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innuendostudios · 3 years

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I was invited to give a talk on GamerGate over Zoom in early 2021. I've long been frustrated that there isn't a good timeline of GG and its origins on YouTube. When people ask "what the hell was GG anyway?" they often get referred to my or Dan Olson's videos on the subject, but both of them were made while GG was ongoing, and presumed a degree of familiarity on the part of the audience. There was just too much to say about what was already happening to spend time getting the audience up to speed, and it was safe to assume our audiences had enough context to follow along. But time moves fast on the internet, and many people who now care about such things weren't there while it was happening, and are lacking the necessary context to follow the better videos. For a long time, I've only been able to direct them to RationalWiki's timeline, which is excellent but so exhaustively comprehensive that it's likely to scare off first-timers.

I realize an hourlong lecture isn't necessarily helping matters, but the first 20-or-so minutes of this video are my attempt at streamlining the timeline such that people can be up to speed on the most important stuff fairly quickly. The rest is talking about what it all meant, how it prefigured the Alt-Right, and using it to better understand digital radicalization.

This video was made with the help of Magdalen Rose, who edited the slides to the audio while I was laid up with a back injury. Go sub to her channel! And please back me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

FUCKING VIDEO GAMES? FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. THEY MADE DOZENS OF PEOPLE MISERABLE FOR YEARS OVER VIDEO GAMES! NOT EVEN FUCKING VIDEO GAMES, FUCKING ARTICLES ABOUT FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. THIS IS WHAT PASSES FOR LEGITIMATE GRIEVANCE. ARE YOU KIDDING ME WITH THIS SHIT??

Hi! My name is Ian Danskin. I’m a video essayist and media artist. I run the YouTube channel Innuendo Studios, please like share and subscribe.

I’m here to talk to you about GamerGate, and I needed to get all that out of the way. I’m going to talk about what GamerGate was and how it prefigured The Alt-Right, and there are gonna be moments where you’re nodding along with me, going, “yeah, yeah I get it,” and then the sun’s gonna break through a crack in the wall and you’ll suddenly remember that all this is happening because some folks - mostly ladies - said some stuff - provably true stuff, I might add - about video games and a bunch of guys didn’t like it, and you’re gonna want to rip your hair out. By the end of this, you will have a better understanding of what happened, but it will never not be bullshit.

Also, oh my god, content warning. Racism, sexism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, rape threats, threats of violence, domestic abuse - I’m not going to depict or describe at length any of the worst stuff, but it’s all in the mix. So if at any point you need to switch me off or mute me, you have my blessing.

Brace yourselves.

Some quick prehistory:

In 2012, feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian ran a Kickstarter campaign for a YouTube series on sexist tropes in video games. And, partway through the campaign, 4chan found it and said “let’s ruin her life.” And a lot of the male general gaming public joined in. And by “ruin her life” I’m not talking 150 angry tweets including dozens of rape and death threats per week, though that was a thing. I’m talking bomb threats. I’m talking canceled speaking engagements because someone threatened to shoot up a school. I’m talking FBI investigation. The harassers faced no meaningful repercussions.

And in 2013, Zoe Quinn released Depression Quest, a free text game about living with depression. They received harassment off and on for the next year, most pointedly from an incel forum called Wizardchan that doxxed their phone number and made harassing phone calls telling them to kill themself. The harassers faced no meaningful repercussions.

(Also, quick note: Zoe Quinn is nonbinary and has come out since the events in question. When I call Zoe’s harassment misogynist, understand I am not calling Zoe a woman, but they were attacked by people who hate women because that’s how they were perceived. Had they been out at the time things probably would’ve gone down similarly, but on top of misogyny I’d be talking about nonbinary erasure and transphobia.)

Okay. Our story begins in August 2014. The August that never ended.

Depression Quest, after a prolonged period on Greenlight, finally releases on Steam as a free download with the option to pay what you want. In the days that follow, Zoe’s ex-boyfriend, Eron Gjoni, writes a nearly 10,000-word blog called The Zoe Post, in which he claims Quinn had been a shitty and unfaithful partner. (For reference, 10,000 words is long enough that the Hugos would consider it a novelette.) This is posted to forums on Penny Arcade and Something Awful, both of which immediately take it down, finding it, at best, a lot of toxic hearsay and, at worse, an invitation to harassment. So Gjoni workshops the post, adds a bunch of edgelord humor (and I am using the word “humor” very generously), and reposts it to three different subforums on 4chan.

We’re not going to litigate whether Zoe Quinn was a good partner. I don’t know or care. I don’t think anyone on this call is trying to date them so I’m not sure that’s our business. What is known is that the relationship lasted five months, and, after it ended, Gjoni began stalking Quinn. Gjoni has, in fact, laid out how he stalked Quinn in meticulous detail to interviewers and why he feels it was justified. It’s also been corroborated by a friend that Quinn briefly considered taking him back at a games conference in San Francisco, but he became violent during sex and Quinn left the apartment in the middle of the night with visible bruises.

