The extent to which the totalizing appropriation through subversive practices, in the visual arts and political activism, can be turned around in order to experience the possibility of a different present is the subject of the proposed contribution. Using the hashtag #DCBlackout and looking at Amalia Ulman’s Instagram performance „Excellences and Perfections“ (2014), the aim is to examine how ‚trolling‘ strategies, previously primarily used as populist manipulation by the political right, are reflexive and subversive and thereby can develop enlightening critical potential. Our thesis is arguing that through the use of mass media rhetoric and distribution channels inside social networks, ‚aesthetic trolls‘ provoke an art and political world that is concerned with criticality and honesty and can present its own defaults and blind spots. In addition to the resulting doubts about the digitally postulated existing, thus something like digital authenticity itself, the reflexive moment, i.e. the influence of the doubt on the individual her/ himself who spreads the digital message, is examined.