Gamergate: The Untold Story
Boobs are awesome. That's right bet you didn't think this video was gonna start with that did you? Boobies titties jigglers...whatever you want to call them, they're just the best things. So are asses. In all shapes and sizes. They're sexy, they're squishy, they're fun! We have no problem with any of these things. in fact we actually want more of them.
We want to expand our horizons beyond just digital jiggling technologies into dong. Yes dong. In all shapes and sizes and all the colors of the rainbow, we want to liberate the dong and have it hang long and proud in the wonderful world of video games. If adults want to play mmorpgs with each other as just a pile of bouncing pixelated genitals then inshallah. We say this because today we're going to take an exploration into the dark recess of the internet. Into a phenomenon that still continues to this day. It was a grift and there are a few players still
hanging around. One that evolves oddly enough from a rebellion against representation all the way to being a primary recruitment tool for modern day nazis. Some have even suggested that the growth and power of the online alt-right led to the election [expletive]. The first president memed into existence. "So today
let's take a look at the npc meme and the idea of meme magic and why this is a tool that's very powerful that the right uses to constantly win. Your meme.com talks about the origin of the meme and you can see this person right here is called a wojak and this person is an npc wojack the idea is that this person is a blank-faced automaton and this is an actual human. [Music plays] However we're not doing this because we don't want to see beautiful naked people in video games. That's fine in fact like we mentioned we want more! Hashtag free dong. We're just gonna stab that straw man to death before you shut the video off. The rage comments about how this is actually a soy cuck fest of beta male virgins because jokes on you internet: we've experienced penetration before! We've also got some more good news. Men are awesome. Don't listen to whatever fake arguments you've
heard about the woke scolds who run the left. We love men and agree there are tons of problems that aren't talked about enough in mainstream media. Abhorrently high rates of suicide, overdoses, addiction, and homicides disproportionately affect the male half of the species. We think the patriarchy is shitty for men and we're going to be frequently talking about how anyone vilifying men as a generality in this tale have been contributing to the problem. Now make no mistake...the tale of the neck beard is amongst the most salted and depressing rabbit holes one can go down. But it's an important hole to explore. It's likely you know one or two aspects of this tale
but to see how connected and complex they become is to taste the beard of god. So buckle down and pull out your red suppository because it's time to mansplain the annals of internet history in... Gamergate. It's a word that conjures up both nostalgia and horror depending on whom you're speaking to. While
the story has been told before it's important to refresh some of the more important parts of it and how the controversy in video game journalism gave way to an online explosion of testosterone and sticky socks. "Boys like strategy games and shooter games and play them because they love them. Not because someone sold them a pink controller or put boobs on a character." While most people believe it began with Zoe Quinn and their ex-boyfriend's blog post the origins technically traced back to 2012 with a then relatively unknown Anita Sarkeesian. "But one thing that I've learned from watching a lot of science fiction and fantasy television is you never ever want to get pregnant on tv." In may 2012 she launched the kickstarter campaign to fund the production of a series of videos on tropes versus women in video games. "In addition to being loads of fun to play research has found that gaming can improve problem solving skills teamwork creative thought and multitasking and improve hand-eye coordination and enhance perceptual and cognitive abilities." Asking
for only six thousand dollars she ended up making over 26 times her original goal. Clearly there was an analytic gap missing when exploring video game plot points in culture and people were willing to pay for it. The industry was lacking in critical analysis and had already begun focusing on new ways to generate income. "Across the board microtransaction games report that as soon as a player uses the store once they're way more likely to monetize again. Many of you may have had this experience with steam or XBLA. Think about how much inertia it
took to get you to download steam and make your first purchase or buy your first pack of dlc. Second time came a lot easier didn't it." While the early days of Atari and Sierra had female pioneers like Roberta Williams by 2010 women only accounted for 10 percent of the video game industry. It was a trend that started with Nintendo marketing their video game products to boys after the gaming crash of the 1980s. "It's Game Boy! It's portable! It's in stereo! And its games are interchangeable! Game Boy comes
complete with batteries and the outrageous new game Tetris. And for head-to-head competition use video link and blow your opponent away!" Appearing in the boys tweens and in between sections gaming and its marketing became associated with men despite also being popular with women. Fast forward to 2012 and Anita produced a series of videos on the numerous sexist elements present in popular gaming franchises from years of generational gendering. And you can imagine the calm collected measured response the internet had. "2010 there was a video I think was 2010 that the video
was recorded in black and white of her university giving a speech where she says i'm not a gamer I had to learn a lot about gaming to get into all this and then come 2012 I mean that but that video wasn't released until after she did her tropes versus women in gaming Kickstarter. 2012 may 2012 she starts a kickstarter and [mumbling] within the first few days she starts posting updates that 'I'm being harassed'. It's like well yeah people generally react negatively to phenomenal bigots on the internet. The second half of it is the social justice warriors we mentioned briefly. There is a sort of insurgent move in video games from a couple of wacky left-wing feminists. And these are
far-left Israel-hating socialist weirdos. So because of those people because of the few people threatening them and by the way I guarantee you if the entire gaming community threatened Anita Sarkeesian...good lord good there would be...there would not be enough people to count how fast those threats would go up. Because the gaming community is massive! Go when you send her a message saying
hey neither i think you're a [ __ ] she goes cha ching. Ironically or of course not even ironically today we've seen the spin machine that drives the profitability of Feminist Frequency in full swing with articles about what a brave survivor she was after facing harassment which I guess has now gone the way is rape sexism and Nazi as words that no longer have any meaning. You know and then she runs off to the next interview that she gets paid. I mean some of her
speeches at university she's been paid 20 grand of speech. That's hilarious. I'm not joking right? And it's just and for her to go 'the internet's being mean to me'. Well maybe if you weren't being a biggot online." You guys act like only women face harassment online and look the majority of the people here are their trolls because they like to see you freak out about it that's exactly what you guys are doing. I mean even your language like 'what are
you sad about?'. So after the death and rape threats seem to have maxed out and the dust had settled Anita Sarkeesian's series certainly exposed one thing: that the video game industry was not prepared to take a critical look at itself. In fact rather than confront many of the worst aspects of the subculture it decided to morph and mutate into an entirely new online cum. The following story is so ridiculous and painful that perhaps the best way to tell it would be to do a scuffed impersonation of the Internet Historian.
