What exactly is “harassment” anyway? 

Like, when I wrote that stuff yesterday, I was thinking of it as any kind of statements really intended to cause someone harm. The way Seebs was talking, though, it sounded like she was exclusively referring to aggression that is illegal. And then you have stuff like Anita Sarkeesian’s compilation of all the harassment she received in a single week, which includes every instance of “fuck you” and even a person saying “you’re not being harassed, people are disagreeing with you” - which is verifiably false, but only harassment insofar as it denies harassment is occurring. 

There are definitely multiple definitions at play here, both when people describe their own experiences and interpret the experiences of others. Qualitative descriptions are one thing, but since the trend seems to be dealing with these things quantitatively, some kind of operational definition is necessary, and I’m actually pretty curious what you guys think.

What is harassment? What “tiers” of it exist? And, of course, where is the cutoff point between it and criticism (which can, in the right context, cause someone harm)?

the-real-seebs:

<just because I sniiip doesn’t mean it’s not a good read!>

It’s important to recognize that “I want to solve this problem” and “I want to assign moral culpability” are nearly always entirely unrelated questions. If you want to prevent burglaries, from a moral standpoint, you make people stop committing them, because they are at fault. But if you want to keep your stuff, you lock your doors. You don’t wait on convincing the burglars to stop. This has nothing to do with moral culpability, and everything to do with picking strategies that produce the outcomes you want. People complain about the injustice of asking victims to change their behavior to mitigate a problem, but the alternative is usually to demand that reality suddenly stop including assholes, and that’s probably not happening this side of the next extinction-level event.

That’s a good point, yeah. Personally I stand by my claim that everything is a little everyone’s fault. The reason I included the bit about placing blame was because a lot of times creators are really harsh toward their audience (or subsets thereof) to the point where I think any reasonable person would expect retaliation. I mean, sure, that’s still not a good thing, but I find it kind of hard to place blame with audiences when they react fairly predictably to these inputs. 

A friend was talking to me earlier and noted how strange it was that stuff like death threats are considered a bigger deal than things like slander/misinformation. Her rationale was that slander was a direct action intended to harm someone’s career or livelihood, while a death threat was just a threat that someone would probably not act on. Most people are not in a position where they could take legal action against a defamatory claim, or they lack the social reach to counter it, making it pretty much guaranteed harm. In cases like that, someone might see counterharassment as the only way to discourage an aggressor and defend their own wellbeing. Would that be morally (if not legally) justified as an act of self-defense? I’m honestly not sure.

I guess my personal thoughts are “I’m glad I’m popular and connected so I don’t have to worry about this”, but I dislike the fact that those words even come up in my head. 

That said, a lot of the people acting out have a complaint/fear that is going unrecognized because it is itself a ludicrous complaint. See also the guy fussing at Bioware about their lack of support for “the straight male gamer” a while back. That guy’s complaint was just plain stupid. It was nonsensical. It did not need to be recognized or acknowledged or addressed; he just needed to grow the fuck up and stop expecting the world to always be entirely about him.

Ludicrous complaints are often the easiest to address! I mean yeah, sometimes you’ll run into someone who just completely disregards anything that would suggest they are wrong, and in cases like this you might have no choice but to move on and seek better vectors of change. With a lot of people who hold positions like this, though, they’re just straight-up misinformed, or come from a cultural/educational background that colors their opinion. 

I don’t know the exact Bioware complaint you’re talking about, but it sounds like the guy is one of those people who is just really inwardly paranoid that he’ll be playing the game and might get into a gay relationship. Like, this is a legitimate fear some people have, particularly if they were raised in a setting where homosexuality was something they were expected to show disgust toward, possibly with social consequences if they don’t. He probably just needs to be reassured that, no, this gay relationship is something you have to actively work toward in-game, it won’t happen by accident.

Or, perhaps reminded that it’s not really gay if it’s in a videogame. Like, just purely utility-wise, Derkeethus was a petty good marriage candidate in Skyrim. And, like, he had a really nice voice too. That was a thing.

