. have these real moments of transformation, which I think is really exciting to hear about that potential. And yeah, just given enough support and funding to be able to carry on these types of initiatives and efforts and experimentations, I think would be great to see, you know, to have something like this exist so that we could see some alternative methods. So it's really great to hear that you've been on the front lines of helping to explore this, but also to experiment and seeing what's possible. So thanks so much for joining me today. In general down because it's really quite fascinating.
[00:57:56.132] Ruth Diaz: Oh, thank you, Ken. It's an honor to have a conversation with you. I've been a follower and fan for a long time.
[00:58:03.356] Kent Bye: So that was Ruth Diaz. She's a trained clinical psychologist and the founder of The Troll Project. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that, first of all, well, I think it's awesome to have alternatives to the existing banning or blocking because, you know, while that's certainly required for people to have good experiences within these platforms, it's for an individual perspective, then I agree with Ruth that it's not necessarily a viable collective solution to the problem and that there are going to be these types of technological solutions. But I do think there is value of having these alternative community driven processes that people could go through that are more focused on maybe some of the root causes of the trolling behavior. all that said there's certainly limits in terms of like the spectrum of trolling and the harm that can be done and a lot of trolling behavior is driven by a lot of sexist misogynistic homophobic behaviors that's not being inclusive in a way that is addressing these more systemic harms that i feel like has a different dynamic when you start to deal with that and i think in her interviews she's directly addressing some of these systemic harms from racism and trying to really interrogate people who are normalizing different racial slurs in a way that she is challenging them on that in this dialectical anti-racist process that she has within the context of some of these interviews for the troll project which you can go to the YouTube channel and see very short clips. But if you click through and go to the trollproject.com and scroll down to the bottom, she'll often have some unlisted videos on YouTube where you can watch the full context of the conversation. So I had a chance to watch a lot more after I had the chance to have this conversation just to get a little bit more context. So when I think about ways of dealing with any ethical or moral dilemma within the context of VR, there's basically like four major pathways to start to address some of these issues. There's the technological architecture and the code, which is kind of like a baseline of what are the things to protect people either personal space bubbles or block and ban. I think the groups and private instances that actually does a lot to mitigate a lot of these different types of dynamics. Some of this stuff happens in these public instances outside of your normal peer group of people and friends and just totally random people who are completely anonymous on the internet. So that is kind of like a recipe for when a lot of these different types of trolling behaviors can start to happen. So there's the technological architecture code, and then there's the culture and the community dynamics. To some extent, the code of conduct is like, this is the culture that we expect. And so then they have to have some level of moderation, either it's from the company itself or peer driven moderation of reporting different codes of conduct violations and having other technological means to be able to do that. And which usually leads to either blocking or banning. And then there's the broader context of the economic market solutions, as well as the law that's being passed by the government. And this is from Lawrence Lessig, where he names these four different levers. And I think generally there's these different types of solutions that you can start to address. So normally there's a technological solution. I think Ruth is really trying to elaborate here is what are the community driven types of solutions to this issue that could be out there to have much more of either restorative or transformative experience around trolling. So a lot of it seems to be rooted in this kind of depth psychological insights from Carl Jung and talking about the shadow and the concept of shadow projection and what she calls the dot model, which is the deepen, orient, transform. This is the model that she has developed. And so there's two essential axes. On one side, there's the troll, who is the villain archetype, who's fighting and being the bully. And then the other polarity point from that troll is the victim, someone who's put into this fight or flight reaction, who's the target of that abuse. And then on the other axis, there's the people who are either bystanding and not doing anything, they're freezing up and they're just kind of this vicarious bystander. And then on the other end, there's the heroes who are trying to fix and become the victor in the situation. And so understanding within a certain situation where you're falling within the context of the spectrum, either you are being the troll, you're receiving the troll, or you're outside of that direct interchange and you're either bystander witness that does nothing or the hero who tries to intervene and step in. and do something. And so if you're on the receiving end as some of these different trolling behaviors, there's the opportunity in the moment to see that as some sort of revealing of some deeper shadow projection that may be within yourself that's being manifested in this other person. I think that's sort of the mindset and frame that you start to get into in order to start to engage with these different conversations. Now, Ruth is a trained clinical psychologist and has been in situations where she's had chairs thrown at her. And so there's like high stakes, physical risks of engaging with some of these types of interventions that she's had within the context of her experience. In the context of virtual reality, it's a lot lower stakes because there's not as much physical harm to directly engage with some of these types of trolling behaviors. So it's an opportunity to have like a little bit more of a safe space to just have these different types of conversations. And as a social scientist, she's finding that like nine out of 10 times when she's trying to engage these trolls and really kind of interrogate and have a conversation and really dig deep into what's going on. She's been at least having these conversations, some of which that she's been releasing on the troll project. But I think there's a lot more stuff that she's recorded that she hasn't released yet at all. So she's asking a number of different fundamental questions like what is trolling? What's griefing? What's bullying? What's the difference between each of these? How do you start to deal with it? What are some solutions? So just to get some of the community reactions to their experiences of trolling. And so she's at this point focusing on a lot of people who have either been former trolls and that they've been reformed or people who are like community managers and have to deal with the trolling from that perspective as And she's looking for more interviewees of people who've been on the receiving end of that trolling, but also potentially other people who are active trolls. One of the interesting insights that was coming up again and again in both the interviews and what Ruth had said within this interview was that a lot of these social VR applications are being labeled as games. And so people are expecting some sort of like game-like behavior. So when they go into VR chat, they don't see a game. They kind of make up their own game and they have their own fun by just messing with people. And so I think there's a little bit of like the ways that we think about what these social VR experiences even are, because I wouldn't necessarily say that VRChat is a game. It's more of like a communications platform for people to come together and to connect in a variety of different ways. Rec Room, I think, has a lot more game elements than something like VRChat. Even though VRChat does have these games, most of the people that are in there are not doing game like activities. It's more of a hangout space of people to actually connect to each other and to communities in different ways. And also just how there's a sort of identity component of trolling where like there could be either a loss of identity or maybe they've gone through their own rejection or canceling or they just feel unconnected in a way that they're not able to maintain regulated states of emotions. And so they're acting out in different ways. And so Yeah, I think through this ethnographic project, she's trying to get a little bit more of these direct accounts of the different experiences that people are having while they're in the act of trolling. And also, what would it look like to have more of a community-driven solution to some of these issues and like a space for people to come in and actually connect to people on a much deeper level. There's a application that's on the Quest store that's called Inner World that has all sorts of different peer groups for a variety of different types of contexts. That is much more that kind of environment to have these group discussions. It may be emerging and happening in some of these different platforms like Horizon Worlds and VRChat and maybe even like EngageXR as well. But I feel like, you know, there's some specific platforms that are completely dedicated to that. So definitely check out InnerWorld if you want to look into some of these different types of peer groups and mental health support and more peer-to-peer support rather than like proper clinical counseling. so yeah the troll project is looking to expand and potentially get some funding to further develop some of these different ideas and to potentially like have more formalized processes for intaking and having a restorative and transformative processes for trolls and that right now they're still doing a lot of these ethnographic interviews and today on june 20th 2024 which is actually going to be presenting at augmented world expo so there'll be a video of that presentation that'll be coming out either later today or tomorrow as well to get a little bit more context and information for some of the latest information since this conversation I did a couple of weeks ago ahead of AWE. So yeah, really curious to see where this goes and very much a worthy project to try to dig into some of the deeper dynamics of trolling. So that's all I have for today. And I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a support podcast. And so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
