a guide to comm goblins

day 5/6 at the rococo hotel malice of Noom with thanks to our sponsor, stupid Noom.

This is long and took me a long time so you are now enduring three days in the Rococo Hotel Palace of Harold Bloom.

I am a Goblin myself, so look at this as an Inside Edition-tier expose. Exposing the business, as it were.

Enough handwringing, let’s talk Goblins!

COMMS Goblins

Acronym: Coercive, Obscurantist, Malignant, often-Murderous Semioticians.

Characteristics: COMMS-Goblins leverage abstractive, diffractive, and extractive prose-stealings to subvert or pervert original structure, intent, or expectation. Rather than “punks,” “vandals,” or the “^𝔊𝔊Macerative Plunderers^𝔊𝔊” of all that was once parsible, apprehensible, and understandable,” these Goblins consider their role as custodial, believing they are doing narrative laundry. Despite their characteristic blenchedness of hope, all maintain a performative enthusiasm and are never entirely joyless.

Methods: Goblining rewards lateral association over coherence. Some rely on prelapsarian citations, others flights of fanciful clause migration. Whether denizens of 4chan or the post-critical Habermas-slaughter of meaning, The Goblin’s theft is not ideological—it is adaptive.

Diet: The gastro-compressional, -digressional, and -indiscretional content they excrete is a byproduct of their bovine digestive torpor. Fattened by low-calorie discourse they can neither effectively digest nor resist, they rechew the curdled cud of this oversaturated content and regurgitate ruminant language that no longer knows or cares what it’s for. Goblins are not merely irresponsible readers and writers; they are the emulsifying bile salts of a culture where interpretation is adversarial, access to information is stratified, and scholarship—pureed into an easily-digestible foie gras for the rich—no longer provides societal sustenance.

Outputs/Inputs: Goblins produce documents with titles like 2026 BlackRock Global Market Outlook and Therme Canada’s Heritage-Inspired Wellness Concourse, with its Terrazo and Holistic-Juicerie, is Eco-Calibrated as a Regenerative Public Realm to Serve an Evolving Parkdale Community. Goblins write all auto-renewal policies. Goblins have historically been responsible for various Harvard Medical School-induced pseudoscientific phenomena such as phrenology, e.g., The Ball-Peen Approach to Deviant Convexities, Moral Laxity, and The Supple Occiput of the Female—from Harvard Medical School.

80% of articles in peer-reviewed journals are penned by Goblins and submitted under the salutary Nom de Fume[1] of the orphan boiling in their Foucauldron for another of its melancholy midnight meals.

Habitat: The Goblin’s home is under bridges. They prefer bridges that are needlessly named. Bridges lacking entrances or egresses, allowing the Goblin to deny there was ever any approach but the one which brought you to its layer of despair.

The Goblin’s vocation home is Plausible Deniability. “What makes you Saussure?” goads ^𝔊𝔊The Ghimbelling Goblin^𝔊𝔊 towards anyone ill-versed in the bracketing of the referent from the real, hoping they’re drawn near enough to learn the difference between a phonetic and physical hatcheting.

Relationship with Audience: These Goblins refer to their readers as dupes, or sometimes little bitches. Sometimes the duped bitches conflagrate in crowds beneath a Goblin’s bridge with the modern-equivalent of pitch-torches, sickles, and flails. Having been “burned before,” The Goblin has grown increasingly motivated by fear, impotent rage, and pettiness[2] Consequently, Goblins currently only accept remote work.

Media Ethics Panels sometimes lure The Goblin into rare public view. Like blood-drenched dictatorial strongmen, they are granted immunity by idealists whose moral need to identify the origins and extent of evil in the world leads to the naïve hope that The Goblin—who slithers on stage, pops his collar, and shouts, “Good evening, dupes, rubes, and little bitches!”—might provide the answer.

“Don’t blame The Goblin,” The Goblin says before sticking moderator Steve Paikin in the ribs with its least-gnarled and thus pointiest claw. “The Goblin didn’t create the material conditions of Goblining nor the carceral collisions of 21^st century hermeneutics.”