Seebs’ whole reply is worth reading as usual, though there’s one part I want to reply to in particular:

the-real-seebs:

[…] I don’t think the level of harassment people are describing is something that ought to be considered acceptable or tolerated to begin with. […]

I just realized it totally might’ve come across as me saying that (and here I was, so proud that I had written a Tumblr post without an hour of proofreading). For the record, I didn’t mean there was a level of harassment or abuse that should be accepted within the industry, but rather that there is a level of harassment that has to be recognized as normal, especially if you’re going to try to improve things.

In addressing a problem like harassment, your first step is to figure out the causes. With something as broad as “harassment”, there are going to be a lot of different causes all contributing to one quantifiable output. When you establish a baseline that is essentially “normal” for someone in a particular position, you can work to isolate isolate specific behaviors or attributes that affect the harassment they receive.

The harassment that was brought up in that Hateful Boyfriend post, for example, is tamer in both content and harshness than what I get on about a daily basis. At the same time, though, I’m a bigger name than its author was - I’m inclined to say that our harassment is both pretty expected for our relative popularity levels and it’s hard to draw conclusions from it. The harassment received by someone like Zoe Quinn is probably greater than mine - but from what I’ve seen, about on par with someone like Andrew Dobson. One attribute both Zoe Quinn and Andrew Dobson have in common is a general hostility toward critics, and I’m inclined to say that the “solution” to their harassment is to either place blame on them for handling their audience poorly or to promote positivity and understanding toward people who don’t want to receive criticism. Either one works.

The key here, even if you’re addressing something pervasive like general misogynistic attitudes in the gaming community, is that you need to address it from the inside. You need to be able to understand a community, see what is causing the misbehavior, identify the people who are perpetuating it, and get them to stop. It’s a very social thing and ultimately, the only way you permanently win is with the collaboration of the people you disagree with. 

The thing you don’t want to do is rush in and start attacking people, since they’re not going to just go away. The thing you really don’t want to do is rush in and start attacking people for the wrong thing, since people who act out are usually doing so because they have some complaint/fear that is going unrecognized. Dealing with situations like this is a delicate thing, and someone can’t just barge in and expect the same treatment from mass audiences that they would get from friends in an artist-circle. I would like to see things improve, but I’m not going to have pity for someone who expects that hurt feelings will be enough to solve problems. 

I don’t want to decry anyone’s harassment as being so normal they should accept it. But, I think actually dealing with harassment as a social issue requires careful movement and an exact analysis of the causes, and misplaced blame only makes things worse. 

It’s been a while since I wrote about GamerGate. Every once in a while someone will still email me about it, sometimes in response to my plea for both “sides” to defend themselves, though I admit a certain disappointment in many of the replies. It’s not that they are poorly written, but as a general trend they have shifted toward a new claim, “GamerGate is damaging the gaming industry”, which never comes with as much defense as I would like. 

As forewarning, this post isn’t particularly thought-out or well-structured; it’s just me sharing some general thoughts.

I guess I should explain where I’m coming from here. Back when I was a teenager, I used to be one of those internet art critic people. Like, you know the type: assholes who went out of their way to provide honest (if often overly harsh) criticism of every art piece someone had the gall to request feedback on. We rebelled against this thing we called, at the time, the “DeviantArt mentality”, where artists would exclusively get their feedback from a small group of friends who would positively regard their work no matter what. Most of us on the more critical side of things knew, from personal experience, that this behavior hindered artistic development and sort of took it upon ourselves to stamp it out.

As I got older, of course, I grew out of it. I realized, as I think most people eventually do, that it’s perfectly okay for someone to do something in a way they personally enjoy. The real issue with what we called the “DeviantArt mentality” was that it was not economically viable. A person who has their work coddled and never learns to appeal to a diverse and discerning crowd will not be able to compete adequately in a professional setting, their audience limited to that small group of friends (who are often artists in the exact same situation). As a result, you have a professional art community of people who expect and value candid and varied feedback, and a “hobbyist” community of people who are primarily interested in working for themselves or a small group of friends. This, I feel, is a working model. 