Off of the abusive ex-boyfriend’s post, 4chan decides it’s going to make Zoe Quinn one of their next targets, and starts a private IRC channel to plan the campaign. The channel is called #BurgersAndFries, a reference to Gjoni claiming Quinn had cheated on him with five guys. A couple sentences in The Zoe Post - which Gjoni would later claim were a typo - imply that one of the five guys was games journalist Nathan Grayson and that Quinn had slept with him in exchange for a good review of Depression Quest. Given the anger that they’d seen drummed up against women in games with the previous Anita Sarkeesian hate mob, #BurgersAndFries decides to focus on this breach of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover story, many of them howling with laughter at the thought that male gamers would probably buy it. This way, destroying Quinn’s life and career and turning their community against them would appear an unfortunate byproduct of a legitimate consumer revolt; criticism of the harassment could even be framed as a distraction from the bigger issue. Gjoni himself is in the IRC channel telling them that this was the best hand to play.

The stated aim of many on #BurgersAndFries was to convince Quinn to commit suicide.

Two regulars in the IRC, YouTubers MundaneMatt and Internet Aristocrat, make videos about The Zoe Post. Incidentally, both these men had already made a lot of money off videos about Anita Sarkeesian. Matt’s is swiftly taken down with a DMCA claim, and he says that Quinn filed the claim themself. (For the record, in those days, YouTube didn’t tell you who filed DMCA claims against you.) Members of the IRC also reach out to YouTuber TotalBiscuit, who had been critical of Sarkeesian and dismissive of her harassment, and he tweets the story to his 350,000 followers, saying a game developer trading sex for a good review might not prove true, but was certainly plausible.

This is where GamerGate begins to get public traction.

Zoe Quinn is very swiftly doxxed, with their phone number, home address, nudes, and names and numbers of their family collected. Gjoni himself leaks their birth name. The Zoe Post, and the movement against Quinn - now dubbed “The Quinnspiracy” - make it to The Escapist and Reddit, which mods will have little luck removing. The Quinnspiracy declares war on any site that does take their threads down, most vehemently NeoGAF. People who defend Zoe against the harassment start getting doxxed themselves - Fez developer Phil Fish is doxxed so thoroughly, hackers get access to the root folder of his website.

In what I’m going to call This Should Have Been The End, Part 1, Stephen Totilo, Editor-in-Chief at Kotaku where Nathan Grayson worked, in response to pressure not just from The Quinnspiracy but an increasing number of angry gamers buying The Quinnspiracy’s narrative, publishes a story. In it he verifies that Quinn and Grayson did date for several months, and that not only is there no review of Depression Quest anywhere on Kotaku, not by Grayson nor anyone else, but that Grayson did not write a single word about Quinn the entire time they were dating.

In response, The Quinnspiracy declares war on Kotaku. r/KotakuinAction is formed, which will become the primary site of organization outside of chanboards. The fact that their entire “movement” is based on a review that does not exist changes next to nothing.

Some people start to see The Quinnspiracy as potentially profitable. The Fine Young Capitalists get involved, a group ostensibly working to get women into video games but who have a Byzantine plan to do so wherein they crowdfund the budget and the woman who wins a competition gets to storyboard a game, but another company will make and she will get 8% of the profits, the rest going to a charity chosen by the top donor. 4chan becomes the top donor. They like TFYC because the head of the company has a vendetta against Zoe Quinn, who had previously called them out for their transphobic submission policy, and he falsely accused Quinn of having once doxxed him. 4chan feels backing an ostensibly feminist effort will be good PR, but can’t resist selecting a colon cancer charity because, they say, feminism is cancer and they want to be the cure to butthurt. They also get to design a character for the game, and so they create Vivian James, who will become the GamerGate mascot.

Manosphere YouTubers Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini launch a Patreon campaign for their antifeminist documentary The Sarkeesian Effect and come to The Quinnspiracy looking for $15,000 a month for an indefinite period to make it, which they get.

In what will prove genuinely awful timing, Anita Sarkeesian releases the second episode of Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, and, despite not being a games journalist and having nothing to do with Quinn or Grayson, she is immediately roped into the narrative about how feminists are ruining games culture and becomes the second major target of harassment. Both she and Quinn soon have to leave their houses after having receiving dozens and dozens of death threats that include their home addresses.

After being courted by members of the IRC channel, Firefly star Adam Baldwin tweets a link to one of the Quinnspiracy videos and coins the hashtag #GamerGate. This is swiftly adopted by all involved.

