Once CEO of a company that made money by selling the virtual world assets of real Chinese laborers, now CEO of a campaign complaining that Chinese labor is destroying America:
Stephen Bannon brought quite the varied résumé to his new gig as CEO of Donald Trump's presidential campaign... Bannon joined and eventually ran a company that made its name and fortune as an online marketplace to sell virtual gold to World of Warcraft players and other online gamers... much of it coming from gold farms in China, where people were paid to play the game and rake up loot.
As Mother Jones astutely points out, this also creates a more or less direct line linking Bannon, Gamergate, and the "alt right" Internet subcommunity which has become a key issue in the US Presidential race:
Bannon may have applied his web knowledge gained from his time at IGE... to Breitbart News, which he transformed into the preeminent destination for the internet-savvy, meme-centric alt-right—in part by stoking the anger behind Gamergate, which saw harassment of female gamers by their male peers.
You know, I once used to write a lot about how virtual worlds would one day influence real world elections, but now that that's actually happening, I'm not so sure it's been a great idea.
Mother Jones story via Julian Dibbell, who knows from gold farming.
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@hamlet: you reported on the future happening of VR worlds influencing politics. You didn't offer any opinion on whether it was good or bad, but stayed objective for the most part. Get over the feeling that you should have done more to keep VWs and politics apart - you're a journo, not a politician. The only way you could hold yourself at fault for bad stuff happening is if it happened and you failed to tell the world when you saw it happening.
Having said that... yeah, this guy was the worst back in the day, and the fact that he's so close to the most powerful post in the world now gives me hippos of fear.
Posted by: Patchouli Woollahra | Thursday, September 01, 2016 at 05:49 PM
Yep, would not have made the connection myself so thanks.
Posted by: sirhc deSantis | Friday, September 02, 2016 at 08:44 AM