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Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, the famous dystopian book (and later movie with Malcolm McDowell) about youth culture run amok, is one of the most disturbing takes on postmodern life, not just because its content is disturbing but also because it has proved remarkably prophetic. While we may not be obsessed with Beethoven ("Ludwig van, baby!"), there's a certain eerie similarity about the trends in violence and popular culture that Burgess depicts and contemporary life, such as the use of "manscara" in Great Britain.

Take, for instance, this graffiti that showed up spray-painted on the side of the Carnegie Library in Oakland:

Kinda funny, yes? Actually, vandalism is apparently the new poetry. The vandals have apparently read Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and it's on a library, so it's ironic, so I guess that makes it OK.

But perhaps the most disturbing trend is the growing presence of "trolls" on the web, people who perpetrate acts of emotional violence on the web for fun. As Mattathias Schwartz writes in The New York Times Magazine:

Measured in terms of depravity, insularity and traffic-driven turnover, the culture of /b/ has little precedent. /b/ reads like the inside of a high-school bathroom stall, or an obscene telephone party line, or a blog with no posts and all comments filled with slang that you are too old to understand.

The nadsat of the troll culture is a language of mysanthropic hatred that finds its jouissance in cruelty. But it's all in fun, so that makes it OK, too:

Thirty-two years old, he works “typical Clark Kent I.T.” freelance jobs — Web design, programming — but his passion is trolling, “pushing peoples’ buttons.” Fortuny frames his acts of trolling as “experiments,” sociological inquiries into human behavior. In the fall of 2006, he posted a hoax ad on Craigslist, posing as a woman seeking a “str8 brutal dom muscular male.” More than 100 men responded. Fortuny posted their names, pictures, e-mail and phone numbers to his blog, dubbing the exposé “the Craigslist Experiment.” This made Fortuny the most prominent Internet villain in America until November 2007, when his fame was eclipsed by the Megan Meier MySpace suicide. Meier, a 13-year-old Missouri girl, hanged herself with a belt after receiving cruel messages from a boy she’d been flirting with on MySpace. The boy was not a real boy, investigators say, but the fictional creation of Lori Drew, the mother of one of Megan’s former friends. Drew later said she hoped to find out whether Megan was gossiping about her daughter. The story — respectable suburban wife uses Internet to torment teenage girl — was a media sensation.

Welcome to the new fun.