In response to all this, Leigh Alexander writes a piece for Gamasutra arguing that the identity that these men are flocking to the “ethics in games journalism” narrative to defend no longer matters as a marketing demographic. Gaming and games culture is so large and so varied, and the “core gamer” audience of 18-34 white bros growing smaller and septic, that there was no reason, neither morally nor financially, to treat them as the primary audience anymore. Love of gaming is eternal, but, she declared, “gamers,” as an identity, “are over.” Eight more articles contextualizing GamerGate alongside misogyny and the gatekeeping of games culture come out across several websites in the following days. GamerGate frames these as a clear sign of [deep sigh] collusion to oppress gamers, proving that ethics in games journalism is, indeed, broken, and Leigh Alexander becomes the third major target of harassment. These become known as the “gamers are dead” articles - a phrase not one of them uses - and they make “get Leigh Alexander fired from Gamasutra” one of their primary goals.

Something I need you to understand is that it has, at this point, been two weeks.

Highlights from the next little bit: Alex Macris, a higher up at The Escapist’s parent company, expresses support for GamerGate; he will go on to write the first positive coverage at a major publication and cement The Escapist as GamerGate-friendly. Mike Cernovich, aka “Based Lawyer,” gets GamerGate’s attention by mocking Anita Sarkeesian; he will go on to hire a private investigator to stalk Zoe Quinn. GamerGate launches Operation Disrespectful Nod, an email campaign pressuring companies to pull advertising from websites that have criticized them. They leverage their POC members, getting them, any time someone points out the rampant racism and antisemitism among GamerGaters, to say “I am a person of color and I am #NotYourShield”; most of these “POC members” are fake accounts left over from a previous, racist disinformation campaign. Milo Yiannapoulos gets involved, writing positive coverage of GG despite having mocked gamers for precisely this behavior in the past, and gets so much traffic it pulls Breitbart News out of obscurity and makes it a significant player in modern conservative news media.

[Hey! Ian from the future here. This talk mostly addresses how GamerGate prefigured the Alt-Right strategically and philosophically, but if you want a more explicit, material connection: Breitbart News took its newfound notoriety to become, as its Executive Chair phrased it in 2016, "a platform for the Alt-Right." That Executive Chair was Steve Bannon, who threw the website's weight behind The Future President Who Shall Not Be Named, and, upon getting his attention, would then go on to become his campaign strategist and work in his Administration. So, if you're wondering how one of the central figures of the Alt-Right ended up in the White House, the answer is literally "GamerGate." Back to you, Ian from the past!]

In what I’m calling This Should Have Been The End, Part 2, Zoe Quinn announces that they have been lurking the #BurgersAndFries IRC channel since the beginning and releases dozens of screenshots showing harassment being planned and the selection of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover. #BurgersAndFries has a meltdown, everyone turns on each other, and the channel is abandoned. And they then start another IRC and things proceed.

It goes on like this. I’m not gonna cover everything. This is just the first month. It should be clear by now that this thing is kind of unkillable. And I worry I haven’t made it obvious that this is not just a chanboard and an IRC. Thousands of regular, every day gamers were buying the story and joining in. They were angry, and no amount of evidence that their anger was unfounded was going to change that. You could not mention or even allude to GamerGate and not get flooded with dozens, even hundreds of furious replies. These replies always included the hashtag so everyone monitoring it could join in, so all attempts at real conversation devolved into a hundred forking threads where some people expected you to talk to them while others hurled insults and slurs. And always the possibility that, if any one of them didn’t like what you said, you’d be the next target.

To combat this, some progressives offered up the hashtag #GameEthics to the people getting swept up in GamerGate, saying, “look, we get that you’re angry, and if you want to talk about ethics in games journalism, we can totally do that, but using your hashtag is literally putting us in danger; they calling the police on people saying there’s a hostage situation at their home addresses so they get sent armed SWAT teams, and if you’ll just use this other hashtag we can have the conversation you say you want to have in safety.” And I will ever stop being salty about what happened.

They refused. They wouldn’t cede any ground to what they saw as their opposition. It was so important to have the conversation on their terms that not only did they refuse to use #GameEthics, they spammed it with furry porn so no one could use it.

A few major events on the timeline before we move on: Christina Hoff Sommers, the Republican Party’s resident “feminist,” comes out criticizing Anita Sarkeesian and becomes a major GG figurehead, earning the title Based Mom. Zoe Quinn gets a restraining order against Eron Gjoni, which he repeatedly violates, to no consequence; GG will later crowdfund his legal fees. There’s this listserv called GameJournoPros where game journalists would talk about their jobs, and many are discussing their concerns over GamerGate, so Milo Yiannopoulos leaks it and this is framed as further “proof of collusion.” 4chan finally starts enforcing its “no dox” rules and shuts GamerGate threads down, so they migrate to 8chan, a site famous for hosting like a lot of child porn. Indie game developer Brianna Wu makes a passing joke about GamerGate on Twitter and they decide, seemingly on a whim, to make her one of the biggest targets in the entire movement; she soon has to leave her home as well. GamerGate gets endorsements from WikiLeaks, Infowars, white nationalist sites Stormfront and The Daily Stormer, and professional rapist RooshV. And hundreds of people get doxxed; an 8chan subforum called Baphomet is created primarily to host dox of GamerGate’s critics.