Class 1: Disruptive Persuaders

These Goblins operate by stylistic, linguistic, or interpretative distortion, and do a lucrative side hustle[3] in persuasive or affective manipulation.

Chaotic, vital, and somewhat self-aware, they are entirely useless to any common good or humanistic endeavour. While they do not cross the threshold into likable delinquency, they are the most honest Goblins, honest with themselves anyway, in that they know they are being, in their puerile parlance, little shits.

^𝔊𝔊The Galling Goblin of Gricean Implicature^𝔊𝔊

Philosopher of Language Paul Grice’s maxim of implicature is designed to avoid the risk of being misinterpreted. Co-operative speech being anathema to Goblins, these ill-mannered imps have reversed-engineered the pragmatics of Logic and Conversation for maximal misinterperative flouting.

“Well,” The Goblin of Gricean Implicature intones haughtily, “I suppose that depends on what you mean by thought.” And just like that, you’re doing the work.

Having recognized others’ insecurities as the path to its particular pathological Palace of Gloom, this Goblin often occupies supervisory roles, carefully curating insolent imputations, which it then transmutes into ‘casual comments’ aimed to inflict maximal psychic harm.

Diet: People trying new things.

Sample Lines: In response to your new perm: “Well, if you need to shave your head, you need to shave your head.

In response to your performance at the poetry slam, “You made…choices.” And who could forget that infernal favourite, “…interesting.

Deviancy/Flourish: The most murderous, but also the best-dressed Goblin, often wearing slacks, but only so you will “wonder what it’s up to.

Habitat: “is typing” notifications.

^𝔊𝔊The Archivist of Absence^𝔊𝔊

This Goblin doesn’t so much ‘pick apart’ as ‘pave over’ paragraphs. Believing with Heidegger[4] that unconcealing is a kind of robbery, this most olfactively-unattractive Goblin’s only revealing characteristic is its signature fragrance of erasure dust: rubbery.

Subtractive, contractive, and redactive, he would have you believe the omitted passage is too sacred, profane, or dangerous for popular reconciliation—and its reconcealing serves the common good. It then severs any challenge to its authority with an editor’s note feigning unquestionable closure of the matter.

Often employed to protect the sanctity of state and corporate secrets.

Job Titles: Global Public Relations Liaison - Nestle Waters; Counter-Disinformation Officer -NSA; Narrative Management Czar - Shell Media Contingencies Division

Tactics: Euphemistic reframing of death counts, economic downturns, and basic human right deprivations.

Sample Line: “Redacted in the interest of FFFF” usually followed by an abyssally-cantilevered em-dash.

Habitat: Ellipses, lacunae, triple-strength strikethroughs.

Deviancy: Claims to bring its scalpel to Media Ethics Panels for metaphoric purposes only, but never explains the need to brandish it so frequently.

^𝔊𝔊The Agent Revocateur^𝔊𝔊

Similar to The AoA, this Goblin dedacts not to erase, but to replace with woolly summations flattering to its own particular pathologies. Often, the content in its abridging brackets is several dozen times longer than the content it abbreviates.

Job Title: As it serves only its own ends, it is unemployed, and styles itself a hobbyist

Interperative Result for the Reader: Foolhardily follow a footnote expecting earnest explication and you’ll find only its greasy fingerprints, a few featherless chickens, and its initials—TAR.

Self-Delusion: Believes it grafts composite issues with surgical precision rather than the ^𝔊𝔊Near-Rightive Bric-a-Brac of Egoic Imposition^𝔊𝔊 its grift is diagnosed as in The DgSM as **awaiting recent revisions from The DiaGoblinisticalSophicalManual’s daily revisions**.

^𝔊𝔊Compression Goblin^𝔊𝔊

Master of the rhetorical pressure cooker, ^𝔊𝔊The Compression Goblin^𝔊𝔊 takes complex, ambiguous arguments and crushes them into a single shimmering aphorism. After he’s been biled down what he calls the “caterwauling,” the catarrhal condensate of its claim scours broadly from meaning scores of π (everything/tautological) to ∅ (nothing/aporetical)[5].

