TMM: The Boring “Team Maktmissbruk” Story
Some people on the internet, especially Facebook that very much took over from IRC (not entirely, but enough to rewrite history) know me by the name TMM. Switching up to Facebook, adding IRCers as friends there, also revealed a lot of names of the people I only knew as MegaHal and such. However, some of the people, through projects like Big Brother and Masterplan (swedish reality shows) also made me know people in person (except for those who knew me from school). This is the story about TMM. A project started as a “fun thing” on IRC, very much also known as the Anti-Ragging culture of the 90s.
1997: Inititation
I didn’t wake up one morning and decide that I’d become an acronym. TMM happened the way most internet things did back then – accidentally, half as a joke, half as a reflex to nonsense around me. In the earliest days I used the nicknames TM and TT. It took me painfully long to realise how stupid short abbreviations were – people reuse them, misread them, or simply snatch them because they look cool (or they didn’t even know about me and took it for other reasons).
That’s how I ended up with TMM, and on cranky days TMM-TT, when TMM started to mutate into everything – like a Quake clan idea somewhere around 1998-1999 (Multiteket, with Olofsson Brotherhood). Most notably, and where it mostly began, was through the kickscripts I wrote that threw out “raggarna” (the flirters), where TM/Team Maktmissbruk appeared as part of the kick reasons. Regular use of TMM faded out around August 2017; after that I mostly used my own name.
What followed was not planned branding. It was a way to show that I wanted to do something – to change, improve, make things more efficient, and throw out what didn’t belong. IRC had a problem – the raggar‑swine that wandered from channel to channel to harass women and DM them like it was a sport. Anti‑ragg, in my terms, meant writing triggers and small modules that could throw people out before they turned a room toxic. Whether that was jealousy, irritation, or early feminism – I’ll let that remain unsaid. I was pissed off. And I wasn’t alone.
2007: From IRC to Facebook
IRC was a perfect mask. You could be MegaHal one day and three other personalities the next. The move to Facebook happened gradually – many of us stayed on IRC, but at some point I realised it could be fun to add a few IRC contacts on Facebook (not just to see who they really were, but because I cared since many of us carried the same values of the society). That also revealed their real names and lives, but these were not people I ever really fought with. Some familiar handles from #sverige showed up with profile pictures, families, politics. It was disorienting and clarifying at once. That pivot exposed a truth about TMM – it was never a mysterious team. It was me, trying to protect rooms where conversations mattered.
Big Brother and Masterplan (2003-2005) bridged the gap between alias and person, even though the very early start was with Baren, 2002. What had been chat ops and bot scripts grew into chat servers and forums that tied into actual TV productions. Suddenly I wasn’t just the guy with a quirky nickname and a short fuse – I was the person people called when their community tech caught fire. I met people face to face. Some put a real name to TMM. Some never did. Both versions of me existed in parallel for a long time.
Team Maktmissbruk and real life
The phrase Team Maktmissbruk started as a tongue‑in‑cheek label on how I moderated – a wink that said I knew I was heavy‑handed, and I did it anyway because the alternative was letting the room rot. The stamp stuck. If someone flooded, targeted, or kept nagging women, they learned very quickly what the triggers did. ircII/Epic aliases and Eggdrop modules – two lines of code culture, one goal. Keep the chat usable without turning it into a police state. Absolute RAGG was never a polished product – it was a kit. It lived in headers, triggers, and comments, and it travelled between shells and servers with me.
Did everyone love it? No. Did it work? Often enough to turn Anti-ragg into a shared habit. A few friends started to adopt the theme. The moniker bled into gaming during lunch breaks in 1998–1999 at the Multiteket education programme – a higher-level sibling to Datorteket – where we learned to make multimedia presentations. For me, Quake was a daytime diversion there, and to play more I cleverly made a presentation about Quake and the participants at Multiteket, that shared space with Datorteket.
The person behind the letters
Currently I really don’t actively use the terms of TMM anymore, except as an invisible artist name that still lingers on SoundCloud (it’s currently not even on Spotify anymore, which may be the plan to reinstate at least as a verified artist). The alias was phased out. I don’t remember exactly when but after 2007, when starting to use Facebook as “Tomas Tornevall” on Facebook (instead of Thomas Tornevall), i started to flag “TMM” as a kind of extra addon-handle only (to let people from the past that it’s me). What happened during that time were music releases under the TMM name – but in practice the alias had become invisible. In 2009 a few tracks were released via RecordUnion, but they collided with another TMM out there. A lot of things started and stopped around then, but the real change of name and the artist identity took even longer. The Facebook page Tornevall (later also DJ Tornevall) was not created until 13 March 2021, right in the middle of an ongoing pandemic.