But by November, GamerGate popularity was cresting, as more and more mainstream media covered it negatively. Their last, big spike in popularity came when Anita Sarkeesian went on The Colbert Report and Stephen made fun of the movement. Their numbers never recovered after that.

Which is not to say GamerGate ended. It slowed down. The period of confusion where the mainstream world couldn’t tell whether it was a legitimate movement or not passed. But, again, most harassers faced no meaningful repercussions. Gamers who bought the lie about “ethics in games journalism” stayed mad that no one had ever taken them seriously, and harassers continued to grief their targets for years. The full timeline of GamerGate is an constant cycle of lies, harassment, operations, grift, and doxxing. Dead-enders are to this day still using the hashtag. And remember how Anita had nothing to do with ethics in games journalism or Zoe Quinn, and they just roped her in because they’d enjoyed harassing her before so why not? Every one of GamerGate’s targets knows that they may get dragged into some future harassment campaign just because. It’s already happened to several of them. They’re marked.

(sigh) Let’s take a breath.

Now that we know what GamerGate was, let’s talk about why it worked.

In the thick of GamerGate, I started compiling a list of tactics I saw them using. I wanted to make a video essay that was one part discussion of antifeminist backlash, and one part list of techniques these people use so we can better recognize and anticipate their behavior. That first part became six parts and the second part went on a back burner. It would eventually become my series, The Alt-Right Playbook. GamerGate is illustrative because most of what would become The Alt-Right Playbook was in use.

Two foundational principles of The Alt-Right Playbook are Control the Conversation and Never Play Defense. Make sure people are talking about what you want them to talk about, and take an aggressive posture so you look dominant even when you’re not making sense. For instance: once Zoe leaked the IRC chatlogs, a reasonable person could tell the average gater, “the originators of GamerGate were planning harassment from the very beginning.” But the gater would say, “you’re cherry-picking; not everyone was a harasser.”

Now, this is a bad argument - that’s not how you use “cherry-picking” - and it’s being framed as an accusation - you’re not just wrong, you’re dishonest - which makes you wanna defend yourself. But, if you do - if you tell them why that argument is crap - you’ve let the conversation move from “did the IRC plan harassment?” - a question of fact - to “are the harassers representative of the movement?” - a question of ethics. Like, yes, they are, but only within a certain moral framework. An ethics question has no provable answer, especially if people are willing to make a lot of terrible arguments. It is their goal to move any question with a definitive answer to a question of philosophy, to turn an argument they can’t win into an argument nobody can win.

The trick is to treat the question you asked like it’s already been answered and bait you into addressing the next question. By arguing about whether you’re cherry-picking, you’re accepting the premise that whether you’re cherry-picking is even relevant. Any time this happens, it’s good to pause and ask, “what did we just skip over?” Because that will tell you a lot.

What you skipped over is their admission that, yes, the IRC did plan harassment, but that’s only on them if most of the movement was in on it. Which is a load of crap - the rest of the IRC saw it happening, let it happen, it’s not like anybody warned Zoe, and shit, I’m having the cherry-picking argument! They got me! You see how tempting it is? But presumably the reason you brought the harassment up is because you want them to do something about it. At the very least, leave the movement, but ideally try and stop it. They don’t, strictly speaking, need to feel personally responsible to do that. And you might be thinking, well, maybe if I can get them take responsibility then they’ll do something, but you’d be falling for a different technique I call I Hate Mondays.

This is where people will acknowledge a terrible thing is happening, maybe even agree it’s bad, but they don’t believe anything can be done about it. They also don’t believe you believe anything can be done about it. Mondays suck, but they come around every week. This is never stated outright, but it’s why you’re arguing past each other. To them, the only reason to talk about the bad thing is to assign blame. Whose turn is it to get shit on for the unsolvable problem? Their argument about cherry-picking amounts to “1-2-3 not it.” And they are furious with you for trying to make them responsible for harassment they didn’t participate in.

The unspoken argument is that harassment is part of being on the internet. Every public figure deals with it. This ignores any concept of scale - why does one person get harassed more than another? - but you can’t argue with someone who views it as a binary: harassment either happens or it doesn’t, and, if it does, it’s a fact of life, and, if it happens to everyone, it’s not gendered. And this is not a strongly-held belief they’ve come to after years of soul-searching - this is what they’ve just decided they believe. They want to participate in GamerGate despite knowing its purpose, and this is what would need to be true for that to be ok.

Or maybe they’re just fucking with you! Maybe you can’t tell. Maybe they can’t tell, either. I call this one The Card Says Moops, where people say whatever they feel will score points in an argument and are so irony-poisoned they have no idea whether they actually believe it. A very useful trick if the thing you appear to believe is unconscionable. You can’t take what people like that say at face value; you can only intuit their beliefs from their actions. They say they believe this one minute and that another, but their behavior is always in accordance with that, not this.