He takes a joint 783-page technical report from The European Securities and Markets Authority titled Black Box Capitalism: Algorithmic Trading and the Marginalization of Human Judgment and comes away with: “The algorithms running the NYSE are no different than cuneiform tablets, they simply process transactions.” On the anniversary of Ariel Durant’s death, his NYRB think piece summarizing The Story of Civilization trash compacts the forty-year project to his own nonsensical claim that, “History is the echo of a gun fired twice, and thus, then, not yet once.”

Tactic: Conjures the illusion of resolution through rhetorical sleight of hand, and semaphorical usuary.

Sample Lines: π = “All is as it ever was, which is how it must remain.” ∅ = “Run out of questions and you’ll have your answers.”

Flourish: Wears Rouse-coloured glasses.

Diet: Tater Taut Pi.

Key Weakness: Can be devoured whole by an open question.

Liminal Type

^𝔊𝔊Therme Advertorial Goblin^𝔊𝔊

Rumoured at The Press Club to be a Wendigo or occupying spirit. Given the high number of Press Club members putatively possessed, scholars of media necro-modalities dismiss this as apocryphal projection or hypocritical cope[6].

This Goblin’s medium is the $75,000 half-page ad masquerading as meaningful discourse identical to any adjacent genuine articles except where Sponsored Content appears in 4-point (blue) font against the (also blue) image of a frothy whirlpool heliogravure-enhanced in triple-ink density at the cost of the Reasonable Annual Wages[7] of three journalists.

While truth must be avoided at all costs[8], it doesn’t outright lie, having learned to leverage tonal gradients and facts selected for “soothe-factor.” Nor does this Goblin so much write as receive their copy through a pneumatic tube powered by the Thermeneutic steam valve. The valve emits either ‘talking points’ or ‘press releases’ that help this Goblin pressurize all critique of political, economic, and spiritual conditions until it evaporates into a soothing mist of affectively-buffered language, future tense-optimism, and scrutiny deferral.

Newly-privatized space is a-bridged into a “value-calibrated wellness activation zone.” The paving over of the perfectly paradisiacal Michael Hough beach to put up a parking lot is advertorialiaised into a “Lake Ontario-adjacent aquifer of community reconnection.” And from actually being open to the public, conceptually, being open to the public is semantically blanched until synonymous with being a paying customer.

These artless articles are never oriented towards a reasonable, or even the rumoured ‘real’ reader, but to pacify some composite family into compliance.

In the Spon-Con, the family, always of four, always indoors, always grateful to the great god Thermes for a “family-first multi-generational aquatherapeutic soak offering just as much to sexy singles.”

In reality, some families of four are so dissatisfied with Sobeys’ steak prices they may give this voting thing the old college try. Hence the high number of advertorialist executions in recent Bay Street bloodletting rituals.

Previous incarnations described demolished heritage buildings buried beneath the bedrock of “public-private optimism[9]” as “elevating outdated architectural narratives into modernity-facing urban scapes.” And when Sidewalk Toronto was forced off the road by the long-haul trek of “next phase deficit-neutral growth planning,” it styled this civic “hiccup” as a “synergistic testbed for long-horizon innovation and next-gen civic ideation.”

This Goblin has value because it once had a soul. The appearance of its byline is the exchange of that soul to aid in the Thermelimination of informed dissent.

And while this name is an asset, it is also the rarest of Goblinic liabilities—accountability. This may explain the strange sympathy this Goblin sometimes evokes. The sympathy may also stem from the unspeakable duress they are subject to, e.g., sedated with scopolamine and hypnotized, e.g., statistically over-prone to spontaneous human combustion, e.g., families abducted and held until the Therme Advertorialist can credibly brand the hungry and underhydrated huddled masses fogging the boulangerie windows as an “ambient multicultural presence.”

Job Title: Spon-COMMS Goblin

Diet: 16K stochastic-screened halftone composite renderings of counterfactual, or, as only too much time can prove, fictional grass.