It's 2013. Zoë Quinn, an independent game developer, creates and releases the video game Depression Quest. It was an interactive fiction game based upon their own experiences with clinical depression. It was widely praised in indie circles as well as favorably reviewed by critics alike. Fast forward to August 15th 2014. Shortly after the steam release of depression quest Quinn's ex-boyfriend Eron Gjoni published a lengthy tirade against Quinn on multiple gaming forums. He accuses them of having cheated on him repeatedly during their brief relationship.
Seeing as how this activity had been used frequently in the past by MRA communities online to threaten and harass women the threads were deleted by the forums. But it's too late. 4chan and reddit have already got hold of Eron's blog called 'the Zoë Post' where he accuses a Kotaku writer of exchanging positive coverage of their video game in exchange for sex. The oldest quid pro quo in the book. You see the core truth at the heart Gamergate hinged on the assertion that Zoë Quinn had in fact exchanged sex. And yet it was having difficulty proving a single instance of it happening. That was until Nathan Grayson arrived. Gamergaters who at this point referred to themselves colloquially as gators had found their savior in the form of a Kotaku journalist who was strongly rumored to be one of Zoë's partners.
Not to be labeled as young, or obsessive, or frankly deeply resentful of women with no social boundaries, the gators had a rallying cry of ethics and journalism as their public mantra. Privately they used codes online such as hashtag burgers and fries titled out to a slut-shaming joke used to spread illegal nude photos of Quinn. All justified of course because it was ultimately to fix a broken system. Except it turns out Grayson hadn't actually reviewed Depression Quest at all. Oops. The quest the salvage ethics was showing itself to be monstrously unethical. 4chan is ecstatic. Finally the deeply online manosphere had found direct evidence of women
achieving favoritism over men due to their looks and their longing desire to corrupt and change the gaming industry as they knew it. And in ways only 4chan knows how to do, they quickly weaponized the online pepes. Soon reddit joins the fight. Spreading Gjoni's manifesto and soon they were enacting justice. Internet justice. They had their game negatively review bombed. They compromised their social media accounts in email and eventually uncovered nude
photos of them that were shared with their friends family and employers. As if that wasn't enough atonement for their sins, they would also attack anyone who tried to stand up for them. Including Phil Fish a fellow game developer who had his finances hacked prompting him to have to sell his copy of Polytron Corporation and disappear from the internet entirely. They turned their sights on Zoë's new boyfriend Alex Lipchitz. Claiming he was an alias of Phil Fish. They bombarded his employers forcing him to resign to save the company's reputation. Eventually
they discovered their home address and doxxed it. Causing both Alex and Zoë to be effectively homeless for several months. But it was all just another worthy sacrifice in the quest to avenge the high crimes that befell this noble hero of testosterone-laden magnificence.
There's just one problem. It didn't happen. Not the harassment and death threats uh that all happened to barbaric proportions, we're talking about the manifesto. Zoë Quinn never traded sexual favors for positive reviews of their game. They never did it to try and boost sales or generate more money. Because the game is free. It always was. "It was one of those examples a very I think early example of like a super disingenuous tactic that works. Right it works given the diffuse nature of like
the modern internet. You can say something like that make that kind of a claim to an already receptive audience and they're not going to go digging for that review necessarily. Because like the person saying it to them because they hold similar beliefs they trust that person. So they're like okay yeah I just believe that exists out there and as a result this is like a clear documented instance of corruption. Ideas that like the Trump campaign
for example would later prey on. Like the idea of a an elite class that is like lying to you um and is like mega corrupt and is all at once brilliant and bumbling. Which is you know that's what they did with games journalism. The Trump campaign just did that with like all of their political opponents. So games journalism has always had ethical issues they're just not the
ones the Gamergaters targeted." Just put a pin in this for now we're gonna get back to that later. Like a million no nut Novembers culminating into a singularity of infinite time and space Gamergate unveiled an often rumored but seldom seen result of mass male alienation. An entire generation of young men indoctrinated by a society imposing upon them a set of standards which were becoming increasingly difficult to obtain. The first mostly online generation that had grown up with high speed gaming and always online subculture. Social media with its highly addictive properties have been manipulating entire generations of young minds without much critical thought paid to the consequences.
"The short-term dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works. No civil discourse. No cooperation. Misinformation mistruth and it's not an American problem. This is not about Russian ads. This is a global problem." With so much of our daily interactions being spent in front of screens with information filtered almost exclusively by artificial intelligence the incentivization towards promoting more incendiary or conspiratorial links is only now beginning to be understood in terms of his damaging potential. Now gamers are not inherently evil people. Either
for enjoying video games or participating in the subcultures that are derived from them. There is a tendency in the mainstream media when reporting on gaming communities to focus exclusively on the toxic atmosphere that men create. "According to Vossen the gamers and the alt-right share common ground. As people who are marginalized are fighting for equality those who've traditionally had privilege, you know especially white men, feel that they are being oppressed by these people who are trying to just be treated as equal." And that ignores two important points. One that violent and threatening gamers do not make up the majority of players or even fans. And two that much of the blame for online radicalization or recruiting does fall on a uniquely single factor: ZARDOZ! "His chosen ones. The gun is good! Go forth and kill!"
