It's impossible to understand US politics or Internet/gaming/virtual world culture without knowing about Gamergate, the numerically small but highly coordinated online harassment campaign unleashed almost exactly 10 years ago. Fortunately there's a new oral history on the topic: The Hivemind Swarmed by David Wolinsky, and the book's summary puts it well:
Gamergate holds the grim distinction of being the first modern online harassment campaign. It arguably served as a model for the alt-right movement that would help propel Donald Trump to the White House. And it highlighted a toxic media culture—not just in gaming, but in film, TV, journalism, and more—in which leaders, through their passivity, took the side of the oppressor. Now, 10 years later—in the wake of #MeToo, Charlottesville, the Trump years, and the January 6 insurrection—the questions discussed here are more important than ever.
I was honored to be one of the many people David interviewed for the book, a highly readable and engrossing first-person account of that period, and what we've (hopefully) learned since then. Thanks to him and his publisher, New World Notes is featuring a lengthy excerpt (below) and a special discount code:
Click here to order the book from Beacon Press and used SCHOLAR25 as the code for 25% off the list price, along with free shipping.
Here's the excerpt, featuring indy pop star Jonathan Coulton, journalist Clive Thompson, virtual world pioneer Richard Bartle, and others (including, well, me, very briefly piping up here):
JONATHAN COULTON, musician:
Everything that’s happening feels very evolutionary to me right now. And by that I mean here is this large complicated system—the internet, social media, blogs—and there are all these little bacteria floating around, all of us, floating around in this space. And occasionally some of us are gonna find the very best way to leverage this technology to do something and we don’t really have any control over whether that thing is a good thing or a bad thing. But I think the fact that the nature of Gamergate and of 4chan culture and of the alt-right, men’s-rights stuff that has grown out of it, I think, is an example of a brand-new kind of propaganda machine that is completely distributed. It’s not anybody’s master plan. It’s just a thing that happened because people liked lookin’ at pictures of cats with funny phrases on them.
CLIVE THOMPSON, Wired contributing editor:
I absolutely think there are things that Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and all the large social networks that emerged in the ’00s could have observed [from online videogame communities]. They all were released with upbeat and naïve ideas about the value of merely connecting people: connecting people without there being any particular guidelines or rules for how people were going to behave towards each other and with very few protocols for dealing with abuse. So it’s perfectly valid to ask, and I’ve talked to a lot of people who said, “Well, why were they that naïve?”
The answers that people often tell me are: “Well, they were a lot of young white dudes who had very little experience in their online world, direct personal experience of abuse, and so they simply didn’t understand that many other cohorts of online users—women and people of color—very frequently get dumped on for saying even the most innocuous thing just because it’s what they are.” But it was probably clear at the time, and it’s certainly clear with hindsight, that anyone building those companies in the early ’00s had lots of examples to look backward to if they cared to look at history to see what types of bad behaviors can occur in online interactive environments.
And a couple of those examples were, frankly, just text-based BBSes in the ’80s and ’90s or blog forum posts from the late ’90s and early ’00s or multiplayer online games. All those games—Ultima Online, EverQuest, I guess even World of Warcraft was probably coming online a little around the time and maybe a little before a lot of those companies were getting big—you’d seen all sorts of forms of trolling and abuse happening on them.
Now, the interesting thing is of course, the games themselves? Those games often really didn’t do much about it either, right? [Laughs] Like, they just let it happen and sort of said, “Well, this is thirteen-year-old boys being bad thirteen-year-old boys,” without noticing that those boys were often being systemically terrible to women in a way that they weren’t to other boys and driving women away from their games. So long as those games are making money, the people making the games didn’t really care necessarily about this sort of thing.
RICHARD BARTLE, online game pioneer/researcher:
We [in games] knew all the stuff that was gonna happen and then it happened.. If you’re creating something which is new, like Facebook, you’re not going to think, “Well, this is very much like all these computer games that I don’t play.” Venture capitalists aren’t going to say, “We’ll put some money into this on condition that you speak to these guys here.” We could recognize it, but if we’re writing to Facebook saying, “Give us money to—No wait! Come back, please!” [Laughs] So, a lot of the things that happened were no surprise at all.
WAGNER JAMES AU, journalist/Second Life historian:
Can we have a platform that is basically a utopia? The short answer is no. The longer answer is you can create optimal communities that get us as close as possible to a golden-rule society or a content, optimal society. I’ve seen it happen.
DAVID KUSHNER, journalist/Masters of Doom author:
There’s a lot of fucking idiots on the planet who don’t have any thing better to do, frankly. So, what are you going to do? That is the nature of the beast. I don’t know that it’s ever really going to change that much. You give people anonymity and power, they’re gonna take advantage of it. We kind of have to develop new skills for how do we navigate this. What a lot of people choose to do is engage and what others choose to do is disengage.