Interperative Result: Dampens critique of civic crises into a climate-, conversation, and consensus-controlled culture of increasingly mildewed Terminal Uplift.

Deviancy: Wears many faces but no one knows where it acquires the skin.

Class 2: Procedural Enforcers

Forever asking The Question Concerning Penology, “Why persuade when you can enact?” these administrative apparatchiks operate downstream of choice. They distribute harm through user interactions designed to be skimmed.

They trap through eye fatigue and disinterest, not deception. After the click, after the unread contract, after the consent that could not reasonably be expected but was agreed to.

^𝔊𝔊Fine-Print Goblin^𝔊𝔊

Its ambition is not to win your trust, but to dissolve your attention. It speaks from the margins, slipping intent beneath your gaze, not to hide it, but to make you complicit in your own misreading.

Tirades in the anti-human clarity of unreadable clauses stacked dozens deep, each cascading confusingly back to one of its many predatory predecessors. Negations, obfuscations, but never any of the real implications all lead to this Goblin’s lone joy in life: the signatory’s Perceptual Lack upon which it blames the signatory’s Procedural Lock-In. That’s when you notice, between the teeth of their feline-toothed combs, that you have signed in blood.

Diet: Latin synonyms for commits to, e.g., obligatur, e.g., promittit, e.g., fidem dedit, from 17th century law books

Interpretative Result: Specializes in clauses precluding escalation, eliminating third-party review, or waiving legal recourse.

Deviancy: Cumulative procedural harms scale with each advance in scroll velocity technologies.

Sample Line: “It was disclosed.”

^𝔊𝔊UX Goblin^𝔊𝔊

These Goblins occlude pathways and clog up halls in which policies can, ostensibly, be read, but are almost always ignored, only to be accidentally, bindingly, and ruinously consented to.

Among the most nimble Goblins, they highlight buttons most deleterious to the user’s financial well-being, gray out opt-out-clauses, and nudge obscenely towards “Ah, why not,” through layout bias, inconsistent interface logic, and asymmetries intended to foreclose contestability and recourse.

Their signature tone is the cool indifference of a platform’s Customize My Experience Wizard—usually a cartoon dog in a radical wizard’s hat, waving a bone as a wand, and flying across your screen on a skateboard, saying, “Sorry my dude, that just won’t fly!” If users push back, it peels off its skin to reveal its glazed Goblin eyes and snarls, “If you’d read the contract you’d know that it never was.”

Tactic: In 99 consecutive contexts Accept means “move forward through this Labyrinthine opt-out maze so you can get back to work” but in the 100^th it means Accept Terms and Conditions.

Interpretative Result: You followed a path of irrevocable consent into a state of non-negotiable “user empowerment” to pay an extra $30,000 for exploitive balance insurance on your massive credit card debt in exchange for “your family’s peace of mind in the untimely event of your beheading.”

Sample Line: “Your complaint has been received, we will do our best to...”
Habitat: “No human override” systems; pre-recorded helpline trees, Microsoft OneDrive.

Class 3: Mnemonic Deviants

Concerned primarily with controlling narrative or epistemic availability, these Goblins engage with memory, historical referents, or archival stability. Their methods are flawed, their metaphysics inconsistent, but they act not to trap, not to persuade, not to dominate—but to preserve something for themselves, something they must consider sense.

^𝔊𝔊The Magpie Goblin^𝔊𝔊

This Goblin sees permitting an argument to reach its conclusion with introduction and premise intact as morally irresponsible.

Magpie Goblins fancy themselves first-rate multitaskers. You might find one eating the brains of your favourite chicken while ringing the necks of your favourite children. What you will not see is a lot of handwringing regarding his bastardization of any phrase he finds appealing from the premises scaffolding the original author’s larger argument.

Disagreeing with Walter Benjamin that “a paragraph is a phalanx” that cannot suffer cowardly defectors or absenteeism of any kind,” the Goblin Panglosses over the paragraph to masticoncatenate a mealy mouthful of sentences brave or stupid enough to hold the line on their own.