No no it's not Zardoz. This is a bit. It's just that there's there's so many different factors that go into how exactly online radicalization works you just you would just... like what no one who isn't 40 is gonna understand a [ __ ] thing. You see Gamergate was also a Youtube content gold mine that turned many skeptics into men lords. Familiar faces today like Sargon of Akkad, Thunderfoot Mike Cernovich, Chris Raygun, and even Milo Yiannopoulus. "You know there's a thing in the men's rights world the red pilling you know you sort of take the red pills and your eyes are open to the realities of the relationships between men and women and how they should both behave and all the rest of it. I've noticed a similar sort of effect in gamers where
they suddenly realize well actually - wait I saw I think it was yesterday I saw a tweet somebody said I just watched fox news and for the first time in my life it's starting to make sense to me. You know and of course a lot of them have been coming to Breitbart to read my stuff and I think there's obviously an inevitable bleed uh into elsewhere in the site." There's an ongoing debate as to how much the content creator influences his audience versus how much their support influences the creator. Many channels who weren't household alt brand names yet had suddenly discovered a digital gold mine. Talking about Gamergate was an internet oil rush that the right had been looking for and as a newly minted member of Breitbart Milo ran with it. Pushing the entire thing directly
into the culture wars. "It's true that yes I am very sympathetic towards the gamergate side of all of this. I'm just a reporter covering the story so let's explore that just in the interest of full disclosure for my audience that's not necessarily keyed in to the minutia of what's going on here." Ideological consistency is not one of Milo's talents. Exemplified by the fact that he had written an article prior to Gamergate...literally the day before the Zoë post was released about
how Elliot Rogers murder spree was influenced by violent video games (a popular anti-gaming right-wing talking point). Seeing the excitement a heavily online reactionary mob was having towards Zoë he knew he had found his calling. Milo's hatred of both the left and feminists... "It was different people on the panel it wasn't me um because I had no interest in going to Austin it was about the only bit of Texas [ding]. This is really good I swear I'm not doing this. I swear I don't do it. You got a lot of good points according to the robot." Found a perfectly harmonized duet in Gamergate that propelled him into stardom. "Everything's great being a woman because I'm a woman. And then
suddenly oh my god she's oppressed and Patreon..." He would crowdsource or outright plagiarize posts from Kiwi Farms or 8chan and target anyone who opposed gamergate. Which were naturally mostly women. Due to the low quality of his research and writing Breitbart's legal team would often spend days correcting his slanderous and baseless accusations. Regurgitating most of what Gamergaters
were posting online about their critics alongside him Carl Benjamin better known as Sargon of Akkad - the online skeptic community began to overlap with the anti-feminist one. A failed game designer himself Sargon found a particularly lucrative home in producing content about Gamergate. "I talk to people who do not give a [ __ ] about ideological differences. A lot of other people are in the same boat as me. Not everyone is on an ideological crusade. I mean I am!" Carl's particular hatred of online feminism combined perfectly with his inability to do substantial research into any of the topics he discusses. "It's afraid when people say something like well the humans provoke them by entering into their habitats they are assuming that the bugs are merely mindless animals that act on instinct and are not capable of moral decision making. Rather than informing the Mormon
extremists that this planet was actually inhabited and at least delivering a demand that they leave... the bugs instead massacred them all without mercy. And if this wasn't enough the bugs then began launching meteor attacks on an unprepared and unsuspecting earth. With the first attack wiping out nearly 10 million people and destroying a major city! Why do I want this unironically? The answer is because Starship Troopers is a manifesto for Jordan Peterson's utopia. Not in
not...". And the success of YouTube Gamergate content let many popular figures to pool in even bigger audiences if they continue to pour gasoline all over the fire that was being created Braithwaite has analyzed the particular narrative dimensions of gamergate technoculture emphasizing how these feelings of victimization and alienation come into geek masculinity informed the efforts of Gamergate participants to preserve masculine technological control via online misogyny. In the analysis presented by this paper the cultural and technological aspects of Gamergate merge within the technological rationality described by Macusa. Gamergate's abuse campaign became endemic because its underlying rationalities were evident in the design governance and communicative culture of a range of online platforms. This is no coincidence the architecture and administration of those online platforms emanate from the very same geek cultures and related industries as Gamergate in online abuse. This paper suggests technology is always already symbolically and strategically implicated in assertions of masculine aggression". Milo Yiannopoulos tactics of attacking people
involved and outright going too far would earn him the reputation of being a joker-fied bad boy in the field. Dislike the new ghostbusters movie? Or you have the audacity to dislike the work in uh you know in Hollywood if somebody who happens to be black or happens to be a woman? And then you get suspended especially when he was one of the more prominent early figures to be kicked off the platform. "One day later milo Yiannopoulos a conservative writer for Breitbart.com was permanently suspended from twitter." Meanwhile Mike Cernovich a man who is known for writing one of the creepiest blogs on the internet. Selling a self-help regiment called the Gorilla Mindset with supplements to go along with it. Not to mention falsely accusing anyone he doesn't like of pedophilia. "Mike Cerna uh no uh Cernovich Thernovich?