If you read through my stuff, it’s pretty clear that I am very audience-focused. I talk about audience statistics a lot, as well as directly interact with fans at every possible opportunity. I don’t spend a lot of time around other artists, even going so far as to avoid seriously participating in any “artist circles”, since I’ve learned many audience members hate the schism this drives between creators and their fans. My policy regarding these things is a simple one: I work for the chaotic and diverse mass of fans that consume my material, and generally stand against anything that discourages them from sharing their thoughts or feelings (since, you know, that’s what my model pivots on catering to).

I never really joined GamerGate, which is why it’s sort of weird when people lump me in with them. What I did was pretty much the same thing I always do: value audience members the same as content creators. When a whole bunch of people are upset about something and a creator says “nah, it’s fine”, my first instinct is to hear both sides out, because as far as I’m concerned neither one has more credibility. As I’ve stressed before, the people who attack me for my thoughts on GamerGate never actually address anything I say as being misinformation, they just attack me for “listening to 4chan/8chan/gamers/whatever”, which is incredibly unsettling because it conveys this idea that I should value certain people higher than others - not because they support their ideas better, but because they are inherently better. 

Which I guess takes me back to this idea I mentioned at the beginning: GamerGate damaging the gaming industry. When people are defending this assertion, they point to the “angry mobs” with no coherent demands, the general level of vitriol flung at creators, and the privacy-crippling digging they do into their targets, etc. All through this, though, I’m just left thinking “Holy shit. This is my jam!”. This thing they’re complaining about is the exact environment I’m used to navigating - in fact, as far as I know, it’s the exact environment the gaming industry always had. When people point to all the horrible harassment developers “received from GamerGate”, it’s tamer than what I’ve gotten just by virtue of being a relatively popular creator. As someone who’s in this industry, the notion that GamerGate is ruining it makes no sense to me since nothing actually changed. 

What seems more likely, to me, is that people stumbled outside their Artist Circles and hit a wild audience for the first time. They didn’t know how to handle a critical and diverse audience, they turned it antagonistic, and they don’t know how to deal with it. It would explain a lot of the behavior you see: demands to see some kind of GamerGate leader they can blame/complain to, assertions that abuse is okay when it’s against the “right” people, lamenting their own harassment when it’s pretty much the bog-standard someone gets from working with a mass audience, etc. From my perspective, it feels like these are fish-out-of-water, dealing directly with my industry for the first time.

I admit when I first started writing this, I considered whether I should be showing these people more sympathy. They are probably scared, I realized: flung headlong into a scary environment their more tightly-knit artist circle did not prepare them for. But, then I thought back to when I was a young artist, and the first time I encountered a harsh critic: I wasn’t a dick to him, I didn’t tell him his opinion was stupid, and I adapted to a critical environment pretty quickly. A lot of these people vehemently decrying GamerGate, however, are kind of accusatory dicks to these groups of individuals they label as “angry mobs”. I started to consider a different theory:

What if this is about privilege? 

What if this is some group of well-connected, well-to-do people who are stepping into a hostile and critical environment for the first time and are completely ass-blasted that they are not inherently valued above others? What if these people are realizing, with horror, that this is an industry where their word is just as valuable as that of some random non-creator on an internet forum, and they’re trying to “fix” it by reinstating a hierarchy with them on top? 

I mean, just speaking personally, there are a lot of things I like about GamerGate and its affect on the industry. I like that when a creator is accused of something, GG digs into it and tries to gather evidence. I like that they’re critical of reporting and have made their presence known as a massive, vaguely-united mob that will lash out and potentially gain dangerous credibility if faced with things that are verifiably false. They’ve been bringing a lot of ideologically diverse people together in an environment where they can typically discuss things without attempting to harm one another. They’ve been speaking out against the tendency to “speak for” minorities. Best of all, it makes it harder to prevail above your competitors with nothing but money and connections. These are all changes I wanted to see in the gaming industry. But, frankly, I can understand why a privileged dickwad would oppose every one of them.