With immaculate impecunity, it gambols from clause to clause, and rambles decoherently from cause to cause in a state of ecstatic specio-temporaleitmotif-adjacency, gleefully, recklessly excising the, “It could be said…” or “Some have argued” prior to an author’s counterpoint, pinning only the counterpoint on the helpless, often dead, author.

The Goblin Watchdog Group of the Durham Region say it simply ignores the wayfinding of a well-constructed thesis containing more than one claim or counterclaim to grope for whatever baubles up to the bright surface of its attentional paean. But to The Magpie, the baubles it nibbles shine brighter than the scaffolding it has stolen them from, especially now that the scaffolding lies in a rubble of random noise.

Something of a moralist, and one of the few Goblins that self-identifies as a progressive, it believes there are enough completed arguments in the world that no mother could love: e.g., the argument once made in favour of smoking as a digestive relaxant; e.g., urban highways as vectors of working-class access; e.g., lead paint as an aesthetic enhancer of childhood spaces.

Job Title: Epistemic Dérivant.

Diet: Sips from fast food dips while picking at a plate of capers and cocktail onions.

^𝔊𝔊The Pedant of Primacy Goblin^𝔊𝔊

Insisting even The Cosmic Microwave Background bears its own unique historical biases, this Goblin insists on going back, all the way back. As far back as possible. Before the Fall. Before the Greeks grabbed Alethia by the waste and commenced this long and wounding linguistic road to ruin.

Like the Therme Advertorial Goblin it doesn’t lie. It doesn’t need to. Its knowledge precedes yours so thoroughly that its sources no longer exist, or if they do, they have branched into the Unscanned Antiquities wings of libraries that are either boarded up, or, preferable to this Goblin, burned to the “primordial ground” like the Library of Alexandria.

Tactic/Diet: Begins diversionary hullabaloo with, “As was argued at the Madrid Colloquium of ’89…” and hopes you try to find the rotographed appendix to the post-session delegate packet he has faithfully cited. It knows you will fail, and when you show up furious, fingers curled to ring the suppurating boils from its knobby neck, well Goblins get a lot of nice meals that way.

Sample Line: “Blessed Augustine’s De Trinitate would be disregarded at the peril of our project[10].”

Interpretive Result: Delays forward movement by demanding first principles. “To understand this properly, we must start with the real…” with 17 footnotes manning the gates of meaning so reader-victims know what It means when It uses the word “real.” All of which exhausts the reader before a claim arrives—and in its voluminous corpus, none yet have.

Deviance: His secret shame: despite the putative wisdom he’s Goblined from the past thirteen billion years, his circular low-information statements make him so unemployable he recently auditioned for the role of Therme Advertorialist Goblin. “For the Civitas Ummah to divine the Therme group’s Hephaestean programme in toto, we must start with why Thales first philosophized that water was the arche of all that could be typified,” this may bring us to a merely provisional understanding of Asclepeionic dispensations of public purification and ablutionary obligation,” surprising few in The Goblin community, he was not hired.

Post-Goblinoid Composites

A point beyond taxonomy; beyond tricks and turns of phrase; beyond terminological coins without faces or fiduciary backing, beyond rhymed themes, rhizomatic schemes, and beyond every programmatic regime—a place where authorial and editorial identity dissolve into the rotting heap we can no longer sell, satirize, or even signify.

^𝔊𝔊The Agent Composteur^𝔊𝔊

No longer a Goblin, it is totally and tonally content to be pointedly unproductive. It does not find prestige in publication, nor strive for remuneration. Its forsaken voice, disarticulate from swallowing too much flakey particulate, resounds[11] fecally rather than focally. And yet, in this Viconian cycle of recirculation, its perspective is not impeded, but paradoxically reseeded. It is not a compositer of narrative cohesion, but the compost heap of all things Cartesian.

When accused of scope creep by jealous Goblins, it offers no defence, simply gurgles a mulchy doxology mulchily while munching now old but once-New Sciences, e.g., The Ball Peen Solution Part 2: Phenomenology.