Okay Mike however you pronounce that I guess. There's a theta at the uh at the end." Had also enjoyed a rising profile thanks to Infowars interest in the conspiracy side of Gamergate. After his takedown of Sam Seder Cernovich had all but washed away the stigma of his sexual assault accusations and was rebranding as a men's rights hero. He and Jones would eventually begin pushing Pizzagate using techniques and recruitment tools that had been proven successful during Gamergate. While on the other side of the right things were getting a lot more alternative. "These are typical diversity images. I don't think these uh these would be much more surprising to anyone. Essentially
diversity is is going to be wonderful. It helps whites. You can have new friends." "Around 2013 the Nazis went online. Hate groups in the US as tracked by the Southern Poverty Law center had been growing in number since the knots but between 2012 and 2014 they dropped by almost a quarter. Patriot groups dropped by over a third. However hate crimes stayed about the same. Radical conservatism was not shrinking but decentralizing. Still radical and still often violent but now full of white
nationalist nomads unlikely to join a formal organization this didn't make them harmless. What it did was protect their asses from the typical hate group cycle of getting the public's attention: making allies in conservative media, swelling their numbers, and then eventually disgracing themselves. With failures in fighting and often enough members committing horrific acts of violence."
Richard Spencer the lord of cringe lords. The answer to the question what if cat urine was personified. He's a neo-Nazi parading around as a libertarian nationalist. He rose to prominence for coining the term alt-right. A rebranding of far-right fascist beliefs with a healthy dose of comedic plausible deniability. "How fake it is which is the idea of meme magic. Yeah right? You've named things into reality. Yeah I don't know. I don't know do you really think that it's real?
Yes. Do you have Steve Bannon can you call him on the phone? No uh but in terms of meme magic uh yeah I think there is something about...I would call it like a self-fulfilling prophecy. We memed alt-right into existence." The alt-right successfully co-opted internet culture with the rejection of what they perceived as the progressive or woke shifting of the overton window. With the rise of Gamergate and the acquisition of pepe as representation of insular meme culture the line between those acting out in legitimate racism and those doing it for the luls was blurred. "I saw it as an opportunity
to put an end to these alt-right claims that has been thrown against me. It wasn't to try and clear my name or save grace." To great utility the alt-right was capable of unifying rejections of third wave feminism critical race theory, trans, and gender issues with a heavily alienated generation. A generation that was beginning to be plagued by existential dread towards an unstable economy, climate change, and a continued transfer of wealth from the poorest individuals in society to the richest. Well I mean not to mention all the things that teenagers think about. While people like Tucker Carlson were harnessing nationalistic sentiments to an older generation.
On the internet it was the youtubers who dominated the culture war. "Um everybody the media and journalists everybody is telling us the problem with twitter is too much trolling. Too much meanness too much quote unquote abuse and harassment. I see the problems exactly the reverse when twitter started cracking down on free speech the platform started failing and that is the history of social networks. That rule has never been broken in the history of social networks. Spencer and the alt-rights rise coincided with the presidential campaign of Donald Trump as did the rise and fall of Pizzagate and its eventual rebranding.
[Music] Pedophiles are raping children in underground dungeons. Pizzagate is real. I'm starting to think our worst fears weren't bad enough. Pizzagate. Who had become a celebrity du jour amongst alt-right circles had propelled his minor internet fame into a growing men's rights movement. Complete with seminars and supplements on obtaining the Gorilla Mindset taken directly from the Alex Jones playbook. "50 percent off with promo code sun s-u-n at Infowars store dot com. It's selling out! Fifty percent off promo code sun at Infowars store dot com." [Magical music] When his customers weren't enjoying overpriced vitamins or learning how to get away with sexual assault... "And he was actually physically touching me. We have a guy in a gas mask and another person in uh and they said they're violent and they want violence we've got push and shove and let's get in it. I love it when they attack me. They're touching me!"
They were engaging in Pizzagate. A conspiracy theory made famous thanks to Mike and Alex. "Now uh Mike Cernovich good to have you here. Oh my pleasure we're definitely approaching the singularity because our time is becoming delayed. Now where I always ask people how long ago was it when Kathy Griffin pulled her little Isis beheading stunt? How long ago was Scaramucci fired? Everything has happened seems like a thousand years ago. Yeah exactly so our time is becoming
dilated because we're being...we're approaching the singularity". At a time when the hatred of Hillary Clinton was a blend of justified: war hawkish, Libya, super predators. "Related to big drug cartels they are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called super predators. No conscience no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that
way but first we have to bring them to heal". Rape apologia. "I'm a pretty lousy President". Mike decided to take down the Clinton empire with the only currency the internet accepted: bat shittery. "You are fraud you're a fraud this call is over I'm going to post the audio obviously because we both recorded. So you're a fraud you're a liar so this is over. Isolating the word pizza in numerous private emails of Hillary Clinton that were now public knowledge courtesy of Wikileaks, many corners of the dark weed began to suspect that pizza may be in fact code for an international pedophile ring. It had all the trapping of the best conspiracies. A few elements of truth, in this case a verifiable series of emails and a mountain of completely fabricated bin basket fiction. "People actually believe a conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton and her former campaign manager John Podesta ran a child sex ring at a pizzeria in DC. This is a lie.
