How I Got Radicalized

I Was a Teen Troll Against Incels on 4Chan

For years, I was an anonymous vigilante against their extreme hate

Photo illustration: Save As/Medium. Source: Getty Images.

Welcome to How I Got Radicalized, a series from GEN that tells the story of a cultural moment that made you drastically rethink how society works.

I remember being on autopilot as I went through my process of wiping my identity on Tor, an open-source browser dedicated to maintaining internet anonymity. I exited the browser, double-checking that everything related to it was closed and triple-checking before finally turning off my VPN. I then slammed my laptop shut and sunk back into my bed, exhausted.

It was a weird liminal time of night. If I went to bed right away, I would get at least three and a half hours of sleep before school. But if I couldn’t force myself to relax, it would be another day functioning on burnt espresso from the Starbucks on 49th Street in midtown Manhattan.

My bones felt tired. All I wanted was the sweet reprieve of unconsciousness, but every time I closed my eyes, all I could see were fucked-up images of dead Black people. Eric Garner, who had been killed a couple months prior, was tattooed to the backs of my eyelids.