Re: OP:
What Gamergate should have taught us about the 'alt-right'
Is this all sounding rather familiar now? Does it remind you of something? If you’re just discovering the world of angry, anonymous online dudes masquerading as victims – hi, come in. Some of us have been here for a while.
This article paints GG as some kind of jumping off point for the alt-right, which IMO ignores a rather large amount of context.
I'll illustrate what I mean with reference to my own experiences of these sorts of debates.
I followed movement atheism online quite avidly until summer of 2011, when "Elevatorgate" happened. Guy asked girl out less than 110% perfectly, got called out, so far so unoriginal. What then happened was that when feminist atheists in the movement were challenged on using bigoted thinking like Schrodinger's Rapist, or for accusing anyone who disagreed with them of being misogynist, this feminist faction then devolved into profoundly unsceptical thinking when their politics were challenged. They behaved in exactly the same fashion as the YECs we'd spent the last few years laughing it - conflating critique with attack, acting as if we were supposed to care that their feelings were hurt by mockery, and worst, moderating and banning commenters they disagreed with. And it turned out there were enough of these people in the movement to cause a not insubstantial rift at the time - though now the movement has basically recovered, and freethoughtblogs and the Atheism+ forums - the ground zero of this rift - are now an irrelevant joke with the last remaining adherents turning on each other.
I ignored this at the time because it seemed more argument would just contribute to this division, but more importantly, to me at the time it seemed like a one-off. I read and stayed up to date on the feuding, but I didn't personally take part, though it did cause me to drop any adherence I previously had to feminism given what I'd seen of it.
I can't remember how I found his work - he might have commented on atheism+ for all I know. A couple of years later I found a book by sci-fi writer Will Shetterly. He wrote about how the American scifi scene had undergone a similar feud - in the 90s. The dynamics and patterns were very similar - flashpoint events that seemed to reveal these huge, underlying divisions, with just enough people who've inveigled themselves into the higher tiers of the group to cause a substantial ruckus when challenged. Spurious accusations of racism, sexism, abuse etc. abounded.
At that point, I started suspecting there might be a pattern to this. Then about a year later, Gamergate exploded.
I decided to get involved in part because this was yet another baseless challenge to a hobby that has constantly been maligned for being a bad influence like every new pastime has. But more than that, I got involved
because this was part of a pattern I could no longer justify ignoring.
And I think this is what Lees - and morningstar, and all the other AGGs - don't get.
This was the first experience a substantial number of young, somewhat disillusioned, and in many cases socially awkward people had of not only being turned on by their "own kind", but it was their first experience of a media coverup, and a rude awakening as to how deeply this ideology had penetrated the websites where they thought they could freely express themselves, and the hobby dearest to them that had been willing to fight off such attacks in the past, but now seemed to be capitulating to the same sort of attack in feminist garb.
Lees talks about canaries in the mine. What got people going was that virtually no websites, which apparently were all acting independently, permitted them to discuss anything that they'd heard about Zoe Quinn, which they had every right to do. It wasn't just moderating away doxxing posts (which is fine), it was a total blackout of any sort of discussion on it. Those sites that did, with the moderation necessary to combat people being doxxed - like the Escapist - were being treated with suspicion.
Even 4chan got censored in this way. When it comes to canaries in the mine, 4chan is the foul-mouthed racist canary whose death signals impending restriction of freedom of expression.
And then when they started looking at society with these experiences in mind, they found the same thing that I did. That these aren't isolated incidents. That these ideologues had infested multiple arenas of modern life, and most concerningly, the contemporary university system, which has preposterous levels of pro-liberal bias. That these people were colluding with each other within many of these sectors, based on ideological common ground.
And what was AGG's response? To tell them they didn't count as members of their own community. Gamers are dead!
Even when abuse was proven, the usual response was that people on their side were being abused too. These techniques, forged in
Gamergate, have become the standard toolset of far-right voices online.
Why don't you just
believe the victim, Matt?
Again, this just shows how little a clue these AGGs have.
When you lot were getting abused, you told us that victims of (alleged) harassment should be automatically believed.
When GGers claim they are being harassed, you palm it off as a right-wing ploy.
Again -
why should they care about what happens to you, when you don't care when the same thing happens to them?
In 2014, the media’s reaction was often
weak or overtly conciliatory – some sites went out of their way to “see both sides”, to reassure people that openly choosing to be affiliated with a hate group did not make them in any way responsible for that hate.