In the negative space, their belief is, “The harassment of these women is okay. My anger about video games is more important. I may not be harassing them myself, but they do kind of deserve it.” They will never say this out loud in a serious conversation, though many will say it in an anonymous or irreverent space where they can later deny they meant it. But, whatever they say they believe, this is the worldview they are operating under.

Obscuring this means flipping through a lot of contradictory arguments. The harassment is being faked, or it’s not being faked but it’s being exaggerated, or it’s not being exaggerated but the target is provoking it to get attention, which means GamerGate harassers simultaneously don’t exist, exist in small numbers, and exist in such large numbers someone can build a career out of relying on them! It can be kind of fun to take all these arguments made in isolation and try to string together an actual position. Like, GamerGate would argue that Nathan Grayson having previously mentioned Zoe Quinn in an article about a canceled reality show counts as positive coverage, and since Grayson reached out to Quinn for comment it’s reasonable to assume they started dating before the article was published (which is earlier than they claim), and positive coverage did lead to greater popularity for Depression Quest. But if you untangle that, it’s like… okay, you’re saying Zoe Quinn slept with a journalist in exchange for four nonconsecutive sentences that said no more than “Zoe Quinn exists and made a game,” and the price of those four sentences was to date the journalist for months, all to get rich off a game that didn’t cost any money. That’s your movement?

And some, if cornered, would say, “yes, we believe women are just that shitty, that one would fuck a guy for months if it made them the tiniest bit more famous.” But they won’t lead with that. Because they know it won’t convince the normies, even the ones who want to be convinced. So they use a process I call The Ship of Theseus to, piece by piece, turn that sentence into “slept with a journalist in exchange for a good review” and argue that each part of the sentence is technically accurate. It’s trying to lie without lying. And, provided all the pieces of this sentence are discussed separately, and only in the context of how they justify this sentence, you can trick yourself into believing this sentence is mostly true.

So, like, why? This is clearly motivated reasoning; what’s the motivation? What was this going to accomplish?

The answer is nothing. Nothing, by design. GamerGate’s “official” channels - the subreddit and the handful of forums that didn’t shut them down - were rigidly opposed to any action more organized than an email campaign. They had a tiny handful of tangible demands - they wanted gaming websites to post public ethics policies and had a list of people they wanted fired - but their larger aim was the sea change in how games journalism operated, which nothing they were asking for could possibly give them. The kind of anger that convinces you this is a true statement is not going to be addressed by a few paragraphs about ethics and Leigh Alexander getting a new job. They wanted gaming sites to stop catering to women and “SJWs” - who were a sizable and growing source of traffic - and to get out of the pockets of companies that advertised on their websites - which was their primary source of income. So all Kotaku had to do to make them happy was solve capitalism!

Meanwhile, the unofficial channels, like 8chan and Baphomet, were planning op after op to get private information, spread lies with fake accounts, get disinformation trending, make people quit jobs, cancel gigs, and flee their homes. Concrete goals with clear results. All you had to do to feel productive was go rogue. In my video,

How to Radicalize a Normie, I describe how the Alt-Right encourages lone wolf behavior by whipping people up into a rage and then refusing to give them anything to do, while surrounding them with examples of people taking matters into their own hands. The same mechanism is in play here: the public-facing channels don’t condone harassment but also refuse to fight it, the private channels commit it under cover of anonymity, and there is a free flow of traffic between them for when the official channels’ impotence becomes unbearable.

What I hope I’m illustrating is how these techniques play off of each other, how they create a closed ecosystem that rational thought cannot enter. There’s a phrase we use on the internet that got thrown around a lot at the time:

you can’t logic someone out of a position they didn’t logic themselves into.

Now, there are a few other big topics I think are relevant here, so I want to go through them one by one.

MEMEIFICATION

So a lot of interactions with GamerGate would involve a very insular knowledge base.

Like, you’d say something benign but progressive on Twitter.

A gater would show up in your mentions and say something aggressive and false.

You’d correct them. But then they’d come back and hit you with -

ah shit, sorry, this is a Loss meme.

If I were in front of a classroom I’d ask, show of hands, how many of you got that? I had to ask Twitter recently, does Gen Z know about Loss?!

If you don’t know what Loss is I’m not sure I can explain it to you. It’s this old, bad webcomic that was parodied so, so, so many times

that it was reduced to its barest essentials, to the point where any four panels with shapes in this arrangement is a Loss meme. For those of you in the know, you will recognize this anywhere, but have you ever tried to explain to someone who wasn’t in the know why this is really fuckin’ funny?

So, now… by the same process that this is a comics joke,

this is a rape joke.