Due to its passivity, it is The Agent Composteur’s rumoured pupil who stirs Goblinairy panic:

The Therme Advertorial Goblin—

once predictably positioned as a provisioner of soft-focus spin—having had the misfortune of visiting a Therme Spa in Europe and observing how Therme’s futural claims have played out in past incarnations, is experiencing some ThermExistential dread.

The ‘boulangerie’ it ThermEvangelized as a “plant-forward nutrient-dense innovation platform” can now be named for what it is: a typical Aramark-run salt and sugar trough for the experientially incarcerated.

It sees the ThermEventuality of its words, “non-exclusionary, progressive public resource,” calcifying into a 99-year private lease with subletting rights to arms expos, predictive policing analytics firms and mobile porn game startups, all foreboding ominously of its cold-blooded ThermExecution in some shadow-y Etobicoke suburb.

Where once it layered promotional clauses like clean towels in a CGI locker room, now it flits frantically as The Magpie Goblin in some hellishly steamy hall of mirrors trying to find in the distended reflections of the 2400-DPI brand-compliant smear, which is all that remains of its melted mouth and in its sunken, shameful eyes, the slightest sense of just who or what it set out to be.

It cannot yet compost like ^𝔊𝔊The Agent Composteur^𝔊𝔊, but in its frenzy, has returned to that early, pesky problem of postmodernity: the project of Churning its guts out. The outputs aren’t pleasant—fermented and sour sludge, coffee grounds and eggshells, brown and green matter—but the Goblin is almost certain, despite his long-standing abuse of the word, they are genuinely holistic, and (with its ability to observe the obvious slowly returning) more organic, than its ThermePhilic DeceptiCons.

It’s not much, but among Goblinic Harm Reduction Advocates such as myself[, this putrefactive praxis is optimistically regarded as a turn away from the fictive vapours of ThermePhilic SootheSaunaErrs, and a turn towards the only path to redemption: to say goodbye not to language, but to all of this compulsive, profit-modelled, egoic out. To forget all this writing so we might get back to rotting.

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[1] Another Goblin “joke” in poor taste, claim orphan’s advocacy watchdogs. Goblins hate watchdogs, as well as all dogs.

[2] Victims’ Associations are lobbying for a diagnostic criterion in The DiaGoblinal Sophistical Manual for what they have termed ^𝔊𝔊Compositional-Defiant Disorder^𝔊𝔊.

[3] Side hustle, a term kept in common parlance by ^𝔊𝔊The Goblin Gary Vaynerchuk^𝔊𝔊.

[4] All Goblins arrive at Heidegger, by way of Gadamer, entirely too early in life. Some speculate this is how people actually become Goblins.

[5] The origins of this Goblin’s Face Tattoo, incidentally, which reads, Π∅Thing Left Unsaid.

[6] Calling things “a cope” is the creation of ^𝔊𝔊The Neologicaustic Goblin of Sense-, Sanity-, and Subjectivity-Reducing Shibboleths in the Soulless Metapragmatics of Social Media Speech Acts and Stance Markers^𝔊𝔊.

[7] As these RAW deals were recently redefined by the ^𝔊𝔊NG-R.A.T.E.: (the Neoliberal Goblin’s Revaluation Algorithm for Talent Elimination)^𝔊𝔊.

[8] As newspapers can no longer incur costs per se, at least not as the term has been massaged by the ^𝔊𝔊The Neoliberal Goblin of Econo-Terminological Drift^𝔊𝔊.

[9] More accurately defined as Public Pessimism.

[10] All Goblins, even repentant ones, have projects. For example, ^GGMartin Heide^GGer’s project of being. Goblins, rarely complete their “projects” because of their many polysubstance impairments.

[11] Heard through the moans in its dreams and the wound in the paeans of its rendition of the Gloria.

[12] ^𝔊𝔊The Self-Loathing, Seldom-Paid, Small Press-Published Goblin^𝔊𝔊, diagnostidentifiable by my ^𝔊𝔊Portmanteaun of Petulant Sado-Satirical Gripin’ and Grievin’^𝔊𝔊