Absolute twelve-story, marble-furnished bollocks.
I searched Google News for "Gamergate" every day for about three months after the furore began. The media coverage was overwhelmingly hostile to Gamergate, and generally downright unfactual, largely because it *didn't* bother to seek out the opinion of people who were aligned with GG.
By leveraging distrust and resentment towards women, minorities and progressives, many of Gamergate’s most prominent voices – characters like Mike Cernovich, Adam Baldwin, and Milo Yiannopoulos – drew power and influence from its chaos. These figures gave Gamergate a new sense of direction – generalising the rhetoric: this was now a wider war between “Social Justice Warriors” (SJWs) and everyday, normal, decent people. Games were simply the tip of the iceberg – progressive values, went the argument, were destroying everything.
The reason they were able to leverage these people so easily is because of the sort of lies and hypocrisy I have highlighted above and all through this thread.
You had one job.
Stop crapping on white men and talking about them in ways both you and they darn well KNOW you wouldn't tolerate if they used them towards nonwhites and nonmen. That is the best thing you could have done from your side of the aisle to attempt to stop this nonsense and begin its reversal.
You had one job, and you blew it. You still are. You're still blaming white men for Trump, even while the polling data shows that plenty of minorities managed to be turned off by the more progressive candidate.
They moved into science fiction with the
controversy over the Hugo awards.
As I mentioned earlier - you people had "moved into" SF during the 90s. Why do you assume a medium is *yours*? How entitled must you be to think that? If you had a right to politicise a medium, don't be surprised when others attempt to do the same. And given that a number of SF and fantasy writers, up to and including George RR Martin, deludedly think SF is an inherently progressive medium, personally I'm glad something happened to shake them out of their complacent thinking.
They saw the culture they considered theirs being ripped away from them. In their zero sum mindset, they read growing artistic equality as a threat.
You literally told them that their identity was over and done with. WHAT THE HECK ELSE DID YOU EXPECT?
He was eventually
banned from the platform after finally abusing a woman who was apparently just famous enough for Twitter to respond.
Ah, you mean for "targeting harassment" against Leslie Jones? The woman who still has tweets up on her account where she literally tells people "Get her!" when someone calls her out?
Would link, but can't because of that no swears in links rule, woop woop. PM if you want the proof.
Again, why should people care about your concerns with Milo
when he was banned for far less than what Jones got away with?
With Gamergate, they purposefully went fishing for anti-feminists. 2016’s batch of fresh converts – the white extremists – came from enticing conspiracy theories about the global neoliberal elite secretly controlling the world.
.....because the progressive left NEVER complains about neoliberal global control conspiracies.
And no, being antifeminist is not being an extremist. Feminists are 7% of the population in the UK, a far more tolerant and egalitarian country than the US. You are the extremists here.
Attempts to find common ground saw the specifics of the demands being shifted: we want you to listen to us; we want you to change your ways; we want you to close your publication down.
Again, who are you talking about here? I recall AGG people constantly trying to moderate away comments they didn't like.
Oh, but those are comments, not content. Content is valuable. Comments are not. And of course this Guardian piece isn't open for comments. That place is even more spineless now than it was two years ago.
his movement that ostensibly wanted to protect free speech from cry bully SJWs simultaneously did what it could to endanger sites it disagreed with,
encouraging advertisers to abandon support for media outlets that published stories critical of the hashtag. The petulance of that movement is disturbingly echoed in Trump’s own Twitter feed.
Again, who did they learn that from?
Which wing is currently trying to get advertisers to pull out of Breitbart?
Which wing is trying the exact same thing in the UK with the Daily Mail?
Which wing boycotted Chick-Fil-A?
This is another left-wing ideal, Matt. You just don't like being on the receiving end.
Looking back, Gamergate really only made sense in one way: as an exemplar of what Umberto Eco called
“eternal fascism”, a form of extremism he believed could flourish at any point in, in any place – a fascism that would extol traditional values, rally against diversity and cultural critics, believe in the value of action above thought and encourage a distrust of intellectuals or experts
Social justice rhetoric isn't intellectual or expert. It's conspiratorial waffle in its own right. Feminism and insectionality are increasingly resembling the young-earth-creationism of the social sciences.
Perhaps the true lesson of Gamergate was that the media is culturally unequipped to deal with the forces actively driving these online movements.
Yes, it is unequipped. It lacks the self-awareness necessary to stop running pieces like this and actually fix their contribution to the current problem.
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