This is just a theory, of course. I mean, all I know is that from my perspective, a bunch of kind of rude and dismissive people are coming in and attacking the group I consider to be my audience as being horrible monsters who don’t appreciate True Art or whatever. I’m not particularly worried, because as I’ve stated before this only facilitates the development of a niche, but I’m still kind of offended when people say GamerGate is damaging the industry or driving away minority developers. Like… I’m here; you can talk to me. I approve of the changes, and I just explained why. I know that some people will be driven away, but a lot of them are kind of assholes to their audience and I parse the hostility toward them the same way I’d parse a rude waiter getting fired by his boss. 

I don’t know. Like I said, I’m an audience person; my primary concern is with the tastes and desires of the people who play my games. I wish people who talk about GamerGate damaging the industry would talk about how it damages it for people like me, because it feels like the focus is purely on making the industry comfortable for the exact type of people I oppose. 

kazerad:

I’ve been too busy to post much lately, but someone named Silicon Fades (e: siliconfades@gmail.com, added at their request) sent me an email which brought up some interesting ideas. […]

Reblogging my own post to note one addition: Silicon Fades asked me to add their contact info in case anyone wanted to discuss the email with them. Their exact words were “I’m not a huge user of tumblr, and I’d like to be engaged in a dialogue with the people who are reading it. If you could stick this email address in the post somewhere and direct any questions or ideas people have towards me, it’d be a great help.”. 

I’ve been too busy to post much lately, but someone named Silicon Fades (e: siliconfades@gmail.com, added at their request) sent me an email which brought up some interesting ideas. I’m reposting it with permission. Whether or not you agree with it, I think it’s worth a read.

Hi, you probably don’t remember but I sent you an email a while back about some gamergate stuff. I’ve read pretty much all of your blog and agree with a lot of what you write about manipulation on the internet. I was reading this (http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/jon-ronson-interviews-adam-curtis-393) today and the book about public shaming made me think about your writing so I thought I’d shoot you this email and make you aware about it in case you weren’t already.

Adam Curtis, the guy being interviewed has a few really interesting documentaries that touch on social control that you might be interested in as well, I think most of them are on youtube. A lot of his work centres on fear and how the concept of an “other” is used by politicians to create narratives that engender policy change. I don’t agree with everything he says but it’s interesting stuff nevertheless.

I see a lot of this in “SJW” culture, and other internet sub cultures in general. I think that the majority of activity that comes under the “Social Justice” banner in fact has little to do with actual activism and is really to do with facilitating and protecting a type of tribal identity. Once you’re “in the gang” the primary objective is protection of those who are also in the gang. In this case however, before one can even get to attacking the others who aren’t in the gang, one has to expound a huge amount of energy existentially justifying the gang in the first place. The necessity of the Crips to it’s members is self-evident, it’s an entity based on practical security and financial gain. The existence of the Social Justice Gang is markedly less evident, especially to it’s members, and so a large part of the workings of the gang are creating, exploiting and uncovering events and people that can be pointed to as reasons for the existence of the gang. At it’s most fundamental, the gang really exists to help facilitate an easy to understand identity for the people in it.

This ties in a lot to some stuff written by Alvin Toffler who you’ve probably already heard of. I’ve only read Future Shock by him but it’s fascinating stuff. He misses the mark at a few points but overall it’s a remarkably prescient look at contemporary society written in the late sixties. One bit that really stuck out to me was how he basically manages to predict the existence of “Anonymous” as a culture:

“Leisure-time pursuits will become an increasingly important basis for differences between people, as the society itself shifts from a work orientation toward greater involvement in leisure. In the United States, since the turn of the century alone, the society’s measurable commitment to work has plummeted by nearly a third. This is a massive redeployment of the society’s time and energy. As this commitment declines further, we shall advance into an era of breathtaking fun specialism – much of it based on sophisticated technology.

