His entire internet persona seemed to consist of him deconstructing other people’s semi-coherent rants. Poor spelling and bad grammar were easy targets for his devastating wit and ability to use spell-check.

Explaining the fallacy of maintaining such an easily satirized persona was futile at best and usually resulted in an extended personal attack on the word choices such critics used (even if those critics counted themselves as friends).

The internet was a perfect forum for his unfocused hatred and derision because it gave him the biggest soapbox with the least amount of personal responsibility. He never saw the faces of the people that he attacked. He never had to deal with bruised egos and the spirits that he crushed in his rampages across message boards and mailing lists.

He was a man and he felt empowered in a way that he imagined men had not been since the days of Leif Garret, when men stood proud and tall and had full, feathered heads of hair. (These days, his hair was thinning a bit more than he was willing to admit. But that didn’t matter, really, because no one who mattered ever saw him in person.)

The idea that answering a person gave them validity did not enter into his consideration because that was not the way his universe worked. Ignoring someone did not convey the same meaning in a medium where thousands of anonymous lurkers ghosted through vigorous discussions and heartfelt confessions. The internet was, to him, a place of interaction and there was no better form of interaction than stating ones opinion – loudly, with force and repetition.

That he was just another voice, howling in the wilderness, adding to the overweaning noise that crowded out the ostensible signal that his fellow users tried to follow meant nothing to him and would have been angrily denounced if it had been pointed out.

In the end, he was just another bitter old crank who would have been better served (and far more satisfied) if he’d spent a decade or two sitting in his window with a shotgun, watching the sidewalk for unlucky pedestrians. His untarnished ego did not even twitch in recognition when he saw the innocuous sig “opinion without opposition leads to tyranny,” even though he was the subject of the original comment.

He might have died, old and alone, or he might have lived a full and happy life with a wife and children. The anonymity that gave his voice such power also removed his ability to keep friends and acquaintances on the net. Nobody cared when he left and nobody wondered when he was coming back. And nobody even bothered to wonder why.