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.