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And to think that this all happened because Scott platformed Mencius Moldbug back in 2013. Search your feelings. You know it to be true.
I wouldn’t really mind Elon becoming techno-monarch tbh, but I don’t trust Trump with absolute power.
I don't agree with your first sentence. As cliche as it might seem, I am coming around to thinking that it all kicked off with GamerGate, when lots of people started noticing that something was off.
I think pro- and anti-GamerGaters both tend to overestimate its impact. I tend to think GamerGate was just one instance of Toxoplasma of Rage that served as a political awakening for some people. I don't think it was more impactful than other Toxoplasma skirmishes, like New Atheism or BLM.
Though I must admit, GamerGate was also a conflict that almost entirely passed me by. I had one friend in college who I had one conversation about it with, and I was vaguely aware of Anita Sarkeesian, but neither side was salient to me (I play video games from time to time, but I'm not a "gamer", and I've never been an SJW or woke scold) and so I was never very invested in it. It would be like me trying to get involved in the "pro-shipper vs anti-shipper" debate in fan fiction communities. I have my principles, and they might align with one or the other side of that debate more than the other, but I'm also not fighting in that war because it seems dumb and fake to me.
Let me take the neutral ground and say that GamerGate wasn't the precipitating event, but it was pivotal insomuch as videogames were (and still are) a universal hobby of young men. And when confronted with the blunt and obvious truth of Noticing the blue-hairs ruin everything, one could either go down the trail of Noticing everything else or sticking your head in the sand and saying it's a good thing. The 4chan/Resetra divergence, the chud/woke speciation.
It was the universal radicalizing event of the generation, and even those who were normie enough to not care were inculcated with the memes (on both the left and right.) No one questions the cultural impact of music or movies. Video games as a medium are larger than both combined. At some point, video games transitioned from being influenced by political trends to making them. Comparing the financial success of chudgames vs wokegames has become a tribal sport.
Which is to say... if someone plays a piece of media for thousands of hours, having it consume every waking moment of their lives, of course it would effect their political values. New Atheism and BLM are dead and gone but people are still mad that they got rid of Tracer's ass wiggle. I think you're just disconnected with what young men back then and now consider important.
It simply cannot have been, because I was of that generation and I was mostly put off by how much people cared about the whole thing on either side.
If I had to pin a name on what it seemed like from the outside, it was like "Asking Disney Corporation for a handjob." The nature of top tier media (AAA video games, blockbuster movies, etc.) is that only a small number of companies are able to marshal the resources in order to make them, and they can only make a few such releases a year, so if your tastes aren't represented in what they produce, you are left out in the cold. So people complain about the big corporations, and their failure to deliver what they want. Woke feminists want ugly, disabled women in the top tier media, and anti-woke coomers want sexy eye candy. Those desires are mutually exclusive, and so one or the other of them will be disappointed.
Some people have really started to invest in the idea of symbolic victories that can be provided by this or that big corporation kowtowing to their desires, and I'm sure I won't be able to dissuade anyone in that camp. But I really think people need a Diogenes and Alexander moment. When Alexander the Great comes up to your wine tub in the middle of the agora and asks if you want anything, you should be prepared to answer, "Stand a little out of my sun."
Nobody needs Blizzard. Nobody needs EA. Nobody needs Disney, or a thousand other big media corporations.
Either create your own stuff, or engage with enduring cultural artifacts that are 30+ years old, or support the smaller creators who are making things closer to your tastes. Like, the ancient Greeks made commentary after commentary about the Homeric epics and engaged with those stories on a deep level for centuries. But our culture is so temporally parochial, so obsessed with novelty, that we enslave our imaginations to big corporations and lose our souls in the process. Human flourishing is not merely to consoom. And it's certainly not to win pointless little cultural victories in a product you paid $60 on Steam.
Wasn't the kickoff event of Gamergate to do with artsy SJW types capturing some sort of indie game award, though?
My sense is that the drama about wokeness in expensive "AAA games" actually came later - the community was instead taken over from below, with the points of incursion being along with the gaming-liberal arts border (journalism, awards, small-scale narrative games). I vaguely recall people asking an evil genie that video games finally be recognised as an artform in the years leading up to it.
The rage was ignited by the coordinated attack of about bunch of articles(about 20 IIRC) showing up in various media outlets trying to "kill" the gamer identity, because a small bunch gamers of notices the SJW types getting coverage for their shit. Gamergate wouldn't exist and nobody would have noticed if it weren't for the "gamers are dead" articles. It just showed that activist had infested the gaming journalism space and people started noticing on how the infestation was present in regular media.
Or/also- that the regular media was aligned enough to be partisan allies. Had GamerGate stuck to just the gaming media, it would have been a tempest in a teacup. When major media influence networks began weighing in, it both demonstrated it was a broader issue, and that the broader media was inclined to picking sides rather than neutrality (which was still the nominal stance of the media of the era- the Obama-era 'we are objective, it's just that reality has a liberal bias,' which started as a Steven Colbert comedic gag line but was unironically adopted).
What was also notable about GamerGate is that it was one of the first major sustained partisan media cancellation storms of its type that didn't actually crush the targets. While 'victory' was proclaimed in the ability to dominate the wikipedia and establishment media records, it lacked the career / identity destroying effect that previous such media storms had, which were known for forcing Republicans to drop Problematic People or deplatform people from, well, entire platforms. GamerGate, while driven off of some platforms as part of the partisan push, survived in others, which started to establish the lines of what spaces were / were not controlled by the party-media, which in turn is what allowed the alternate/right (not alt-right) media systems to grow beyond progressive-media control.
This led the a reduced-but-defiant rather than beaten-and-cowed demographic, which by existence demonstrated both (a) the ability to survive attempts at media cancellation and (b) the nascant support base for the unapologetically-resistant.
Previously, this was broadly thought impossible. Afterwards, Donald Trump took a similar approach- openly confrontational and defiant to attempts at Gamergate-style coordinated media warfare- that ultimately won the white house in 2016.
It wouldn't be right to say that Trump won because of gamergate, but gamergate was a paradigm shift that increased not just hostility to coordinated media efforts, but the belief in the ability of a force to survive such attacks, and thus view such a strategy as not intrensically doomed.
Put another way- the media-juggernaut that 'won' gamergate was shown to be more limited and vulnerable than it had been believed, and so more people were willing to believe it could fail.
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles.
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