I’m not gonna show the original image, but, once upon a time, someone made an animated GIF of the character Piccolo from Dragon Ball Z graphically raping Vegeta. 4chan loved it so much that it got posted daily, became known as the “daily dose,” until mods started deleting every incident of it. So they uploaded slightly edited version of it. Then they started uploading other images that had been edited with Piccolo’s color scheme. It got so abstracted that eventually any collection of purple and green pixels would be recognized as Piccolo Dick.

Apropos of nothing, GamerGate is a movement that insists it is not sexist in nature and it does not condone threats of rape against the women they don’t like. And this is their logo. This is their mascot.

If you’re familiar with the Daily Dose, the idea that GamerGate would never support Eron Gjoni if they believed he was a sexual abuser is so blatantly insincere it’s insulting… but imagine trying to explain to someone who’s not on 4chan how this sweater is a rape joke. Imagine having to explain it to a journalist. Imagine having to explain it to the judge enforcing your abuser’s restraining order.

Reactionaries use meme culture not just because they’re terminally online but also because it makes their behavior seem either benign or just confusing to outsiders. They find it hilarious that they can be really explicit and still fly under the radar. The Alt-Right did this with Pepe the Frog, the OK sign, even the milk glass emoji for a hot minute. The more inexplicable the meme, the better. You get the point where Stephen Miller is flashing Nazi signs from the White House and the Presidential re-eletion campaign is releasing 88 ads of exactly 14 words and there’s still a debate about whether the administration is racist. Because journalists aren’t going to get their heads around that. You tell them “1488 is a Nazi number,” it’s gonna seem a lot more plausible that you’re making shit up.

MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS

Online movements like GamerGate move at a speed and mutation rate too high for the mainstream world to keep up. And not just that they don’t understand the memes - they don’t understand the infrastructure.

In an attempt to cover GamerGate evenhandedly, George Wiedman of Super Bunnyhop interviewed a lawyer who specializes in journalistic ethics. He meant well; I really wish he hadn’t. You can see him trying to fit something like GamerGate into terms this silver-haired man who works in copyright law can understand. At one point he asks if it’s okay to fund the creative project of a potential journalistic source, to which the guy understandably says “no.”

What he’s alluding to here is the harassment of Jenn Frank. A few weeks into GamerGate, Jenn Frank writes a piece in The Guardian about sexism in tech that mentions Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn. In another case of “here’s a strongly-held belief I just decided I have,” GamerGate says this is a breach of journalistic ethics because Frank backs Quinn on Patreon. They harass her so intensely she not only has to quit her job at The Guardian, for several months she quits journalism entirely.

Off the bat, calling a public figure central to a major event in the field a “journalistic source” is flatly wrong-headed. Quinn was not interviewed or even contacted for the article, they were in no way a “source”; they were a subject. But I want to talk about this phrase, “fund a creative project.” Patreon is functionally a subscription; it’s a way of buying things. It’s technically accurate that Frank is funding Quinn’s creative project, but only in the sense that you are funding Bob Dylan’s creative project if you listen to his music. And saying Frank therefore can’t write about Quinn is like saying a music journalist can’t cover a Bob Dylan concert if they’ve ever bought his albums.

And we could talk about the ways that Patreon, as compared with other funding models, can create a greater sense of intimacy, and we also could comment that, well, that’s how an increasing number of people consume media now, so that perspective should be present in journalism. But maybe it means we should cover that perspective differently? I don’t know. It’s an interesting subject. But none of that’s going on in this conversation because this guy doesn’t know what Patreon is. It was only a year old at this point. Patreon’s been a primary source of my income for 5 years and my parents still don’t know what it is. (I think they think I’m a freelancer?) This guy hears “funding a creative project” and he’s thinking an investor, someone who makes a profit off the source’s success.

The language of straight society hasn’t caught up with what’s happening, and that works in GamerGate’s favor.

In the years since GamerGate we have dozens of stories of people trying to explain Twitter harassment to a legal system that’s never heard of Twitter. People trying to explain death threats to cops whose only relationship to the internet is checking email, confusedly asking, “Why don’t you just not go online?” Like, yeah, release your text game about depression at GameStop for the PS3 and get it reviewed in the Boston Globe, problem solved.

You see this in the slowness of mainstream journalists to condemn the harassment - hell, even games journalists at first. Because what if it is a legitimate movement? What if the harassers are just a fringe element? What if there was misconduct? The people in a position to stop GamerGate don’t have to be convinced of their legitimacy, they just have to hesitate. They just have to be unsure. Remember how much happened in just the first two weeks, how it took only a month to become unkillable.

It’s the same hesitance that makes mainstream media, online platforms, and law enforcement underestimate The Alt-Right. They’re terrified of condemning a group as white nationalist terrorists because they’re confused, and what if they’re wrong? Or, in most cases, not even afraid they’re wrong, but afraid of the PR disaster if too much of the world thinks they’re wrong.