We all know the only people who are trapped in a pizza place are those robots at Chuck-E-Cheese". [singing Final Countdown] Not that people shouldn't have noticed that this was one of Mike's signature moves. "So now they're saying oh you must be you must be melting down and you know everything else but um I'm I don't know like I'm cute. I look cute. Got a little sun. I don't...I don't understand now...". Having performed a few KO's versus James Gunn Vic Berger and Sam Seder which were eventually reversed when they discovered again to be completely taken out of context and had zero evidence of actual pedophilia. Eventually
enough people took hashtag Pizzagate seriously that someone went into a pizza parlor armed and ready to kill pedophiles he may have identified. "We actually thought initially that he was a staff member because he was walking straight for that back room staff member you know kind of looked at me and and indicated that this was a gunman. Edgar Welsh appearing in court this afternoon". Pizzagate wasn't a direct one-to-one evolution with gamergate although there was significant overlap in the communities thanks to figures like Cernovich being the propagandists promoting both. The media is claiming that this is because of Pizzagate. This is very dangerous fake
news. Anybody claiming that the gunman today at comet pizza had anything to do with Pizzagate is lying". After a firm crackdown on Pizzagate - shut down reddit's, discord forums, and some legal woes for Infowars - remnants of the fractured conspiracy theory slowly overlapped with the other side of the culture war in the meme war theater. "Hello ethnic Kekistanis. This is big man Tyrone supreme president of Kekistan here to brief you on a special mission for all battle ready meme warriors. Pepe the lovable frog and Kekistan a subculture built around the World of Warcraft word for lol or lul. That fused with an ancient Egyptian frog god Kek...just bear with us okay uh this is the internet.
It's not exactly going to be like the battle of Gettysburg. Memes became the currency in the online culture wars. Belonging to a certain group like an alt-right community in 4chan was also so anonymous that the ability to demonstrate belonging came in the relevance and efficacy of memology. To this effect the creativity and diversity of pepe memes grew in both their scale and racism. There
was also a belief online the memes themselves had the ability to manipulate life itself. While they were certainly in the minority the biggest upset in modern political history did lend some life to the magical powers of the internet. Remember how we said Milo Yiannopulos had capitalized heavily on the Gamergate movement and pushed it into a key talking point of the conservative culture wars? Well that wasn't by accident. It was by design.
As America was gearing up for an election Donald Trump was apparently making a deal with the devil , according to Joshua Greene and the devil's name was Steve. "They think you're a big powerful man who will bring an end to their way of life and all life on earth. Am i really that powerful? Of course I am". Von Bannon of house Harkonnen has a really weird story explained in the book 'Devil's Bargain Steve Bannon Donald Trump and the storming of the Presidency'. He made his early wealth through the licensing rights to Seinfeld by negotiating
a deal on behalf of Ted Turner. He then got Goldman Sacks to invest in video game mining. And no we don't mean that kind. This was way before bitcoin. We're talking about gamers playing games like World of Warcraft for hours just collecting gold so they can sell it off for real cash in the real world. It was a highly lucrative business until tens of thousands of gamers rose up enraged at people cheating at something they had worked so hard to accomplish themselves. They organized digitally on forums and collectivized until they actually forced multi-billion dollar major corporations like Blizzard to put an end to the gold mining in World of Warcraft. While bruised but not defeated Bannon learnt the power of the quote 'rootless white males who spend all their time online'. Five years later when he joined Breitbart he immediately began working
on hiring those rootless men to radicalize the masses into populism. He had been an independent documentarian - if you want to use that term in the loosest possible sense - meaning not at all. And was interested in transforming online activism into something that could take shape in the real world. "Bannon refers to it as the third world war the longest global conflict in history. Bannon is saying that there wasn't a cold war. There was a real war that the soviets started but that most western leaders didn't want. Milo Hippopotamus bridged that gap and was one of the major assets
to transfer the gators into pepes and eventually into MAGAs. Milo was already positioned as one of Bannon's top culture warriors and was also beginning to talk about other conspiracy theories that would help cross-pollinate the groups. The big enemies that were targeted were third wave feminists and social justice warriors who dyed their hair into neon furry expressions of soy. "surprise [ __ ] free Tay-K free Palestine you ain't this [ __ ] Tay-K what's view lives you got bars Outraged the mere thought of being outraged they were a scourge on the internet. Demanding that everything be censored and no one have fun. While various corners of the right-wing
circle would attack them in the form of Youtube rants and college eviscerations, hatred of liberals, democrats, and their associations with a globalist pedophile cabal had taken a life of its own. Donald Trump's victory shocked the world. Every poll and data point and projection was showing Hillary Clinton to be a sure thing. US imperialism was secured. Then an outsider came along to drain the swamp. By outsider of course we mean that he wasn't a hardline republican favorite. "Get back in the business of creating a more peaceful world...
