I still remember Gamergate as when online media first started wandering away from serving its audience to indulging its sense of snobby, moralized superiority and when called on it tried to rally everyone against the audience

Someone needs to do an Elon!twitter update of this classic GamerGate meme of Vivian James, personification of video games, leading anons into exile, in which they’re coming back out of the desert as a conquering army, Muhammad-returns-to-Mecca style

You know, there’s a rough breakup… she comes out appealing to community standards of conduct… then she gets cast as the monster for the (new, deprofessionalized Discourse) internet to hate, while professional internet media frets

Underplayed that Depp/Heard is a karmic mirror of GamerGate

oh to follow up on my recurring “if GamerGate occurred at the speed of the Dreyfus Affair”, last year Dreyfus would’ve been irrevocably pardoned and next year Zola gets interred in the Pantheon

Okay, Zoe Quinn trying to start a movement by encouraging people to post stories of abusers using the dev community as a mask for exploitative relationships is funny to begin with

But having it immediately blow back on her performative male feminist allies Wile E. Coyote style is just… ::chef kiss::

Setting aside that GamerGate only gets a glancing mention before getting tossed into the headline for clickiness

and setting aside that Pareene already did this schtick (”fuck, if this alt- stuff is what gets young people into conservatism these days, that means this is what and who institutional conservatism is going to be for the rest of our lives”) better

Brianna Wu ran for Congress in 2018, we’ve already had GamerGate politicians

GamerGate was proof of concept for a social conservativism updated to defend secular ‘90s culture

If GamerGate happened at the pace of the Dreyfus Affair, J’Accuse would’ve been published around last Christmas and the whole thing wouldn’t be over until 2026

Catching side glances at this Nick Robinson thing and it’s like “he’d insistently solicit sex from everyone, but no one in the industry scene wanted to cross him because he’s so influential, his friends could make or break you.”

And I’m thinking “Wait a second, the performative-vulnerability indie dev scene works by trading sex for favor with Gawker-type video game journalists? That’s downright unethical.”

Anyway, what brought me to that was thinking about something. I’m very much a text guy so I kind of categorize 4chan and stuff like that as a primarily text medium with occasional illustrations, but there’s a reason they’re called imageboards.

And one really interesting thing about imageboard culture is how big it is on the concept of personification. I’ve talked about polandball and the other countryballs, which come from Krautchan, and Pepe (”sad frog”) and Feelsguy, but also things like the suit/greenface Anon, Fawkes mask Anonymous, /v/irgins, Le Happy Merchant, Captain Sweden, Iron Pill, and Big Red. Always been fond of the Japanese-style moe anthropomorphization, too - ebola-chan and all that.

Like, it’s telling that the very first thing GamerGate did, on coming to self-awareness and realizing they were a thing, was to create Vivian James and start investing charisma in her.

raggedjackscarlet:

Gamergate is basically our generation’s “Mods vs. Rockers”.

how pathetic.

Something for Everyone

You know, I think a lot of modern internet culture war shit goes back to the ‘60s-‘70s (counter)cultural refoundation that both sides claim lineage from. ‘cause there’s a sense it was sold as something for everyone - women, racial, and gender/sexual minorities would get their civil rights and inclusionary movements recognized, in return straight white guys got the consensus that Cool People agree: sexualization is Correct, being offended is Incorrect. And there’s a growing sense (from all sides) that the terms have not been upheld.

Sad Puppies and the Hugos. Because that’s what we’re talking about now, apparently.

Both sides claim to be the true heirs of SFF. The antis sniff that it’s obviously them because the genre has always been committed to a progressive vision, especially starting with the '60s-'70s and the New Wave.

And that’s not wrong, but there’s a lot of stuff under that aegis. You have Left Hand of Darkness, with LeGuin all “gender fluidity would be great; we could experience our true selves independent of mutilatory social structures, and it would give rise to meaningful new cultural practices oriented around the beauty of self-discovery and self-crafting”.

And then there’s Varley’s Eight Worlds, which is like “Just imagine, if perfect sex changes were consumer services like haircuts, you could experience banging-hot hetero sex from both sides!”

Or Marion Zimmer Bradley all “adding strong female characters to fantasy allows us to escape tedious military epics towards an exploration of the importance of emotional labor, correctly identifying life-creation, not -destruction as the fundamental force of history”.

And meanwhile, “Red Sonja, DAAAAMN. She could force herself on you, how hot is that?”

(Joss Whedon postures like he’s from the Bradley tradition, but he’s toooootaly from the Red Sonja tradition.)