Between 2003 and 2006, a lot of us learned that community is infrastructure. But community is not only infrastructure. Personal involvements also matter – and we learned the hard way how much they can damage relationships. Sometime after May 2006 and before December 2006, a serious conflict erupted between a handful of people, some with key roles over IRC servers connected to Big Brother. That conflict eventually led to TMM ending the relationship with what was then m-irc.net (m-sys), by simply withdrawing the entire server network from the shared constellation and continuing to run what was left of Big Brother’s chat servers. I still haven’t been able to pin down the exact date.
In the 1990s, music for me meant trackers and shitty software. I composed with a keyboard, mouse clicks and weird notes, not a piano. FastTracker made sense to a brain that thought in if‑statements and labels. Around 2009 I hauled the alias out of the server room and into distribution experiments. TMM went to Spotify – and the result was honest and rough. I had help from friends, I moved back to Skåne and absorbed a ton of bass‑forward electronica from the web radio era. Out of that came Bloodline – a track built like a sprint, borrowing a line from a 2007 film merely because it fit the mood. Freakshow landed as a mini‑album beside it. Neither were masterpieces. I continued producing more tracks offline, even though I tried to get more content online. But I wasn’t ready.
Then came the naming problem – again. There were other TMMs out there. Some with catalogues I wouldn’t touch with a bargepole. My releases were conflated with somebody else’s profile, and there was no clean way to fix it without detonating more than I intended. So I pulled it. Reluctantly. Later, the nostalgia grew louder than pride, and the material began to return – under my own name where it belongs. Psychopath has already surfaced with another artist name than TMM, but Bloodline will come back with proper data. And with this, maybe other creations that never seen the light before.
Project Anti-Ragg
Here’s the unromantic version. Anti‑ragg meant: build a barrier to make life livable for the people you want to keep. The scripts looked for patterns – the public “hey girl” opener, the instant PM after a single public line, the persistence after a very clear no. Throttle. Time‑out. Kick. Ban. Repeat.
I wrote those scripts because good people were leaving rooms and the idiots were staying, happily unaware that most of the users on IRCNet had always been men. Trying to be flirtatious on IRC was like looking for female prisoners in a male prison (not literally, but it paints the picture). The dominance on chats was always men, even if many women were also drawn in. But the golden days are probably over – except perhaps if you count DreamHack. If the price of keeping decent company was that some troll called me a maktmissbrukare – fine. Wear the stamp. In hindsight, Anti-ragg was early content moderation with the edges exposed. Today’s platforms wrap the same logic in policy decks and machine learning. Back then we had shell accounts and a will.
The long arc from TM to TMM to TMM-TT to Thomas Tornevall is a lesson in ownership. Initials are cheap. Craft takes time. But initials also dilute (sometimes) – when the music collided with a different TMM, it wasn’t a legal problem – it was an identity problem, since nicknames and artist names are not very well protected with trademarks. The solution was to just let it go. Besides, TMM wasn’t really a clever thing to run on.
Today, TMM is not a team, a bot, or a clan. It’s a footnote that still makes friends smile. The person remains. If you were there – in #sverige, in late‑night chat rooms that felt like kitchen tables, in forums that exploded when a show went live – you already know the punchline. TMM was never a myth. TMM was a mask I wore to keep the lights on while I figured myself out
A short half accurate timeline of the development
- Mid‑1990s – lived in the trackers. Music meant modules, not studios.
- 1997 – TM becomes TMM, and Anti‑ragg goes from an idea to scripts that actually kick.
- 1998-1999 – Quake shows up as a lunch break diversion at Multiteket, where it became part of a multimedia presentation project – a very local phenomenon, not a clan.
- 2000s – chat servers, forums, and the broadcast era take over my calendar.
- 2006-2007 – conflicts lead to leaving m-irc.net/m-sys and continuing Big Brother chat servers independently.
- 2009 – Bloodline arrives as proof that curiosity outruns perfection. A few tracks are also released via RecordUnion under the TMM name.
- 2017-08 – last regular use of TMM on IRC; the alias retires from daily use while the person keeps building.
- 2021-03-13 – the Tornevall Facebook page (later DJ Tornevall) is created in the middle of the pandemic.
- 2022-2023 – early seeds of a restart are planted, with experiments under my own name and the rebuilding of a presence as DJ Tornevall.
- 2024-10 – the remaining TMM catalogue is revoked from Spotify due to the naming circumstances around TMM.
- 2020s – the music returns under my name, and the old tracks find their permanent home.
Closing – why I’m writing this now
Most of this story is quite irrelevant for most of the people I know. The reason I’m writing this is because the whole TMM artistry went wrong when another so‑called powerdick shifted things and my songs ended up under an unknown artist profile. Nostalgia however plays a big part – people don’t know what TMM is or was, but some still do. So this is my way of setting it straight: not just for me, but for future questions. I have kids thay may find their way, or some day wonders what the hell this is all about. TMM was a phase, a mask, a habit – sometimes misunderstood, sometimes abused and sometimes extremely hated.
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