please clap...". He was still a rich elite. That had no sign of changing. But he was crass and open about his nationalism and uncomfortable love for the country. A reality tv showman who was beloved by a cult-like following and the jingoistic power of a monster truck. Trump's Presidency played out pretty much exactly as bananas as you'd expect. But even more shocking was the mutation taking place from Pizzagate into the final boss of conspiracy theories. The Shang-Tsung if you will. One that combined multiple other favorites over the years like evil cabal of Jewish bankers. Evil cabal
of Jewish media. Illuminati. Rich elite families... mostly Jewish. Secret cannibal cult and pedophiles. Evil government conspiracies and collusion. And of course the most evil being in history... George Soros! And that's not even the most bat [ __ ] part. Hinging at the center of this was Donald
Trump being the savior of humanity working behind the scenes with a top-level informant named only Q who spoke oddly like someone had been reading Alice in Wonderland on ketamine. Mockingbird. HRC detained not arrested yet. Where is Huma? Follow Huma. This has nothing to do with Russia yet. Why does POTUS surround himself with generals? What is military intelligence? Why go around the three-letter agencies? What supreme court case allows for the use of MI versus congressional assembled and approved agencies? Who has ultimate authority over our branches of military without approval conditions? Unless 90 plus in wartime conditions what is the military code? Where is law being held? Why POTUS will not go on tv to address nation? POTUS must isolate himself to prevent negative optics. POTUS knew removing criminal rogue elements as a first
step was essential to free and past legislation. Who has access to everything classified? Do you believe HRC Soros Obama etc have more power than Trump? Fantasy. Whoever controls the office of the Presidency controls this great land. This is QAnon he rarely states specific facts." Qanon was
not a monolith and it overlapped with numerous individuals who were either devout believers or happy to be part of a decentralized cult. Roger Stone while not allowed to share the President's inner grace anymore was a firm believer arguably until this day. Seeing as he's an opportunist in most other respects it's also entirely plausible he enjoys the myth more than the man. Now Q as a story is way too vast on its own to even remotely tackle here. We'd recommend watching Colin Hoback's incredibly thorough documentary 'Q into the Storm' that exposes the entire history of the movement including possibly outing Q himself. It's hard to overstate how far this whole thing went from being an obscure online theory to being instagramed by the President's family and his inner circle. Combined with Trump eventually
lying that the election was stolen the whole thing was perfectly positioned to reach a critical peak. [Alex Jones yelling] We're coming for you creatures! We're coming for all you commie traitors in congress that have stabbed us in the back! [Chanting] USA! USA! USA! [Yelling and screaming] [Screaming and struggling] [Gasping for air] The dust had settled on the capitol. The glass repaired and the families have grieved. The culmination of so many different groups united together by a common thread. Or post. Or retweet. We've seen what
the radicalization of a single individual on the internet can do in terms of causing damage in the real world but never in numbers this large. Most cults or religions met in real life. Trained in real life. More importantly they knew they were part of a collective group taking orders from a hierarchy. Q may have been that hierarchy but he was still anonymous and what people decided to do with that information was polished by outside agents. "Want to affirm the massive landslide Donald J Trump or are
we going to turn over a constitutional republic to the forces of...what did the Figaro say? The forces of darkness. See through in the fog of war is that have clarity. It's to have clarity that know January 6 was going to be the day or one of these big days and you had to converge everything down to January 6th". You could point the finger at the corporations for allowing it to grow to such dangerous proportions. Specifically big tech who knew well before it gotten out of control that it was going to be a problem. You could blame some of the adolescent gamers whose rootless rage was manipulated into revolutionary action once they had grown up. You could say it was those who vilified every single
gamer as if they were a misogynist or a racist. "There was also all these accusations of sexism and homophobia. Yeah like if you didn't tow a line you were a misogynist you were a sexist and suddenly like the people that we have been reading for like years at this point um were saying like hey you know you fans who have been reading us forever, you're sexist uh you're misogynist probably racist.
And it was just like what is happening?" You could say it was the crony corruption between the publishers and AAA game producers selling reviews and throwing journalism out the window. You could say it's the mods or the programmers behind 4chan who allowed so many conspiracies to flourish. You could say it was the pundits and influencers who spread the idea to the masses. You could say it was the politicians who embraced this new cult-like approval of their strong man or perhaps even the President himself cheering them on. But what really lies at the core of all this? [Loud Voice: ZARDOZ!] After the
shooting in Columbine both parents and politicians began to scramble to determine what could have caused such an atrocity. "Would enjoy blowing your opponent's head off is a problem. I bought this game because it contains the blood and violence that was represented in the arcade version. And violent video games became the focus. Titles like Night Trap and Doom and Mortal Kombat
were seen as so grotesque that they were actually infecting children's minds. When actual studies and research revealed something completely different. My personal sense having spent countless hours mowing down aliens monsters or sometimes even literal Nazis in various games is that video games themselves, even action or violent ones, don't radicalize a person or cause them to become violent or aggressive. But one of the core lessons from psychology is
that sometimes our gut instinct can be wrong so what's the literature say? I couldn't find anything published literature wise linking video games to extremism radicalization or other things of that nature. Now me not finding it doesn't mean it's not there but given the ongoing moral panic about video games that's practically as old as I am and the abundance of studies arguing for a link between violent or action video games and aggression I would have expected to have at least stumbled across a mention of it if it were there. What I did find was an examination of US youth violence and general homicide rates compared against movies and video games and there was a stretch of time in the mid 20th century where there was a smallish correlation between movie violence and homicide rates. But eventually that reversed and for violent video games there's a negative correlation between youth violence rates and video games and video game releases especially violent ones. Where you see a release and there is a decrease in youth violence so if anything it seems that violent media is actually reducing real world harm not increasing it.
So was everything about Gamergate a lie? Of course not. I mean there was so many competing groups and ideologies and pent up frustration that at the time nearly everything became hyper-polarized. Luckily that's no longer the case in modern society. The gators were completely correct for example that Anita Sarkeesian didn't come from a gamer background. "It's a soundtrack of one song except I'm doing video games so it's not exactly a fandom...I'm not a fan of video games. I actually had
to learn a lot about video games in the process of making this". So she was effectively an outsider critiquing a group that saw it as an attack. She didn't get everything correct in her analysis like the fact for example that Hitman doesn't actually require you to murder a sex worker to get through a level. You're in fact punished if you complete the mission that way. And there is absolutely a monstrous problem with the relationship between video game companies and reviewers just not in the way you think. "There's always been far too close of a relationship between like games press and PR for example. So you have you know for with games journalism like if you're going to review a game or whatever or like get early access to it you're probably going through PR. PR people. There would be
pretty clear conflicts of interest going into like people's coverage of games. Umm and that's just like by design. And it also over the years I think, bred a pretty subservient press". AAA game companies today are massive corporations that spend huge budgets on developing software. Their flagship series needs to generate even larger returns for their business models to make sense. To this aim they force their employees to work excessive hours in a process known as the crunch in order to meet deadlines. They also spend very large amounts of money on advertising directly on the very magazines and websites that will be reviewing their titles later. When gaming
outlets such as Kotaku take a journalistic approach to reporting on game companies either on their abysmal treatment of workers or insider accounts of development troubles they can be met with a blacklisting as was the case with Bethesda. "A type of game we'd never done before. Had a lot of difficulties at launch. And we got a lot of well-deserved criticism". Or the case of the Dead Effect 2 developer who leaked that they had formed a blacklist in a direct response to negative reviews of the game. Most large publications will get early copies of a game so they can review its contents to time exactly with the release of a title but reviewing a game negatively could potentially lose you that privilege allowing your competitors who aren't as savage to gain a legitimate advantage. If we're
being honest capitalism and more specifically the endless pursuit of higher quarterlies, has destroyed so much of what made the early video game industry incredible. Massive multiplayer games with micro transactions, DLCs that don't include what you should have paid for in the first place or bloated collector edition sets. Free to play games whose profit motive lie in using the exact same techniques as casinos and most importantly the never-ending shopping shopping shopping for aesthetics that used to be included with your original purchase. "This is a fantasy. This is not reality. And I don't believe people could punch somebody's head off if they tried". I know it's it's a wild concept. You spend over 50 bucks on a game and you get the whole game at once. So then the other question remains...were Gamergaters all incels or at the very least misogynists?