And then you have stuff like Stranger in a Strange Land, which is about interspecies tolerance, peace, love, and understanding, as enabled by author-insert dirty old man Jubal, attended poolside by his harem of buxom secretaries, including the one trained to totally suppress her personality so to better serve.

Like I said, something for everyone.

(Modern equivalent being Kim Stanley Robinson, recurring theme being “If scientists ran the world, there would be peaceful, multicultural, inclusionary socialism. And also collective nude bathing, where young female students seduce their mentors.”)

And you know, I’m still waiting on the WisCon panel on “Recovering the Promise of Teenage Groupies”.

Honestly I’m not much in the fandom these days but I do get Gardner Dozois’ “World’s Best” anthology every year, and I have noticed an increase in stories where nothing happens, but at least it’s brown and queer folks it’s not happening to.

One story a bit back that stuck with me, the message seemed to be “working in a Foxconn plant would suck”, which okay but I couldn’t even tell what was SF about it. Another that started promising - in an Islamic country (bcuz good point, the future won’t just come for white Anglophones), polygamy and semi-arranged marriage coexist with social media (ditto), and men hire Cyranos to polish their appeal, under the pressure that not every man can win even one wife. That’s a solid premise! But once this is established, the protagonist just throws up his hands and experiences a wave of relief as he realizes he could just be gay instead.

And it’s like… wut.jpg

In a proper world an editor would’ve returned that with a note saying “great story, can’t wait to see it when it’s done”. But that’s exactly the issue, isn’t it, that box-ticking and message Correctness are being accepted in lieu of quality.

Actually, you know what that really reminds me of? Christian rock.

Just recently came across this from a-man-in-black, connecting hashtag gamergate to “norms of chan culture”, and I think he makes a some interesting, true points! It’s worth reading. He’s an anti-, and anti-anythings usually have understandings of their nemeses more worth reading than the anythings do of themselves.

I’m not totally in love with it - it rhetorically asks “Who do [journalists] talk to? …they can’t collectively interact with anyone”, immediately after very clearly laying out the norms and procedures for talking to a collective ‘chan style. That’s part of a general weakness whereby it accounts for norms of anonymity or variable opaque pseudonymity by reference to acculturation but takes norms of “true name” or persistent thin pseudonymity as a priori defaults, and seems to breezily assume the latter as the “real” norms and culture of twitter or even “life in general” when the very existence of ‘gaters and anons, and viability of #gg and ‘chans would seem to call that into question.

But still. And then I checked some of his other storify pieces (Seriously, though, at the point where you’re using a 3rd party site to render your longform twittering even minimally readable, maybe consider not doing your longform on twitter?) and I can tell he’s onto something in this, “The Redpill Right”, because he’s agreeing with things I’ve said.

Him:

essential to the Redpiller POV is the idea that everything is a game and the people who win played better.

(Ahem.)

They share a viewpoint, but they don’t yet share a common identity. …But that identity is forming. And they’re finding each other.

…It’s 4chan, it’s Reddit, it’s Uber. It’s the manosphere and it’s the atheist community. It’s bitcoin and libertarians and gamers.

An approvingly cited comrade:

If you believe what they believe, toe the line, reify their mythology of gaming, and so on, you *belong* in their nomos, a meaningful order.

…[a “nomos”] syntheseises meanings into a coherent system of beliefs that provides people in a given society with a common schema with which to approach the world.

(Sounds kind of like a thede, but probably sounds kind of like a lot of things. It’s probably worthwhile for intellectuals to reinvent wheels every now and then, helps escape the cruft and politics of established fields.)

[They are creating] a “fictive ethnicity.”… Culture, history, lore, philosophy, even a primitive form of religion, all predominate here… making an identity out of reactionary politics…

And then me, back in May:

I will say what intrigues me more, and what could really be a prime mover in that sector, is the construction of a modern, international, English-speaking Australian-American-Polish-British-Scandanavian-Serbian-etc. white volk around a core of internet-native right-masculo-populism on the chans’ “waifus, warhammer, and white nationalism” model

things like Polandball’s (and SatW’s) western-centric resurrection of the concept of national personification, heavy metal culture and the associated Vikingism, feelsguy’s translinguistic sense of selfhood, /pol/’s kebab removal… well, just /pol/’s /pol/ness, really

Now this sounds ridiculous. I know this sounds ridiculous. This is me pointing to cultural trends particularly prominent in the dork niche circles I notice and ascribing to them world-shifting importance. I know it is.