ACCOUNTABILITY AND CONTROL

A thing I’ve talked about in The Alt-Right Playbook is how these decentralized, ostensibly leaderless movements insulate themselves from responsibility. Harassment is never the movement’s fault because they never told anyone to harass and you can’t prove the harassers are legitimate members of the movement. The Alt-Right does this too - one of their catchphrases is “I disavow.” Since there are no formalized rules for membership, they can redraw boundaries on the fly; they can take credit for any successes and deny responsibility for any wrongdoing. Public membership is granted or revoked based on a person’s moment-to-moment utility.

It’s almost like… they’re cherry-picking.

The flipside of this is a lack of control. Since they never officially tell anyone to do anything but write emails, they have no means of stopping anyone from behaving counterproductively. The harassment of Jenn Frank was the first time GamerGate’s originators thought, “maybe we should ease off just to avoid bad publicity,” and they found they couldn’t. GamerGate had gotten too big, and too many people were clearly there for precisely this reason.

They also couldn’t control the infighting. When your goal is to harass women and you have all these contradictory justifications for why, you end up with a lot of competing beliefs. And, you know what? Angry white men who like harassing people don’t form healthy relationships! Several prominent members of GamerGate - including Internet Aristocrat - got driven out by factionalism; they were doxxed by their own people! Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini parted ways hating each other, with Aurini releasing chatlogs of him gaslighting Owen about accepting an endorsement from Roosh, and they released two competing edits of The Sarkeesian Effect.

I say this because it’s useful to know that these are alliances of convenience. If you know where the sore spots are, you can apply pressure to them.

LEADERS WITHOUT LEADERSHIP

One way movements like GamerGate deflect responsibility is by declaring, “We are a leaderless movement! We have no means to stop harassment.”

Which… any anarchist will tell you collective action is entirely possible without leaders. But they’ll also tell you, absent a system of distributing power equitably, you’re gonna have leaders, just not ones you elected.

A few months into GamerGate, Randi Lee Harper created the ggautoblocker. Here’s what it did: it took five prominent GamerGate figures - Adam Baldwin, Mike Cernovich, Christina Hoff Sommers, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Nick Monroe, formerly known as [sigh] PressFartToContinue - and generated a block list of everyone who followed at least two of them on Twitter. Now, this became something of an arms race; once GamerGate found out about it they made secondary accounts that followed different people, and more and more prominent figures appeared and had to get added to the list. But, when it first launched, the list generated from just these five people comprised an estimated 90-95% of GamerGate.

Hate to break it to you, guys, but if 90+ percent of your movement is following at least two of the same five people, those are your leaders. The attention economy has produced them. Power pools when left on its own.

This is another case where you have to ignore what people claim and look at what they do. The Alt-Right loves to say “we disavow Richard Spencer” and “Andrew Anglin doesn’t speak for us.”

But no matter what they say, pay attention to whom they’re taking cues from.

AD CAMPAIGN

George Lakoff has observed that one way the Left fails in opposition to the Right is that most liberal politicians and campaigners have degrees in things like law and political science, where conservative campaigners more often have degrees in advertising and communications. Liberals and leftists may have a better product to sell, but conservatives know how to sell products.

GamerGate less resembles a boots-on-the-ground political movement than an ad campaign. First they decide what their messaging strategy is going to be. Then the media arm starts publicizing it. They seek out celebrity endorsements. They get their own hashtag and mascot. They donate to charity and literally call it “public relations.” You can even see the move from The Quinnspiracy to GamerGate as a rebranding effort - when one name got too closely associated with harassment, they started insisting GamerGate was an entirely separate movement from The Quinnspiracy. I learned that trick from Stringer Bell’s economics class.

Now, we could stand to learn a thing or two from this. But I also wouldn’t want us to adopt this strategy whole hog; you should view moves like these as red flags. If you’re hesitating to condemn a movement because what if it’s legitimate, take a look at whether they’re selling ideology like it’s Pepsi.

PERCEPTION IS EVERYTHING

One reason to insist you’re a consumer revolt rather than a harassment campaign is most people who want to harass need someone to give them permission, and need someone to tell them it’s normal.

Bob Altemeyer has this survey he uses to study authoritarianism. He divides respondents into people with low, average, and high authoritarian sentiments, and then tells them what the survey has measured and asks, “what score do you think is best to have: low, average, or high?”

People with low authoritarian sentiments say it’s best to be low. People with average authoritarian sentiments also say it’s best to be low. But people with high authoritarian sentiments? They say it’s best to be average. Altemeyer finds, across all his research, that reactionaries want to aggress, but only if it is socially acceptable. They want to know they are the in-group and be told who the out-group is. They don’t particularly care who the out-group is, Altemeyer finds they’ll aggress against any group an authority figure points to, even, if they don’t notice it, a group that contains them. They just have to believe the in-group is the norm.