There is no question there was and still is a large amount of individual actors engaged in behavior like online bullying, hate speech, doxxing of multiple figures, death threats, rape threats, and swatting. The fact that they were largely anonymous and connected globally 24/7 fueled the scale of abuse. Many of the points raised in Feminist Frequency regarding the industry were salient and often unspoken ones. "It's no secret that fighting games often feature sexualized female characters
and often feature characters whose design is rooted in ethnic stereotypes. Sometimes these two elements combine in sexualized exotified female characters. In street Fighter IV Elena wears well she wears almost nothing. But the bands that she wears on her arms legs and neck vaguely suggest African tribal culture and she possesses that stereotypical character trait of a mystical connection to the earth. I'll show you my dance". But to the original question: no of course not. The problem comes in when people attempt to simply draw a line through each one of these phenomena like they're the natural linear evolution of each other. Whereas the whole thing
is closer to a web with many overlapping pieces and characters who along the way learned that they can manipulate it all for their own nefarious purposes. And the worst part about all this is that the whole thing is a sleight of hand. What I mean to say is that secret pedophile cabals or elite liberal pizza enthusiasts or even women and non-binary gaming journalists are not what are actually threatening men. If you look at the current leading causes of death
in men it's first accidental death. A category that combines drug overdoses and car accidents. Now the leading cause of overdoses is from opioids and the epidemic that swept across North America started in large part because pharmaceutical companies like Purdue Pharma incentivize doctors to push their products. "The company one of the three brothers who originally took it over would regularly be asking for sales reports. He would be coaching people on how they should go out and uh and push oxycontin to doctors. When you started having people dying of overdoses he uh is very involved in emails saying look the way we're gonna spin this is that it's about drug addicts. These people are criminals. This is not our problem. Blaming the victims? Blaming the victims absolutely". On top of which many of the biggest names in the game spend more money on advertising
than they do in R&D. Massive corporations like Walmart and Walgreens were accused of ignoring red flags or addictions and fueling the crisis. Next is suicide and the leading causes are mental illness. Something that the US health care system is not adequately addressing. "Then in 1988 President Reagan slashed federal mental health spending by 25%. So where do people end up?
For a lot of them jail. In 2012 there were 10 times as many mentally ill people in prisons and jails than in state hospitals and close to 400 000 adults with untreated mental illness are in jails. In effect prisons are the new mental institutions". With number seven being unemployment and number eight being social isolation. Another large unspoken problem is our addiction to social media.
Programmed to keep users on them for as long as possible and reinforced with AI that continues to promote more incendiary content. And we keep going back to this: the profits to shareholders are more important than the health of people. "Facebook surveyed its own systems and found many levers where there were many possible ways they could have been set. And Facebook found that the setting that had been used before which was optimized for hyper growth was potentially dangerous". So we doom scroll and we hate post and we don't feel any more fulfilled for doing either.
if you're watching this and you're conservative you may have come into it with a bias knowing we skew left. Just as we would have done the same had we been watching a conservative documentary. Which all naturally tends to serve those in power profiting off all of our social interactions. So let's recap. Gamergate was provoked by two key incidents that grew into an internet subculture that directly targeted multiple groups. Milo platypus under the guise of Steve Bannon was quick to weaponize the phenomenon and turn it into a mainstream culture war. Mike Cernovich at the time became known as the quote
'based lawyer' who approached Gamergate from a legal perspective and rapidly became one of the gators heroes. He garnered so much attention that he stopped practicing law to become a full-time men's rights advocate with pills to boot. He was also a key figure in shifting the online anger towards a new conspiracy theory called Pizzagate. Milo also began promoting Pizzagate once it became popular, going as far as even lying publicly in a speech in LA that he had insider information on it being verified at the highest level of government. "We're going to talk this evening about a few things that are close to my heart, Milo told his audience. Although I have one announcement to make which is that sadly when I announced that I was going to be speaking about Pizzagate this evening I got a number of phone calls with Washington DC area accounts saying not yet". Eventually Bannon
became the President's chief strategist and rode the wave of patriotism through Qanon all the way to the insurrection itself. This whole story ends up being less about a singular event but more about the evolution and mutations of online outrage being synthesized and funneled into real life action. The media ran around and still runs to this day like a headless chicken furiously trying to keep up and only observing small pieces along the way. Anyone who's cashed in on the process can have plausible deniability. "It really is it's it's a it's a magician's trick". That they never personally advocated for hate speech or revenge porn or doxxing or even caused violence. Even if
the effects of their work result in it. Jeremy. Oh wait did we forget to mention Jeremy Hambly. in 2021 on a podcast with all the biggest names in outrage porn the Quartering explained firsthand how lucrative the moral panic over 'Star Wars The Last Jedi' had been. "We gained 200 000 subscribers during the fallout 76 debacle. Another 100 000 during the Battle Genderfield 5 debacle. We all gained big during um the Last Jedi right? And there hasn't been something like that for us. The closest we had in the last year was Kevin Smith's He-Man but like there hasn't been a big push in the last year and if there isn't another one next year to kind of refresh viewership I've already kind of started planning my exit plan. So I'm maximum grift. I mean you got a mobile game? You got a mobile game you want me to talk about? Just email me". [Cough] How profitable
and lucrative it was and worries that they'll never get another gold rush like that. For those unfamiliar Jeremy's the host of the Quartering. The popular right wing pop culture channel on Youtube. He's come a long way from being kicked out of Magic the Gathering for harassment. "Because this video does not show I doxed any female cosplayers? What this is okay is a tweet. Not one that I made! [Space SFX] Magnify that death sphere! Now Hannah is spreading false information. I was not banned for harassment. I never was. It was pepe memes and mild banter with another creator.