I mean, you can go to a Philadelphia Eagles game and be sitting next to some belligerent drunk who’s just completely obnoxious and yelling ridiculous things. You know what I mean? It’s all kind of how you handle it. I mean, I don’t mean to sound glib, but maybe I’m more of a fatalist. I don’t think that we can change this. I think it’s just the way it is. And I think people just got to figure out how they’re gonna deal with it. I mean, because you don’t want to deal with it too much. I mean, yes. Should Twitter ban hate groups and all of that? I mean, okay, there’s an argument there, but there’s always somewhere to go.
If you talk to young people about this, they don’t even think much about it. It’s so second nature navigating this and they often think that adults are just out of their mind, trying to understand why we’re so overly concerned. It’s like [the 1936 anti-drug propaganda film] Reefer Madness. I think that the reality is most people are able to figure this out for themselves, and then there’s the ones that choose to engage.
There’s always that kind of dichotomy or that tension between freedom of speech and then all the lunacy that ensues. It’s not like that’s new. You can go to Speakers’ Corner in London and people stand on a box and say whatever they want. People can stand there and yell back or engage or walk by.
JASON MANNING, author/sociologist:
Are these things fixable? If by fixable you mean end conflict, no. [Laughs] You purge the most current load of the most outrageous jerks, and people will focus on the next level of things that caused them outrage and have to purge those and you’ll just wind up with a purity spiral of eventually in the society of saints, the least saintly is the sinner.
ANGELINA BURNETT, Halt and Catch Fire writer:
There’s a profound problem on Twitter, but there’s a really easy way to solve this problem, and this is gonna sound glib and I will immediately follow it up with all the reasons it’s problematic, but the way to solve that is to get the fuck off Twitter. And I understand that there’s some people who the way their lives are set up and their livelihoods and their jobs, they do not have that luxury. I think there are way more people who do have that luxury than are willing to admit they have that luxury. I think we have a profound addiction to social media.
It’s so far gone. I don’t know how we turn the fucking tanker around. I feel like such a Luddite saying this, but the solution is to get the fuck off those platforms. It just is. At the very least, it’s limiting your exposure and actively forcing yourself to go out and connect with the community in-person. I don’t enjoy knocking doors.
I don’t enjoy talking to strangers. I’m an introvert. I’m a writer. I like to stay in my house and make things up in my head. The act of canvassing and knocking on the door of a stranger and trying to draw out of them a conversation about what they care about, what matters to them? It’s not fun for me, but it is life-changing and it is perspective-widening.
In 2012, I went to Ohio to knock doors [for political canvassing]... It was so socioeconomically diverse. In the morning we’d be knocking doors on these million-dollar houses on a lake and by the evening I was nearly falling through rotting porches in the shadow of an abandoned rubber plant. I was walking through pee-stained stairwells in a housing project, then I was knocking doors on a little middle-class neighborhood with wreaths on the door.
You can’t ever go back from an experience like that. Within a compressed period of four days, talk to people from all fucking walks of life and you realize so quickly—I even sound like a fucking politician, but it’s true—how much we have in common, how really all of us want is a comfortable life full of love and friends and family where we take care of each other. That’s really all people fucking want and that’s where the tribalism comes from because the center cannot hold.
Once the community becomes billions of people, everything begins to collapse, and so your instinct is to make it small and protect it, but the reality is we all want that same fucking thing. And so when you can approach life with that perspective, all that other shit falls away. It becomes very hard to believe that a woman who said a racist thing before she got on a plane deserves to lose her job by the time she lands.
I don’t know that the platforms can change. I don’t know that there is anything that the platform can do the way they’re set up now to solve this problem. We as individuals, as human beings, have to challenge ourselves to be better and we have plenty of evidence throughout history that that is totally possible and happens all the time, and we have evidence that we’re totally fucking incapable of it and will fuck it up. [Laughs]
More info on Hivemind Swarmed here. I discuss much more throughout the rest of the book, like the time a top game designer told me about hiring a personal bodyguard to protect himself and his family from death threats, and the time I visited a Facebook game studio which had a guy in military fatigues posted outside armed with a Desert Eagle hand cannon. To protect developers of Facebook games.
And here's some posts I've written about the topic over the years:
- Journalist Critical of GamerGate Posts Best Critique of GamerGate Directly in GamerGate Forum (2014)
- Gamergate Hasn't Hurt Academic Interest in Gaming, Say Leading Scholars -- If Anything, It's Increased Interest (2015)
- Gamer Sexism Made VR Pioneer Jaron Lanier Less Utopian About Virtual Reality (2016)
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