This is why they have to believe games journalism is corrupt because of a handful of feminist media critics with outsized influence. Legitimate failures of journalism cannot be systemic problems rooted in how digital media is funded and consumed; there cannot be a legitimate market for social justice-y media. It has to be manipulation by the few. Because, if these things are common, then, even if you don’t like them, they’re normal. They’re part of the in-group. Reactionary politics is rebellion against things they dislike getting normalized, because they know, if they are normalized, they will have to accept them. Because the thing they care about most is being normal.

This is why the echo chamber, this is why Fox News, this is why the Far Right insists they are the “silent majority.” This is why they artificially inflate their numbers. This is why they insist facts are “biased.” They have to maintain the image that what are, in material terms, fringe beliefs are, in fact, held by the majority. This is why getting mocked by Stephen Colbert was such a blow to GamerGate. It makes it harder to believe the world at large agrees with them.

This is why, if you’re trying to change the world for the better, it’s pointless to ask their permission. Because, if you change the world around them, they will adapt even faster than you will.

THE ARGUMENT ISN’T SUPPOSED TO END

Casey Explosion has this really great Twitter thread comparing the Alt-Right to Scary Terry from Rick and Morty. His catchphrase is “you can run but you can’t hide, bitch.” And Rick and Morty finally escape him by hiding. And Morty’s all, “but he said we can’t hide,” and Rick is like, “why are we taking his word on this? if we could hide, he certainly wouldn’t tell us.”

The reason to argue with a GamerGater is on the implied agreement that, if you can convince them they’re part of a hate mob, they will leave. But look at the incentives here: they want to be in GamerGate, and you want them not to be. But they’re already in GamerGate. They’re not waiting on the outcome of this argument to participate. They’ve already got what they want; they don’t need to convince you GamerGate isn’t a hate mob.

This is why all their logic and rationalizations are shit, because they don’t need to be good. They’re not trying to win an argument. They’re trying to keep the argument going.

This has been a precept of conservative political strategy for decades. “You haven’t convinced us climate change is real and man-made, you need to do more studies.” They’re not pausing the use of fossil fuels until the results come in. “You haven’t convinced us there are no WMDs in Iraq, you need to collect more evidence.” They’re not suspending the war until you get back to them. “You haven’t convinced us that Reaganomic tax policy causes recessions, let’s just do it for another forty years and see what happens.” And when the proof comes in, they send us out for more, and we keep going.

The biggest indicator you can’t win a debate with a reactionary is they keep telling you you can. The biggest indicator protest and deplatforming works is they keep telling you in plays into their hands. The biggest indicator that you shouldn’t compromise with Republicans is they keep saying doing otherwise is stooping to their level. They’re not going to walk into the room and say, “Hi, my one weakness is reasoned argument, let’s pick a time and place to hash this out.”

And we fall for it because we’re trying to be decent people. Because we want to believe the truth always wins. We want to bargain in good faith, and they are weaponizing our good faith against us. Always dangling the carrot that the reason they’re like this is no one’s given them the right argument not to be. It’s all just a misunderstanding, and, really, it’s on us for not trying hard enough.

But they have no motivation to agree with us. Most of the people asking for debates have staked their careers on disagreeing with us. Conceding any point to the Left could cost them their livelihood.

WHY GAMES?

Let’s close with the big question: why games? And, honestly, the short answer is:

why not games?

Games culture has always presented itself as a hobby for young, white, middle class boys. It’s always been bigger and more diverse than that, but that’s how it was marketed, and that’s who most felt they belonged. As gaming grows bigger, there is suddenly room for those marginal voices that have always been there to make themselves heard. And, as gaming becomes more mainstream, it’s having its first brushes with serious critical analysis.

This makes the people who have long felt gaming was theirs and theirs alone anxious and a little angry. They’ve invested a lot of their identity in it and they don’t want it to change.

And what the Far Right sees in a sizable collection of aggrieved young men is an untapped market. This is why sites like Stormfront and Breitbart flocked to them. These are not liberals they have to convert, these people are, up til now, not politically engaged. The Right can be their first entry to politics.

The world was changing. Nerd properties were exploding into popular culture in tandem with media representation diversifying. And we were living with the first Black President. Any time an out-group looks like it might join the in-group, there is a self-protective backlash from the existing in-group. This had been brewing for a while, and, honestly, if it hadn’t boiled over in games, it would have boiled over somewhere else.

And, in the years since GamerGate, it has. The Far Right has tapped the comics, Star Wars, and sci-fi fandoms; they tried to get in with the furry community but failed spectacularly. They’re all over YouTube and, frankly, the atheist community was already in their pocket. Basically, if you’re in community with a bunch of young white guys who think they own the place, you might wanna have some talks with them sooner than later.

Anyway, if you want to know more about any of this stuff, RationalWiki’s timeline on GamerGate is pretty thorough. You can also watch my or Dan Olson’s videos on the subject. I’ll be putting the audio of this talk on YouTube and will put as many resources as I can in the show notes. The channel, again, is Innuendo Studios.

Sorry this was such a bummer.

Thank you for your time.

#video essay #alt-right playbook #Youtube

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