Now apologize as you've received evidence. [Space SFX] Magnify that death sphere! Why is it still blurry? Yeah I'm not going to sexualize you. I mean [ __ ] me if i'm going to say that i wish there was a little slot down here you know for me to you know for us to pleasure each other. You know because that's not what your intent is. I mean [ __ ] oh yeah look totally non-sexual here. I mean who would in their right mind ever make a comment
about your cosplay giving them an erection. Because [ __ ] you like you know 13 14 50 year old kid that doesn't have social skills please everyone on the internet come and support CSsprinkle run on twitter let her know how totally unattractive and unsexual she looks. And maybe she will avoid these digital rapes". Exposed for his numerous transphobic, racist, and homophobic comments. "Trans people always get lumped in with women and for example and peep people of color okay. But in my opinion from a biological standpoint they're still male. Boyish looking uh lesbian
takes this and turns it into this. You mean to tell me that there's not some agenda there"? Trying to shield himself by saying he has two gay black dads. Being exposed for revealing his father is in fact white only to double down and say his biological father is in a gay polycule with his other two gay black dads. "My family is none of your business. And it's really shocking to see how openly phobic you are. Hope you enjoyed this video we'll talk to you again real soon". To pumping the outrage button on every woman or minority whoever finds themselves in a lead role. And let's not forget Brie Larson. "A lot of people said hey you made 20 videos on Brie Larson are
you obsessed? No no no no I was giving the people what they wanted. And because of that look at what Brie sent me. A beautiful Brie shed. See this is the shed. This is the Brie shed he bought to taunt her". While currently making a living off trying to fuel the very same animosity towards women and non-binary gaming journalists he's also simultaneously upset how anyone would suggest that he had anything to do with gamergate. My very first video on this channel is from 2017. Three full years after the peak and two years after the the valley and several years after anyone ever cared about this". Jeremy no one is accusing you of creating Gamergate. You cultivated an audience using the very same form of moral panic. In fact you even tried to bring it into the Magic the Gathering scene before you were kicked out. "A
lot of things have been coming to light for me in the past couple of weeks. Really past couple months. And it's the shocking similarities between what's going on in Magic the Gathering... how it parallels with a lot of the core issues of Gamergate". And he's not alone. Conservatives will continue to push whatever talking point is either the most politically effective or from a content creator side the most lucrative. "This is one of these things where I've realized sometimes we all want to think that we can sort of get a story and understand the story and I want to think that i can sort of read enough about something that i can understand it and explain it in a kind of simple way. This is one of these things that just goes beyond everything.
It is truly a rabbit hole of information and misinformation and one of these things where you can't make everybody happy. I really at this point the more I know about it the less I actually know". Liberals will continue to either enable or ignore the systems that foster inequality while the media plays catch-up or ignores what's really happening until it's too late. When I was young I used to take every part-time job I could get my hands on. Whether it was mowing the neighbor's yard or cleaning their dishes or something like that just to put together a few dollars to buy a new game or a console. I would end up getting something like the Game Gear and then I would collect every game I could for that system and then I would sell the whole thing and get a Nintendo with just one game and do it all again for the Super Nintendo and the Genesis and the 64, PlayStation, Saturn...I had an Atari Jaguar at one point.
And that ended up coinciding with the time that was really bad in my life. Where you know most of my peers in high school would be partying on a Friday night... I would just be sitting at home trying to pull the sword out in Secret of Mana or running around terrified of the pyramid head in Silent Hill 2.
And if someone had come up to me and told me that the only thing in my life at that time that was making me happy was was wrong or evil or or made me misogynist or a racist just for enjoying it... I honestly would have told him [ __ ] you. So I get it. I really do.
[Dave Sighs] [Lance] What? [Dave] I mean what am I doing here? What are we doing? Like you're just I'm just standing next to you awkwardly this close while you just go off on some crazy unhinged diatribe? [Lance] I thought it would make more sense for like...[Dave] What do you mean makes sense? Like am I not a man?! Can I not speak?! [Zoë] Bouts of stability so I could actually work on stuff and move on would be great. Um and I don't know I don't think I can stop and i think the simple fact of the matter for me is I love games more than they hate me. so What? What? What what is this? Like like we're two feet apart I'm just standing here awkwardly while you just go off on some like crazy rant about like what what what are we doing? Why am I here? Why am I bothering here? I don't know I thought this would work. Am I not a man? Can I not speak? Do I not have a voice? He has a voice!
2021-11-19 01:40