We can anticipate the formation of subcults built around space activity, holography, mind-control, deep-sea diving, submarining, computer gaming and the like. We can even see on the horizon the creation of certain anti-social leisure cults – tightly organized groups of people who will disrupt the workings of society not for material gain, but for the sheer sport of "beating the system” – a development foreshadowed in such films as Duffy and The Thomas Crown Affair. Such groups may attempt to tamper with governmental or corporate computer programs, re-route mail, intercept and alter radio and television broadcasts, perform elaborately theatrical hoaxes, tinker with the stock market, corrupt the random samples upon which political or other polls are based, and even, perhaps, commit complexly plotted robberies and assassinations. Novelist Thomas Pynchon in The Crying of Lot 49 describes a fictional underground group who have organized their own private postal system and maintained it for generations. Science fiction writer Robert Sheckley has gone so far as to propose, in a terrifying short story called The Seventh Victim, the possibility that society might legalize murder among certain specified “players” who hunt one another and are, in turn, hunted. This ultimate game would permit those who are dangerously violent to work off their aggressions within a managed framework.

Bizarre as some of this may sound, it would be well not to rule out the seemingly improbable, for the realm of leisure, unlike that of work, is little constrained by practical considerations. Here imagination has free play, and the mind of man can conjure up incredible varieties of “fun.” Given enough time, money and, for some of these, technical skill, the men of tomorrow will be capable of playing in ways never dreamed of before. They will play strange sexual games. They will play games with the mind. They will play games with society And in so doing, by choosing among the unimaginably broad options, they will form subcults and further set themselves off from one another.“

Anyway he postulates that a large reason for the existence of subcultures is that it provides a ready made template for a person to use as an example of how they want to live their life, and helps reduce the number of decisions they have to make in a world that’s saturated with decisions. Over abundance of choice is one of the core tenets of future shock. This is useful in understanding some of the actions we see in something like gamergate. If one thinks of oneself as an affiliate of the social justice gang, then when confronted with any actions or ideas that can be seen as signifiers of the enemy gang (fat neckbearded fedoras) then the reaction that you have to be seen to be having is already decided. You don’t have to waste any of your precious thinking time with analysing a new situation, because the gang and your premade identity have already figured out how you’re supposed to react. Hence the large numbers of people deriding the gamergate movement without any attempt being made to inquire what was really happening. “I’m a social justice advocate (however casually), this movement has been defined to be counter to ours, therefore it can safely be ridiculed.”

Notice also how many of the rhetorical devices used by both sides of the gamergate divide are essentially the same. Take something like this page (http://ggobservations.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/the-five-people-you-will-meet-in.html) linked on the siderbar of /r/gamerghazi. It seems sensible enough at first, but with a quick find and replace you can make it sound horrible. Replace “Gamergate” with “A Liberal University”, “The Common Troll” with “Cultural Marxists” and “Conservative Bloggers” with “The Jews” and you get some pretty typical Stormfront esque propaganda. Interestingly enough, the way that page treats minorities as agency-less hordes to be utilised by Machiavellian masters means that you can just leave that section as it is. The oft-seen argument that “Gamergate has some good ideas but the name has become tainted, the people who want real good change to happen should move on and leave that name behind” sounds an awful lot like “I’m not a feminist, I’m an egalitarian. Feminisim as a label is associated with crazy feminnazis.”.

In the end it all comes back to identity. It’s comforting to know that you’re the group that’s “in the right”, and it’s useful to paint your enemy is both a caricature to be ridiculed and a genuine threat to the safety of those you share your identity.

Obviously this is just my way of looking at things. I think it’s useful but I’d be wary of applying it in too many places. I think that’s one of the pitfalls of sociology in general that lead to internet social justice being what it is today. Someone comes along with a perfectly good metaphorical device (in this case the concept of “privilege”) that describes a particular situation, interaction or system in a way that makes that sense and illustrates the situation. For example - “I have privilege that you do not have and thus my view of this matter is different than yours, and I should try and understand it from your un-privilged point of view in an effort to reach a more just situation” is a perfectly reasonable and useful way of thinking about things that happen in society. The problem arises when, after this tool is applied in a few different scenarios and it is shown it work, people latch on to it and think of it as some kind of grand unified theory of sociology through which all of human interaction can be predicted and we end up with where we are right now.