Sure, heavy metal is not the actual historic musical tradition of any people. Sure, Norse neopaganism is not the actual historic religious tradition of any people. Sure, Tolkien-by-way-of-D&D aesthetics are not the actual historic mythology of any people.

Unless, of course, you count “2008” as being a part of history, or those then alive as counting as a people. Or, say, 1978. Or, you know, the 19th century, and the conscious, successful Wagnerian construction of Germanic identity from which these are all lineally descended.

To Golda Meir is attributed the line that there is no such thing as a Palestinian, by which was meant that the identity didn’t predate the establishment of the state of Israel. True, true. Neither was there such a thing as an Israeli. But then the state of Israel was established.

The thing with Polygon and Kotaku renouncing review embargos, and going in on Ubisoft over AC:Unity, and retroactively downgrading Destiny… that’s brilliant, and I bet most people don’t even make the connection to hashtag Gamergate.

They finally did what they should’ve, took a step back from the fray to calm down and plot how to turn the whole thing to their advantage. And if they pull it off they could actually come out stronger from the whole thing. They’ve already earned the indie devs’ loyalty from acting as their champion, and their media compatriots for championing their prerogatives against the unwashed masses (I expected Salon to jump onside because obviously, but seeing the fucking London Review of Books do it first and harder was an eyeopener). Now by actually jiujitsuing “ethics in game journalism” to reposition themselves as champions of their alienated audience, and using it as a club to extract concessions from the AAA studios - well, if they pull it off that’s pretty much running the table right there.

They’ll cool down on the SJW “muh intersectionality in vidya” beat, you mark my words. Maybe poke the hornets’ nest for attention every now and then, but the free ride is over and now they know that costs them more than it pays off. They’ll just quietly commission less and less of that stuff. They’ll never make a public show of contrition, that was never in the cards, that’s not how Gawker and its bastard children roll, that’s never been how they roll.

Nick Denton’s brilliant stroke, going all the way back to Gawker’s origins as Gawker Stalker, was to not even make pretense to the American tradition of Sulzbergerian evenhanded postwar monopoly journalism, but to go the British competitive no holds barred venomous one, all taking shots at each other, stirring up witch hunts to boost circulation. It’s been like that for a long time, where multiple outlets are in competition for the same national readership - that’s where 1984’s “prolefeed” and “Two Minutes Hate” come from. That’s why Milo Yiannopoulos, from the British system himself, was the one landing all the hardest blows on the other side of this fight.

I mean, it’s interesting. It’s interesting, and I like living in interesting times, but there’s a reason that phrase comes from a backhanded blessing - as a way to run a culture it’s fucking dangerous, it leads to pillarisation. The Dutch model - Protestant/Catholic/secular social democrat - is safe enough with the European confessional wars well behind us, but the 19th and early 20th century models, where the pillars could be “monarchist” or “communist” or “fascist”, (or even the pre-20th century American party-affiliated yellow press), that was fucking dangerous. Journalists talked their countries into war, into revolution, to boost their numbers and make their names. There’s a reason British libel law is so strict, and that’s to create some leverage to tamp things down when they start stepping on toes that matter.

I mean hell, we’re on course for a full-blown constitutional crisis in a decade or two in no small part because Murdoch imported the British model.

kontextmaschine:

(donglegate and Sarkeesian and dickwolves and whatnot aren’t the infection, they’re the inoculation)

…and this is the immune reaction. Just realized I called it a year ago.

e8u:

thegreatgadfly:

thespectacularspider-girl:

I think you should see this:

Nissan pulls ads from Gawker http://theralphretort.com/nissan-cuts-ties-gawker/

And Gawker making an article in response to it http://gawker.com/how-we-got-rolled-by-the-dishonest-fascists-of-gamergat-1649496579 (archive.today link https://archive.today/UXA4r)

It is like they want to deliberately sink their business into the ground by showing themselves as being about the worst place to advertise in, seeing how they treat advertisers.

P.S: bonus points for saying that Renée J. James, president of Intel, is a “craven idiot”.

——————————————-

Gawker, confirmed for mad.  Like.  Mad mad.

AND THEY CAN’T DO A THING TO STOP IT.

Looks like they’re opting for the “run ourselves into the ground” option. And here I thought they’d be smarter than that. Lol. I was wrong.

Max Read-era Gawker is a glass cannon.

