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Gamergate, thankfully, occurred during the period where I was less online than I had been both before and after. Like many, I was a New Atheist during it's heyday, before the split of Atheism+. Thankfully, the split just made the space boring to me, and I avoided joining either the proto-alt-right or the proto-woke factions that emerged.
The impetus for the split really was Elevatorgate. At the time, I remember being sympathetic to the feminist side (and was very much a feminist at that point). In retrospect, I still think they were right on the object level. It involved one female atheist blogger (Rebecca Watson) sharing a video talking about her experience at a recent atheism conference. She recounted a story in which a guy (with whom she hadn't really interacted with) was in an elevator with her at the end of the night and invited her back to his room for coffee. Her message was (I believe I'm quoting directly) "Guys, don't do that." And, at the end of the day, I think that's perfectly good advice. It is a pretty lame move, and while not worthy of strong social sanction, I think it's worth telling a bunch of guys (many of whom are nerdy, maybe autistic, and too-online) that it's not a great way to get a girl to like you or to invite women into your movement.
As the feminist side tells it, this spawned a surge of hate mail and complaints from guys, threatening sexual violence etc etc. Who knows how profound that was, but the fact is the internet did seem to react pretty strongly to what seemed to be like relatively mild chastisement.
However, the feminist side pushed back hard (irrationally so, imo). I remember eyerolling at the essay "Schrodinger's Rapist" asserting that, due to rape being a statistically male-dominated practice, any guy in an elevator was potentially a rapist, and thus making a proposition/move in a confined setting like that understandably triggers a woman's fears of getting raped. The other side had a lot of fun writing a parallel essay about black people and crime-- which, to be clear, was trying to show that such statistical discrimination was unfounded.
Like Gamergate, the event spiraled into a discussion about whether/how this male-dominated subculture treated women poorly, and whether/how entryist women were ruining the culture. Richard Dawkins even chimed in with his satirical letter "Dear Muslima", mockingly comparing the plight of an American woman being asked for coffee to the brutally patriarchal culture of Islam.
Soon after that, Atheism+ was explicitly founded, with a number of the popular blogs adopting the logo and claiming that reason not only tells us to disbelieve in God, but furthermore should guide our behavior on other aspects of life and society (read: social justice). For me, the blogs just became boring at that point, but I was still feminist/SJW enough that those who dug in their heels on the other side didn't really resonate with me either. By the time Gamergate rolled around, I was still online but just not that into it. Several years later, a friend sharing a Scott Alexander post brought be back into the world of online discourse.
Despite the similarities, I think it's really important to see one crucial difference between Elevatorgate and Gamergate: Elevator Guy remains anonymous to this day. The goal of Watson's video was not to punish this guy in particular. Whereas Gamergate, to my best understanding, involved lots of doxxing on both sides, and aimed to hit people where it hurt: in "real life." This is why I'd say there is a strong case to be made that Gamergate is a time to flag as the starting point for modern culture war. Before then, internet conflicts were internet conflicts, and insane level to which flame wars could be taken was a humorous badge of honor for nerds. After Gamergate, the stakes started to become real.
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