In this case I think the best way to move forward for everyone is to consider anybody who you interact with online as a real human, and not as a representative of any movement or generalised identity. It’s only if we take individuals on their own terms and try and do something about their concerns in a compassionate way that we can move beyond looking at each other as two-dimensional boogeymen.

It should be pretty apparent by this point in the rambling that I’ve got absolutely zero formal sociolgical education, but it makes sense to me.

Anyway I thought you might like the book.

Peace

After I asked permission to repost his message, they sent me an addendum. I’m assuming the reposting permission applies to it as well:

One other small point. I think a lot of the frustration that people like you and I (apologies if none of this jives with you, but it seems to be in line with your observations and analysis) have with regards to "anti gamergate” and established Internet social justice cliques is a result of the dissonance between their stated goals and their unconscious goals. What we see as tactically unsound and exasperating only looks that way to us because we’re considering those actions in the context of of the surface objective, eg “stop gamergate” . In reality, the actions might be perfectly serviceable at achieving other aims that are beneficial to the clique, eg protect and define our identity, or the personal advancement of individuals through accumulation of social and economic capital.

Social identities are probably memetic in nature and as such operate on a survival of the fittest basis. The meme of the social justice warrior identity (as you’ve stated before, not necessarily someone who advocates social justice, but someone who takes it to unnecessary and detrimental extremes) has survived through a relative amount of turmoil in its life. The fact that it’s survived thus far is an indication that it’s fit for some purpose, whatever that purpose may be.  Though it might seem to us to be inefficient in achieving what we see to be its goals, that’s a failing of understanding on our part. Essentially, the fact that the identity prevails is an indication of its usefulness to the people who choose to adopt it, and the onus is on us to determine what needs it fulfils for those people, and how to manipulate it to achieve our goals. 

Actually, I’ve been think about a counter point to that last email that ties into some of what Toffler posits in future shock. 

Everything I just said relies on the capabilites of memetic selection. However, if memes are anything like their genetic counterparts, then it could be said that there’s a natural (one must avoid automatically assuming that natural = perfect but I think it holds true here) ratio of mutations per generation that allows natural selection to filter out the beneficial traits from the detriment ones. Too many (and too drastic) mutations per generation and the chances are the species suffers. On the other hand, too few mutations and the species stagnates, unable to cope with its changing environment. We can imagine a similar scenario with the development of ideas, and a large part of what Toffler says in the book hinges on the fact that we’re developing and sharing new ideas at an ever accelerating rate. If we don’t have sufficient time to test these ideas, then it might be that what at first seems beneficial comes to be disastrous at worst, or a waste of time at best. 

Just as many believe (erroneously, in my opinion) that natural selection in humans has stagnated due to modern medicine and needs eugenics to prune our gene pool, one can easily imagine a corresponding inverse, where, faced with the ever accelerating onslaught of information technology, an elite few need to be responsible for a sort of eugenics of ideas (eumemics?) to keep our collective consciousness fit. This terrifying and fascinating concept is basically the plot of metal fear solid 2 (it really is about ethics in video-game plot contrivances). Toffler proposes the much less fascist idea of separate communities designed to accelerate at different rates, with people who struggle to cope with the transient nature of modern life living in much more traditional lifestyles (which also serve as handy living museums), those who are able to cope with a rapid rate of development living in ways that push technological and social boundaries, and with most of the population living somewhere in the middle, with the developments from the accelerated communities gradually filtering through once they have been shown to be sound. Free movement from one group to the other is encouraged as each individuals capacity for transience can vary throughout ones life. 