The Choire/Balk/Doree Gawker could handle this shit, but then it would never have gotten itself in this position in the first place. That’s not speculation, just go over to The Awl, which is basically the Choire/Balk/Doree Gawker aged in place, and check out their Gamergate stuff. It’s still anti-, and given to celebrate their triumphs before they hatch, but that “we’ll get them in the end” stuff is the line of someone rationalizing a strategic retreat and regrouping.

Hell, even Pareene could’ve handled this. He’d be an insufferable little shit about it (I have no idea how he missed both of the Daily Caller’s “most punchable faces in media” lists), but he at least knew that the Gawker brand voice was contempt, not hatred. I mean, look at this. Correct.

Eh. I could tell Gawker was headed nowhere good in 200…7? 9? Back when commenting was open by audition only and there was an article about some kid falling out a window and one of the commenters invoked Anal Cunt’s classic Conor Clapton ballad, “Your Kid Committed Suicide Because You Suck”, and then someone huffed that we should show more sensitivity, because a child has died and all that, and then the huffer was not included in that Friday’s round of commenter executions.

It’s funny looking at the comments, people reading ‘gaters as a new cultural development that’s ruining your arcadian internet. Nah man, that’s the traditional culture of the old internet you built yours on top of. Used to wander the plains freely, and as recently as a decade ago you intermingled, but by now you’ve pushed it back into reservations on the ‘chans, and you’re still pushing. Cet animal est très méchant; Quand on l'attaque, il se défend.

I guess my investment in all this is that I was born and raised into citizenship in the older internet, and I’ve got a bit of patriotism about it.

hallowmeme-url:

kadathinthecoldwaste:

spacetwinks:

i cannot imagine caring about corruption in game reviews

The global video game industry was valued at around $65 billion in 2011, and has likely grown since then. I don’t have figures on exactly how much reviews change sales figures, but it seems prima facie that they would make a non-trivial difference. If that assumption is true, a pattern of consistent corruption in reviews could easily change sales figures by hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of a well-known reviewer’s career. Entirely aside from feelings about the video games themselves, that seems significant from a purely economic standpoint? I can easily imagine myself caring about, say, publishing fraud, misappropriation of government funds, or cheating in sports, and I can’t really see what the difference is besides the fact that sports and video games are “low culture” and there’s a certain social cachet involved in trumpeting one’s lack of interest in such.

(None of this is meant to defend the accusations of review-related corruption various segments of the internet have made against Zoe Quinn, which as far as I can tell are wholly trumped up, and would not merit the firestorm of abuse she’s received even if they were true.)

The more obvious comparison is to movie and music reviews, where both the “corruption” that gamer gaters complain about (reviewers making political judgements) and the actual corruption (publishers forming closer relationships with journalists, buttering them up and withdrawing access if they don’t like their attitude) have been present since the start, without this being a scandal per se.

Have you never heard someone decide a film must be crap because the “work of genius five stars” quotes on the poster are from minor (and thus more easily pressured) publications, or because the producers have limited previews to soft critics (Harry Knowles was particularly infamous for this). Have you never heard a critic referred to as “rentaquote”. Wouldn’t you think the world had gone a little crazy if a scandal started over this well existence of these phenomenon? 

The two major ethics-in-entertainment hoohas of the late 1950s, over radio payola and rigged TV quiz shows, were subjects of widely covered Congressional investigations, with honest-to-god laws passed in response.

A better parallel to the whole #GamerGate thing might be film criticism. The 1960s saw a crop of high-profile critics working in a distinctly literary style - Sontag, Kael, Sarris, and their imitators.

On the one hand they elevated the field, introducing auteur theory and promoting the creatively visionary “New Hollywood”, and the best critical pieces of the era were and still are worth reading in their own right.

On the other hand a lot of that New Hollywood stuff they were boosters for was indulgent crap, and under their influence film reviews started following book reviews in treating the work at hand as a jumping-off point for whatever tangential, often political, subject the critic felt like writing an essay about.

The subsequent rise of Siskel and Ebert and their consumer-oriented reviewing (reducible to a simple thumb-based watch/don’t watch binary) can be read as a backlash against these trends. Roll in their format change (from print to TV) and the ability this granted them to augment their reviews with excerpts from the work, and there’s a clear precedent here for a shift to Let’s Plays and YouTube reviews.

The one thing I have to say about #GamerGate, it’s that for the biggest and most successful pushback against online social justice culture to date to consist of a twitter hashtag campaign encouraging people to pressure spineless corporate suits into cutting off the income of people expressing unpopular positions for fear of alienating their consumer base…

…well, you know what they say. Live by the sword, choke on your own medicine.