Comment Re:They just can't shut up about GG, even now (Score 4, Interesting) 308
I still think the key to understanding GamerGate is the Wizardchan suicides, though not from the channers side.
Full disclaimer here, I'd already had a run-in with Zoe Quinn, though I didn't know her real name at the time. A group of Something Awful goons doxxed and outed a gay furry teen I used to know, and after his homophobic family kicked him out they harassed Luke to suicide. On IRC, Eris, ZQ's handle at the time, bragged to me about "purging moral indecency from the internet."
Of course when we tried to do anything about it we were mocked for 'fursecution' and nobody cared about gay teens or furries back in '08-09 so it all faded quickly. Google can't even find anything about Luke now.
So, fast forward a few years, Wizardchan, a forum for suicidally depressed weird incels nobody cares about gets twitter-mobbed by the Weird Twitter group ZQ is a big wheel in, a couple of them apparently suicided, and suddenly the gaming press is really obsessed with covering this up. At this point, I didn't know ZQ was the Eris I'd dealt with years ago, but I was a game dev, I knew some of these journalists, and I couldn't understand why this was the hill they had to die on. I mean, incels didn't have the reputation then that they do now but it was only months after after Elliot Rogers, nobody was going to care much if incels were helped to kill themselves. In hindsight, she was following the old pattern of finding a group of nerdy men no one will care about and harassing them for the lolz. Except this time 4chan flipped out about it. This was where
My guess, and I have no evidence for this, is that a few of the journalists involved were also old SA goons who were involved in that stuff, and they were horrified at the idea of ZQ publicly exposing the good old days now that they were all about the 'harassment is bad, LGBT is good' social justices. Whether that part is what happened or not, the result was an attempt at mass dehumanization of the gamers. After all, it's not killing people if they're not people, right? Gamers are dead, gamers are everything evil that proper human beings aren't. That fed hard into the SJ movements anti-nerd prejudice, since a group focused on social manipulation does not get along with people who are bad at being social. Meanwhile, as the parent post points out, the gamers were about at breaking point with the bullshit being flung at them.
This had the side-effect of tying social justice politics to abuse, the movement to push 'politics' out of gaming is really an attempt to push emotional abusers out. The abusers are too adept at crying 'you hate me because of my politics' and the gamers are trying to use a shotgun to kill a fly so the whole thing is just a shitshow now.
So by the time I learned of the connection between ZQ and Eris, the alt-right were making inroads into GamerGate, and it was obvious that I'd never see any justice for Luke if I talked about it. I'd just be giving the alt-right more ammo to red-pill people to their side. It still hurts to know that I'll never be able to talk about it, that the homophobically murderous SA goons have won, for now.
What worries me is that this attitude has permeated all of the social justice movement. I'm involved with some SJ initiatives in gaming these days, and sometimes there's a cult-like atmosphere of how Those People, the ones who Aren't Like Us, must be opposed in every way, and never allowed to poison the minds of the Pure with their existence. It's a mirror of my white supremacist cousin, that all the world's ills are the result of Those People and if we can just get rid of them we'll be living in utopia. I wouldn't say this handed Trump the 2016 election, it was too soon, but it's spread through SJ enough that I fear it'll hand him the 2020 election. It works way too well to mobilize the opponents into voting against an existential threat to their existence, while persuading the base to sit smugly at home in their bubble of righteous isolation.
The SJ movement needs to take a step back and have a good, hard look at themselves and where they are going. Too many of the people who've abused myself and my friends in the past now feel safe and empowered by the SJ movement, and I can get no traction in doing anything about it. As long as they can invoke the GamerGate boogeyman though, they're not going to achieve the self-reflection necessary, and we're going to have populist-right movements recruiting their victims. That's the true legacy of GamerGate, the moment when Social Justice stopped caring about either.