That diverted pretty weirdly, but the takeaway of all this is that some of the things I said in my last email are reliant on the stress-tolerances of memetic evolution as a self-regulating mechanism. Personally, I think that although there’s a possibility that things like social justice cliques could simply be a manifestation of social development moving too fast, I’m still liable to believe that they do serve a valid purpose for the people who engage in them, even if I can’t figure it out yet. 

lapisamethyst:

Mild Frustration

kazerad:

…

The article you’re referring to with “Useful Idiots” is this Slate one right? http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/10/how_to_end_gamergate_a_divide_and_conquer_plan.html

I remember reading it and making a comment on it that “Calling people Useful Idiots isn’t going to win anyone over…And yet based on the latter half of this article I’d actually consider it in support of Gamergate.” Because after the Useful Idiots insult, it basically advocates to make an honest effort to communicate with moderates, clean up the obvious corruption that does exist in the industry, and stop with the Boogeyman level insults.

D= You’re not the first person to assume I was talking about that article. Which is weird to me since that article only says “useful idiots” in quotes, says who it’s quoting, and even links to the article of the person who actually made the accusation.

Aurbach’s article says a lot of the same things I say, though he’s a bit more biting about it. Like, he actually asserts that Gawker is so toxic and associated with harassment that any journalists who want to be taken seriously should dissociate from the company and renounce it. 

And whoooosh, down my note goes, already two pages deep in the 90,000 Likes and Reblogs.

fawriel:

[snip]

Faw! Bad Faw! Don’t reblog things like this with the tag “instant reblog”. 

The Baltimore Hypothermia Hotline mentioned in that image is not real. I wrote an entire essay about it a year ago. It’s the number for a mental health crisis hotline, which is probably getting bombarded with calls to the point that nobody can get in. At least the few times I checked it to confirm, the line won’t stop being busy.

Baltimore is Baltimore. It doesn't have a hypothermia hotline. It just has a lot of sad homeless people walking around in the snow holding cardboard signs that say “anything, please”. 

I have gotten some decent responses since I put out that request, though as I go deeper into the whole thing it only gets more baffling from a meta perspective. I didn’t mean this to be an opinion survey, but after almost everyone messaged me with “I support GamerGate, buuuut…” it kind of turned into that.

Like, let’s take a step back and look at this. I don’t think anyone who associates with GamerGate unconditionally likes GamerGate. They’re an inefficient maelstrom operating under the tumultuous and self-critical ideals of Anon Culture, only retaining support by the fact that they are 1.) actually doing things, and 2.) sometimes they are good things. Most people who identify as a part of it are there for reasons that seem more archetypal of Tumblr’s Social Justice community, taking a stand against behavior they perceive as majority-favoring or unethical even if doing so gets them labeled as a disorganized mob of whiny children. As is typical of these groups, bigotry in their opposition only strengthens their resolve - see Lewis’ Law. 

On the other side of this, you have a group that purports to not be a side at all, but unrelated individuals who share a critical opinion of GamerGate. Which isn’t a bad thing, but strictly speaking it also mirrors the feelings held by most of the people who actually associate with GamerGate. It creates a weird situation where everyone more or less wants the same thing, descended into two rough factions where one sloppily fights for a good cause and the other believes the sloppiness causes more harm than good.

But… it keeps coming back to this idea that if anyone actually wanted to get rid of GamerGate, all they would really have to do is outperform it. If the people who oppose it with hacking, bigotry and slander put that effort into negating the concerns that lock a lot of moderates into GamerGate, it would take the wind out of its sails and probably taper it off. Yet even to professional writers who speak out against GamerGate, it feels like this idea is completely foreign to them. I still remember the guy who described the majority of moderates who identify as a part of GamerGate as “useful idiots” tricked into supporting a bad cause. Like, oh my fucking god, you don’t get the moderates on your side by calling them idiots for disagreeing with you, you listen to their concerns! It should not be this complicated.

At this point, I feel convinced that there is no “anti-GamerGate”. There is a bunch of utterly incompetent and violent people who disapprove of GamerGate but have absolutely no idea how to make it go away. I could organize a better anti-GamerGate than these people. And fuck it, maybe I should.